Someday this booklog will be useful to you
Ahh, when I can't seem to write fiction, it is nice to know that I can always fall back on getting my rant on.
11. The Group, Mary McCarthy - An impressive book, but not one that I particularly enjoyed. McCarthy somewhat sporadically follows the lives of a bunch of Vassar graduates as they make bad choices, take up with nasty men, and are generally just as nasty to each other and everyone else. I really didn’t like anyone in this book. They are all products of their time, to be sure-racist, classist, sexist. Their attitudes are probably accurate. But man, it was unpleasant spending 500 pages in their heads. It made it very hard to sympathize with them, even, say, the one married to a cruel and emotionally abusive man called Harald-which was also the name of McCarthy’s first husband. You don’t want to get on McCarthy’s bad side, I’m thinking.
It’s fun, though, to watch her verbally eviscerate someone, whether as herself taking on her nemesis, Lillian Hellman-“every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’”-or in the guise of Lakey, the leader of the Group, who comes back from Europe at this novel’s end accompanied by her baroness girlfriend and rips horrible Harald a new one. It’s a great moment, but it was really hard for me to get through the entire book to arrive there. I don’t doubt for one second that people like McCarthy portrays did exist, or that much of wealthy white society in the ’30s was exactly like this-the book feels brutally authentic. However, I wouldn’t have wanted to spent time with these creeps then, and I don’t want to now, either. Reading this book was a bit too much like being stuck at an interminable party full of people you don’t much like-and who make no secret of the fact that they freakin' hate you.
12. Audition, Ryu Murakami - Ryu Murakami (who I always think of in my head as “the other Murakami”-sorry, dude) certainly has talent as a shock artist. This book is brutally effective-in an intrinsically ridiculous, Fatal Attraction kind of way. I can’t even bother getting offended as a woman or, well, a person because the concept is really so dumb-and yet, it’s expertly paced, with (the other) Murakami evoking a sense of dread even when nothing explicitly frightening had so far taken place. That’s some skillful storytelling. And maybe you can rightly claim that it’s wasted on this idiocy (women are crazy! they will seduce you with their beauty and then do freaky-ass shit to you with a saw!), but on the other hand, I can’t and don’t begrudge anyone the need for the occasional doofy horror novel. I mean, I even kind of liked it: I laughed, I shivered, I rolled my eyes. It served its purpose. Well played, other Murakami. Well played.
13. Eight Days of Luke, Diana Wynne Jones - I remember really liking the rare bits of Diana Wynne Jones I read as a kid (mostly the Chrestomanci Chronicles), but most of her books that I’ve read as an adult have been kind of underwhelming. This is sadly no different, despite quite a bit of hype, including Neil Gaiman’s big shoutout in American Gods. I liked David and Luke, but I felt that most of the problems they face are solved too easily; the story feels like it could become epic, but instead it stays almost willfully, shrinkingly small. The fate of the world could be at stake...but instead let’s worry more about David’s living arrangements. At times it’s kind of like what one would imagine Harry Potter would have been like if all of the action had continued to revolve around the Dursleys.
So, you know, it was fine-good ideas, mediocre execution. You can see why Gaiman wanted to do something else with the material: something vaster; something that, even if it’s still imperfect, nevertheless has consequence.
14. Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, Peter Cameron - The obvious line is to call this book an updated version of The Catcher in the Rye, and, you know, I'm actually okay with that, because I love Salinger and I loved this. James' vibrant voice is terrific-funny and real-and the scene at the National Gallery is absolutely killer. Exploring James' lonely psyche will make you feel less so.
15. Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words, Jay Rubin - Interesting, if not electrifying, biography of Murakami by one of his English translators. Rubin’s discussion of the translation process itself was perhaps the most engaging and illuminating part-the English version of Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is abridged, WHAT. I also loved hearing that Murakami pays a lot of attention to the sound and the rhythm of the words when he writes-hey, that’s my technique, too! Dude, Haruki and I are like that.
Seriously, though, while it’s great to get some more extensive biographical information to put behind Murakami’s amazing body of work, it’s interesting to note that while Rubin does a good job of explaining who Murakami is in the most basic terms, there’s really no way to break down how he does what he does. A gift like that is, I think, elusive and ineffable. Zaphod Murakami’s just this guy, you know? And that’s actually pretty awesome.
16. My Summer on Earth, Tom Lombardi - There was a clear moment when I should have known to take one look at this book and run swiftly in the other direction. It was when I noticed that the front and back covers, instead of bearing proud quotes from other authors and publications praising the book, were plastered with fake quotes from made-up alien newspapers. That, my rational mind told me, cannot be a good sign. And yet, as usual, the part of me that just wanted to have fun with a fun book about an alien who comes to earth and takes on human form and falls in love shushed my more sensible brain. Those fake quotes are kind of cheeky and fun! it insisted. Come on, aliens in love-how bad can this be?
This book is so bad that both my rational and dopey fun-loving minds ruptured and died, leaving me to automatically turn page after page, slack-jawed with amazement that this dreck somehow got published. Got published and marketed for teens (!!!) even though it is soggy and leaking with filthy language, bizarre and repulsive descriptions of sex, homophobia, and violence. Now, I really do not think that I am a prude-teenagers should absolutely read about sex in its many forms, and they can easily survive hearing an f-bomb or two, for fuck’s sake. (See? There.) But they-and in fact, nobody, and certainly not I-do not need to read the word “douche” twenty times a page, or encounter such callous and frankly icky depictions of sex. Nor do teens/I/anyone need to read this book, which is incomprehensibly, insanely bad-hit by a two-by-four while tripping on acid and sick with stomach flu hallucination bad. In fact, that explanation makes more sense to me than the fact that this book actually exists.
But it does. Instead of my imagined cute alien romance, it does. Life is cruel sometimes.
17. First Contact, Evan Mandery - It's like Vonnegut, but without the occasionally creepy treatment of women and minorities! This was seriously fun. There are alien con men and a president obsessed with his underpants and a cheerful bludgeoning of the fourth wall. It’s clever and funny and sort of slyly about stuff. Now I only wish it were an easier sell. I managed to briefly get it onto the bestseller list at our store, though at the very bottom, and this only through very nearly physically forcing it into customers’ hands. I generally have a hard time selling anything if, in describing the plot, I have to use the word “aliens.” (The Sparrow was a non-starter for me, too, although I did try.) “Time travel” also doesn’t get me very far, and I doubt “amnesia” or “apocalyptic shenanigans” would do terribly well either. All the things I love, and my customers turn up their noses! Oh, watch me shake my head and sigh.
This is honestly very good, though. You should read it even if they won’t.
18. The Lost City of Z, David Grann - Okay, I officially do not want to go to the Amazon. I am open to the possibility of going almost anywhere-I love adventure! In a please-god-let-there-be-adequate-bathroom-facilities sort of way-but the Amazon is now officially off my list. The bugs! The snakes! The parasitic worms! Haha, okay, I think I am perfectly happy visiting this region from my armchair only.
Fortunately, Grann makes the journey exciting and vivid. He combines the story of Percy Fawcett-one of the last of the terribly English, gentlemanly explorers, who disappeared in the Amazon while searching for a (possibly apocryphal) lost city he called Z-with his own search for evidence of Fawcett’s fate and with a wealth of history about the region and about exploration in general. There is so much fascinating information in this book it’s almost overwhelming, and yet that narrative is also fast-paced and consistently engaging. This is the kind of true-life story that even the best fiction would have a hard time rivaling.
19. The Art of Racing in the Rain, Garth Stein - I am halfway tempted to dismiss this as a “man’s book.” I don’t feel comfortable doing that however, as 1) I have had way too many women tell me that they adored this book, that it made them weep and filled them with joy and cleared that pesky rash right up; and 2) if a dude dismissed pretty much anything as a “woman’s book,” I’d want to punch him in the throat. So, fair’s fair. This is not a “man’s book.” But it is a book written by a man with, I think, a seriously dim understanding of women and, quite possibly, people in general.
This is a book about a man called Denny. Denny is practically a saint. He loves his wife and his daughter and his dog, and for them-only for them!-he puts his dreams and his career as a *cough* professional race car driver on hold. When his wife gets cancer, he adheres to all of her wishes, including letting her and their daughter live with his creepy controlling in-laws. And when, while the rest of the family is packed away at said in-laws, a young, nubile, non-blood female relative brazenly attempts to seduce him, does Denny take her up on this offer of no-strings-attached sex? No! He bravely fends off her advances! Just like he refuses to give in when, after his wife’s inevitable death, the horrible in-laws try to gain custody of his daughter-going so far as to use a false accusation of rape by the duplicitous teenage seductress to improve their case! In the face of all this, wouldn’t most men give up and despair? But Denny-Denny the professional race car driver stays strong!
Yeah, okay. This may not be a “man’s book,” but that is a male fantasy if I ever heard one.
The only thing that makes this book at all believable is that it’s narrated by Denny’s dog. Denny’s dog is a dog-although, much to my disappointment, not an exuberant pup like Up’s Dug; Enzo instead sounds (as he would proudly assert) almost human-and thus he is loyal to a fault, and thus one can sort of see how Enzo-the-dog would see Denny-his-human as near-perfect. Enzo’s love for Denny is moving, and some early passages about their relationship turned out to be the only ones in the book that really worked for me. They were also, I suspect, what made so many of the people I’ve talked to-women and men-adore this book. Assuming you can ignore everything else about the story, I can sort of see where they are coming from there.
But I can’t ignore everything else about the story. Dog narrator or not, this is still a story about a perfect man persecuted by cartoonishly evil grandparents and almost left in ruin by, you know, one of those oh-so-common fake rape accusations. Have men at some point been falsely accused of rape? I’m sure they have. And you know: that really sucks. But you know what sucks even more? All the women who have actually been raped and then actually been told that no one would or should believe them, that the case will never go to court, that they guy will walk, that, you know, they were kind of asking for it anyway. And, fine, this may be partially my issues at play here, but that is all I could think about while Enzo praised Denny’s stoic dignity and bemoaned his powerlessness in the face of those evil, evil lawsuits. And I didn’t believe it. I didn’t believe a word of this book. Talking dogs-those I am willing to buy. I could even conceivably have been sold on the “oh and also there is reincarnation” twist at the end of the novel. (Um. Maybe.) But Denny’s saintliness and the grandparents’ unadulterated evil and the girl who cried rape-um, nope. Those I cannot buy. Nor do I want to.
Whether or not this is a “man’s book,” it is definitely not a book for me.
20. The Unfinished Angel, Sharon Creech - Apparently, I will read just about anything with an angel in it these days-even a kids’ book, in which I know there will be no chance of random angelsextiems. Actually, in this particular book, it seems there’s really no chance of anything. Nothing happens. There are some orphans and a girl with experimental fashion sense and an angelic narrator who speaks with an occasionally charming shaky grasp on grammar. But NOTHING HAPPENS. The angel wonders why it is unfinished, without a purpose, and I was interested in the answer to that question. But one does not materialize. There are small town shenanigans and more orphans and no one threatens to throw anyone else back into Hell or visits a den of iniquity or speaks Enochian or ANYTHING. Bleh. I think, even as a child myself-without an angelsextiems agenda-this book would have bored me. I always liked it when things happened.
Total Reviews: 20/41
11. The Group, Mary McCarthy - An impressive book, but not one that I particularly enjoyed. McCarthy somewhat sporadically follows the lives of a bunch of Vassar graduates as they make bad choices, take up with nasty men, and are generally just as nasty to each other and everyone else. I really didn’t like anyone in this book. They are all products of their time, to be sure-racist, classist, sexist. Their attitudes are probably accurate. But man, it was unpleasant spending 500 pages in their heads. It made it very hard to sympathize with them, even, say, the one married to a cruel and emotionally abusive man called Harald-which was also the name of McCarthy’s first husband. You don’t want to get on McCarthy’s bad side, I’m thinking.
It’s fun, though, to watch her verbally eviscerate someone, whether as herself taking on her nemesis, Lillian Hellman-“every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’”-or in the guise of Lakey, the leader of the Group, who comes back from Europe at this novel’s end accompanied by her baroness girlfriend and rips horrible Harald a new one. It’s a great moment, but it was really hard for me to get through the entire book to arrive there. I don’t doubt for one second that people like McCarthy portrays did exist, or that much of wealthy white society in the ’30s was exactly like this-the book feels brutally authentic. However, I wouldn’t have wanted to spent time with these creeps then, and I don’t want to now, either. Reading this book was a bit too much like being stuck at an interminable party full of people you don’t much like-and who make no secret of the fact that they freakin' hate you.
12. Audition, Ryu Murakami - Ryu Murakami (who I always think of in my head as “the other Murakami”-sorry, dude) certainly has talent as a shock artist. This book is brutally effective-in an intrinsically ridiculous, Fatal Attraction kind of way. I can’t even bother getting offended as a woman or, well, a person because the concept is really so dumb-and yet, it’s expertly paced, with (the other) Murakami evoking a sense of dread even when nothing explicitly frightening had so far taken place. That’s some skillful storytelling. And maybe you can rightly claim that it’s wasted on this idiocy (women are crazy! they will seduce you with their beauty and then do freaky-ass shit to you with a saw!), but on the other hand, I can’t and don’t begrudge anyone the need for the occasional doofy horror novel. I mean, I even kind of liked it: I laughed, I shivered, I rolled my eyes. It served its purpose. Well played, other Murakami. Well played.
13. Eight Days of Luke, Diana Wynne Jones - I remember really liking the rare bits of Diana Wynne Jones I read as a kid (mostly the Chrestomanci Chronicles), but most of her books that I’ve read as an adult have been kind of underwhelming. This is sadly no different, despite quite a bit of hype, including Neil Gaiman’s big shoutout in American Gods. I liked David and Luke, but I felt that most of the problems they face are solved too easily; the story feels like it could become epic, but instead it stays almost willfully, shrinkingly small. The fate of the world could be at stake...but instead let’s worry more about David’s living arrangements. At times it’s kind of like what one would imagine Harry Potter would have been like if all of the action had continued to revolve around the Dursleys.
So, you know, it was fine-good ideas, mediocre execution. You can see why Gaiman wanted to do something else with the material: something vaster; something that, even if it’s still imperfect, nevertheless has consequence.
14. Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, Peter Cameron - The obvious line is to call this book an updated version of The Catcher in the Rye, and, you know, I'm actually okay with that, because I love Salinger and I loved this. James' vibrant voice is terrific-funny and real-and the scene at the National Gallery is absolutely killer. Exploring James' lonely psyche will make you feel less so.
15. Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words, Jay Rubin - Interesting, if not electrifying, biography of Murakami by one of his English translators. Rubin’s discussion of the translation process itself was perhaps the most engaging and illuminating part-the English version of Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is abridged, WHAT. I also loved hearing that Murakami pays a lot of attention to the sound and the rhythm of the words when he writes-hey, that’s my technique, too! Dude, Haruki and I are like that.
Seriously, though, while it’s great to get some more extensive biographical information to put behind Murakami’s amazing body of work, it’s interesting to note that while Rubin does a good job of explaining who Murakami is in the most basic terms, there’s really no way to break down how he does what he does. A gift like that is, I think, elusive and ineffable. Zaphod Murakami’s just this guy, you know? And that’s actually pretty awesome.
16. My Summer on Earth, Tom Lombardi - There was a clear moment when I should have known to take one look at this book and run swiftly in the other direction. It was when I noticed that the front and back covers, instead of bearing proud quotes from other authors and publications praising the book, were plastered with fake quotes from made-up alien newspapers. That, my rational mind told me, cannot be a good sign. And yet, as usual, the part of me that just wanted to have fun with a fun book about an alien who comes to earth and takes on human form and falls in love shushed my more sensible brain. Those fake quotes are kind of cheeky and fun! it insisted. Come on, aliens in love-how bad can this be?
This book is so bad that both my rational and dopey fun-loving minds ruptured and died, leaving me to automatically turn page after page, slack-jawed with amazement that this dreck somehow got published. Got published and marketed for teens (!!!) even though it is soggy and leaking with filthy language, bizarre and repulsive descriptions of sex, homophobia, and violence. Now, I really do not think that I am a prude-teenagers should absolutely read about sex in its many forms, and they can easily survive hearing an f-bomb or two, for fuck’s sake. (See? There.) But they-and in fact, nobody, and certainly not I-do not need to read the word “douche” twenty times a page, or encounter such callous and frankly icky depictions of sex. Nor do teens/I/anyone need to read this book, which is incomprehensibly, insanely bad-hit by a two-by-four while tripping on acid and sick with stomach flu hallucination bad. In fact, that explanation makes more sense to me than the fact that this book actually exists.
But it does. Instead of my imagined cute alien romance, it does. Life is cruel sometimes.
17. First Contact, Evan Mandery - It's like Vonnegut, but without the occasionally creepy treatment of women and minorities! This was seriously fun. There are alien con men and a president obsessed with his underpants and a cheerful bludgeoning of the fourth wall. It’s clever and funny and sort of slyly about stuff. Now I only wish it were an easier sell. I managed to briefly get it onto the bestseller list at our store, though at the very bottom, and this only through very nearly physically forcing it into customers’ hands. I generally have a hard time selling anything if, in describing the plot, I have to use the word “aliens.” (The Sparrow was a non-starter for me, too, although I did try.) “Time travel” also doesn’t get me very far, and I doubt “amnesia” or “apocalyptic shenanigans” would do terribly well either. All the things I love, and my customers turn up their noses! Oh, watch me shake my head and sigh.
This is honestly very good, though. You should read it even if they won’t.
18. The Lost City of Z, David Grann - Okay, I officially do not want to go to the Amazon. I am open to the possibility of going almost anywhere-I love adventure! In a please-god-let-there-be-adequate-bathroom-facilities sort of way-but the Amazon is now officially off my list. The bugs! The snakes! The parasitic worms! Haha, okay, I think I am perfectly happy visiting this region from my armchair only.
Fortunately, Grann makes the journey exciting and vivid. He combines the story of Percy Fawcett-one of the last of the terribly English, gentlemanly explorers, who disappeared in the Amazon while searching for a (possibly apocryphal) lost city he called Z-with his own search for evidence of Fawcett’s fate and with a wealth of history about the region and about exploration in general. There is so much fascinating information in this book it’s almost overwhelming, and yet that narrative is also fast-paced and consistently engaging. This is the kind of true-life story that even the best fiction would have a hard time rivaling.
19. The Art of Racing in the Rain, Garth Stein - I am halfway tempted to dismiss this as a “man’s book.” I don’t feel comfortable doing that however, as 1) I have had way too many women tell me that they adored this book, that it made them weep and filled them with joy and cleared that pesky rash right up; and 2) if a dude dismissed pretty much anything as a “woman’s book,” I’d want to punch him in the throat. So, fair’s fair. This is not a “man’s book.” But it is a book written by a man with, I think, a seriously dim understanding of women and, quite possibly, people in general.
This is a book about a man called Denny. Denny is practically a saint. He loves his wife and his daughter and his dog, and for them-only for them!-he puts his dreams and his career as a *cough* professional race car driver on hold. When his wife gets cancer, he adheres to all of her wishes, including letting her and their daughter live with his creepy controlling in-laws. And when, while the rest of the family is packed away at said in-laws, a young, nubile, non-blood female relative brazenly attempts to seduce him, does Denny take her up on this offer of no-strings-attached sex? No! He bravely fends off her advances! Just like he refuses to give in when, after his wife’s inevitable death, the horrible in-laws try to gain custody of his daughter-going so far as to use a false accusation of rape by the duplicitous teenage seductress to improve their case! In the face of all this, wouldn’t most men give up and despair? But Denny-Denny the professional race car driver stays strong!
Yeah, okay. This may not be a “man’s book,” but that is a male fantasy if I ever heard one.
The only thing that makes this book at all believable is that it’s narrated by Denny’s dog. Denny’s dog is a dog-although, much to my disappointment, not an exuberant pup like Up’s Dug; Enzo instead sounds (as he would proudly assert) almost human-and thus he is loyal to a fault, and thus one can sort of see how Enzo-the-dog would see Denny-his-human as near-perfect. Enzo’s love for Denny is moving, and some early passages about their relationship turned out to be the only ones in the book that really worked for me. They were also, I suspect, what made so many of the people I’ve talked to-women and men-adore this book. Assuming you can ignore everything else about the story, I can sort of see where they are coming from there.
But I can’t ignore everything else about the story. Dog narrator or not, this is still a story about a perfect man persecuted by cartoonishly evil grandparents and almost left in ruin by, you know, one of those oh-so-common fake rape accusations. Have men at some point been falsely accused of rape? I’m sure they have. And you know: that really sucks. But you know what sucks even more? All the women who have actually been raped and then actually been told that no one would or should believe them, that the case will never go to court, that they guy will walk, that, you know, they were kind of asking for it anyway. And, fine, this may be partially my issues at play here, but that is all I could think about while Enzo praised Denny’s stoic dignity and bemoaned his powerlessness in the face of those evil, evil lawsuits. And I didn’t believe it. I didn’t believe a word of this book. Talking dogs-those I am willing to buy. I could even conceivably have been sold on the “oh and also there is reincarnation” twist at the end of the novel. (Um. Maybe.) But Denny’s saintliness and the grandparents’ unadulterated evil and the girl who cried rape-um, nope. Those I cannot buy. Nor do I want to.
Whether or not this is a “man’s book,” it is definitely not a book for me.
20. The Unfinished Angel, Sharon Creech - Apparently, I will read just about anything with an angel in it these days-even a kids’ book, in which I know there will be no chance of random angelsextiems. Actually, in this particular book, it seems there’s really no chance of anything. Nothing happens. There are some orphans and a girl with experimental fashion sense and an angelic narrator who speaks with an occasionally charming shaky grasp on grammar. But NOTHING HAPPENS. The angel wonders why it is unfinished, without a purpose, and I was interested in the answer to that question. But one does not materialize. There are small town shenanigans and more orphans and no one threatens to throw anyone else back into Hell or visits a den of iniquity or speaks Enochian or ANYTHING. Bleh. I think, even as a child myself-without an angelsextiems agenda-this book would have bored me. I always liked it when things happened.
Total Reviews: 20/41