Girl Detective

But consider how many relationships survive sewn together with tacit complicity and mutual deception. It’s the cold light of discovery that’s so dangerous. Better to live with the lies. (P. 170)

Book #41 in my 50 book challenge for the year was highly recommended to me by two members of my writing group. One said it was the perfect mix of story and craft. Mostly, I agree. Mawer tells a story that shifts back and forth in time, and back and forth among characters. Nonetheless, he always maintains strict authorial control, and the story unfolds seamlessly. I don’t agree that it is perfect because of characterization. There was one character who became sympathetic only as it served the story. Once it did no longer, she slipped back into her not very complex self. Another character, also a woman, had an almost cruel lack of redeeming qualities. Finally, the main character, Rob, never really seemed a character in and of himself, only as he related to the other characters. The characters never came alive for me, so I found it worthwhile, but not superlative.

The Scott Pilgrim graphic novels, volumes 1 and 2 (Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, respectively) by Bryan Lee O’Malley were books number 39 and 40 in my fifty book challenge for the year.

Scott is a 23 year old slacker who has no job, is in a band, and lives in a tiny apartment in Canada with his gay roommate Wallace. Scott has struck up a romance with 17 year old Knives Chau, a girl he met on the bus. Subsequently, though, he sees a girl in person who he recognizes; she’s been skating through his dreams. He introduces himself to the girl, Ramona Flowers, at a party, and their romance begins, though he hasn’t yet broken things off with the increasingly crushed-out Knives. Volume 1 ends with a hilarious Hong Kong movie-ish fight between Scott and an ex-boyfriend of Ramona’s. In Volume 2 Scott must face the second of Ramona’s evil ex-boyfriends, and we get more backstory on the girl that left Scott heartbroken before Knives. There’s also another Hong-Kong movie-ish fight, this time in a public library, during which we learn why Knives has such an odd name.

These are funny, weird and exceptionally charming books. They are teen fiction with magical realism, distinctive manga-inspired art, engaging characters and some drop-dead funny panels. I’ve also liked O’Malley’s previous work on Lost at Sea and Hopeless Savages: Ground Zero, which is written by Jen Van Meter, who is married to comics and mystery writer Greg Rucka.

I am delicate and the world is impossibly wrong, is unthinkable and I am not forewarned, forearmed, equipped. I cannot manage. If there was something useful I could do, I would–but there isn’t. So I drink. (P. 202)

Paradise by A.L. Kennedy, book 38 in my 50 book challenge for the year, was a recommendation from Blog of a Bookslut, where Jessa Crispin noted that it might be the best book of the year. Michael Schaub disagreed; he thought it was Francine Prose’s A Changed Man, that is, until he read Paradise.

The voice of Hannah Luckraft is always powerful, and at times funny, tragic, pathetic, sharp or blurry. I struggled to limit myself to quoting just one passage above, but the novel begs to be marked up, it is so full of memorable bits. Hannah’s voice runs the gamut, as she narrates this non-linear love story of two drunks. It reaches off the page and draws me in, clutches me in a death-grip until its final, murky end. I was more than impressed by Kennedy’s writing; I was a little scared by it. But I couldn’t look away, either from the writing or from what happened (or didn’t) to Hannah.

Anyone who has read the book, please email me. I must discuss the ending.

I picked up Mysterious Skin, book 37 in my 50 book challenge for the year, after a recommendation by Michael Schaub at Blog of a Bookslut. Schaub noted that a movie had just been made and was receiving good reviews. This was the third book in a row I’d read with narration revolving among characters. Heim’s writing wasn’t always strong enough to carry this off. I sometimes had to flip to the beginning of a chapter to remind myself who was speaking because the voices weren’t distinct. The two main characters are Brian and Neil. We are introduced to them when they are 8, then return to them 11 years later. Brian is a loner struggling to recall what happened that left him with no memory after a little league game, while Neil is a homosexual hustler who keeps upping the level of risk in his life. The stories intertwine skillfully. Neil is an especially compelling character, sympathetic in spite of his recklessness. Overall, the book is concerned with memory–what we recall and what we don’t, and how we bring memories and blanks with us as we age. The writing, especially toward the end, flagged considerably, but the story and characters were enough to propel me to the end, which, while it answered the questions posed by the book, was a little contrived-ly weird for me.

Apologies for the movie-cover link. Amazon was not being cooperative when I tried to link to the cereal cover, which was the copy I read from the library.

I saw this author at the Twin Cities book fest last fall and liked what she had to say. Where No Gods Came, book #36 in my 50 book challenge for the year, is the story of Faina McCoy, returned to her mother in Minneapolis from California, after her father must take an Australian oil-rig job to pay off gambling debts. Faina’s mother is an alcoholic and her sister Cammy is a runaway and a grifter. Faina quickly gets drawn in to taking care of her mother. She struggles through Catholic school and numerous painful encounters. The portrait of Minneapolis is well-drawn, though the names of streets and locations have been switched or disguised. The narrative switches among the characters, but their voices are not distinct. I sometimes had to flip back to the beginning of a chapter to remind myself which person was speaking. In spite of that, the characters were distinct and believably, often depressingly, complex. Much of the novel was quite dark, so I was relieved when Faina, whom I’d come to care about, gained the redemptive ending I thought she deserved.

I finished Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories the weekend before last, book #35 in my 50 book challenge for the year, and one question looms large: why do so many people hate the ending? I felt there was a good sense of closure, and didn’t feel rushed into it. Also, I’m not sure what part can be called “the” ending, since she’s got about a dozen story lines, all of which have some sort of end.

While I did think that the various mysteries weren’t hard to guess, I didn’t find this problematic. Instead, I was so engrossed with her characters that I was reading to spend time with them. Having a set of difficult mysteries to second guess would have distracted me from them. The central character is a detective named Jackson Brodie, hired by several of the other characters to solve the case histories of the title. The narration revolves among many of these characters, and each voice and view are distinct among the many narrators. I was impressed by how Atkinson kept the reader grounded, reminding throughout of times, dates and ages, rather than expecting me to flip back and forth. Additionally, she was quite good at jumping the narrative ahead over some big revelation, then going back to it later, through another character’s viewpoint. This never felt contrived to me. Atkinson had a smooth authorial control that kept things moving along at a fast, but not breakneck speed.

I so loved the characters that I regretted when I finished the book, and regretted even more that I had to start my next one right away. I got Case Histories from the library, but am going to buy a copy. I would like to read it again, and soon. Now that I know the endings, I can examine Atkinson’s crafted writing at a more leisurely pace.

Buying the book, though, has not yet occurred because it has not been easy. I asked my friend Queenie, who works at a bookstore to pick up a copy for me. She checked three of the biggest stores nearby, none of which had a copy. Case Histories was published in October, and stores don’t often reorder hardcovers after six months, since the trade paperback will be out in a few months. So if you’re thinking that you’ll browse through it the next time you’re in a shop, you may be out of luck. I will probably be purchasing from Amazon.

As you can see from the link above, I am now an Amazon associate, so if you purchase anything from them by following a link from me, I will receive a tiny percentage, which will go to further books and DVDs to review here. I will get a general link set up soon. I know you kind readers have many options of buying books, and probably more than one site through which you could purchase, so I thank you in advance for any consideration.

Jennifer Weiner does a hilarious reading of Curtis Sittenfeld’s review of Melissa Banks’s The Wonder Spot. Sittenfeld’s Prep was given to me by a friend, so it’s on my nightstand now, though the reviews I’ve read have been less than compelling. At a presentation I attended earlier this year, Michael Cart, a young-adult fiction expert I’ve quoted before, wondered if Prep would have been better with an editor familiar with the young adult genre, since it includes a lot of typical YA cliches.

I loved Banks’s first book, a novel in stories, The Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing. The Wonder Spot, the victim of Sittenfeld’s review, is in transit to my local library right now.

Yet at bat on my reading list is Paradise by A.L. Kennedy, on deck is The Fall by Simon Mawer, and in the hole is Family Matters by David Guterson, all library books that have a return date. I think my library to-be-read books are going to create a black hole as they crash through the surface of my nightstand, where they reside alongside the “books I already own that I intend to read real soon” and “graphic novels that I’ve bought recently”. I’m not sure that taking the phrase “on the nightstand” literally has been the motivator that I thought it would be.

I finished watching Season Two of MI-5 on DVD last night, and am in the middle of A. L. Kennedy’s alcoholic love story, Paradise. I must take some drastic measures to lighten things up. If those are the only two media things I’m in the midst of, I might forget what hope is.

Both, though, are extremely good. I recommend them, just in conjunction with other, lighter things.

From Bookslut:

There’s coverage of Lionel Shriver, the US-born author who won the Orange Prize yesterday for We Need to Talk About Kevin, at The Scotsman, The Independent, the BBC, The Times, the CBC, Reuters, and This Is London. Much is made of her traditionally masculine first name and her decision not to have children. (Quick, how many male authors have you seen get quizzed incessantly about their lack of offspring? I think it’s about…let me do the math here…yeah, about zero. Ah, vive le double standard.)

Well, yes, but the male authors who don’t get quizzed haven’t written a book with a main character of a mother who doesn’t form a bond with the child that goes on to commit mass murder.

If Ms. Shriver doesn’t want to have kids, I applaud her decision to buck convention. The premise of this book smacks of an extreme apologia, one which, however well-written, doesn’t compel me to read it. A simple “no, not for me” would suffice.

Influenced again by the lit blogs, I am reading Kate Atkinson’s book Case Histories. A few years ago I read her first, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, which won the Whitbread. I liked but didn’t love it. I thought the ending felt contrived, though I had enjoyed the book as I read it. That book, as well as Smilla’s Sense of Snow, taught me not to recommend a book until I’ve finished it. Endings are hard to do, and even harder to do well. Bad endings have the unfortunate ability to cast their shadow over that which went before them. But I am drawn to the idea of a variety of passionate and intelligent readers writing their reaction to a book, so I decided to give Case Histories a go when the Lit Blog Coop picked it as their Summer 2005 “Read This” recommendation.

As of page 128, I’m happy I gave Atkinson another try. There are three mysteries involving three families, and one investigator who has looked into two of them as of my reading to page 128. The characters are engaging and complex, the writing is strong, and the mysteries are intriguing. I put the book down when I must, but I do not wish to draw out this reading experience. Several passages have stood out to me, making me wish for my own copy to underline. This is an uncharacteristic urge, since I have lately enjoyed the freedom from book ownership and cost afforded by my local libraries. I will post more on the book as my reading progresses. I’m hoping that the ending does not disappoint.

[Michelle] was driven by something, only she didn’t know what it was but she was sure that if one day she could get everything finished then she’d be free of whatever it was that was driving her. “You’ll never get everything perfect, Michelle,” Shirley said. “That’s impossible.” But it wasn’t. Given enough time you could make anything perfect. P. 41.

On the eve of starting the next draft of my novel, I re-read this book for inspiration, book #34 in my 50 book challenge for the year. I’m thrilled to re-read. It’s something I did when I was younger, before I got overwhelmed by all the good books out there. But re-reading is a practice, even a skill, that I want to cultivate. The first time I go through a book, I read to see what happens. I race ahead to find out. Subsequent readings allow me to savor the the choices the author made in terms of language, craft, and story.

Speak is teen fiction, and one of my favorite books, not only of recent years but perhaps ever. The main character and narrator is Melinda, who starts ninth grade with no friends, because she called the police during an end-of-summer party. Both times I read this, Melinda’s voice reached out and grabbed me, and hauled me along her very sad and yet extremely funny story.

It is my first morning of high school. I have seven new notebooks, a skirt I hate, and a stomachache…

Older students are allowed to roam until the bell, but ninth-graders are herded into the auditorium. We fall into clans: Jocks, Country Clubbers, Idiot Savants, Cheerleaders, Human Waste, Eurotrash, Future Fascists of America, Big Hair Chix, the Marthas, Suffering Artists, Thespians, Goths, Shredders. I am clanless. I wasted the last weeks of summer watching bad cartoons. I didn’t go to the mall, the lake, or the pool, or answer the phone. I have entered high school with the wrong hair, the wrong clothes, the wrong attitude. And I don’t have anyone to sit with.

I am outcast.

The ending is so fitting that it flirts with overdetermination, yet it is so balanced that I don’t want to change one jot of it. I am frankly envious of the author who wrote such a compelling character, powerful voice, and wrenching story. I love this book.

This was also the eleventh book I finished this month. If I keep up this pace I’m going to beat my goal handily. Maybe I should give Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle a try. It feels as if the more I read, the more I’m able to read. Some of the books I’ve read this month were short, but some weren’t–one was the nearly 1,000-page Don Quixote! I feel I’m a better, faster reader than I was before I gave myself this challenge.

a teen fiction anthology edited by Michael Cart. Book #33 in my 50 book challenge for the year. As usual with Cart, this is a strong collection by talented writers including Katherine Paterson, Lois Lowry and Jon Scieszka. The stories range in tone and time though all center on the theme of the future. It was published in 1999, prior to what many people asserted was the turn of the millennium. Because its publication pre-dated 9/11, the stories and themes take on an almost old-fashioned innocence, which feels strange because the collection is only a few years old.

Book #32 of my 50 Book Challenge for 2005. The author said she wrote this as a break between Persepolis and Persepolis 2. It has the same charm and humor of Persepolis, but feels more slight, both in weight and in content, like the graphic novel equivalent of a novella. It centers on an after-lunch gathering of women for tea and discussion of others and each other, and their mostly difficult relations with men. The title refers to a method of falsely re-creating virginity, a practice that one story told with disastrous results. As with Persepolis, the art is deliberately simple. It is easy to find points of recognition in the stories, even with women of different age and culture.

Book #31 in my 50 Book Challenge, by Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev. Another strong entry in the Bendis/Maleev collaboration. Daredevil, confronted by his naked ex-girlfriend in his bed, a.k.a. The Black Widow,

DD: My life’s kind of in dissaray.
BW: As opposed to when?
DD: You got me there.

It’s a solid story that moves fast and has some funny bits. The collection includes an issue drawn by several artists, who do a much better job than is usual for a gimmicky flashback issue. Maleev’s art seemed more photo-referential than it has before, reminding me of Tony Harris’s art in the very entertaining Ex Machina.

by Elisabeth Robinson. Book #30 in my 50 Book Challenge for 2005. A novel in letters about Olivia Hunt, who is trying to produce a film of Don Quixote when she finds out her younger sister is dying of leukemia. The letters are from Olivia to various people in her life–friends, family, co-workers, her ex-boyfriend.

The epistolary format didn’t work for me. I didn’t find Olivia’s narratives well differentiated in types of letter (emails were similar to faxes and to letters) or in recipient (she told parts of the story to whomever she was writing to, so if you removed the “Dear X” from the letter, it didn’t matter for long stretches whether she was writing to her sister, her friend or her ex.) I think this book might have worked better if Robinson would have interspersed narrative and letters, rather than trying to cram the former into the latter.

There were some sentences that were unwieldy and incongruous in general, made more so for being in a letter, e.g.,

It’s a clear, fine spring day and I had to feel it for a minute, to just breathe in the sweet magnolia scent of a June day in the Ohio Valley.

Also, Robinson didn’t use quotation marks, which made dialogue sometimes difficult to follow.

Perhaps as a result of the letter format, none of the characters felt three dimensional. I didn’t see much growth or increased insight even in the main character of Olivia. Things changed around her, but I didn’t find her very changed at the end.

On the positive side, there was a good balance of funny and sad, and some interesting insight into the Hollywood experience. Since I read it recently, I understood all the references to Don Quixote, and thought it was a good thematic match for her sister’s illness. I thought it especially ironic that she notes in a few letters that people should not worry about Gilliam’s Don Quixote, since it won’t get made. Her fictional version does get made, though in real-life Robinson worked on a version that didn’t. Terry Gilliam did eventually try to film Don Quixote. He turned his failure into the documentary Lost in La Mancha.

This is a good article with a disgusting title on the rise of novels told in stories. I’ve read two novels in stories (NIS) recently, Elizabeth McKenzie’s Stop That Girl, and Elizabeth Crane’s All This Heavenly Glory. Both were good, but the stories got less good as their protagonists got older, a problem I didn’t find in one of my favorite books from a few years ago, Melissa Bank’s NIS The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing. (FYI, Bank’s follow up, The Wonder Spot is due at the end of this month, and looks promising.)

In general, I prefer novels to other forms because of continuity of voice and characterization. NIS books have more of this than do books of unrelated short stories, but it’s an uncomfortable hybrid. Though the author of the article is dismissive that market issues are driving the rise of the NIS, I think it’s valid. Short stories don’t sell as well as do novels. It’s interesting to see the rise of a new form, one of which, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, waits on my bedside table. But I’m not yet convinced that these so-called novels aren’t literature with an attention-span problem.

In spite of my previously professed preference for novels, I have read and enjoyed several short story collections lately.

28. All This Heavenly Glory by Elizabeth Crane. Similar in many ways to #25 Stop That Girl by another Elizabeth (McKenzie, who in fact is named in one of the fawning blurbs by little-known authors on the back, one of whom is Thisbe Nissen, whose name I’ve always admired even if I have not read his [her?] books), this is a novel in stories about Charlotte Anne Byers, who eventually goes through a convoluted dropping of the Anne on her way to adulthood; the stories alternate between childhood and adulthood, though I found the former rather than the latter more engaging, making me wonder, as I did with the aforementioned Stop That Girl, whether all stories with intriguing young heroines have them grow up into boring, crazy women, in this case who are boringly redeemed by the love of a younger man, though the book itself isn’t boring, in fact it’s quite funny, such as in the opening story when she says she is seeking Owen Wilson (not an Owen Wilson type, she clarifies, but the man himself), and I often recognized myself in bits (though not the parts that involved, as did Crane’s previous collection, #24 When the Messenger is Hot, an opera-singing dying/dead mother, Iowan step-family, authorial move from NYC to Chicago, and an annoying tendency to use the second person narrative when things got a bit too autobiographical), as in her childhood obsession with her friend’s Crissy dolls, one of which I owned as a child, and whose growing hair never broke, though I wrote previously about how Crissy’s “sister” Velvet’s hair mechanism did break, and if you find this ongoing sentence with commas and parentheticals to be very annoying, then you might want to give the book a miss, because Crane is very fond of them and can go on for over a page, though, admittedly, she does it more skillfully than do I.

29. Beware of God by Shalom Auslander. I wasn’t in the mood for dark humor, but this collection won me over. It’s extremely dark (lots of death, including people, a dog, a monkey) but so clever, subversive and funny (God is a happy, giant chicken!; the Peanuts characters take sides in warring religious factions!) that the end result is almost charming. I laughed out loud several times, and would have read more parts aloud except that my husband had to leave for work and I didn’t think Drake would get the jokes.

A few years ago when I worked at a used book store, I was excited to come across omnibus editions of some of my favorite books from childhood, such as Curious George by Margret and H.A. Rey, Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne, and George and Martha by the late, great James Marshall. All the good books in one nice volume; what a great idea!

Except, of course, that it’s not. Omnibus editions, for both kids and adults, have the same problem. They are too much of a good thing. Bigger books are harder to handle than smaller ones. Smaller books are more likely to be taken hither and yon and actually read. Yes, there is the problem of smaller print, but most of us bookworms have corrective lenses already.

My husband G. Grod recently read an omnibus edition of Le Carré. That was an ideal omnibus situation–he was going to read a bunch of short, related books very quickly. Our 21-month-old son Drake struggles mightily to haul the Curious George and George and Martha omnibuses (omnibi?) off the shelf and to the reading chair. A commendable effort, but, oh, the poor parent who is now faced with reading the entire omnibus aloud!

Eschew the siren call of the omnibus edition, that Costco version of literature. Instead, spend a little more on individual, human-sized books that can be read one at a time.

(NB Comic books vs. graphic novels are a related, but different, discussion.)

Years behind everyone else, I recently finished reading Fast Food Nation. Overall, I found the book discouraging, but not surprising. It details many disgusting, inhumane practices of the fast food and meat industries. One of the most disturbing facts is that there is little or no regulation or testing on meat that is sold to public schools. Kids are most likely to get the worst meat.

My most lasting impression from the book is that I am very fortunate. I do not risk life or limb at my job. I can afford food that is grown and created conscientiously. I am, indeed, lucky.

27. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, translated by Edith Grossman. I did it! It was long, but well worth it. Sancho Panza and Don Quixote are interesting, complex characters. The book is by turns amusing and sad. What I enjoyed most were the tricks that Cervantes played with multiple authors and various reference points. There are gaps in the story, e.g., Sancho’s wife has four different names. Cervantes didn’t correct the mistakes on subsequent printings, but instead wove them into the entire story. Grossman’s translation and notes make this book easy to read and enjoy.