Chuckabilly's Literary Lollapalooza August 2010

This is Literary Lollapalooza, August 2010 Edition.

Books Read This Month:

Netherland by Joseph O’Neill

Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? by Neil Gaiman and Andy Kubert

What is the What by Dave Eggers

A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem

Books Acquired:

Fiction: A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore, I am Number Four by Pittacus Lore, The Acid House by Irvine Welsh, Filth by Irvine Welsh, Marabou Stork Nightmares by Irvine Welsh, Robot Dreams by Isaac Asimov, The Spies of Warsaw by Alan Furst

Non-Fiction:

E-Books: Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem

Books Borrowed: Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? by Neil Gaiman and Andy Kubert, Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins, True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey

Currently Reading: I am Number Four by Pittacus Lore

Reviews of This Months’ Books:

Netherland by Joseph O’Neill

I actually read this book in July, but realized I had not included it after I posted July’s Lit ‘Palooza. I include it here, in apologia.

Netherland is a fascinating read. Told in first person by the narrator, Hans van den Broek, a Dutch-born and London-educated financial consultant who has found himself living in New York following the events of 9/11. At heart this is the story of a man living abroad in a strange place, and trying to find his place in a new home.

Hans is a likeable protagonist who connects with his home and with New York by playing cricket with a variety of working-class immigrants in Brooklyn. Among these cricket enthusiasts Hans meets Chuck Ramkisoon, a fast-talking, charismatic man with many capitalist interests and dreams of making cricket mainstream in America.

Told with the same thoughtful, well-paced plotting and vividly drawn characters one would find with Paul Auster or Don Delillo, this book is a slow burn. Slowly drawing you in, gradually enveloping you into the literary world, by the end you have lived in van den Broek’s distorted, alien, and ultimately life-changing Brooklyn. The character of Chuck Ramkisoon is a revelation, and when he is pulled, handcuffed from a New York reservoir many years later, it only deepens the mystery and lore you are already so entangled in.

At the beginning of Obama’s presidency in ’08 he was reading this book, and it has garnered numerous literary honors and awards since then. An eye-opening look at immigrant culture in the United States, this is a thought-provoking and deeply enriching novel.

Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? by Neil Gaiman and Andy Kubert

This is not the first Batman tale by Neil Gaiman (those earlier tales are collected here as well), but this is the latest and most likely the last. In fact, it IS the last. The last Batman story that can be told: The story of his death.

As Batman attends a funeral populated by all his villains, friends, and allies after a long and storied career, he converses with an unseen female companion about all that he sees. Through different artistic styles, Gaiman and Kubert take a walk down memory lane reliving various important moments in the Dark Knight’s mythos by recreating the drawing and writing style of Batman creators throughout the 90 year history of the world’s greatest detective.

The result is a bittersweet farewell to a character that has had many lives. Of course the character of Batman can never really die, but that is the beauty of what Gaiman does here: by honoring Batman’s death, he is celebrating the immortality the character has attained.

Not the best Batman story ever told, but definitely the last…and a fitting tribute to my favorite of all comic book heroes.

What is the What by Dave Eggers

This is another tale about a U.S. immigrant, but in this case, he is Valentino Achek Deng, and he is a real person living and breathing in the United States.

Eggers, a brilliant biographer, as attested by his own autobiographical A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and the astounding Zeitoun, about an Islamic man in post-Katrina New Orleans. What is the What is the life story of a surviving “Lost Boy” of the Sudan. Told in the first person, but greatly enhanced by the author’s imagination, this biography is considered by author and subject to be a novel based on true events.

The story is a heartbreaking one of many trials and tribulations. As a warning it moves much slower than Eggers’ other works, without the optimistic zeal that keeps the others moving forward of their own volition. This is a bit of a slug-fest, but it is totally worth slugging through it.

Valentino Achek Deng is having a hard time adjusting to Atlanta. For one, his home has been just been invaded and robbed, and he has been beaten and tied up on the floor of his apartment, left for dead. As he awaits his roommate’s possible return, or a neighbor to hear his muffled yells or panicked kicks at the walls and door, he recounts the long and storied events that led to his being in his current state. That story involves constant starvation, fear, death, and the abandonment of family and of anything resembling home and safety.

His is a horrible story about great wrongs suffered upon a people by another. Sadly he is not alone. Thousands of others share his grief, and his horrific past. Like Zeitoun this is an incredibly true story about one man’s overcoming great odds to survive and live happily as an outsider in the United States.

Seriously, Eggers is one hell of a writer. If you haven’t read his others, go read Zeitoun. Then you’ll want to make your way through each of his other books. This is number three for me and there are two more novels to go. I can’t wait.

A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

I find it odd, but it seems like almost every book I read this month took place post 9/11, and is greatly shaped by that momentous day.

A Gate at the Stairs is a novel about a young woman coming of age in the Midwest in the year following 9/11. Tassie Keltjin, our young protagonist, is the daughter of a potato farmer in a small town, and has moved to the university town of Troy to attend college. It’s here that she starts working as a nanny for a glamorous and mysterious family, and finds herself drawn deeply into their world, changing her own life forever.

This is a great American novel about those complex years of early adulthood that we later look back on realize truly shaped who we later became. It is a novel about small moments that seem big at the time and is written with all the warmth and humor and firecracker wit one could hope for. Lorrie Moore is an incredible writer: an obvious love for words and their meaning, she attacks each sentence with equal ferocity. But unlike other writers, Moore’s intellectualism isn’t pretentious or self-flattering, but winning and warm.

A great book of sadness, and hope, and triumph, and loss A Gate at the Stairs is an astonishing novel about race and class in modern America. Just like real life, it is at turns hilarious and heartbreaking, and it will make you laugh and cry, often at the same time.

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

Mockingjay is the third and final installment in The Hunger Games trilogy. Picking up immediately following the events of Catching Fire this book follows Katniss Everdeen as she tries to navigate the twisted world, at which she’s found herself the center. The colonies are in revolt, the Capitol is panicked, and Katniss finds herself being used as a pawn in revolutionary Colony 13.

I can’t say enough about this trilogy of young adult novels. Each volume picks up immediately on the heels of the last, and each one raises the stakes and the excitement. As usual there are many shocking deaths and we lose characters we’ve grown to love over the course of the series, but we also find ourselves locked in the middle of a tense love triangle as Katniss has to decide between the staid and loyal Gale, and her fierce protector in the games Peeta.

This novel is my favorite of the three, but of course don’t start here. Go back and start with The Hunger Games. They are truly some of the best dystopic science fiction novels one can find. Great characters, amazing action and suspense, this series will not disappoint!

Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem

Wow. I really don’t even know where to start with this comic book super hero inspired coming of age tale cum love letter to a childhood Brooklyn.

Fortress of Solitude is many things. It is an amazing coming of age story following young Dylan Ebdus growing up on the streets of Brooklyn in the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s. The main story focuses on Dylan’s moving to Brooklyn and his assimilation into the neighborhood: wallball and stickball are cornerstones of his childhood. His father is an artist intent on creating infinite tiny paintings on top of film stock. His mother, a social hippie, intent on raising her son in a classless, raceless Brooklyn, becomes increasingly vacant until she is gone completely. Dylan is left with his newest neighbor, and his best friend Mingus Rude, the son of a lead singer of a 60’s soul group, The Subtle Distinctions. Dylan and Mingus’ lives intertwine with a homeless street person named Aaron X. Doily, who has been spotted flying from rooftop to rooftop in the dusky evening air. After a close call, the homeless bequeaths his magical ring to Dylan and he and Mingus begin flying themselves, taking on the identity of a superhero Dylan and Mingus begin fighting petty crimes with the newly found powers the ring bestows on its’ owners…when they aren’t tagging trains and walls with graffiti and getting high on marijuana or cocaine.

Crossing as many genres and styles as one book can, this is book is a tour-de-force. It is an amazing literary force to be reckoned with, demanding to be taken seriously with its serious social issues of homelessness, gentrification, race wars, class wars, drug use and addiction and heartfelt examination of what it’s like to be raised white in a largely black community. And then it punches through the walls of the normal and introduces super powers like flying and invisibility, and doesn’t treat them as gimmicks, but further terrain that must be negotiated in the tricky world of being human and nurturing adult relationships.

This is one of the most wildly divergent novels I have ever read. It is literally schizophrenic in its make-up. It is both a tough coming of age novel about growing up amid gang and drug influences in Brooklyn, and a fantasy story about a kid who inherits a ring from a dying superhero that bestows magical powers upon the person who wears the ring.

It is astounding fiction. The writing is unbelievably emotional and nostalgic. I have never been taken back to my own childhood as strongly as I was here. Lethem transported me right back to the days when I would get “yoked” by school-yard bullies, and he kept me completely entranced throughout like I was living Dylan and Mingus’ lives right along with them.

An important and devastating novel, this is incredible heights of fiction writing, teetering ever-so-close to the edge and always threatening to fall from the ledge of believability. Luckily Lethem knows how to walk a tightrope and he manages to pull off a heartbreaking, exciting fantasy without one false note.

Sickboy's Literary Lollapalooza, August 2010

With this one, I can get caught up, and try to keep current from here on out. It was a decent month of reading, 8 books, but three were read in one week while sitting on a boat in the middle of the ocean. So, I don’t guess it’s normal for me to read this many at a time. Again, books denoted with “*” are Pulitzer Winners. August brought with it a trilogy, some rewritten history, and a Pulitzer Winner. Enjoy this latest edition of Literary Lollapalooza…

BOOKS ACQUIRED AUGUST 2010

The Girl Who Played With Fire, Stieg Larsson

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, Stieg Larsson

To Kill A Mockingbird*, Harper Lee

My Life as An Experiment, A.J. Jacobs

Interpreter of Maladies*, Jhumpa Lahiri

Tinkers* Paul Harding

Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist, Michael J. Fox

BOOKS READ AUGUST 2010

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson: I’m going to start by saying this is not the type of book I would normally read. But every time I walked into a bookstore, I couldn’t help but be beat over the head with this book, and the two that follow it. So, I thought I’d see what the hubbub was all about. I’m pretty glad I did. This, the first book in the trilogy, started slow, but I liked where it was going, so I pushed forward. By the time I was somewhere short of halfway through it, it started moving quickly, and I didn’t want to put it down. Lisbeth Salander, the main female character, is a delightfully anti-social hacker with a severe mistrust of everyone she meets. Salander is hired by Mikael Blomqvist, an anti-business journalist, to assist him in his attempt to solve a 40-year old murder. As he continues to open new questions, he finds himself spiraling toward an answer he couldn’t possibly have imagined; an answer that points toward other murders, as well. I wouldn’t say the translation is brilliant, but Larsson’s story is wonderful, with richly imagined characters that could have come straight out of real-life. In fact, the character of Salander felt like one of my friends had been plucked out of her life, given the skills to be a hacker, and placed in the book. I couldn’t finish the book (or the trilogy, for that matter), without thinking of this person every time Salander was front and center. That, to me, is a giant compliment to the author.

The Girl Who Played With Fire, Stieg Larsson: Much like “The Empire Strikes Back,” this is the book in which all the good stuff happens. This book brings us the continuing adventures of Blomqvist and Salander, and it’s a great ride. We begin to learn why Salander is the way she is after she’s accused of a double homicide. Blomqvist takes it upon himself to prove her innocence, and “bombs” are dropped. I literally had to set the book aside at one point and digest something I had just read. I don’t really have much else to say without spoiling it, so I’ll just tell you to read …Dragon Tattoo, if only to read this one. It’s modern excellence.

The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest, Stieg Larsson: The final book in the trilogy (Although I’ve heard there’s an unfinished fourth that Larsson’s estate is holding on to. Probably a good thing, as it would probably suck if someone else tried to finish it) brings us to the conclusion of the saga started in earnest in …Played With Fire. I can’t stress enough that I didn’t think I was going to like the first book, but had so much fun reading these that I knocked all three out in about a week and a half. I just couldn’t put them down. Every spare moment of time I had was spent reading these books. If you like thrillers, these are the books for you.

The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, Rief Larsen: There’s a theme here with last names pronounced the same way this month, I think. This book was a whole lot of fun. While an entirely different type of book, it reminded me in a way of House of Leaves: quite a bit of notations and drawings in the margins, helping shed light on the nature of one T.S. Spivet. Spivet is a twelve-year old cartographer who has been awarded the Baird Award through the Smithsonian. Instead of telling anyone, he makes his own way to Washington, DC from Montana. The book is divided into three sections: The West, The Crossing, and The East. Each section brings with it new challenges for our young hero, as he journeys across the country, where he surprises the Smithsonian with his age. He becomes an instant national celebrity, due to his brilliance as a cartographer, and realizes shortly after his year long residency at the Smithsonian starts that he doesn’t really want to have anything to do with it. He’s a melancholy, conflicted boy, and Larsen’s storytelling is charming. I loved this book, and all its layers and subplots. It was fun.

My Life as an Experiment, A.J. Jacobs: It’s no secret: I love the books of A.J. Jacobs. He’s funny. He’s relevant. And good lord, does his wife put up with a lot of crap. She must be a saint. A departure from the year-long journeys Jacobs enlightened us on in The Year of Living Biblically and The Know-It-All, My Life as an Experiment details ten month-long experiments, and all of Jacobs’ hilarious results. My personal favorites were “My Outsourced Life” (in which he outsources his tasks and correspondence to assistants in India), “The Truth About Nakedness” (in which he poses for nude photographs for Esquire), “and “My Life as a Beautiful Woman” (in which he helps his babysitter set up a profile on a dating site, and then helps her weed through the bad submissions, as well as assist in responding to the ones he and she like). As usual, Jacobs is funny and smart. If you haven’t read any of his books, I would suggest doing so. Now.

To Kill A Mockingbird*, Harper Lee: I’m not going to say too much about this book, because I’m pretty sure I’m the only person I know that didn’t have to read this in school while growing up. I assume most (if not all) of you know this book, or have at least seen the movie (which I haven’t seen, either). So I’ll just say this: I can’t figure out why I had never picked it up before. I loved every word of every page. And I have the feeling it’ll be one of those books that I read again. And again. And again.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Seth Grahame-Smith: Yeah. I read it. And it was glorious. It’s a biography of Lincoln’s life as a vampire hunter. Debunked are the reasons history has given us for the Civil War. Oh, slavery was still an issue, but not in the sense that we’ve come to see it: the war was brought on by vampires in the South wanting to enslave mortal humans. Lincoln was charged with winning this war to prevent that from happening. While the book was pretty clever, for the most part, I knew very quickly (with no indication from the author) that one John Wilkes-Booth would be a vampire. I can hear all of you screaming, “Why would you spoil it?” Well, number one, it’s obvious. Number two, it doesn’t really spoil anything. We all know what happens to Lincoln. This book is about the journey he took to get there. It’s not the most well-written book I’ve ever read, but it’s a whole lot of fun.

Under the Dome, Stephen King: I finally got around to this one, after it sat in my stack for months and months. It’s not Mr. King’s best. The story itself was fun and interesting, but there’s something I’ve noticed about the man: as he gets older, his younger characters get cheesier. It’s obvious that, at this point in his life, Stephen King is out of touch with the way young people talk. Sure, he gets some of the details right, as far as his pop culture references, but when I hear teenage characters saying words that haven’t been used by teenagers since I was in middle school, it kind of takes me right out of the story. I don’t find it believable. And that’s a problem for me (and with me, truthfully). Outside of that, this story about a force-field like dome that descends around a town, locking insiders in, and outsiders out, is a pretty good ride. As sometimes happens with King’s books, the climax comes fast and furious and is over in a matter of a few pages. Which isn’t always a problem, except when you’ve read 1000+ pages and you feel like there she be a little more payoff and conflict involved with the final resolution. But, that’s always been the fun in his books: they’re more about the journey than they are the result. And I like journeys. So, I guess I don’t really have anything to complain about here. If you like Stephen King, you’ll like Under the Dome. If you’re “meh” about Stephen King, you can probably skip it.

Sickboy's Literary Lollapalooza, July 2010

I won’t waste time with excuses here. Please forgive me if my reviews (if that’s what you want to call them) aren’t up to par. I don’t expect to remember every little thing when it’s been two months since I’ve read these. As always, "*" denotes a Pulitzer Winner. Let’s get July’s Lollapalooza underway!

BOOKS ACQUIRED JULY 2010
None (What? This can’t be right…)


BOOKS READ JULY 2010

Dead Man’s Walk, Larry McMurtry: The first book in the Lonesome Dove series is a look at the early careers of Texas Rangers Augustus McRae and Woodrow P. Call. It’s a pretty easy read, centering on the beginning of the long relationship between Gus and Call, and their first run-in with Buffalo Hump (and his son, Blue Duck), the Comanche leader that would prove to be the two Rangers’ biggest enemy during their careers, and Kicking Wolf, noted Comanche horse-theif (during Part One). The bulk of the book, however, focuses on the Rangers signing up to free Santa Fe from Mexico. Upon getting sold out by the General in charge of the “raid,” the Rangers are marched south through the deserts of New Mexico to be tried and executed, the “Dead Man’s Walk.” Obviously, since this book was written after Lonesome Dove, we all already know that Gus and Call survive, so I’ll just move on to the next book in the series…

Comanche Moon, Larry McMurtry: This book caused me problems. Not during the reading of this book, I actually thoroughly enjoyed it (We’ll get to the problems later in the post). Comanche Moon takes place during the twenty years between Dead Man’s Walk and Lonesome Dove. We’re given early stories of some of the characters we were initially introduced to in Lonesome Dove, and get the stories of some of the characters mentioned in Dove, but not actually included (spoiler: they’re dead during Dove). Again, the book is set in Austin, the Llano, and Palo Duro Canyon in west Texas. Buffalo Hump and Kicking Wolf are again central in causing grief and problems for Gus, Call, and the rest of the Rangers, as Buffalo Hump leads his final great raid from the Palo Duro south through Austin and on to the “Great Water.” We’re treated to the continued relationship between Gus and Clara, as well as introduced to the strained relationship between Call and the whore, Maggie, and her son, Newt. Blue Duck has a much more important role in Comanche Moon, and the book serves as a slightly less than decent fleshing out of the story arcs for those involved in Lonesome Dove.

Lonesome Dove*, Larry McMurtry: I have to start this by saying this is my favorite mini-series of all time in the history of EVAR. Well cast, well filmed, and a great tale of a cattle drive started on a whim. However, by the time I was 100 pages in to this book, I was ready to get in my car, drive to Booked Up in Archer City, TX, and wait there until Mr. McMurtry graced his store with his presence so I could berate him. That’s not to say that I disliked the book. I very much liked it. A whole lot, actually. BUT… Mr. McMurtry and his editors apparently didn’t feel they needed to go back and revisit this book when he wrote Comanche Moon. Not a single detail from the original book in the series was lined up with the details in Comanche Moon. And since I read them in order that they take place, it was infuriating while I was reading Lonesome Dove. I don’t know if it was laziness, or if McMurtry wanted to change the stories 12 years later while writing the prequel, but it bothered me so much I almost couldn’t get past page 150 of Lonesome Dove. My recommendation, if you’re going to read these books, is to read them in the order they were written, not in the order that they take place (and you probably shouldn’t read them one following the other, either). As this was a Pulitzer Winner, I had no choice other than to push forward and read it all. I did, and I’m glad I did, inconsistencies aside. Once I was able to stop my mind from focusing on the other books, I found Lonesome Dove to be one hell of a book. Gus and Call are two of the best American literary characters in history (in my humble opinion), and the sprawling epic nature of this book is phenomenal. The characters are well-imagined, the scope of the story is amazing, and it’s a wonderful journey from Texas to Montana (with a little Arkansas thrown in for good measure). READ THIS BOOK. Even if you don’t like westerns. I promise it’s worth your time.

The Cheese Monkeys, Chip Kidd: I wanted to like this book. I really did. But I didn’t have it in me. This book is a prime example as to why people that make their living designing covers for books probably shouldn’t try to write one. The story idea was alright. But this book has all kinds of problems. The narrator switches between three different names for another character, and I found it confusing. No problem if it’s happening as the story moves forward, and there’s an explanation, as far as I’m concerned. But when you’re switching between names multiple times in a paragraph (and sometimes in the same sentence) and you’ve never explained why the narrator doesn’t use just one name, it gets very confusing and frustrating. I spent the first quarter of the book thinking he was talking about three different people until I made the connection. I’m not stupid. If it took me that long to figure out that he was referring to one character with three different names, the writer and editors fucked up (I would not usually use that word in these posts, but that’s the best term for this: they didn’t make a mistake, they fucked up). The ending sucked (I’d love to find a more eloquent way of saying that, but there’s not. “Sucked” is the best word for it). I felt like Kidd was going for a forced existential ending, trying to make me wonder what it all meant (while ultimately deciding that it didn’t mean anything, as our actions don’t matter). Instead, I was wondering why I wasted my time on his miserable excuse for a book about a freshman art student in college and the junior female (in a relationship with an architecture student) that he has a crush on. I picked this book up because the blurbs on the back did their jobs: they made it sound REALLY interesting. It wasn’t worth the dollar I spent on it from the clearance shelf at the used book store. Not to mention the fact that I could have spent the time I took reading it doing absolutely nothing, and it would have been a better use of said time.