Book Round-Up

 Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells: Still enchanted by the series. I think I'm going to buy them (high praise!)

Winter's Tales by Isak Dinesen: A varied collection of tales, rigid in upholding the class system and morality, but also with sharp insights about the inherent oddness and tragedy of some people. "The Dreaming Child" in particular, about the lies we tell ourselves, has stuck with me.

Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead by Sara Gran: I joined a book club, and this was the first (for me) pick. And I was one of the only people who liked it, ha. Ostensibly a murder mystery set in New Orleans about a year after the flood, it's by no means a conventional procedural. There are elements of magical realism, not a whole lot of detecting gets done, and Claire is an oddball (to put it mildly). Instead it's about trauma, the lack of control we have over what happens to us, and the ability to rise above it. This is the start of a trilogy and I'm looking forward to the other two.

The Librarians by Sherry Thomas: Of course I was going to read a book about librarians who solve a murder. Unfortunately, it was a bit of a disappointment. I liked the characters and the story, but the whole thing felt engineered, like the author was given a checklist of modern topics, character traumas, and pop cultural references to incorporate.  A more organic version of the story would have been perfect.

English Is not Easy by Luci Gutiérrez: This is a delightful graphic novel that explains the English language to non-native speakers. For a native speaker like me, the value is in the quirky, funny, occasionally bawdy illustrations.

Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts by Kate Racculia: This story has the titular character go on a scavenger hunt arranged by an eccentric millionaire while dealing with the ghosts (figurative and literal) of her past, but it took an unexpectedly dark turn towards the end. Still, it was fun and engrossing, and filled with a number of great characters.

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy: another book club pick, and again I was one of the only ones who liked it. It's a family drama with elements of eco-dystopia and magical realism; normally I avoid dystopian novels at all costs, but gratifyingly this one found hope in human relationships, particularly in those of parents and children. A common reason given today for not having children is the unwillingness to subject them to climate change, but that can lead to a sort of despairing complacency, an excuse to not bother to try to solve the very many problems we are facing. Future generations can and should inspire us to work towards the common good. I think some of my fellow club members were hung up on the lack of explanation for the some phenomena and motives in the novel, whereas I'm more comfortable with unanswered questions. It's a sad novel, but gorgeous in its own way.

Book Round-Up

Camino Island by John Grisham: the best part of this novel was the beginning, specifically the description of the theft of priceless manuscripts from Princeton University and the federal investigation that immediately followed. Unfortunately the narrative fizzled out after that.

How to Solve Your Own Murder by Kristen Perrin: a fun mystery, wherein the murder victim tasks her putative heirs with solving her murder if they want to inherit.

Nettle and Bone by T. Kingfisher: I continue working my way through Kingfisher's novels. The subject matter in this one -- patriarchy, misogyny, domestic abuse -- is bleak, but Kingfisher wisely balances it with fairy tale elements like impossible tasks and goblin markets, along with a healthy dose of absurdity (such as a demonic chicken).

PopCo by Scarlett Thomas: I don't know why it took me so long to read this given how much I liked Our Tragic Universe, not to mention the math, puzzles, and cultural commentary in this book. And, for the most part, it was really good! The only flaw was the reveal late in the novel of a plan that seemed to me (but not the characters, apparently) hopelessly idealistic and not at all well thought out. In that sense, it reminded me of The Absolute Book. 

Book Round-Up, Christmas Edition

A Child's Christmas in Walesby Dylan Thomas: Thomas is most famous for his poetry, so it is no surprise that this prose work is remarkably lyrical and impressionistic.  Thomas strings together memories from his childhood to form a perfect Christmas, where even the snow was better than it is now.  A lovely little story.

The Lump of Coalby Lemony Snicket: A slight but amusing "fable," with Snicket's trademarked wordplay and sensibility.

Holidays on Iceby David Sedaris:  I read this every year, to prevent any undue seasonal sappiness.  The stories are a mix of fiction and (exaggerated?) memoir, skillfully satirizing the expected targets -- commercialism, empty pieties, and Christmas letters.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens: After spending most of my life avoiding Dickens (I found Oliver to be a twit, and it took me three tries to get through Bleak House), I finally read this and enjoyed it (it probably helped that it was so short; this edition pads it out with a long introduction, a chronology of Dickens's life, and a glossary).  The best part was the last "stave" -- Dickens expressed well Scrooge's elation bordering on hysteria and tinged with the slightest fear that it was too good to be true.  It was also fun to compare it to all the different versions I have watched this season.

 The Tick: Giant Christmas Cavalcade: The Tick started out as a superhero parody for the New England Comics stores' newsletter, but proved so popular he soon got is own comic, cartoon, live action show, and merchandise.  This collects some of the Christmas annuals, and features the Tick fighting cowboys, weekending in a chalet, and putting on a Christmas Pageant with all the other heroes and villains.  My first exposure to the Tick was watching the cartoon in college, which was absolutely brilliant, so I'd been meaning to check out the comics for a long time.  Unfortunately, these stories weren't that great.  Reviews indicate that the original comics are much better, so I'll seek those out next.

Building Stories by Chris Ware

This is not your typical graphic novel.  It comes in a big box, and contains fourteen different segments in different formats -- broadsheet, accordion fold, newspaper, pamphlet, Golden Book, and so on.  There's no particular order to read them in, just pick one up and start in on Ware's tale of life and loneliness, told in his clear, neat, evocative illustrations.

The work centers around a nameless, one-legged woman struggling with depression, but it's not as bleak as it sounds.  Ware is no sadist, delighting in making his characters suffer; instead he is deeply understanding of them. Building Stories is about life, and the way one copes with everyday disappointments and expectations.  By almost every standard, the protagonist has a good life, and she acknowledges it (certainly in hindsight and sometimes in the present), but it doesn't make her struggles and doubts any less sincere or painful. 

Several sections of the work have been published elsewhere, including in the New York Times Magazine, which is where I first encountered Ware and his endearing protagonist.  That portion focused on the apartment building the woman lived in for a time, and aptly demonstrated different kinds of loneliness -- the young woman, convinced she would never get married and have children; a married couple unable to break out of their vicious, petty, squabbling cycle, and the elderly landlady with no one in her life other than an aide, thinking over the choices (and non-choices) she made long ago.  Ware's art and writing is like a sharp needle to the heart, so skilled he is at capturing the feelings so many of us experience at one point or another.

The segment ends with a flash forward to the protagonist, now married and with a child, marveling over her past loneliness (not really a spoiler, given the nature of the work).  It seems like a happy ending, but it isn't, really, because the other segments, about other areas of her life, show that the loneliness and sense of loss never really go away.  In this sense Building Stories reminded me of Our Tragic Universe; it is a story-less story, with no real ending or beginning, no neat resolutions or dramatic revelations.  This is not a happy, cheerful work, but it is a profoundly human one.

Our Tragic Universe

Like a lot of modern fiction (or at least the modern fiction I tend to read), Scarlet Thomas's Our Tragic Universe is about storytelling, albeit more explicitly than usual.  Meg is a writer of formulaic young adult books, a science fiction series, and book reviews for a local paper; she also teaches writing workshops and helps other writers learn how to create various genre works.  On top of all that, she is determined to finish her big “literary” novel, a work she has written and deleted and rewritten for over ten years.  Thomas’s novel is loosely structured around Meg’s life as she comes to terms with her career, various relationships, and her understanding of the universe. Meg is a talented storyteller, something that is readily apparent despite her own self-deprecating attitudes towards her work, and throughout the book she recounts folktales, plots of potential novels, jokes, alibis for her friends, excuses for herself, memories, paradoxes, thought exercises, dreams, experiments, and archetypes.

In addition, a good chunk of the novel is spent on arguments and discussions various characters have on the nature of life and storytelling.  I suspect such digressions will turn off many readers, but for me it was like attending a fascinating graduate seminar, or better yet, hanging out at a bar with a bunch of really smart people.

The debate the characters have about storytelling mirrors in some ways the debate between “genre fiction” and “literary fiction” I wrote about earlier.  Meg’s friend Vi, in particular, has no patience with genre, with anything that tells a story, follows rules, or is conventional in any way.  She keeps pushing Meg to write “flabby, plotless stories” because that would be true writing, and (like Meg herself), can’t acknowledge that Meg’s facility with genre fiction is in fact a real talent.  Some of it comes from Vi’s own political and social leanings -- she is an ethnographer who studies marginalized or overlooked cultures, and so is suspicious of anything “conventional” because it reminds her of the western culture that has so dominated history, literature, and discourse.  In the process, however, she can fall victim to fetishizing that which she is trying to respect.

Vi also relies on restrictive, highly specific definitions of stories, which don’t track with what many modern readers understand to be stories.  Moreover, she ignores the storytelling that is part of the marginalized cultures she studies, instead calling it “storyless” storytelling, despite it having in some cases its own conventions, patterns and, well, story-ness.  In fact, late in the book she lays out the structure for storyless stories, which turns out to be just as rigid as the structure for conventional stories.

Interestingly, Vi goes on to posit a different take on storyless stories, where characters don’t worry about what they said or did, they just act.  These stories’ value lies in helping people realize that they should spend less time trying to fit their own lives into a particular narrative they feel they should live, and more time living; this echoes a point Meg makes earlier about doing real things for the enjoyment of it rather than obsessing about perfecting oneself.  A storyless story, then, is not so much a different kind of story as it is just life, in all its messy, incoherent glory.  Life, or storylessness, is figuring out what questions to ask, rather than trying to cram something into neat little answers.

So what does this have to do with the story of Our Tragic Universe itself? The New York Times review was critical of the book, arguing that Thomas incorporates too many elements and events without resolving them in a satisfactory way.  Meg’s financial woes, and a troubled relationship, are resolved in a conventional, deus-ex-machina way, but fairly early on with a good chunk of the book to go.  The mystery of how she acquired a particular book seems critical at first, but then becomes irrelevant.  A storyline involving a childhood friend is never resolved, or even really made clear.  But I think that’s the point -- these things are not flaws in Thomas’s work, they illustrate the “storyless story.”  The narrative does not conform to western conventions of storytelling, where every element is relevant and every plotpoint is resolved neatly; what happens in the book is much more akin to real life.  Some mysteries really are never solved.  Some things seem freighted with importance at first, but ultimately don’t matter.  Relationships are messy, and don’t always end neatly or quickly.  We live and then we die, and our efforts come to nothing and we don’t know what happens after. “You will never finish what you start . . . . You will not overcome the monster. And in the end, you will come to nothing.” But that’s ok, because the value is in the journey, in the questions asked rather than answered.