Here is my favorite, it is called "We All Gather to Eat and Watch Television":
My grandparents, cousins, brother, and sisters Gather to eat dinner and w...moreHere is my favorite, it is called "We All Gather to Eat and Watch Television":
My grandparents, cousins, brother, and sisters Gather to eat dinner and watch Hercules. I pick the bones from my fish, take a sip of lassi. In the corner are photos taken With shaky hands long before my birth. Everyone's laughing. The room is filled with age, Dry skin, oiled hair, unbrushed teeth. Hercules picks up a rock and crushes a head Of the Hydra, and my grandfather laughs Like he did when my uncle, wounded and broken In the Liberation War of 1971, Came back with a head full of hair. When he laughs, everyone joins him. My cousin hits his sister Pretending she is the Hydra. She starts to cry, but no one notices. My uncles discuss politics as Hercules disagrees With Hera. They smile quietly and talk in detail About the pieces of Khaled that were discovered in plastic bags Outside the Parliament building. They wonder whether they should have let The dogs continue eating. Another auntie joins in, the one who abandoned her son In the monsoon rains of 1999 at the corner of Sher-e-Bangla Road, Where dogs are killed and dumped. She was mad at her husband For not making enough money. The years have carved an emptiness in her face. My mother serves me more fish and asks How I like it. I look up at her and smile, as I always do. The monsoon rains begin tomorrow, and mark the beginning Of nothing special.(less)
Everybody loves George Saunders and everybody loves these stories and they should because he is great and these stories are great.
In a way it does no...moreEverybody loves George Saunders and everybody loves these stories and they should because he is great and these stories are great.
In a way it does not seem like it should be hard to write stories that are funny and conversational while also devastatingly empathetic and driven by moral convictions, but no one else seems to be able to do it quite this way, so.
Not all of the book is exactly that good. There is even one story that is straight-up bad, "My Chivalric Fiasco," which is a bad RenFair joke and that is basically all. And a couple of other stories are a bit slight or feel over-similar to earlier George Saunders stories.
But two things. In the story "Home," the way everyone mindlessly parrots to the traumatized (Iraq?) war veteran "Thank you for your service" is the sort of devastating, moral-vanity-exposing detail that makes Saunders a genius. Everyone says it; no one means it; it isn't even really remarked upon in the story, it's just part of the life of this vet whose life is a mess and who is suffering from untreated PTSD. Something perfect in the way Saunders manages that detail. And the other thing is I am sort of oddly fascinated by the short-short "Sticks," which is more abstract and poetic than many Saunders stories. I see it was originally published in 1995, making it by far the earliest story in this collection. So it can't be considered new ground but it is something different.(less)
This is a good story about Detroit but it sort of feels like a padded-out magazine piece to me and needs more story or something. But it is a good Det...moreThis is a good story about Detroit but it sort of feels like a padded-out magazine piece to me and needs more story or something. But it is a good Detroit magazine piece anyway.(less)
Oh man this is a good book, this is what I am talking about, this is how you do it. So great to read a story that is deep reporting that reads like a...moreOh man this is a good book, this is what I am talking about, this is how you do it. So great to read a story that is deep reporting that reads like a novel, but you don't doubt that it really was reported out. Beautiful book.(less)
Seemed like just the perfect thing to be reading right now between policy slogs and campaign press releases and also as a break from the very good but...moreSeemed like just the perfect thing to be reading right now between policy slogs and campaign press releases and also as a break from the very good but somewhat demanding other novel I've been reading on and off for forever now. Nice and candyish and propulsive. Bit of a commentary on reality tv embedded. It's good. I may or may not read the next two as Laura tells me it is all downhill.
I have heard it said that it's awfully dark for YA but in a way I think the starkness of its moral palette is probably exactly what makes it work for teenagers, for whom the world is always good and evil, life and death.(less)
Really very good! It's drawn on sort of a small canvas, with a small number of characters and a lot of scenes that take place inside hotel room, and i...moreReally very good! It's drawn on sort of a small canvas, with a small number of characters and a lot of scenes that take place inside hotel room, and its setting in the not-yet-developer mirage city in Saudi Arabia straddles the wildly exotic and the totally mundane. But the details feel very real -- Dave Eggers traveled to King Abdullah Economic City and seems to have taken good notes -- and death-of-salesman story, of a middle-aged guy contemplating obsolescence, is a compelling one, again.
And the other reason A Hologram for the King works is that the big world of globalization and politics and labor and America's place in the world, in Eggers' narrative, show through in admirably restrained and non-obvious ways. It feels to me like Eggers has a point but it's not a sermon. That's a good quality in a novel.
It's also got a breezy pace and a freaking gorgeous cover, if you are the sort of person who likes to read quickly and/or admires objects. Yeah thumbs up to this one.(less)
I love Jonathan Lethem and all but this is just noodling. Maybe that is what most of these 33 1/3 books are? The only other one I've read is "Let's Ta...moreI love Jonathan Lethem and all but this is just noodling. Maybe that is what most of these 33 1/3 books are? The only other one I've read is "Let's Talk About Love" and it is one of my favorite books of all time so not a fair comparison.
The problem with this book is that it doesn't have an argument and it doesn't have reporting and it doesn't really have enough personal content to give it an arc. It is just variations on a guy saying, "Oh, man, I love this record. Isn't it great?" Of course it is great, but come on.
Lethem does seem to be having fun, sort of, but the critical points just don't land. "This is a 'the slow song,'" Lethem writes about "Heaven," "not because the tempo's so different from 'Memories Can't Wait' or 'Mind' (and 'Drugs' will be far slower), but because the song demands it be understood that way." Um, okay?
And then you get these sort of quasi-parodies of bad grad school essays, stuff like:
If "Talking Heads" are the collective "implicit author" of Fear of Music, and David Byrne is, in turn, the band's "auteur," and if David Byrne is the type of rock musician who will eventually end up writing "real" (as opposed to "as-told-to") books, and if books, including this one, are written about the band and its singer-lyricist-leader and its songs and albums, and if songs have lyrics which are quotable and analyzable, and if Fear of Music is, in at least certain quarters, received as a kind of "concept album," does any of this mean, necessarily, that there is a text in this class?
I see a few sort-of jokes in there but it's not enough.
So, yeah, Lethem is terrific and Talking Heads are the greatest but this is not a keeper. It's not very long, though, so that is good.(less)
The Cromwell of Wolf Hall was sort of admirable, an expert manipulator of complex systems -- courtly politics, international currency markets, the law...moreThe Cromwell of Wolf Hall was sort of admirable, an expert manipulator of complex systems -- courtly politics, international currency markets, the law. Reading the book, which was told tightly from his own perspective, his disgust with the 16th-century Catholic Church felt totally understandable, commendable even. Thomas More, the famous martyr, "A Man for All Seasons" himself, was a bloated old sadist who personally oversaw the torture of supposed heretics.
And as detailed and lovely as its history is, the book (this one too) casts Cromwell as almost a contemporary figure, the modern power broker -- almost a political consultant, almost Stringer Bell.
So here in Bring up the Bodies is Cromwell at the middle of this three-book arc: He's Stringer Bell somewhere around the beginning of season three, let's say, when things are just starting to get away from him. The climax of the book has Cromwell managing King Henry VIII's divorce Anne Boleyn. And it's not that he, Cromwell, makes a mistake exactly in his handling of the affair but that the big rotting institutions around him are finally aligning against him.
"You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him," Cromwell thinks, late in the book. "But as Thomas More used to say, it's like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you're thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws."(less)
I am reading this book in English but goodreads does not seem to list the English version (yet?). Anyway it is quite good so far. // Done. Really real...moreI am reading this book in English but goodreads does not seem to list the English version (yet?). Anyway it is quite good so far. // Done. Really really good. Light touch but a lot of information in this. A lot of pictures of walls. (less)
Short, which is nice. More books should be short like this. You get to the end of the chapter and you're like, oh, great, that chapter is done. Substa...moreShort, which is nice. More books should be short like this. You get to the end of the chapter and you're like, oh, great, that chapter is done. Substance? Well it is a good analytic argument in favor of urban density or more specifically against zoning regulations that limit urban density. I guess the argument is correct and it is certainly not an area of public policy that many people think much about which makes it worthwhile. I live in a small city so I wondered how the basic framework might apply here or not. The Wausau area like a lot of small cities has been growing in the direction of sprawl but lately the city seems to be building a denser city center with more multi-unit residences, so maybe we are moving in the right direction.(less)
Well I must say this is probably the best novel/essay/philosophical exploration of Soviet central planning I have read all year.
It is a strange sort o...moreWell I must say this is probably the best novel/essay/philosophical exploration of Soviet central planning I have read all year.
It is a strange sort of book when the lives of the characters and their actual human relationships feel a bit secondary to the explication of ideas about economics. Stranger, though, that it works. The book is gripping! The ideas are amazing! The actual characters' human stories are ... pretty good, too, if not quite the point.
Here is the essence: There was a time in early postwar history when Soviet Russia's economy was growing rapidly and many in the country had the idea that, through the power of technology and ideas, the Soviets really could overtake the U.S. economy and beat capitalism on its own terms. It was a doomed proposition, but there was a time when that was not obvious.
So one of the things this book is about is how the idealists and reformers with the plan get worn down and chewed up by the bureaucracy and the reality of these failing institutions. And that is a part of human experience that is sadly universal, as any view of The Wire knows. Something beautiful about Red Plenty is that it doesn't take it as a given that the project was always doomed to fail, though probably it was.
Another thing the book does very well, by the way, is to illustrate the absurdity of economic central planning itself. There's an illuminating passage in which a mid-level planner runs through a series of considerations that make it clear that the only link in the entire system with no power or leverage at all is the end-user, the consumer, whose inconvenience (or outright abuse) causes no ripples in the otherwise carefully calibrated chain of suppliers and bureaucrats. Crazy, but there you go.
In the end even though the characters' stories are subsumed by the macro-story (bit of an analogy there to the book's broad themes), this is a great, weird hybrid of a book about economics and history and institutions. About the power of ideas and the limits of that power. And still a novel, pretty much.(less)
The title story in this collection is pretty much the best thing, weird and trancelike and propulsive and ominous. And like most of Bolaño's stuff I a...moreThe title story in this collection is pretty much the best thing, weird and trancelike and propulsive and ominous. And like most of Bolaño's stuff I am not even sure I can articulate why I love it so much but man I love it so, so much. (less)
Sharp! Doughty's writing style is a tight, self-confident jab. This book has all the sex and drugs and gossip you want from a minor rock star memoir,...moreSharp! Doughty's writing style is a tight, self-confident jab. This book has all the sex and drugs and gossip you want from a minor rock star memoir, but it is not really one of those humblebrag-style "oh man I was sooooo messed up back then" narratives. (Looking at you, Keith Richards.) Doughty's times with drugs and minor rockstardom seem to have been fairly miserable, and so as the recovery arc takes shape in the last fourth of the book, it is a relief. I am glad he is better.
By the way, I liked Soul Coughing pretty well but never exactly loved them. (A new solo song by Doughty, "Na Na Nothing," was one of my favorite of 2011, though!) Doughty is a good writer and worth reading for his writing voice, not because you like or liked his songs. Also it turns out he hates all of those Soul Coughing albums.
Maybe I could have done with a little less ax-grinding against the other members of the band. It is not that I don't believe Doughty's account that they were manipulative, abusive, songwriting-credit-stealing narcissists; I'm sure they were. I'm on Doughty's side! But isn't every band some flavor of dysfunctional family? "Band members who resent the lead singer and try to bring him down" is a familiar enough dysfunction, and after awhile the anecdotes proving that this was the case pile up.
But whatever. That is not the whole book and as a whole I found the book really good on addiction, recovery, living inside one's head, and even, unexpectedly, a bit on travel.(less)
Sort of funny. Basically an 85-page wind-up to a punchline. Luckily it does not take very long to read. I pretty much liked it but will probably forge...moreSort of funny. Basically an 85-page wind-up to a punchline. Luckily it does not take very long to read. I pretty much liked it but will probably forget about it tomorrow. (less)
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