http://www.goodreads.com/review/list_rss/10378 en-US Mon, 18 Aug 2008 06:52:50 -0700 60 http://www.goodreads.com/ 200 41 http://www.goodreads.com/images/layout/gr_logo.gif 30247951 Mon, 18 Aug 2008 06:52:50 -0700
--describing his (and others') predicament, stranded at O'Hare by an inexplicable flurry of flight cancellations, as akin to Purgatory, Bennie surveys the "crowd of temporary refugees waiting, waiting, yawning, drumming fingers on kneecaps, asking cellphones what they did to deserve this, rereading The Da Vinci Code to keep from having to stare at the carpet. . . . A semi-punished lot, all of us: imprisoned within a pause, desperate to ascend;"

--one of Bennie's failed poems is "like an unfocused photograph;"

--"A fat man with the pinched red face of an infant and such a stink to his breath that you could smell his laughter across a crowded room."

And so on. Further, you could smell my laughter, too, at a number of very finely-pitched lines and scenarios, including one wonderful riff on the problems of breaking up with a lover named Stella that was simultaneously funny and a sly commentary on the unfortunate impact of literature on Bennie's life.

A few reviewers have been put off by the book's "failure" to hew more closely to its pitch (a complaint letter to American Airlines drafted in O'Hare), but while the central structural conceit does provide constant running gags, what is key is not the rant nor the situation but the more complicated comedy of finding a sense of one's own life through words which reach out to connect. Bennie is a (once-mildy-successful cum failed-human-being poet), a translator of Polish works (and one novel, translation in process, recurs throughout as a contrapuntal aria to B's own memories and complaints), a very bad father, a very good alcoholic (in abeyance), a very beleaguered son. I was impressed by how many balls Miles threw into the air, and how his juggling never seemed too strenuous or too arch--the play of narratives, the complicated flashback structure, the bustling ramble of a first-person rant all complemented one another, mostly. If I have any complaint, it's that I'd have appreciated a longer novel, more ambitiously teasing out the intersections of a Polish post-war novel and this poet's failed life, a more explicit attention to the central macguffin (the rant to American). Where others see problems and want the clutter cleared away, I'd have gone for extended play. But there's an understated precision to many of Miles' seemingly throwaway riffs and complications; quoting John Ciardi about the perils of the translator, who "tries for no more than the best possible failure," Bennie briefly notes how that would make a good epitaph, and it's quite lovely how often Miles can pull such rabbits out of threadworn or ridiculous hats.

Miles also nails the pleasures and pitfalls of alcohol abuse, and I'll let his Bennie close the review, with another of his great riffs:

"The worst part of sobriety is the silence. The lonesome, pressurized silence. Like the way sound falls away when you're choking. Even when I drank alone, the vodka provided me with a kind of soundtrack--a rhythm, channeled voices, a brain crowded with noise and streaming color, the rackety blurred clutter of my decrepitude. At the meetings everyone talks about how much more vivid life is without the booze, but I think, though I never say, that vivid is the wrong word. Life is rather more clear. I'm supposed to be thankful for that clarity, I know, for being freed from that dissonant inner music, from all those flatulent trumpets in my brain, and for finally being able to see life as it is, me as I am.... I'm supposed to be thankful, I know, for finally being shucked down to the core of me. But forgive me, I can't help it: Thanks but no thanks."

A good book.]]>
author: Jonathan Miles
name: Mike
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 08/08
date added: 08/18/08
shelves:
review:
I'm waffling between 3 and 4 stars, but lean higher for two reasons. 1) I swallowed the book in four smooth, gut-punching shots, finding it occasionally astringent but relishing its fire, reveling in the boozy combination of nasty jokes and maudlin recollection. It's sentimental and yet rigorously derisive, and I enjoyed the narrator Bennie's company on both counts. 2) This ain't some cheap rotgut, as the prose quite often bubbled and popped and woozily tilted against convention, e.g.:

--describing his (and others') predicament, stranded at O'Hare by an inexplicable flurry of flight cancellations, as akin to Purgatory, Bennie surveys the "crowd of temporary refugees waiting, waiting, yawning, drumming fingers on kneecaps, asking cellphones what they did to deserve this, rereading The Da Vinci Code to keep from having to stare at the carpet. . . . A semi-punished lot, all of us: imprisoned within a pause, desperate to ascend;"

--one of Bennie's failed poems is "like an unfocused photograph;"

--"A fat man with the pinched red face of an infant and such a stink to his breath that you could smell his laughter across a crowded room."

And so on. Further, you could smell my laughter, too, at a number of very finely-pitched lines and scenarios, including one wonderful riff on the problems of breaking up with a lover named Stella that was simultaneously funny and a sly commentary on the unfortunate impact of literature on Bennie's life.

A few reviewers have been put off by the book's "failure" to hew more closely to its pitch (a complaint letter to American Airlines drafted in O'Hare), but while the central structural conceit does provide constant running gags, what is key is not the rant nor the situation but the more complicated comedy of finding a sense of one's own life through words which reach out to connect. Bennie is a (once-mildy-successful cum failed-human-being poet), a translator of Polish works (and one novel, translation in process, recurs throughout as a contrapuntal aria to B's own memories and complaints), a very bad father, a very good alcoholic (in abeyance), a very beleaguered son. I was impressed by how many balls Miles threw into the air, and how his juggling never seemed too strenuous or too arch--the play of narratives, the complicated flashback structure, the bustling ramble of a first-person rant all complemented one another, mostly. If I have any complaint, it's that I'd have appreciated a longer novel, more ambitiously teasing out the intersections of a Polish post-war novel and this poet's failed life, a more explicit attention to the central macguffin (the rant to American). Where others see problems and want the clutter cleared away, I'd have gone for extended play. But there's an understated precision to many of Miles' seemingly throwaway riffs and complications; quoting John Ciardi about the perils of the translator, who "tries for no more than the best possible failure," Bennie briefly notes how that would make a good epitaph, and it's quite lovely how often Miles can pull such rabbits out of threadworn or ridiculous hats.

Miles also nails the pleasures and pitfalls of alcohol abuse, and I'll let his Bennie close the review, with another of his great riffs:

"The worst part of sobriety is the silence. The lonesome, pressurized silence. Like the way sound falls away when you're choking. Even when I drank alone, the vodka provided me with a kind of soundtrack--a rhythm, channeled voices, a brain crowded with noise and streaming color, the rackety blurred clutter of my decrepitude. At the meetings everyone talks about how much more vivid life is without the booze, but I think, though I never say, that vivid is the wrong word. Life is rather more clear. I'm supposed to be thankful for that clarity, I know, for being freed from that dissonant inner music, from all those flatulent trumpets in my brain, and for finally being able to see life as it is, me as I am.... I'm supposed to be thankful, I know, for finally being shucked down to the core of me. But forgive me, I can't help it: Thanks but no thanks."

A good book.
]]> 29466026 Fri, 15 Aug 2008 12:58:50 -0700
author: Neal Stephenson
name: Mike
average rating: 4.48
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 08/08
date added: 08/15/08
shelves:
review:
Because I need to get halfway through another big-ass book, and then leave it in the corner to scorn me.
]]> 30191300 Thu, 14 Aug 2008 19:49:02 -0700
author: Michael Berube
name: Mike
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1998
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 08/14/08
shelves:
review:

]]> 30002846 Tue, 12 Aug 2008 20:43:41 -0700
author: Andrew Pyper
name: Mike
average rating: 2.78
book published: 0
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 08/12/08
shelves:
review:

]]> 30002843 Tue, 12 Aug 2008 20:43:39 -0700
author: Andrew Pyper
name: Mike
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2006
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 08/12/08
shelves:
review:

]]> 30002841 Tue, 12 Aug 2008 20:43:36 -0700
author: Andrew Pyper
name: Mike
average rating: 3.19
book published: 2001
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 08/12/08
shelves:
review:

]]> 29132739 Mon, 04 Aug 2008 10:29:10 -0700
We open in this counterfactual 'seventies, amid a Cold War furor that is funhouse mirror to our own, even as its varied inhabitants scramble to make sense of this new world with old-world-order lenses. Carl Sagan and Yuri Gagarin have prominent roles, and there are sly allusions to Eugene Marais and Seth Brundle, but it'd be a shame to spoil the neat twists and ideas Stross packs into a breezy 90-odd pages. Like the best alternate histories, Missile Gap provides some sly meditations on the nature of history (and the respective misconceptions of dialectic and anthropic notions thereof). My only complaint is that the assassination of JFK doesn't even get a wink.]]>
author: Charles Stross
name: Mike
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at: 08/08
date added: 08/04/08
shelves:
review:
This is really an extended short story (novella? novelette? novelito?), and loony as all hell, and great fun. The earth, circa the Cuban Missile Crisis, is skinned "like a grape" and repositioned on a flat disk light years from our current galactic position and some many thousands of years in the future. If that bit of outlandish tomfoolery (carefully worked out for its physical implications, including the end of the space race) doesn't bring a smile to your face, skip this.

We open in this counterfactual 'seventies, amid a Cold War furor that is funhouse mirror to our own, even as its varied inhabitants scramble to make sense of this new world with old-world-order lenses. Carl Sagan and Yuri Gagarin have prominent roles, and there are sly allusions to Eugene Marais and Seth Brundle, but it'd be a shame to spoil the neat twists and ideas Stross packs into a breezy 90-odd pages. Like the best alternate histories, Missile Gap provides some sly meditations on the nature of history (and the respective misconceptions of dialectic and anthropic notions thereof). My only complaint is that the assassination of JFK doesn't even get a wink.
]]> 25809220 Sun, 03 Aug 2008 19:58:03 -0700
But I'll reserve again, screwing the next patron. Mwah ha ha ha ha.]]>
author: Liao Yiwu
name: Mike
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 07/08
date added: 08/03/08
shelves:
review:
Half-read (so far). These are excellent oral histories/narratives of people displaced, marginalized, oppressed, eccentric, and/or forgotten in the New China. In some ways reminiscent of the best of Studs Terkel's stuff, as many reviewers note, but the accounts seem more shaped, are certainly given more room to breathe and bump about. I think they're most appreciated as sipping whiskey, rather than swallowed whole, and now the damn library demands it back tomorrow.

But I'll reserve again, screwing the next patron. Mwah ha ha ha ha.
]]> 27742789 Sun, 03 Aug 2008 06:36:04 -0700
author: Jonathan Segura
name: Mike
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 08/03/08
shelves: abandoned
review:

]]> 28212863 Sat, 02 Aug 2008 19:08:02 -0700 by Mark Costello indicates. Short version: I was utterly engrossed. I recommend it highly. But I worry that anything I could say about it would turn you off. E.g.,

a) any summary will give it a sense of high-concept plot (cop on the beat in suburban Colma, a city of cemeteries, communes with the dead) that would either lure in narrative junkies bound to be disappointed by a far more meandering character study (I was reminded most often of Richard Russo's understated skill) OR scare off readers (like me, when first hearing of it), fearful that this is a glorified movie pitch. OR

b) any expanded riff on its governing metaphor (the dead alive, the living not really living) might turn its matter-of-fact agility into left-footed stomping.

And if (a) or (b) weren't enough, if I hinted that it's about people stuffed with small regrets who find, by novel's end, a sense of meaning ... you'd probably turn tail and run, eh?

I admit that I backed into reading it, myself. I first heard about this from a post on forthcoming books at Locus, the sci-fi magazine. The title veered toward very silly or wonderfully confident, so I jumped to see the cover image and find out anything else at Amazon, and it had a cartoon on the front. A good one, but, still (I thought): and comic-booky premise. Never mind.

Then flash-forward to a couple weeks ago, the book's on the shelves, I grab it to take a look and its back-cover blurbs are from a very intriguing band, notably Thom Jones, Dan Chaon, Kevin Brockmeier. (I look at blurbs, but it's less a matter of finding my favorite authors logrolling one another than finding a strange coalition of favorites. I recall grabbing my first Stephen Wright novel cold, in hardcover, without any prior knowledge, just because Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, and Toni Morrison all pimped it. So blurbs don't matter, except when they do.) This got me to give it a closer look.

The book is very Fred Astaire, so light on its feet that 400 pages flash by. There's any number of wonderful moments, pitch-black cop conversations that made me laugh out loud, some lovely precise images of the NoCal coast. But I went looking for dazzle to illustrate my point and came a cropper. The book isn't showy; each line is a little pebble, not much to ponder on its own, small and hard and clear, but taken en masse Dorst slowly builds a rock garden, ordered and beautiful, and it catches the eye.

All I'm doing here is trying to circle around the fact that this is a book I think was really damn good, but I'm not sure how to convince you that it's really damn good, and every move I make in that direction I fear might have the opposite effect, so: wanna go out on a limb and trust me? ]]>
author: Doug Dorst
name: Mike
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 07/08
date added: 08/02/08
shelves:
review:
This is a hard book to review, as the quite positive but bland affirmation by Mark Costello indicates. Short version: I was utterly engrossed. I recommend it highly. But I worry that anything I could say about it would turn you off. E.g.,

a) any summary will give it a sense of high-concept plot (cop on the beat in suburban Colma, a city of cemeteries, communes with the dead) that would either lure in narrative junkies bound to be disappointed by a far more meandering character study (I was reminded most often of Richard Russo's understated skill) OR scare off readers (like me, when first hearing of it), fearful that this is a glorified movie pitch. OR

b) any expanded riff on its governing metaphor (the dead alive, the living not really living) might turn its matter-of-fact agility into left-footed stomping.

And if (a) or (b) weren't enough, if I hinted that it's about people stuffed with small regrets who find, by novel's end, a sense of meaning ... you'd probably turn tail and run, eh?

I admit that I backed into reading it, myself. I first heard about this from a post on forthcoming books at Locus, the sci-fi magazine. The title veered toward very silly or wonderfully confident, so I jumped to see the cover image and find out anything else at Amazon, and it had a cartoon on the front. A good one, but, still (I thought): and comic-booky premise. Never mind.

Then flash-forward to a couple weeks ago, the book's on the shelves, I grab it to take a look and its back-cover blurbs are from a very intriguing band, notably Thom Jones, Dan Chaon, Kevin Brockmeier. (I look at blurbs, but it's less a matter of finding my favorite authors logrolling one another than finding a strange coalition of favorites. I recall grabbing my first Stephen Wright novel cold, in hardcover, without any prior knowledge, just because Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, and Toni Morrison all pimped it. So blurbs don't matter, except when they do.) This got me to give it a closer look.

The book is very Fred Astaire, so light on its feet that 400 pages flash by. There's any number of wonderful moments, pitch-black cop conversations that made me laugh out loud, some lovely precise images of the NoCal coast. But I went looking for dazzle to illustrate my point and came a cropper. The book isn't showy; each line is a little pebble, not much to ponder on its own, small and hard and clear, but taken en masse Dorst slowly builds a rock garden, ordered and beautiful, and it catches the eye.

All I'm doing here is trying to circle around the fact that this is a book I think was really damn good, but I'm not sure how to convince you that it's really damn good, and every move I make in that direction I fear might have the opposite effect, so: wanna go out on a limb and trust me?
]]> 28727943 Wed, 30 Jul 2008 06:54:13 -0700
author: Adam Johnson
name: Mike
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2003
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 07/30/08
shelves:
review:

]]> 28727257 Wed, 30 Jul 2008 06:53:50 -0700 Alive in Necropolis which came with an array of intriguing back-cover blurbs, including one by Adam Johnson... which reminded me that I'd liked Emporium and really liked this one.

And rather than just dump some stars on it, let me point you to a very good review that lays out many good reasons why I, too, liked the book.

My favorite thing was the juggling of real bleakness with an often deadpan silliness -- not some nihilistic "and now we cavort while the world crashes," but a painful and vivid tangle of misanthropy and staggering idealistic hope. This is vague, I know, but that is the gist of the sentiment I took away from the book....

...but sentiment be damned, eh? It's a pretty good academic satire, then an even better post-apocalyptic black comedy. And line by line Johnson can startle. ]]>
author: Adam Johnson
name: Mike
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2004
rating: 4
read at: 01/05
date added: 07/30/08
shelves:
review:
Just began Alive in Necropolis which came with an array of intriguing back-cover blurbs, including one by Adam Johnson... which reminded me that I'd liked Emporium and really liked this one.

And rather than just dump some stars on it, let me point you to a very good review that lays out many good reasons why I, too, liked the book.

My favorite thing was the juggling of real bleakness with an often deadpan silliness -- not some nihilistic "and now we cavort while the world crashes," but a painful and vivid tangle of misanthropy and staggering idealistic hope. This is vague, I know, but that is the gist of the sentiment I took away from the book....

...but sentiment be damned, eh? It's a pretty good academic satire, then an even better post-apocalyptic black comedy. And line by line Johnson can startle.
]]> 27101832 Tue, 29 Jul 2008 08:44:40 -0700
author: David Wiesner
name: Mike
average rating: 4.55
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at: 07/08
date added: 07/29/08
shelves:
review:
Lovely drawings, a story told entirely through drawings. Besides being gorgeous & lush, they invited extrapolations -- Max and I had a great time fleshing out what was going on, who the boy was (and the various other children were). Thanks for the rec, Mme T!
]]> 24846959 Tue, 29 Jul 2008 07:45:18 -0700
Lehane's novel opens with a baseball game, inviting comparisons to DeLillo, and his prior work in detective fiction clued us earlier to his fondness for Hammett and Chandler. But his real roots in this book run through the social realism of the early-twentieth-century. No postmodern games, no ironic detachment--no, Lehane, like Pietro di Donato and Michael Gold, wears his heart on his sleeve, has fire in his eye, is willing to embrace a cliche or a clumsy bit of exposition to see the story through. If the plotting gets a bit hamfisted, the footwork occasionally a little leaden, the characterization a bit too big-screen, reach back and embrace the pleasures of that genre -- these are tools more than symptoms, and the novel's punches still connect furiously and frequently: it moves and is moving in equal doses.

And now and again, besides his gift for ripping action sequences and sweeping social context, Lehane unleashes some fantastic, over-the-top lines that sweep me up again and again:

--a boxer watches an opponent on his last legs, "notic[ing] how childlike his expression had become, as if he'd just hatched."

--a baseball "soared straight at" a player "and then went lazy in the blue sky, like a duck deciding to swim the backstroke..."

Ah me. Really damn good stuff, so far, and I can't imagine it tanking.

FINISHED REVIEW:
It didn't tank. I think I hit above on most of the elements which worked throughout for me, so I'll just add a couple more thoughts:

--as with the social realist works referenced, there are moments that seem ham-handedly plotted, the kind of ex machina coincidences that make me cringe (literally a page or two after a character is mentioned for the first time, the secret of his existence revealed, he walks out of a storm to interrupt a dinner party). The sincerity, the melodrama of such moments -- the operatic over-the-top "sweep" of many instances will probably drive some readers crazy, and made even this reader slow down, fall out of the rush of plot and ideas and energy.

--But such moments are few, and as often as they put the brakes on, equally often they were bound up in the book's many, many pleasures. This book's just a hair over 700 pages long, yet I flew through it, and there's little empty padding--it's not big out of mere ambition to be big, but out of a real and achieved sense of historical, political, and familial sweep. I enjoyed the hell out of my read, despite those twinges.

I'll close with an admission of my shameless appreciation for the novel's politics, and of its aesthetic decisions: at times I kind of wish it were more like The Wire, more sophisticated in its sweep and detail, more grounded in more far-reaching social examination, more subtle in its depiction of character. But how many people saw that show? And, instead, we get a big, popular, page-turning, and populist fiction which defines the necessity of unions, which details the longstanding historical crimes of poverty and race? Which exploits the many, many associations between the anti-anarchist furor of 1918 and the current state of American politics (while carefully drawing the lines between capital and the politics of fear)? We should have more fiction like this. ]]>
author: Dennis Lehane
name: Mike
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 07/08
date added: 07/29/08
shelves:
review:
7/26/08: I'm half-done, and half in love. Oh, it's a realistic love, of warts as well as wonders, but I admit: I'm a sucker for a book so fully invested in exploring the deep rifts and crimes of class and race in America.

Lehane's novel opens with a baseball game, inviting comparisons to DeLillo, and his prior work in detective fiction clued us earlier to his fondness for Hammett and Chandler. But his real roots in this book run through the social realism of the early-twentieth-century. No postmodern games, no ironic detachment--no, Lehane, like Pietro di Donato and Michael Gold, wears his heart on his sleeve, has fire in his eye, is willing to embrace a cliche or a clumsy bit of exposition to see the story through. If the plotting gets a bit hamfisted, the footwork occasionally a little leaden, the characterization a bit too big-screen, reach back and embrace the pleasures of that genre -- these are tools more than symptoms, and the novel's punches still connect furiously and frequently: it moves and is moving in equal doses.

And now and again, besides his gift for ripping action sequences and sweeping social context, Lehane unleashes some fantastic, over-the-top lines that sweep me up again and again:

--a boxer watches an opponent on his last legs, "notic[ing] how childlike his expression had become, as if he'd just hatched."

--a baseball "soared straight at" a player "and then went lazy in the blue sky, like a duck deciding to swim the backstroke..."

Ah me. Really damn good stuff, so far, and I can't imagine it tanking.

FINISHED REVIEW:
It didn't tank. I think I hit above on most of the elements which worked throughout for me, so I'll just add a couple more thoughts:

--as with the social realist works referenced, there are moments that seem ham-handedly plotted, the kind of ex machina coincidences that make me cringe (literally a page or two after a character is mentioned for the first time, the secret of his existence revealed, he walks out of a storm to interrupt a dinner party). The sincerity, the melodrama of such moments -- the operatic over-the-top "sweep" of many instances will probably drive some readers crazy, and made even this reader slow down, fall out of the rush of plot and ideas and energy.

--But such moments are few, and as often as they put the brakes on, equally often they were bound up in the book's many, many pleasures. This book's just a hair over 700 pages long, yet I flew through it, and there's little empty padding--it's not big out of mere ambition to be big, but out of a real and achieved sense of historical, political, and familial sweep. I enjoyed the hell out of my read, despite those twinges.

I'll close with an admission of my shameless appreciation for the novel's politics, and of its aesthetic decisions: at times I kind of wish it were more like The Wire, more sophisticated in its sweep and detail, more grounded in more far-reaching social examination, more subtle in its depiction of character. But how many people saw that show? And, instead, we get a big, popular, page-turning, and populist fiction which defines the necessity of unions, which details the longstanding historical crimes of poverty and race? Which exploits the many, many associations between the anti-anarchist furor of 1918 and the current state of American politics (while carefully drawing the lines between capital and the politics of fear)? We should have more fiction like this.
]]> 27662561 Tue, 29 Jul 2008 07:21:32 -0700
The Review:
Or, wait--that's friggin' arrogant. A review:
There has been talk on this site, and in one instance in regard to this very book, about the rating system for books. The five-star scale has provoked discussion and debate, as some see "stingy" where others see "anti-inflationary standards." I decided to take the time to spell out how my final rating emerges, in a quite quantitative and precise manner, from complex and rigorous calculations.

For instance, I hate memoirs. There are certainly exceptions, examples which counter my vigorous and well-deserved antipathy, but as with country music, Hank Williamses are few and far between. More often, with country music and memoirs, you get achy breaky heart crapola. Memoirs are always trying to teach me valuable lessons, or at the very least impart how someone else learned a valuable lesson, even if at times that lesson emerges only through antithesis (the memoir showing in grim, thorough detail how someone didn't learn any lesson, but instead took too many drugs, had too much sex, hated her- and/or him-self to the point of suicide, etc.). This is a memoir: that's one star.

But thankfully I was taught no lessons, and those that Julie Klam learned were dryly and subtly illustrated, and (even better) of little use to me as object lesson. This is a memoir that is about memories generally funny and sometimes sad and often both, a self-examination painlessly attentive to a generally likable and funny self, a meditation on growing up that (huzzah!) illustrates neither a sermonizing disdain for childishness nor a Lifetime-movie tinged-with-autumnal-regret obedience to the middle-class respect for adulthood. We get doody jokes and a lovely appreciation of motherhood (having one, being one). As memoirs go, for this reader it's far more Hank Williams: that's four stars.

I think it is very hard to be funny. Two stars just for trying. And add a star because funny memoirs are either oxymoronic (my bulimic junkiedom being no laughing matter) or stuck in the shadow of the oft-great Sedaris (who is really, really, really hard to imitate, and I wish people would stop trying)—Klam is funny in her own fashion. In fact, we can find any number of instances where she made me laugh out loud: her mother worried about finding "true love" (i.e., marriage) quickly, else be stuck "with a flying monkey;" an ex's appreciation of a favored CD (Enya) was "discovered . . . on the Crystal Light iced tea commercial;" a throwaway line about Mel Stottlemyre. Hell, just using the words "Mel Stottlemyre" gets you five stars. That is a goodreads rule.

Oh, occasionally, the jokes fall flat. Maybe too reliant upon pop-cultural references, lines can seem less incisive about the person or situation they're revealing and more like shtick. (She refers to her mother's tendency to narrate their travels around their village as "Jewish Eye for the Hick Town," a joke which seems to have a limited shelf-life and was less useful at nailing down her mother than others—like the flying monkey, above.) So, take away two stars.

However, when I made somewhat disappointed reference to (one of my comedy gods) Albert Brooks' last film as "too much shtick," one of my friends whispered "Mike Reynolds hates the Jews!" Besides being funny, even if he borrowed it from Andy Kindler, it made me feel bad. Because I love the Jews. To prove I'm not anti-semitic with that shtick comment, I give the book back a star, or maybe two.

And that made me think some more about comedy: comedy is usually a sharp pointy stick. Poking fun, sometimes aggressively enough to break the skin. Or skewer. But Klam works this amazing magic, throughout. It is comedy that never loses its teeth yet never rips out a throat; her digs reveal her delight in the very people being teased. Further, her comedy embraces the ironic distance of the narrator's perspective without losing any emotional connection. And every now and then, Klam's witty writing attains a perfect poetry at the synchronicity of snipe and snog: after a few fine, funny lines about her mother's ineptitude in the kitchen, she closes the section noting that "[t]he considerable smoke in the kitchen at every meal made us feel like we were eating in a dream." That line is multivalent, man. To be funny and to be moving, biting but never bitter? Good gravy. That's six or seven stars.

So, where are we at? I'm bad with math, but believe me—-my star rating for Klam's really fine book reflects much difficult figuring, extended periods of contemplation. Complex acts of ratiocination. It was much harder work than the book, which was a fast, lovely delight of a read.
]]>
author: Julie Klam
name: Mike
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 07/08
date added: 07/29/08
shelves:
review:
The author made me laugh in a few short sentences, thrown casually up as comments on a review. Now I figure a book's got to have ... maybe two or three hundred times as many sentences, some of which may be long, some of which were probably even revised, so the word-to-smirk (or even -to-snort) ratio's gotta be huge. Sign me up.

The Review:
Or, wait--that's friggin' arrogant. A review:
There has been talk on this site, and in one instance in regard to this very book, about the rating system for books. The five-star scale has provoked discussion and debate, as some see "stingy" where others see "anti-inflationary standards." I decided to take the time to spell out how my final rating emerges, in a quite quantitative and precise manner, from complex and rigorous calculations.

For instance, I hate memoirs. There are certainly exceptions, examples which counter my vigorous and well-deserved antipathy, but as with country music, Hank Williamses are few and far between. More often, with country music and memoirs, you get achy breaky heart crapola. Memoirs are always trying to teach me valuable lessons, or at the very least impart how someone else learned a valuable lesson, even if at times that lesson emerges only through antithesis (the memoir showing in grim, thorough detail how someone didn't learn any lesson, but instead took too many drugs, had too much sex, hated her- and/or him-self to the point of suicide, etc.). This is a memoir: that's one star.

But thankfully I was taught no lessons, and those that Julie Klam learned were dryly and subtly illustrated, and (even better) of little use to me as object lesson. This is a memoir that is about memories generally funny and sometimes sad and often both, a self-examination painlessly attentive to a generally likable and funny self, a meditation on growing up that (huzzah!) illustrates neither a sermonizing disdain for childishness nor a Lifetime-movie tinged-with-autumnal-regret obedience to the middle-class respect for adulthood. We get doody jokes and a lovely appreciation of motherhood (having one, being one). As memoirs go, for this reader it's far more Hank Williams: that's four stars.

I think it is very hard to be funny. Two stars just for trying. And add a star because funny memoirs are either oxymoronic (my bulimic junkiedom being no laughing matter) or stuck in the shadow of the oft-great Sedaris (who is really, really, really hard to imitate, and I wish people would stop trying)—Klam is funny in her own fashion. In fact, we can find any number of instances where she made me laugh out loud: her mother worried about finding "true love" (i.e., marriage) quickly, else be stuck "with a flying monkey;" an ex's appreciation of a favored CD (Enya) was "discovered . . . on the Crystal Light iced tea commercial;" a throwaway line about Mel Stottlemyre. Hell, just using the words "Mel Stottlemyre" gets you five stars. That is a goodreads rule.

Oh, occasionally, the jokes fall flat. Maybe too reliant upon pop-cultural references, lines can seem less incisive about the person or situation they're revealing and more like shtick. (She refers to her mother's tendency to narrate their travels around their village as "Jewish Eye for the Hick Town," a joke which seems to have a limited shelf-life and was less useful at nailing down her mother than others—like the flying monkey, above.) So, take away two stars.

However, when I made somewhat disappointed reference to (one of my comedy gods) Albert Brooks' last film as "too much shtick," one of my friends whispered "Mike Reynolds hates the Jews!" Besides being funny, even if he borrowed it from Andy Kindler, it made me feel bad. Because I love the Jews. To prove I'm not anti-semitic with that shtick comment, I give the book back a star, or maybe two.

And that made me think some more about comedy: comedy is usually a sharp pointy stick. Poking fun, sometimes aggressively enough to break the skin. Or skewer. But Klam works this amazing magic, throughout. It is comedy that never loses its teeth yet never rips out a throat; her digs reveal her delight in the very people being teased. Further, her comedy embraces the ironic distance of the narrator's perspective without losing any emotional connection. And every now and then, Klam's witty writing attains a perfect poetry at the synchronicity of snipe and snog: after a few fine, funny lines about her mother's ineptitude in the kitchen, she closes the section noting that "[t]he considerable smoke in the kitchen at every meal made us feel like we were eating in a dream." That line is multivalent, man. To be funny and to be moving, biting but never bitter? Good gravy. That's six or seven stars.

So, where are we at? I'm bad with math, but believe me—-my star rating for Klam's really fine book reflects much difficult figuring, extended periods of contemplation. Complex acts of ratiocination. It was much harder work than the book, which was a fast, lovely delight of a read.

]]> 28417050 Sun, 27 Jul 2008 07:58:05 -0700
author: Graham Greene
name: Mike
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1955
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 07/27/08
shelves:
review:

]]> 27801947 Sun, 20 Jul 2008 17:45:47 -0700
author: Neil Gaiman
name: Mike
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1995
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 07/20/08
shelves:
review:

]]> 27801936 Sun, 20 Jul 2008 17:45:44 -0700
author: Neil Gaiman
name: Mike
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2005
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 07/20/08
shelves:
review:

]]> 27801923 Sun, 20 Jul 2008 17:45:38 -0700
author: Neil Gaiman
name: Mike
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2004
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 07/20/08
shelves:
review:

]]> 27801904 Sun, 20 Jul 2008 17:45:29 -0700
author: Neil Gaiman
name: Mike
average rating: 4.53
book published: 1995
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 07/20/08
shelves:
review:

]]> 27801903 Sun, 20 Jul 2008 17:45:28 -0700
author: Neil Gaiman
name: Mike
average rating: 4.52
book published: 1999
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 07/20/08
shelves:
review:

]]> 27801895 Sun, 20 Jul 2008 17:45:25 -0700
author: Neil Gaiman
name: Mike
average rating: 4.46
book published: 1999
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 07/20/08
shelves:
review:

]]> 27801891 Sun, 20 Jul 2008 17:45:23 -0700
author: Neil Gaiman
name: Mike
average rating: 4.56
book published: 1999
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 07/20/08
shelves:
review:

]]> 27801888 Sun, 20 Jul 2008 17:45:22 -0700
author: Neil Gaiman
name: Mike
average rating: 4.45
book published: 1999
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 07/20/08
shelves:
review:

]]> 27801887 Sun, 20 Jul 2008 17:45:21 -0700
author: Neil Gaiman
name: Mike
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 07/20/08
shelves:
review:

]]> 27801884 Sun, 20 Jul 2008 17:45:20 -0700
author: Neil Gaiman
name: Mike
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2005
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 07/20/08
shelves:
review:

]]> 27801877 Sun, 20 Jul 2008 17:45:17 -0700
author: Neil Gaiman
name: Mike
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 07/20/08
shelves:
review:

]]> 27801874 Sun, 20 Jul 2008 17:45:15 -0700
author: Neil Gaiman
name: Mike
average rating: 4.40
book published: 1991
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 07/20/08
shelves:
review:

]]> 27801871 Sun, 20 Jul 2008 17:45:13 -0700
author: Neil Gaiman
name: Mike
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1991
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 07/20/08
shelves:
review:

]]> 27801866 Sun, 20 Jul 2008 17:45:11 -0700
author: Neil Gaiman
name: Mike
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2005
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 07/20/08
shelves:
review:

]]> 27801863 Sun, 20 Jul 2008 17:45:10 -0700
author: Neil Gaiman
name: Mike
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1998
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 07/20/08
shelves:
review:

]]> 27801862 Sun, 20 Jul 2008 17:45:09 -0700
author: Neil Gaiman
name: Mike
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1998
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 07/20/08
shelves:
review:

]]> 13159214 Sun, 20 Jul 2008 16:47:10 -0700
ON CONCLUDING, JULY '08:
Finally closed the door on the last story. I enjoyed each one, as they came along, but what I say above kind of stands--nothing threw me over, made me rethink my sense of story, made me double over (in pain, empathy, astonishment, laughter). But that's a pretty damn unfair standard to bring to bear, and they were pretty consistently good, these stories, and very worth parsing out. ]]>
author: Neil Smith
name: Mike
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2008
rating: 3
read at: 07/08
date added: 07/20/08
shelves:
review:
WRITTEN WAY BACK: I'm 3 stories in. (I let these collections sit by the bed, and pick up and dabble, like cleansers between other courses.) Smith has a remarkable confidence, backed up by a precision in prose. The stories are high-concept whimsy (the bang) shackled to an almost-emo sincerity, often despairing (the crunch). I like 'em well enough, but I keep seeing Lorrie Moore and Judy Budnitz staring over his shoulder... so I can't recommend him as the best bright new thing. But there's talent and ambition, so he may be another comer, finding the right pitch....

ON CONCLUDING, JULY '08:
Finally closed the door on the last story. I enjoyed each one, as they came along, but what I say above kind of stands--nothing threw me over, made me rethink my sense of story, made me double over (in pain, empathy, astonishment, laughter). But that's a pretty damn unfair standard to bring to bear, and they were pretty consistently good, these stories, and very worth parsing out.
]]> 26802965 Sun, 20 Jul 2008 16:31:43 -0700 and James M.)

Second, that the plot didn't erupt much until page 150 was pure joy. I fell in love with the meandering observations, the every-alley-investigated plotting, the often fine and funny and moving prose. E.g.,

"Don Wiggington wore his soul on display--hooded eyes, fleshy oblong cheeks, a dash of gargoyle running through his wide nose and rubbery lips. His were the sluggishly corrupt features you'd expect to mark a Renaissance cardinal on the take, one robe pocket full of dispensations, the other stuffed with bribes and Medici kickbacks."

That's Clark's style in a nutshell--even a stray metaphor for a minor character worth a few lines. We follow two poor-white brothers with a demon of a father, one quickly turned ne'er-do-well then eventually transforming into another grim small-town back-country evil. The other breaks out, goes to law school, marries up, has a rich life, before finding himself back in his old haunts, and--eventually ('round page 150)--returned to grapple with the consequences of an event which binds him to this vicious brother (now in prison).

Third, once the plot kicked in, the book felt more labored, not so much the dynamics of the necessary narrative twists and tensions--no, Clark does a decent job with the noirish plot, when he cares about it, and it's worth caring about. No, there's something about character interaction and development that seems to get more labored, jockeying with agitation rather than agility between a casual (Southern-fried) humor and a portentous (Southern-fried) sense of a guilt-ridden history. If I had to point to one thing, it'd be the main character's partner in law office and in friendship. This guy, Custis, never rang true to me--or maybe it was just the interactions he had with his "best friend" (and our protagonist). In fact, it may be that not ringing true is kind of intentional... a factor of race, as this black man seeks to fit in with a vaguely racist context and a friend committed to heavy-handed ironic post-racism. Maybe.

Either way, this relationship is central to the second half, and it felt like a tire had blown out and been replaced with a donut, and the ride was far bumpier.

Still, I did enjoy it. The first half of the book had me leaning 4 stars, very entertained and engaged, and the second half fell down to okay (a worthy but less fully-appreciated 2 stars), so--we'll split the difference. I think it'd be an enjoyable read to many folks: fans of Southern fiction, character-driven mysteries, and/or novels of ethics. (But if this sort of thing sounds good, I might turn you toward Clark's first novel The Many Aspects of Mobile Home Living or two great Southern novel/mysteries by Michael Malone, Time's Witness and Uncivil Seasons.)]]>
author: Martin Clark
name: Mike
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2008
rating: 3
read at: 07/08
date added: 07/20/08
shelves:
review:
Hmmm. First, they're pitching this like it's a legal thriller, and at 150 pages in the other shoe, partner to the opening set-up of a crime, had yet to drop. So don't come in expecting Grisham (god forbid), or even a mystery, really. This is a novel about ethics and about characters, very densely-imagined people bound up in situations both realistic and (despite an odd framing device which posits this all as true history rejiggered by a little authorial imagining) either Biblical or Noir-deterministic in its central plot. (Maybe a little of both, Abel and Cain--old testament and James M.)

Second, that the plot didn't erupt much until page 150 was pure joy. I fell in love with the meandering observations, the every-alley-investigated plotting, the often fine and funny and moving prose. E.g.,

"Don Wiggington wore his soul on display--hooded eyes, fleshy oblong cheeks, a dash of gargoyle running through his wide nose and rubbery lips. His were the sluggishly corrupt features you'd expect to mark a Renaissance cardinal on the take, one robe pocket full of dispensations, the other stuffed with bribes and Medici kickbacks."

That's Clark's style in a nutshell--even a stray metaphor for a minor character worth a few lines. We follow two poor-white brothers with a demon of a father, one quickly turned ne'er-do-well then eventually transforming into another grim small-town back-country evil. The other breaks out, goes to law school, marries up, has a rich life, before finding himself back in his old haunts, and--eventually ('round page 150)--returned to grapple with the consequences of an event which binds him to this vicious brother (now in prison).

Third, once the plot kicked in, the book felt more labored, not so much the dynamics of the necessary narrative twists and tensions--no, Clark does a decent job with the noirish plot, when he cares about it, and it's worth caring about. No, there's something about character interaction and development that seems to get more labored, jockeying with agitation rather than agility between a casual (Southern-fried) humor and a portentous (Southern-fried) sense of a guilt-ridden history. If I had to point to one thing, it'd be the main character's partner in law office and in friendship. This guy, Custis, never rang true to me--or maybe it was just the interactions he had with his "best friend" (and our protagonist). In fact, it may be that not ringing true is kind of intentional... a factor of race, as this black man seeks to fit in with a vaguely racist context and a friend committed to heavy-handed ironic post-racism. Maybe.

Either way, this relationship is central to the second half, and it felt like a tire had blown out and been replaced with a donut, and the ride was far bumpier.

Still, I did enjoy it. The first half of the book had me leaning 4 stars, very entertained and engaged, and the second half fell down to okay (a worthy but less fully-appreciated 2 stars), so--we'll split the difference. I think it'd be an enjoyable read to many folks: fans of Southern fiction, character-driven mysteries, and/or novels of ethics. (But if this sort of thing sounds good, I might turn you toward Clark's first novel The Many Aspects of Mobile Home Living or two great Southern novel/mysteries by Michael Malone, Time's Witness and Uncivil Seasons.)
]]> 21450489 Fri, 18 Jul 2008 10:39:18 -0700
author: José Saramago
name: Mike
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1996
rating: 4
read at: 06/08
date added: 07/18/08
shelves:
review:

]]> 26386818 Fri, 18 Jul 2008 08:08:17 -0700 http://www.goodreads.com/revie.... Go read that.

My review's a meager "yeah, yeah" to everything she said. Vigorous head-nodding. Amens, if I was prone to amens. The accounts here are honest, funny, startling, dishonest, shattering, and always engaging. The editing is really superlative; I think it's hard in oral histories not to fall into redundancies or to sell short the narrative's structure, but McNeil et al. with great grace and momentum allow for the accounts to both unfold and speed along, plots emerging and yet anecdotes lingeringly, lovingly displacing such forward motion.

To Jessica's astute criticisms, pro and con (particularly around the loud absence of race), add only that I was startled at how impressive an account of the rise of a commercial film industry this was. Folded into the personal stories and the cultural shifts and the sleazy/seductive/exploitative sexual politics and the unblinking attention to addiction, there's also a great subtext detailing how technologies, cultural contexts, political forces, audience demographics, production financing (legal and, often, less-so), auteurs and hacks, economic factors, and legal philosophies structure and restructure the making of mass culture. (Even at the margins of the masses...)

I would note in closing my restraint, far more impressive than Jessica's as I am a far bigger doofus, at avoiding stupid puns, which was (ahem) very hard to do. ]]>
author: Legs McNeil
name: Mike
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at: 07/08
date added: 07/18/08
shelves:
review:
The best review I've seen of this--the review that sent me to the library to get (while the librarian looked on disapprovingly) and then read (very quickly)--is Jessica's, found at http://www.goodreads.com/revie.... Go read that.

My review's a meager "yeah, yeah" to everything she said. Vigorous head-nodding. Amens, if I was prone to amens. The accounts here are honest, funny, startling, dishonest, shattering, and always engaging. The editing is really superlative; I think it's hard in oral histories not to fall into redundancies or to sell short the narrative's structure, but McNeil et al. with great grace and momentum allow for the accounts to both unfold and speed along, plots emerging and yet anecdotes lingeringly, lovingly displacing such forward motion.

To Jessica's astute criticisms, pro and con (particularly around the loud absence of race), add only that I was startled at how impressive an account of the rise of a commercial film industry this was. Folded into the personal stories and the cultural shifts and the sleazy/seductive/exploitative sexual politics and the unblinking attention to addiction, there's also a great subtext detailing how technologies, cultural contexts, political forces, audience demographics, production financing (legal and, often, less-so), auteurs and hacks, economic factors, and legal philosophies structure and restructure the making of mass culture. (Even at the margins of the masses...)

I would note in closing my restraint, far more impressive than Jessica's as I am a far bigger doofus, at avoiding stupid puns, which was (ahem) very hard to do.
]]> 25254929 Mon, 14 Jul 2008 11:32:37 -0700 Everything and More). But it's more fun than any 36 of 40 math teachers, so what the hell.

That's right, math teachers. I'm throwing down. Push the taped glasses up your nose, square away the sleeves on your stained-white button-downs, hide the pointy edge of your compasses, and get ready to rumble.]]>
author: Leonard Mlodinow
name: Mike
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2008
rating: 3
read at: 07/08
date added: 07/14/08
shelves:
review:
Clear and generally effective, but never particularly invigorating in its claims; for better and worse, very chatty. I like math (NERD!), and would have liked a bit more of a challenge (see David Foster Wallace's Everything and More). But it's more fun than any 36 of 40 math teachers, so what the hell.

That's right, math teachers. I'm throwing down. Push the taped glasses up your nose, square away the sleeves on your stained-white button-downs, hide the pointy edge of your compasses, and get ready to rumble.
]]> 27219245 Mon, 14 Jul 2008 11:25:33 -0700
author: David Foster Wallace
name: Mike
average rating: 3.39
book published: 2003
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 07/14/08
shelves:
review:

]]> 27101747 Sun, 13 Jul 2008 05:14:53 -0700
author: Jonathan Harr
name: Mike
average rating: 3.66
book published: 1996
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 07/13/08
shelves:
review:

]]> 25163831 Sat, 12 Jul 2008 14:52:48 -0700