Stories, Sailing and Sci-Fi

Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It 
by Malie Meloy

This is the best short story collection I've read since Olive Kitteridge, which was a VERY good collection that you should also read. The stories here are economical and full and poignant.  They're all about, in one way or another, what the title implies: characters who want it both ways, which is a powerful theme for literary stories, don't you think? I read the book in two days, because the stories are so lean. Amazingly, despite their verbal paucity, the stories never feel rushed or limited in scope.Thumbs up! A++++++ quick shipping would buy from again.


Hornblower in the West Indies
by C.S. Forester

I read the first Horatio Hornblower book (first by fictional chronology, not publication history) when I was a Junior in High School. This is the last Hornblower book! I haven't read any in between. And much like Hornblower, in the intervening period I have gone quickly from a seasick, press-ganged Midshipman to a grumpy, legendary commander-in-chief of the West Indies. I like the Hornblower series much more than the Aubrey/Maturin books by Patrick O'Brien. Forester's books are more readable, I think. The novels are broken up into stand-alone novellas. Anyway, great book.  Maybe I'll go back and read the rest of the series. "All hands to the tops'l main aft rigging lines! We're riding hull full bulwarks in a Maiden's tack, men! Full sheets on deck 'round the keel! Leeward, port-side!" (Sailing.)


Solaris
by Stanislaw Lem

My feelings about this book are a little mixed. On one hand, it does a lot of things that I really hate in books: the writing is dense for no discernible reason, the characters are boring and uninformative and melodramatic, and (being written in 1961) the only woman is girlish and fatally dependent on the men in the story. The writing, in particular, is rough for me. Lem has an annoying Lovecraft-like tendency (at least in this book) to describe objects in unending detail which are supposedly beyond imagination anyway. He even uses the term "non-Euclidean geometry" to describe a confusing alien landscape, which is all sorts of Lovecraft. On the other hand, this is an idea novel. Realistic or informative characters aren't super necessary if the ideas are interesting enough. Here, unlike in the two Heinlein books I read earlier this year... the ideas are pretty OK! Basically, the novel is about humankind's attempts to make contact with the enormous, living, gelatinous ocean that covers an alien planet. And... we can't! Lots of science fiction takes it for granted that even very strange alien creatures would be able to communicate with us, using math or music or telepathy or whatever. But that's kind of a weird idea. We can barely communicate with chimps. It's a book about the potential limits of human intelligence, ability and exploration. Worthwhile!

Faulkner, etc

I haven't posted in a while. I've been going through a bit of a funk, book-wise. I've been writing a lot recently (In fact I sold two pieces of fiction! My first ever!), and I weirdly have trouble reading when I write. Ugh. Sorry. I hate to be that guy. “Oh, my novel that I'm working on blah blah” -That Guy/Me.

Anyway, I've read a few things. But I've ALSO been watching some good shows! Are you watching Breaking Bad? Why nottttt?

A Light in August by William Faulkner

I ended my last post by expressing admiration for the quality of characterization in top-notch modern lit and asked a question: have writers been getting better at this, or am I just getting older? Basically, I wanted to know if I went back to the Classics whether they would be as poignant as some of the more modern lit has been for me recently.

So my answer is: Sort of?

This was a good book. I liked it a lot ("Phew!" - William Faulkner), and it's obviously pretty far ahead of its time, structurally speaking. Three plots sort of interweave throughout the book in a way that feels very modern and very smart. But I didn't love the quasi-stream-of-consciousness style. And, maybe for that reason, I thought the book was a little too.. loose? Is that a thing? I don't mean that it's sloppy, or that it's narrative wanders (that's OK in a novel). Just, something on the level of the sentence and the paragraph wasn't... tight? I don't know.

Anyway, there were some real solid moments. And the characters were for sure compelling. Hooray, Faulkner! You're not famous for nothing! Hooray Classics! You're still worth reading!

Ballistics by Billy Collins

I once asked a guy who is in a position to have a real opinion about poetry and poets what he thought of Billy Collins. I was probably even holding up a copy of this book. “He's OK,” the guy said, and then he sort of shrugged. “Kind of a one trick pony.” I get that. But I still really like this trick, and I'm not yet sick of this pony. What if your pony could do this trick? That's a good trick! Your pony probably OK to just coast on that trick for a while. Anyway, Billy Collins is great is what I'm saying.




Cards on the Table by Agatha Chrisite

I don't remember this one too well. The plot revolved around a murder that was solved by... knowing what characters' bridge playing strategies said about their personality? I mean, that sounds pretty cool, but I literally know nothing about bridge. So, for the whole book, Hercule Poirot was all “Ah, but in the third rubber of the second match a grand slam occurred! Only a bold person would have doubled down in such a situation.” And I was like, “Sure. OK.”




Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why by Bart Ehrman

I know my Bible pretty well. No jokez. Ask me something about it! And I love Old Testament criticism and history. I mean just LUV it. Totally inexplicably. I picked up this book thinking I would brush up on my New Testament textual criticism. Oh, man. I forgot how boring early church history is. “Javius points out that in the Alexandrian texts, which are generally considered to be based on older versions, except in cases where....” Yuck. Wow. It's... Look, I'm sure this book is fine. But I do not care. Just not my cuppa!

Tina Fey and Lorrie Moore

Hello! It's been awhile. I've been busy with work and other things, but I have read two books. These are the books!

Bossypants by Tina Fey


One of the things I love most about 30 Rock is its strong female voice. As someone who grew up white, male and affluent... I'm sort of required to feel guilty about the relative fortune of abstract populations that are unlike myself. So I do! Like, genuinely, I really do!

I'm embarrassed to admit that don't know much about minorities or poor people. But I do have some experience with affluent white women, and so feminism has become the ism for me. 30 Rock is--duh--hilarious and great without any kind of additional qualification, but it also simultaneously deals with the disparity that women experience in everyday life and pokes fun at the sorts of people (me!) who think that sort of thing is important. Tina Fey's book has a lot of the same stuff: It's serious and thoughtful about the kind of messages it sends, but it's also just silly a lot of the time. It basically reads like a very short collection of blog posts. I imagine it's exactly as funny and thoughtful and likable as my blog. I'm like the boy Tina Fey. Yes.





A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore


This book is fucking excellent.

It's one of those fancy pants, capital-L Literature gigs (grosssss!), so there's not a lot of plot to go around, really. But basically it's about this: a girl in college who finds a job as the nanny for an adopted child.

The power comes from two places. First, like most Literature worth paying attention to, it draws on the uncomfortable truths of being an adult human being. That is, it trades in the fact that we are often petty or insecure or greedy, but don't really realize it. Second, the protagonist, Karen, has a really strong voice. I tried (unsuccessfully) to explain the voice of the author to my girlfriend several days ago. It's funny I guess? I don't like "funny" books, a la Douglas Adams or Christopher Moore.This book isn't funny like that. It's "clever," but not in a winking, Oscar Wilde sort of way. It's just... OK... The author, the character--whoever--seems to have a lot of fun with the language of the novel. But it isn't written in such a way that's condescending or separate. It's actually a very sad book. I bookmarked an instance where I thought the way in which the author savored wordplay in a tragic way was particularly poignant, for some reason:

"And sometimes it was true: the three of us would go out together, and we were like a family. If he had loved me, or even if he'd just have said so, I would have died of happiness. But it didn't happen. So I didn't die of happiness. Words for a tombstone: SHE DIDN'T DIE OF HAPPINESS."

Like that's kind of funny, right? But not in a way that separates itself from it's subject, which is what I dislike about most funny books. You get it. I'm totally making sense. For sure.

When I was in middle school, and first got into serious reading, I read the classics almost exclusivley: Dickens, Dostoevsky, Dumas. I basically refused to read anything written after 1950, believing that the works of real value and importance were the older ones. In college, I finally got into more modern work--work like this--and it's been breathtaking.

It makes me wonder: did literature just get better in the last 30 years, or have I just gotten older, gotten more capable of appreciating the emotional difficulties represented in the work of any writer? Anyway, I'll find out soon. My next read is my first ever Faulkner: A Light In August.


Bye!

Desert Solitare by Edward Abbey

Edward Abbey doesn't want you to call him a nature writer.

But that's stupid and also he is dead, so today I'm going to write about Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey, nature writer.

I have been looking forward to reading this book for a long time. I grew up in the Mojave, and I've gradually developed a pretty deep fondness for the desert. When people think about "nature" I'm pretty sure they think about trees. Or lakes or flowers or jungles. Or at least, like, grass. And those things are fine. Who doesn't like trees! But there's something special about the desert, about its size and scope and the very fact that it's almost theatrically inhospitable. Whenever friends from other parts of the world come to Las Vegas, I take them out into the desert because I really, really want to spread the Good Word about it.



Edward Abbey was a park ranger in Arches National Park in the 1950s. He lived alone in a trailer out in the wilderness. Desert Solitaire is basically a collection of his journals from that time. I always imagined that the book was a sort of love-letter to the desert, a long, thoughtful pitch for my all-time-fav ecosystem. I imagined Abbey was an Annie Dillard of the Desert.* I... was wrong. More on that later.

Today was my first day off of work since March 20th. I went for a hike. All the pictures in this post are from that hike this afternoon. I took them with my cell phone. It felt really fantastic to get outside, to walk around. At one point I sat down in the shade underneath a tall boulder, and I thought about what would happen if I fell from one of the rocks. I wondered what would happen if I died out there.

Which is really to say that I thought about time. That is thing about the desert: it doesn't change. Sure, like any place, plants come and go with the seasons, and animal and insect life follows. But if I had slipped away underneath that boulder, and the archaeologists of the future had stumbled across my bleached, elegant bones there--they would have seen pretty much the same landscape that I saw. Forests grow and die, coastlines are transformed daily. But the world of slate and sandstone is about as close to eternal as we're ever gonna get.

Which brings me to what I didn't like about Abbey. He's... cranky. He's just a cranky, curmudgeonly old hermit! Sometimes his book is really beautiful, sometimes almost insightful. But mostly it's just awkwardly petty! It's just an ol' crank airing his contempt for tourists, businesses, the government, car-owners, wealthy people. Blech. That is the opposite of why I think the desert is #1. The desert is great because it provides perspective, makes little complaints seem dumb.

It took me a while to even figure out what felt off about the book. Finally, I came to a chapter about a horse named Moon Eyes. The horse was once owned by a rancher, but had escaped and by that time lived alone in the canyons for a decade. Immediately Abbey says, "I want to have that horse." I thought: that's weird. It seems like he would want to respect its break from bondage, want to keep it wild at all costs. It was a pretty mild inconsistency, but Abbey seemed oblivious to it. And then it hit me. I knew why the whole book had felt so weird: this guy wasn't remotely introspective or self-critical. He wasn't a philosopher or poet or mystic. He was just some cranky hermit! I started to enjoy the book much more after that, honestly. Because there really are some nice passages. And the chapter about Moon Eyes is great.

Taking history classes, I would sometimes feel self-conscious about being from the Southwest. America--especially Western America--doesn't live surrounded by history the way much of the rest of the world does. The southwest is particularly starved of any buildings older than 50 years. But looking out on the dramatic landscape this afternoon, I thought: Europe can keep its stupid cathedrals.

Bye guys!

*If you haven't read Annie Dilard, go read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek right now. I'll wait.

Quitting a Job and Getting Back to Work

I gave notice at one of my jobs. Don't worry--I've still got two (!?) others. But now I'll have weekends off again, which means I'll have time for what's really important: making friends and living a rich, full life reading and 'riting. I already know what book I'm going to read next, and I think I'll have a long post afterwards. So. Look out for that!

But until then, and despite my busy schedule, I've done a tiny bit of reading here and there. Let me catch you up.

The Trouble with Poetry by Billy Collins

After a minor personal disaster a few weeks ago, I called in sick on a Monday. I went on a hike, commiserated with a friendly bartender over gin and tonics, wandered around a Home Depot, and eventually found my way to the poetry section of a Border's Books. The store was big and mostly empty. Even the shelves were weirdly bare. After flipping bored-ly through Neruda and Cummings, I picked up a slim book because it had a neat picture of a black bear on it, and then I sat in a chair and I read the whole thing.

I like poetry. I like it a lot, actually. But I came to the game late. That is, I have about a decade of serious prose reading under my belt now, but it wasn't until I was a junior in college that I realized that poetry was actually pretty OK, too. As a result, I don't really have the terminology to talk about poetry. The jargon, or whatever. ("Oh yes, the sonic qualities of stanza two! How evocative!") But Billy Collins is fun. He's funny sometimes, too. Which is nice. He just has a really accessible voice, and writes poems I really like? Read some of his stuff! This book was very good.

Also, afterward I wrote a Billy Collins-ish poem of my own. (You can laugh. It's supposed to be kind of funny!)

The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss

I didn't finish this one.

This is the second book in a Fantasy Trilogy called The Kingkiller Trilogy. These books are a big deal in the Fantasy world. People like them a lot. The books are about Kvothe, who is a really cool guy. That's basically it, actually. He's a guy who is just really cool, and he is now tending bar at a tavern and telling the story of his cool life.

I read the first book, called The Name of the Wind, last year. I enjoyed it! I mean, sure, the characters were terrible and silly and the world wasn't super compelling. But the pacing was just incredible. That man knows how to get you from one scene to the next, knows how to make the stakes seem realistic and interesting, and knows how to make the book feel... meaty, despite it's speed.

But this time I was skipping pages. One of the two big problems with High Fantasy novels (more on other one in a second) is that they tend to be bloated and sluggish. They get too caught up in the details of their made-up world, or something. Anyway, they just tend to be big, fat, slow awful things.

And the other reason they are lame is best exemplified by The Wise Man's Fear. Kvothe is ridiculous. He is too cool. He is cool to the point that I felt embarrassed for the author. He's just... literally the best at everything there is. The best swordsman, the best magician, the smartest student, the hardest worker, the best actor, the best singer, the best bartender. These are all actual things that he is the best at. What? Okay, okay. How about this: He has sex for the first time ever with a supernatural sex demon. He is so good at having sex that instead of killing him (which is what usually happens?) the sex demon is compelled to send him out into the world to tell everyone how good he is at having sex. Yes. Really.

That's your character Patrick Rothfuss! Ooops!

 Sorry, nerds!

See you soon, everybody!

Mini Reviews, April 2011

 Hello!

Recently I was offered a THIRD (!!!) job. The position is an incredible opportunity, and I'm very excited about it! But it adds and ADDITIONAL 40 hours of work each week to my already full-ish schedule. The position is a temporary one, so I'll be back in the swing of things around July. But until then I don't have much time to read or to post here.

But I've read a few books since I last made an entry. Here are some quick thoughts about them!

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen


Jonathan Franzen has basically become my new favorite author. I liked Freedom better than I liked The Corrections, which is saying something, It's not that Freedom is a better novel. They're the same good. Same-sies. But Freedom had things to say that were more immediately relevant to me. I know that the title of the book isn't precisely central to the interests of the story, but I'm a person at really specific age and of a really specific temperament that happens to have held some really specific ideas about the notion of "freedom" that are... changing as I enter my ripe mid-bigenarian years. Franzen has had (roughly) this to say about the notion of freedom (not a quote): that we're told that it is basically the most important factor to the happiness of a person, but maybe happiness really comes when you finally give up all that freedom and just deal with the fact that you are person you always were. I'm just at the right place in my life to find that idea fascinating and dangerous and important. Good timing, J-Franz!

Empire Falls by Richard Russo


Empire Falls is about the manager of a diner in a small town in central Maine. It won a Pulitzer. It's my kind of thing, guys. But Franzen may have ruined other books for me. His characters are so uncomfortably realistic that I feel a little embarrassed reading more timid character authors, now! Miles Roby--the protagonist--is essentially perfect, or anyway he's perfectly sympathetic. His flaws are things like, "too self-sacrificing," and "too much of a dreamer." There's nothing seriously wrong with him or anyone else. Even the villains are transparently motivated. These are people who can only populate fiction, and so I didn't feel like they had anything really informative to say about my own life. Russo is a good writer, but this story's seams were sticking out all over the place--I could see his pen strokes on every page, and in every event. Let me give you an example. The story's two central conflicts: whether or not Miles will ever move out of Empire Falls, and whether or not he will ever get together with Charlene (of course: sassy, smart, confident, with huge breasts) never once feel like organic extensions of the characters. They feel like things meant to keep me reading. They feel like things to add pages. And I never cared about them. Anyway, it's a good enough book. No regrets. Just... nothing exceptional.

The A.B.C. Murders by Agatha Christie


There are a few ways to write a "mystery" novel. One of them is the Thriller, where the book revolves around trying to catch an established criminal before he or she commits his or her next crime. Another is the Whodunit, where the book revolves around placing together clues to reveal which--of a cast of possible suspects--committed a specific crime. I read Christie because I don't like Thriller, but I like Whodunits. And this story starts out like a straight Thriller, but ends as a Whodunit. It's one of the better Christie books I've read, though I didn't think I'd like it. Good book!



Packing for Mars by Mary Roach


This book was pretty good. It's about the science that goes into having human beings in space. It turns out this is a hard thing to do! Space is cool, but it sounds awful to be there. Roach is a good non-fiction writer. She's funny, clear, informative. I liked her book about the science of sex better.

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty

When I was a senior in college I took a class called "The Psychology of Transcendence." It was a real hippie sort of thing. Half of the class was about Attachment Theory, and half  revolved around meditation and books about Zen Buddhism and poetry by Mary Oliver. After class my house-mates and I would sit around and talk about intimacy and family and God. It had (and has, I assume) a reputation around campus for being a Life-Changer. This is because it will probably change your life!

The professor for this class suggested--among other things--that the students commit to a "Daily Spiritual Practice," by which he meant meditating every day. The idea (I think) is that doing so would provide perspective and grounding. It's a sound piece of advise, and I haven't taken it seriously enough. But I remember thinking about its similarity in design to two Practices to which I already had a casual commitment: Singing and... (you guessed it!) Reading.

For whatever reason, and without giving it much thought, I have held fast to the belief that there is something good and worthwhile and important about reading books. This is beyond the desire to learn things, or to seem smart, or to relax, or be entertained.  This is the sense that somehow the act itself--that daily going off somewhere to be quiet and alone, to communicate with an author and experience the world through her eyes, to sit and chew on the texture of her words--has the capacity to slowly fill you up in preparation for the ways in which Life insists on emptying you out.

Lonesome Dove is an 800-page Pulitzer Prize-winning western. It has a broad cast of characters and spacious interests, but it's generally about two ex-Texas Rangers named Gus and Call making a cattle drive from Southwestern Texas to Montana. Gus is gregarious, whimsical, and lazy, while Call is rough, hard-working and practical. As you might imagine, they and their party come across all sorts of small mishaps through which they must navigate. But the real power of the book comes from its comfort with the characters and its sense of place.


It's a deliberate, meaty book. Things happen slowly. Each character lives his or her life at its own pace, and as a reader we are simply made witness to the particulars of it. It's not until around page 200 that the characters even begin the cattle drive, leaving the titular town behind. Before that they just kind of... hang around: they talk to each other, drink, gamble, dig a well, bake some sourdough biscuits.

The Corrections pretty dramatically altered my ideas about what "character-driven" fiction really looks like. And neither Gus nor Call are "realistic" by any stretching of that term, but there is nevertheless something informative about them. As in any good Western, there's something both terrestrial and mythological about the characters and their mission.They're everyday sorts of people, but by virtue of their place in that particular historical setting, their story can't help but rise above its regional interests.

I was raised in a suburban tract home, and I'm about as much a Cowboy as I am an Astronaut or a Pirate. Nevertheless, Westerns have always held a special place in my heart, and I think it has to do with growing up in the desert. There's just something about big, empty, uninviting, beautiful landscapes and the lonely people who inhabit them that has always felt like home to me. And the novel's journey from Texas to Montana mirrors my own important migration "up north."

The last eighteen months have been hard for me, sometimes. They've been a crash course in rejection, disappointment and compromise. I guess this is what being an adult is like (?!?). I don't want to complain too much, because Duh. But my most meaningful personal and professional goals have all sputtered and stalled at the start line, and I've become freshly acquainted with Frustration and Shame.

I'm not done with this book. I read 10 to 20 pages each day, and I'm only about a third of the way through the thing. I may put together some more thoughts when I finish, but I doubt it. I have some other books coming in at the library for me. There's a copy of Flannery O'Conner's Complete Stories sitting on my dresser that is just begging to have some teeth sunk into it. But for the next two months or so I'll continue to chip away at Gus and Call's story. Something about the book, about the pace and the breadth, has been exactly what I've needed at the end of a day. Sitting alongside those characters has been my version of a Daily Spiritual Practice, the activity that--providing foundation beneath my life--reminds me what is constant and valuable.

The Corrections was a better book in every conceivable way, and The Moral Landscape was more interesting to talk about. But Lonesome Dove--at least right now--is exactly the book I'm looking for.