No Touch Monkey! And Other Travel Lessons Learned Too Late

#156
Title: No Touch Monkey! And Other Travel Lessons Learned Too Late
Author: Ayun Halliday
Publisher: Mariner
Year: 2003
288 pages
As travel narratives go, this is an average example of the drug-seeking backpacker genre. Halliday is sometimes funny, but her tendency to elaborate on all the ways that she is an unpleasant travel companion override her attractiveness: She doesn't seem fun to share a room, bus, or foreign experience with. Much of the book is not about "lessons learned too late," but perhaps unintentionally about lessons never learned, particularly regarding recreational substances, cut-rate accommodations, and local water. In the last chapter she regrets not enjoying her travel more before she had a child. Had this been the book's starting point and organizing principle, it might have been more interesting, substantive, and memorable.

The Book of Salt

#155
Title: The Book of Salt
Author: Monique Truong
Publisher: Mariner
Year: 2003
268 pages

A lyrical and evocative reflection on colonialism, but reported as a story about desire and wholeness. The narrator, Binh, is Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas's Vietnamese cook at 27 rue des Fleurus in Paris. Some reviewers have critiqued it for not being enough about Stein and Toklas; this is like criticizing A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court for not focusing on King Arthur. While Stein and Toklas provide a foil and a context, this is Binh's narrative. While Vietnam and France are the backdrop, he is a young man both literally and figuratively at sea.

Though I occasionally tripped over a bit of Truong's prose, overall the novel flows well, is a joy to read, and mixes sweet, sour, bitter, and salt as exactingly as any cook could wish.

Buried Fire

#154
Title: Buried Fire
Author: Jonathan Stroud
Publisher: Hyperion
Year: 2004
333 pages
I'm sorry to say that, other than trolling for short stories in anthologies, I've exhausted all of Jonathan Stroud's U.S.-available works. Like Garth Nix, Stroud writes young adult fantasy young adult horror underpinnings. Buried Fire is no exception. Overtly a story about dragons and the powers they bestow, it quickly reveals its preoccupation with the unspoken underside--under ground, lost in history, evil, and unconscious. the protagonist, Michael, is as problematic as the protagonist of the Bartimaeus Trilogy; that is, he's an adolescent. Less subtle but more complex than The Leap, it is most similar to The Last Siege, which remains the best of these three.

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

#153
Title: Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
Author: Alison Bechdel
Publisher: Mariner
Year: 2006
234 pages

The author/illustrator of the long-running comic serial Dykes to Watch out For, Bechdel has occasionally told parts of her coming out story. In this autobiography/graphic novel/comic in the Howard Cruse style, she  tells the story of her father's death. As the segments accumulate (including some re-tellings), the reader learns more about Alison and her father's complex relationship. Bechdel interweaves parallels between her family's life and literary references; sometimes, it's eerie. A definite one-sitting read.

As She Climbed across the Table

#152
Title: As She Climbed across the Table
Author: Jonathan Lethem
Publisher: faber and faber
Year: 1997
Genre: fantasy and science fiction
192 pages

You know by now that I love Lethem, right? Who else could write a love triangle with a physicist, a social scientist, and nothing? Though is includes a blind Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, Schrodinger's cat, and many other amusing features (some of which are surely physics jokes that I don't get), this is pretty much a love story. It's relatively simple, sometimes a little labored, but generally pleasant and fun to read. Turn on "Particle Man" and enjoy.