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The Lacuna

#539
Title:  The Lacuna
Author: Barbara Kingsolver
Publisher: Harper
Year: 2009
508 pages

Read as an audiobook narrated by the author. The story revolves around a number of empty centers, much like illumination around a manuscript page. Many events and elements recur usefully and enjoyably. The tone shifts at about Book 4 in a set of writings, mostly news articles, that struck a sour note and seemed hollow in a bad way. A tone of false jocularity jarringly appeared at times. The tightening scrutiny of HUAC was realistically unpleasant and difficult for me to listen to in the lead-up to this election season. The conclusion was satisfying. I'd enjoy reading it again now to appreciate how the pieces fit together.

Leaves of Grass

#538
Title: Leaves of Grass
Author: Walt Whitman
Publisher: ?
Year: 1854
333 pages

I read a public domain edition and calculated the page count. Whitman kept revising until his death, so it's a little hard to say which revision I read. I know it wasn't the first edition.

This was the fourth of the "encyclopedic" books I read simultaneously from DailyLit. Whitman is sometimes more a thesaurus than a poet, pouring forth endless lists of synonyms, related ideas, associate professions, and the like. This may help account for the varying quality of the poems, some of which are indeed exultant, joyous, transcendent, all-encompassing; others, however, are quite dull, mundane, and seem to lack a raison d'etre.

When I Was Puerto Rican

#537
Title: When I Was Puerto Rican
Author: Esmeralda Santiago
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Year: 1993
Country: Commonwealth of Puerto Rico (an unincorporated territory of the United States)
286 pages

This is primarily a memoir of a Puerto Rican childhood. Santiago gives a satisfying account of daily life with its occasional dramatic, punctuating events. She uses description well to imbue the landscape with emotional resonance. The New York section was thinner and seemed rushed. It would have benefited from an additional 20% of the page count added to allow more showing and less telling.

Selections from James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson

#536
Title: Selections from James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson
Author: James Boswell
Editor: Robert William Chapman
Publisher: Oxford
Year: 1821
220 pages

I understand and appreciate this biography's historical import in terms of the way biographies are constructed, just as I appreciate the ways in which Proust, Joyce, Stein, and Woolf altered the shape and focus of the novel. However, I find that I love neither Boswell, who seems to be a sycophantic toady, nor Johnson, so many of whose bon mots are merely forms of insult and aspersion. This quickly wore on me and soon became unbearably tedious. I'd have preferred to read much more about Johnson's construction of the dictionary, a still-topical subject that has a great advantage over obscure, class-riddled jibes at the expense of many, many other people. Let us not refer to male privilege, pray let us not.

Tree of Smoke

#535
Title: Tree of Smoke
Author: Denis Johnson
Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
Year: 2007
620 pages

I agree with reviewers who call this sprawling or confusing, but I thought both of these aspects contributed to a useful chaos and uncertainty that paralleled the war in Vietnam, the landscape traversed, and the clash of world views. The audiobook was infinitely easier than the novel since the speakers were more clearly differentiated. Who's on the level? Are there conspiracies? Did the colonel know what he was doing? Thought these questions are raIsed but not answered, this was nonetheless a satisfying novel.

Just Dirt: Memoirs

#534
Title: Just Dirt: Memoirs
Author: Wilson Smith
Publisher: Wilson Smith (Lulu)
Year: 2007
131 pages

A slim yet emotionally substantial collection of memoirs comprising a portrait of the author's life. Though most are straightforward, they are evocative and sometimes lyrical. It is not so much that the events unfold dramatically as that the demonstrate a growing maturity through the accretion of experiences.

The Stone Gods

#533
Title: The Stone Gods
Author: Jeanette Winterson
Publisher: Harcourt
Year:
212 pages

Any Winterson is a treat, though not necessarily fully intelligible. A lot about this sort-of-science-fiction novel made me laugh, not least of which was the core story in which all of the intrepid explorers, who the reader might expect will be the new hope of humanity, die. The core narrative, though, is about the continuity (or even more extreme, the inevitability) of human, robot, parrot, and universal experience. A fun novel about archetypes, plus space pirates, bisexual robots, and of course, stone gods.

Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void

#531
Title: Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void
Author: Mary Roach
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Year: 2010
336 pages

Sex, scatology, other stuff, and space travel. Roach is funny as hell, with long, delightful tangents that wheel away from the narrative (not unlike Frank Poole after HAL finishes him off). Readers of Roach's other books will recognize the points of intersection (corpses, e.g., or sex in space). I'd have liked more on the temperament needed for long space voyages, but that's about my interests, and perhaps not Roach's.

Just like Someone Without Mental Illness Only Moreso

#532
Title: Just like Someone Without Mental Illness Only Moreso
Author: Mark Vonnegut
Publisher: Delacorte Press
Year: 2010
224 pages

In the interval between The Eden Express and the present memoir, Vonnegut's diagnosis has shifted from schizophrenia to bipolar disorder. This isn't surprising for two reasons: 1) He responded well to lithium, which today we generally understand as tipping the scales toward a bipolar diagnosis; and 2) schizophrenia is a garbage category for a lot of disorders that include psychosis (and in my opinion, may not be etiologically related). These days, there's a lot less hebephrenic schizophrenia and a lot more bipolar II.

The Eden Express makes more sense as a narrative of manic and depressive episodes (leavened with a plethora of recreational substances). It's wild, fast, roller coaster-like. The author is not in consensual reality for much of the story. By contrast, Just like Someone Without Mental Illness Only Moreso is a normalized book, slower and perhaps less interesting, although the contrast over time is fascinating. Read the two together as a really good look at how disruptive unchecked bipolar disorder can be.

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World

#530
Title: Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
Author: Jack Weatherford
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
Year: 2005
352 pages

An interesting and entertaining history of the Mongol empire. The tone is sympathetic and the author asserts that the Mongol invasions of European towns and cities were not as horrific as European history books assert. This has caused angry and vituperative responses from some reviewers. I'm not in a position to compare conflicting accounts, but mildly note that generally speaking, whoever tells the story spins it in their favor. Also, I'm awfully sorry that some Christian communities were attacked. I agree that that might well have been horrible. Perhaps, in the spirit of reciprocity, those reviewers might consider how those gentile communities treated the Jews who lived there. Lots of horror there as well.

Head Cases: Stories of Brain Injury and Its Aftermath

#529
Title: Head Cases: Stories of Brain Injury and Its Aftermath
Author: Michael Paul Masdon
Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
Year: 2009
314 pages

Light on science, long on condemnation of almost every medical professional and system except his own hospital. Rife with grammatical problems and incorrect usage. Head trauma is a serious and underserved phenomenon, but I've seen heroic and sustained efforts on behalf of people with TBIs, so has Mason. Instead, read Where is the Mango Princess?, which also indicts TBI health care, but with more specificity and better balance.

The Colors of Space

#527
Title: The Colors of Space
Author: Marion Zimmer Bradley
Publisher: Walsworth Publishing
Year: 1988/1963
141 pages

As opposed to Proust, this reminds me of early adolescence in a positive way. I received a few bucks a week for allowance and I'd rush to the bookstore, then stand in delicious agony before the fantasy and science fiction racks, endlessly considering which 1 or 2 paperbacks to get. I'd usually get 2 at $1.50 or $1.75 apiece, go home, read them, and the next day face 6 more days without books. The Colors of Space recalled this experience: I started it on DailyLit, sent for the next installment, sent for the next installment, and before you know it, I was done and started on the second Marion Zimmer Bradley. As to plot and writing, these were also familiar--straightforward space cowboy story, simple plot, no real subplot, resolution, space cowboy becomes a space cowman. Mind you, I'm not complaining. It's like eating a little bag of lemon drops--sweet, familiar, pleasant, and not of great consequence.

#526
Title: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
Publisher: Eigal Meirovich
Year: 2009/1921
48 pages

Cute and a little stupid, though, I imagine, less so in its era. Man grows backward; is castigated; dies/is born.

Swann's Way (A La Recherche du Temps Perdu #1)

#525
Title: Swann's Way (A La Recherche du Temps Perdu #1)
Author: Marcel Proust
Translator: C. K. Scott Moncrieff
Publisher: Vintage
Year: 1970/1913
474 pages

At this time I would like to quote from that finest flower of the cinematic arts, Barbarella: "It amuses the Great Tyrant to resent the expense of feeding orchids to slaves." This, then, was my experience of the first volume of Proust's massive yet strangely static A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. It amused me to resent the effort of reading Proust, finally finishing a mere 28 years after I began. That's a lot of orchids.

As a story, I found it too interior and agonizingly self-scrutinizing for my taste, though I applaud Proust's thoroughness. Swann's Way was one of four books I began simultaneously on DailyLit, reading 1 to 3 segments a day for the last ever so many months. Although it wasn't my intention, all are encyclopedic, each in their own specially hellish and complete manner. I will characterize them as I complete them. Swann's Way, which I finished first, is a compendium of internal states and perceptions, exquisitely masticated until the fibrous pulp disintegrates in an undifferentiated mass that is not as sweet as one might have anticipated or hoped. It reminded me of a person I once dated when I was young. This person would say things like "When I get up in the morning to go to work, I think, 'What's the point? Why don't I just kill myself right now?'" And when this person would say these things, I would think, "Okay,  go ahead. It would be more interesting than this endless rumination on what tiny slivers of experience mean." You must remember that I was 13 or 14 at the time, and wouldn't have enjoyed an actual suicide. Still, Proust puts me in mind of being 13, not only due to the minute dissection of every nanosecond and potential action, but because of the excruciatingly preadolescent social behavior of almost every character, petite bourgeoisie or no. I've seen Proust hailed for his skewering of the rising middle class, but I must report in all honesty that it reads like a middle school lunchroom, replete with titters, frosty and unexplained snubs, crises of meaning and interpretation, and once in a great while a moment of relief that merely presages the return of unendurable social strictures. Imagine Swann as the band teacher, 35 perhaps but still at the mercy of those pimply smirks. Today's cold entree is orchids.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2nd reading)

#524
Title: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2nd reading)
Author: J. K. Rowling
Publisher: Scholastic
Year: 2007
 759 pages (17 disks)

Second time, this one on CD. The pacing is much better when I'm listening rather than racing through it in the hours after its release.

Fire (The Seven Kingdoms #2)

#523
Title: Fire (The Seven Kingdoms #2)
Author: Kristin Cashore
Publisher: Dial
Year: 2009
466 pages

I enjoyed this in its own right, and I enjoyed it as a prequel to Graceling. Fire is another strong female protagonist whose relationships with men are more mutual than is sometimes the case in fantasy/swords and sorcery novels. Intertwined with Fire's story is that of Leck, who appeared in an important role in Graceling. While that book focused on the lands where gracelings arise, here the story concerns beautiful monsters, of whom Fire is one.

Quite aside from the story and the writing, both of which held my interest, I want to appreciate several aspects of the story. First, the non-marital sexual and romantic relationships were nicely described without gratuitous sex scenes. Second, the existence of same-sex relationships was acknowledged neutrally and without much emphasis by the narration and characters. Third, you've got to love a young adult novel where the protagonist's travels are thwarted by her monster-attracting menstrual blood. Now that's an interesting twist.

City of Bones (The Mortal Instruments #1

#522
Title: City of Bones (The Mortal Instruments #1)
Author: Cassandra Clare
Publisher: Simon Pulse
Year: 2007
 493 pages

Many of the reviews of this book, and many of the emotions in those reviews, focus more on the reviewers' relationships with Cassandra Clare and her writings in the world of online Harry Potter fandom. I see that I read one of her novellas or novel sections several years ago, but didn't associate it with her authorship of The Mortal Instruments. I leave the articulation of those disputes to other reviewers. To the charge that City of Bones or her other writings plagiarize the likes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer I couldn't say. To the critique that they are derivative, I note that when I read the very first Star Wars novel, purchased from Science Fiction Book Club before there was a movie, I thought, What a piece of thieving crap. I still think this. I am much less troubled by Clare's book because it makes much better, creative, and expansive use of its fantasy/urban fantasy/science fiction/mythoreligious roots and sources. It's fresh and, to me, unangering compared to the wholesale larceny committed by the first Star Wars,* or Eragon, or The Sword of Shannara (or even many parts of the story of a certain boy wizard). If anything, I am much more tired of the Betty Sue cute teen girl who suffers the ambivalence of being the apex (or possibly nadir) of a love triangle. Often, the action stalls here for tremulous or truculent conversations between adolescents whose time might be better spent slaughtering the demon who is attacking them.

While the writing wasn't sterling, I wasn't pulled out of the narrative by it too often, and Clare's worldbuilding, while sometimes holding the possibility of inconsistencies, was ambitious. As a first novel it kept my attention and showed promise.

*(Star Wars From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker, 1976)

Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town

#521
Title: Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town
Author: Nick Reding
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Year: 2009
269 pages

Read as an audiobook. An absorbing, educational, and grim history of methamphetamine production and distribution in the Midwest, punctuated by the stories of meth makers, users, and the people trying to shut it down. The criticism that Reding got some geography wrong is picayune and of little consequence, though I agree that it is a problem that should be corrected. More concerning is Reding's reductive concept of how meth is a drug that uniquely fits the American work ethic, and that meth use and addiction pretty much comes down to bad eco0nomic times. For one thing, I'm sure people in Southeast Asia, where it's manufactured in Burma/Myanmar and is a long-time favorite of long-haul truck drivers, could tell an equally compelling story about the meaning of meth and how it fits their culture. For another thing, sociology aside, meth is inexpensive, a compelling high, and quite addictive.

The Dead and the Gone

#520
Title: The Dead and the Gone
Author: Susan Beth Pfeffer
Publisher: Graphia
Year: 2009
321 pages

A companion to the post-apocalyptic Life As We Knew It, this young adult novel tells the story of the same events from the experience of a teenage boy in New York City. Though he is male, I found this version more frightening, perhaps because there were more people but fewer trustworthy adults around.

I do have one nagging criticism, which is that trying to break in through the doors of apartments in NYC is impossible. Go to the basement and get a fire axe, then chop through an interior wall, or rappel from a higher floor and kick in a window.