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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Papillon

#507
Title: Papillon
Author: Henri Charrière
Translators: June P. Wilson & Walter B. Michaels
Publisher: Perennial
Year: 1970
Country: French Guiana (overseas region of France)
 560 pages

Eh. As long as you understand it's fiction (in the style made famous by A Million Little Pieces) it's interesting enough, though it's picaresque and there's really no developmental self-reflection. There is more insertion into and extraction of objects from the anus than in much pornography. Really, it's enough to make you rethink shaking hands with the guy.

Poor Papillon, who protests his innocence while evincing a startling degree of criminal knowledge and underworld relationships, periodically becomes enraged and spews angry fantasies. Yeah, I'd let him into my house. If you want to see the basis for the movie, read this. If you want to read a prison narrative, there are better, and more true to life.

Lord Jim

#411
Title: Lord Jim
Author: Joseph Conrad
Publisher: Bantam
Year: 1900/1981
271 pages

Audiobook here. This relatively short novel was stretched to almost 14 hours, a slow reading rate.

At its heart, this is a novel about attempting to overcome one's own haemartia, or tragic flaw. While the Greek audiences of Aristotle's time found the hero sympathetic because of his important error. Setting aside the complexities of the term itself, it would seem that by the time in which Marlow narrates Jim's tale, the tone is a combination of horror, amused contempt, and pity. Were Jim not "one of us," an often-repeated sentiment, I assume there would have been more Schadenfreude than pity. If the story and highly predictable plot about seeking first escape from, then redemption for, one's misdeeds are set aside, the more interesting aspect of the novel is the question of "one of us" versus one of them and how identification or rejection of commonality affects Marlow's storytelling. Since Marlow's narration is the frame for several of Conrad's novels (including Heart of Darkness), it would be interesting to compare his reasons for and degree of relationship to the people whose stories he animates. In some ways "one of us" is a theme for Conrad's The Secret Agent as well.

The Hours

#410
Title: Michael Cunningham
Author: The Hours
Publisher: Picador
Year: 1998
230 pages

Read as  an audiobook while birdwatching in Thailand.

Well-constructed and well-crafted, this is a highly engaging and poignant novel in three interwoven strands. These three stories of depression and suicidality are related by Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway--the writing of it, the reading of it, and the becoming of it--across the 20th century. This description doesn't do justice the the elegance and precision of the telling. Especially enjoyable for those familiar with Woolf's works and life.

The White Tiger

#352
Title: The White Tiger
Author: Aravind Adiga
Translator: John Buchanan-Brown
Year: 2008
Publisher: Free Press
304 pages

Read as an audiobook with an excellent reader.
Well-narrated, quick, wry and entertaining, though not without its moral dilemmas, which include self-centeredness, classism and stereotyping perpetuated even by those who see themselves as enlightened or different, disloyalty, murder, and the question of whether living in "the darkness" and a corrupt social surround explain, justify, or let one off the hook for one's actions. I'd have rated it higher if the narrator made a better acknowledgment of the effects of his actions on his family. This seems to be an authorial omission, since the shape of the narrative cries out for it.

Read with Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven for more on post-colonial iniquity,inequity, and rage.

The Time Traveler's Wife

#349
Title: The Time Traveler's Wife
Author: Audrey Niffenegger
Year: 2003
Publisher: Harcourt
556 pages

Audiobook here.

As with all time travel narratives, the structure was an important element, here executed well. The resolutions of  plot points were managed relatively tidily. The middle of the book moved slowly, though it could be argued that it was necessary both for establishing a domestic interval and for developing the theme that love doesn't solve all of the problems experienced by Odysseus afloat on the sea of time.

I did not enjoy the audiobook, which I interspersed with the physical book. The Henry reader sounded jaded, bored, and Humbert Humbert-like.