A few books in a few weeks

I am stricken with some blogatory obligation to write something new. Either I haven't been reading much at all lately, or I have just failed to be enthralled by my recent reading material. I started reading The Archivist by Martha Cooley some weeks ago and was slightly put off by way in which the author decided it was a good idea to fuse past and present. I get the point of doing so--we are all haunted by our pasts. But it felt tedious to read. Then I picked up Alice Munro's The Runaway and Beth Lisick's This Too Can Be Yours. I enjoy Alice Munro's old fashioned style and astute sense of both place and humanity. But when I picked up Lisick's book, I couldn't quite take the humor. I really enjoyed her memoirs, but this book of short stories was just too over the top for me at the time I picked it up. I can certainly appreciate her use of humor, but it is so out of sync with my own imagination that it is difficult to accept at certain times. But I finished her collection of brief stories and decided I needed to go to the bookstore. Actually, before my trip to the bookstore, I started reading Queen of the Oddballs, a typical memoir written by a woman who grew up in the 70s and found her childhood experience unique enough to write it up and market it to women who like to read about what other women did while growing up female. It was amusing, but I still thought it was necessary to buy some new books that I chose myself rather than picked up for free at work. I came home with Weight by Jeanette Winterson, which is slightly less glorious than I had hoped, and The Lipshitz Six, by T Cooper, because I went to a book reading for this novel a few weeks ago and thought it might be worth reading.

Follow-Up to The Accidental

Last night I finally got around to finishing The Accidental. Aside from the fact that it was heavily inconclusive and that the last chapter was excessively disjointed from the remainder of the novel (except for the first chapter which matched the theme and substance of the last), I liked the book. I am certainly a fan of Smith's style. The twelve-year-old girl Astrid was certainly the most likable character. And despite how repulsive Amber was, she really was the center of the novel who provided the way for each individual character's personal crisis to come to the surface. In Magnus' case, she may have even helped him work through a crisis, in a certain sense. A few of the characters were ill-realized, namely Eve. Her midlife crisis was obvious from the outset, but she was depicted so free of moorings that it was impossible to judge the breadth of the crisis. Michael was painted as a weak individual, and this characteristic was essentially the strength of his character.

The Accidental by Ali Smith

I have a weakness for unusual language, and this book certainly satisfies this soft spot I have for seemingly mixed up syntax and points of view verging on strange. Like Hotel World, The Accidental is told through multiple voices. Each member of the family the story centers around gets a chance to narrate. This provides a veritable collage. It is a fascinating, quilt-like story, pieced together in a very careful and beautiful way. While many of the characters are quite annoying, they couldn't be this way with a less well-crafted story. Amber, who at this point in the story appears to be "The Accidental," is the worst of all. She is crazy in that charming way so as to avoid being pinned down as such by the other characters in the story who aren't particularly well-adjusted themselves. The mother has writer's block. The father, an English professor, has compulsive affairs with students. The 17-year-old boy is seriously disturbed. And the 12-year-old girl, who also happens to be a focus-point of the story, is just blatantly innocent, adolescent and a perfect character for someone (Amber, with her non-conformist, oddly adolescent ideas, perhaps) to take painful advantage of.

At about half-way through the story, I am hooked. I remember when this book was released a bit over a year ago, it was certainly talked about enough for me to hear about Smith and acquire a few of her other books. But until now, I never happened upon this particular book myself. I definitely look forward to the rest.

Sound Bites by Alex Kapranos

This is an innovative rock band tour story/culinary adventure. People have written about food on the road and being on the road with a band, but as far as I know, Alex Kapranos is the first to write about eating food on the road while touring with his band. The lead singer/guitarist of Franz Ferdinand writes amusingly about food-as-adventure. Each very short piece is chalk full of vibrant descriptions that are simple and evocative and draw upon his knowledge of food that he gained during the time he spent as a commis chef. The book is amusing to read. He eats marrow bone in New York, deep fried pizza in his home country, Scotland, sushi in San Francisco, and some very oddthings in other countries around the world including deep fried insects and durian.

-->More information at Library Thing.

Blogs and Books

Over the past few weeks and days I have been exploring other blogs about books. Aside from my original inspiration, bookslut.com (which is not a blog), I have also discovered the People Reading blog, a fabulous exploration about what the people of the San Francisco Bay Area read in public places, and the 100 Books project that just concluded. All those bookish geeks out there seem to have a blog dedicated to the things they read, and now, I can include myself in the growing number of litbloggers. I can't promise that mine is more innovative, and in fact, it is probably more traditional. But I'll see what sorts of ideas I come across in my blog-reading. Maybe I'll just hit upon a presentation that seems a bit new, and a bit more interesting.

Florida and Other Wonderous Words by Christine Schutt

I was supposed to be Christmas shopping yesterday evening when I strolled into my local bookstore. I thought I might check out Amy Sedaris' new book on entertaining guests. But it was apparently nowhere to be found. Instead of pursuing the book into the hidden areas of the bookstore, I perused the new hardbound fiction. Then I moved on to the general fiction shelf where I was promptly drawn to look for one of the elusive books by Christine Schutt, my current author-obsession. Since discovering her book A Day, A Night, Another Day, Summer last Summer, I have asked every literary-minded friend and acquaintance if they have heard of her work, and as of yet, no one has. I like that she remains my literary secret, though a secret she is not considering that her book Florida was nominated for a National Book Award. It was this book that I came across yesterday. And I couldn't resist the temptation to buy it for myself, though I really did have intentions of buying things for others. But really, I want to share Schutt's work with everyone and no one. I want to share it with everyone because I want them all to experience her work like I have. But I am hesitant to share my knowledge of this author's magnificent prose because I know that most people will not have the same riveting experience that I did upon first discovering her work.

The Visible World

For the past week, I have been slowly slogging through The Visible World (Houghton Mifflin, 2007)by Mark Slouka, a novel about a boy of Czech immigrant parents that probably mirrors the author's life at least to a certain extent. The prose is stunning, and the story is delivered in short tidbits, slowly unraveling (or piecing together) the protagonists dream-like childhood that was informed by the wartime atrocities his parents escaped. The book is about the aftermath of war and love (in the time of war).

For some reason, I have not yet finished the novel. It is not so enthralling that I can't set it down, but I still keep on reading, however slowly I am getting through the text. At only 242 pages, I should have finished the book by the middle of last week. But, as I have been picking through the pages slowly during my lunchtimes I have not. The book reads like a dream or a not-quite-clear history re-told by someone once removed from the actual story. This is why I keep on reading. The story's dream-like character propels me on.

The Kiss by Katheryn Harrison

I started reading this book almost a year ago. I knew there was a reason why I had put it down, and I remembered that it had something to do with the subject-matter, but remembering that the prose had been well-crafted, I recently pulled it off my shelf again. At first it was almost enthralling, despite having forgotten the beginning which I did not bother to re-read. But soon after falling into its prose, adept at conveying the nature of obsession in all its simple horror, I realized that it was beginning to work as a spell and it was pulling me into its web. I wanted to extricate myself from the story, to cleanse my mind of the events that were beginning to weigh heavy somewhere inside myself.

It must not be easy to write any tale of obsession, particularly on penned as memoir, and more particularly, one detailing a story of incest. But neither is a story of this kind easy to read. It slowly seeps into the mind, almost tar-like. Upon reaching the halfway point in the story, I began to feel unclean. I craved to clean my mind of the darkness in this story, of the possibility that this happens, as I know it does. Instead, I set the small, carefully bound book down, in a refusal to continue. But now, after reading as much as I did, I can't take the story out of myself. Stories are like this.

Last Year's Books

I have been writing about books on my blog Tightrope, which mainly details my adventures in San Francisco's literary underground. But I have determined that it is time for a blog dedicated solely to books, specifically the books I read.

As a sort of retrospective, this is the list of links to the posts on Tightrope dedicated to books:

There's Chocolate Cake on my Motorcycle Boots

Solitude and Great Books

New Seasons in New Places

It is ok to be independent

Self Help Sells

The Death and Resurrection Show

Summer reading on dreams, trees, and Scotland

Enchanting Fiction

Presidential Doodles

Apathy

Litquake Strikes

Writers With (or without) Drinks

Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name

Worldchanging is So San Francisco