Joe Jones

I like author Anne Lamott. A lot. Sometimes I dream that she arrives on my doorstep with her dreadlocks, best-friend-the-priest, and a book of poems by Rumi and announces that she is my long lost Aunt who has come to drink coffee and talk about life until the wee hours of the morning. Sometimes, in my dreams, we listen to Dawes together and smoke on the porch. Sometimes we go to church together and bake the blackberry cobbler of my youth.
Suffice to say, I follow her on twitter and buy her novels when I see them because I want her to feel loved so she keeps on writing.
This was the case with Joe Jones, which I dutifully read, cover to cover.
Even though I really only like her nonfiction.
Even though the first few pages of dialogue were so confusing that I finally had to stop trying to figure out who was saying what because I knew if I didn't I'd have some kind of mind-melt-down.

The Hunger Games

I don't like bandwagon reading. I wasn't part of the Harry Potter craze, I don't know the order of the Twilight series and certainly won't be part of the crush of women making 50 Shades of Grey account for 20% of all book sales.

However, a good book is a good book and I don't like to miss out. With The Hunger Games movie already out, I figured I could now safely read Suzanne Collins' novel without feeling like I would have to discuss it with every third person on the lightrail.

I am assuming most of you don't have the same strong feelings about popular fiction and have already read it - [ so good, right?!] - negating the need for this review. For those out there like me, however - here are the things I wish I had known before cracking it open:

Little Bee

The film will create connection where the book could not.

I so wanted to love this book. I wanted so bad to love what I was sure would be subtle political commentary. I wanted to learn more about the global economy and to suffer along with characters who try in vain to buck a system of racism and dictatorship.

And I tried. I really did. I re-read paragraphs I didn't like. I put off reviewing the novel so that I could really ruminate on it. I forced my bookclub to talk about it for a good hour longer than usual.

Despite the premise and timeliness of the subject, the cited research and constant presence on the wall of Employee Recommendations at my favorite indie bookstore, I just could not bring myself to care about any of the characters. At first I was sure that the lack of connection I felt to the writing had to do with the British stoicism that must, must be a characteristic of all UK writers. The uninspired dialogue must have been intended to be hyper-realistic. I tried to see the essence of innocence, femininity, and strength that embody the cover art between the lines of text. The problem I think, is that with such sensitive subject matter - the impact of war on individuals and separation between first- and third-world priorities - we as everyday first-world readers need our writers to lead us through the muck and mire. I'm not saying I want my every opinion shaped by left-leaning citizen journalists, but I do need a clearer picture of the emotions that true globalism and transparency will inevitably bring to the surface.

Hector and the Search for Happiness

Hector and the Search for Happiness is a pretty big title for such a little book. In another writers hands, the subject could be grossly over-written. (Is this a thing? Over-written? I'm going for a book equivalent to over-acted...ridiculously tiresome. I'd love to hear your thoughts.)

In general, I liked it. The writing style was an interesting change from what I normally read - childlike, but not childish. "It was Sunday, but Edouard was at the office because he had to finish a piece of work for the following day. He was going to show a very important man how to carry out a merger, and he wanted to do this ahead of another Edouard from another bank who wanted to show the same very important man how to do the same thing. And this very important man in turn wanted to carry out the merger ahead of another very important many who wanted to do the same thing. Hector had understood that in business everything was always a bit of a race whereas in psychiatry it wasn't really like that, you just had to be careful not to let your patients talk too much, otherwise you'd be late for the next ones, and they wouldn't like it." [page 41]

Also I like lists, and in Hector's quest, as he goes along he simply lists the 23 lessons in happiness he learns. It makes them easy to remember, and I suppose, to put them into practice.

What I don't like, is being reminded that for many men (although in this case it might just be a cultural difference since author Francois Lelord is from France and practices psychiatry there) infidelity is not a big deal, and as long as it doesn't make you feel TOO bad, you should just keep your indiscretions discreet and you can have your cake and it too.

The Graduate

I found this musty copy of Charles Webb's The Graduate in the basement of my grandparents house, in a pile of old National Geographics and issues of Cosmo from 1974. Jackpot! With a hand-drawn silhouette of a woman's leg across the cover and commendations by the Chigago Tribune and the New York Times promising a "Brilliant...Sardonic, Ludicrously Funny" novel, I was so excited for a campy, sexy, comedy-of-errors to read on the plane back to Arizona.

I'm not exactly sure what passed for sexy or funny in 1963, but if this was it - we've come a long way, baby.

The Graduate is the story of a college-educated, son of a lawyer who returns home after four years of schooling to loll around his parents house, depressed, bored, and suffering an existential crisis. He's ornery, lazy, and entitled, but despite an ill conceived affair with the morality-challenged wife of his father's business partner, his cannot quite fight the strong inner drive to seek out the white bread path of least resistance that has been set before him from birth.

Me Talk Pretty One Day

Sometime between attempting to capture a pigeon for the $750 reward and Ira Glass waving a magic, fame-inducing public radio microphone under David Sedaris' chin, the brother of the equally famous Amy Sedaris - more about her here, interviewed on the Sound of Young America - wrote a little collection of essays called Me Talk Pretty One Day. 

Recalling with a dry wit the funniest moments of his youth in North Carolina, multiple "art school" phases, and life on the French countryside, Sedaris' could have been trained in an Ivy League MFA if not for his constant usage of "Xerox" in place of "copy." Well that, and then also, there was The One About the Turd.

East of Eden

Giving John Steinbeck's East of Eden 3 out of 5 stars on Goodreads seems harsh I know.

After all, it is an epic, and I liked the other epics I read. It spans a multi-generational family history, a sweeping geographical history, and an inherent Biblical metaphor. Steinbeck himself wrote of the novel: "I don't see how it can be popular. I am inventing method and form and tone and context." (Intro, pg vii) Anti-mainstream, drenched in self pity, fatalist, and if you turn a blind eye to the blatant (albeit at the time, culturally accepted) racism and sexism, the novel practically begs for a feverish cult status among the hipster crowd. It was even part of Oprah's book club.

It's true the writing is sublime, nuanced, honest and subtle - "Tom started to call after him, and then he leaned wearily down and picked up the telegram. He sat in the sun on the bench outside the forge, holding the telegram in his hand. And he looked at the hills and at the old house, as though to save something, before he tore open the envelope and read the inevitable four words, the person, the event and the time." (page 310)

The Ballad of Reading Milton

I read this story at the bar of old college haunt, drinking my coffee black and making brilliant and acerbic notes on the side of the page. If you squinted hard enough, ignoring the bright glare of the sun on the window outside and the packed cafe inside, you would have sworn I was living inside that Edward Hopper painting. At least that's how I choose to write - I mean, remember - it.

For those not up-to-date on the Indie Elite crowd - last year, someone from University of Texas at Austin, where the now famous writer/director (and bff of the Wilson twins) Wes Anderson once studied (see: Bottle Rocket, Rushmore,  The Darjeeling Limited and this Amex Commercial), found a short story he wrote in undergrad that was published in the school's literary magazine in 1989.  The Ballad of Reading Milton.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

I listened to the first installment of the Trilogy that Swept the Nation as an audio-book. As hyped, the late Stieg Larrson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was intriguing, well-written and in this case: well-read. 

However, not until l I borrowed a paper copy to complete this review did I realize I had heard an abridged version - that paragraphs and whole sections of text were missing!  At first I was outraged, and concerned that the questions I had planned to pose here would be irrelevant had I read the original version. But then I started to think about the editing process and wonder; If without those sections of text, I still enjoyed the story and reached a basic understanding of the plot and characters as intended and became inclined to seek out the second book in the series - than why NOT leave those words out? In fact, why include them in the original in the first place?

A Visit From The Goon Squad

When I finally get around to writing my own Great American Novel, I want it to be just like Jennifer Egan's newest, A Visit from the Goon Squad. It reads exactly the way I've always wanted my bedside table books to, with each chapter easily standing alone as its own short story (no need to re-read the last few pages from the night before to "catch up") and yet each chapter is also inherently necessary to the narrative as a whole. A brilliant writing technique eloquently executed.

For those who dislike a non-linear storyline (like in the movie Momento) you may have difficulty at first when one chapter told from the perspective of a mid-aged man in New York proceeds a story where he is now relegated to a bit player in the memory of a thirteen year old girl in California, a story in which he too is only thirteen. Egan does a great job easing the reader through each transition. While not a single character takes center stage more than once in the book, I assure you, this is a cohesive novel, not a compilation of vaguely connected anecdotes.

Jitterbug Perfume

Perhaps as a ferry-riding, flannel-wearing, raindrop-dodging Hipster-Diva, I am pre-disposed to drinking the Tom Robbins' kool-aid.  Or spritzing his perfume, as it were.  Jitterbug Perfume is a complex, time- and space-bending epic that I loved. But it is not for everybody. It is wildly imaginative, poetic, and sensual.  Pulling away from the page was a bit like waking from a deep dreamy sleep. I had to shake my head and remember that flowers emerging as a global replacement for traditional religious consciousness is only one man's elaborately constructed theory in which to define this changing world and his own looming mortality.

Still. To devise such a convoluted, yet so carefully constructed storyline that spans hundreds of years and thousands of miles, includes manufacturing secrets of the notoriously tight-lipped perfume industry and makes the appearance of a lusty man-goat seem completely acceptable is, in a word: Brilliant.

Even the smallest loose ends were addressed and tied up neatly in such a way that I found myself nodding..."OF COURSE a crown of live bees is a proper emblem for ushering in the age of the botanical, what else it could it be!?" and then...

Gorgeous Disaster: The Tragic Story of Debra Lafave

If it gets a kid to read, who cares if it's Playboy?

Thank god for the guilty pleasure of Gorgeous Disaster: The Tragic Story of Debra Lafave. From the opening pages I was hooked - I even kept the book in my bag so I could read at stop lights in the car...it was embarrassing. I really didn't want anyone to see me with a poorly written tell-all about a teacher-student sex scandal. Not my usual genre; not a piece I will display on my shelves, and if I die tomorrow, please do not look at my search history - I usually Google things like this, and this, and not this.

Author Owen Lafave - ex-husband of the very beautiful Tampa Bay middle school teacher - means well, and I really believe that. He even includes a chapter on his top seven methods for discouraging teacher impropriety (pg 280). He tries hard to present an objective view, to tell the story of his ex-wife's claim to fame without anger or excuses. In telling story though, he only contributes to her ego, to the salaciousness of the event and the press it gathers. I suspect however, that Debra's ego wasn't the only one inflated by the media storm around the scandal.

In Cold Blood

Before CSI: Miami was 48 Hours, and Dateline NBC. Before those came...America's Most Wanted. Whether based on current headlines or in the chronicling of a true crime, we have created a long-standing niche for the writers of the gory, the depraved, the heart-wrenching nightmare events of families not too unlike our own. The popularity of these shows owe a debt to Truman Capote and his and 1965 best seller In Cold Blood.

For better of worse, I would argue that investigative journalism became entertainment with its publishing. An engrossing, hard-to-tear-your-eyes-away read. With In Cold Blood, Capote is a master of suspense.

Blame it on the internet age, but I have a hard time wading through pages of detailed description. Get to the point already! However, once I actually sat still and began reading the long, incredibly descriptive text, I found myself sucked in, despite ever-present distractions and the temptation to just skip to the "good parts."

Holes

I had forgotten just how wonderful some young adult literature is until I recently did the Elementary-Age Literature homework for a friend in an Elementary Education degree program.

The assignment was an analysis of Holes, a novel by Louis Sachar designed for the fifth grade reader.

I love how quickly young adult literature gets to the point. We get introduced to the five most important things about our hero in the first 10 double-spaced pages. The depth of evil within our story's villain is revealed on page one - seamlessly, simultaneously tied to the story's setting: "The only trees are two old oaks on the eastern edge of the “lake.” A hammock is stretched between the two trees, and a log cabin stands behind that. The campers are forbidden to lie in the hammock. It belongs to the warden. The warden owns the shade." (Page 1)

The Hummer and the Mini

Last week, as I sped down the road in Scottsdale Arizona, I slowed down at the sight of a brand new custom edition Chrysler PT Cruiser with faux wood panels on the sides, clearly channeling the "Woodies" of the 1930's, 40's, 50's and 60's. A few days later, a photographer I know showed me how he had updated one of his fancy cameras by affixing distressed leather to the body. The new designed to look old. The delicate designed to look tough. For better or worse, everywhere I look now I see the paradoxes that served to jumpstart the writing of Robyn Waters' The Hummer and Mini: Navigating the Contraditions of the New Trend Landscape.

Do Magazines Count?

If glossy, advertisement-heavy fashion and home improvement magazines counted as reading, then maybe, maybe I got at least semi-close to reading 100 books in the year 2010.

Somehow though, I can't quite give myself permission to discuss in depth any of the dog-eared, half-flipped through issues of Lucky, ReadyMade, and Phoenix Home & Garden that currently litter most available surfaces in my home. I can however, reflect on what entertaining and informative literature I did manage to consume, and share with you some of the interesting things I learned about books and myself along the way.

The Hours

There is a video in the archives of The New Yorker online which includes what most believe is the only recorded spoken words of author Virginia Woolf. It is a strange piece of audio, surreal to be listening to the voice that I have imagined so differently. It was part of a BBC recording entitled "Words Fail Me."

This post could hold a title of the same name. Michael Cunningham's The Hours is an absolutely brilliant piece of literature, and if I were able to discuss it with even half of the intelligence, wit and sensitivity he exhibits, I would be writing books, not just reviewing them -

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

Such a great premise. A never-mentioned great aunt is released from a Scottish psychiatric hospital after 61 years, 5 months and 3 days into the care of an unwitting twenty-something boutique owner who still lives in the flat that was once the site of the offending act that put the aforementioned relative away all those years ago. Certainly bonds are to be formed and dark family secrets are to be revealed...Sounds good, doesn't it?

Unfortunately, what could be a dark and twisting tale of secrets, lies and those unspeakable things that pass from generation to generation is mucked up by a few awkward sub-plots involving an amorous step-brother and a married boyfriend and a flash-back style that just didn't sit well on the page.

The Red Tent

"I would be a woman soon, and I would have to learn how to live with a divided heart." (Pg. 86)

...and so we recognize the theme of Anita Diamant's novel - The Red Tent - as well as that of the lives of women everywhere. This story of Dinah is loosely based on the Biblical saga of her father Jacob, who was the son of Esau and grandson of Abraham (as told in the book of Genesis). It is a powerful family drama; an epic, multi-generational legacy along the lines of Gabriel Garcia Marques' 100 Years of Solitude. As with the Marques' novel, at the closing the book, I found it impossible that so much could have been said in only 321 pages.

As should be expected, the text itself is beautiful, poetic. But in my reflection of the novel, I found I couldn't really remember any particular lines, only "scenes" and emotions tied to particular moments.

How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying

Ah, the good old days, when men were men, status was akin to the number of windows in one's office, and all the best secretaries wore conical bras.

You may have seen the musical version of How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying, starring Matthew Broderick on Broadway in the early 1990's, or you may have been lucky enough to have lived the life author Sheppard Mead described in 1952.

Getting straight to the point - I found How to Succeed...(aka: The Dastard's Guide to Fame and Fortune) not quite worth the read.

I realize that I might take myself just a little too seriously to ever fully "get" any satirical work but the text left me cold.