Downtown Owl - Chuck Klosterman (2008)

I don't know what possessed me to pick up Downtown Owl for my most recent trip downstate. Though I haven't read Klosterman's nonfiction extensively - the cover of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs makes my skin crawl, even though I rather liked the limited selections I've read. And I instinctively cringe from tales of small town life. So often they end up "heartwarming," or else they try so hard not to be "heartwarming" that they turn positively apocalyptic. Also, I suppose my inner narcissist takes offense at the presentation of narrowness of experience as a near-virtue - does living in Europe as a teenager make me a bad person? And my inner introvert is terrified by the thought of knowing the same 800 people for 70 years.

Regardless, I did pick it up, and I'm glad I did. The story is set in 1983-1984 in very-small-town Owl, North Dakota (Klosterman grew up in ND in a town of 500-some residents). It consists of a description of ordinary life there through the eyes of three rather different residents: Mitch, the relentlessly normal 16-year-old high school quarterback; Julia, recently transplanted from Milwaukee to teach public school social studies; and Horace, 73-year-old widower and member of the local coffee klatch.

Naturally, it's full of other colorful characters, like the reluctant former football star working on his brother's buffalo farm, and the football coach/English teacher with the twin bad habits of giving male students embarrassing nicknames and getting female students pregnant.

The main theme on the minds of all the main characters is common knowledge - the fact that, in a small town, there's so much that "everyone" knows, so much that everyone has "always" known. But what do they know, really? What's the truth? And what does all that common ground really mean for the community? The three central characters look at these questions from the perspective of the kid who doesn't fit in, the newcomer, and the lifer, respectively. As the school principal said, "This is what being alive feels like."

A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian - Marina Lewycka (2006)

With its vaguely absurdist title, this caught my eye when it was first published, but I just got around to listening to it on my recent business trip downstate.

Synopsis: Nadia, an English sociology professor of Ukranian descent, is beside herself when she finds out that her 84-year-old immigrant engineer father, Nikolai, is planning to remarry - especially when she discovers that the bride-to-be is the voluptuous and scheming 36-year-old Valentina, freshly arrived from Ukraine. To protect her eccentric father from Valentina's machinations and her maniacal pursuit of western luxuries and a British passport, Nadia must join forces with her estranged, class-conscious older sister, Vera. In the process, Nadia comes to understand better how the experiences of living under Stalin's rule and through World War II - experiences that English-born Nadia, the postwar child, didn't share with her parents and sister - have shaped her family and their relationships. Fortunately, her husband Mike is there to listen to her father, oblivious to the abuse he's receiving at the hands of the hateful Valentina, talk on and on about his latest project, a book about the role of Ukranian engineering in the history of tractor technology.

The book is full of reminders about how much pain can lie under the surface of a life, with the immigrant experience offered up as a case study. It's also painful to the reader, much of the time, to watch Nadia and Vera struggle to protect their father against his transparently trashy new wife. In the end, sympathy turns up in the strangest places.

Seasonal Illiteracy, Part 2

My devotion to the audiobook is well documented here. Without them, I doubt I ever would have managed to clean my last apartment, and I'm sure my previous commute would have driven me to insanity years earlier. The selection available in public libraries, particularly offerings on CD (versus cassette), has exploded in the last five or six years. Another brilliant advance is that many public libraries now have audiobooks available for internet download, generally through contract with a third party. Usage rights vary, but this is a really, really great thing.

I've been leaning heavily on the audiobook front lately, since I've been working on two very tedious projects - that is, work projects that involve tedious busy-type work but which are too technically involved to delegate to anyone cheaper. Through trial and error, I've discovered that boring-but-brainy work is most compatible with genre mysteries and children's fiction - amusing and undemanding fare. The former often come in series, of course, so it's not hard to find something acceptable; I have a standing list of recommendations for the latter from my mother, the children's librarian. Here's some of the selection that's been getting me through spreadsheet purgatory this month:

Because of Winn Dixie (Kate DiCamillo): From now on, I'm referring to my dad as "the Preacher." And I'll name my next dog Safeway.

Anastasia Krupnik (Lois Lowry): Poor kid. I wouldn't have liked it if my parents had had another kid when I was ten, either.

Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World (E.L. Konigsburg): Not that memorable. It involved a nursing home, a professional organizer, an expensive home theater system, and a ten-year-old with a far-fetched grasp of contemporary philosophy.

Wedding Planner's Daughter (Colleen Paratore): set on Cape Cod, so kind of nostalgic.

The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling (Lawrence Block): not too terribly forgettable. I don't think I've read very many other books actually set in the 1970's. At least, I can't remember any.

Death of a Charming Man (M.C. Beaton): Part of a very redundant series set in the Scottish highlands.

The Jackal's Head (Elizabeth Peters): I need to learn not to bother with Peters books that aren't the Amelia Peabody series.

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell - Susannah Clarke

It took me a few tries to get through this. I don't ordinarily give a piece of contemporary fiction so many chances, even on audio, and I think I only did so with this one because the blogosphere has been resonant with vague enthrallment over it for the last several years, I'd heard the ending was to die for, and the story was in fact interesting enough. It was still far longer than it needed to be - forgivable once you plow through it, but likely to lose a lot of readers along the way.

How to describe it? Magic, mystery, mysticism, manipulation, madness, secrecy, suspense, surprise, jealousy, power, love, war - all in a tasty candy coating. And I mean that in the best possible way.

The ending was well done. Thought the actual events of the story become increasingly mystical and frenetic, the narrative becomes more and more measured, deliberate, disciplined. The final pages leave you wanting more - which is interesting, when most of the book's significant bulk leaves you wishing for a bit less.

The footnotes are a delight - but moving Brussels to Nebraska was sheer brilliance.

The Only Thing More Boring than the Last Two Days...

...would be a book about the last two days. I've hit upon a title for my first novel: The Killer Mosquitoes of Findlay, Ohio. I don't know what it will be about yet, but stay tuned.

Since talking about coffee shops is almost like talking about books, kudos to the folks at Coffee Amici for making a trying business trip a lot more bearable. They make one mean iced latte. Seriously, I was really impressed.

Also, on the long drive to and from this trip, I got in my first big chunk of audiobooking since starting my heavenly ten-minute commute. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell gets a lot more compelling after the first third or so. Started out too fairy-tale for my liking, but now it's good stuff.

Summer Reading Redux

A brief rundown of the salient selections from this summer's out time:

Me Talk Pretty One Day - David Sedaris - I was getting overwhelmed by the moving thing and wanted something to laugh at. The first half was boring. The second half was good. It's disturbing how funny such messed up people can be. Moving myself this summer, I loved the parts when he was working for the Marxist moving company in New York. A quote on brooding on poetry:

If a dead poet on the other side of the world could describe my feelings with such precision, I had to accept with humility that my love was not exceptional, that I had invented nothing, that everyone falls in love in more or less the same manner.

The View from Saturday - E.L. Konigsburg - Mom the Librarian recommends children's literature on a regular basis. This one was great. I loved every single character. My Sister the Blond Artist and I listened to it on the drive from Rustingham to Chicago.

First Among Sequels - Jasper Fforde - I'm afraid this franchise may be spent. Pity, because it was so much fun. This one is set in 2002, around 15 years after Something Rotten.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - J.K. Rowling - Way fun. Fast paced. Nice work, Jo! I also thought the Order of the Phoenix movie was quite well done - they finally found the adaptation code. Good thing, too, since that book had, what, 6,000 pages?

Summerland - Michael Chabon

Premise: The characters of North American folklore inhabit a parallel world where they spend most of their time playing baseball.

Plot: Three children from Puget Sound travel to fairy-land in a flying Saab in an attempt to save the universe from Satan.

No, seriously. Avert the apocalypse before the bottom of the ninth. Aided by a Sasquatch, when necessary.

I think this is a children's book, but I'm not quite sure. It was too forgettable in the beginning - so much so that when my mind wandered and I lost track of the plot, I rarely bothered to reorient. Perhaps I would have enjoyed more of it if I'd been paying more attention, but sometimes you have to make the book responsible for that. It did get better, worthwhile even, but no thrills or chills.

A deep-seated passion for baseball would likely help the reader along here. I can't claim to have that. In principle, I like the game well enough, but the excesses of Selfimportantville fans have kind of turned me off generally. Or maybe I just like to blame things on Selfimportantvillains.

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana - Umberto Eco

The plot of this book gives entirely new meaning to the phrase, "a life in books." Yambo, a sixty-year-old Milanese antiquarian bookseller, wakes up in the hospital with amnesia - he can't remember his occupation, his wife, his home, or even his own name. Yet, he can recall word-perfect every book, poem, and miscellaneous quotation he's ever read, and until he's able to regain his personal memories, this literary memory is the only connection he has to his own life.

Yambo returns home to immerse himself in the life he's created, the life he's been living for over thirty years, which is as unfamiliar to him as a stranger's. After a time, his wife advises him to visit the country house where he spent much of his childhood, hoping that a return to earlier surroundings may help to trigger the return of the memories Yambo needs to regain.

This is where things get funny. Yambo returns to his childhood home, desperate to remember the realities of his life, to remember anything that has actually happened to him, anything other than what he's read in books. Accordingly, he settles in and spends several weeks...reading old books. Really, though, this isn't as self-defeating as it sounds; Yambo hopes that by revisiting his book-memories in the place where they were originally formed, he might be able to re-connect the verbal to the vital. He visits the attic and pours through the pulp-fiction and adventure stories of his childhood, the nationalistic propaganda of his Mussolini-era gradeschool readers, the magazines and comics of his early teen years - all the time in search of the elusive "mysterious flame," the visceral flicker of recollection that's somehow more real than encyclopedic.

Through this process, Yambo rediscovers the physical and cultural trappings of his childhood (interesting to any reader without a personal connection to Fascist Italy), but learns little directly about himself and his family. The reader discovers more about the real Yambo through his responses to the exercise - through the process by which he attempts to reconstruct his own biography from the "biography of a generation" he's creating through ephemera. Along the way, there's much to consider about the perils of losing one's heart in one's head.

More than half way through the book, Yambo discovers evidence of an adolescent romance (this isn't a spoiler - my edition divulged this information on the back cover) which Eco clearly intended to alter the course and focus of Yambo's journey. The history of the mysterious Lila promises to be the key to Yambo's puzzle, if only he can uncover it. This plot device, however, was not as effective as it might have been. For one thing, it was introduced too late in the quest-tale to be convincing as a driver. It also changed the tone of the narrative and Yambo's attitude enough to make the characterization feel discontinuous. Perhaps the influence of the Lila episode was meant to be evident in Yambo's character throughout the book, but his portrayal changes after Lila is introduced, and the reader who's become attached to the Yambo from the first half may not make the transition comfortably.

Bottom line: Not Eco's best; however, the character sketch is fresh and interesting, and the river of both high- and pop-cultural references flowing throughout the book is satisfying, even charming.

Farewell, Jack?

I just finished reading Jasper Fforde's The Fourth Bear. The two (so far) volumes of Fforde's Nursery Crime series lack the snap of his Thursday Next books - I'm sure some readers would call them "disappointing," but I can't bring myself to use such a grave word to describe something that exists only for sheer fun.

Still, The Fourth Bear was by far the weakest offering in the Fforde lineup. It started weakly, had a few bright spots, and fizzled at the end. In the last 20% of the book, I truly wondered whether Fforde had given up. As if he said, "Hey, this is coming together so poorly that I'll never sell another Jack Spratt book once this is published - let's just get it over with." There were gimmicks and characters from the first Spratt book that mysteriously vanished in this one, and others that suddenly appeared out of nowhere, almost as though Fforde had second thoughts about the details of the series premise. Unfortunately, once a series is started, it's too late for much of that, and the effect in this book is confusing.

The few clever bits, the ones that most summoned the feel and characterization of The Big Over Easy, were good enough that I wished Fforde had been able to bring the rest of the book up to par.

The Big Over Easy, while, again, perhaps not up to Thursday, turned out to be quite neatly written, the plot of which could be easily imagined in any genre mystery, only with a ridiculous setting. Completely palatable to anyone with a taste for Fforde's variety of absurdity (which not everyone has, granted).

Bottom line - if you want to try out Fforde, which I do highly recommed, start with The Eyre Affair; if you connect with Thursday, you might also like Jack.

Thursday will be back in July, but I won't be surprised if we see no more of Jack Spratt. Too bad, I liked him.

(p.s. - If you keep a handwritten book journal, definitely pick up some Fforde. His name is too much fun to write.)

(p.p.s. - Never buy a used car from a Wilde character.)