Book 278: The Possibilities

"Afterward, I had touched my abdomen. I pinched my skin. I thought it was possible that that moment, that particular choice, would hurt me for the rest of my life. Or maybe it wouldn’t. I would never know. Everything just becomes a part of you. Gets woven into the tapestry. The next day was an ordinary day."

Dates read: November 22-27, 2018

Rating: 5/10

Even though it's now been nearly a decade since I practiced law, both of my parents still want me to go back to it. I feel extremely comfortable with my decision to leave it behind. I was so miserable, and while a significant portion of that misery was related to the exact situation I was in, I figured out enough about the general situation of your average litigator to know that it wasn't for me. Some people thrive under constant pressure, find it exciting and stimulating to never know what the next day will bring. Not me. I crack. Before it was over, I was crying in the shower every morning, terrified of what might be facing me at the office that day. Getting out was 100% the right call and I am very happy doing what I do now.

My parents just want the best for me. They want to see me put that legal education that I paid for to full use, to get to the earning potential that would make it easier to pay off those student loans. They want a life of success and comfort for me because they love me. But children have a way of turning into their own people. In Kaui Hart Hemming's The Possibilities, reporter Sarah St. John is struggling with the recent loss of her son, Cully. In his early 20s, he'd recently moved back in with his mom in their hometown of Breckinridge when he was caught in an avalanche while out on the slopes and killed. A few months after his death, as Sarah is trying to figure out how to start living in, she finds herself confronting the reality that she might not have known him as well as she thought.

First, she and her best friend, Suzanne, find evidence that Cully was selling pot when they're cleaning out his room. But more importantly, a young woman called Kit turns up on Sarah's doorstep out of nowhere. She's pretending to be making some extra cash shoveling snow, but it turns out she was the girl Cully was seeing when he died. And she's pregnant. As his family (Sarah, her father Jack, and Sarah's ex/Cully's father, Billy) prepares for a final celebration of his life, Kit's pregnancy and uncertainty about what to do about it stirs up powerful emotions.

Hemmings clearly has an area of interest in her writing: much like the Kings in The Descendants, the St. Johns in The Possibilities are a family coping with the loss of a loved one in a setting of intense natural loveliness. Each family has a quirky member who serves as empathetic comic relief (foul-mouthed child Scottie in Descendants, here QVC-addicted Jack), and each family deals with an outsider connected to the loved one as they grieve. Ordinarily I wouldn't think it quite fair to compare two of an author's works quite so closely, but the parallels between these books are so strong that it doesn't seem avoidable to do so. Hemmings is far from the only author who writes books that feel like variations on a theme (Jane Austen, for example, wrote wonderful books that aren't actually all that different from each other, plot-wise), but for these two to directly follow each other makes the feeling that this is a bit of a retread even stronger.

And to be honest, of the two, this one is worse. A lot of the elements feel a little half-baked, like Sarah and Suzanne's friendship, and the tension between Suzanne's desire for sympathy for going through a divorce and Sarah's continuing grief. And while the decision Kit wrestles with about her pregnancy is obviously supposed to be the source of great dramatic tension, I never really felt a great deal of suspense about how it would play out. The book does have highlights: Hemmings writes lovely, poignant prose, and for the most part she builds compelling characters and lets them shine. This is a perfectly pleasant book, and if I hadn't read and loved The Descendants before I picked it up, I would probably have liked it more. But it suffered for the inevitable comparison, and I'd recommend the other much more heartily.

One year ago, I was reading: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Two years ago, I was reading: All the President's Men

Three years ago, I was reading: Freedom

Four years ago, I was reading: Innocent Traitor

Five years ago, I was reading: The Group

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Book 278: The Possibilities

Book 216: Stiff

"Cadavers are our superheroes. They brave fire without flinching, withstand falls from tall buildings and head-on car crashes into walls. You can fire a gun at them or run a speedboat over their legs, and it will not faze them. Their heads can be removed with no deleterious effect. They can be in six places at once. I take the Superhuman point of view. What a shame to waste these powers, to not use them for the betterment of humankind."

Dates read: March 13-17, 2018

Rating: 8/10

I feel like one of the formative moments in realizing you're an adult is when you talk to your parents about what they want to happen to them when they die. First of all, realizing your parents are going to die (assuming you're fortunate enough to make it to adulthood without losing one or both of them) is something that's hard to actually wrap your mind around. Obviously you know they and everyone will eventually go, we all do, but thinking about it literally happening is upsetting. And then you start thinking about what to do with your own body after you're done using it and it gets really tricky to deal with.

It takes a skilled hand to write about death and bodies without being either so respectful as to be boring or just morbid. Luckily, Mary Roach has just such a hand and her book, Stiff, is an interesting and wide-ranging look at what happens to us when we die. Well, no one really knows what happens to the soul/spirit/whatever it is that animates us (she does devote a chapter to this, which she develops into a book in its own right, Spook), but our bodies. There's the usual burial/cremation, but Roach is more interested in the options we don't usually consider: donating one's body to science for medical students to practice anatomy on, chemical cremation, even allowing for the use of one's body in automobile crash testing (the dummies aren't nearly realistic enough). Some people even want to be composted. It turns out there are a lot of things your body can get up to!

Death may be a part of life, but it's still a part of life that there are a lot of deep, unprocessed feelings about. This book only works because of the way Roach just nails the tone: there's a deep undercurrent of honest curiosity that's present as she explores her subject. She recounts her own experience sitting with her mother's body after her death and how it made her feel, and doesn't forget that the bodies she sees in her explorations were once someone else's loved one too. She's honest about the ugly side of things...to the point where I found one of the chapters, about using bodies to do research about how the body decomposes under various scenarios (to help law enforcement and pathologists/coroners better estimate how long bodies have been in the elements after death) a little icky. But it never feels gratuitous. She doesn't say something irreverent or gross just for the shock factor. If you've ever wondered what happens to the outside of you when you die, or if you're curious now that you've thought about it, this is an intriguing book and I highly recommend it.

One year ago, I was reading: Say Nothing

Two years ago, I was reading: Ghost Wars

Three years ago, I was reading: The Wars of the Roses

Four years ago, I was reading: The Woman Who Would Be King

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Book 216: Stiff

Book 182: Lincoln In The Bardo

"A train approaches a wall at a fatal rate of speed. You hold a switch in your hand, that accomplishes you know not what: do you throw it? Disaster is otherwise assured.
It costs you nothing. 
Why not try?"

Dates read: October 15-17, 2017

Rating: 8/10

Lists/awards: Booker Prize

As much as it's inextricably woven into our lives, sometimes I wonder what the world would be like right now if there was no social media. No Facebook, no Twitter, no Instagram. Want to share baby photos with friends back home? You'd have to text, or email, or even just hard copy mail them. Advertising would still just be on TV, or in our mailboxes or magazines, or at the top of websites. I'm sure we'd still get those chain forwards from that one aunt, the ones that told you if you didn't forward this on to twelve people by midnight you'd never find love, or that there was a clear image of the devil in the smoke over the Twin Towers on 9/11, or those kind of things. But the ability to share low-quality information widely and quickly would be much diminished.

One area I think it would make a real difference would be in political news coverage. It's easier to cast a gauzy glow over figures that never faced the kind of constant examination that politicians today face. There was a lot of stuff going on in the White Houses of yore that even if it was known, wasn't published and dissected and scrutinized the way things are now. Like, for example, when Abraham Lincoln's 11 year-old son, Willie, died while he was in office during the Civil War. Mary Todd Lincoln had a breakdown, and Lincoln himself didn't cope well either. He went to the vault where his son's body was, at least once, and picked him up and held him. It was a demonstration of terrible, profound grief, and if it happened today can you imagine the tweets?

It is this situation, the heartbroken Lincoln going to see his dead son, that inspired lauded short-story writer George Saunders' first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo. The bardo is based on the Tibetan concept of a liminal state between life and death, fairly similar to the Catholic purgatory but without the connotations of having done something "wrong", and the Lincoln in question is not Abraham but Willie himself. It is his soul that comes to the bardo, where he encounters other spirits, those who have elected to stay. They don't believe themselves quite dead...they refer to their coffins as "sick-boxes" and are sure that they'll soon recover and get back to their lives as they knew them. But they all know that children aren't supposed to linger, they're supposed to move on. And Willie is more or less ready to do so when his father appears, to hold him and talk to him, and promises to come back. So now Willie, too, wants to stay.

There are three main ghosts/spirits/souls that take on the task of trying to figure out how to inspire Willie to move on: Hans, Roger, and Everly. Hans was an older shopkeeper who remarried after the death of his first wife. He waited to consumate his second marriage until his young and lovely bride was comfortable, and after months, she's finally ready to do so...and then Hans is struck violently in the head by a wayward beam. Roger was a young gay man who managed to find love in a time when that was difficult...only to get dumped and slit his wrists in despair. As he bled, he realized how beautiful the world was and how much he wanted to live. And then there's Everly, a former reverend who lived righteously but is too afraid of heavenly judgment to go. They try everything, including communing with the President, to get Willie going where he needs to go.

This is a very odd novel. It's mostly structured like a play...dialogue is followed by a notation of the speaker's name. Then there are occasional sections where Saunders excerpts nonfiction historical sources to describe various aspects of the situation at hand: the party the Lincolns hosted at the White House the night Willie lay dying, what Lincoln actually looked like, what Willie was like, the day of the funeral. There's no traditional "narrative" at all. I'll admit that this made it a bit of a struggle to get into...I don't usually especially enjoy reading plays, and there's not a lot of information provided about what's going on and who the various characters are right off the bat. But my reluctance to put down books before I've finished them paid off here, because once I got into the flow of it, I found the back half quite strong and the ending unexpectedly powerful.

I've never read any of Saunders' short stories, but I'm excited to do so in the future because the sheer inventiveness of this novel is delightful. As someone who loves The Divine Comedy, I enjoyed his take on Dante's technique of contrapasso, giving the spirits physical manifestations matching the reason they won't leave the bardo. Although it won the Booker Prize for its release year (which was awarded the day after I finished reading it!), this is a novel destined to be divisive and one that I'd therefore hesitate recommending widely even though I personally enjoyed it. If you're looking for a straightforward form or narrative, or something more traditionally "historical fiction", this isn't for you. But if you're interested in a more unusual reading experience that challenges you to read in a different way, I'd encourage you to at least give it a try!

One year ago, I was reading: How to Love Wine

Two years ago, I was reading: Migraine

Three years ago, I was reading: Devil in the White City

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Book 182: Lincoln In The Bardo

Book 181: The Blind Assassin

"You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn't necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labeled bones."

Dates read: October 10-15, 2017

Rating: 10/10

Lists/awards: The Booker Prize, Time Magazine All-Time 100 Novels

We're constantly telling the story of our lives. To other people, but most of all to ourselves. Amping up the parts that make us look good, glossing over the parts that make us look bad, editing out that parts that don't quite jibe with the character we want ourselves to be. No one likes to remember our worst moments, though those are the ones that creep into our heads at 2 a.m. when we can't sleep. But at the end of the day, all you can do is try to be better tomorrow, and the day after that, and so on and so forth.

Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin starts with the end at the beginning: Iris Chase's sister, Laura, drives off a bridge in Iris's car. From that point on, we get three threads of story: (faux) newspaper accounts related to Iris's life, Iris looking back on her own life as an old woman and telling the story that leads up to what happened with her sister, and a story-within-a-story, called "The Blind Assassin", about a pair of secret lovers weaving a science fiction tale about a pair of secret lovers. Unveiled early on in the narrative through the newspaper accounts, it is revealed that shortly after her sister's death (which is ruled an accident), Iris's husband died. And then their daughter grew up with drug problems and succumbed to them, leaving her own child behind. And then that grandchild was raised not by Iris, but Iris's sister-in-law, who also died. Iris is old, and alone, and has no reason to hold on to her secrets anymore. So she starts to write.

She starts with the story of her grandparents, and the button factory her grandfather started in their small Canadian town, the profits from which rendered him suitable enough marriage material for her grandmother, from a society family in decline. When their three sons went off to war, only Iris's father came back. His wife, Iris and Laura's mother, was never especially healthy and died from complications from a miscarriage. Her father tries to keep the family business together through the Depression, but the Chases find themselves unable to even maintain their own finances, and that's how Iris finds herself married off to Richard, an older industrialist, in a deal that's supposed to keep the factory open and what's left of the family afloat. Instead, the entire Chase family capsizes, in their own ways.

After revisiting The Handmaid's Tale shortly before I read this book, and then reading this book itself, I was reminded what an incredibly gifted author Margaret Atwood is. To pull off the narrative structure of the book, with its intertwining threads and mysteries, is a fiendishly difficult task, but to do it while writing so beautifully and powerfully is the work of a master. It is a little jarring at the beginning, when you're first getting used to the path the book is taking you down, but it works. There were so many passages in this book that I marked, struck by how gorgeous the phrasing was. The characters, particularly Laura and Richard, were vivid, and Iris herself is someone we gradually come to understand as she tells her story and feels so real that when the book and her story end, the loss feels unusually poignant.

This is an incredible book: sad, yes, but told with such skill and in a way that keeps you wanting more and more...I had a hard time putting it down at night. I'm kicking myself that this is only my second Atwood and I'm really looking forward to getting into more of her work. As a heads up to potential readers, there is some really heavy stuff in here: parental death, spousal abuse, sexual abuse/rape...I think Atwood handles this material with sensitivity and grace, but it's something to be aware of. I'd recommend this book strongly, particularly for mature readers (there's nothing gratuitous, but there's a lot of darkness and I think it's a work that's best appreciated with a little life experience behind the reader).

One year ago, I was reading: The Heart of Everything That Is

Two years ago, I was reading: If We Were Villains

Three years ago, I was reading: We Need to Talk About Kevin

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Book 181: The Blind Assassin

Book 173: The Year of Magical Thinking

"If the dead were truly to come back, what would they come back knowing? Could we face them? We who allowed them to die? The clear light of day tells me that I did not allow John to die, that I did not have that power, but do I believe that? Does he?"

Dates read: August 29-31, 2017

Rating: 8/10

Lists/awards: National Book Award, The New York Times bestseller

I'm very lucky in many respects, and one of them is this: my entire nuclear family is more or less healthy and very much alive. My parents, my sister, my brother-in-law, my husband...I've never experienced that kind of loss. My mom had lost both of her parents by the time she was my age, which just blows my mind. Even now, I don't feel prepared to lose either of my parents, much less both of them. I know this will change, and one day I'll find myself having to say goodbye to people that I love dearly, but for now I'm grateful.

I was reminded of just how lucky I am when I read Joan Didion's memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking. In it, she recounts an incredibly terrible time: while their adult daughter Quintana is fighting for her life in the hospital, a normal-seeming winter cold somehow having progressed into pneumonia, septic shock, and coma, Joan and her husband John come home, and while she's getting things ready for dinner, he suddenly keels over, dead after a massive heart attack. She doesn't know that right at the moment it happens, of course. All she knows is that he falls, is non-responsive, she calls an ambulance, they try to resuscitate him, and then off to the ER. She finds out shortly after she arrives that he's gone. Forty years of marriage, and then he's gone just like that.

But she can't just focus dealing with the loss of her constant companion for decades (as professional writers, they both worked from home). Her daughter is still comatose, and Joan has to break the news to her not once but twice (she forgets when she falls back into a coma after being told the first time). Quintana does seem to recover, the funeral happens, and she flies back to California with her own husband...only to collapse again on her way out of the airport. Joan leaves her NYC apartment to head to LA to be there for her daughter, and is constantly buffeted by memories of her family's early, happy years in the area. Eventually Quintana recovers again, and Joan returns home, wrapping up her book a year and a day after her husband's death.

On the surface, there's very little in Joan Didion's life that I can relate to: she and her husband lived at a level of financial security where they made regular trips to Paris (their quibbling over what turned out to be their last trip, taken at John's insistence because he had a vague feeling that it might be his last chance is something Joan relates), they lived in LA for a time to write screenplays, they take daily walks in Central Park. And like I've said, I've never lived through the kind of awful experiences she recounts in this book. But she's an extremely talented writer, so her words spoke to me and tugged at my heart. She doesn't just tell you that grief takes you around in circles, she has motifs in her writing that pop up over and over again, taking you on that journey with her. You feel her agony when she thinks she's plotted her route around LA when she's there with Quintana to avoid anything that would remind her of when her husband was alive but she finds that she didn't plan carefully enough and the fragile scar tissue she's built up is battered by waves of memory.

It feels odd to say that I "enjoyed" reading a memoir about profound grief. But I found it incredibly compelling and difficult to put down even though it was hard to read. She really takes the reader on a journey with her. Knowing that even though she was alive at the end of the book, Quintana died shortly thereafter, made its impact even greater. I'd never read any of Didion's work before, but I picked up one of her novels and two of her essay collections after reading this book, because I wanted to read more of her writing. I'd recommend this book to anyone that feels like picking it up.

Tell me, blog friends...do you have to relate to a memoirist's experiences to get into their book?

One year ago, I was reading: Possession

Two years ago, I was reading: Stranger in a Strange Land

Three years ago, I was reading: Private Citizens

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Book 173: The Year of Magical Thinking

Book 155: Spook

"If you do a web search on the initials EVP, you'll find dozens of sites with hundreds of audio files of these recordings. Though some sound like clearly articulated words or whispers, many are garbled and echoey and mechanical-sounding. It's hard to imagine them coming from dead souls without significantly altering one's image of the hereafter. Heaven is supposed to have clouds and white cloth and other excellent sound-absorbing materials. The heaven of these voices sounds like an airship hangar. They're very odd."

Dates read: June 24-27, 2017

Rating: 7/10

I think I've mentioned this before, but if I ever want to send myself into existential-crisis-land, I start wondering what exactly happens when we die. I get the biological piece, but what about the "me" part? Where does it go? Is there a soul, or am I just the sum of various electrical and chemical reactions in my brain? Of all the many thousands of years that there have been and will be humans on this planet, do I really only get to see these decades that I'm allotted in this life? Or is there another life where I get to see how it all plays out?

I've given myself anxiety just writing about it! Much like me, Mary Roach is a skeptic about life after death, and so decided to turn her science-oriented eye towards the various theories out there about what happens when we're gone. In Spook, she travels to India to meet people who claim to be reincarnated, she meets mediums and goes to a class to learn how to channel the dead herself, she goes to England to see Cambridge's preserved sample of what was alleged to be "ectoplasm", and she looks at the so-called research behind the popular theory that people lose 21 grams of weight at death when the soul departs the body.

In every instance, she's confronted with the gulf between what the heart wants to believe and what the scientifically-validated research says is real. Hindus frequently claim to know someone who is reincarnated, but their belief system encompasses this and reincarnations usually seem to occur in close proximity (i.e. the person who is now dead and their "new" body are usually within less than 100 miles of each other). On the other hand, the motives that one might suspect behind a dubious claim, like the desire for financial support, aren't usually present. There are frequent reports, in the United States, of people who have had near-death experiences feeling like they're floating away from their body and can see it recede below them as they go towards the light. But only in a very, very few of them did they report seeing anything that they wouldn't have been able to see from within their body before. Every attempt to replicate the 21 grams experiment has failed, including several of that researcher's own.

Much like A.J. Jacobs in last week's post, Mary Roach manages the tricky art of tone-setting for a work exploring an issue that tends to elicit strong and often irrational feelings. It comes clearly through that, like most of the audience that would be inclined to pick up this book, she's primarily fact-oriented but in her heart, hopes she'll find something there. The idea that when our bodies die, the person that we are inside that body just stops along with us is a harsh one, and the fact that virtually every belief system includes some sort of continued life demonstrates that people really don't want to believe it. The way she structures the book, too, into short chapters focusing on one theory each, helps keep it moving along and away from getting bogged down into tiny intricacies. In a subject area that can be heavy, this helps keep it light.

I will say that this might not be the book for the deeply reverent. Roach refuses to hold back from having a sense of humor about any of it and some may think she treats the sacred too cavalierly. But for anyone who has questions and wants a peek into what science tells us about the various and sundry ways that the dead have been said to interact with the living, this is a witty, enjoyable read.

Tell me, blog friends...do you let yourself go down the rabbit hole on this issue or do you manage to not think about it (if the latter, please tell me your secret in the comments)?

One year ago, I was reading: A Vast Conspiracy

Two years ago, I was reading: Eleanor of Aquitaine

Three years ago, I was reading: Oriental Mythology

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Book 155: Spook

Book 146: If We Were Villains

"Ten years of trying to explain Dellecher, in all its misguided magnificence, to men in beige jumpsuits who never went to college or never even finished high school has made me realize what I as a student was willfully blind to: that Dellecher was less an academic institution than a cult. When we first walked through those doors, we did so without knowing that we were now part of some strange fanatic religion where anything could be excused so long as it was offered at the altar of the Muses."

Dates read: May 15-20, 2017

Rating: 7/10

For someone who's been dead for over 500 years, William Shakespeare's still pretty damn popular. It seems like there's at least one major screen adaptation every year. And everyone reads at least one of his plays at some point in high school, right? They're probably the only plays which most people have actually read all the way through in their lives (I include myself in this number, I don't particularly care for reading plays). While some people hate his stuff and most feel more-or-less indifferent, there are also some people who REALLY love it. I'm not one of those people, but I do have a favorite of his works (Much Ado About Nothing) and still regret that I didn't get a chance to take a course focused on Shakespeare in college from a legendary professor.

It's a group of people who are super duper into Shakespeare that is the focus of M. L. Rio's If We Were Villains. The book mostly follows seven Shakespearean acting students in their senior year at an exclusive arts college. We know something big and bad happened, because the book opens with one of the seven (Oliver, our protagonist) being released from prison after a decade. He agrees to return to his alma mater and speak to the detective who put him behind bars to finally reveal the true story of what happened all those years ago.

Based on the length of sentence alone, it shouldn't be surprising that what happened was that someone died. The who and the how I'll leave for the reading of it, because the bigger issue is what happened after that person died. The way the remaining members of the group deal with the death, and how it changes their relationships with each other, both on and off the stage. They'd each developed a little niche over their years together (the king, the femme fatale, the good guy, the ingenue, the villain, etc), and the removal of one of the spokes of the wheel renders the structure unstable.

If you've read The Secret History, a lot of that will sound pretty familiar to you. Indeed, it's pretty obvious that Donna Tartt's debut novel was a significant source of inspiration for Rio for her own. And that's fine, Tartt doesn't own the concept of a tight-knit group of students studying an obscure subject at an exclusive private college dealing with the fallout from the death of one of their own. But here's the thing: if you're going to write a book with strong parallels to a novel that's been consistently popular since it was published 25 years ago, you have do it at least as well or better. And although I want to make it clear that I did enjoy reading If We Were Villains (I did love The Secret History, after all), Rio didn't quite hit that mark.

The characters fall a little too neatly into the roles they fill onstage: Richard, the king-type, really is a raging egomaniac; Meredith the femme fatale really is a sexpot; Wren the ingenue really is demure and sweet, etc etc. Where this fails most problematically is that the "background player" types are kind of underdeveloped, and that's Oliver and Filippa. Oliver, you'll remember, is the main character and while it's not unusual for a reader-insert-character protagonist to be kind of bland, Oliver never really captured or held interest for me. Filippa is the only other member of the group that doesn't come from privilege and the small peeks we get at who she is make her easily the most potentially interesting character, and it's frustrating that she's given the short shrift. The plot developments, too, weren't handled especially deftly. I'm generally not good at anticipating plot twists, but I called nearly all of the major ones easily. Rio's prose is solid, though, and I'd definitely be open to reading more from her in the future. I'd recommend this to people who loved The Secret History and want to read something similar, but if you haven't read that book yet, it's better than this one.

Tell me, blog friends...are there "if you liked that, you'll love this" books that you feel pulled off being better than the inspiration?

One year ago, I was reading: Valley of the Dolls

Two years ago, I was reading: Smoke

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Book 146: If We Were Villains

Book 142: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

"Beth and I are still thinking it's too early to leave Toph with anyone but family, that to do otherwise would cause him to feel unwanted and alone, leading to the warping of his fragile psyche, then to experimentation with inhalants, to the joining of some River's Edge kind of gang, too much flannel and too little remorse, the cutting of his own tats, the drinking of lamb's blood, the inevitable initiation-fulfilling murder of Beth and me in our sleep. So when I go out, once a week, on a day Beth and I have chosen together, Toph gets his things together, stuffs them into his backpack, uses both straps, and walks over to her house and spends the night on half of her futon." 

Date read: April 24- May 1, 2017

Rating: 4/10

Lists/Awards: New York Times Bestseller

By the time she was my age, my mom had already lost both of her parents. My grandmother died when my mom was just 25, and my grandfather had a massive heart attack in his sleep when she was in her early 30s. My dad, on the other hand, didn't lose his first parent until he was just about 50 and his second only earlier this year. I can't even imagine what it must have been like to lose two parents by my age like my mom did. My parents are still a big part of my life and there's so much more still to share with them.

Dave Eggers, though, had it worse than anyone I personally know. He lost both of his parents, to cancer, one just about a month after the other, when he was only a senior in college. In his memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Eggers recounts those deaths and his subsequent guardianship of his 8 year-old brother, Toph. The Eggers brothers leave their Illinois home behind and move to the Bay Area, in part to stay close to their older sister Beth, and in part for career opportunities for Dave as he tries to get a new magazine, Might, off the ground while also trying to figure out how to raise a child.

Before I even picked this book up, I was aware that it seems to inspire strong feelings. Some people HATE it and some people think it's magnificent. How you will receive this book depends entirely on how you feel about Eggers' writing. If you think his stream-of-consciousness, wildly tangential, constantly-on-the-verge-of-a-panic-attack style of narrative is great, you'll think this book is amazing. If, however, you want a straightforward, relatively linear narrative, you will think this is the worst thing you've ever read.

It feels beside the point to talk about story structure, because there isn't really any (it's very hard to tell how fast time is passing and there aren't really narrative beats to speak of), or character development, because there isn't really any of that either. Even for a memoir, a sense of story and character tend to be important, but neither is a priority for Eggers. While I'm usually fairly open to nontraditional narrative, this book is 100% style over substance. The most compelling part, for me, was the relationship between Dave and Toph, and Dave wrestling with both his fierce love and concern for his brother and his acknowledged resentment of being prematurely thrust into a parental role. However, I mostly found it tiresome. It held my attention inconsistently at best, I was usually bored long before a particular side riff was over. Eggers' flaw isn't that he's wildly self-absorbed (I think memoir is an inherently self-absorbed form since it's literally assuming that your own life is so compelling that other people want to read about it), but that he's not nearly as interesting as he thinks he is. I wouldn't recommend this book, but I wouldn't tear it out of anyone's hands and I can understand why some people really respond to it. I just didn't.

Tell me, blog friends...do you think your life is interesting enough to write a book about?

One year ago, I was reading: Mildred Pierce

Two years ago, I was reading: Wild Bill Donovan

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Book 142: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Book 99: The Executioner's Song

"Once, she was running around the place and he called to her. Something in his voice made her tear all the way down, and she couldn't stop and banged into him, hitting her knee so hard it really hurt. Gary picked her up then. She had her legs wrapped around his waist, and her arms over his neck. With her eyes closed, she had the odd feeling of an evil presence near her that came from Gary. She found it kind of half agreeable. Said to herself, Well, if he is the devil, maybe I want to get closer."

Dates read: October 15-28, 2016

Rating: 5/10

Awards/Lists: Pulitzer Prize, New York Times Bestseller

The death penalty is one of those political issues that people seem to have a gut-level, strong response to. You're either horrified by the idea of the state taking the lives of its citizens, or you see it as a powerful, necessary statement of the state's ability to punish those that have violated its most fundamental laws in the most profound way possible. It's one of those issues it's pointless to argue about...the reaction to it is visceral rather than logical. As it stands now, the United States is on the verge of having to have a broad conversation about it again, as one of the drugs that make up the judicially-approved "cocktail" for lethal injection is effectively no longer available for executions. Will there be a replacement developed, will we go back to the gas chamber, nooses, and firing squads, or will it be abolished? Only time will tell.

The death penalty has, of course, been abolished once before. In Furman v. Georgia, in 1972, the Supreme Court in a very divided opinion struck down death penalty statutes all over the country, citing arbitrariness and racism in determining which defendants were subjected to it. Four years later, in Gregg v. Georgia, the Court reversed itself and allowed the death penalty to resume. The first person to be executed after Gregg was a man in Utah named Gary Gilmore. In The Executioner's Song, Norman Mailer tells the story of how that came to be.

It's not actually all that complicated. Although he was quite bright, Gary had an unstable childhood and started getting into trouble young, stealing cars and getting sent first to juvie and then real jail. At 22, he was imprisoned for armed robbery and after spending 14 years on the inside, he was eventually paroled and went to Utah to live with a cousin. Although his family and new community genuinely tried to help him, Gary had a hard time adjusting to life in the real world...until he met Nicole Baker. Nicole had a troubled history of her own, including commitment to a mental health facility and two divorces (along with two children) at the age of 19. Their relationship was intense but turbulent, and their breakup left Gary spiraling out of control. He shot and killed both a gas station attendant and a hotel clerk, and was caught, tried, and sentenced to death in relatively short order. When the sentence was pronounced, Gary decided not to fight it...he went through lawyers until he found one that would honor his decision to not appeal and let the penalty be carried out. Although a few appeals were undertaken on his behalf, much to his fury, he was ultimately executed by firing squad on January 17, 1977.

Out of this, Mailer spins a 1000+ page epic. And there's probably an incredible 500-600 page book inside of it somewhere, but boy howdy was this in screaming need of a firm editor. The book is divided into two roughly equal sections...the first ends with Gary's sentence, and the second not too long after his execution. Both portions drag for extended periods. Although Mailer's prose style is interesting and engaging, his determination to include everything he uncovered in his clearly very extensive research weighs down the narrative. The book takes a couple hundred pages to get to the point where the murders happen...which are then over, along with the trial, in about fifty. The back half of the book is dedicated as much to the wheelings and dealings of Hollywood players trying to get the rights to Gary's story as it is to Gary's actual story, and though there's a statement in there about how Gary pretty much stopped being a person and started being a commodity from that point forward, it's honestly just not that compelling. I never had any emotional investment in the relationship between Lawrence Schilling and his girlfriend, although from the attention Mailer paid to it you would think it's an important component of the proceedings. The book finishes strong by recounting Gary's last hours, death, and the immediate fallout on his loved ones, but there had been so many bumps in the road along the way that I was mostly just glad it was over. You have to admire its ambition and scope, but the actual product is very uneven. It's worth reading, if you're interested in this kind of thing, but not a must-read by any stretch.

Tell me, blog friends...do you get into political arguments?

One year ago, I was reading: this book!

Two years ago, I was reading: Gilded

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Book 99: The Executioner's Song

Book 97: The Life of the World to Come

"Fiona and I kept talking, kept living in this way, long after our friends had grown comfortably into their older, smaller lives. We claimed every experience for only ourselves: the first snow, the last rays of the day, every star we gazed at was ripped from the public domain- property of Fiona and Leo's New Life Together, copyright and patent pending and no squatters allowed."

Dates read: October 10-12, 2016

Rating: 5/10

We've all gone to pieces over a bad breakup, haven't we? Tell me I'm not the only one. I had two rough breakups before I met my husband: one with the guy I dated off-and-on for three years in college, and one with the guy I dated off-and-on for a year in law school. I'm friendly with the both of them now, but holy smokes did I lose my brain then (sorry, everyone who had to deal with me). But I think a brutal heartbreak can, in the long run, be a net positive: it certainly helped me reflect on my own behavior in relationships, and think about what I actually wanted out of a partner, and somehow I ended up with the best husband in the world.

In Dan Cluchey's The Life of the World To Come, Leo Brice is a anxiety-ridden pre-law senior in college when he meets Fiona Haeberle. Fiona is quirky, outgoing, mercurial, an aspiring actress, and she and Leo quickly become a couple. They move to New York for Leo's legal education, she gets a job on a cheesy soap opera that films locally, and they're happy. Or so he thinks. Right after he finishes the bar exam, though, she suddenly leaves him in the middle of the night for her co-star.

Leo is completely devastated, and while he tries to put himself back together, he begins a job with a small firm focusing on death penalty appeals. Leo recovers from his breakup as he gets involved in his case, defending a religious man convicted of an out-of-character murder many years prior...with a young, pretty co-counsel who makes Leo feel like there might actually be a life after Fiona maybe. The client is only a half-hearted participant in his own appeal, and his philosophizing helps Leo get his own life back together.

So when I was in college, Garden State was a super-hyped movie. I like it, but it hasn't aged especially well...a lot of the self-conscious quirk on display has come to feel artificial. And it is, of course, the poster child for the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trend that was a big thing around that time. I actually think Natalie Portman's Sam is one of the better-done examples of it, but it got a little irritating for a while there. This is relevant here because this totally feels like a screenplay that was written to be one of those Manic Pixie Dream Girl movies and then became a novel. Despite being so central to the plot, Fiona doesn't really have much of a character. Any insight into who she actually is and what drives her is left for a cringeworthy conversation Leo and Fiona have years after their breakup, in which the now-famous Fiona calls her ex to ask if she was a good girlfriend and he gets the chance to take her down a peg (of course he takes that opportunity). It's not presented as a gross moment for him, but rather as a moment of triumph, and that's just one of the issues with this book.

Besides Leo not really being all that interesting on his own (tightly-wound lawyer gets dumped, gets sad, tries to rebound with a coworker...snore), the book doesn't really seem to have a lot of direction or any real idea of what it's trying to say. Breakups suck? Working on a death penalty case can improve your mental health? It's cool to bang your coworkers if your boss eggs you into it? I'm not necessarily opposed to reading white-dude-navel-gazing if it's done well, but this isn't done well. If reading about a 20something dude mourn the loss of his girlfriend who's more concept than person is something that sounds interesting to you, you might enjoy this book. If not, move along.

Tell me, blog friends...have you ever had a terrible breakup?

One year ago, I was reading: Sophie's Choice

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Book 97: The Life of the World to Come

Book 87: The Other Side of the River

"That's not to say the history isn't there. Whites have killed blacks before. Or killed because of blacks. The stories have passed on from generation to generation, over supper or over a beer, on stoops or in parlors, told by grandmothers and by pastors, the narratives shaped and reshaped by people's prejudices and blurred memories and by their own experiences. And while they may not be recorded in history books, they exist just as powerfully and vividly in these oral tales."

Dates read: September 6-10, 2016

Rating: 5/10

Maybe it's just my own privilege, or growing up in a small, fairly homogeneous town, or cluelessness, or other/more things, but I feel like the shooting of Michael Brown really kicked off a national movement of racial issues back into the mainstream. As much as we, as a country, tried to clap ourselves on the back for electing our first black president and pretend really hard that we're living in a post-racial world, it didn't work. Racial divides, state-sanctioned violence against people of color, and institutionalized prejudice still exist. As a white person, it's been an exercise in learning the limitations of my own experiences and trying to figure out how to do better in the ways that I can. There's a whole process to that, of course, and it's one that requires constant learning and growth.

But really, of course, these issues have been a problem for a long, long time. It doesn't seem like the early 90s were that long ago, but it's somehow been 25 years since then. And in 1991, the mysterious death of a black teenager in small-town western Michigan inflamed the same kinds of tensions that surround race today. Alex Kotlowitz's The Other Side of the River examines the fallout of the drowning of 16 year-old Eric McGinnis on two towns, Saint Joseph and Benton Harbor, divided by race and class, and yes, a river.

If you're the type of person who needs their mysteries to be solved, don't read this book. We never do find out how Eric ended up in the water where he perished. He could have been walking and slipped. He could have tried to swim. He could have been chased and fallen in. He could have been pushed in. Trying to figure out exactly what happened bedevils Kotlowitz, as well as Jim Reeves, the detective assigned to the case. What they do know is that Eric, from mostly black Benton Harbor, came into overwhelming white Saint Joseph one evening to go to a teen dance club. He had recently had a short flirtation/relationship with a white girl. At some point in the night, he was busted stealing cash from a car and was briefly chased down the road by the furious owner. And a few days later, his body surfaced.

Kotlowitz pulls back and widens the frame to give us the context for the scene in which Eric's death occurs. He talks about the history of the two towns, how Benton Harbor was initially the big, prosperous one and Saint Joe was little more than a string of beach cottages...but, like in so many cities, white flight during the 60s drained it of capital. Despite being neighboring communities, the divides between St. Joe and Benton Harbor just got deeper and deeper as the years passed. The communities had already been roiled before Eric's death when a white police officer shot and killed a black teenager who he mistakenly believed was a dangerous suspect in a crime. So when Eric drowned and the St. Joe's police department, unused to handling potential homicides, made some tactical errors and failed to find any serious suspects, unease and suspicions between the communities flared back up.

The book is interesting enough, and well-written enough, but it doesn't really go anywhere. Kotlowitz clearly wants to get his readers to think about all sides of the issue (and by that I mean there's a definite sense that he knows most readers will be white and leads them through the struggles of the local black community so they understand why a drowned teenager was viewed with such suspicion), but he doesn't have anything especially insightful to add to the conversation. It's a solid read, but ultimately doesn't resonate much.

One year ago, I was reading: Behave

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Book 87: The Other Side of the River

Book 65: Zero K

"They would come and take her. They would wheel her into an elevator and take her down to one of the so-called numbered levels. She would die, chemically prompted, in a subzero vault, in a highly precise medical procedure guided by mass delusion, by superstition and arrogance and self-deception."

Dates read: June 25-27, 2016

Rating: 5/10

I can't remember the first time I really thought about what happens to us after we die, but I do remember that it kept me up all night. My very first existential crisis. I started wondering where "I" go when my body stops. Do I just disappear? Does some aspect of me survive somehow? How do I know how it all ends (the story of the people I love, the story of the world)? Religion answers most of those anxiety-producing questions for people of faith, but I'm not religious. So I just have anxiety.

Life, and death, and life after death are at the heart of Don DeLillo's Zero K. I'd never read DeLillo before, but his reputation proceeds him so I was excited to finally do so. The novel focuses on Jeffery Lockhart, who we first meet as he's entering a mysterious facility somewhere in Central Asia called the Convergence. His stepmother Artis is dying, and is choosing to have herself cryogenically frozen so that she can be revived when her body's ills can be cured and her consciousness can be restored. The Convergence is a cult-like space for the super-rich to shuffle off this mortal coil, with art installations, like mannequins in discomfiting poses and banks of TV screens that play footage of disasters on mute, among a maze of smoothly paneled identical rooms. Artis is there thanks to the incredible wealth of Ross Lockhart, Jeffrey's father, with whom he has had a difficult relationship even since Ross walked out on Jeffrey and his mother. Jeffrey is disturbed by his time at the Convergence, and it resonates after he returns to his native New York and tries to resume his normal life, where he's made a practice of detachment: temporary jobs, long-distance girlfriends. We get peeks at Jeffrey's childhood, dominated by memories of his father's departure and the fallout that had on his mother, whose own lonely death also looms large in Jeffrey's psyche. It's left to the reader to try to figure out how much it was his time at Convergence, or his childhood, or a mixture of the two, that plays into Jeffrey's movements towards actually getting closer to his latest girlfriend and her troubled son when he gets back to New York.

I'm a big movie-watching as well as a book-reader (I actually think the latter has supplanted the former these days since I'm reading so much more than I used to), and this book reminded me of a literary version of a mash-up of The Tree of Life and the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's a dream-like meditation on mortality, without much actual plot or even real character development. It feels like abstract art in a way...it's got a tone and a theme, but making connections and fleshing it out and figuring out how to feel about it are on the person taking it in (in this case, the reader). It's a book to read slowly and contemplate. For me, personally, I found it alienating. Like the end of 2001, it made me think about things and have feelings, but I didn't really feel like I understood it. And not in the way that makes you want to go back and mine deeper in the layers of it to find new gems, but in the way where I felt like it was written specifically to be distant and aloof. If you're in a mood to contemplate the deeper questions of life, this will be a solid read but otherwise the supple prose is about the only selling point.

Tell me, blog friends...what books did you feel like you just didn't quite get?

One year ago, I was reading: A Tree Grows In Brooklyn

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Book 65: Zero K

Book 43: The Hangman's Daughter

 

"Drums rumbled, cymbals clanged, and somewhere a fiddle was playing. The aroma of deep-fried doughnuts and roasted meat drifted down to the foul-smelling tanners' quarter. Yes, it was going to be a lovely execution."

Dates read: April 16-18, 2016

Rating: 3/10

Whether one agrees with it or not, there's no denying that the death penalty has a long history. Modern day executioners push a vial of potassium chloride into an IV line and, if everything goes right, wait for the heart to stop. But once upon a time, a death sentence meant beheading or hanging (or worse, like drawing and quartering). The Hangman's Daughter begins with a messy execution in 1600s Bavaria (in modern day Germany): young Jakob Kuisl is supposed to be helping his father, the hangman, with a beheading that ends up terribly botched. It's a grim, moody scene that sets the stage for a dark story.

But after the opening prologue described above and the first scene of the story, in which a young boy is rescued from a raging river at great danger, only to be discovered to be already dying from a blow to the head, the plot stalls out considerably. The boy has a crude tattoo that the townspeople decide indicates witchcraft, so the local midwife is promptly accused and imprisoned awaiting torture and execution. Jakob, now himself the hangman (and torturer, and proto-pharmacist...he wears a lot of hats) is convinced of her innocence and joins forces with Simon, the town doctor's son, to figure out who actually committed these crimes (the murder of the first child is followed by the murder of two other children and some property destruction to boot). They're racing against time as hysteria and pressure to convict and burn the witch grow daily.

Where is the titular hangman's daughter in all this, you might ask? Excellent question! Magdalena is very much a secondary part of the story, and the book could easily be rewritten without her character being missed for a second. She's having a love affair with Simon, which we're continually reminded cannot end in marriage because her father's profession renders her unclean. In the scheme of things that don't quite work about this book, though, the title is small change.

While Jakob Kuisl, as a hangman who studies science and works as a healer when he's not torturing and executing, is an interesting character, no one else in the book has much depth. Simon and Magdalena are flat "young lovers", and the various townspeople are even more one-note: officious, or anachronistically fair-minded, or superstitious, no one is a whole person. And speaking of anachronisms, holy smokes is the language in this historical novel completely out of whack. Obviously as a non-German-speaker I read it in translation and I hope the issue was poor translation, otherwise there's just not even an attempt to make language the slightest bit accurate to the time. There's also a ton of repetitious phrasing, of phrases that are unusual enough that it's really noticeable. These writing/translation problems are so jarring that they take you straight out of the world of the novel. Other than that, there are about 100 more pages of the book than there is plot to fill it, so it drags on pretty badly. At the end of the day, it's just not a very good book.

Tell me, blog friends...do you think a book's title character should be a major part of the story?

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Book 43: The Hangman's Daughter

Book 3: Reservation Road

"There are heroes, and there are the rest of us. There comes a time when you just let go the ghost of the better person you might have been.” 

Dates read: October 15-18, 2015

Rating: 3/10

So along with my unquenchable appetite for books, I'm also a voracious movie-watcher. I remember seeing a trailer for the movie version of Reservation Road at some point, deciding it looked sad but interesting, and throwing it on my Netflix queue (where it lingered for a long time because I was constantly pushing up more interesting-looking things). And then when I came across a cheap used copy of the book, I bought it and figured that I might as well read it, because the book is always better, right?

Well, after reading the book, the movie has come off my Netflix queue entirely. Because if the book is better, I can't take the movie. I knew it was going to be depressing going in based on what I knew about the plot: a young boy is killed in a hit-and-run car accident, and that accident has powerful reverberations on everyone involved. Obviously anything dealing with child death is going to be difficult material, but I used to read those Lurlene McDaniel books about teenagers with cancer on the regular, so surely I could handle it.

Turns out, not really. Not because it was too emotionally charged, but because it was boring and uncentered. The story is told in rotating chapters, varying perspective between Dwight (the driver that hits and kills ten year-old Josh), Ethan (Josh's father), and Grace (Josh's mother). The novel doesn't spend enough sustained time with any of the characters to really dig into them more than on a surface level: Dwight feels guilty, but not enough so to jeopardize his relationship with his own ten year-old son by turning himself in; Ethan feels impotent rage at his powerlessness in the situation, and Grace just withdraws from everything. I did find myself wondering why Grace was written in the third person while the men were written in the first person. Did Schwartz not feel comfortable writing first-person perspective for a woman? Is it supposed to be symbolic of her emotional deadening with grief, that she doesn't even have the willpower to view herself as the center of her own story anymore? I'm honestly not sure. None of the characters grows or changes, everyone just stays stuck in their patterns. Which is probably realistic, I can't even imagine what the process of mourning the loss of a child would be like and hope I never have to know. But it doesn't make for enjoyable or even very interesting reading.

Tell me, blog friends...what books that you enjoy are kind of depressing? Are there any subjects you won't read about it because they're too much?

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Book 3: Reservation Road