Severance

by Robert Olen Butler

The concept is pretty rad: a human head is believed to remain in a state of consciousness for one and a half minutes after decapitation, and a person speaks about 160 words a minute in a heightened state of emotion... so, the author wrote 62 stories, each 240 words long, "capturing the flow of thoughts and feelings that rush through a mind after the head has been severed." (Quotation from the book jacket.)

Some of the best short stories I've ever read have been of the extremely short variety,* but a whole book of micro-stories becomes rather tiresome after, oh, five or six. Plus, stream of consciousness is always dicey to begin with. After the first ten or so, the choice of characters — ranging from a prehistoric man, to Anne Boelyn, to a roasting chicken, and beyond — became more interesting than the stories themselves. Yet, the stories are so brief, you ought to read them all anyway for the occasional flashes of brilliance. (Such as the aspiring court jester whose acrobatic prank goes awry and ends with him falling crotch-to-face upon his master while "already full excited at my joke.")

Another good toilet book, or, if you're not a compulsive in-bed reader, read one or two just before sleepy time.


*There's a possibly apocryphal tale of Ernest Hemingway's answer to the challenge to write a story in just six words: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."

The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007

edited by Dave Eggers
introduction by Sufjan Stevens (my future husband)

A lovely anthology of recent writing as judged by a group of San Francisco high schoolers, and Dave Eggers, under the aegis of the 826 Valencia writing program (and pirate supply store!). Runs the gamut from lists to comics to journalism to fiction to memoir... Truly eclectic and all well-done, though some were more to my liking than others purely as a matter of taste and not due to a failure of craft.

My favorites were "Best American Names of Television Programs Taken to Their Logical Conclusions" by Joe O'Neill*; "Ghost Children" by D. Winston Brown; "Selling the General" by Jennifer Egan; "The Big Suck: Notes from the Jarhead Underground" by David J. Morris; and "Literature Unnatured" by Joy Williams.

*An example:
1. Touched by an Angel
2. Contacted by a Lawyer Who Deals with These Sorts of Cases
3. Settled Out of Court with an Angel
4. Blamed All Subsequent Problems in Life on Encounter with the Angel

Spud

by John van de Ruit

Somewhere on the cover it says this book is "South Africa's Catcher in the Rye." I don't get the comparison. This book is so much better than Catcher. (Disclaimer: I think I waited too long to read CitR; I was nearly 30 by the time I read it, and all I heard was a spoiled brat whining about his rich-kid problems.)

Spud's about a 13-going-on-14-year-old who goes to boarding school on scholarship. (Younger and poorer than Salinger's protagonist; also, this is the story of him actually going to school rather than the story of him getting expelled and/or running away.) This book is funny; I laughed out loud several times. (Still not getting that comparison.)

Since it's set at an all-boys boarding school, you get a bit of implied/suspected homosexual shenanigans (not really involving the main characters), as well as a bit of the homophobia standard among boys of a certain age (not so much as to be offensive or discomfiting).

The story takes place in 1990, the year Nelson Mandela was released from prison and the South African government began the process of repealing apartheid laws. These facts don't affect the plot terribly much, but you get a good sense of how political events were often on people's minds during this time. Without being preachy, it's simply taken for granted that apartheid is wrong and it's days are numbered.

Bottom line, I loved this book and I'm anxious to read the next installment. I may have to ILL it, though — which I can't even do until the new year. It's on the thicker side for a young-adult novel, but the diary format makes it a quick read. I'm not sure how to recommend this one; I almost think girls would like it more than boys would. Well, boys would like it, but they'd be embarassed about it at the same time. And actually, now that I think about it, there's a bunch of stuff that would totally gross out the young ladies.

The Book of Lost Things

by John Connolly

From an author who's previously written mysteries and thrillers, we now have this abso-freaking-lutely awesome fairy tale for adults. I loved this book, tore through it in less than three days, and have already verbally recommended it to at least five people.

It's a coming-of-age story with a young boy/man whose mother has died after a long illness and whose father rather swiftly remarried and produced a baby brother. (Step-mom was a nurse at the institution where the dead mum was receiving hospice care, which gives you an idea of the timeline.) The story begins in the suburbs of London during WWII. Boy has conflicts with step-monster, but she's not evil; everyone's having tough times, and once we cross Narnia-style into the alternate reality we'll see that all the characters are imbued with complexity and ambiguity.

The coolest thing about this book is the way it retells the fairy tales you thought you knew. For example, Little Red Riding Hood wasn't a girl who was nearly eaten by a wolf, she was woman who fell in love with and seduced a wolf, giving birth to a race of half-wolf, half-human creatures that embody the struggle between instinct and intellect.

This book also gets bonus points for having a gay knight (disowned prince, in fact) searching for his lost lover, and for managing to encourage acceptance and diversity while acknowledging that those ideals don't mean that people won't sometimes have negative reactions and that those reactions don't necessarily indicate their deeper feelings.

I'm putting this book in my Top 10. (There are actually only two other books that are definitely in my Top 10: The End of Faith, which I've already blogged, and Cloud Atlas, which I haven't yet, although I have written up another of the author's books, Black Swan Green. Building my Top 10 is one of the things I hope to accomplish through writing this blog.)

Sloppy Firsts
    and
Second Helpings

by Megan McCafferty

A friend of mine who also reads quite a bit of teen fiction turned me on to this series. It's kind of racy, in that it doesn't shy away from sexual topics or language, and yet it's totally not explicit at all. In fact, it's frustratingly inexplicit if, like me, you actually want to read the sex bits. Oddly, my library has these books cataloged in adult fiction, but I just checked three other library systems that, with the exception of a single branch, have it cataloged in young adult.

So what's so great about another series about the dating/sex-life woes and family travails of a suburban teenager? Partly it's that flirting-with-the-edge-of-naughtiness aspect, but I also appreciated that the protagonist is (academically) smart without being the stereotypical geeky girl who gets a makeover. Best of all is the boy she falls for — cuz, honey, I fell for him too! He's also smart, but he's a bad boy too. Is there anything hotter?

I'm a little wary going into the third book, since high school is over and the star-crossed lovers are going to different colleges. It took two whole books to bag the hot bad boy, and I don't know if I'm ready to move on. We shall see. Yes. We shall. (That's an inside joke that you'll only get after you read Second Helpings.)

Glacial Period

by Nicolas de Crecy

When I first read about this graphic novel, it was supposed to have been the first in a series of GNs commissioned by/in cooperation with the musée du Louvre, but I haven't seen hide nor hair of any others. (Could just be my library's not getting them.) The author/illustrator is well-known in Europe, apparently, but close to unknown here across the pond.

It tells the story of archaeologists far in the future, during a glacial period, searching across the frozen wastes for evidence of a fabled lost civilization (us). The part that threw me was the talking dogs, who also have the ability to smell traces of the past, brought along on the expedition not quite as equals but certainly not as servants either. (My advice is just to pretend they're not dogs.) Anway, they manage to get into the ruins of the Louvre, where the paintings and what they depict mystify the explorers, who make many bizarre assumptions and speculations about the people who created them. Meanwhile, a bunch of ancient artifacts depicting gods/goddesses of various cultures start talking to each other and one of the talking dogs. And from there it just gets weirder...

Left me a little cold (ha ha), but one of my friends really dug it. (I know, the puns have got to stop.)

Rin! 1
Rin! 2

by Satoru Kannagi

This is a really cute three-book series (and of course my library doesn't have the third book!!!!) about a kid on the high school archery team with a weird sort of crush on his older brother's best friend. See, he gets really nervous and afraid and can't shoot well unless he gets a hug from this older boy, who acts peeved about it but harbors romantic feelings he won't admit to — at least not until another suitor comes a-courtin'. There's some boy-on-boy kissing, but nothing sexier than that. Definitely one of the better non-explicit yaois I've read.

I just ILL'd the third volume.

Corrections to My Memoirs

by Michael Kun

A collection of very-short short stories, most humorous — occasionally laugh-out-loud, other times wince-inducing. I'd probably only recommend it to a connoisseur of the form. It would also make a good toilet book, as the book itself is small and the stories are easily digestible.

Worst things about it are the mock publisher's introductions to each story detailing the fictitious awards not really bestowed upon the author's work. Kind of amusing at first... then cute... then precious... then just plain irritating (rather like an infant).

Best thing about it is the cover, which, along with the title, is a jab at James Frey's A Million Little Pieces:

Oh the Glory of It All

by Sean Wilsey

I don't recall where I heard of this book, but it was pitched as "if you liked Running with Scissors...", and it's by an author who's written for McSweeney's. It lives up to that pitch, having the requisite self-absorbed mother, quirky and precocious child, and distant father, adding an evil step-mother, a series of boarding schools, a dash of juvenile delinquency, and actual verifiable facts. (The author's wealthy and well-known parents went through a drawn-out divorce even after which their relationship laundry regularly was aired on the society pages of San Francisco newspapers.) It isn't as funny as Running with Scissors, but makes up for that with the emotional depth and real pathos that was lacking from Augusten Burroughs' memoir. It could have used a touch more editing, though; I was skimming a bit toward the end.

The Nature of Monsters

by Clare Clark

Another book I read because of reviews. I was intrigued at first, but didn't actually put the book on my list until after a second or third review. It's good, but not great, but definitely good enough to recommend for historical fiction junkies. Reminded me a little of Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson.

I'd like to say there's a strong feminist undercurrent, but the author's handling of it is uneven — a matter of opportunities missed, perhaps. There's a reference to midwifery being supplanted (undermined and sabotaged, in point of fact) by medical "science" at a time when the science was plagued by all sorts of bizarre and mistaken theories, such as the idea that certain experiences or emotions during pregnancy could result in monstrous babies (with dog heads or monkey tails, harelips, birthmarks and the like). But the story ultimately skates over the issues of the vilification and persecution of midwives and the loss of herb lore and "folk remedies" to pin the shortcomings of the emerging culture of male physicians/doctors on the opium-fueled delusions and resentments of a frustrated (and himself disfigured) apothecary.

Ultimately I think this book is more about the way each of us is utterly alone, the challenges of taking care of someone else while struggling with the question of whether anyone will ever take care of us. Rather bleak stuff, but not quite on the level of a Thomas Hardy.

The Baby Jesus Butt Plug: a fairy tale

by Carlton Mellick III

There isn't much I can say about this book. I stumbled across the title somewhere, put a hold on it so I could look at it, wound up reading it just cuz it's pretty short and weird enough to captivate even while it disgusts. (Tries to disgust, I guess, it was too dumb to be truly disgusting.)

It's a punk (not my definition) fairy tale about a future (?) world where people are slaves to corporations run by children, people are copied at Kinko's instead of being born; a world in which some people keep Baby Jesuses as pets (here's a mental image for you: a Baby Jesus with six swollen teats giving suck to a litter of baby Baby Jesuses) and some people use Baby Jesuses as "marital aids" (i.e., sex toys).

I'd recommend this book only to three types of people:

1. those who like to look at blobs of who-knows-what and/or festering wounds
2. those who frequently say, "Omigod, this is so gross — taste it"
3. those who enjoy the smell of their own farts

Just in Case
     and
How I Live Now

by Meg Rosoff

I am an Anglophile. I read young adult fiction. I love Meg Rosoff!

The main character in How I Live Now is a 15- or 16-year-old girl with an eating disorder (which I totally don't remember, but it's in the subject headings) who leaves New York to stay with her auntie and cousins in England. Some sort of unspecified terrorist attack or outbreak of war leaves the kids home alone and auntie stuck wherever she went on some kind of business trip or something. So there's a bit of Swiss Family Robinson element, with the kids trying to feed themselves from the garden and survive without electricity; some Lord of the Flies conflict among them, and some bad stuff that goes down when they leave the relative safety of home to try to find out what's happening only to encounter a band of crazy Mad Max types gone nuts in the seeming apocalypse; and a dash of Blue Lagoon romance. (The anorexic girl bangs her slightly younger cousin, which caused a bit of a stir when the book won the Printz award in 2005, because technically it's incest or something, but, like, whatever, they're cousins, who cares?)

[a few hours later...] Looking back at what I wrote, it doesn't sound like a good book. I don't know why I compared it to so many books/movies when it isn't even very much like any of them. I guess it's hard to explain why it's good. The story is told in retrospect and concludes with the narrator/protagonist returning to see her cousin who was scarred — literally and figuratively — by the same experience from which she emerged more or less unscathed. I don't know what else to say, except that I really liked this book. It's relatively short, so it'd be a good one for teens not that into reading. The shortness also lends itself well to urgent book report needs, and the whole terrorism/apocalypse theme should make it that much easier.

Just in Case is also pretty good. It's a similar teen-friendly length and tells the story of a 15-year-old boy who changes his name and his image in order to try to escape Fate. Not just lower-case fate, and more than his fate per se, because Fate is a character in the book. It's a bizarre conceit to have Fate interjecting threats and heckles here and there, and it's a little annoying, but not too bad because there isn't that much of it. Much more effective and interesting are the parts of the story narrated by Justin's pre-verbal toddler brother, wise beyond his years in a very Zen sort of way. His parents are useless and nearly absent in the way parents often are in young adult books, but Justin gets by with a little help from his friends. More proof that teenagers are temporarily insane.

American Purgatorio

by John Haskell

Reviewers loved this book. Even so, I didn't bite until I'd read several of the glowing reviews. It's been a while since I read it, so maybe that's why I'm having trouble thinking of what to say; but I also remember being a little bored and frustrated with the book, but not enough to stop reading. (At least one review calls the book "mesmerizing," but last time I checked that's not what the word means.) It's kind of gimmicky too.

It must be lifted from the jacket, because several reviews refer to the main character walking out of a gas station convenience store to find that "his life has vanished." Really, it's his wife who's vanished. To the extent that his life vanishes, it's because he can't accept her disappearance and goes off on a cross-country odyssey to find her — a goose chase, in chapters corresponding to the seven deadly sins, on which he ultimately finds himself, so to speak.

******SPOILER ALERT*******
Don't read any more if you think you might read this book, I'm about to ruin the ending...

Alls I got to say is, this guy must have really liked The Sixth Sense.

M or F?
by Lisa Papademetriou and Christopher Tebbetts

Cyrano de Bergerac meets instant messaging — hilarity ensues. That's what was supposed to happen, I guess. Also, this whole gay-boy-and-his-fag-hag-are-into-the-same-guy-and-they-don't-know-if-he's-gay-or-straight thing is getting a little tired. I wanted to like this book, I really did. And it does have a surprise twist at the end. If you haven't read as many gay-themed young adult novels as I have, you might enjoy it, cuz it's not actually that bad.

Let Us Be Perfectly Clear

by Paul Hornschemeier

This is a weirdly constructed book — really two books (Let Us Be and Perfectly Clear) back-to-back and bound together so that it has no back cover but two front covers from which one reads toward the middle of the book. It's a collection of short comic (as in strip, not as in funny) pieces which occasionally overlap but don't have an overarching theme. Some are great, some are stupid, some are very short and deeply unsatisfying, one of them will make you feel a bit nauseated. To some extent these are "art comics" that will be most appreciated by other graphic artists and illustrators. For the rest of us, it might be worth flipping through but it's not really something you'd want to read straight through.

The Invisible

by Mats Wahl

Now a Major Motion Picture! Gosh, I hate when they put that on the cover. In fact, just as this is the English translation of a book written in Sweden, the American movie is remake of a Swedish movie, and of course the American version ups the ante by adding a second invisible character because, as we all know, most Americans are incapable of detecting subtlety or paying attention to a tragedy that isn't also a romance.

As to the book, subtlety is not in the plot but in the excruciatingly slow unfolding of events. I'm not giving anything away by telling you there's an invisible character — the title does that well enough, and his invisibility becomes apparent early in the story. Really, much of the plot is rather predictable, but, thanks to excellent writing, that doesn't diminish the tense, strangled urgency or the crushing sense of tragedy that permeate the book. It's a pretty quick read, a good recommendation for "reluctant reader" teens and those with a book report due tomorrow.

Also, spend a few moments pondering the book jacket. I didn't see it until I held the book open and looked at the whole image that wraps around from front to back cover.

I Love Led Zeppelin: panty-dropping comics
     and
Monkey Food: the complete I was seven in '75 collection

by Ellen Forney

Hilarious and highly recommended if you like comics. (These are definitely comics, not graphic novels.) Forney's drawing style is well-suited to both the comedic and the erotic themes.

I Love LZ is mostly one-page, one-off comics in the how-to vein: how to be a fag hag, as explained by Margaret Cho; how not to get caught using drugs; how to reattach severed fingers; how to twirl the tassels on your pasties — all a little dirty, subversive, sexy, etc. It also includes a few longer comics, including one written by a gay male friend and illustrated by Forney. Not that everything else is oppressively gynocentric, I just found that one extra interesting, for reasons you should be able to imagine.

Monkey Food is the episodic narrative of the author-illustrator's wonder years. I was only two in '75, but I'm still old enough to appreciate the way bell-bottoms and loud colors can turn the screw on ordinary human foibles.

Happiness: a history

by Darrin M. McMahon

A survey of the evolving definitions of "happiness" in Western thought — not, as you might expect, dealing with psychology, but rather in terms of mythology/religion, philosophy, sociology, a touch of linguistics, and even a bit of zoology (happiness being one of the things that distinguishes man from the other animals). Some examples: in ancient Greece, happiness was a matter of fate or luck; the spread of Judeo-Christian values gave rise to the notion that happiness could be achieved through virtuous living; in modern times people think happiness is mankind's natural state, that we are entitled to happiness, that we simply need to eliminate the physical and/or psychic barriers that are keeping us from being happy.

I found this book intensely interesting, but it was slow reading. I got about halfway through, took a break and read some fluffy teen fiction, then went back and finished. I'd only recommend this book to someone who's certain s/he wants to read philosophy and intellectual history; dabblers should look elsewhere.

Children of Hurin

by J.R.R. Tolkien

Unless you're a nut-case, skip the introductory stuff, which will be especially confusing for those who haven't read The Silmarillion. Otherwise, this is a nice stand-alone novella of Middle Earth. The action takes place well before anything in the trilogy, and it won't add much to the experience if you're planning to read or re-read the trilogy. But like I said, it's a fine story, worth reading even if you're not a hardcore Rings fanatic.

P.S.: Sorry I haven't posted in so long. Busy with other stuff, yadda-yadda-yadda. I'll try harder.

Call Me by Your Name

by André Aciman

The first review of this book that I read made it sound really boring — and I am totally OK with books in which not much happens, so it must have sounded re-e-eally boring. I don't recall what tipped me over the edge, but it may have been the sexy cover:


Interesting, isn't it, how an image can be non-explicit and yet somehow sexier than if it were? But I digress...

I really didn't want to read another book about a teenage queer boy and the older (but not much older) man who changed his life. But I'm glad I did. The writing is just lovely, and the emotions are rendered with an intensity and realism that overshadow the plot's un-originality. The book is mostly about the build-up, the excruciating anticipation; then the short-lived explosiveness of the thing itself; and ultimately the book tries be original by tacking on a completely unnecessary chapter showing how one of the lovers never totally gets over it.

I was about to say the book is slim, so the unnecessary epilogue-y bit doesn't ruin it, but I checked online and it's 248 pages. It sure didn't seem that long, which means I must have been reading it quickly, which is kind of odd for a book that's mostly about anticipation — but maybe it isn't. The author writes about one's sense of time being affected by feelings of anticipation and desire, and I must have had an experience similar to the character's. I guess this book is more original (in quality, if not in content) than I thought. (Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure one of the reviews said something to that effect, which means I'm not being original. It's a vicious, vicious circle, isn't it?)