Big Heavy Books

I just about gave myself a nosebleed last night with A Dance with Dragons. At 1,040 pages in hardback, I can barely lift the book with one hand, let alone hold it up to read it in bed. What's a girl to do? Start another book for bedtime reading: Wolf Hall. Wait, that one is 560 pages. Ouch. I need to start working out with weights to keep up with my reading.

Since I am about to leave for a trip to Tucson to see my sister and her new baby, I ordered Wolf Hall on the Kindle. I've been using the Kindle a lot recently to read first chapters of books I'm considering. So far I've tried and rejected several, including the new Eric Larson book In the Garden of Beasts which I didn't like any better than I liked Devil in the White City (which is to say, not at all).

I like the feeling of security that I get from the Kindle. If I have that with me, I am never without a book because if I finish (or don't like) one I can always get another! (That's assuming I have wi-fi and a functioning credit card.) Now I no longer have to travel with books and backup books, though I still obsess about what to take on each trip.

Here is a gratuitous shot of my lovely sister and beautiful nephew, just to break up the boredom. It's my blog; I'm allowed to do this.

Emily and Seth, July, 2011

The Orphan Sister by Gwendolen Gross

This book is about three sisters in New Jersey and their parents. No, not really. This book is really about how you can be isolated and disconnected even while surrounded by people, how you can be the same as everyone else but be so different, how you can think you know everything but really know nothing, or, think you know nothing but really know everything.

The orphan sister is Clementine. Born as one of a set of triplets, her sisters are identical but she is fraternal. The three sisters share a strong bond, but the connection between the twins far outweighs anything they share with Clementine. Clementine’s parents’ relationship is also impenetrable to Clementine; it’s based mostly on lies and mutual avoidance of reality, and the dissolution of their marriage provides some of the only action in the book.

Clementine is the odd girl out, in so many ways, and Gross explores all of them. She writes beautifully of Clementine’s loneliness and confusion about where she fits and how she should live her life. Sometimes I wished that more things would happen in this book, but mostly I liked hanging around inside Clementine’s head as she explores her inner landscape and makes her own map of where she belongs.

(Book 21, 2011)

Kraken by China Mieville

This book is an unreadable mess, a fascinating, memorable, unreadable mess. I really wanted to like it: it’s got much of what I look for in fiction: a clever, original plot, complex characters, challenging language. But it’s so overwritten, and Mieville is so enamored of his own ideas that it just grinds to a halt about half way through, brought down by the weight of all its excess baggage.

Mieville writes slipstream fiction--stories that straddle the boundary between realism and fantasy, and in Mieville's case that eschew traditional science fiction and fantasy tropes like robots and vampires.

Kraken is about a formaldehyde-preserved giant squid (architeuthis) that goes missing from the British Museum, and Billy, a museum curator who goes on a quest to find out what happened to it. But really, (as Sarah Lyall, writing in the New York Times says), that is like saying that King Lear is about property rights. Kraken is about a secret squid-worshipping religious cult; Kraken is about an urban army of sorcerers with their own reasons for wanting the squid (and the internecine warfare that erupts over who controls the squid); Kraken is about an obscure branch of the London police force dedicated to tracking the movements of the magical underworld.

But in his enthusiasm for introducing us to all these different actors and subplots, Mieville loses all forward momentum. The book ceases to be about where the squid went and just becomes about all this other extraneous flash. For pages and pages, Billy wanders around London with Dane, former member of the squid cult, and they encounter all these other weird folk and mysterious events, but they hardly find out anything at all about who might have the squid. And eventually, I just grew tired of all the smoke and mirrors and I couldn’t keep track of who was whom, and who might want the squid or not, and it just didn’t matter anymore. Mieville lost me, and I couldn’t finish the book.

Okay but here is the really really strange part. One way to track the activities of the underground sorcerers’ mafia is to read the graffiti in sketchy neighborhoods. This morning I saw this new tag on a wall across the street from my office. I swear I am not making this up. What does it mean? Why is it there? What is going on?

Corner W. Johnson & Brooks St., Madison, WI 7-11-11

ETA: Here is another one, spotted a few blocks from the first one, a few weeks later.

Corner E. Johnson St. and Frances St., Madison, WI 8-1-11

(Book 20, 2011)

Little Bee by Chris Cleave

Egad I am picky. A lot of people liked this book, and there is much that is great about it, but I have a big problem with it that I can’t ignore. It’s like two books, written by two different people. Chapters alternate between the voice of Little Bee, a young female survivor of horrific violence in Nigeria, and Sarah, the English woman who is her rescuer. Little Bee’s voice is unique, thoughtful, moving, evocative, heart-wrenching. Sarah’s voice is phony, clichéd, and shallow. I am really in the dark about how Cleave can write so well as Little Bee and so badly as Sarah.

Of course we are supposed to think that Sarah is phony and shallow, because we need a contrast with Little Bee. But I could barely read Sarah’s chapters. Instead of the hyperrealism that we see in Little Bee’s chapters, Sarah’s are sketchy and unbelievable. Her husband dies and there is a funeral, but where are his parents? Her parents? Their siblings? It was the most unrealistic funeral chapter I’ve ever read. Other chapters have similar gaps and weaknesses, and read as if they were dashed off as drafts of chapters, instead of final versions. Cleave could have made Sarah phony and shallow and still provided some polish and verisimilitude.

Unfortunately you can’t just read Little Bee’s chapters and get the whole picture. Because Little Bee’s story is so compelling I still recommend this book, but be prepared to skim Sarah’s chapters.

(Book 19, 2011)

Vacation Reading

Family trips to visit my dad are great opportunities for reading. A long plane ride, lots of down time on the beach and the screen porch, a house full of books--I love it. Even my teenage reluctant reader could be found with his nose in a Dave Barry book.

I read 2.5 books in a week! Here's the list: Started Early, Took my Dog, by Kate Atkinson, State of Wonder by Ann Patchett, and half of The Orphan Sister by Gwendolen Gross. I also still have to blog about Little Bee by Chris Cleave and Kraken, by China Mieville. I'm sorry I've gotten so far behind but I promise to catch up soon.