I Couldn't do it...

Here's a thing I never thought I'd say: I couldn't finish a book by Arturo Pérez-Reverte.  The Nautical Chart should have been cool.  The premise is great; the characters are strong and, in my case, I'm heavily endeared to the author.  (Pretty sure I've covered him way more than anyone else on my blog.)  It was the pace that was it's undoing.

I give every book I read fifty pages.  I gave this three times that amount, because of my past good experience with Pérez-Reverte.  I can say definitively I like his historical fiction more than his contemporary crime thrillers though I enjoyed The Flanders Panel a lot.

The Great 2012 Reading Rut continues...  

Montana 1948 by Larry Watson

"It is commonplace to refer to the narrowness and intolerance of small-town life, but it seems to me just the opposite is true, at least of Bentrock, Montana, in 1948.  The citizens of that community tolerated all kinds of behavior, from the eccentric to the unusual to the aberrant.  From Miss Schott and her palominos to Mrs. Russell, who was a kleptomaniac (…) to Arne Olsen, a farmer, who never (never) bathed and was proud of the fact, to Mr. Prentice, the band director at the high school who liked his boy students better than he liked his girl students, to old Henry Sandstrom, who shot mourning doves in his backyard, cooked them, and ate them.  To my uncle Frank who molested his patients.  How many other secrets had our town agreed to keep?"  Page 121

Finding a story that deals with the bad side of tolerance is a bit odd.  Generally we encourage people to not be afraid of someone else just because they are different.  David, the narrator of Montana 1948, struggles to come to terms with a kept quiet family secret.  He learns of people's acceptance and tolerance of what he only vaguely understands but deems terrible. His struggle, and more explicitly his father's, is in doing the right thing under the eyes of those who would rather look away.  

There are two communities in this novel.  The first is the one that David is aware of: the town of Bentrock where his wealthy and powerfully connected Grandfather Julian has all-consuming influence.  David's father, Wes, is the sheriff as was his father before him.  David's Uncle Frank--the local high school all-star in everything, and decorated war hero--is not only the most well liked guy around for miles but one of two doctors in the county.  David is twelve when the story begins and by way of being an only child and the indulgences granted by his family name, he is a bit spoiled in his own way.  The other community we never see directly and the bits we do see are slightly colored through David's eye, as the Sioux Indians which touches all parts of the town and proves to be the crux of the book's tension.

Wes' casual racism toward Indian's is inherited from his father, but he can't ignore Sioux house keeper and David's daytime care taker's  illness and certainly not her death with suspected foul-play.  As Marie's health declines she makes it clear she does not want to be treated by Dr. Frank Hayden and it comes out that many women on the reservation have been abused by him in the past, but the word of a Sioux against a Hayden is as good as nothing.  David, in his own way, was in love with Marie and while he doesn't seek to play 'boy detective' he does seek explanations as to her passing and accusations against his uncle.  

The more we think facts, or perhaps even evidence is coming to light the more we see that the horrors he learns of that shook his world are merely common knowledge to so many in Bentrock.  His only solace comes as he see his father chose to do the right thing: arrest his brother, and deal with the nightmare that is Julian.  

The resolution of events is not what readers would expect, and not merely in how the plot unfolds but also in the larger themes of tolerance and injustice and what people choose to turn a blind eye on and never again give it thought too, no matter how disturbing.       

The events of David's childhood managed to distort his perception of reality all around him and certainly had to affect him as he grew into an adult.  

"For myself, I eventually became a history teacher in a Rochester, Minnesota, high school.  I did not--do not--believe in the purity and certainty of the study of history over law.  Not at all.  Quite the opposite.  I find history endlessly amusing, knowing, as I do , that the record of any human community might omit stories of sexual abuse, murder, suicide….  Who knows--perhaps any regions' most dramatic, most sensational stories were not played out in the public view but were confined to small, private places.  A doctor's office, say.  A white frame house on a quiet street.  So no matter what the historical documents might say, I feel free to augment them with whatever lurid or comical fantasy my imagination might concoct.  And know that the truth might not be far off.  These musings, of course, are for my private enjoyment.  For my students I keep a straight face and pretend that the text tells the truth, whole and unembellished."  Page 164

Much of what was presented felt familiar (swap rural south and blacks for 'no-where' Montana and Sioux) but simplicity of the themes and their universal resonance makes this story hard to ignore and powerfully compelling.  

The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka

It's the collective voice that defines The Buddha in the Attic.  The book is not the story of a Japanese picture bride, rather all of the women who came to the US under the terms of an arranged wedding, and the voices of their children and husbands too.  Everything is 'we' 'us' 'they' and 'our,' and what we lose in intimacy (which is shockingly very little to nothing) we gain in perspective and scope.  While encompassing so much at what seems like only a glance readers get as close to the story as they would want.  

While there isn't a typical narrator or main character to follow there is a traditional story arc.  We see the women on the boat from Japan to California.  We see them settle down in their new lives with their new husbands and come to terms with all the lies they have been told concerning their husbands looks (the women had only seen twenty-year old pictures) status, and most cases near poverty.  We see how they raise a family, spend their money, and how they deal with white people.  Eventually we read about their utter disappearance at the time of world war two.  

There is a duality to near every experience they have.  The jealousy, envy, hatred for the whites they work and deal with mixed with adoration and desire.  They take pride in the quality of their labor--no matter how menial--even if they detest the job being done.  There husbands are perhaps the strongest point of contention.  On the way over the women are expecting up-and-coming businessmen, wealthy land owners, or even those in the medical or legal profession, but what they get are farm hands, restaurant workers, and gardeners for the rich.  While they despise their husbands there is also a loyalty to them and a general unwillingness to entertain leaving.  

It's a short book that, for many, will introduce a minority and hardship into the landscape of American culture that they were previously unaware of.  It's duration is a blessing as I'm not sure how such a distinct narrative voice would hold up over hundreds of pages.  Each paragraph stands alone, being self contained and powerful enough to merit thought all by itself.  By the book's end you'll be thanking Otsuka for the oddity of her third person, collective voice because if we got any closer to the story of the Japanese picture brides she presented we may not have experienced the shared joys and small triumphs of all, nor would we have been spared many aspects of the harsh brutality and ugly reality that is a part of our history.  

Month in Review and of Things to Come

The End of Times are upon us and it has nothing to do with my recent reading of Doomsday Book.  Today marks the fifth straight day, as in five in a row, of 100 degree and higher heat.  I've know for awhile now that I'm going to hell, I just thought I had more time.  Long as I can take my books with me I think I and suffer eternal damnation; and really, it can't get any hotter...

I bought a few books this month.  All under two-hundred pages in an effort to make some progress in getting my number of books read this year up.  Of course of the other end of that equation is having to read a few books, which I'm still struggling to do.  At the year's halfway point I have no delusions of meeting my repeat goal of last year with fifty books read.  I read Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, and Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.  I may have been to harsh in my words with the former as I enjoyed it only wanted much more of the good stuff.  I was heartened that hear from someone else that Fahrenheit 451 is high school reading material regardless of the author's intended audience.  Which in turn got me think about young adult fiction and how much I like it for it's general simplicity as opposed to plot convolution of adult fiction; particularly fantasy.  More than anything else about Bradbury I was blown away by how contemporary the book was sixty years later.

My other purchases for the month included Buddha in the Attic by Julia Otsuka and Montana 1948 by Larry Watson.  I'm currently reading Otsuka and while I knew this book was going to be good, I had no clue it was going to be as good as it is.  I'll be finished shortly and posting my thoughts.  I've knocked a few more pages out of the short story collection I'm working on, but nothing remarkable to talk about.  The near six-hundred page Pathfinder RPG rulebook has also occupied a bit of my reading this this month, but needless to say, I'm enjoying all of that.

Looks like I'm becoming a nerd again...

Apropos of nothing, there are a lot of concerts coming up that I need to go to and limited funds to draw on to see them: Stevie Vai, Ted Nugent, The Shins (a maybe), Derek Trucks, some version of The Allman Brothers Band and one rumored show this fall that I'm not at liberty to speak of just yet.  I'm too old for amphitheaters and arena shows so that cuts down some of the acts, but still.  
 
I foresee a lot of free time in July so if I'm not on the lake with my friends as much as possible I'll try to accomplish two things: read more, and not melt.    

Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

Giving me a book that centers around time travel is the fastest way to make me cringe; a rolling of the eyes is the only other, milder, reaction that I could yield.  The idea of time travel itself doesn't bother me rather there are so many potential problems that an author chooses to entertain when they make time travel the focus of a novel.  So far as the mechanism of sending someone back in time goes, Doomsday Book works, but I was still left cringing; though for different reasons.    

Kivrin Engle is a student who wants to go back to 1320's England to study culture and life immediately before the plague hits.  For very good reasons the middle ages are shut off to time travelers.  For poorly explained reasons that border on deus ex machina she gets to goes back anyway.  She is not a historian; merely a student.  Not even a graduate student doing research for her master's thesis or Ph. D. she's a freshman with very high marks; nothing more.  I loved the idea of sending academics back to the past to understand human interaction and culture much like a scientist going into the wild to observe an extraordinarily sheltered people or wild animals in their habitat while making every effort not to interact or alter the subjects manner.  (Though Kivrin make no effort at non-interference.)  Here is where the head scratching begins: so Oxford has the ability to send people back to the past (with a mind blowing ease and lack of paperwork, waivers, or minimal safety precautions) but they do so with nearly no agenda for what this person is to do upon arrival and no stronger criteria than, 'I'd like to go do the middle ages please' than to deem someone worthy to be sent back in time.  

Kivrin is book smart; but seemed to me a real word idiot.  There was nothing wrong with the premise of sending someone back for the reasons Kivrin wanted to go, but once the project was approved considering her poor judgement and phenomenal lack of logical, forward, 'next-step-in-the-process' thinking I can't believe she ever would have been the person chosen to go.  Much of her behavior can be wholly excused by illness, which proved to be a theme that Willis was aware on every page of the book.

A fully blown epidemic that results in a city wide quarantine breaks out as soon as Kivrin is sent back.  Kivrin is among the first exposed and very first to become symptomatic but there is no one to help her deal with this flu-like virus in the 1300's.  With rest, plenty of water, and some benevolent caretakers, she defeats the virus in a few days, while others in modern times get worse and pass away despite modern medicine's best efforts.  This motif is repeated later in the book, when the plague breaks out in the village Kivrin has been sent back to; only with the plague she had been previously treated against all forms of the illness and granted immunity.  Speaking of repetition…

There are some pacing issues that make sections of the book feel a bit like a grind but none so bad that trump the repetition of events, words, phrases, seemingly entire paragraphs.  The book splits into two narratives once Kivrin is sent away, the other deals with Badri, a tech working on the project to send her back, who is the first to come down with the virus.  Entire chapters focus on Badri with very little to no progression merely re-treading what has already happened.  Kivrin's story fairs little better as she struggles to find her footing in the past and readers are made to struggle with, "Where is this book going?"

Also, the novel's point of view jumps around nearly as much as the repetition makes itself known.  This is an area in which I'm very forgiving, and nothing I read was ever jarring, but I counted as much as three different narrations in the same paragraph at one time and that is a bit much to take.  

The time travel mechanism works; if only for very convenient reasons.  I'd like to see others do much the same with Willis' device.  I think my main points of contention with pacing and repetition could have been eliminated with a first person point of view told by Kivrin.  (Or even better, if you've read the book and really want to think of something awesome, first person as told by Mr. Dunworthy!)  A lot of what I felt was slow could merely be me looking at the novel through a contemporary lens as I do today's fiction, or perhaps in Doomsday Book's twenty years it hasn't aged particular well.  Either way it's fun, and different and I'd love to read more of the same if only a few issues were addressed.    


For a different look at the same book, check out Maria's blog and let us know what you think. 

The Month in Review and of Things to Come

Again, I almost forgot to do this month end wrap up.  Oh well, better late then never.

I didn't do much reading in May.  I got about two-hundred pages into Accacia by David Anthony Durham and had to put that down as I've come to terms with the fact that secondary world fantasy isn't my thing.  I read a few more stories out of the Warriors collection that I've been picking up here and there and just last night (which is decidedly not May) I finished Urth of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe.  So yeah, not much reading happening.

Earlier this year I had been doing well with knocking out a lot of the big books on my shelves but I may have instilled some backlash as well.  I've decided I'm gonna go on a tear with short books this summer.  250 pages or less can hopefully keep me focused and get back on the my reading track.  Years past I was reading five or six books a month, now I feel like two is an accomplishment.  So the short book thing will also help to inflate my number of books read by the end of the year in addition to pushing me back to where I was with reading regularly.

Needless to say, I'm open to all kinds of suggestions on the short awesome books.  I'm also thinking that reading and blogging will go hand-in-hand so hopefully one will lead to an increase in the other.

Should you be curious part of delay in getting this post up was in deciphering what I'd initially written.  In the first draft, words were spelled backwards, sentence order read from last word to first in a few places, and there were a few sentences that even I couldn't iron out and just gave up on.  I'm convinced that one day, I'll will write something upside down.

Shopping

So I went book shopping after work today.  It's Maria's fault and I'll tell you why later.  While I didn't find the book I was looking for I did end up with two when I left.  Furthermore, in going book shopping I was able to clear out a stack on trade-in books that was getting precariously tall on my floor.  


I bought Litany of the Long Sun by Gene Wolfe because he is amazing though that is no secret.  This book contains first two books in his The Book of the Long Sun series:  Nightside of the Long Sun and Lakeside of the Long Sun.  It's an attractive paperback from Orb that comes in at around five-hundred fifty pages.  I already own Epiphany of the Long Sun, the last two books in the series, which contains Caldé of the Long Sun and Exodus from the Long Sun in hardback in a Guild America Books edition.  So, all-in-all, it's a mismatched collection of The Book of the Long Sun.  I can't explain to you why, but I want a complete collection of each: the second half of the Orb edition and the first half of the Guild America Books edition.  And yes, I already know I'm crazy.  


Wolf remains the only science fiction writer that I read with no reservation.  (That said I've never considered Michael Swanwick a science fiction writer, thus I read his work all the time...)  Also , Wolfe remains the only writer in any field that I will risk reading a book in a series.  Presently, I'm finishing The Urth of the New Sun by Wolfe--which is better than I ever thought possible--and so, I'll probably take a break from Wolfe for a while because he makes my head hurt with awesome juice.  


The second book I bought is one of those that makes you mad at the publishing industry.  The name is horrible: (and therein may lie many of the answers for my anger) Flights: Extreme Visions of Fantasy edited by Al Sarrantonio.  How is it possible that such a collection of short stories is ever published by such an amazing amount of authors and yet I've never heard about it until I accidentally come across it in a second hand book store?  It could be awful, but seriously, look at the author line up.  It's not likely that this original anthology sucks.  I'm looking forward to getting to this one sooner than later.  


As for the book Maria brought to my attention for our joint read (oops did I spill the beans?!?!) more on that later.