About Books – Page 4 – A Bevy of Books

Mystery Solved – sadly

The Mystery of Grace by Charles de Lint is the story of a young woman (Grace) who dies unexpectedly but, instead of Heaven or Nirvana or nothingness, what she gets is a rebirth in her apartment – but in a world inhabited only by all those who died in the same small area of town in the last 50 years. A twist on a familiar theme, it is the story of star-crossed lovers with a serious impediment – one of them is dead.

I have already sung the praises of de Lint once or twice in this blog, so I won’t tell you again how much I love his work and how I feel like some of his books have literally changed my life and my way of thinking. Someplace To Be Flying and Forests of the Heart are books I will have to bequeath to someone, because they will be in my book collection until the day I die (hmm, maybe I’ll have them cremated with me). Unfortunately, The Mystery of Grace fell short of the incredibly high bar de Lint has written for himself.

I am most certainly not saying that TMoG is a bad book. It is not. It is a good book. Grace is a girl who loves hot rods (as I do) and actually works on them (as I do not), and the guy she falls for is someone I would probably fall for. But as I read the book, I felt like I’d read it before – not the details, but the general storyline (TMoG is brand new). At first, I chalked it up to having read and re-read the 50 stories or whatever that de Lint has written in his decades of writing (he has lots of short story collections in addition to a dozen or more novels). Then I picked up Promises to Keep this week – another de Lint I thought I hadn’t read before. Well, I had read it before – it’s really more of a novella, published as a young adult fiction novel. It is the story of Jilly (a recurring character in many of de Lint’s Newford books) and how she is offered the perfect life by a friend of hers – a life in a world where some of the dead go after they pass on. The bones of this world – which Jilly ultimately rejects – are the same as the afterworld in TMoG. That’s why it all seemed so familiar.

It’s clear that the idea showed up in Promises to Keep, and de Lint developed it much more fully (and more interestingly) in TMoG. but it still bugs me. It smacks of a lack of ideas – a need to fulfill a contract and recycling stories to do it. And I expect a lot more from my uber-favorite author – probably unfairly.

And while I’m venting, the gear-head stuff in the book does not ring quite true. It reads like something very well-researched, but not as believable as almost everything else in his work. I am a gear-head, I love it, and it felt just a little bit ‘tacked on’ as something cool rather than something real and true to a person. And in general, the book felt thin – like the world and the characters in general lacked a certain depth. I’m sure this is partly due to my being spoiled by the Newford stories, where I have dozens of stories worth of history that inform even the short stories. But this one reads more like something he wrote in the early years – when he wrote short stories. His writing (like most great writers) has improved over the years, so this one would have been a fabulous short story, but is instead a not-so-fabulous novel. It pains me to say anything negative about my boy, but I won’t pretend that I loved TMoG. If someone else had written it, I would have said it was a de Lint rip-off that did not quite live up to the master. That the master himself wrote it does not make it masterful.

Bad Bev

I’ve been a big slacker lately when it comes to keeping my blog up-to-date – partly because it’s no longer a part of my real job and partly because it was making reading feel like an obligation – like I was a bad girl if I didn’t blog about what I was reading.

Not reading is absolutely not an option – that would be akin to being cheerful in the morning or not drinking tea. But not blogging – hell, that’s as easy as making toast. To add to the fun, writing has always been a weird thing for me. I love it, but the avoidance maneuvers I have in place make it difficult to be disciplined about getting it done – especially if there is no real ‘deadline.’ School papers, magazine articles, cover letters – these all come with built-in deadlines that force me to sit in front of the computer and shift gears from the Verbal Bev to the Written Bev. And the Written Bev is a happy girl, it’s just the gear-shifting that is a significant speed-bump.

I know this is yet another thing that – as a supposedly-mature adult – I should be doing. That is, living up to my promises (not blogging; one need not be mature nor an adult to blog, and many a mature adult has made the cut without a blog to their name, phew!). And I’m pretty good at living up to my promises and responsibilities – except when they are promises to myself, and responsibilities that affect only me. No one gets fired if I don’t write, my ‘A’ is not in jeopardy if I go 10 days without updating my blog. I just have to listen to the increasingly-irritated voice in my head that says I’m a loser for not doing it. It’s the same voice that yells when I send birthday presents late and don’t call my mother. I can ignore a certain level of bitching, but when the volume gets loud, something has to be done (and we all know I’m not going to call my mother).

So, to recap some things I’ve read lately – that I’ve decided in my all-powerful position as The-Boss-of-Me do not require a full write-up on this here fabulous blog:

I read the entire series of The Chronicles of the Cheysuli by Jennifer Roberson, borrowed from a fellow sci-fi fan and infinitely enjoyable. The books tell the story of a magical race (the Cheysuli, of course) who have been persecuted and lost many of their powers. If they can fulfill the multi-generational prophesy, there will be peace and a return of powers they’ve lost. No deep-thinking required here – like dessert for the hard-working brain. The first book and the last two books were the best (there are eight total).

I re-read Jack of Kinrowan by Charles de Lint. This is a two-book compilation of Jack the Giant-Killer and Drink Down the Moon. JoK is a fun re-telling of the Jack and the Beanstalk fairy tale in a modern urban setting. Not his greatest stuff, but – again – a good read.

I have also read The Book of Illusion and Outliers, but those deserve a space all their own, so look for them soon.

I apologize to those oodles of faithful readers out there who have come recently to BoB and been disappointed – but I can’t promise it won’t happen again. I may be a slacker, but I’m not a liar. Happy Reading!

What to read, what to read?

I was just going to skip the write-up on Arresting god in Kathmandu by Samrat Upadhyay, mostly because it doesn’t take many words to say “the writing was okay, but I didn’t get the point of any of its short stories.” Instead, I decided it was an opportunity to discuss how I chose the books I end up reading.

Several things led to my picking up AgiK, none of them very scientific (must be the lit major in me). I have several beloved authors that are Indian (Bharati Mukherjee, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Arundhati Roy), and this author comes from the same area of the world. I read ‘Nepal’ and my brain said ‘Tibet’ (again, same part of the world, I believe they maybe even be adjacent to each other, although I have not verified that). So I was thinking ‘the same country as the Dalai Lama’. But of course, that couldn’t have been true, because one of the other things that intrigued me was that Samrat Upadhyay is supposedly ‘the first Nepali author writing in English to be published in the West.’ And we all know that the Dalai Lama has published several books – but maybe he doesn’t write in English? You see how I was tricked?

And that title – Arresting god (note small g) in Kathmandu – how cool does that sound? I’m a sucker for the obscure title (Five Quarters of an Orange? quarter=four, how did they get five?). Smacks of questioning religion (a particular area of interest for me), exotic places (who even knows where Kathmandu is? Or how to pronounce it correctly?). And in practical terms – as my roommate pointed out – what do you do, put handcuffs on him? How exactly does one arrest a deity? (I’m sure Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman would have a few ideas).

In the case of Away by Amy Bloom, I already mentioned that I picked it up because of 1) the title, and 2) it mentioned Alaska on the back. In addition, the edition I have has a close-up of a fancy fruit bowl/centerpiece with a background of a stream through the wilderness. Having picked up Blackberry Wine on the same shopping trip (with its associations with Five Quarters of an Orange), I imagined it would be similar to something by Joanne Harris so I finally picked it up. Turned out, not so much.

It doesn’t surprise me that people stick with authors they know – if you’ve read previous books and enjoyed them, it is a safer bet to buy another of their books than to try someone you’ve never read. That makes it tough for new authors, but there it is. For those of us with an ever-voracious appetite for something new and exciting to read, there are resources out there to get more information on the latest book. I have an email subscription to the weekly Powell’s newsletter, and in it they discuss upcoming releases and do tons of reviews/interviews/whatnot on their website as well. I picked up Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, Population: 485 by Michael Perry, and bonk by Mary Roach (which I have not read yet) based on information I read in those newsletters.

There are also independent bookseller associations (such as indiebound.org) that distribute information on new releases that are less about making the publishers happy and more about telling readers about great writing. In stores like Title Wave, you’ll find cards placed in front of new releases with recommendations from the American Booksellers Association (a trade association of independent booksellers) and, like Powell’s, hand-written notes with recommendations from staff members. (In case y’all haven’t picked up on it yet, I’m a big fan of the independent bookstore ).

Obviously, you can check the best seller lists and book reviews in sources such as The New York Times and your local paper, but people like books for very different reasons, and you don’t always get a good sense of the book from a review. I mean, seriously, some of you may have already decided that I have no idea what I’m talking about because you loved Away and have devoured everything Amy Bloom has read. And it’s a tough world out there, I hate wasting my money on a book that wastes my time. Thankfully, the world also invented the used bookstore.

I love spending half as much on a book – whether I love it or hate it – and having the option of getting at least half my money back (or like credit for future books) for a book that suckered me in with a cool title and a completely inaccurate synopsis. I just add those to the pile, and next time I go to Powell’s (until recently, Title Wave) I take those duds with me and let the fine people at the store credit me for the junk I don’t want while I spend all that credit and more before they’ve even had a chance to look at them. And of course, when the budget has been stretched beyond its limit, and the credit is all burned up – there’s always the library (whew!)

So get out there! Take a chance! Read a book! That’s an order.