Favorite Authors – Page 5 – A Bevy of Books

This cowgirl was a little sad…

I recently borrowed the audio book for Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins for another road trip to see the Sista. I chose it 1) because there were a limited amount of books in the correct format available on the library website, and 2) because I’ve been a big fan of Tom Robbins since high school (Jitterbug Perfume was my first) and hadn’t read this one in years. And I have never seen the movie – I was just looking stuff up and realized it stars Uma Thurman & was directed by Gus Van Sant. Maybe I’ll give it a shot on a slow night. However:

Sometimes, it’s a bad idea to re-read books.

I know, that’s practically blasphemy, coming from me. But, while I had remembered the good stuff about this one, I’d forgotten the bad stuff. Or maybe, being older and (presumably) wiser, I noticed the bad stuff more.

ECGtB is the story of Sissy Hankshaw, a woman born with thumbs twice the size of regular thumbs. Of course, she becomes the greatest hitchhiker the world has ever know, but can’t unbutton her own shirt. She falls in love (several times) and learns all kinds of interesting things about herself, whooping cranes, the nature of time and other wonders in her travels.

There is a lot of great stuff in here about finding your own path, and not letting public opinion tell you who you are – none of that has changed. And Robbins is FUNNY, and a master of the interesting metaphor. It was a good choice in a lot of ways.

And the bad stuff isn’t terrible stuff. It’s just that all the fun/sexy/strange stuff totally came off as masturbatory – it’s supposedly about a girl/woman being open with her sexuality, but is really about the kinds of fantasies young men have about a woman being open with her sexuality… ya know? In a book otherwise populated with deep-thinking and light-heartedness, it was disappointing and distracting to listen to (since I was listening, not reading) the kinds of stereotypical crap you can get anywhere.

And to top it all off… I was missing the last two sections of the book on my iPod. I have yet to determine if it was operator error or a glitch in the matrix, but either way – I was a bit pissed off! Luckily, I had two other books in reserve (of course!). So I listened to a few chapters of Tom Sawyer until I got home. phew!

Extremely Sad & Incredibly Wonderful

I read Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer again this week and fell in love with it all over again.

I heard about the book from a fellow student in my Studies in Fiction class. I never did thank her for that, or tell her how much I loved the book. We were reading Pattern Recognition by William Gibson and Falling Man by Don DeLillo in class – two books that deal with the aftermath of 9/11 in New York. Emily did not like either of them (both of which I loved) and recommended EL&IC.

EL&IC is probably the most powerful, stunning, achingly sad book I’ve ever read – and I’m a fan of beautifully sad books. Some are more lyrical (The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy comes to mind), and some more profound (such as The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje) but this book allows you to experience the sadness of an 9-year-old boy who’s lost his father in the Twin Towers. It also touches on the losses his family experienced in WWII that are not so far removed from the present as you’d imagine. It is a map of heartbreak and guilt and loss that seemed abundantly human and intimately personal. I cried hard, more than once, and it helps me believe that personal redemption is possible and I can survive almost anything if this young boy can find a way to survive what happened to him. Everyone in the world should read it.

A pair by Joanne Harris

I have previously extolled the virtues of Joanne Harris, so no one should be surprised that I picked up two more of her books: Holy Fools and Coastliners. I had Powell’s credit, so I went to ‘Harris’ on the shelf and grabbed the cheapest two that I hadn’t already read. I did not realize that they were actually linked to each other – and I even read them in the proper order!

Holy Fools was my favorite of the two. Set in the 17^th century in a French nunnery on a secluded island, it examines love, evil, miracles, organized religion (the institution vs. the belief system) and being true to yourself. This story is told almost exclusively from the viewpoint of Juliette, a gypsy & itinerant player who hides away in a nunnery with her young daughter after a brush with the law. Regardless of whether you like her or agree with her, Juliette is a vivid and real character that is hard to stop reading about.

The world as I see it is one where there are few easy answers, and knowing yourself and being true to that self offer the only chance of retaining one’s sanity and still being happy. Juliette loves the wrong man, makes poor decisions and doesn’t always do the right thing – but loves with her whole heart, and cares for all of the people she loves to the very best of her not-inconsiderable abilities. When put in an impossible situation, she strays pretty far outside the box to protect her friends and her daughter, and even punish the bad guys a little. The ending is left up to the reader, no easy answers and no plot tied up in a neat package – another preference of mine. No one’s story has a precise beginning or ending, and I prefer fiction that knows how to end a book without a metaphorical ‘they lived happily ever after.’ This one didn’t have the emphasis on food that her other books had (at least, the ones I’ve read), but the mood is powerfully rendered and hard to leave behind.

Coastliners might have been a fine book if I hadn’t been comparing it to Harris’s other work. It certainly is not a bad book, by any stretch. Good characters, setting was unique, interesting and well-written, plot was effective. I think what was missing – for me, at least – was a powerful theme. All of Harris’s other books have a guiding focus that uses every plot twist, character flaw and detail of setting to support her message. In contrast, Coastliners read more like a great summer read without too much depth to it. Of course, in comparison to a true ‘summer read’ kind of book (I’m thinking of something like Evanovich or Shopaholic-type reads) this one is plenty deep. Mado is a young woman returning to the island she called home as a child after her mother dies. Her reclusive father still lives there, and she’s soon caught up in the drama of the haves vs. the have-nots on the island. My favorite thing about the book? Harris has two nuns that were inspired by Charles de Lint’s Crow Girls! I love it when the strange pieces of my life intersect.

I am currently revisiting my obsession with The Wheel of Time, after reading the latest book. Suddenly, not spending so much time on the computer…

Fangirl Post: Michael Chabon

First, I should probably apologize for letting almost A MONTH go by with no posts. I have no excuse for ignoring all (two) of you fine people for that long. I have, maybe, one-week’s worth of excuse – I wrote my first official book review for Bookbrowse.com two weeks ago! I will blog about The Children’s Book after that review is published, and put a link up so you all can check it out. With any luck, my bio on their site will encourage two more people to find me out here in the interwebs. Won’t I be special then? Now, to business.

Michael Chabon (pronounced Shay-bon, as I learned this week) is a crazy good writer. I first saw the name after watching the film, Wonder Boys (starring Michael Douglas, Tobey Maguire, Frances McDormand, and the ever-fabulous Robert Downey, Jr.), which was based on his second (published) novel (which is about the experience of writing his second [unpublished] novel, which sucked hard-core). I loved the movie and (as usual) went looking for more quality entertainment by the same guy. His first novel (Mysteries of Pittsburgh) was good, but it was The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay that made me a die-hard fan. Not only great writing and superb story-telling, but a comic-book-history theme and the obligatory gay sub-plot! But don’t take my word for it – he won a Pulitzer for that one. I’ve since read all his novels and a few of his short stories, eagerly awaiting each new gem.

This is a writer who just gets better and better. Some of his latest stuff (The Final Solution, Gentlemen of the Road) has been short novellas with great story – but the language is better than great, it is extraordinary. I just want to dive in and swim around in the words and phrases and sentences forever and ever. And he’s only two years older than me (and apparently happily married <sigh>). He should have a few more decades to be cranking this stuff out.

One of the dozens of reasons I moved to Portland was because there was so much cool stuff going on here. Case in point – a reading by Michael Chabon! Free at Powell’s! His new book! Book-geek heaven hosts book-geek-idol extraordinaire! And did I mention it was free? And less than five miles from my house? At the coolest bookstore on the planet? (sorry Title Wave, but it’s true). Of course, I was going. But, I must admit I was worried. What if he was lame in person? What if he spoke like that guy on the Clear-Eyes commercials? What if he was stiff and boring and ruined my future reading pleasure with his lameness? I shudder to think.

Thankfully, he was everything I hoped he would be. I’d seen photos, so I knew he was reasonably attractive (one worry down, dozens to go). But he was funny and humble and sexy and teasing and witty, and human while being utterly adorable. And he really did look a lot like Michael Douglas did in the film. He read two essays from his new book which were marvelously written and slyly thought-provoking while making us laugh out loud (me and my 200 best book-geek friends). All in all, a perfect first-run of the author visit circuit at Powell’s, and confirmation that my author-love is not misplaced.

This week – Barbara Ehrenreich comes to town.

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.