A Roundup of My Summer:
Water Books
- Barron, Sandra Rodriguez. The Heiress of Water. NY: Harper Perennial, 2006
- Bilal, Parker. Dark Water: A Makana Mystery. NY: Bloomsbury, 2017.
- Callahan Henry, Patti. The Bookshop At The Water’s End. NY: Berkley/Penguin Random House, 2017.
- Camilleri, Andrea. The Shaper of Water. NY: Penguin Books, 2005
- Cleeves, Ann. Dead Water: A Shetland Mystery. NY: Minotaur Books, 2014.
- Cuomo, George. Trial By Water. NY: Random House, 1993.
- Del Toro, Guillermo. The Shape Of Water. NY: Feiwel and Friends, 2018.
- Esquivel, Laura. Like Water For Chocolate: a novel in monthly installments, with recipes, romances, and home remedies. NY: Anchor Books, 1995.
- Finch, Charles. The Woman In The Water. NY: Minotaur Books, 2018.
- Gruen, Sara. At The Water’s Edge. NY: Spiegel & Grau, 2015.
- Gruen, Sara. Water For Elephants. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 2007.
- Harrison, DeSales. The Waters & The Wild. NY: Random House, 2018.
- Hawkins, Paula. Into The Water. NY: Riverhead Books, 2017
- Gregson, J.M. Too Much Of Water. England: Severn House, 2015.
- Lamb, Wally. We are Water. NY: Harper, 2013.
- Locke, Attica. Black Water Rising. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2009.
- Moore, Jean P. Water On The Moon. Berkeley, CA: She Writes Press, 2014
- Nesbitt, John D. Good Water. Five Star Publishing, 2016.
- Sauma, Luiza. Flesh And Bone And Water. NY: Scribner, 2017.
- Steadman, Catherine. Something In The Water. NY: Ballantine Books, 2018.
- Stracher, Cameron. Water Wars. ILL: Sourcebooks, 2011.
- Suzuki, Koji. Dark Water. NY: Vertical, 2006.
In Japan, I grew up
riding a ferry to and from a mainland and though the body of water is
different, the feel of the Governors Island ferry is the same. The distance between the Manhattan Ferry terminal
to Governors Island is only 800 yards, much shorter than crossing the Japanese
Inland Sea, but I still walked upon patched together diamond plate and smelled
the same diesel fumes from trucks on board.
There is a high school on Governors Island and on my first morning
commute, a teen told me about his life plans of getting the hell out of New
York City when he graduates from the Harbor School. He will work on a tanker as
a mechanic and sail to and from Japan.
My Japanese mother is a
Christian blip in a sea of Buddhists, and because of this, my name was lifted
out of the Christian Bible- Psalm 23rd to be exact. Everyone knows this Biblical poem, even if
you are Hindu, Muslim or Atheist. It is the one recited at memorials and in every
movie funeral.
The lord is my Shepard I shall not want.
He maketh me lie down in green pastures
He leadeth me beside still waters
bla bla bla…
My birth name “Migiwa” is a literal translation of
“beside still waters” in Japanese, and so I decided to read as many novels with
the word “Water” in the title for my summer task. There is a lot of water imagery in
Christianity. Baptisms, renewal,
rebirth, cleansing away of the wrongs of humanity, and this is what I had hoped
to encounter in the books I chose to read whilst sitting in the abandoned
library in house #5 on the island.
However, this is not at all the water imagery I encountered in the books
at my reading table. For example, I
found that the British like to kill off people, mostly women and dump them into
watery graves.
The first book I picked
up for my summer project which I subtitled “the self-imposed island isolation
sentence” was by Paula Hawkins; the same author that wrote The Girl on the Train. This
recently published book titled, Into the
Water, was just as dark, and structurally similar to the earlier train
mystery, with unreliable narrators and chapters divided by individual inner
dialogue; a bit of a gimmick I felt, but it was easy to decipher the macabre
tale.
In present day Beckford,
a small town outside of London, Jules tries to find out if her sister Nel had
committed suicide, or was it murder? She claimed “there are people who are
drawn to water, who retain some vestigial primal sense of where it flows.…place
of ecstasy, could be for others a place of dread and terror.” So the water
beckons various characters, like a siren’s song.
It is hard to give a
quick synopsis of this convoluted tale, as there are several wrongs and crimes
happening at once. The surprise ending,
(as with the Train book) was not as shocking as it could have been. At the core of the tale, drowning witches
from history are intertwined with present day women who have been thought to
have committed suicides. Unwanted,
problematic, slutty women, or so the community labels them have perished in the
waters. In Beckford, water has an ominous, sinister, foreboding quality. It conjures up witches and brought up
memories of sitting in Jury Duty watching the video of Judge Judith Kay kindly informing
the good citizens about the history of the judicial system. Women were once accused of being witches and
instead of the civilized trials we have today, their fates rested on whether
they would sink or swim- literally. The
accused were tied up and thrown into icy rivers and lakes, and if the women
sank, they were thought to be innocent, but ironically died from drowning
anyway.
In Charles Finch’s The Woman in the Water (prequel to the
Charles Lenox Series), the setting is 1850 London. The upper-class Charles
Lenox, and his trusty valet Graham, live in a flat with their no nonsense
housekeeper Mrs. Huggens. Sir Richard
Mayne, the head of Scotland Yard with his two unlikeable and jaded underlings
are investigating a perfect crime. The
body of water at the center of this tale is the river Thames where two bodies
were found. It could not be any more
similar to Sherlock Holmes, and because this is a British tale with a watery
center, references to Shakespeare’s Ophelia are abundant.
The Brits seem to love mystery series, and in Too Much of
Water: A Lambert and Hook Mystery, J.M.
Gregson shows us another crime. In Gloucester, England, superintendent
John Lambert and detective sergeant Bert Hook, investigate another murder. This
time, a body has been dumped into the River Severn. The narrative jumped around
from character to character, told from third person omniscient and created
doubt about each suspect the detectives encountered. Again Ophelia is presented
to the reader.
A bit further north, I was taken to the Shetland Islands, to the Voe-
the narrow bay of the Orkney and Shetland islands within the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea. In Anne Cleeves’ Dead Water, a man named Jerry Markham
is murdered and it is up to retired inspector Jimmy Perez to sort it out with
his partner Willow Reeves from the mainland. It was a tale with many red
herrings, involving environmental themes, amidst blackmail and politics, but in
the end, the crime was committed because of love.
Dark Water: A Makana
Mystery by Parker Bilal was an international spy thriller similar to Ian
Fleming’s James Bond series, but with a culturally diverse twist. At the center is Makana, a Sudanese private
investigator. As with the typical Bond style genre, there is also a petty crook
turned terrorist leader (Jordanian), Secret intelligence agent (British),
chemical weapons expert, computer hacker, and a well connected entrepreneur
(Turkish), all engaged in a labyrinthine plot involving back-stabbing,
kidnapping and revenge conspiracies. The action took place near the Nile River
& the Bosporus Strait, which separates the Black sea from the Marmara Sea.
I realized early on that the daughter in the prologue was alive (not dead) but
other than that, I was lost because there were so many convoluted plot lines
and characters double-crossing one another.
Catherine
Steadman’s debut novel Something in the
Water, was the last British murder mystery in my stack. The story started
out in London but traveled to Bora Bora where the crime was committed. Written in the form of a diary with dated
chapter titles, attractive protagonist Erin Roberts makes ridiculous choices during
her honeymoon with her attractive husband.
But because the story was so easy to read (like the ease of mindlessly
watching television), I somehow ended up rooting for Erin even though she was
so shortsighted and laughable. The pacing was similar to a film script as the
story started in October during mid-conflict and went back and forth in time,
like a Tarantino film mixed with Bridget
Jones’ Diary. There is a surprising
ending, well you could spot it a mile away but still somehow the ending was
satisfying.
Speaking of cinematic chick-lit, Sara Gruen’s At the Water’s Edge took me to Scotland in the 1940s. There was a death, three in fact, but this
was not a murder mystery at all. The characters were three upper-class
Philadelphians with British roots: beautiful Maddie (Madeline Penneypacker) the
protagonist, her reputation tarnished due to her insane mother who had
committed suicide (yet another watery suicidal death of a beautiful woman akin
to Ophelia), Ellis Hyde, her selfish, cowardly husband, and his best friend
Hank. They travel to Glen Urquhart, Scotland on a cargo ship during the war. Similar to the white whale in Moby Dick, the trio
go on a search for the Loch-ness monster.
The two careless, spoiled, wealthy man-childs, dodge the war by escaping
their petty problems in Philadelphia. Their
insensitivity and disregard for other humans is sickening, and the worse of the
two men, get what is coming to him with the help of the River Ness. This story is full of superstitions and
magical thinking, and an engaging tale, but I was a bit disappointed by this
second book by Sara Gruen with Water in it’s title.
The first book I read by Ms. Gruen was Water for Elephants, which had been sitting on my bedside table for
so long that I’d forgotten it was there.
Inviting myself to finally read this book was wonderful because Water for Elephants was everything the
other book was not; historical fiction with a cast of sympathetic characters
who travel with a fictional circus much like Barnum and Bailey during the
depression, traversing the country on a circus train. However this engaging
story did not revolve around actual water.
The only mention was in the beginning of the story when one man in a
nursing home asks the protagonist “Do
you know how much an elephant drinks?” and Jacob Jankowski, the veterinarian
storyteller proceeds to tell a gigantic tale, involving an elephant.
The Shape of Water:
The First Inspector Montlbano Mystery by Andrea Camilleri took place on Sicily in
the Tyrrhenian Sea. An important man is found dead,
seemingly of natural causes but Inspector Montalbano has other ideas. There are a lot of characters with Italian
names making it difficult to keep everyone straight. There are Feliniesque
characters of small town life, the mention of mafia gangs, and of course because
this is an Italian story, food is important and mensioned often. The title comes from a parable told by the
detective to the deceased man’s wife:
“I had a little friend, a
peasant boy, who was younger than me. I
was about ten. One day I saw that my
friend had put a bowl, a cup, a teapot, and a square milk carton on the edge of
a well, had filled them all with water, and was looking at them attentively.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked him.
And he answered me with a question in turn.
‘What shape is water?’
‘Water doesn’t have any shape!’ I said, laughing. ‘It takes the shape you give it.’”
The second book I read titled
The Shape of Water was by Guillermo
Del Toro and Daniel Kraus and is better known than the Montalbano series in
this country because it won last years Oscar for best picture. I saw the movie first then discovered that it
was a book written by the director, and expected it to be a screenplay, and was
pleasantly surprised to find a book better than the movie with fleshed out secondary
characters. I got the best of both as I saw the scenes from the film in my
minds eye, as I read. Del Toro, along
with his co-writer Kraus creates scenes of vivid colors of greens and teals,
with other sickening shades of green, not blue.
The featured bodies of water are the Amazon River, rivers in Baltimore,
and a confined tank in the government laboratory. Water is both a cleanser of filth made by
humans and a habitat for all living things inside and out. Each chapter
alternates from the viewpoint of a different character; Strickland the government
antagonist, Eliza a mute, her neighbor Giles, wife of Strickland Lainie, and a Russian
spy named Hoffstetler. In the last
section, three short chapters are written from the point of view of the sea
creature, which totally threw me off as the grammatical structure and
punctuation did not make any sense. I’m
sure the writing was trying to feel stream of consciousness, as the creature
does not speak.
The moment I finished
this book, I saw an alert on my phone about flooding in Baltimore due to heavy
rains, and that some of my Facebook friends living in the area had marked
themselves as “safe”. Art imitating
life.
Skip a few decades
forward and set partially in the same Amazon jungle where Del Toro’s sea
creature was captured, I find Luiza Sauma’s Flesh
and Bone and Water. It is a story I have read and seen in movies before, a
story of class differences and forbidden love; yes it sounds like a daytime
drama (and in fact the characters watched these telenovelas in the book), but
the setting of Brazilian small towns and Marajo islands made the story seem new
to me. The narration begins in the present when Andre, a 45-year-old physician
receives a letter from someone in his past (think Cinema Paradiso). Here he begins to tell his story from age 17
the time after his mother’s death. Water
appears not only in river form, as a watery grave, but also of the heavy
oppressive jungle climate and sweat. The
title of the book: Flesh and Bone and Water
is revealed at the very end of the book:
“Bia
(Andre’s daughter) is a strong swimmer and is soon far ahead- just a black dot
in the water, which is cool, calm and heavenly.
Will I ever swim here again? NO.
Just in my dreams. I lie on my back and float,
as I did back then, and I almost feel the same.
Just flesh and bone and water, just another animal, another Indian
swimming in the Amazon.”
In Attica Locke’s Black Water
Rising, a murder takes place in Houston, in the Buffalo Bayou. This film noir style writing of a black civil
rights lawyer to try and get justice was believable, suspenseful and layered in
it’s telling. The water in the setting
is black and ominous, but the black protagonists are honest and powerful and
tries to overcome oppression, corporate greed and corruption.
I was
reminded of one thing as I read Jean P. Moore’s book Water on the Moon, and that was to avoid books by unknown
publishers. This one was created by She Writes Press. In this story, a plane crashes into house
that had been in the Ravina family for generations, which begins a search for
Lidia’s family past. The “water on the moon” of the title is used only as a
metaphor for the hidden good things in life. It only enters the story because
the day the plane crashed into Lidia’s home, a rocket crashed on the Moon,
which had been looking for water. Water
on the Moon was a predictable romance disguised
as a mystery, with a disappointing ending.
Good Water, by John D. Nesbitt,
was another book published by an unknown press.
Tommy Reeves and Red Armstrong are ranch hands working for a racist landowner
who hates Mexicans. The body of water is
the Graybull River that feeds the reservoir that is controlled by white
ranchers. I thought this would be best
for middle schoolers as a discussion starter for race relations and
environmental issues, and all the explanation of Mexican food preparation and
meals was informative.
The other YA book in my stack was The
Water Wars by Cameron Stracher. In a
future dystopic American Mid-West, the map of North America has been redrawn in
accordance to the availability of scarce or non-existent water. The coastline
has been eroded by global warming or was taken away by greedy governments. Most of Florida and Louisiana are gone. There are water pirates. In this landscape, a
brother and sister try to survive by looking for a kid who is a diviner that
can find water deep in the earth. This book frighteningly shows the trajectory of
this country and how man is destroying valuable commodities. It is every dystopic story rolled into one
from Mad Max to the Hunger Games.
Meanwhile,
in a small town somewhere in Massachusetts, Florian Rubio’s son Brian is
implicated at the center of a drowning in George Como’s Trial By Water. This poorly
constructed story uses fictional Bottleneck Lake as a metaphor for a dying
organism being killed off by man, which paralleled the teenage crime. The book
had some interesting themes but due to the unsympathetic characters and
unrealistic dialogue it was totally not worth the time to read.
In
Sandra Rodriguez Barron’s The Heiress of
Water, the Pacific Ocean is not a dumping ground but a place that gives
life for a change. The narrative paces back and forth between 1970s El Salvador
and present day Connecticut. This
medical love story, with scientific facts that guides the narrative seemed so
far fetched that I had to keep looking up the research to validate the author’s
details, and indeed they were true. The
story was a bit schmaltzy, but the science was interesting enough for me to
solder on to the end.
A Yeats
poem anchors the narrative in DeSales Harrison’s The Waters & The Wild. By this time, I was using Ophelia as an
adjective: as in, there were many “Ophelianic” suicides- Miriam in the River
Loire (Nevers, France), Daniel also fated to parish in same river as Miriam,
and their daughter Jessica in the “Ophelianic” bathtub. There was abundant water imagery here beyond
the watery grave but also in the tears shed by grief, the “flood of death”, and
in time people got over their troubles just as “water finds its level”. I won’t say any more, as there is a surprise
ending.
I usually avoid
collections of short stories because they are just, well, too short. I get confused reading one story after
another in quick succession, but since it was summer and summertime makes me
nostalgic for Japan, I settled on Koji Suzuki’s Dark Water. I was excited to read this book primarily because it is
written by a Japanese author, and water inevitably has to be a central
character or backdrop when setting stories on this island nation. I chose to
read these short stories only on the ferry.
Cue nostalgic string
music: the Prologue and Epilogue introduces a grandmother telling stories to
her granddaughter, and ties the last story back to the present. This collection includes seven unrelated
eerie stories with water involved. The structure
is similar to Arnold Lobel’s children’s book Mouse Soup, where there are
stories inside one larger story. Here, the sea is a depository of human garbage
and waste, as well as a keeper of stories, where the objects found floating on
the surface become illustrations for the gruesome tales.
1.
Floating Water
There
are bits floating around in a glass of water that comes out of the tap in a new
high-rise apartment that a single mother (YOSHIMI Matsubara) and her daughter
(Ikuko) occupy. There is some mystery
about the place, and later is assumed that the missing child from the past has
ended up in the water tower on the roof of the building and everyone has been
drinking, bathing in and washing with bits of the girl.
2.
Solitary Isle
A
teacher (Kensuke Suehiro) had a childhood friend (Toshihiro Aso), who brags
about taking an ex-girlfriend (Yukari Nakazawa)to a deserted island and leaving
her there while pregnant. The teacher
goes back to this island with a mentor (headmaster Sasaki), called Battery No.
6 nine years later, and encounters a wild child.
3.
The Hold
A
brutish and abusive conger eel fisherman (Hiroyuki Inagaki) with a history of
family abuse beats his wife (Nanako) and his timid son (Katsumi). He kills his
wife in a drunken stupor, and forgets his evil deed until it is too late.
4.
Dream Cruise
Masayuki
Enoyoshi is taken on a yacht ride by the Ushijimas to be recruited into a
pyramid scheme. The boat stalls and cannot be restarted again. Ushijima dives in to see if he can release,
what ever is stuck on the propellers and believes that a little boy is caught
in the mechanics of the boat.
5.
Adrift
Kazuo,
a lifelong seafaring man is on his last tuna-fishing voyage going home, when
his ship encounters an abandoned haunted yacht, empty of its 4 passengers.
6.
Watercolors
Kiyohara,
an inhumane performance manager/director, actress Noriko Kikuchi, Yuichi
Kamiya, fired actor, now relegated to being a sound mixers assistant, all seem
to be in a play within a play, of the horror nature. Water leaking from the top floor slowly drips
to the lower floors.
7.
Forest Under the Sea
Fumihiko
Sugiyama and Sakakibara are spelunking when they become trapped inside the
cave. Twenty years later, Sugiyama’s son
returns to the cave where his father perished.
Laficato Hearn’s writing
was definitely in the periphery as I read all of these eerie tales written by
the same author who wrote The Ring. There is an old Japanese folk tale called
Urashima Taro and the Princess of the Sea, which illustrates the sea as
a place for treasures, and the tortoise is the denizen of the water who needs human
protection. I could spend another few months analyzing each novel, tracing them
back to fairytales or folktales, but perhaps this is a project for the winter.
April 10, 2018
Some Luck
by Jane Smiley
Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2014
395 pages
Early Warning
by Jane Smiley
Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2015
476 pages
Golden Age
by Jane Smiley
Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2015
443 pages
Once I asked Hiro, as I was sadly finishing up a book,
"Don't you hate it when a good story comes to an end?"
and his reply was
"yeah, that's why I read series"
And thus I began the trilogy unfolding of a farming family in Iowa.
An
epic tale of one family called Langdon, that takes place over three
volumes. Part one titled Some Luck begins with Walter and Rosanna
Langdon in 1920 as they are starting out with their first child, Frank
on during hard times right before the depression.
When a
book begins not with a prologue but a family tree, you know you will
be in for a tale full of fascinating characters, and it was reassuring
to see the layout of the family, orderly and parallel lives plotted
neatly as I flipped back and fourth to this chart as I anticipated each
member's future.
The book is laid out in short
chapters, each one spanning only one year. It was comforting to read
about a time where everyone's place in the family, and society was
determined already. On the farm, women were at home having babies and
taking care of the house, while the men were out in the fields, riding
their horses, plowing the crops. There were conflicts and problems, but
mostly it was man against nature, not man (and women) against each
other. Life just was.
Here is an example of life back
before electricity, little Frank Langdon age 7, walking home alone from
school, before iPhones, before arming elementary school teachers:
"Mama
was walking back and forth in the front room with Lillian (the baby) in
her arms, watching for him out the window, as she did every afternoon.
He only had to walk a quarter-mile on his own, and that was on the
road- the rest of the way, he walked with Minnie, Matthew Graham, and
Leona Graham, who was thirteen...From the schoolhouse to the Grahams'
was through the fields, but Mr. Graham took the horses out and stamped
down the snow for them. With Minnie, he went another bit, and then
Minnie's ma, in her apron, watched him until he was well on his way and
could see his own barn. "
The sense of community was strong and each member of the community had their own unspoken part, out of responsibility.
Smiley,
cleverly writes from each individual family members point of view;
whether it be the patriarch Walter or the small child Frankie. All
personal narratives are believable and as a parent, I could see both
sides of an idea.
Farming and working the land in
1930's was hot as hell, summer temperatures reaching into the 100s for
weeks on end. It was the time of Walker Evens photos,
the great dust bowl and depression, but people made due with the
strength of family. Looking back into history has its advantages. Even
as people starve, and wells run dry, we know what happens next in
history, soon there will be a war and farmers will persevere.
There
are many children, and each are fleshed out with their unique
characteristics and traits, and not hard to keep track of. The first
book spans 30 years following first Walter and Rosanna, then slowly as
we go to war with the oldest son, Frankie, we shift perspective to their
children's generation. Then again in 1952, the narration changes from
the point of view of the next generation, as the last chapter leaves us
devastated over the death of a primary character.
The
First book introduces us to the first Langdon generation and goes
through the most physical change in the world. The hardships are
palpable- with droughts, working the land, worry about starvation. Life
was much more physical. There were no cars, no electricity, no phones,
no Monsanto, no harmful pesticides. It really laid out the inner
workings of family, and as a unit, how they tried to survive.
The
second book, (like the Harry Potter series),reaches outward, and brings
the characters outside of their small town. The 2nd generation begins
to get more involved with the world, they travel, become interested and
tangled up with politics, world events. They have more time, more
leisure to look inward as well, and that leisure gets them into
trouble. The 2nd generation is consumed with affairs, drugs, therapy,
and depression.
Smiley paints pictures with her
writing, no matter who or where she is telling us about; a ranch in
California, the desserts of Iraq. winters in Chicago or riding a bicycle
to work in Washington DD.
This is a story that shows
us the "big picture" of like, the characters are related by strong ties
of relations and blood, even if they only meet one another once in 10
years.
In book 3, I began to see some tricks Smiley
uses as sort of cliff hangers from the ending of one chapter to
another. for example: At the end of 1999 Charlie goes for a trek in the
wilderness alone:
"He lengthened his stride...Was it strange
that he had given so little thought to the future,that he was so
engrossed in the next few steps that he had forgotten about the cliff at
the end of the path? It felt good to walk, though. Good, possibly,
to be dismissed and given up on. ..And then thought that maybe this was
the first real thought of the rest of his life."
Readers
will probably think with an ending of a chapter like that, that we will
never see Charlie again, but it was a little nothing.
or
in
1994 Frank (now in his 70s) is flying cross country in a small jet. As
the plane hits bad weather, we think this will be it for Frank. The
storm is bad, and they barely make it through. After they land, I
sighed a sigh of relief that Frank would continue for a few more
chapters as he exits the plane and
"walked toward the edge of the
runway to take a piss, thinking how utterly familiar the landscape was
to him, not only how it looked, but also the scent of the rain and the
dirt and the summer vegetation. He unzipped his fly."
Then the next moment there is a phone call to his wife Andy and we hear something awful has happened. Tricks.
The
biggest takeaway I had from the epic story was that people are
basically born with their personalities intact. The disposition of a
baby can easily be seen in their character as adults. I see that with
Hiro as well as a lot of his friends.
One of the more
humorous (but true probably) metaphors of farming, or the evolution of
farming from family owned instinctual way of farming to the scientific,
Monsanto pesticide ridden back to going organic...life going full
circle.
"In principle, Jesse should not have been
opposed to these changes. Hadn't he always been the one to advocate for
the most precise, the most efficient, the most scientific,
noninstinctual methods? Hadn't he been very patient with his father,
with the stories about the chickens and hogs and the dairy cows, the
oats and the horses, and wetting your finger in your mouth and holding
it out in front of you to test the direction of the wind? Hadn't he
been a little thrilled when he referred to everything about the farm as
"inputs" and "results"? But he was sixty. Maybe every sixty-year-old
deplored change, said that things had gone too far, recalled the good
old days of whatever?
One last metaphor:
Weeds
always grew fast and produced seed almost instantly. Corn and beans
and, for that matter, peas, tomatoes, zucchini, and peppers, were the
slowpokes, rather like educated couples who produced a single precious
child when they were in their thirties.
As I began
getting toward the end of 2010 in the book, I realized that Smiley was
going to have to cover a few years into the future. One of the
characters becomes a congressman, and another is deeply entrenched in
the financial crisis. There is a lot of the world, current events that
has created and affected the characters. There is mention of Clinton,
Lewinsky, scandals, Obama, Iraq. The book was published in 2015 which
means, even if she was writing up to the month of publication, there was
no way that Smiley could even foresee what would happen with Asshole
Trump in office. I began getting nervous how the future 3 years would be
laid out. There is not one mention of Donald Trump in any of the
books, not even as a news worthy tidbit item. How could one write about
the last 2 years without living through it?
February 15, 2018
Nick Hornby
Riverhead Books, 1995
323 pages
Yesterday one of my students told me he is binge-watching
Dynasty. Wait, WHAT???? Isn’t that
80’s decadent glamour soap? Yeah,
he says, it’s a remake. I just
read an article in something about how there are so many remakes of 80’s and
90‘s TV shows; One Day at a time- with an updated Latina cast, Fuller House- older same cast without
the twins, Will and Grace, older and still gay, but less taboo of being
gay. This is happening because the
people who grew-up watching these shows are now the producers and executives of
television, and thus the nostalgia of their youth are being relived for the
next generation. But really,
Dynasty?
So in the same nostalgic vein, I re-read another book from
my past: Nick Hornby’s High
Fidelity. Then continuing on my nostalgic track, I re-watched the movie with
the same title, starring John Cusack and Jack Black. This is the equivalent of chick-lit for dudes,
dude-lit. Making top five lists,
angst of relationship foibles, slacker dude being unsure of his future along
with his oddball friends, sleeping around, etc.
This book, just like Catcher in the Rye, is a period piece,
and seemed very sophomoric to revisit in my middle age years. The movie however, was enjoyable to
watch, (especially Jack Black in his breakout roll) even though the setting had
changed from London to Chicago.
The Bad-AssLibrarians of Timbuktu, and their race to save the world’s most preciousmanuscripts.
February 12, 2018
By Joshua
Hammer
Simon &
Schuster
2016
This is
what I knew off hand about Mali:
That Ali Farka Toure is/was from there. I started listening to his music- back when it was called “world
music” when I used to frequent SOB’s with Christine. I liked the music, but
never really researched the people who made the music.
This is
what I knew about Timbuktu: a remote location often compared to bum-fuck, as in
I never see them anymore, they moved out to Timbuktu…or they moved out to
bum-fuck. Sad western education.
Africa is a
continent, not a country, and must be reminded of often, even if it is a common
slip of the tongue, and we should know better. So I did not know much about Timbuktu.
As I wrote
in my Holiday card this year, we are destined to repeat our horrible histories,
and this book really proves that point.
500 years before the Nazis destroyed books there was a
highly civilized literate society
in Timbuktu. The books that were being destroyed were not just paperbacks with
risqué materials in them, nor even
printed Gutenberg style books.
The books we are talking about were the hand scribed and meticulously
illuminated one of a kind books, and these books were hidden in ditches, holes
dug in the desert sand, in caves and people‘s backyards to be hidden from the
religious madmen, it’s always religion that creates stupidity isn’t it?. Imagine digging out a 13th century illuminated
manuscript in your backyard.
page 212
Timbuktu as
a paragon of moderation and intellectual ferment that had fallen victim to a
once-in-a- millennium conflagration.
Timbuktu had witnessed the killings of scholars by the Emperor Sunni Ali
in the 1300s, the rise of the anti-Semitic preacher Muhammed Al Maghili in the
1490s, the edicts of King Askia Mohammed banning and imprisoning Jews during
that same decade, and the implementation of Shariah law in Timbuktu by the
jihadis in the early and mid-1800s.
…constant state of flux, periods of openness and liberalism followed by
waves of intolerance and repression…anti-intellectualism, religious
purification, and barbarism had coursed through the city repeatedly over the
preceding five centuries.”
Those in
power rewrite history to make their point, progress their ideas, make excuses
for their bad behavior. The white
men who kidnapped a culture of Africans to become enslaved lied to themselves,
and those around them to justify their actions.
for example:
Western
white men declared that “Negroes….to be naturally inferior to the whites, no
ingenious manufactures among them, no arts, no sciences”
Hegel (remember that philosopher we were
forced to read in 1st year philosophy class?) said “Africa had no
indigenous system of writing, no historical memory, and no civilization. (they are) Unhistorical,
Undeveloped."
The untrue
absence of books and literature in the African continent proved that Negros
were savages, and thus ok to enslave them.
The Bad-Ass
Librarians of Timbuktu knew a different fact. One man in particular, Abdel Kader Haidara, was entrusted
with his fathers library of manuscripts, a large portion of them were
illuminated scribed texts on astronomy, medicine, and other sciences that were
written 1300-1400s. Haidara and
his colleagues knew that if these books were destroyed, the history of his
country would be as well.
I learned a
lot about this part of the world, all the fucked up shit that happens with
religious fundamentalists, the conflict of ideals within each religion and the
amazing history of one African nation, and made me think what else was going on
in the vast continent. This amount
of scholarly research, and literacy couldn’t have been isolated only to
Mali. There must have been so many
other pockets of civilization that existed and probably wiped out before
Europeans could discover it.
Sad, so
sad.
February 4, 2018
Vintage Books, 2000
448pgs
A huge undertaking of a debut novel, this paperback edition has moved with
my library many times. I don't even remember how the story ended when I
picked it up again last month, thought I did remember the hilarious
beginning, and could see in my minds eye, the Halal butcher wielding his knife
at the mess of pigeons.
The unearthed bookmark in it, is a boarding pass from JFK to Heathrow
Airport, sometime in March, of what year I am also not certain. But I
deduce that at the time of this first reading, I was dating an American
sculptor who had grown-up in England (Ealing to be exact) and I must have been
going to visit his family for spring break and though I visited the Romer
family often, I’m sure we probably broke up not too long after I read this
book. Because of these visits, I realize, Ealing has always been a ramshackle,
immigrant filled neighborhood, even though Zadie Smith's narrative takes place
in Willesden Green, six miles from Ealing.
I’d forgotten all the “big” issues, that were contained in this book. Colonialism, Cross racial marriages and
friendships, war buddies hashing over their youth in a Irish-named Arab owned
bar, history of the Pakistani uprising against the British, conflicts of
religion (mainly Hindus, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Muslim fundamentalists called
KEVIN with an unfortunate acronym problem), genetic engineering, animal rights
activists, issues of children of immigrant parents, separation of twins, and so
much more. The whole time as I read, I
was amazed at how such a young author (age 25 at the time of publishing) could
tackle so much and write from so many different viewpoints.
Though the writing was a pleasure to ingest, it was hard for me to keep up,
and I could sense many chapters as being submitted to the New Yorker as stand
alone chapters for the young fiction issues.
I reserved a few more Zadie Smith books from the library; Swing Time the
most recently published book now sits on my nightstand. Then I remember that I had vowed not to read
any books by one author in a row. Last
year I spent most of my reading time going through all the books written by a
single author in one go, and found it to be too confusing: Richard Russo- The Bridge of Sighs, Empire
Falls, Nobody’s Fool, That Old Cape Magic….and after the third book, I found
myself getting thoroughly confused at which characters belonged in which
book. The tone of writing was so
familiar that timelines and characters easily became jumbled in my mind; Lucy
from The Bridge of Sighs could easily have been cavorting with Miles Roby. Even the most disparate settings and reading
audiences from one author such as JK Rowling could get mixed up; Casual Vacancy
and Harry Potter, one being a grown up version of the other…though reading
Rowling through the eyes of her pseudonym Robert Galbraith was a bit different
in tone.
I’ve just realized that unconsciously, and unpurposefully, I’ve been reading
books that take place in England. (With
Hiro, I’ve been reading Neil Gaiman; Coroline and now The Graveyard Book)
Random House, 2017
306 pgs
Another British import, this novel was plowed through in a
single day. Just as the title suggests,
it was a lovely weaving of music throughout the narrative, classical, jazz,
blues, classic rock, pop, everything.
The author writes as she speaks, starting thoughts and sentences, but
leaving them unfinished for you to guess at and later understand. The location is an old dodgy street, and has
the small town feel of the little shop around the corner. It is a book that will probably mention Nick Hornby’s
High Fidelity in every review, though instead of mixed tapes, we have a lover of vinyl. The
soundtrack is great, though after reading this book, you can’t listen to it as
background music, it must be paid attentioned to while lying on the floor with your eyes closed.
Goodbye Vitamin: A Novel by Rachel Khong.
As generation X, which I am a part of, gets older, we are
given a new title: Some of us are now renamed the Sandwich
Generation because we are caught between two tasks; caring for our
own children as we juggle to care for our parents. The question is always: how can I continue
taking care of this Benjamin Button-like creature, while hustling to research middle school
applications at the same time? The vitamin at the title of this book we say goodbye to, is going down the hatch…hoping it
will keep memory loss at bay.
Rachel Khong's book is structured in the form of a journal of
sorts. It lays out one year in the life
of Ruth, (starting on December 26th) the protagonist marking her
days, starting with the moment her father’s pants are found in a tree. He is beginning to lose his memory, and thus
Ruth moves back home to her childhood home to help out. The prognosis points to Alzheimer’s. In her journal, there are flashbacks to her (delusional)
happy life with an ex-boyfriend. There
are journal entries written by the father, about Ruth as a child; precocious
and adorable like:
Today when you lost a
tooth, you cried that you looked like a pumpkin. When I told you to behave, you
said “I am being HAVE!”
This story takes a big problem happening in one family’s
life and breaks it down into small obstacles.
Their problem is not historic, it does not span a large swath of
time. It is written from the personal,
the interior and very much alone.
This is Rachel Khong’s first novel. It got rave
reviews. It’s good but, it’s no White
Teeth by Zadie Smith; though there were some funny bits, like thoughtfully funny,
introspectively funny.
The narrative slowly unfolds hidden in a collection of
random facts and trivia.
It poses the question: what happens when we become our
parent’s parent? When our parents become
children? And halfway into Ruth’s year at home, June 11th to be
exact, the role reversal becomes obvious, and Ruth begins to mimic the journal
entries of her father. Anecdotes are
cute when describing the behavior of a toddler, but when those same stories
depict one's own parent’s actions, it is heartbreaking.
Off to re-read White Teeth next.
Last books read in 2017-
Finished first thing in 2018 as I lay congested and
snurfling in bed:
The Art of Asking; or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help, by Amanda Palmer
I love to trace conversations….as in:
Talk, talk, talk, talk….gab, gab, gab,….bla bla bla bla…..
Then you and your friend find yourself talking about some
bizarre topic, like calves being birthed in the snow, or wigs worn as a hat…
what ever it is, I always like to stop the conversation in mid sentence and
say…
“how did we get here?” then I trace the conversation, in
typical hopscotch manner like playing a game of 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon.
So in this fashion, here is how I got to Amanda Palmer’s
book:
Hiro’s school has hired The Brooklyn Conservatory of Music to come in and
teach music to the 4th grade once a week. Originally, we were told that they would
begin orchestra, with each student picking an instrument- a dream of principle Bill’s,
but like all of Bills ramblings on, this did not happen….and no parents got word
of it until some kid went home and told their parent that they were playing Jingle Bells on the ukulele in
music class.
And due to either mismanagement or bad communication, there
are not enough ukuleles for the whole class.
So only half the class can play at a time...
So only half the class can play at a time...
AND they are learning Hokey Pokey as well as Jingle Bells…
Very far from the orchestra we were promised last spring...
Therefore I told Hiro there’s this other song you would probably
like better and its WAYYYYYY better than Hokey Pokey.
Amanda Palmer’s Ukulele Anthem!
Which of course he loved
and must learn all the words to,
and maybe even get the strumming correct,
and practice it enough to be able to perform it for the Talent Show at the end of the year…
because how boring is it to have to sit through your classmate play Vivaldi from the Suzuki book….
and must learn all the words to,
and maybe even get the strumming correct,
and practice it enough to be able to perform it for the Talent Show at the end of the year…
because how boring is it to have to sit through your classmate play Vivaldi from the Suzuki book….
So I searched for YouTube videos of AFP (Amanda Fucking
Palmer) playing the Ukulele to show Hiro, and in my scanning, I sidetracked
myself with a few videos of Neil Gaiman and Amanda on stage at a Book
Festival...
where I discovered she had just published her first book…
which came from a TED talk she did about her Kickstarter campaign, working as a living statue and other fascinating things about her.
So I checked out the book.
where I discovered she had just published her first book…
which came from a TED talk she did about her Kickstarter campaign, working as a living statue and other fascinating things about her.
So I checked out the book.
It was a memoir disguised as a "how to book". It was funny, touching, and gossipy- just the
light reading I needed a the end of the year.
I read excerpts here and there, up to around pg 50 to Hiro and we
laughed out loud together on the train.
There is a hilarious interior script she has going on inside her head, as
she stands silently on her milk crates dressed mime-like in her bridal getup that Hiro wanted me to read over and over:
Of course, a 9 year old should not use some words when screaming songs at the top of his lungs while playing Ukulele to the whole school.
These are the words, and what words I replaced them with:
Heroin -replaced with Drugs
Smack (in relation to Heroin) -again replaced with Drugs
bitching -replaced with complaining
holy fuck -replaced with holy moly
vibrator -took out
flask of Jack -took out
Questionable words I left in, because without it, it wouldn't make sense:
pipe bomb
hand gun
kill
Here’s what I learned from the book:
1. popular,
extroverted people tended to be loners when young; which I never understood' don't those two traits sort of cancel each other out?
2. You need people around you, put yourself out there to be
ridiculed if you want people to want to help you.
3. dealing with social media is a full time job that only a small percentage of people can make a living off of.
Artemis by Andy Weir
I found out about Artemis from the Buy The Book (interviews)
section of the Times. The interview was,
unsurprisingly nerdy and though I got a few titles to put on my reading list, overall it
was dull. But I was still excited that
the author of The Martian had his second book out.
It was an easy quick read, like watching a movie- which it
will probably become in the near future…in fact I would not be surprised if he
had already signed a movie deal the second the book went to the publisher.
It is not as good as The Martian.
Actually it was a bit annoying- or rather the protagonist is
annoying to listen to, especially her smart ass interior monologue…which felt
like it was written by a high school girl growing up in the 80’s, the type of
girl who read S.E. Hinton books like it was the bible. Actually now that I think about it, this would be a great book for a high school girl and Penguin should market it to the YA population under the genre of kick ass girls and STEM. Anyway the creator of Mark Watney wrote from first
person point of view as a 26 year old woman.
The whole time I’m thinking: I hope he had a lot of women vet this
writing…which he did, but still...
Here is what is good about it though:
Women play a large roll of intelligent parts
The physics and math is tangible (like last time)
The cast of characters is very multi-ethnic.
I liked the mixing of high tech and low- like all the acetylene
welding torch descriptions which made me nostalgic for my college and set
building welding days.
I await the movie.
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