Walking on the Moon

This wasn’t what I was expecting at all. The elevator pitch for this was that Percival Everett wrote a version of Huck Finn from Jim’s perspective. And it is that, as much as it’s any one thing.

I think a fair amount of the fun of James is riding along with Everett and figuring out what he is up to. I will say that I think he does a good job capturing the flavor of Huck Finn, which is such an oddball of great literature that I’d be hard pressed to describe that flavor with any precision. My review above mentions that in Huck Finn “there are many moments of lyrical beauty; laugh-out-loud bits of humor; huge moments of grappling with good and evil.” I think all that is true in James as well.

Strongly Recommended.

I had read Lady Chatterly before, but I went back to it because Bukowski spoke so glowingly about D. H. Lawrence in Ham on Rye. I see some of what Bukowski sees.

I couldn’t really come to Lady Chatterly without its reputation looming. It has both a reputation as an explicit story and as a literary work. By modern standards, it is not terribly salacious, but Lawrence does talk frankly about sex and the people who have it. And I think he does have meaningful insights to share, but there is a lot to say. And I have learned to be skeptical of narratives about women’s lives written by men.

I hope that Lawrence doesn’t believe he’s written the last word on intimate relationships, though sometimes it sounds like he might. A lot of the book is anchored in the time and place, though I think a fair amount of his observations are fundamental. I also think the universe of people in love is larger than he considers. All together, I find the book easy to criticize, but hard to dismiss.

Recommended.

Sister, Sinner is the a biography of a sort I don’t see often enough. Claire Hoffman picked someone who cries out for biography and walks through that life in a lively way without putting making it too obvious to the reader what she thinks. I am impressed that she can make me very interested in Sister Aimee Semple McPherson, realize that she is a very important figure in the history of America, of Los Angeles, and in the history of Religion in America, and still let me decide what I think of all that.

McPherson (Semple McPherson? And there’s another husband in there later… I’ll stick with McPherson) definitely led a life. She built a Pentecostal church out of fervor and charisma. Then using the mass media of the time – radio and newsletters – made it a nationwide church movement. And then there is either a kidnapping or a faked kidnapping. And then Los Angeles politics gets involved. And when it all seems to die down McPherson refuses to let it. It is a wild story just in the facts of it.

Hoffman digs in. Everything she describes is well sourced. McPherson was a celebrity of the day on a par with British royalty or Hollywood stars, so there is copious contemporaneous news coverage as well as detailed church records and some tell-all books. Hoffman sifts it all into a narrative, but leaves the ambiguities there for the reader to weigh.

Strongly recommended.

I feel like I’m not really giving Martha Wells her due when I say this was another good Murderbot book. This was another good Murderbot book. Writing series SF is hard and she makes it look easy.

Recommended.

Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club was kind of a thing. It caused a bunch of excitement and some hand-wringing when it (and the movie adaptation of it) appeared. I’m just acknowlegding that it is tough to talk about it knowing what it became.

I think a lot of the power of the novel is in Palahniuk’s prose. It is sharp, disorienting, and propulsive. He starts in media res and then gets confusing. I spend a lot of the book mentally off-balance in a good way. It is a lot of fun be dragged along with.

Fight Club is very much of its moment. I think a lot of the book is intended to be funny, and a lot of the jokes are references anchored in the 1990s. Palahniuk isn’t name-checking celebrities or anything so blatant, but part of the drive of his writing is referring to a movement or a mindset in a couple words that are evocative to a 1990s reader.

I’m curious how that will work as the book ages. I had no trouble playing along, but I was a young man in the 1990s. I can imagine English professors my age assigning this book to their classes assuming the students will be compelled and receiving blank stares from modern readers. But who knows? My fortunetelling abilities are not supporting my retirement.

Recommended.

A friend recommended this strongly to me, and though I’ve generally tacked away from Charles Bukowski, I dropped it on my LAPL hold list. If he always writes like this, that’s my mistake. Ham on Rye just blew me away.

Bukowski writes phenomenally sharply. I get the impression that every word on the page is there to do exactly what he wants it to do. I am even more impressed that he marshals his words without fanfare. There are not many quotable phrases or passages here. But I am always in exactly the moment he is telling me about.

He does this in the service of a first person narrative from a character who I probably wouldn’t want to spend too much time with. He puts a person on the page who is unapologetically outside society in some basic ways and walks us through his early life. The protagonist comes from an abusive home and a poor world. The language is raw and blunt. And perfect. Bukowski puts the reader exactly into the evolving mind of an amoral person. Even “amoral” is not quite right. His protagonist has a code, it’s just not aligned with society. It’s one of those works that the only thing that describes it perfectly is the thing itself.

Bukowski does this as Charles Bukowski. His persona is well defined as an alcoholic outsider. Any reader is going to see Ham on Rye as autobiographical. And he puts this perfect realization of a shambling mess on the page knowing people will think it’s him. That is bravery that I respect.

A must.

This is a Booker-award winning novel about 24 hours in the life of astronauts on a near future space station. The location and characters are used to literally look at our world from a higher perspective.

That is a good basis for a novel. Samantha Harvey’s prose is evocative and she does a nice job of balancing the ethereal with the mundane. The characters are drawn with a poetic blend of abstraction and specificity. She addresses the big picture of life on earth and how weird it is to work in space.

Man, that should be candy to me, but it does not quite come together. It always feels just a touch too writerly. I understand what she is aiming for in the abstraction of her characters, but instead of inhabiting that space between a living being and a symbol in a story they just seem like literary constructs.

Look, the book won a Booker prize. In general the folks who hand those out are better judges of writing than I am. But I am not a fan.

I did read the Aeneid. Obviously there’s a huge body of criticism and annotation that I’m not going to be able to add anything to. But for the record, I found it interesting as both a narrative and as a telling of a national creation myth.

I wouldn’t call it completely rip-roaring as a narrative for the modern reader. It is epic poetry about people who lived a couple thousand years ago and while many of their emotions are ours, there are many concerns that are not. And beyond that, these are embodiments of national virtues and outright Gods. Not completely relatable.

Yet I enjoyed a lot of it. I didn’t realize that this was a primary source of the Trojan Horse story. It remains an unbelievable narrative, but the story of the sacking of Troy was more affecting than I was expecting. Telling the story of early Rome as a prophesy embossed on Aeneas’s shield was new to me also. It’s a transparent way to teach some Roman history, but still interesting.

That’s mostly just me rambling. It’s the Aeneid. If you are curious about this time period or classic epics at all, it’s kind of a must.

Recommended.

Peter Swanson has put together a book that’s a little bit murder mystery, a little bit character study, and – for me – a little bit nostalgia trip. Kill Your Darlings starts with a murder and follows our characters back through time to show how we got here. He does a nice job both telling us who they are and what happened to lead us to the events that start the book.

It’s a little bit of a gimmick to work backward through time. I think it works pretty well here, partially because of the murder mystery connection. A mystery reader who found the style gimmicky could still imagine the building flashbacks as facts uncovered in investigation. I thought it was a reasonable way to build the characters.

Swanson ties his characters to specific ages and dates that are within a year of my birth. He also takes them on a junior high trip to DC that I also took. I wind up feeling a bit of extra nostalgia for that.

Overall an interesting story told with some panache.

Recommended.

I’d heard little bits and pieces about Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mister Ripley for a while but never got around to reading it. (I know there’s a movie, but I haven’t seen that either.)

The book is pretty much a character study of what I’ve seen described as a “charming sociopath.” I can’t really quibble with that characterization. Highsmith shows us this fellow in vivid detail.

It’s a good read. The writing is great, the plot is suspenseful. I spent the book living in Ripley’s head in a way that’s difficult to pull off.

But I still find it a more interesting book to talk about than to read. Picking away at Ripley’s motivations – and maybe Highsmith’s intent – is a lot of fun. Probably worth reading just to do so.

Recommended.