Walking on the Moon

Mary Roach is a really brilliant science writer.  She picks a topic that 12-year-olds would be excited about, like what happens to the food we eat.  Then she goes off and finds out a ton about it and writes it up  in a way that speaks to the reader’s inner 12-year-old and more mature side.  The result is great books like Stiff, Packing For Mars, and today’s topic, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal.

Gulp is a good choice for Roach. Her inner 12-year-old gets to talk about all kinds of icky things like spit and poop and make actual fart jokes while her inner science nerd gets to learn about one of the most interesting things people do: turn food into energy.  And poop. It’s glorious for her and the reader.  Her footnotes on the ironic names of researchers are worth the price alone.

This is great, clear science writing with a sense of fun.

Strongly recommended.

Stephen Dobyns really impressed me with  The Church of Dead Girls a few years ago.  It’s the kind of book that makes you read anything you see an author put out after it to see how powerful his work can be.  The followup, Boy in The Water also had its pleasures. The Burn Palace is another thriller that ripples out from an eerie initial murder.

I enjoyed many aspects of The Burn Palace.  The plot is lean and propulsive and the characters are all well drawn and interesting.  The setting is well realized and the writing is powerful.  It is diverting in every way.

What it doesn’t have is the haunting initial image and mounting dread of Girls or the meditation on evil present in Boy. This seems like a good thriller without any other agenda. It is enjoyable but not nearly so memorable as some of Dobyns’s best work.

It’s no sin for a thriller to be unfavorably compared to The Church of Dead Girls. Burn Palace is a great way to spend a flight or a few days of reading, but it won’t haunt you.

Recommended.

What can I say: I like western mashups.  I enjoyed the original Vertigo Comics Jonah Hex horror/western mashups, and I enjoyed The Six-GunTarot.  The premise is a little Buffy meets Bonanza, and as with most high-concept titles, that can go either way.  John Landis says “What’s important and essential is the execution of the idea.” Rod Belcher has executed.

In some sense this is all from the Vertigo (or Buffy) handbook.  There’s a mythical menace tied to this town in the West that draws a quirky set of powerful defenders to the area who must learn to work together to defeat the big bad.  Along the way lessons will be learned, bonds will be forged, etcetera.  In a World Where…

So, execution matters.  And Belcher delivers.  He’s thoroughly competent at the action parts. He writes a heart-pounding fight scene and the tension building damages your cuticles.  All the thrills are delivered well.

What I liked more was the low-key moseying pace of his characters.  Make no mistake – the action is moving fast, but the characters use their time more for the wry aside or the polite discussion than for the ironic one-liner.  In Six-Gun, the Hellmouth has opened below Lake Woebegon.  It’s a winning tone, and makes the all the blockbuster stuff that much more enjoyable.

There’s no literary pretension here.  This is an engaging adventure story.  And it’s very engaging and adventurous, with a side of small town charm.

Strongly Recommended.

David Sedaris doesn’t change much.  That’s to be expected from a man who has written compellingly about his OCD, but it leaves a reviewer in a difficult place.

Owls marks his return to the short personal essay after  Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk‘s side trip into fable.  I liked Chipmunk, but I’m not sure it was as well received as his essays.  It’s unfair to start by saying that the man doesn’t change when stepping slightly outside his comfort zone gets him zapped.  Still, if you picked up any of his other works, the content and format of Owls is no surprise.

I quite enjoyed Owls. Sedaris writes charmingly about himself, his quirky world, and our quirky world.  Spending a few hours in his literary company is entertaining and rewarding.  Owls is written by Sedaris the established writer, and it is a little sad that it is not as thrilling and unexpected as Naked, but it is every bit as enjoyable.

This is good fun if you like Sedaris’s writing.  If you have disliked his work in the past, this isn’t going to win you over.

Nick Dybek’s When Captain Flint Was Still A Good Man is a solid literary work.  He takes a claustrophobic hide-bound town and the strained relationships inside it and makes it something both mythic and small.  It’s a story of place and time more than character, but the place and time are worth a look.

His characters are solid, but not stunningly original.  They are creatures of his small fishing town and more personify parts of it than exist on their own.  He has passages where the narrator looks back from where he gets to later, but one sees clearly that he’s a different person than the one experiencing the events in the novel. The time and place are the stars.

The time is the time when a young person decides who he’s going to be – to the extent that he has a say in that decision.  His protagonist is reactive, as most are then, but introspective enough to make the transformation interesting.  Similarly the setting is condensed enough to make nearly every action symbolic.

Fortunately, Dybek has an even hand and an ear for dialog, so that the symbolism stays clear but not hackneyed.  The larger meanings are never hidden, but never overwhelm the story’s rhythm.  The story is a good yarn with some grand gestures.

Recommended.

Even if Sam Lipsyte’s The Fun Parts is aptly named I’m curious to see what the rest of his writing is like.  What’s here is wonderfully character-driven mayhem that is great fun to read.  Because this is not happening to you.

Lipsyte walks a fun line creating characters that are both chaotic and small.  They’ll screw up the lives of those around them and themselves with grand emotion and petty scale (as an internet acquaintance once quipped). None of these folks are villains, but all of them are screwed up in some semi-comical way.

There are real tragedies in here as well, but even the foregone conclusions and dire destinies are the stuff of comic opera.  Each of these characters is an embodiment of a non-obvious but twisted aspect of our culture.  Things could be dire in some cases, but Lipsyte provokes a wry smile and a “what are you going to do” shrug more often than despair.

These are a lot of demented fun.

Recommended.

Vampires in the Lemon Grove is a collection of wonderfully off-kilter short stories from Karen Russell that manage to be symbolic without being portentous.  All of them have some aspect of the magical in them, but no two are alike.  The variety of setting and character keeps the ideas fresh and the stories engaging.

The stories are also refreshingly non-cinematic.  More to the point, they’re literary without making too much of that fact.  They are a pleasure to read as much for their language and their structure as they are for their incident.  They hold the reader’s attention without spectacle or excessive flash.  I wanted to see what happened as much for what it means as for how a story turns out.

Vampires contains stories that reward  contemplation and capture attention.

Recommended.

Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore isn’t described as a Young Adults title, but it has that tone.  Considering the quality of today’s YA works, that shouldn’t be taken as a slight, nor is it intended as one.  It does mean that Robin Sloan spins a fast-paced enjoyable yarn, more memorable for the sense of adventure and wonder than for its carefully realized characters and poetic passages.

That sense of thrill and enjoyment is really difficult to sustain, especially when the thrill comes from a sequence of puzzles that really aren’t as clever looking in from the real world.  Robin’s savvy about the feel of tech people and the joy of a good puzzle, but he’s not Neal Stephenson. Those impressions and that excitement carried the story, even for a nit-picker like me.

The plot involves a centuries-old conspiracy, the latest big thing, and the people and societies (secret and public) that make things happen in the world.  There are some nice observations about the cults and sects we all are parts of in this world and why Sloan values the ones he does. Overall a fun read.

Recommended.

This is a Kindle single, really a short insider’s memoir, about the early days of the James Bond franchise.  It’s primarily about the translation from novels to movies in the 1960’s and 70’s.

There’s lots of insider goodness – telling anecdotes and personal remembrances – that I’m sure will delight detailed fans.  I’m not a deep fan, so I actually felt a little adrift in the thing.  I felt like I was expected to recognize some of the names as they came on stage, but other that Ian Fleming and Sean Connery, I didn’t.

Even coming in cold like that, this was a diverting enough read, but I think a bigger fan would get more out of it.

John Irving writes a John Irving novel better than anyone else does.  That’s more of a trick than it sounds like.  More than many writers, Irving pays explicit homage to his influences and has become closely attached to a set of symbols and touchstones.  Having such a strong and imitable voice will attract parodists and rip-off artists at a surprising rate. It’s easy for a rip-off to become more noticed than the original; ask Bill Hicks.

It’s amusing that Irving has chosen to practically parody himself in In One Person. Reading it isn’t so much a game of “spot the trope” as looking for ground that hasn’t been covered by Irving before. It’s a misleading game, though.  Even as I was checking the boxes (there’s a cross dresser, there’s a wrestler, it’s a New England Prep School, Dickens story, oh, look Austria) it never felt old. It’s a nice way to make the point that individual characters and people are individuals, even if they share experiences.

And really, what Irving does better than anyone is build his characters lives that bring them into sharp focus.  There’s usually an issue of the day to address as well, of course.  The man is a Dickens disciple, after all.  While his well-wrought characters generally illuminate that issue, I always enjoy them just for their clockwork completeness and emotional verisimilitude.

In One Person has a lot to say about the lives of non-heterosexuals (that sounds PC, but Irving covers a fair amount of this ground) that is certainly worth hearing.  Irving says it all by walking a real person through that world and inviting us along. Writers have been doing that since Dickens (at least), but few as well.

Recommended.