I know. You can't tell a book by its cover. My brain knows this but, sadly, my heart does not. I am totally seduced by covers.
Some recent acquisitions are cases in point:
Let's just say, it claimed me immediately. Reading the endorsement on the back from Elmore Leonard -- just icing on the cake, my friend. I was already seduced by the cover!
1930's New York from the working man's perspective. High steel. Realistic and gritty. My kind of read. I hope!
Lastly, I've been toying with a Pacific coast road trip so I picked up the Lonely Planet Caliornia guide 2006 in one of those discount bins.
What caught my eye? The red station wagon with wood paneling and white wall tires topped by the iconic surf board. So very seduced was I!
Oddly enough, its not just attrctive covers that seduce me. Sometimes I am completely smitten by the ugly and ungainly. The awkwardness calls out, you know?
Like Provendor Gleed by James Lovegrove.
Or Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo.
Or Theodore Sturgeon's More than Human
All of them, books with unattractive covers that totally seduced me. And were great to read, each in their own peculiar way...
Here's a question for you: Clowns -- Funny or Scary?
Most people can immediately choose. Probably based on some first clown encounter during early childhood. For me, I always found clowns a bit scary. Never funny. My only exposure to them was the Santa Claus parade -- Clowns bundled up in parkas with painted faces and mitts. Lurching about. Ill-trained. I never had the opportunity to see professionals at work, folks like Barnum and Bailey under their big top doing their well-oiled gags.
So I picked up Clown Girl with mixed feelings. I admit I was drawn to the rubber chicken cover but repelled by the thought of clowns. A whole book about clowns. Clown life. Paragraph after paragraph of clown-isms and clown cliches. The ups and downs of clowndom. I almost put it directly back on the shelf
Luckily, I have a book selection process: I wander about the shop randomly picking up books whose titles, authors or covers interest me. Then armed with the stack of books I find a space, preferably a sitting space, and I read the first 10 pages of each book. The author's words either make or break it.
For 80% of my picks, I jetison them after the 10 pages. They bore me or are badly written or are just ill suited to my mood.
I knew I had to buy Clown Girl after only half a page. Two paragraphs to be exact:
Balloon tying for Christ was the cheapest balloon manual I could find. The day I bought it, it was hidden on the lowest rung of a dusty spinner rack down at Callan's Novelties, snuggled alongside shopworn how-to guides: Travel Europe by Clown Circuit!, Rubber VomitSkits for Beginners, and Latex: The Beauty of Cuts, Bruises, Scars, and Contusions.
Want to tie the Virgin Mary? Start with a light blue balloon.For Jesus, use easter green. There are tips on tying a crucifix, a lamb, even a Sacred Heart in two sizes, big or small. Ooo la la! These tricks are simple but smart. The grand finale is the pieta,Mary with a grown Jesus sprawled across her lap in a four balloon extraveganza like a tangled link of sausages, or a Japanese bondage trick. The pieta or bondage, sacred or profane; in balloon art the two are that close together, one thin twist.
You either love that or you hate it. It either makes you want to read more of what Monica Drake's crazy imagination can dream up, or it leaves you cold and disinterested.
I loved it. Clown Girl took me places I never dreamed one could go. That is my kind of book.
Something tells me that a big chunk of the reading public will probably not enjoy this book.
The protagonist is a drug-dealing thief. He steals goods, partly to cover the cost of living, but mostly because he can. He's someone on the fringe of everything. No stranger to violence. No fan of propriety. His story is told in pieces, forward and backward. Slices of the present cut with the unforgettable past.
The things he does. The way he acts. It should be repellent. I'm sure that for some folks it is. But for me? I loved it. Every gritty scene. Every wrenching moment. Every poetic description of Saskatchewan's rural no man's land.
Annette Lapointe crawled inside this character's skin and as you read you are pulled under, too. Her words feel authentic. Her framing of scenes is acutely astute. Her dialogue conjures up real voices. The pace of the story is slow but relentless. The juxtaposition of cold action and achingly deep emotion. It tore my heart out.
I'll be donating this one to the library. I want everyone to taste the richness of Lapointe's prose.
Never thought I'd say that. Horror is not my bag. And the recent flicks like Saw? And Hostel? Resounding *eeewwww*
But Fido? Now that is the movie of the year as far as I'm concerned. It hits allllll my little joys: social satire, physical comedy, pop-culture resonances, biting wit, excellent acting (even by the virtually mute) ... *love*
Even though it was the second night showing the cinema was only 1/3 full. A mix of couples and trios. Twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings and some f*ty-somethings. The movie opens with a pseudo '50s-style documentary explaining to school kids how the zombies originated as threat to humans but became walking-dead manservants due to applause-worthy strides in collar technology.
I started laughing then and pretty much did not stop until the credits rolled. Talk about cathartic.
I did note two or three other laughing persons in the audience but by and large most people were not audibly amused. I don't know whether that says something bad about me, or them.
Just like Buffy the Vampire Slayer wasn't really about fighting demons, Fido isn;t really about zombies. If your sense of humor is offbeat. If you ever saw an episode of Lassie. If you are fascinated by the extremes of human group behavior -- then this is the movie for you.
Ah, Katherine Mansfield!
Devisive. Brassy. Contrary. She's a writer after my own heart.
She made Viginia Woolf jealous. And prompted DH Lawrence to call her a "loathesome reptile".
Her biographer quotes her at 16 saying:
‘I’m so keen upon all women having a definite future – are not you? The idea of sitting and waiting for a husband is absolutely revolting and it really is the attitude of a great many girls . . . It rather made me smile to read of your wishing you could create your fate—O how many times I have felt just the same. I just long for power over circumstances.’
Her headmistress said Katherine was:
She embraced risk and died at thirty-four with only 3 books under her belt. Before her death, she spent time at a Bavarian health spa. Even though it provided no cure it did furnish a conucopia of material for writing. She produced a set of short, sharp, comic stories. Each satirizing the cultural clash between English and German patrons of a German pension. She takes risks and mostly succeeds. The pieces she writes take place before WWI and are littered with offensive, incisive, nationalistic slights and threats.
It amused me to no end.
Katherin Mansfield re-invented the short story and I am eternally grateful!
(available here from Modern Voices at Hesperus Press)
Swierczynski's book has it all:
- Short, sharp scenes
- Bank robbery gone wrong
- Brutes of all stripes: Russian, Italian, Irish
- Scary violence nicely sandwiched between grim humor
- Mutes who aren't mute until they're really mute
- Scary tubes which are prone to re-visitation
- People named Bling and Mikal and Mothers
- Gritty-noir-decomposing-Philly
*smiles as head spins*
It's dark and blood-spattered and running on jet fuel.
Read it. Just read it.
*wanders off to find The Blonde *
I'm 317 pages in. Just 352 to go. Recently its been feeling more like a thousand.
Acts of Faith is not a bad book. Not bad at all. Good writing. Descriptive. It tells its tale straight forward. No gimmicks. No twisting about. It shares the principal energy between three main camps: the American pilot, the Kenyan aid worker and the evangelical Christian. There is reasonable fleshing out of characters. There is necessary slow revelation of crucial details. All in all nothing to complain about.
But I'm not thrilled. I feel like it's not telling me much of anything I didn't already know. I'm an incurable reader of news from all sorts of sources. Sudan and its troubles weren't unknown to me.Corruption and abuse in the world of "aid provision" is something I've known about for a long time. As are the harrowing effects of unbending religious beliefs.
Maybe, if I'd never dabbled in reading politics, this story would come off more explosive, more relavatory. It's kind of the same feeling I had after seeing the movie Blood Diamond. OK movie. But not exactly shocking if you'd knew anything about the ugly underbelly of the diamond trade.
No doubt I will finish Mr. Caputo's narrative. And feel some measure of enjoyment along the way. But I'll probably not run out and look for other by the Pulitzer prize winner.
Not in a horror-flick-gone-wild kind of way, rather in a chilling, squicky fashion. The story is like a particulary horrible, yet riveting car crash. Something verging on obscene, yet radiating a twisted human essence.
There's East Germany post-Stalin. With all it's recursive layers of surveillance.
There's the protagonist, Stefan Vogel. So explanatory. So lacking intent. So very quick to do the unthinkable for reasons warpedly almost-understandable.
There's Stefan's brother and father and mother. Each grabbing control when they can and slinking away when they must.
There's Katje and Kitty and Inge.
There's America shining in the distance.
And of course the glass of wine. *splash*
Let's just say it's starts out ending badly and you read on because you have to know why...
You've got to be in the right mood when reading short stories. You've got to be attuned, awake, sharp enough to catch the quckly falling star. I sometimes try reading short stories at night when I'm tired and it almost always fails. I blink once too often, I miss the point. If quizzed at that moment I'm likely to say the stories are bad rather than fess up that I'm the part of the system cycling too slowly for the job.
Anyway, yesterday and the day before I was in the right mood. The perfect mood. I picked up Sayles' The Anarchist's Convention and Other Stories because it had that pile of chairs on the cover -- a winning image if ever I saw one -- and dug in.
Fab characters speaking realistic dialogue in unusual circumstances. It was a joy. A pleasure. I urge you to go read!
Way back in October I wrote about my dismay with DBC Pierre's "Ludmila's Broken English". How it just didn't measure up to the magnificence of "Vernon God Little".
But I am weak. And prone to changing my mind. Especially when confronted with prose like this:
When the bouncer left them, Lamb turned and nailed both charges in the eye. 'Will we call it a night? I've stuck my neck out here - don't let me down.'
The pair stopped beneath a single, napkin-white spotlight, and rumpled visibly. Their suits drooped sideways towards each other, as if magnetically drawn. They dropped their eyes. Bunny clenched and unclenched his hands by his side, trying to ignore the muffled apocalpyse banging through the walls. He reached a hand to Blair's back, and began to trace a gentle circle.
It was four minutes past midnight.
Can't you picture those two? Bunny and Blair, the formerly conjoined twins. Whose first night on the town as separate human beings comes apart as they nearly get bounced from the club for fighting...
Lovely stuff.
DBC Pierre? I take all my mean words back.
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Brooke said:
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