Books I’ve Read: 2018 edition part 2
I published info about books I read during the first couple months of the year. I may have taken a break from reading, or it’s possible that I just wasn’t good at tracking for awhile. In any case, here are some more things I read in 2018!
MAR 23: The Overneath, by Peter S. Beagle, 2017.
I had never read Beagle before this collection of short stories that my brother Stephen and sister-in-law Lorna gave me for my birthday. What a delight! Simple prose in fantastic settings rendered as if they are places you’ve been to or at least imagined before opening these pages.
My favorites? The story of the adjunct professor in desperate times. That’s just begging for analysis with the current state of higher ed in the U.S. The one about the mentor and new mentee discovering an illegal drug ring. The one about the young lad who cares for the wounded but dangerous creature, who meets love, who survives. And the one about the wise man who is compromised by his lust for a trickster woman. I wrote all that a month after finishing the book without looking back at the story titles, so forgive me for the bizarre summaries. I was trying not to give any spoilers, and I think I succeeded.
My one complaint wouldn’t be a complaint if it didn’t happen so often. It’s super male-centric. I just saw Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs and I have the same complaint. Great characters, great stories, great fun. And SO. MANY. MALES. Really. If you don’t believe me, count them. Most of the females who do exist in these largely male-populated worlds are secondary, supportive, sex objects, maternal supports, sirens. Bleh.
I love men. I’m crazy about men. I’ve got nothing against men. I feel the same way about pizza, about sunshine, about a walk in the park. I love all these things, but if it was 90% of my experience on any given week (never mind a given year, decade, or lifetime), I’d say, maybe it’s time for a salad or some rain or a swim at the beach. Y’know? Representation. It matters.
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APR 22: In Calabria, by Peter S. Beagle, 2017.
This book was also part of my bday surprise. Yay for birthdays!
I kept putting down this book because I knew bad things were going to happen and I didn’t want them to happen and I felt almost like I could prevent the bad things from happening if I stopped reading. Yes, I have indeed been heavily influenced by The Monster at the End of this Book starring lovable furry old Grover.
Maybe it was more that I didn’t want to experience the bad things with the characters until I was ready. I sure did know that it was inevitable.
That said, when I gradually moved forward with my reading, one small chunk of the book at a time, I found that the tale was one I could accept as it was told. I wasn’t completely devastated as I had feared.
The main character is lovable. He writes poems and works the land and otherwise tends to be crotchety and keep to himself. I appreciate how stories help me remember that often there’s more to people than surface grumpiness. My friend Janet says something about never really knowing another person’s story….I sometimes am good about reminding myself of this, and sometimes it’s something I need to work on.
The story reminds me a bit of Robert Frost’s “Home Burial.” It’s also a bit like E.T. And a bit like Good Fellas and The Godfather. You think I’m joking, but I’m not.
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APR 30: The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother, by James McBride, 1995.
I was asked to read an introduction for James McBride when he is awarded an honorary doctorate at my university’s commencement in May 2018. I said YES! and a day later I was at my university library checking out this book.
It was a good read. I liked how it brought together the author’s voice and memories with his mother’s voice and memories, almost like an intergenerational dance. It was not the kind of book that had me on the edge of my seat, and it also didn’t really transport me completely into most of the scenes. I felt more like I was sitting next to someone who was flipping through a photo album and offering brief commentary. The author-narrators seemed to hold readers at a bit of a distance, with only glimpses of sharp open honesty.
In some ways, I found the restraint an obstacle. To some degree, however, I wonder if that was what made me invest in the narrative—that the restraint somehow perversely made me want more, made me want to actually see these characters more fully, enter into the conversations more directly, know these people that seem to combine goodness and suffering and confusion and make it seem like it will somehow be okay.
It’s the kind of book that should be made into a movie except it will be a helluva job for the person writing the screenplay because you can’t make a movie from such broad brushstrokes. In movies, you need scenes and characters and dialogue.
Or maybe it could be done as one montage after the other. That would be really funny! and that is somehow the way the narrative felt to me….it was one montage after another with only the occasional stillness of playing out a scene.
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MAY 7: The Miracle at St. Anna, by James McBride, 2003.
I found that I like McBride’s fiction more than his memoir. I was interested in this story from the start, and I really didn’t know what was going to happen next. Pretty cool.
The stand-out element in this book is the characters. They run the gamut—good guys, bad guys, smart guys, dumb guys, and everything in between. Not enough awesome women character, but there are a couple in there who play a serious role.
I also appreciate the historical elements and the way it all seems like it could’ve played out just as the book was written, even though there are some elements of magic or mysticism.
The worst thing about this book is the title. The rhythm is off. It should sound like The Miracle at ch-ch-ch-ch, like The Miracle on 34th Street, or it could’ve been Miracle at ch-ch, like Nightmare on Elm Street; but The Miracle at St. Anna sounds all wrong.
And the title sounds like the story of a pilgrimage instead of a war story. What would I have called it, you ask? (Yes, I am listening to you.) Maybe In the Eye of the Sleeping Man or Village People. No, not Village People. But now “Y-M-C-A” is going through my head. Please tell me I’m not the only one.
This book has a bit of Forrest Gump in it, a bit of The Green Mile (which also has Tom Hanks in it, oddly enough). It’s the really big African American male who is intellectually slow but seems to be smarter than others (or even magical) in a lot of ways—he seems similar to characters I’ve met in other places.
The questions about war and racism made me think of Small Island and also, to some degree, Slaughterhouse-Five and even The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
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MAY 15: Song Yet Sung, by James McBride, 2009.
This book reminded me a lot of Miracle, and that was good because I liked them both. The time and place were completely different, and the plot was different. But it was historical fiction with a storyline and characters that drew me in and that kept me reading.
And there were a couple more female characters in this one, and they were interesting, and that was good.
You know what else was good? The title.
This book has a lot of characters, so I don’t think it would translate really well to a movie, but I could see it being a mini-series.
When I read the author’s note at the end, I remembered reading about Harriet Tubman when I was in elementary school. I loved reading about her, and I didn’t connect this book to her at all until I read McBride’s explanation. The character in this book seemed fragile, vulnerable, and beautiful; I always thought of Tubman as strong and daring, and I never really thought about her physical attractiveness at all.
The book made me think a lot. I wondered whether or not the degrees of complicity in unjust systems matter or not. Is the “nice” slave owner any better than the abusive slave owner?
And it was thoughtful about whether or not slaves would truly gain freedom by escaping to North. I never really thought about this, and I’m not certain I fully understand, but I think it was a refusal to paint the North (or anyplace) as a place of true freedom, as a place of justice. And it also seemed to get at the ways structural injustices and the habits of our minds can feed one another; leaving a place where you’re not considered a person may not necessarily undo the internalized lessons about lack of personhood.
Again, I’m not certain I fully understand how these ideas were playing out, but it made me think that the key is to live with some kind of ethical code no matter where we are, because everyplace is unjust in some ways.
If I can do that much thinking while enjoying a fast-paced page-turner, it’s a sign that I’m reading a pretty good book.
Right after I finished this book, I briefly met Mr. McBride at my university. He spoke at commencement, and I had the privilege of reading his introduction. I met him briefly at breakfast beforehand. I was slightly disappointed that I didn’t get to really chat with him, but you know what’s cool? I had some really good conversations with other people who ended up sitting near me at the breakfast—people from my school I hadn’t yet interacted with except in passing. At one point I literally said to a colleague, “Wow. That conversation got very deep very quickly, didn’t it?”
I think I was living one of those lessons from Song Yet Sung. It’s not so much where you are (or whom you’re talking to); it’s more about what you do in that place. I didn’t forge a super-bond with James McBride in person, but his writing both entertains and speaks to me. I have forged bonds with many less-famous people in person, and that’s a good thing I’m always always grateful for.
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July 24: Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe, 1958.
First, I have to comment on over TWO MONTHS having passed since I last blogged about a book. That’s bizarre. I was reading in this time period, but I guess I didn’t complete a book for pleasure—I was reading a lot of scholarly work and I was dipping into a memoir that was episodic, so I may still go back to that one. And I may have read a book without blogging. That kind of thing happens. I watched several TV/Netflix series, and I don’t feel bad about that because TV is often so amazingly good. As Padraig Burns said to me last spring, some of the best writers of our time are working in TV.
Anyhow, I didn’t realize it had been so long since I blogged about a book. I feel a bit of shame! Let’s cast that off and get into my reaction to Things Fall Apart.
Obviously, this book has become canonical. And it’s shocking that I hadn’t read it before now. Especially because it has such an awesome title.
I loved the style. The matter-of-fact narrator would sometimes repeat information but in a reverse way (I read the book and on the next page, The book was enjoyed over the course of a week and that sort of thing—except about the characters in the book, not about me and my reading!). And the wisdom of stories and metaphors was sprinkled throughout the narrative, usually coming from the voices of characters. One of my favorites was that the crowd was so dense that if you threw up a handful of sand, not a grain of it would land on the ground. I paraphrased it, but don’t you love how it makes you picture the density of the crowd in such a vivid way?
I didn’t love the lack of a driving narrative. I’ve become really lazy about my reading, and my favorite books now are the ones that pull me in and keep me there, motivated to find out what happens next. I think about the worlds of these books when I’m not actively reading, and I wonder where the characters will end up and how they will get there. Too often, books do not provoke my curiosity or compel me to find out what happens next.
I appreciate the refusal to rely on an us/them narrative in any way. Yes, there were lots of binaries and comparisons between different kinds of people and different ways of life. But the matter-of-fact narrative allowed complexity and allowed readers to make judgements for ourselves.
The part that was hard was when the white people came. I kept putting down the book because I knew bad things were going to happen, and I didn’t want them to. I find myself doing that regularly at this point in my life (or at this point in contemporary politics?).
But I did read on to the end. And bad things happened. But it was all in that matter-of-fact style, not getting me to weep or tear my hair out or anything emotional. I say this as someone who can cry at the drop of a hat. Instead I just feel a kind of deep sadness, in my belly. And I feel like the story is sitting with me, not intruding or preaching or manipulating me in any way but rather being still next to me and letting me process it in my own time and my own way.
That may be part of the reason why the story didn’t pull me through the novel. The narrative was not designed in a way to compel or manipulate readers. The thing I struggled with as a lazy reader is the thing that I guess I most love about the book—it’s quietness. All kinds of violence was present, but it was at a bit of arm’s length, over there, like a news story.
I’m done with the book, but the stories are still there, sitting by me or in me or something, which doesn’t often happen with a news story.
I’m not sure what the book reminds me of, except parts of The White Hotel by D.M. Thomas that present violence in analytic and dream-state ways. The tone in some ways reminds me of the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy, where humor and satire and a documentary style come together in ways that are slippery, so it’s tough to tell exactly how we as viewers are meant to feel about the stories. But both of these works mix narrative styles while Things Fall Apart keeps a consistent tone.
I may come back to this one at some point, or at least read others’ takes on it. Something is definitely compelling me now that I’ve finished reading it!
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I think I’m going to publish this as is. And hopefully I’ll read enough books to justify parts 3 & 4! And hopefully some of those books will be by female writers. What’s up with me and all these male authors?? Wait, it’s okay. I just looked back at the earlier blog post about what I read in 2018 and it was dominated by women. Not that I’m counting or anything, but, yes, I’m counting. Because that helps me pay attention, and representation / support / endorsement / etc matters to people’s lived realities and to my own awareness of other perspectives. Things get really imbalanced really quickly if I stop noticing. <steps down from soapbox>
Laurie Mac Reads 