A pair by Joanne Harris

I have previously extolled the virtues of Joanne Harris, so no one should be surprised that I picked up two more of her books:  Holy Fools and Coastliners.  I had Powell’s credit, so I went to ‘Harris’ on the shelf and grabbed the cheapest two that I hadn’t already read.  I did not realize that they were actually linked to each other – and I even read them in the proper order!

Holy Fools was my favorite of the two.  Set in the 17th century in a French nunnery on a secluded island, it examines love, evil, miracles, organized religion (the institution vs. the belief system) and being true to yourself.  This story is told almost exclusively from the viewpoint of Juliette, a gypsy & itinerant player who hides away in a nunnery with her young daughter after a brush with the law.  Regardless of whether you like her or agree with her, Juliette is a vivid and real character that is hard to stop reading about.

The world as I see it is one where there are few easy answers, and knowing yourself and being true to that self offer the only chance of retaining one’s sanity and still being happy.  Juliette loves the wrong man, makes poor decisions and doesn’t always do the right thing – but loves with her whole heart, and cares for all of the people she loves to the very best of her not-inconsiderable abilities.  When put in an impossible situation, she strays pretty far outside the box to protect her friends and her daughter, and even punish the bad guys a little.  The ending is left up to the reader, no easy answers and no plot tied up in a neat package – another preference of mine. No one’s story has a precise beginning or ending, and I prefer fiction that knows how to end a book without a metaphorical ‘they lived happily ever after.’  This one didn’t have the emphasis on food that her other books had (at least, the ones I’ve read), but the mood is powerfully rendered and hard to leave behind.

Coastliners might have been a fine book if I hadn’t been comparing it to Harris’s other work. It certainly is not a bad book, by any stretch.  Good characters, setting was unique, interesting and well-written, plot was effective. I think what was missing – for me, at least – was a powerful theme.  All of Harris’s other books have a guiding focus that uses every plot twist, character flaw and detail of setting to support her message.  In contrast, Coastliners read more like a great summer read without too much depth to it.  Of course, in comparison to a true ‘summer read’ kind of book (I’m thinking of something like Evanovich or Shopaholic-type reads) this one is plenty deep. Mado is a young woman returning to the island she called home as a child after her mother dies.  Her reclusive father still lives there, and she’s soon caught up in the drama of the haves vs. the have-nots on the island. My favorite thing about the book?  Harris has two nuns that were inspired by Charles de Lint’s Crow Girls!  I love it when the strange pieces of my life intersect.

I am currently revisiting my obsession with The Wheel of Time, after reading the latest book.  Suddenly, not spending so much time on the computer…

my apples and their tomatoes

I picked up Apples & Oranges: My Brother & Me, Lost and Found by Marie Brenner because it implied that it could answer the question of how you get along with people with opposing ideologies, i.e. your rabidly Republican uncle who thinks your gay friends should be shot, or your disgustingly liberal cousin who thinks that all the rich people should be placed in work camps.  You have to see them on holidays, you genuinely like them as people, but how do you get around these sometimes-insurmountable obstacles to polite conversation?

Well, the book had no answers.  And I don’t blame the author, I blame the idiots who created the sales pitch and tag lines and whatnot.  What the author was writing was a very personal book about trying to be close to her brother as an adult, after years of aggravation and fighting.  Yes, they had differing political views, but that was not the core of their disconnect, it was merely another symptom, a hot-button to blame for the anger and lack of communication.  Brenner does a decent job of exploring their childhood and their extended family relations, trying to figure out exactly where the pattern originated and maybe find a clue as to how to overcome it.

I thought the book was good, but not great.  Brenner is a journalist and can clearly write a good sentence, but I didn’t think the book was all that interesting.  I love memoirs, but this one didn’t hold my interest.  It seemed like the kind of book that was therapy for the author rather than something meaningful to be shared with readers. On the plus side, I now have a favorite kind of apple – Honeycrisp.

Living in Portland means that I live in apple country.  And being a conscious shopper, I try to buy local as much as possible. I am also trying to eat healthier – more fresh fruits and vegetables, for example.  The problem is, I’m not a big fan of apples, at least not the uncooked kind (give me a baked apple pie with caramel and ice cream and I’m yours forever). In A&O, the brother grows specialty fruits – mostly apples and pears (much of the book takes place in Washington state). Learning about the fruit-growing business was one of the ways that Brenner reconnected with her brother. So there was a lot of talk about apples, and he often rhapsodized about the Honeycrisp, so I picked one up at New Seasons on my next shopping trip. To my surprise, it was significantly different than your basic Granny Smith or Red Delicious – and yummy.  Who says reading isn’t good for ya?

Fangirl Post: Michael Chabon

First, I should probably apologize for letting almost A MONTH go by with no posts.  I have no excuse for ignoring all (two) of you fine people for that long.  I have, maybe, one-week’s worth of excuse – I wrote my first official book review for Bookbrowse.com two weeks ago!  I will blog about The Children’s Book after that review is published, and put a link up so you all can check it out.  With any luck, my bio on their site will encourage two more people to find me out here in the interwebs.  Won’t I be special then?  Now, to business.

Michael Chabon (pronounced Shay-bon, as I learned this week) is a crazy good writer.  I first saw the name after watching the film, Wonder Boys (starring Michael Douglas, Tobey Maguire, Frances McDormand, and the ever-fabulous Robert Downey, Jr.), which was based on his second (published) novel (which is about the experience of writing his second [unpublished] novel, which sucked hard-core).  I loved the movie and (as usual) went looking for more quality entertainment by the same guy.  His first novel (Mysteries of Pittsburgh) was good, but it was The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay that made me a die-hard fan.  Not only great writing and superb story-telling, but a comic-book-history theme and the obligatory gay sub-plot!  But don’t take my word for it – he won a Pulitzer for that one.  I’ve since read all his novels and a few of his short stories, eagerly awaiting each new gem.

This is a writer who just gets better and better.  Some of his latest stuff (The Final Solution, Gentlemen of the Road) has been short novellas  with great story – but the language is better than great, it is extraordinary.  I just want to dive in and swim around in the words and phrases and sentences forever and ever.  And he’s only two years older than me (and apparently happily married <sigh>).  He should have a few more decades to be cranking this stuff out.

One of the dozens of reasons I moved to Portland was because there was so much cool stuff going on here.  Case in point – a reading by Michael Chabon! Free at Powell’s!  His new book!  Book-geek heaven hosts book-geek-idol extraordinaire! And did I mention it was free?  And less than five miles from my house? At the coolest bookstore on the planet? (sorry Title Wave,  but it’s true).   Of course, I was going.  But, I must admit I was worried. What if he was lame in person? What if he spoke like that guy on the Clear-Eyes commercials?  What if he was stiff and boring and ruined my future reading pleasure with his lameness?  I shudder to think.

Thankfully, he was everything I hoped he would be.  I’d seen photos, so I knew he was reasonably attractive (one worry down, dozens to go).   But he was funny and humble and sexy and teasing and witty, and human while being utterly adorable.  And he really did look a lot like Michael Douglas did in the film.  He read two essays from his new book which were marvelously written and slyly thought-provoking while making us laugh out loud (me and my 200 best book-geek friends).  All in all, a perfect first-run of the author visit circuit at Powell’s, and confirmation that my author-love is not misplaced.

This week – Barbara Ehrenreich comes to town.

A slow reading week…

I haven’t read much in the last week or two, and before that was not reading much that really excited me (other what I’ve already posted).  I have allowed myself to become addicted to a television show (Grey’s Anatomy) and have been watching it on DVD – between that, work and having a life, not much reading going on. Pretty unusual.

I saw the movie Watchmen when it was in the theater (the best friend is a huge Jeffery Dean Morgan fan, and I am a big comic book geek).  We were both horribly disappointed and irritated that we’d wasted money and time on such a bloody, violent, depressing and (most important to me) pointless flick. I can do without the blood and violence, but that wouldn’t be enough to turn me off of a movie.  And I am fine with depressing and meaningful, or pointless and fun.  But depressing and pointless – well, that’s a load of crap.  I had been meaning to read Watchmen because it was highly lauded by critics – surprising for a graphic novel.  After seeing the movie, I was compelled to read the book and find out what the movie had screwed up on.

Alan Moore’s graphic novel is much, much better than the movie based upon it (a movie that Moore refused to be affiliated with because he didn’t believe it would work).  But I still didn’t like it very much. I’m pretty sure that if I hadn’t seen the movie, I would have had a different reading of the book, but it’s too late for that now.  The book has three or four sub-plots that are completely missing from the movie and added much to the point Moore seemed to be trying to make – that you cannot do evil things and not become evil.  The comic book is as violent and bloody as the film, but in comic-book form, the impact of the violence is more cerebral and less disgusting.  The book was compelling (while the film dragged on) and while still be depressing, at least was not pointless.  There is a lot of irony and contrasting of stories that is completely missing in the movie.  The character of Dr. Manhattan is much more developed in the book, and there is some fascinating stuff about the nature of time and experience that adds much to the backbone of Moore’s concept.  All in all, the book was enjoyable, if not something I would highly recommend.

I also read Kaye Gibbon’s The Life All Around Me by Ellen Foster – follow-up to her first hit novel Ellen Foster. Ellen is a girl who’s lost her mother and somehow manages to stay driven and positive in the face of abuse, crushing poverty and racism in the South.  Both books are written in the first person.  I remembered liking Ellen Foster, so I picked up the sequel (written a decade or two later) when I saw it for $3.  TLAAMbEF was not the powerhouse the first novel was, but those who loved Ellen from the first book would probably enjoy seeing what came next.

I recently got a gig reviewing books for a newsletter/website called BookBrowse.com – soon I’ll get paid (a tiny bit of money) to review new books!  My first book is The Children’s Book by A. S. Byatt – and it’s due in two weeks, so I had better get back to reading soon!

Mystery Solved – sadly

The Mystery of Grace by Charles de Lint is the story of a young woman (Grace) who dies unexpectedly but, instead of Heaven or Nirvana or nothingness, what she gets is a rebirth in her apartment – but in a world inhabited only by all those who died in the same small area of town in the last 50 years.  A twist on a familiar theme, it is the story of star-crossed lovers with a serious impediment – one of them is dead.

I have already sung the praises of de Lint once or twice in this blog, so I won’t tell you again how much I love his work and how I feel like some of his books have literally changed my life and my way of thinking.  Someplace To Be Flying and Forests of the Heart are books I will have to bequeath to someone, because they will be in my book collection until the day I die (hmm, maybe I’ll have them cremated with me).  Unfortunately, The Mystery of Grace fell short of the incredibly high bar de Lint has written for himself.

I am most certainly not saying that TMoG is a bad book. It is not.  It is a good book.  Grace is a girl who loves hot rods (as I do) and actually works on them (as I do not), and the guy she falls for is someone I would probably fall for.  But as I read the book, I felt like I’d read it before – not the details, but the general storyline (TMoG is brand new).  At first, I chalked it up to having read and re-read the 50 stories or whatever that de Lint has written in his decades of writing (he has lots of short story collections in addition to a dozen or more novels).  Then I picked up Promises to Keep this week – another de Lint I thought I hadn’t read before. Well, I had read it before – it’s really more of a novella, published as a young adult fiction novel.  It is the story of Jilly (a recurring character in many of de Lint’s Newford books) and how she is offered the perfect life by a friend of hers – a life in a world where some of the dead go after they pass on.  The bones of this world – which Jilly ultimately rejects – are the same as the afterworld in TMoG.  That’s why it all seemed so familiar.

It’s clear that the idea showed up in Promises to Keep, and de Lint developed it much more fully (and more interestingly) in TMoG. but it still bugs me.  It smacks of a lack of ideas – a need to fulfill a contract and recycling stories to do it.   And I expect a lot more from my uber-favorite author – probably unfairly.

And while I’m venting, the gear-head stuff in the book does not ring quite true.  It reads like something very well-researched, but not as believable as almost everything else in his work.  I am a gear-head, I love it, and it felt just a little bit ‘tacked on’ as something cool rather than something real and true to a person.  And in general, the book felt thin – like the world and the characters in general lacked a certain depth.  I’m sure this is partly due to my being spoiled by the Newford stories, where I have dozens of stories worth of history that inform even the short stories.   But this one reads more like something he wrote in the early years – when he wrote short stories.  His writing (like most great writers) has improved over the years, so this one would have been a fabulous short story, but is instead a not-so-fabulous novel.  It pains me to say anything negative about my boy, but I won’t pretend that I loved TMoG. If someone else had written it, I would have said it was a de Lint rip-off that did not quite live up to the master.  That the master himself wrote it does not make it masterful.