Swamplandia!

Summer's here, which means vacation time. So I'm taking a vacation from reading books based in the midwest and heading straight to Florida. Swamplandia! by Karen Russell is everything its title implies. Like the Binewski family in Katherine Dunn's Geek Love, the Bigtree "tribe" live on the edge of society and earn a living being themselves. They live on one of Florida's 10,000 islands and runs a tourist show of alligator wrestling. Aside from the thousands of "mainlander" tourists, the kids only interact with each other and are blissfully unaware of life on the mainland. Kiwi is the oldest and has dreams of attending Harvard. Dreamy Ossie communes with and runs away with a ghost, leaving the youngest, Ava, to fend for herself.

Russell's Florida swamplands have Weed Witches instead of bagladies, long abandoned dredgeboats are homes to marriage inclined ghosts from the 1930s and dank canals lead to the Underworld. Each of the children live on the brink of reality and they compellingly pull us along a journey of questionable danger. Susan Orlean nearly forgets her journalistic bias in favor of seeing a rare orchid in The Orchid Thief, so why wouldn't the reader think the Bird Man a contemporary Charon?

Ms. Russell's novel is a fascinating read-- equally creepy, mysterious and funny (Kiwi's jobs and interactions with fellow "new hires" in competitor World of Darkness are worth the cover price) and Ava's love for her family is priceless. 5/5 netflix stars.

The Song of the Lark

I continued my revisit of Willa Cather with The Song of the Lark, a book I hadn't read previously in high school, but which kind of reminded me of me in high school. Thea is talented adolescent musician living in small town Moonstone, CO. Many of the adults in her life realize her talent could take her beyond the small town and Thea ultimately realizes this too. Like Thea, I knew college would be an opportunity for me to leave Kansas and experience life in a bigger city than Wichita.

Thea and her family all make sacrifices so she can study piano and voice in Chicago. Cather uses her descriptive writing style to highlight Thea's training. Whereas I love her descriptions of life in the west and midwest, her accounts of lessons and operas were less interesting to me. Thea had "an attitude" that in a woman today would be considered bitchy-- I had to catch and remind myself that her journey was unusual for a woman of her day and her obstacles numerous.

This was just not my favorite Cather book, although she still tackles contemporary themes of racism against immigrants and women working and taking non-traditional life routes (Thea rejects marriage in favor of career). 3 out of 5 stars.

Great House

The History of Love by Nicole Krauss was not my favorite so I was pleasantly surprised by how moving her third novel, Great House, was.  In Great House, a large desk is the centerpiece both of the houses it occupies and the lives it touches. As an adult, I haven't had any furniture I care about-- I could get rid of it all and wouldn't miss it. But this desk represented a nostalgia for all who posessed it: nostalgia for a pre-Holocaust home in Budpest, nostalgia for a poet disappeared under Pinochet, the hope of another book written at it. Krauss weaves together disparate lives in different parts of the world, giving the book a kind of mystery as I kept reading to see how they would all connect together.

As in The History of Love, Krauss uses a bit of dialogue tic (which is what I disliked) but it is minor and I think her overall writing is improved. I look forward to her next books.

5 out of 5 netflix stars

My Antonia and The Bean Trees

The midwest might be considered the breadbasket of America, but my sister and I knew midwestern foods from the following categories: vegetables were from a can, and usually casseroled with the help of cream of mushroom soup. Salad would be based on jello not lettuce, and would be sprinkled throughout with marshmallows or mandarin oranges, not peppers or croutons.  By late January the snow piles had reached 5 feet and taller and I had a nostalgic hunger for not just banana pudding and Old El Paso tacos, but tales of survival in the midwest when survival meant more than shoveling the front sidewalk.

I'd read My Antonia by Willa Cather in high school and remembered loving it, although the story had faded in my memory.  In the last quarter of the 19th century Antonia arrived in Nebraska farmland with her family from Bohemia. Not farmers by trade, they struggled through the first winter, with Antonia easily doing the farm work of any boy her age and aided in English lessons by Virginia transplant Jim, a boy a few years her junior.

A century later Taylor was making her own journey out west in Barbara Kingsolver's The Bean Trees.  For Taylor, survival meant escaping her native Kentucky without getting pregnant, but when her car breaks down in Oklahoma and she's given a catatonic little girl, she names her Turtle and takes her with her to her ultimate stopping point of Tuscon, acknowledging the irony.

Jim is the narrator in My Antonia, but the women are it's heroines. He admires their strength and beauty-- these are women who have to work to earn a living. For some that means prospecting for gold, opening a successful dress shop or raising a family to work the farm. He defends them the anti-immigrant bias of the day and even years later when he's a successful Harvard trained attorney, is humbled by their success.

To rescue herself, Taylor jumps into motherhood, rescuing Turtle, but also rescues Estevan and Esperanza, immigrant refugees from Latin America and Lou Ann, a woman who becomes her roommate and confidante and needs Taylor as much as Taylor needs her.

Five stars for both books, which satiated my hunger for the midwest while I was holed away in a terrible New England winter...even if I did have to indulge in some 7 layer dip and Snickers salad.

The Woman in White

How many English novels set in extravagent estates in the mid 1800s have made you wonder, "how come these people don't have jobs?"  Sure there's the nannies and the pastors and the family attorneys and all the various servants, but most of the gentlemen and women prance around waiting for mail that tells of their beloveds also prancing around waiting for mail.

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins is a bit different.  The story opens with Walter Hartwright accepting a position as an art teacher for a couple of country estate living daughters of a nervous wreck of a gentleman.  En route to the new job, he runs into a distraught woman in white who needs directions to London and assurance that Mr. Hartwright will forget about her. He mentions the interaction to his new pupils, one, Laura, who bears astonishing resemblance to the Woman in White. And from this the stage is set for one of the first mysteries published-- and piles of letters that are sent back and forth between estates with replies that come quicker than our email of today.  Collins was a trained lawyer and goes into detail about financial and inheritance law of the time-- important if you are just going to live off interest.  A couple of notable characters are introduced along the way-- Sir Percival Glyde who is both obsequious and nervous, Count Fosco who is devious, and a slew of passerby who make the book a quick read.

Ultimately the denoument was well executed, but long! Like, 100 pages long. Other than that it was as good as the Millenium series for sure.

netflix stars: 4/5

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Zeitoun and The Lacuna

If Dave Eggers wrote the original Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, he's followed it up as an adult with even more heartbreaking works: What is the What a few years ago and Zeitoun in the past year or so.  It might be too soon for some to read a non-fiction account of a family's post-Katrina life in New Orleans.  If that family is Muslim, it might put anyone over the edge.  After sitting on my shelf for a year, I picked it up only because it's the current book club pick. I didn't know if I was ready to cry through the entire story.
The cover is an illustration, but could be any number of photographs that came out the days following the hurricane and levee breaks...a man in a canoe, gliding through the streets.  The man is Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian immigrant who owns a contracting business along with his wife, Kathy.  Eggers writes about their lives in a journalistic fashion.  He fills in the day-to-day life of a hard working father of five with brief backgrounds of Zeitoun's life in Syria and Kathy's life as a younger woman in New Orleans (including her decision to convert to Islam).  Kathy and Zeitoun watched the weather reports leading up to Katrina's attack on the gulf coast much as we all did, but most of us didn't have to decide weather or not to evacuate and most of us didn't have to come home to houses completely inundated.  Even fewer of us chose to stay in New Orleans, as Zeitoun did, witnessing trapped neighbors, looting, interrogations by the law and the lawless.
The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver is a different account of so called law in the guise of public safety but 50 years earlier.  It's a fictional account of William Harrison, an American who grew up in Mexico and ended up working for Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera as a kind of jack of all trades-- sometimes plaster mixer, sometimes cook, sometimes confidante to Mrs. Kahlo.  Frida has become such an iconoclast that it was hard to believe her conversations with Harrison.  I had trouble seeing where Kingsolver was going at times-- why so much background on Harrison's mother? It was a 600+ page book and at times I felt like I wouldn't make it through.  But then there was a turning point.  When Kingsolver devoted the second half of the book to Harrison as popular author and quiet bachelor in a small Southern town, the story became compelling.  Kahlo and and Rivera are too big to compete with and Harrison deserves to stand on his own, and he does.  In a short time we learn that he is targeted as a Communist, quotes from his fiction are attributed to him, out of context, and no matter what, the US government will bring him down.  Kingsolver is a bit heavy handed in her allusions to current government control and persecution (read Zeitoun) but Harrison is a complete and sympathetic character. I felt the same helplessness with Harrison as I did with Zeitoun.
These may not be the best reads for conspiracy theorists...or maybe they're the best reads for all of us. 5 and 4 stars respectively.

The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World

A certain Evil Twin is contributing this post on The Know-it-All by AJ Jacobs. I'm thankful for this because a) I have been too busy to read, b) too busy to post anything I have read and c) I like Evil Twin #1 (and #2).  To bring home the point that we do not share the same taste in books, I have subsituted the normal cover shot of a book with a pie chart.  --And

 

For the most part, my taste in books is the exact opposite from Steph's and Andrea's. So it should have been no surprise, when I wrote to Andrea about enjoying the Know-it-All, that her reaction was less than favorable. Normally, biographies are my favorite. Seldom do I get to laugh out loud on a plane packed with people, while reading one of my non fiction dry biographies. But then again this book is not meant to be a serious read.
AJ Jacobs starts a quest to finish the entire Encyclopaedia Brittanica from cover to cover. Maybe that is where he won me over, as I spent many an hour with our Encyclopaedia Brittanicas as a young child. In this absurd endeavor, we see the root of his insecurities, a brilliant father, who is quirky and fun, his nemesis/brother-in-law, who is more successful than him, and the number one failure, his inability to sire a child with his ever patient wife. Most of the encyclopaedia facts that pepper the pages are simply a device to illustrate all these insecurities in detail.
The Know-it-All won't change your life, it won't make you cry, and it may fill your head with random factoids. It is fun read meant for the beach or a plane, a place where you can giggle without making a huge ass of yourself.