.png)
.
This is a wild ride of books here. Holy smokes. I'm so eclectic!
I need to feel that way after earlier today.....
047) Resolution by Robert B. Parker, finished August 8
Picked this up from a Little Free Library when I had an hour to kill. Sat near a streetlight under the BART tracks. Logged a hundred pages right there. Every time I sat to read from it, seemed like the pages flew by. Still took a week to notch 321 pages. That's how it goes sometimes.
Parker has a plain style that makes Hemingway look wordy and and McCarthy logorrheic. But it's deep into character. And memorable. Surprised such simplicity works. But work it does.
Probably a lot to learn from reading Parker.
This is the second of four novels in this series about Cole and Hitch. Violent stuff. And thoughtful on questions of morality. But most of what it may be saying goes unsaid.
That's just how they talk
seven days
048) American Zion: A New History of Mormonism by Benjamin E. Park, finished August 23
Given that Aaron and I have spent hours (and hours) discussing this book over the last couple years, I don't feel a great need to spill at length here, other than to say that it is excellent. It it tough and steely, honest and true, generous and enfolding. It puts things I know into freshly sketched context and provides new information as well. It's well written and endlessly fascinating. Really, it's everything you might want from a one-volume history on a massive topic.
That topic is the long relationship between the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the United States of America. Which has ranged from fraught to bemused to cozy to dangerous.
As he points out in the final chapter, the current tenions arrive during a unique moment: "The battle they ['Latter-day Saint authorities'] are waging is not between Mormons and America, as the dividing lines are now within America."
Yeah. So...is that good or bad?
Tomorrow, the two-year anniversary of my beginning to read American Zion, Aaron and I are getting online with Ben to discuss his book and some other shared interests. I'll come back and turn this paragraph linkcolor when that's available online.
exactly two years to the day
049) The Candy House by Jennifer Egan, finished September 1
An absolutely brilliant book. My first Egan and I think it's playing similar games to her famousest one? but this fractured series of barely-related stories is absolutely appropriate for the ideas the novel is playing with. Among the stories is perhaps the best second-person story I've read (I can't remember the other couple great ones I know I've read, so who can say for sure).
Up until the last twenty-some pages, I suspected I would be telling you about how great the book was, every element truly excellent, yet not really a very good book because, connected or not, what, really, did these stories have to do with each other? But the last couple stories worked it out. Especially the penultimate one.
I remember reading somewhere, Orson Scott Card saying that he'd rather write novels that short stories because he spends the same amount of creative capital on either and novels pay better so why waste all that effort on a mere story? By that reasoning, this novel required the creative capital of any dozen other novels. Each section is fantastic. It took me awhile to understand/accept that characters that had been so richly drawn might ne'er return. It seemed . . . spendthrift.
The novel takes place in the recent past and the recent future in a world much like but not identical to our own. It's fair to call it science fiction but as it feels more like a world just to the edge of our own that "science fiction" seems like an exaggeration.
But isn't that often the very best science fiction of all?
three weeks more or less
050) Juliet: The Lives and Afterlives of Shakespeare's First Tragic Heroine by Sophie Duncan, finished September 7
I absolutely tore through the first half of this book (title Searching for Juliet according to the acknowledgments and in Britain—but I like our cover much better*) but slowed way down in the second half where it felt like Duncan was sometimes stretching to fill pages with interesting things she'd found even if there wasn't much to say about them. Occasionally she devolved into overly online liberal cliche in order to glue it all together. That said, I still really dug the book.
.png)
The British cover looks like it's meant to attract a YA audience. The American cover is just amazing. I wish you were holding it in your hands.
And this image of Juliet is perfect. She's the right age (not quite fourteen), lovely, thoughtful. I've probably seen it before (I married a huge Waterman fan), but I didn't remember it. It's great.
My other complaint (of this book, remember, that I actually really really like) is that they didn't pony up for a couple twenty-page glossy sections filled with images. Her section on the art of Juliet filled me with a desire to see what the heck she was talking about. And I'd love to see images from various productions she discusses. I care less about images from Verona or tragic couples labeled Romeo and Juliet but you know that other reader want to see that stuff. Not sure how much more expensive that would have made the book but it would (likely) have been worth it.
I want to go back to my first complaint and flesh it out a little. Duncan's at her best when discussing Juliet as an artistic phenomenon. How the story is told and retold in various media (the stage, oils, novels, movies) and her cultural and literary criticism is excellent. She has a harder time when she wants to talk about Juliet's influence on the real world. The stuff about fascists was fascinating but kept losing track of Shakespeare's Juliet. And when we get to topics like real-world people dying under a Juliet label, or diversity in casting, she keeps getting distracted, talking more about contemporary concerns and trying to shove Juliet into the conversation. It's awkward. The information is often interesting but the application to her new arguments read more like a string of tweets fueled by barely contained liberal rage. And hey—I'm pro–liberal rage! I got plenty myself!) but instead of Juliet taking the lead, current worries do, and the book suffers as a result.
But, once again, I loved this book. Through the first half of the book I was constantly interrupting people to tell them cool factoids I was learning. In the second half this rarely happened even though there was still tons of cool stuff. Juliet is the kind of book that makes me wish it was a thing, that writers of nonfiction would create an online repository of all the cool stuff they'd collected. The closest I found for Juliet was its author's Instagram (it's not very close). It's the 2020s! You're allowed a website!
Sigh.
Anyway, if you're at all into this stuff, definitely read Juliet. It's terrific.
(Also, if anyone wants to push back on my first complaint, let me just say you're absolutely correct. It may be a bit sideways, but the naming patters of slaves is important and belongs in the book. I suppose my real issue is rhetoric, not tangents.)
under two months
051) Lost Girls by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie, finished September 12
I kind of want to write a long essay on this book and publish it somewhere but I probably won't because I'm already annoyed with myself for even reading it. But best I can tell, no one's written about Lost Girls with the goal of interrogating its self-serving and redundant and contradictory, built-in, redundant rhetoric. In short . . . it really only works if you ignore what it's saying. But I suppose a work like this that is, ah, meant to be enjoyed an image at a time, can get away with such crap. Especially when it's done by a pair of arteests. And, in this case, if you say the emperor has no clothes on, people might miss the metaphor.
As long as I'm complaining, let me give one to each of the creators. 1) Moore is doing the same thing he's done a dozen times before. 2) Gebbie has a solid sense of anatomy but I'm not sure she's ever seen a human face before.
nine months
052) Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, finished September 12
Man, does this novel end powerfully. While at times I'd really had enough of Moby-Dick, here at the last, oh, thirty pages, it is absolute storytelling fireworks and thematic explosions. 100% successful. Amazing.
I suspect every time I read this book (this is only time two) different parts of the story will appeal to me No doubt the beginning will always charm and the ending will always thrill, but what parts from the middle will stick and which will feel disposable?
Part of my wishes Melville had edited a bit more, hadn't felt a need to include everything. But any cut would be a loss to some reader. Some of my favorites this time that may or may have not thrilled me last time include the treatise on white and the Spirit-Spout. The Spirit-Spout got me thinking about how to properly adapt Moby-Dick to film and I decided the best way is twenty or so hourish-long episodes, with the same cast, but delivered by differing behind-camera crews with visions unique to each story. The Spirit-Spout is likely animated. Taika Waititi can have the meeting-Queequeg episode. And so on.
I listened to perhaps as much as a third of this. When I was sick. Driving the length of California alone. I liked the experience well enough.
Of course the real question is will I read Moby-Dick again—truthfully, I do not know.
But even though I'm ambivalent to some measure, it's not a book that will leave me.
I don't think it's unfair to call it a masterpiece.
five months
053) Apos by Anna M. Wright, finished September 14
First, no question this book is a thing of beauty. Even how it was packed when it arrived in the mail took my breath away. The book itself is printed gorgeously. A terrific use of paper and colors. When you hold it in your hands you'll be surprised you paid so little for it.
The book consists of stories Anna collected over many, many interviews with former missionaries. These former missionaries have a range of attitudes toward and relationships with the Church now that some years have passed. Anna collects their stories and shares them as is, without any judgment. It's almost unsettling how fairly she treats each person without ever inserted her own opinions regarding whether the person is right about this or wrong about that. She just accepts them as they are. In this way, the book is an awesome act of charity. And a bit of a fingerwag at those of us who want to fix people. I don't think of myself that way, but many times when reading this book I wanted to jump in and set folks straight. Even though, time and again, the stories demonstrate that is rarely a helpful coarse of action.
The book also makes me feel old. Stories of pandemic and online missionary work are so alien from my experience thirty years ago. And yet these kids (and they do feel like kids to me, now) are terribly, terribly familiar.
Lately, I've been developing a (hubristic?) desire to serve as a mission president, to serve young missionaries with generosity and kindness, empowering them through patience and listening and demonstrated forgiveness. Don't know why I've been feeling this way (such a call is ludicrously unlikely), but Apos confirmed both the value and difficulty of such service.
Good luck to all the mission leaders out there. Missionaries need your love and your kindness and a certain amount of nobility and goofiness to demonstrate what being a fail-and-try-and-fail-and-try again Saint may be.
a couple months i guess
previous books
