summer reading, part 2: unaccustomed earth, the girl with the dragon tattoo, and march

Unaccustomed Earth, by Jhumpa Lahiri

(333 pages, 2008 - paperback)

Jhumpa Lahiri (The Namesake, Interpreter of Maladies) is a writer of meticulously crafted, melancholic stories of Bengali Indians in America. Many of her characters are second generation Bengalis, so it comes as little surprise that identity, exile, acceptance, culture and family are common themes. In that way, Unaccustomed Earth - a collection of five short stories and one novella told in three parts - doesn't really break new ground. The stories focus on the family lives of first and second generation immigrants living in the East Coast, many of whom - despite their PhDs from Ivy League universities - struggle to understand themselves and those closest to them. They are precise, beautiful, and written with an expert hand; however, very similar to her previous work. If you have not yet read Lahiri (and you should) then Unaccustomed Earth is a wonderful place to begin, but for those already familiar, don't expect anything particularly innovative here. I'm curious what would happen if she'd stretch her wings to write about something other than Bengalis...

My Grade: A-

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson

(590 pages, 2008 - translated copy, paperback)

I adore a good murder mystery, and the late Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - though not perfect - is a pretty good addition to the genre. Investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist finds himself accused and convicted of libel after pushing a little too hard against a too powerful tycoon. Shamed and stripped of his journalistic powers, he accepts a job investigating the forty-year-old mysterious disappearance of Harriet Vanger, niece of one of the wealthiest, most powerful men in Sweden. Harriet's disappearance is a play on a classic locked-room mystery - she disappeared off a island that, due to a major auto accident on a bridge, was sealed off from the mainland. An intense search ensued, yet no body or clues surfaced, the case went cold, and was Harriet was all but forgotten. That is, of course, until Henrik Vanger hires Blomkvist to look at the case with a new set of eyes. What follows is a nasty little mystery full of twists, turns, and and heaping helping of misogyny.

Larsson originally titled this book "Men Who Hate Women," which is a terrible title for a book, however apt for the story he tells. With the exception of one or two characters, the men in this novel are hateful and violent, and several of them are just plain sadistic. The violence depicted in this book is enough to make many readers squirmy; however, I eat episodes of American Justice for breakfast, so that's not my big complaint. My criticism is that, although the middle of this novel was totally gripping, the beginning was tedious and the ending lazy. That said, trust that I will soonly be reading the hell out of The Girl Who Played with Fire, the second book in this trilogy. Larsson's writing may not be perfect, but he hooked me. He hooked me good.

My Grade: B-

March, by Geraldine Brooks

(280 pages, 2005 - paperback)

I must have been nine or ten-years-old when 'Santa' left me a copy of Little Women under the Christmas tree. It was love at first read, and I can't think of a book I've loved as well or read as often. And I know I'm not alone here, ladies. Little Women is one of the most beloved books in American literature, so writing its sequel is an incredibly risky endeavor. I can think of so many ways that March could have failed, but instead Brooks managed to not only capture Alcott's magic, but add depth and dimension to her classic novel. Perhaps it's because Brooks - rather than focusing on the March children - decided to tell an entirely new version of the story by focusing on the family's patriarch instead.

March is the story of Mr. March, an ardent abolitionist who volunteers himself as a chaplain in the Union army at the "ripe old age" of 43. March's source material offers very little of Mr. March's Civil War experience other than a few upbeat letters written before an illness forced him to prematurely return home. Brooks takes these vague details and uses them to create a masterful piece of historical fiction. Unlike the version in Alcott's original, this Mr. March is flawed, vulnerable and fully fleshed-out. And unlike many Civil War stories, Brooks's characters are a far cry from their Uncle Tom's Cabin-esque stereotypes. I normally shy away from historical fiction, but March breathes life into what can be a dense and stale genre. March won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006, and it absolutely deserved it. I cannot recommend this novel enough.

My Grade: A

summer reading, part 1: the yiddish policemen's union, atonement, and new moon

Seeing how my reading of books has recently far out-paced my reviewing of them, I'm attempting to catch up with three mini reviews today and three more to follow shortly. Mea culpa for my tardiness, and enjoy your weekend, sweetness.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union, by Michael Chabon

(418 pages, 2007 - paperback)

You may remember that I finally read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay last summer and loved it so much that it's now safely on the short list of my all-time favorite books. Eager to read more Chabon this summer, I dusted off my unread copy of The Yiddish Policemen's Union and hoped that it was at least half as good as "Kavalier and Clay." And half as good is about right.

Perhaps the best thing about this book is its premise. The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a noir murder mystery set in an alternate world where Jewish refugees have set up camp in Sitka, a long strip of land along Alaska's panhandle, after the 1948 collapse of the state of Israel. Although the settlement is a massive success, the land is merely on loan from the U.S. government, so when the government suddenly decides to let the lease expire, the Jews of Sitka find themselves turned away from yet another home.

As the novel begins, Reversion is just around the corner and washed-up homicide detective Meyer Landsman has discovered that a murder has taken place in the flea-bitten hotel he's been living in since his divorce. Perhaps because every aspect of Landsman's life has turned disastrous, he becomes obsessed with solving the murder of his neighbor - a former chess prodigy who was once widely thought to be the Messiah. It's a mystery that no one seems to want solved but Landsman, but with little else to live for, it's a mystery that Landsman feels he must solve regardless the cost.

Again, the best thing about The Yiddish Policemen's Union is how imaginative it is, though that's hardly the only thing its got going in its favor. It's also quite funny in parts, a poignant love story, and a nice little mystery. Does it reach the heights Chabon achieved with "Kavalier and Clay"? No. But is it worth your time just the same? Sure. I'd say so.

My Grade: B

Atonement, by Ian McEwan

(351 pages, 2001)

Ian McEwan is one of those authors I've long been embarrassed at having never read, so when I found a hardcover copy of Atonement on sale for $2 at a used book store, I figured his time had finally come. And wow. I've been missing out.

By now I'm sure that most of you have seen the recent film adaptation of McEwan's novel, so I won't bother with too much plot summary. Basically, 13-year-old Briony Tallis, a girl who lives and breathes stories, is confused by something she sees between her sister Cecilia and Robbie Turner, the housekeeper's son. When something much more deviant happens later that evening, Briony points an accusing finger at innocent Robbie and spends the rest of her life trying to atone for her crime.

Since Atonement was such a wonderful film, I almost made the mistake of passing on the source material. How I forgot the golden rule that the book is almost definitely better than the movie, I do not know. McEwan's Atonement is a masterpiece - gorgeously written, a successful experiment of structure and perspective, and a impressively accurate portrayal of the inner workings of a thirteen-year-old girl. Additionally, it's a true testament to the author's storytelling abilities that, having seen the film, I already knew what was coming, and yet I still found the plot absolutely engrossing. Simply put, Atonement is a freaking great book. There's only so many ways I can say it.

My Grade: A

New Moon, by Stephanie Meyer

(563 pages, 2006 - paperback)

Say what you will about me, but I ain't no book snob. I will read almost anything. I guess I'd rather be a part of the conversation than be able to claim some sort of literary purity. Enter New Moon. Now, if you ask my students about New Moon, they'd probably say something like, "Squee! Team Edward! Team Jacob! Like, ZOMG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" But they're largely crazy people, so let me lay some truth on you instead.

Twilight is not a very good book for reasons I've already adequately spelled out here. But New Moon? Well, it's even worse. Meyer's writing is just as awful in this second installment, but heroine Bella is even more annoying and (I can't believe I'm saying this, by the way) the whole thing suffers from a long absence of Edward in all of his dreamy, glittering twee glory. Werewolf Jacob tries to replace him, but Edward proves to be - embarrassingly enough - irreplaceable. The Cullens are the Twilight saga, and if you send them out of town for much of the book, then New Moon is the result - boring filler while we wait for Edward to stop pouting and resume saving his bland girlfriend's life every couple of hours.

My Grade: D+

weekly book review: sharp objects, by gillian flynn

Firstly, it's been a bit since I've posted on what I've been reading, although that is in no way a reflection of my recent reading habits. I've actually read quite a bit this month. I just haven't written about any of it. So, in order to catch up I'm planning on posting shorter, more frequent reviews for the next couple of weeks or so. I'm talking, like, straight to the point reviews. No messing around. 250 words or less. (And if your response to that is, "About time, windbag!" then, well, that's a bit mean, don't you think?)

I'll begin with Gillian Flynn's Sharp Objects, a book which, to put it mildly, disappointed. I normally try to be especially kind to first-time novelists, but this book really pissed me off for some reason. No, scratch that. It pissed me off for several, very sound reasons. To list: I hated how Flynn, a woman, wrote about women - like she had to make them extra gritty, boozy, troubled, violent, and hypersexual in order to prove she can attract male readers. Even for a pulpy murder mystery, the characters risk absurdity in their level of caricature. It's sloppily edited, entirely too heavy-handed in its use of "sharp objects", and the plot twists are both absurdly convenient and glaringly obvious. In fact, I had the murderer pegged by page 37, but read the other 235 pages anyway in the hopes that I was wrong. Unfortunately, I wasn't. The plot really was that clunky and obvious, and yet Stephen King gave it a very favorable blurb. (Because Flynn and King both write for Entertainment Weekly, perhaps? Book politics. Blech.)

I have no doubt that Sharp Objects could make a passable made-for-T.V. movie, but that's hardly a compliment, and although I realize that saying all this makes me sound a bit cruel, I feel obligated to tell you the truth. This book did more than just disappoint me. It insulted my intelligence. I'd like to spare others a similar fate.

Sharp Objects

Gillian Flynn

2006, 272 pages

weekly book review: the somnambulist, by jonathan barnes

"The many men, so beautiful. And they all dead did lie. And a thousand thousand slimy things lived on, and so did I."

For the most part, the books on my list of resolution reads are heavy, depressing, beastly things, and I found myself needing a break from all of that. Enter: The Somnambulist.

Set in Victorian-era London, The Somnambulist chronicles the (mis)adventures of Edward Moon, a magician past his prime whose true passion is solving crimes, and his sidekick The Somnambulist, a massive, milk-guzzling, hairless mute who is able to endure impaling with neither injury nor pain. Add a bizarre murder, an albino, a menagerie of circus freaks, prostitutes, assassins, poets, a creeeepy Utopian cult, a man for whom time passes backwards, a medium, and various assorted psychopaths and you have The Somnambulist - a novel that is part Frankenstein, part Sherlock Holmes, and one of the strangest, freakiest, funniest, and most overall enjoyable books I've read so far this year.

The narrator, both unnamed and unreliable, begins his tale with a warning: "This book has no literary merit whatsoever. It is a lurid piece of nonsense, convoluted, implausible, peopled by unconvincing characters, written in drearily pedestrian prose, frequently ridiculous and wilfully bizarre." And although Barnes' prose is far from pedestrian, all those other things are pretty much true. This, of course, is what makes it so much fun to read.

Full to overflowing with twist, turns, and red herrings, Barnes' story more than once risks becoming a bit too absurd, yet he somehow manages to pull it all off. Well, mostly pull it off. The only notable exception to this would be the ending, which wasn't quite as satisfying as I'd hoped it would be. Still, I found Barnes' debut to be a clever and wholly pleasant diversion, and its flaws easy enough to forgive.

In short - I liked it. I liked it a lot.

The Somnambulist

Jonathan Barnes

2007 (paperback), 353 pages

book review: paper towns, by john green

A paper town is a utter fiction - a place that exists only in maps created by mapmakers eager to keep potential thieves from plagiarizing their work. In a sense, Margo Roth Spiegelman is a fiction too. To Quentin Jacobsen, she's a miracle - a sort of manic pixie dream girl who's "the kind of person who either dies tragically at twenty seven like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, or else grows up to win the first-ever Nobel Prize for Awesome." 

Adorably nerdy Quentin (Q) seems to have spent his entire life in love with with myth of Margo, so when she shows up in his bedroom - dressed like a ninja inviting him to join her on a campaign of nocturnal vengeance - he is too flattered to refuse. It's a wild night that leaves play-it-safe Q exhausted, exhilarated, and hopeful that he and Margo can rekindle the friendship they one had as very small children in a time before deeply entrenched social cliques.

Apparently, Margo does not share the same sentiments, because come morning she is gone. Mere weeks away from graduation, Margo has seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth, although no one but Q seems too terribly concerned. She has, however, left a web of clues behind - clues which Q believes she has left because she desperately wants to be found. With little more to go on than a marked-up copy of Leaves of Grass, Q sets off to unravel the mystery of where his dream girl has gone, and in the process learns something perhaps more important: There are no dream girls. There are only girls, and loving the idea of someone is unfair to the actual person whom you've romanticized into fiction.

I heard about Paper Towns while attending a conference on notable new releases in Young Adult Fiction, and was eager to read it after my presenter called it a "masterpiece." Personally, I think that word may have been too freely applied; however, Paper Towns is one of the best books written by one of the best Young Adult authors doing it today. It's a fresh and compelling mystery that is smartly written and, at times, laugh-out-loud funny. Maybe I wouldn't call it a masterpiece, but it is really quite excellent. If you're a person who, like me, maintains a Young Adult library, then consider Paper Towns a must-have addition.

Paper Towns
John Green
2008, 305 pages

weekly book review: the amnesiac, by sam taylor

Fittingly, I have no recollection of where I heard about The Amnesiac, and I only have the haziest remembrance of purchasing it.  Weirdly, it's as if the little sucker just magically *appeared!* on my bookshelf, where it then sat, gathering dust for ages.  And it may have continued to gather dust for quite some time to come, however I spent a lot of time on the road this holiday season and the book I had been reading just wasn't doing it for me.  I needed something else, something readable, something fun and something preferably in paperback.

Enter The Amnesiac.:

After breaking his leg on the stairs of his Amsterdam apartment, James Purdew suddenly finds he has time to do something he hasn't done in a long time:  think.  And as tends to be the case, the more he thinks, the more trouble he finds.  His life in Amsterdam starts to fall apart as James becomes increasingly obsessed with three years of his life that have become lost to his memory, those being the years he spent as a college student in the town of H.  An avid journaler, James has three journals detailing his life during those missing years, but, for some reason, those journals are locked up in a black safe he keeps under his bed, and he has no idea where the key could be.  Clearly, something very bad happened in H., something he once chose to forget, but something he is now hell-bent on remembering.

In an attempt to unlock the mystery of those missing years, James must become the detective of his own mystery.  He returns to the British town of H., gets a job fixing up the crumbling remnants of the house where he once lived, and starts unearthing clues to who he was and what happened to him there.  The deeper James digs, the stranger things get, as the plot takes a bit of a Gothic turn, where suddenly a 19th century manuscript becomes a key to unlocking the mystery of James' own past.

To paraphrase the blurb on the back of the book, The Amnesiac is described as a time travel book without a time machine, a science fiction book without the aliens, and a murder mystery without the murder.  This description is pretty apt, and is a large part of why I liked it so much, despite the fact that it wasn't the most original premise for a book.  (At times, the plot felt quite similar to films like Vanilla Sky and Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind.)  But even if similar stories have been told before, Taylor sprinkled heavy references to Borges, Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Freudian psychology, Heaven and Hell, and Descartes' solipsistic brand of philosophy (i.e.: "I think, therefore I am.") into his story, using them as clues that continued to keep me thinking and guessing until the end.  In The Amnesiac, Taylor has created something more original and intelligent than your average dimestore mystery novel, while still managing to craft a tale that was a whole lot of fun to read.

After skimming some other reviews of this book, it seems as if many folks didn't like it as much as I did, complaining that the ending wasn't very satisfying and that Taylor was a little heavy-handed with the references to Borges and Freud.  And those are complaints that I can certainly understand.  The Amnesiac is hardly a perfect novel. However, I thoroughly loved it, warts and all.  While reading, I, like James, became a detective - underlining clues, scribbling in the margins, and working the story over in my mind long after finishing it.  

In short, I can't remember the last time I had so much fun reading a book.  I'm not sure whether or not I fell in love with The Amnesiac,  but I certainly thought about it a lot when it wasn't around.

The Amnesiac

Sam Taylor

383 pages, 2007

weekly book review: the soul thief, by charles baxter

File this one under "showed promise."

Baxter's anticipated follow-up to the highly acclaimed The Feast of Love started off well enough, I suppose. Nathaniel Mason, narrating awkwardly in the 3rd person, is a graduate student in upstate New York and on his way to one of the smarmiest parties ever put to ink. It's there, amongst the hipsters and faux Marxists, where he first meets Jerome Coolberg,"The Soul Thief." Coolberg is purported to be some sort of genius, however Nathaniel is quick to note that nearly everything spewing from his mouth is stolen material.

Though he first seems harmless enough, it doesn't take Nathaniel long to realize something about Coolberg is a bit...off. Still, Nathaniel can't seem to help from forming an uneasy friendship with Coolberg, and that's when things take turn for the creepy. Nathaniel's apartment is burgled, his clothes go missing, and Coolberg somehow seems know very personal things about Nathaniel - things Nathaniel doesn't recall ever sharing with him. The issue is forced to its crisis when he catches word that Coolberg has taken to passing Nathaniel's history off as his own. His excuse? He's writing a book, and Nathaniel's a major source of inspiration. From here the story takes several twists, the biggest one being, of course, the ending. Which was awful.

As I stated earlier, this novel certainly had potential. Annoying opening party scene aside, the first act read like Hitchcock at his best - full of ominously mysterious characters with undefined motives. In fact, the book even begins with a reference to Psycho, a reference the reader will later recognize as a major clue. And even though I *loves* me some Hitchcock, I most certainly didn't love this novel.

Why? As the plot unfolded I was bothered by several things, but I could have looked past the pedantic dialogue and unlikeable characters had the ending delivered better. And when it comes down to it, it's the ending that ruined The Soul Thief for me. I'll be vague for the sake of anyone who may still want to give it a shot, but after all the allusions dropped throughout, I was geared up for the ending to be as classy and smart as a Hitchcock film, when instead it felt cheap and gimmicky. Baxter my man, you could have done so much better.  

I have no doubt that Charles Baxter is a great writer, however I'm not sure one would be able to discern that on this strength of this novel alone. Hardcore Baxter fans will probably still want to check it out, but for everyone else...maybe don't bother. It wasn't the worst way to spend a few hours, but it was hardly the best.

The Soul Thief

Charles Baxter

210 pages, 2008

monday book review: the monsters of templeton, by lauren groff

Wilhelmina ("Willie") Upton - a promising graduate student at Standford University - has fled back to her small, historic hometown of Templeton, New York "steeped in disgrace." The affair with her married grad school mentor has been found out, and, now pregnant with his illegitimate child, she hopes to find solace in her mother, Vivian ("Vi") Upton - a woman whose footsteps Willie has unwittingly fallen into. Herself a child of the free-loving 1960s, Vi had always told Willie that she is the product of one of the many lovers she took while living in a San Francisco hippie commune, but when Willie returns home Vi thinks it best that she finally tell her daughter the truth about her parentage. In an attempt to take her mind off of her own unraveling life, Vi partially lets Willie in on the long-kept secret of her heritage - that she is not a result of "any one of three random hippies in a San Francisco commune," but rather the illegitimate daughter of some "random Templeton man." Thinking it best that Willie have a task to keep her occupied in her time of emotional duress, Vi refuses to reveal this man's identity, but instead insists that Willie solve the mystery for herself. The novel that follows is made up of the random snatches of genealogical research, generational family rumors and gossip, and historical documents Willie digs up to help piece together the epic story that is her family's history, and - most importantly - to discover the true identify of the father who shared her hometown but whom she never knew.

The "monsters" in The Monsters of Templeton are numerous and varied. The day of Willie's homecoming also happens to be the day when the fabled lake monster of the town's Lake Glimmerglass dies, its fifty-foot fish corpse rising to the surface to finally end the several-hundred-year-long debate over its existence. There is an actual ghost that haunts Willie's bedroom, and who occasionally emerges to help her in her quest. And, of course, there are various human monsters who are unmasked as Willie unravels the thread of her family history to reveal betrayal, murder, rape, countless affairs and loads of intrigue. As a whole, the novel is part mystery, part historical fiction, part magical realism, and only partly successful.

Obviously, when you pick up a book knowing that one of its characters is a giant lake monster, you don't really go into it expecting absolute realism, but even still one of my criticisms of the novel is that some of the twists in the plot are too easily arrived at. For instance, when Willie reaches a dead-end in her search, her mother - *tada!* - suddenly remembers owning a sealed envelop of old letters written by the very same relatives Willie is researching at that particular moment. Or, when she's not sure what path to travel down next - *tada!* - a ghost emerges and tell her. There aren't many moments like these, but when they happened I couldn't help but roll my eyes.

Next, is the language. Time and time again, Groff's sentences felt like they were trying way too hard. I wouldn't call it pretentious exactly, but with characters named Marmaduke, Cinnamon, Primus Dwyer, and Ezekiel Flecher; and with ridiculous sentences like, "He slept, openmouthed like a boy, blissfully naked, his smooth rear exposed trustfully to the sky" she is definitely risking absurdity on more than one occasion.

But despite all of this, I couldn't help but enjoy reading this book. The story - although often unbelievable - was engrossing, and the language - while often grating - was also often beautiful, allowing the terrible spots to be quickly and easily laughed away. It's been a long time since I've felt so conflicted by a story, and that alone is reason enough to make me glad to have read it.

The Monsters of Templeton
Lauren Groff
2008, 361 pages

monday book review: special topics in calamity physics, by marisha pessl

I finally got around to finishing Pessl's  debut, which seems to have met a steady stream of both critical acclaim and general annoyance following its 2006 release.  Well aware of the opinions of both camps, I tried to approach Special Topics... with an open mind, and I found myself wavering between loving it and wanting to hurl it across the room. The novel - at least in terms of length - is epic, but although the plot meanders considerably, it's essentially a murder mystery wrapped in coming-of-age drama.  Blue van Meer has spent her formative years bouncing around the country with her brilliant and pedantic father who seems hell-bent on creating a child who is every bit as brilliant and pedantic as himself. Although they rarely stay in one city for longer than a college semester,  Dr. van Meer finally gives in to his daughter's desire for stability by accepting a teaching position in a sleepy little town in North Carolina and enrolling her in St. Galloway - a ritzy prep school that reeks with pretension.  Here, Blue's major plans are to enjoy her senior year and clinch the title of class valedictorian, but when she catches the eye of Hannah Schneider - a mysterious, beautiful teacher who is the beloved leader and mentor of "The Bluebloods" (basically the richest, snottiest kids in school) - drama, intrigue and death are soon to follow. 

Again, it's been awhile since I've read something that was as enjoyable as it was frustrating. While the actual story was intriguing enough to keep me reading, I found the writing to be gimmicky and grossly overwritten.  I was constantly getting lost in endless strings of smiles, metaphors and parenthetical citations used, presumably, to prove how smart the narrator was (i.e. - A chandelier isn't "gaudy." Rather, it's "a gold, five-tiered chandelier...hung like an upside-down duchess shamelessly exposing to the paying public her ankle boots and froufrou petticoat."  Ugh.) But there are moments, especially after the first 150 or so pages, when Pessl seems to forget how witty, dazzling, and innovative she is trying to be and just writes, and these are the moments that keep me reading. Basically, is there considerable talent here?  Yes.  Would Pessl have benefited from more disciplined editing? Most definitely.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Marisha Pessl

2006, 514 pages

books: in the woods

I am right pissed off.

In the Woods is Tana French's debut novel. Lots and lots of people like it. It's 400+ pages long and has two parallel story lines - one that's interesting and one that's not. Unfortunately, 75% of the novel was dedicated to the latter.

Mind you, I wouldn't have stuck with a 400+ page novel if I truly hated it. The prologue was excellent, the cover quite pretty, most of the time I appreciated French's writing style, and as far as crime dramas go I suppose this one had a bit more eloquence, substance and style than most.

However, I didn't really care who murdered the young ballerina because I figured it out about 100 pages in. With three quarters of the novel left to go, I stuck things out for that second story line. The one that wasn't paid nearly enough attention. The one that was never resolved.

So yes, if you like reading long-ish books that end in messy disappointments then I've got one to lend. But I actually quite like you, so maybe let's not.

Oh, bother.

Up Next: The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman

books: 14 down, 10 to go: the raw shark texts

Life, the Universe and Everything is, in my humble opinion anyway, pretty ambitious subject matter for a novelist’s debut, but such is the focus of The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall – one of the weirdest books I’ve read in quite some time. The novel begins with a man (the Second Eric Sanderson) choking, lying on the floor and with no memory of who he is or how he got in that state. Thanks to a letter addressed to him by the First Eric Sanderson, he is led to a psychologist who informs him that he is suffering from a very rare psychological condition – a psychotropic fugue “thought to have been the result of prolonged emotional trauma stemming from the death of his girlfriend Clio Aames, who drowned in a scuba diving accident while the pair were on holiday in Greece.” While Dr. Randle proves to be only marginally helpful, it’s from her that he learns that he’s been suffering from this condition for the past two years, and in that time has had eleven recurrences, each one erasing more and more of his memories.

The puzzle of Sanderson’s condition begins to take form when he returns home and is immediately inundated with letters, strange coded messages (a video of a flickering lightbulb, for instance), and dictaphones, all addressed to him from his pre-amnesiac self. Through this odd correspondence, Sanderson comes to understand that over the past several years he’s suffered repeated attacks from a Ludovician – a highly territorial conceptual shark that feeds on memories and language. The story that follows is an odyssey, moving him back and forth through time and planes of reality, to discover how to destroy the shark and save himself.

And if all of that sounds terribly confusing and odd, than that’s because it is.

Perhaps more than anything I’ve read so far this year, this novel made me work, and I appreciate that. Reading this book was an experience that was equal parts romantic, weird, and downright confusing - maneuvering through the jargon was a chore for me at times - however after the second reading (yes, I read it twice), I found myself appreciating it and its eccentricities more and more. It’s clear to me that readers will either love or hate this book, and there’s certainly plenty to criticize - the often-times vapid dialogue, for instance - but I’m a woman who’s willing to forgive a writer many things if the story itself is a solid one. Finally, it has an ending that begs to be discussed, so Paul (and anyone else feeling so inclined) - let’s.

Up Next: The Big Girls, by Susanna Moore

books: 9 down, 15 to go: the dead fathers club

The Dead Fathers Club (Matt Haig of The Guardian) is a retelling of Hamlet, where the protagonist is a 11-year-old boy named Philip Noble whose recently deceased father appears to him as a ghost, claims that Philip's Uncle Alan killed him to usurp his position of "king of the CASTLE," and demands that Philip kill his uncle so that his death is avenged, he can avoid "The Terrors," and move on to the afterlife. The novel is macabre, funny, poignant, and (to me, anyway) unputdownable. At times, it reminded me of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time as well as Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which are two other books that I also enjoyed more than a little bit. But please don't think that all the comparisons mean that Haig's writing style is unoriginal. I didn't feel that way at all. I loved this book both for its highly engaging story as well as the fact that Haig has a simple, beautiful way with words that would often give me pause. I highly recommend it, and although I suppose it's technically a young adult book I see how it really would appeal to most anyone. Unless, that is, you are a person who is terribly sensitive to correct punctuation usage since Haig, like my freshmen, simply cannot be bothered most of the time.

To conclude, here is a passage from The Dead Fathers Club that I was particularly found of. Enjoy.

I woke up and it was still dark. There was sound of a train far away and it was like the world was doing a sigh. Sometimes when you wake up you are in a different time like you have gone in a time machine and the time I was in was before Dad died.

Everything was normal and Dad was in bed with Mum in the next room sleeping with his arm flopped over her and I was thinking about going to see Derby with him on Saturday. It was going to be good and my thinking was getting faster and less sleepy and pushing me through time until I was in this morning.

Then I knew Dad wasnt in the next room and he was not taking me to the Football and when I remembered a heavy feeling came into my brain.

In the future there will probably be scales that can weigh how heavy memories are and it will be like when Mum and Renuka went to Weightwatchers. People or special doctors and Brainwatchers will say This memory is very heavy you need to lose weight in your brain.

Then they will tell you to exercise your brain in the right way to make it lighter.

My brain was so heavy this morning I didn't think I would be able to get it off the pillow without shaking out some of the pictures in my head of Dad. Like the picture of him when he flicked water on me and Mum when he was in the swimming book in Rhodes and we were dry on the sunbeds...or the heaviest picture of all which was when we went to Sconce Hills in the snow and his face was red and cold but his hands were warm in his woolly pattern gloves and I was still little enough not to be scared of holding his hand and he was dragging the sledge.

He was looking down at me and his words made clouds in the air and snowflakes turned into rain on his nose and his words said Come on Ill race you to the top... And then when we were at the top we both crunched onto the snow on our backs and laughed clouds up to the sky and I sat on my elbows and looked at him lying in the snow and felt the most happy ever but then I cant remember anything else because the picture is snow and melts in my brain.

Up Next: Heart-Shaped Box, by Joe Hill