Book Notes: What I've Been Reading Lately

So, after a two month hiatus to welcome our baby into the world (thank you very much), "Head of the Class" is back, but with something different this week.

It only makes sense to write reviews of new books, but lately I've been reading some older titles, some only from last year, others decades old, and this week I'll pass those recommendations on to you.

I named our new boy Cormac Aran McGrath, which derived from and sent me back to two literary sources.

First was Cormac McCarthy.  Previously I had only read Blood Meridian, The Road, and All the Pretty Horses.  Returning to him now, many years later, I started by rereading Pretty Horses and then completing the Border Trilogy with The Crossing and Cities of the Plain.  It's a strange sort of trilogy, where the second book has no character or plot connection to the first, and then the second pairs up the main characters from the first two books - more like a triptych than a trilogy, but one in which the story arc climbs higher throughout all thousand pages of the works.  The overarching theme could be summarized as "what fools these mortals be."  And then they die in a pool of blood.

No Country for Old Men fell within this same genre and feel.  At times, you'd think this story was happening just down the road from John Grady's familial hacienda.  No Country, however, seems more written for the movies, with an unsympathetic bad guy and more of a thriller plot line, slightly unoriginal (unsuspecting dude comes across a cache of drug money and keeps it, prompting the bad guys to pursue).  It says a lot that you might as well just watch the movie for that one, whereas the movie of Pretty Horses is a complete waste of time and does no justice to the book.

Lastly, I added Child of God to my McCarthy roster as well, a shorter, more deliberately violent work, and honestly an earlier, immature work where the violence is less thematic and more ramped up for shock value, a sort of proto-Silence of the Lambs.  You won't be missing much to miss this one.

I also circled back around to Stones of Aran, a two-work meditation on nature and history (both human and geological) by Tim Robinson.  The first book, Pilgrimage, details his musings as he walks the perimeter of the largest of the three islands, Inishmor.  For the second tome, Robinson turns inland and walks the Labyrinth of stone walls that define this tiny, harsh land.  His writing bears that perfect balance of the scientific storyteller, and reading these books is like going on a trip.  By the way, if I ever have the choice or chance, I would trade in my Savannah digs for a seaside cottage on Aran, a place I have never been but which Robinson taught me to love.

Besides my baby's namesakes, I read Jamie Quatro's collection of short stories, I Want to Show You More, a recommendation which came from, of all places, Runner's World magazine.  She is a runner, you see, and has one story in this collection about running, a surreal tale that reads like a cross between a moral fable and a nightmare vision.  Most or almost all the stories have character connections - the narrator of one story is the husband of another story's narrator, who appears as a passing minor character in yet another story, and so on.  At first I found these connections enchanting, but about two-thirds through the book they grew annoying and frustrating, and I felt like I would have to read the book twice through for earlier stories to make complete sense - keep in mind that some of the stories (I think?) had no connection to the others.  Overall, though, Quatro is a masterly writer, and I look forward to reading her in the future.

One of my favorite books of all time, Danny the Champion of the World, we are reading now in my fourth grade gifted class, which prompted me to pick up another book of Dahl's somewhat randomly, The Story of Henry Sugar and Six More.  I read this one backwards, starting with the essay called "Lucky Break: How I Became a Writer," in which Dahl touches on his youth, schooling, and service in the RAF during WWII.  The stories in this book, by the way, appear written for a younger audience, but only just so.  Some are definitely for young adults or older adults.  Anyway, the essay (which my students will read when we finish Danny) guided me to Dahl's two autobiographical works, Boy and Going Solo, which were quick, delightful reads.  He did more by the end of his twenties than I'll probably do in my whole life.  I've always admired Dahl as a writer, but add to that now a personal admiration.

Book Review: WARP - The Reluctant Assassin by Eoin Colfer

Full disclosure: I am an Eoin (pronounced "Owen") Colfer (pronounced "Colfer") fan.

I have read everything he's written, all fifteen or so young adult works, his handful of young readers, and his two novels for adults (well, three, really, counting his Part Six of Three continuation of Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker series).  I got 30 copies of Artemis Fowl and made 35 of my students read it.  I "liked" him on Facebook.  We named our dog after him (though we spell it "Owen").

Moreover, I consider him a modern master; he can balance a swiftly developing, viscously convoluted plotline while drawing in precise detail fascinating and wildly different characters.  His scenes remain embedded in your memory as if they had happened to you; you will see people in the park or grocery store and mistake them for his characters.  Pardon me a second while I wipe the foam from the corners of my mouth.

Colfer is best known for his nine-book Artemis Fowl series, and this title marks the first in a new, open-ended series involving time travel between Victorian London (think Jack the Ripper) and the modern day.  And my mentioning of Jack the Ripper is not accidental: the villain in this novel is the man who is such a murderous devil - Garrick - that he himself knifed Jack the Ripper just to show him up.  Now that's a bad dude.

Witness how Colfer controls the tension in a particularly bloody scene:

     Percival whistled two notes, high and low.  The signal for Turk to advance from the folds of velvet curtain that concealed him.
     Turk made even less noise than Percival, as he wore silken slippers, which he called his murder shoes.  He came up on Garrick from the rear and reached out for a shoulder, to steady the magician for the scimitar's blade, but his questing fingers skinned themselves on glass instead of flesh and bone.
     A mirror, thought Turk.  I have been misled.
     Terror sank into his gut like a lead anchor - he had the wit to know that he was done for.
     The mirror image of Garrick reached out through the mirror and plucked Turk's own sword from his hand.
     "You will not have need of this," said Garrick's image, and he plunged it directly into Turk's heart.
    Turk died believing a phantasm had killed him.

Obviously, if you were expecting something cute and nifty along the lines of Spy Kids, you, too, like Turk, have been misled.  I doubt Disney will be making this one into a movie any time soon - it would be the first NC-17 kids' movie ever.

But you can see, even in such a short passage from the center of the book. how Colfer shapes short-lived characters amidst a tense action scene - Turk's name, his silken slippers, his nickname for them, his scimitar, his darkly comic "I have been misled," his confusion as he dies - all these little touches delineate a character distinctive from the others (he is one of a trio sent to kill Garrick).  Colfer makes this person real and living even as he kills him.

If you cannot bring your big adult self to read young adult fiction, no matter how masterly crafted, then go for Plugged or Screwed, Colfer's works for big people.  However you go about it, step into one of his perfectly formed worlds and you'll find the boundaries of your world blown open.

Book Review: Nothing Gold Can Stay, stories by Ron Rash

A few stories into this collection of fourteen I found myself asking aloud, "How did I ever miss this guy?"

Rash hasn't exactly been obscure: he's won several prizes over a decade of publishing novels and short stories.  But I hadn't ever come across his work before.  Now I have everything he's written out from the library, stacked beside the couch for a glorious summer author study.

Nothing Gold Can Stay, as the title indicates, bears the heavy theme of decline and death - the cover art,  a bare tree silhouetted grey on black before the moon of the "o" in "nothing" - captures the feel of the book perfectly.  The same tree is featured on the spine, but in gold.

The story "Where the Map Ends" demonstrates the collection's verve.  Two fugitive slaves - one older, one younger - spend the night in the loft of a barn, and wake to find the farmer has discovered them.  Rash frames the tension beautifully:

A cowbell woke them, the animal ambling into the barn, a man in frayed overalls following with a gallon pail.  A scraggly gray beard covered much of his face, some streaks of brown in his lank hair.  He was thin and tall, and his neck and back bowed forward as if from years of ducking.  As the farmer set his stool beside the cow's flank, a gray cat appeared and positioned itself close by.  Milk spurts hissed against the tin.  The fugitives peered through the board gaps.  The youth's stomach growled audibly. ... The farmer did not look up but his shoulders tensed and his free hand clenched the pail tighter.  He quickly left the barn.

The tension releases when the fugitives realize the farmer is not overly fond of their former master and therefore sympathetic to aiding their escape.  But not entirely.  The farmer sees traces of the slave master's red hair in the younger fugitive and directs all his antipathy for the war and wealth at this one, while aiding the older, African-born fugitive in his quest for freedom, leaving the elder slave to decide if he can abandon his youthful charge.

The people in Rash's stories are desperate, trapped by circumstances, and scrambling for release from their trials.  Like the elder fugitive in "Where the Map Ends," they learn that freedom does not come without its burdens.

Book Review: Diana Wynne Jones, "Reflections On the Magic of Writing"

I came to Diana Wynne Jones's work in a roundabout way.  Already a fan of Hayao Miyazaki's movies when Howl's Moving Castle came out, I was surprised to find that someone else's book lay behind the story, since Miyazaki has a way of owning everything he uses - his style and vision are so engulfing.  The book was so, well, magical, that I went on to read three more of her novels.

Now we have a collection of essays and various other pieces by Jones, Reflections On the Magic of Writing, that, even for a casual reader of her work like me, not only exposes the influences and thinking behind her own writing, but solidifies her place among major 20th-century English writers of fiction.

Neil Gaiman contributes a heartfelt introduction, but his star power fades swiftly when Jones takes the stage and reveals her approach to writing children's literature, a method like that of a research psychologist:

     From my window I can see a steep stretch of woodland ... I have watched it for five years now.
     It is full of children who appear to be mad.  A group of girls totter down the slope. ... anyone
     who watches this wood, or anywhere else where children habitually play, will quite soon notice
     a number of things, all of which ought to have great importance for anyone who is interested in
     writing for children.

But Jones doesn't analyze: she embraces.  She writes about Tolkien, Narnia, learning to read Anglo-Saxon, and a favorite of mine, the somewhat obscure but startlingly brilliant poet Mervyn Peake.  She takes each in her arms as one would a child one adores, but without sentimentality or stooping to hero-worship.

What sets this book apart from all other posthumous essay collections is that it shines - these are no leftovers, or some last scraping at sales by a publisher.  This collection sparkles, it crackles, it burns with life like the fiery burning bush that not only burns without consuming, but provides a place for the voice of the divine.