A Million Little Pieces by James Frey
This was a difficult book to read because of the extensive hype that surrounds it. I knew it was an Oprah book and that it was declared to full of truthiness, which caused no shortage of teeth-gnashing and garment-rending among both its fans and detractors, however, I wasn’t stepped in the mythology one way or the other.
I read this book as though it were about a fictional character, James Frey, who just so happened to have the same name, birthday, and basic life trajectory as the book’s author, who ends up in a fairy tale rehab setting. This enabled me to suspend my disbelief and disgust at James Frey, shameless self-promoter, and just be one with the narrative.
While I did find myself rooting for James Frey, the character, James Frey, the author, needs to perhaps become acquainted with some basic conventions. Commas, appropriately used periods, and a lighter touch with the conjunctions would serve the author well. I’ve decided to quit harping on the total lack of quotation marks, dialogue tags, and paragraph indentation since, well, you guys know that by now. Unlike Frey, I don’t need to repeat myself ad-nauseum to get my point across.
As a memoir, this thing tanks because there is very little about that feels credible. I’ve been around junkies and lived in the ghetto, and his descriptions of both just don’t jive with what I have observed. His characters have a comic book feel to them as well. I don’t buy that that this is all how Frey’s “junkie-ness” manifests itself as a narrative technique.
As literature, this book has even fewer legs to stand on. The symbols are all obvious and the imagery feels hackneyed and cliched. It almost feels like a parody of good literature and that the author is laughing all the way to the bank at the wonderful hoax he put on us all.
I couldn’t help but compare this book to the other memoir I’ve recently read, Heft On Wheels by Mike Magnuson. Both feature a kind of intellectual everyman with an obsession and a substance abuse problem. One likes to go on and on and on and the other simply lets the reader make her own conclusions about situations. One is nearly 400 pages and one is barely over 250. One can apply the basic conventions of the English language, and, well, I respect my readers enough not to keep bloviating on the obvious.
This was a pleasant enough way to spend the afternoon, but A Million Little Pieces in no way represents anything particularly novel or interesting in the canon of American literature.
What are you reading this week?
-by Miranda Webster
With an expected heat index of 100 degrees Fahrenheit and a high moisture content in the air, I’m reading a whole lot this week. Of course, with the heat and humidity, my motivation to read wanes with my motivation to do much of anything, so I feel more like I am slogging through several books rather than reading them.
First up, is Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife by Sam Savage. This one was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Authors pick, and I am actually reading for my book group that meets there. It follows the (mis)adventures of a literate rat set in a 1960’s seedy bookshop. The author has a doctoral degree in philosophy from Yale and looks a bit, well, counter-culture, by the picture of him on the jacket. I’m going to guess that this short book goes much deeper than one would expect out of a story with a rat protagonist.
I’ve been trying to read Atonement by Ian McEwan, but I just can’t seem to get into this book. I am forcing myself to finish it — or else! I sense something Big is supposed to happen and I’m nearly a hundred pages into it with no dramatic payoff. I hate Briony, by the way. I’m glad Lola is a bitch to her. I can find no fault with McEwan’s literary technique, but his execution is making my teeth rattle right now.
I’m breaking up Atonement with A Million Little Pieces by James Frey, which I find I am slogging through for different reasons. I hate this book as well, and not just because it was an Oprah book (I hate Oprah books). I hate the bizarre literary affectations Frey misuses in this book: the terse prose, the random noun capitalization, the lack of punctuation setting off dialogue, the way the text just is crammed onto the page. I felt sorry for him after Oprah railed at him on her show, but no longer!
What is on your night stand right now? Are you relishing each turn of the page or are you slogging through to just to say you finished the book?
A Soldier of the Great War by Mark Helprin
-by Caroline
Sometimes I get a hankering to just get completely lost in the world of a book. Usually I pick up more fantastical novels when that urge comes over me. But when I first picked up this book, I found myself lost in a world that was of this earth, real enough at one time,fantastical in its way, and now as ethereal and unreal as Middle Earth. I’m speaking of the last gasp of Romantic Europe just before the First World War. That world was destroyed in the aforesaid war and we live in many ways in the world that resulted. This world is shown to us through the reminiscence of one Alessandro Giuliani, a soldier of the great war, whose world was shattered and through beauty, love, and faith is redeemed, shattered, and redeemed again.
The book opens in 1964, in Rome, with Alessandro as an old man. He tells his story, the story of the world and the people he loved and lost, the story of the whole century really, to an illiterate young factory worker with whom he finds himself unexpectedly–and as a point of honor–walking through the night from Rome to the village of Monte Prato, some seventy kilometers away. (And that is a hilarious story in its own right).
I like to promote this book when I can. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything like it by a contemporary author. To me he is like Tolstoy or Dostoevsky in his reach and the sweep of his canvas–and yet with the dark, anguished, humorous, thoroughly modern sensibility of a Vonnegut or a Joseph Heller. Helprin sketches the final years of empire through Alessandro’s memories of boyhood and then shows its destruction and the almost unimaginable toll that destruction took in the lives of human beings. I go back to it again and again and am always astounded by the intensity, the wild imagination, the beauty and the heartbreaking love to be found in it–even in the face of unimaginable horror and insanity.
Helprin’s use of language is incredible and he truly plumbs the question of how beauty and love can still save us from despair–even in the face of the horrors of the modern world, unique in both their kind and degree. Alessandro transmits his story, his wisdom, his survival as an act of love both to the boy he has just met (perhaps read as those of us who come after the generations who were the “first fruits” of modernity) and to those who did not survive and whom he loved even though it broke his heart.
Mark Helprin was a partisan of Bob Dole in 1996 and in fact convinced him to resign from the senate for the campaign and even wrote his farewell speech for him. He’s since associated with the neo-cons (though not lately I notice) and has been a conservative commentator on some TV news talk shows. It was disappointing and confusing to me, since what he seems to be saying in this book is so at odds with what that “party” is perpetrating on the world. It is as if Helprin’s mad dwarf Orfeo Quatta (read it, read it!) had been elected president and Alessandro went on the stump for him. But the balm this book has been to me over the years is such, that I have to forgive him.
A Few Attitude Changing Books
-by Miranda Webster
A sophisticated reader reads for a variety of purposes – sometimes for pleasure, other times for information. Every so often, a book comes along to reignite passions and rearrange priorities.
Heft on Wheels by Mike Magnuson is just one of those books. Mike, by way of a serious road cycling addiction, loses his alcoholism, two-pack of cigarettes habit, and junk food overload. He goes from a 275 pound chub to an athletic, trim 175 pounds in nearly one summer. Along the way, he finds his humanity.
I will be honest: I find cycling just slightly more exciting than golf which is just barely more interesting than watching paint dry. However, Magnuson explains the technical aspects of road cycling in such a low-key manner, that I was entranced by every ride and every race. I cried and laughed as Mike pulled his life together one messy step at a time.
Like Magnuson, I have undergone a life makeover in the past few years. I am ready for a physical one as well and this book gives me hope that I can, indeed, just do it.
What books have changed your lives?
(Sorry for the posting paucity this past week. I had some things to do offline. I know, shame on reality for intruding on my interweb life.)
A Few Hot Summer Reads
-by Miranda Webster
Ahh…summer. High temperatures, high humidity (for those of us not near mountains), and relaxing trips to the beach. After slathering ourselves with high SPF sunscreen, we bibliophiles reach for a good book to pass the time.
A summer read must be long enough to lose myself into, but short enough to finish in one afternoon. There must be a sassy heroine, a fun plot, and some amusing sidekicks along with a happy ending. I like to smile in the summer – Anna Karenina is a February read, perfect for its short grey days.
To me, nothing says good summer read like a book by Olivia Goldsmith. I could read Marrying Mom, First Wives Club, Switcheroo, and The Bestseller over and over again. The heroines are smart and sassy; the men get their comeuppance, and I escape inside another world much more glamous than my own.
This summer, my reading list isn’t as light-hearted as usual. I am re-reading The Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, The Moviegoer by Walker Percy (at Randy’s suggestion), and then Once an Eagle by Anton Myrer (at Cpt. Jack’s suggestion).
What makes a good summer read for you?
You Don’t Have to Live Here by Natasha Radojcic
-by Miranda Webster
I was browsing the new book section at my favorite library last winter when I spied the cover to You Don’t Have to Live Here by Natasha Radojcic. A review on the back of the book promised “unsympathetic” spare prose and the synopsis explained that this was a coming-of-age and coming-to-America story. Since I really like both, I eagerly checked out of the library.
This book did not disappoint and I read this powerful book in one sitting, sad that the book ended. Told in a series of vignettes, it is the story of Sasha, an ethnic Bosnian with a Muslim mother and Christian Gypsy father, who despite being the niece of a powerful Yugaslavian Communist official, always seems to find herself on the fringes of society with the wrong kind of men.
As Sasha falls into one bad situation after another from Yugoslavia to Cuba to Greece and, finally, New York City, it would have been very easy to write this story as a simple tear-jerker filled with a variety of stock characters. However, Radojcic neither treats her characters nor the series of harrowing experiences Sasha falls into, with excess sentimentality. Instead, she portrays every character as a flawed, but complex, human being – capable of both great good and great evil.
Few authors produce well-written books about characters that in real life would offend most readers’ basic moral sensibilities, but Radojcic manages to do just that by taking us into the world of the wise-cracking, observant Sasha.
A Few Good Paragraphs
-by iBrenda
After giving up on a book right after I started (see “A few not-so-good books”) I started a new book this evening.
Just the first few paragraphs into the book, and I am in love with it already:
“In the middle of my marriage, when I was above all Hugh’s wife and Dee’s mother, one of those unambiguous women with no desire to disturb the universe, I fell in love with a Benedictine monk.”
“… I marvel at how good I was before I met him, how I lived molded to the smallest space possible, my days the size of little beads that passed without passion through my fingers. So few people know what they’re capable of. At forty-two I’d never done anything that took my own breath away, and I suppose now that was part of my problem — my chronic inability to astonish myself.”
I’ll give this book lots of time. It looks promising, because my rule of thumb is that if the first few paragraphs pull me in, it’s usually a winner.
I’d be interested to read the first few paragraphs from whatever anyone else is reading.
A Few Not-So-Great Books
-by Miranda Webster
I read Bird By Bird by Anne Lamott and instantly fell in love with both Lamott’s folksy style and writing advice (Shitty first drafts!). This book helped me through some very bad writerly ruts, so I headed over to my favorite library to check out one of her novels, Blue Shoe. I nearly committed bibliocide about ten pages in. I was so furious with this book, I was rooting for the supposedly unsympathetic ex-es. I wished for all manner of disaster to befall the main character, the whiny, self-righteous, self-absorbed Maggie. I wished some editor had grown some cajones and made Lamott rewrite the entire tedious mess. I mean, I absolutely adore Lamott’s non-fiction, yet I was astonished at what a stinker this book was.
We’ve all shared some of our favorite books and how they have influenced us. Now let’s hear it for books that have made you cry from disappointment.
Atonement by Ian McEwan
-by iBrenda
This is not my favorite book of all time, but it is the most engaging book I’ve read so far this year, having just finished reading it. I’ve lost a lot of sleep with this book; have kept it close to me day and night and into the wee hours. McEwan’s prose is exquisite. The plot was so compelling it kept my thoughts from straying too far from the characters even when I wasn’t reading it. However, at the end, McEwan jilted me like a suddenly disinterested lover. But don’t let that keep you from trying this book out.
It’s about “love and war, childhood and class.” It’s about how one big lie that a girl told ruined lives. It’s about the futility of trying to undo a lie and learning to live with it.
From the back cover: “On a summer day in 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witness the fliration between her older sister and the son of a servant. Briony’s incomplete grasp of adult motives and her precocious imagination bring about a crime that will change all their lives, a crime whose repercussions Atonement follows through the chaos and carnage of World War II and into the close of the twentieth century.”
Where do you look for a few good books?
Sometimes I just need a book like a junkie needs smack. My favorite place to head for my book fix, particularly if I don’t have something specific in mind is the very nice library to the north. They have a very good selection of new books – and not just the ones on the NYT Bestseller List – in various topics and genres. Books by local authors are also featured.
When I’m feeling spendy, I like to head over to Ann Arbor, MI and visit Shaman Drum, one of the nicest independent bookstores in the area. Their staff is knowledgeable and their selection of good books just can’t be beat by the mass retailers.
What is your favorite source for books? When you need a good book fix, where do you head?
