Reading Rainbow

I have been reading a lot lately, but not really managing to post book reviews. In part, this is because I fear that this really boring for our (three) readers. But, hey, we’ll be gone for a few days, so you just might get bored enough to read this post (or the books therein).

• The Sign of the Book: A Cliff Janeway Bookman Novel [John Dunning]. Sometimes book suggestions tell you a lot about the person who suggested the book. In this case, the book definitely fit the book recommender. That said, I don’t adore mysteries wherein the protagonist/detective is a grizzled solo veteran cop-man facing the demons of his ex-loves (or his love’s ex-demons). Just a little too cliché (In fact, for mysteries wherein the protagonist/detective is far more compelling, I’d recommend the work of Sujata Massey – just received two more of her books for the holidays. Yay!). This mystery was set in Colorado, which was a nice touch, and had the literary thing working for it. I’d say a lot more about how the story develops etc. but I don’t want to spoil the book for some of you who might read it. Overall, I’d say it wasn’t a bad read (and it was compelling in that way that mediocre books can be), but I don’t know that it’s worth a purchase.

• The Black Echo [Michael Connelly]. Guess I was on a bit of a mystery kick. A man-mystery kick. Anyway, read this one in one night. Which suggests that it was both compelling and lacking substance (although perhaps it isn’t fair to expect this of mysteries published by Warner Books?). I actually think this mystery was slightly better written and more thought-out than the one above. It was also set in Los Angeles, which was interesting for me, a fellow southern Californian, to read. Mysteries are, indeed, hard to review since you don’t want to give the show away. . . Let’s just say, I had sort of figured this one out about halfway through, but it was complex enough to keep me reading. Another point: I am not the kind of person who needs the mystery to end neatly, wrapped up with a little bow, but I don’t like unresolved questions. Don’t tell me that something “could have been” in an attempt to clean things up: you are the author! Take a stand – readers can accept that suspects might have destroyed evidence, but when you make the detective speculate about missing evidence – it leaves an unsettled feeling and makes you seem lazy (you know, if the details from earlier in the book don’t fit the conclusion you’ve written, that’s okay – you can go back and edit your earlier work).

• The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love [Oscar Hijuelos]. Not even sure if it is fair to review this book, as I gave it up after about 100 pages. Giving up on a book is actually pretty rare for me, so you know it has to be a bad fit/book if I won’t even finish it. In this case, I felt that there was just a lot of sex and really not that much plot or character development. I don’t mind reading about sex, and I even think that books with sex in them can find a place in the high school curriculum, but the combination of the sex and totally unsympathetic and uninteresting characters just made this book a non-starter for me. I should add, though, that this book did win a Pulitzer Prize in 1990, so this review likely does not reflect the average response to this book. I also recall some complimentary words from Mitichiko Kakutani on the back of the book. So maybe I just missed the point here. Totally possible.

• The Stone Diaries [Carol Shields]. This was rich little novel, a multi-generational story told through a family of women. It reminded me a bit of one of my favorite books, Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose. Perhaps that’s because they were both concerned with telling the stories of women who went their own way in the world. The Stone Diaries is, I think, less of a book than Angle of Repose. The descriptions weren’t quite as vivid, nor that characters quite as moving. Angle of Repose also has the whole taming-of-the-west thing going for it, whereas The Stone Diaries is mostly set in the Canadian plains and Illinois. I’ll stop with the comparisons now and just focus on The Stone Diaries – but, suffice it to say, if you are only going to read one of the two, it should be the other one. One thing that irked me about the main character in The Stone Diaries was that there had been no clues that we were not to trust her, and then the author suddenly started suggesting that she (the character) had a bit of a problem with hyperbole. So then I read the rest of the story wondering whether it was really the story or not. I have no problem with main characters whose views of the world are not trustworthy – I just like this made clear before the middle of the book. But this is a small quibble in what was a pretty decent book. Interestingly, given my review above, this book also won a Pulitzer Prize (in 1995). Just goes to show you . . .

• The Feast of the Goat [Mario Vargas Llosa]. No magical realism in this book. Rather, the book focuses largely on the Dominican Republic under Trujillo. I likely would have gotten a lot more out of this book if I had known more about the history of the Dominican Republic and its political development in the twentieth century; the book, though fiction, references real characters and real events. I definitely found myself wishing that I knew more than I did about this regime and region, which is, I guess, a sign of an engaging book. A bit like the non-fiction masterpiece Imperium which I did read with a map and history book close at hand, and, consequently, learned much about Russia. Anyway, The Feast of the Goat tells the stories of two different groups of people, both driven to desperation and misery under Trujillo. The two stories/groups of people never really intersect, which was a bit strange, as I kept waiting for fate or an accident to bring them together. The conceit of two stories, plus the setting of a real regime, made for many (perhaps too many) characters to remember and follow. Also, strangely, the two plots are given equal time (alternating chapters) at the beginning of the book, but this fades as the book progresses, for reasons that I couldn’t really figure out. However, the book offers an excellent portrait of the things that individuals will do under such regimes; this book is not an upper, and it was not always easy to read. Vargas Llosa is a gifted writer (whose work is also featured in this, another book I really like), and he makes the vile actions and torturous living conditions incredibly real.

• Four Spirits [Sena Jeter Naslund]. This is the second of Naslund’s books that I’ve read. At first, I thought this one was less masterful, less epic than Ahab’s Wife. However, I was drawn into the beautifully scripted story and the rich characters. Naslund offers an excellent portrait of the way in which racial and sexual hierarchies were maintained with violence and the way in which individuals sought to over-turn these hierarchies, sometimes using violence, sometimes not. The book is definitely less of an epic than Ahab’s Wife in that it has a much more narrow scope and setting, it is not, however, less masterful. In part, this is because Naslund writes from her own experience as a white southerner seeking racial justice in the 1960s. I find this period in American history absolutely compelling (and thus was delighted to receive McAdam’s Freedom Summer for the holidays) and liked the way that this book built on actual events with fictionalized (and slightly archetypal) characters. If one could only read one Naslund book, I’m not sure which I’d suggest. Ahab’s Wife was a beautiful story, and, unlike Four Spirits, one could not really predict the outcome, yet the latter offers an important window into an era that profoundly changed America, plus some pretty interesting characters.

I’m currently reading A Brief History of Central America, as well as still working my way (slowly) through A History of the Jews. I also just received many books as holiday gifts, so I’ll be starting some of those soon, too.