2015 Tournament of Books

Goodness. How y'all been? I've been off writing my own books, and it's left poor Overreader a little Underwritten.

(See what I did there? That's how you know I'm an author, those word play games.)

But it's time once again for The Tournament of Books! The TOB (aka the Rooster) is a March-Madness style books tournament (go figure) which pits some of the most discussable books from the prior year against each other.

There are 16 books this year. To date, I've read 13 and have plans to read one more before the first round judgement. And I pretty much enjoyed them all - some I've loved. 

My current favorites: Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante, All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld, Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, Redeployment by Phil Klay, Silence Once Begun by Jesse Ball.

I loved the whole Ferrante trilogy (well, series - there's a fourth forthcoming), and my family and I listened to Station Eleven with great pleasure on a road trip in December. 

Anyway, there will be ranting and cheering and exclaiming aplenty in the next couple of weeks as the TOB first round gets underway, and I'm super excited.

All the Light We Cannot See

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
(Scribner / Simon & Schuster Audio, 2014)
Format: Audio CDs via library (narrated by Zach Appelman)

From Goodreads: "MARIE-LAURE LIVES WITH HER FATHER in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure's reclusive great-uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum's most valuable and dangerous jewel.

In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure's converge."

Almost before 2014 had started, I began to hear buzz about this book from all kind of places. Online, sure, because that's where I hear most book buzz (I am using both 'hear' and 'buzz' figuratively here.) But also from real live people! So I approached it with a little of that 'will it live up to the hype?' trepidation. Well, folks. Although it may just be compounding the hype problem, I can tell you: yep. It really does.

The book is ostensibly about how the stories of blind French girl Marie-Laure and orphan German boy Werner intersect as WWII sends both of them to the same small island off the coast of France. And it is, but more than that, it's about how the intersections of those stories touch the reader. Doerr's descriptive passages tend towards the dreamy - beautiful, a little unreal, transportive. The world as known through Marie-Laure's other senses contribute largely to that dreamy feeling, but Werner is clever about and constantly tinkering with radios, which bring another auditory dimension to the prose. Radios prove to be Werner's ticket out of a grim life working in the coal mines of his hometown, a ticket that, due to his place and time, can lead only into the ranks of the Hitler Youth and, eventually, the German army. Marie-Laure, meanwhile, leaves Paris with her rather old-fashioned locksmith of a father (it's a craft, and elegantly described, but so full of iron skeleton keys and clever woodworking that it doesn't seem to have much room for modernity.) Her father's entrusted with a treasure from the museum where he works, and in trying to keep it and Marie-Laure safe, they end up in the home of his uncle, who's been housebound since the traumas of WWI. They're an unlikely and quite lovable set of characters, but also lovable are Werner and his compatriots, who Doerr works effectively to show as pawns in the larger, crueler games of the Nazi war machine.

I was impressed with Appelman's narration - he's a new-to-me narrator, and I'm always pleased to find new voices to enjoy. It was steady and weighty and the various accents felt natural. I wished for a little more differentiation between character voices at times, but otherwise was happy to let him carry me on this journey across the sea. (Doerr uses the French sea and Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues as ongoing reference points, and it felt right to let the narration just wash over me.)

The Signature of All Things

The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert
(Viking / Blackstone Audio, 2013)
Format: audio CDs via library (narrated by Juliet Stevenson)

From Goodreads: "Spanning the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this enthralling story follows the fortunes of the Whittaker family as led by the enterprising Henry Whittaker, a poor-born Englishman who makes a fortune in the South American quinine trade. Henry's brilliant daughter, Alma, becomes a botanist of considerable gifts. As her research takes her deeper into the mysteries of evolution, she falls in love with Ambrose Pike, who draws her into the realm of the spiritual, the divine, and the magical. Alma is a clear-minded scientist, Ambrose a utopian artist, but they are united by a need to understand the workings of the world and the mechanisms behind all life." 

So I went into this with not the highest expectations, and without knowing much about it other than some positive comments from people I trusted who (like me) didn't particularly like Eat, Pray, Love. 

Henry Whittaker’s adventures quickly captivated me; he’s a brash and shameless egoist whose ambition is more than enough to drive him to all the fame and fortune he craves. I wish the force of his personality had been used to greater effect after his daughter Alma grew up; suddenly he becomes someone who needs managing and coddling, a transition that doesn’t really honor the Henry we watched grow from a thieving London gardener to the richest man in Philadelphia.

It does, however, work as far as turning Henry and his vast empire into an albatross around Alma’s neck. One of her several albatrosses, as it turns out, since she is also burdened, she feels, by her size and appearance, her unusually inquisitive brain, and the Dutch reserve instilled by her austere mother. Alma is a very hungry caterpillar of a child, absorbing everything around her, but she spends the majority of her narrative in her cocoon, struggling to burst forth. It makes for some really intense drama, as Alma’s longings, large and small, fail to be realized.

And then the intense, talented, odd Ambrose Pike shows up, and Alma emerges from her cocoon, but not as the magnificent butterfly she’d imagined. At least she can fly, though, and this third part of Alma’s life is less intense but ultimately more satisfying to her as a person.

(I do realize that since Alma and her father are botanists, I should have framed this whole thing in terms of a plant growing then flowering, but then I’d have to get into a whole plot-spoilery thing about pollination, and no one wants that.)

Here’s the very weird thing about this novel. I definitely enjoyed it; I wanted to be right there as Henry grew his empire and as Alma bloomed (there, I did it), and I had physical reactions to the emotions happening (achy heart, gasps, etc.) It was intense, and took place in a great world – all the plants, all the parts of the world, all the science and brainy people. But once it was over, I was gone. It didn’t stick; it didn’t plant a seed in my soul. (I will stop with that now. Probably.)

Juliet Stevenson’s reading is impressive. She conveyed Alma’s joys and shames and obtuseness and sharpness with pitch-perfect tones. It’s a long, long narration (18 CDs) and I know from other lengthy audiobooks that there’s a tendency to lag or lose the flavor of the text with long projects, but Stevenson was present for the whole thing. (This isn’t a surprise, given some of the hefty classics she’s narrated so beautifully, but it’s still a delight.) I’m cautious about listening to more literary works (instead of reading them) because I don’t want to risk losing touch with the text, but Stevenson is so reliably accessible and emotive that I blindly trust her to interpret whatever she’s reading. That trust was rewarded again here.

The Dinner: Pull Up a Chair

The Dinner by Herman Koch (translated by Sam Garrett)
(Hogarth / AudioGo, 2013)
Format: audio CD via library (read by Clive Mantel)

From Goodreads: "It's a summer's evening in Amsterdam, and two couples meet at a fashionable restaurant for dinner. Between mouthfuls of food and over the polite scrapings of cutlery, the conversation remains a gentle hum of polite discourse—the banality of work, the triviality of the holidays. But behind the empty words, terrible things need to be said, and with every forced smile and every new course, the knives are being sharpened. Each couple has a fifteen-year-old son. The two boys are united by their accountability for a single horrific act; an act that has triggered a police investigation and shattered the comfortable, insulated worlds of their families. As the dinner reaches its culinary climax, the conversation finally touches on their children. As civility and friendship disintegrate, each couple shows just how far they are prepared to go to protect those they love. Tautly written, incredibly gripping, and told by an unforgettable narrator, The Dinner promises to be the topic of countless dinner party debates."

I'm all: woah. Then I'm all: yikes. Then I'm all: NO WAY. What a horrifying delightful spectacle of a novel. Paul deftly drew me right into the midst of his disdain for his brother, the very up-and-coming politician Serge. I'm right there with him as he disparages the fancy restaurant, the pretensions of the headwaiter, the tiny portions. He speaks with love and tenderness and respect for his wife and son, even while alluding to the very hot water his son and Serge's son are in. 

But the anecdotes pile up, inexorably, each one a little signpost. And suddenly I'm on a path, being guided by a trickster demon, and there's no way to go back. By the time Paul orders a grappa, I'm peering at this book through my fingers (I can do that when it's an audiobook.) 

Clive Mantel ate up The Dinner with a spoon. (Sorry. Couldn't resist.) The way he spits out the name "Serge" every time; his fond tone whenever he mentions Paul's wife; how calmly he relates Paul's increasingly eye-popping stories as if he, like Paul, considers them just everyday moments.  

I've seen a lot of reviews saying that The Dinner is an exploration of how far we will go for those we love, and that sort of thing. To me, that's not the theme. Instead, it's about facades, why we construct them, and how those we love do and don't see through them. Paul repeatedly quotes the opening of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina ("Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.") What Koch examines in The Dinner is the unique versions of unhappiness that make up one of those unhappy families; a funny and compelling and dire warning to all.

The Son, Reviewed by a Texan Daughter

The Son by Philipp Meyer
(Ecco & HarperAudio, 2013)
Format: audiobook via library (read by Will Patton, Kate Mulgrew, Scott Shepherd, and Clifton Collins Jr.)

From Goodreads: "Spring, 1849. The first male child born in the newly established Republic of Texas, Eli McCullough is thirteen years old when a marauding band of Comanche storm his homestead and brutally murder his mother and sister, taking him captive. Brave and clever, Eli quickly adapts to Comanche life, learning their ways and language, answering to a new name, carving a place as the chief's adopted son, and waging war against their enemies, including white men-complicating his sense of loyalty and understanding of who he is. But when disease, starvation, and overwhelming numbers of armed Americans decimate the tribe, Eli finds himself alone. Neither white nor Indian, civilized or fully wild, he must carve a place for himself in a world in which he does not fully belong-a journey of adventure, tragedy, hardship, grit, and luck that reverberates in the lives of his progeny. 

Intertwined with Eli's story are those of his son, Peter, a man who bears the emotional cost of his father's drive for power, and JA, Eli's great-granddaughter, a woman who must fight hardened rivals to succeed in a man's world."

So. My husband's from Ireland. I explained to him why this book rubbed me wrong this way: your hero is the son of mythic Celtic queens and kings. He fought off the Normans and the Vikings and the  British, too, for good measure. Helped St. Patrick with the whole snake issue. Meets the locals down the pub of an evening for a reflective pint. Has a son he lost to the IRA, a daughter who married a Protestant land owner, an aunt or three who perished in the potato famine. Let's see, what else? Oh, yes, he's best friends with a Druid and learned to write Ogham symbols before being shown the mysteries of beehive burial chambers. When the Troubles began, he watched the younger generation struggle to choose sides, all the while holding true to his abiding principals and playing the tin whistle and attending church every Sunday. His favorite child was in the GPO that day; his least favorite was the only one to survive. One granddaughter becomes a famous Irish dancer, another is part of the diaspora, and his descendants are uncannily good at surviving when the Celtic Tiger roars off into the sunset. They all invest properly in technology and also know how to farm their long-held land for bricks of peat to burn of an evening. 

Do any of their characters need to be more deeply developed than that? Is having a tangential role in every Child's History of Ireland significant moment enough to make their dynasty worth reading about for hundreds and hundreds of pages? If so, great. The Son is just right, then. 

And I don't dispute that it's well-written. I mean, I could have done without the detailed descriptions of how to use every bone of the buffalo, or how to cap an oil well, or how wild mustangs are different from domesticated horses. But then again, I'm a 7th generation Texan. I not only had all those lessons from my own schooling, but I've reviewed them all when my sons took the same year-long Texas history classes in 4th and 7th grades. So Meyer is telling a very (very) romanticized version of Texas lore here, and that's delightful and romantic and fascinating if you've never heard it, but once you have, or if you take that away from this tome, is what's left worth the hype?

For me, it wasn't. I felt beat over the head by his themes (you should probably respect who came before you, while keeping in mind that whoever that was that you're displacing stole the land from someone else to start with). I liked Eli okay,  and his progeny to some extent, but he never hit me as one of those vital characters you just can't escape once you close the book.

I do have tolerance for the sensationalizing of a dramatic history. I've enjoyed plenty of epic sagas full of sweeping adventures ripped from the headlines of whatever era they visit. In this case, though, I didn't feel like the underpinnings were enough to support the hype.

And then there's JA, who is worthy, I grant, of lots of pages because she encompasses so much that her great-grandfather would admire. And yet, she can only do so by eschewing everything 'girly' about herself, including her non-initialed name and the pearls from her grandmother. She works damn hard to fit into a man's world, and that was interesting and engaging, but also sad. I'd not have minded another female character who was interesting and engaging, even though she was 'only' raising her children on the frontier or surviving years as kidnapped Comanche chattel, or subverting societal expectations of her role as a member of the non-white underclass. (These women existed in the book, they just... didn't do much, except act as foils to the men and sometimes deliver succinct speeches about their lives before being shunted off to the sidelines for the rest of the book.)

The narration of this audiobook was great. The various narrators were quite in tune with their characters' cadences, especially in the case of Eli, whose patterns of thought were so well-suited to Comanche life even before he was kidnapped. I wish I hadn't had so very long to get acquainted with everyone, but as I did, I'm glad I enjoyed that aspect of this novel.

There, I'm done being surly now.

The Good Lord Bird

The Good Lord Bird by James McBride
(Penguin Audio, 2013)
Format: audio download via library (narrated by Michael Boatman)

From Goodreads: "Henry Shackleford is a young slave living in the Kansas Territory in 1857; the region is a battleground between anti- and pro-slavery forces. When John Brown, the legendary abolitionist, arrives in the area, an argument between Brown and Henry's master quickly turns violent. Henry is forced to leave town with Brown, who believes he is a girl. 

Over the ensuing months, Henry, whom Brown nicknames Little Onion, conceals his true identity as he struggles to stay alive. Eventually Little Onion finds himself with Brown at the historic raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859, which was one of the major catalysts for the Civil War."

The Good Lord Bird won the 2013 National Book Award and is on the current Rooster Tournament of Books shortlist. It was practically the rule that I was going to like it. But I'm such a rebel; I don't abide by rules. I forge my own path! I strike out in my own direction! No one can make my decisions for me!

So here's my own, personal, not ordained take on McBride's novel: super. I so dug the narrative voice, the main character, the thematic elements, the humor. Surely this was in part due to Michael Boatman's narration, which was all about Onion's voice. He was very much on this crazy journey with Onion, from Kansas to West Virginia, through battles and life in campgrounds and reconnaissance at Harpers Ferry, to the eve of the raid and beyond. Boatman is so good at translating McBride's tone and dialect that I wonder if I'd have enjoyed the book so much in print. (I did look at the sample online, and can see why it would be hard to jump into cold, but as an oral experience, the whole thing just runs along like a clear fast stream.)

John Brown comes across as crazy (like a fox) and super charismatic; no matter how often Onion talks about striking out on his own, he's as caught up in Brown's plans as the rest of them. Part of this is the combination of youth and the inclination to stick with the devil you know, but part is that Onion is proud to be John Brown's good luck charm. And I love the way McBride handles Brown's vast store of superstition and omens: they very much inform the text, but they don't dominate it. It's easy to just ascribe it all to Brown's craziness, but all along, and without Onion particularly noting it, those beliefs prove important.

Rooster Ten! The Tournament of Books is Back!

It's time! It's time! The Morning News's Tournament of Books Shortlist has been released!

Here it is:

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

At Night We Walk in Circles by Daniel Alarcón

Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell

Hill William by Scott McClanahan

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid

Long Division by Kiese Laymon

The Dinner by Herman Koch

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

The Good Lord Bird by James McBride

The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri

The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton

The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara

The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert

The Son by Philipp Meyer

The Tuner of Silences by Mia Couto

Play-In Round:

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

Woke Up Lonely by Fiona Maazel

As all my loyal readers know, I've read six of these. (My non-loyal readers can figure it out by seeing that six of these have links to my reviews on this site.) (I don't have disloyal readers.) Of the six I've read, I'm delighted that each of them is in the tournament, as I very much liked them all, and found a lot 'discussable' about each. Hopefully the trend will continue as I delve into the other titles.

The first thing I did? Lots of chatter back and forth with my Goodreads group "The Rooster!", because oh, have we ever been awaiting this list. (The internet really does have every kind of community you could wish for, eh?) (Interested? - I will totally approve your request to join us.)

Second, I of course hit the search boxes on my library websites. Luckily, I was able to find most of the ones I hadn't read, so I will be powering through them in anticipation of the brackets coming out for this March-madness-style book tournament.

And third would be the reading. All the lovely, lovely reading. I'm so looking forward to it. Next up is Meyer's novel, which I've heard a million great things about. Could I possibly love it more than the Rowell or the Lahiri? Stay tuned, my friends. I'm sure to let you know.

Building and Shifting and Rebuilding Again

Building Stories by Chris Ware
(Pantheon, 2012)
Format: it's a box. filled with 16 different, interrelated graphic booklets. mostly different formats. Anyway, I bought it, because sometimes, a gal's gotta spend hard-earned cash on her reading material. (her hard-earned gift card from her awesome friend.) (Thanks, A!)

From Goodreads: "Building Stories imagines the inhabitants of a three-story Chicago apartment building: a 30-something woman who has yet to find someone with whom to spend the rest of her life; a couple, possibly married, who wonder if they can bear each other's company another minute; and the building's landlady, an elderly woman who has lived alone for decades. Taking advantage of the absolute latest advances in wood pulp technology, Building Stories is a book with no deliberate beginning nor end, the scope, ambition, artistry and emotional prevarication beyond anything yet seen from this artist or in this medium, probably for good reason."

So, it's safe to say I'd never have picked this up if it weren't for the Tournament of Books. I do like graphic novels sometimes, but I don't seek them out - I just get them when strongly recommended. And this isn't a normal graphic novel. There's no explicit method of reading it - the books, fold-outs, broadsheets, etc. are packed in order of size, but of course as soon as you unpack them, you have to play with them and flip through to see all the variety and generally make a mess of it all, so it's not like you can keep them in order that way. 

I started with the one that's like a game board / blueprint of the building, then flipped around some of the smaller stuff, then wisely picked the one modeled on the Little Golden Books, which was, naturally, earlier source material about the woman with one leg who appears in most of the stories. She's the often-depressed-and-lonely woman who struggles with forming attachments, finding fulfilling work, and other 'lives of quiet desperation'-type issues while her downstairs neighbors fight (and make up) and her landlady sits quietly with a lifetime of secrets unshared, and the flowers by the front stoop grow and cross-pollinate and grow anew.

Some of these stories end a little hopefully, and many of them wrap around tragedies large and small. They focus on interior lives, the fictions we knowingly perpetuate, the futility of striving, the moments of happiness which are all too fragile. It's all very cyclical - when the building is knocked down, taking with it the stories of all who have lived there, another will arise and the lives within will be formed from the same building blocks as those who have come before. And that's a little grim, in its way, but also, sometimes, a comfort.

Baghdad Bureaucracy and Grim Humor

Fobbit by David Abrams
(Grove Press, 2012)
Format: Audio CDs via library (read by David Drummond)

From Goodreads: "Fobbit \’fä-bit\, noun. Definition: A U.S. soldier stationed at a Forward Operating Base who avoids combat by remaining at the base, esp. during Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003-2011). Pejorative.

In the satirical tradition of Catch-22 and M*A*S*H, Fobbit takes us into the chaotic world of Baghdad’s Forward Operating Base Triumph. The Forward Operating base, or FOB, is like the back-office of the battlefield – where people eat and sleep, and where a lot of soldiers have what looks suspiciously like an office job. Male and female soldiers are trying to find an empty Porta Potty in which to get acquainted, grunts are playing Xbox and watching NASCAR between missions, and a lot of the senior staff are more concerned about getting to the chow hall in time for the Friday night all-you-can-eat seafood special than worrying about little things like military strategy.

Darkly humorous and based on the author's own experiences in Iraq, Fobbit is a fantastic debut that shows us a behind-the-scenes portrait of the real Iraq war."

War is fun! Okay, perhaps war isn't fun. But Abrams sure is. He took his experiences in the Iraq war and swirled them in a layer of sarcasm, a sprinkling of humanity, and leavened it with all the absurdity at his disposal. And it's yummy. A bitter trifle, sweetened by excellent comic timing and a plot that grows, almost without the reader noticing, to one of those perfectly constructed moments of ironic narrative inevitability.

Two things about the characters: the primary narrative voice, Gooding, is far from foible-free, making sympathy with him something he really has to earn; and the secondary characters are deep enough, even the deeply flawed ones, to avoid caricaturization and blanket ridicule. Everyone has someone who loved him once, or the intention to behave properly, or something real and redeeming about him. And as much as the grunts outside of FOB Triumph dealing with daily life on the streets of Baghdad might look askance at the Fobbits in the air conditioning of Saddam's former palace, Abrams gives the back-office set enough of a purpose to somewhat balance the often ridiculous bureaucratic shell game they tend to be playing, day in and day out.

Some readers might tire of the constantly sarcastic tone, unless they're listening to Drummond's narration, when they will instead be laughing, then laughing, then laughing some more. Each character's distinctive, carefully planned (I have to presume) and perfectly gauged voice is a gem. He's also finely tracing, with his tone, the journey from, for example, writing an early press release about a KIA soldier, with all the fresh horror of the danger outside the gates and gruesome photos in the in-box uppermost, to the ennui of the third or fourth such report in a shift, when it's all about carefully parsing how much of a presence the Iraqi forces should be reported as having in the latest incident. Drummond and Abrams are one of those perfect narrator-author pairings, and I'm so glad I listened to this title as I tackled the Tournament of Books. Much as I gobbled up Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, I hope that Fobbit beats it into the play-in round, because I'd love to engage in more conversations about it. (I haven't read the 3rd option, Kevin Powers's The Yellow Birds, so I kinda also hope that makes it, which would give me a push to move it up my TBR list.) (Not that my TBR list isn't a megalith dominating my bedside already.) (But enough about me. Get Fobbit on audio. Enjoy!)

Disappearing Genius and Suburban Warfare

Where'd You Go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple
(Little, Brown & Company, 2012)
Format: audio download via library (narrated by Kathleen Wilhoite)

From Goodreads: "Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she's a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she's a disgrace; to design mavens, she's a revolutionary architect, and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom. 
Then Bernadette disappears. It began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette's intensifying allergy to Seattle--and people in general--has made her so agoraphobic that a virtual assistant in India now runs her most basic errands. A trip to the end of the earth is problematic. 
To find her mother, Bee compiles email messages, official documents, secret correspondence--creating a compulsively readable and touching novel about misplaced genius and a mother and daughter's role in an absurd world."


"Mummy?"
(Sorry, Empty Child reference - favorite Doctor Who quote of my sons & mine. Kind of a fun echo between the gas mask kid and the book cover, though, right?)

This is so readable a compilation of the source documents young Bee compiles in her efforts to find out where, exactly, her mother (the titular Bernadette) has gone. Bee's voice is on the line of naiveté, but her gradual awakening to a broader understanding of her doting, almost coddling parents is her internal journey. Her actual journey - the family trip to Antarctica that was the straw that broke Bernadette's hold on what she tried to call normalcy - is a hard-won and significant journey, as well. I loved the way Semple (via Bee) arranges all of the emails, invoices, memos, articles, and other documents to tell the Fox's story, which builds to unexpected and fun places.

It's hard to put down, it stays with you, and it has a lot to say about genius, identity, community, and family. Plus, sarcasm. Lovely, lovely sarcasm. Not that I've ever had cause to make slightly snarky comments about über-parents in the suburbs or anything. (Love you all! Thanks for all you do to make our schools shine! But you scare me some.) And the payoff between Bernadette and her self-appointed arch-enemy Audrey takes the sting out. Somewhat.

Wilhoite gives Bee a touch too much lisp and verve at times, but also the wry tone that suits the teen. I really like what she does with the adults, especially Bernadette and Audrey. Bernadette's ennui regarding her community clashes brilliantly with Audrey's self-satisfaction.

Rooster Tournament of Books

On Monday the official Tournament of Books (hosted by The Morning News) (sponsonred by Nook) (enjoyed by me) begins!

They have a fancy fun circular "bracket" printable, which is nice and all, but I... I've mentioned me & spreadsheets, right? I love spreadsheets. And traditional looking brackets. So I made one.

Feel free to download, copy, share, adjust, make fun of my color choices, etc.

Here's the blank bracket (well, with opening round filled in):
And here's my picks:
(I'm sending my picks to Kerry at Hungry Like the Woolf - she runs a contest to see who picks correctly. Enter yours by Sunday night!)

Happy Roostering, y'all.

Stories Worth Grasping for Dear Life

Dear Life: Stories by Alice Munro
(Douglas Gibson Books, 2012)
Format: ebook via library

From Goodreads: "With her peerless ability to give us the essence of a life in often brief but spacious and timeless stories, Alice Munro illumines the moment a life is shaped -- the moment a dream, or sex, or perhaps a simple twist of fate turns a person out of his or her accustomed path and into another way of being. Suffused with Munro's clarity of vision and her unparalleled gift for storytelling, these stories (set in the world Munro has made her own: the countryside and towns around Lake Huron) about departures and beginnings, accidents, dangers, and homecomings both virtual and real, paint a vivid and lasting portrait of how strange, dangerous, and extraordinary the ordinary life can be."

Short stories aren't always my cup of tea. (I adore tea, BTW. A cup of tea is always my cup of tea.) Short stories ask so much of the reader in such a short space, if they're done well, but if they're not, well, it's cheating, isn't it? The writer just not having a book's worth of conversation to have with me, but not making the shorter chat weighty and worth my time.

(Sometimes I am hard to please. And judgmental.)

Anyway, Munro never does that. The only problem I have with reading Munro is that she reminds me of why I get impatient with non-Munro short story writers sometimes. Also, I want to stop after each one and reflect and reread and relish, but I also want to race forward to the next one. It's all giddy-girl with her first crush, me and these stories. The quiet but essential inner lives of the characters, the spotlight nature of small town inhabitants never not in each other's business, the language! Munro's language is simple and precise, incisive, alive.

I was going to tell you my favorite stories so you could dip in if you don't believe me, but it would just be the first ten items on the table of contents. Maybe Amundsen or Gravel, but they all sang to me, so I'm not going to choose. I will say that the final quartet of stories, which she sets apart with a note about them being more autobiographical, are my least favorite in this collection.

That said, even in those, Munro's turn of phrase seemed designed, at times, to shoot arrows of self-realization at me. I mean, could this sum up my own child's play any more smoothly:

• From Night, describing the games of her younger sister: "These tended towards domesticity rather than glamour."

Or this, my suspicion about how I'm viewed today:

• From Voices, describing why her mother didn't always fit in: "I think people found her pushy and overly grammatical."

This is one of the nominees in the Tournament of Books and I'm looking forward to the discussion about it. Unless people don't say nice things about it, and then I'll get judgmental on them.

History, Fact, Fiction, Terror, Bravery, and a Possibly-Green Car

HHhH by Laurent Binet
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012)
Format: hardback via library, translation by Sam Taylor

From Goodreads: "HHhH: “Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich”, or “Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich”. The most dangerous man in Hitler’s cabinet, Reinhard Heydrich was known as the “Butcher of Prague.” He was feared by all and loathed by most. With his cold Aryan features and implacable cruelty, Heydrich seemed indestructible—until two men, a Slovak and a Czech recruited by the British secret service, killed him in broad daylight on a bustling street in Prague, and thus changed the course of History.

Who were these men, arguably two of the most discreet heroes of the twentieth century? In Laurent Binet’s captivating debut novel, we follow Jozef Gabćik and Jan Kubiš from their dramatic escape of Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia to England; from their recruitment to their harrowing parachute drop into a war zone, from their stealth attack on Heydrich’s car to their own brutal death in the basement of a Prague church.

A seemingly effortlessly blend of historical truth, personal memory, and Laurent Binet’s remarkable imagination, HHhH—an international bestseller and winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman—is a work at once thrilling and intellectually engrossing, a fast-paced novel of the Second World War that is also a profound meditation on the nature of writing and the debt we owe to history."

Here's what I think:          . 

This is so complex but playful but sobering but deft but messy that I'm having trouble knowing where to start. First of all, a factual thing - yes, the parachutists and their mission are followed in some detail, but this is really, I think, a novel about Heydrich. Who, if you don't know much about him, kind of sucks. Binet's account of his rise to power and absolutely single-minded ruthlessness is as chilling and nausea-inducing and gob-smacking as you'd expect, given that he truly was, as the synopsis says, 'feared by all and loathed by most.' Binet doesn't give us everything - well, it would take several volumes to give us everything - but he does enough. More than enough. 

Mixed with that is the author-as-narrator voice, where Binet details his own growing interest in Heydrich's assassination and the ways in which he builds up information and impressions to turn them into this book. While I looked askance at this through the first third of the book - not because I object to the intrusion and inversion of traditional narrative, but because I was rolling my eyes at Binet's view of himself - I hit a point where the author-narrator comments were treasures. From then on, the book flew by and I hated to put it down. In my mind, he was assembling a bunker around himself of source materials, so that by the end he was fully immersed in each second of the attack and attempted escape. I actually came to care whether the Mercedes Heydrich was in was the black one in the museum, or green, as reported in a couple of earlier fictionalized accounts. 

So now I'm changing my earlier statement. (Announcing this is a very Binet-like thing to do.) This isn't a novel about the Slovak and Czech who united under the Resistance to kill "the Butcher of Prague." It isn't a novel about how Heydrich grew into each of his terrifyingly well-earned nicknames, making him a most desirable target for assassination. It's a novel about writing a history, about Binet as writer and Binet as character, destined to make you think about him every time you encounter a historical account from here on out. 

Read it, and tell me if you are as flipped over by it as I am.

Beautiful Ruins

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter
(Harper, 2012)
Format: audio download via Audible (narrated by Edoardo Ballerini for Harper Audio)

From Goodreads: "The story begins in 1962. On a rocky patch of the sun-drenched Italian coastline, a young innkeeper, chest-deep in daydreams, looks out over the incandescent waters of the Ligurian Sea and spies an apparition: a tall, thin woman, a vision in white, approaching him on a boat. She is an actress, he soon learns, an American starlet, and she is dying.

And the story begins again today, half a world away, when an elderly Italian man shows up on a movie studio's back lot--searching for the mysterious woman he last saw at his hotel decades earlier.

What unfolds is a dazzling, yet deeply human, roller coaster of a novel, spanning fifty years and nearly as many lives. From the lavish set of Cleopatra to the shabby revelry of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Walter introduces us to the tangled lives of a dozen unforgettable characters."


I abandoned this novel after a couple of pages and only went back to it because it's on the 2013 Tournament of Books list. Since a couple of people had mentioned the quality of the audio, I used one of my Audible credits for it, and gave it another try. Boy am I glad I did. Let that be a lesson to me about judging too soon. 

So, there's the innkeeper Pasquele, who's the driving force, the pure-hearted guy with a couple of not-so-pure moments in his past. His encounter with the actress Dee, though only a couple of days in their lives, affects them both profoundly for decades to come. And not just them - there are webs radiating out across continents, in their gentle but insistent ways. There are multiple time frames and story lines here, and they play together nicely. I kept wishing the different characters could impart their lessons to each other, even if they were no where near each other in time or space, which was an interesting game to play as I read. (Listened. Whatever you want to call it.) It all pulled together into a rich, fun, smart tale that touched on desire, identity, heritage, memory, ambition, beauty, and loss. Just lovely.

Ballerini is a new-to-me narrator, and I enjoyed him ever so much. The Italian accents were charming, and his handling of many different Hollywood types (producer, writer, actors) felt spot-on. I do think that if I'd given the print version another chance, I'd have devoured Walter's novel for its own sake, but this is one of those narrations that truly enhances the experience of the book.

So many books, so little time? Start here!

On some blog, somewhere - maybe it was on Twitter, these things are lost in the mists of time - I ran across mention of the 2012 Tournament of Books. It's a March Madness style bracket pitting various darn good novels from 2011 against each other. I'd read a few, or put them on my 'to be read' list, and many of the rest of them looked worthwhile. So I added to my list, and really, couldn't be happier with the selection. Thus far I've read 7 of the 16 titles, and started Swamplandia twice only to put it down twice. (I hear such good about it. It really ought to be up my alley. But I'm just not captivated. Has anyone read it? Yay or nay?)

The two I most recently finished are both slim and weighty, focused on unprivileged youths in small communities beset by natural disasters. Otherwise, they're vastly different in tone, subject, and style.

Nathacha Appanah's The Last Brother is set on Mauritius towards the end of WWII. Raj is an intelligent but weak nine-year-old when his older and younger brothers are killed during flooding at the sugar cane plantation where his family scraped out a life. His parents move him to the center of the island, where his abusive father begins work as a prison guard. Unbeknownst to Raj - or to most of the islanders - the prison is guarding a group of Jewish refugees who were turned away from Palestine and have no other home. When Raj is confined to the prison hospital to recover from a beating, he befriends a Czech boy named David. Although Raj knows nothing about the war, or the Jews, or why a boy a year older than him would be smaller than him, the two find common ground in imaginative games, exploration of their landscapes, and the little French each knows. After a cyclone rips the community apart, Raj helps David escape, which propels them on a fraught and sorrowful journey based on an elusive hope. Appanah's translator Geoffrey Strachan handles her words tenderly, I can tell. Each of her paragraphs, her scenes, is crafted with a precise balance that traps me on an island off Africa for the duration.


Jessmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones is set in rural Mississippi in the days leading up to and through Hurricane Katrina. The ungrounded but laser-sharp fourteen-year-old Esch has spent half her life raising her baby brother, whose birth ended their mother's life, and navigating minefield-heavy relationships with her father, her older brothers, and their omnipresent friends. As the novel opens, her father is obsessively trying to fortify their ramshackle home in preparation for the hurricane, her brother's prized fighting pit bull is giving birth, and Esch is only beginning to suspect that she's pregnant. Twelve days later, when the novel closes, the hurricane's destructive force is, at least, at an end, but Esch and her family have more than the physical rebuilding to attend to. In the interim, Esch's close observations and interest in Greek mythology, coupled with Ward's lyrical language and tight structure, forced me past each character's facade and into a complex human reality that keeps my eyes open long after I shut the book.


What have you read from the Rooster list? What will you put on your list? The tournament starts tomorrow, with The Sense of an Ending up against Devil All the Time. Since I haven't read Devil, and I liked Ending, I'll hope Barnes goes on. Or maybe I'll hope Pollock wins, to encourage me to read his novel soon.