the only olive i'll consume

I finished "Olive Kitteridge" quite happily just over a week ago. I've started recommending it at work, emphasizing its ability to portray silver linings amid all the dark clouds. I've been distanced from the book because I've already started reading "On Writing" by Stephen King, but I'll do my best to stay true-to-form today, but covering just a few of the stories. I also owe Goodreads a review, since that's why I have the book in the first place. Random House sent it to me all shiny and crisp, but even the short time it spent traveling in my bag wore it out pretty well. Nothing's ripped, but the edges are soft now, and you can see scratch marks from my keys and wallet. I knew this book wouldn't stay pristine, though, because I marked important passages with fun little arrows. Some look like sideways smiley faces, others like enigmatic Chinese characters.

A Different Road
I didn't mark much in this story, because most of the words simply drove the narrative to the climax, where the reader is left to gawk at Olive and Henry's near-lethal bickering. Coming home from a restaurant one night, Olive is in dire need of a restroom. The closest one is at the hospital (remember, we're in the sticks), and Olive remarks that since she was born there, the least they can do is offer her a toilet. The emergency-room doctor insists on checking her out, and I was surprised when Olive didn't resist. But the timing was unfortunate, because two masked gunmen arrived and forced Olive, Henry, a doctor and a nurse into the bathroom. One masked man remained their captor while the other presumably stole drugs. As hostages, Olive and Henry spewed insults at each other. They were uncontrollable under the pressure and revealed deeply buried resentments. This, combined with the already traumatic experience, had sad consequences for their relationship.

"No, they would never get over that night because they had said things that altered how they saw each other. And because she had, ever since then, been weeping from a private faucet inside her, unable to keep her thoughts from the red-haired boy with his blemished, frightened face, as in love with him as any schoolgirl ..." The captor had unmasked himself, revealed his fear and vulnerability, and Olive had taken notice. I could probably write a whole paper on how this event allowed Olive to embrace a side of herself she had neglected. But the author didn't revisit this, so I'll not dwell on it. That's something both good and bad about this book. The stories involve deep issues of so many characters, your imagination could run wild with any one, and as a result, we're left to make our own assumptions about Olive. Just like everyone else.

This wasn't my favorite of the stories, but it was pivotal for the characters' lives. I wish it had felt more dramatic so it would have had more entertainment value. As it is, no one is shot, and the event is both shattering and inconsequential. I suppose the author thought the conversation needed something extreme to bring it about, but if the event were too extreme, it would overshadow other important events in the book. The town believes Henry shuts down because he was faced with his mortality, but Olive knows the truth. Unfortunately, we don't have a second story from Henry's perspective, since he soon lapses into a vegetable state because of a stroke. Some insight might be available in the initial story, but the average reader doesn't have time to revisit that without devoting much too much energy to one (albeit Pulitzer-winning) book, and neither do I.

Highlights from Winter Concert
"Funny to have tickets in order to get into a church."
"What a lonely thing to be a young girl!"
"Mrs. Lydia was looking at her with those new eyes; unnerving to have a sixteen-year-old's eyes looking at you from an old woman's head."

In this story, a man admits to cheating on his wife. But first, they comment on the marriage of Olive and Henry Kitteridge, and introduce the idea that Henry can "stand" his wife simply because he loves her.

Tulips
Another plot-driving narrative, though this one includes more palatable circumstances and just plain better writing. The most poignant moment occurs when Henry collapses: "She shouted at him, waiting for the ambulance to come. His mouth moved, and his eyes were open, and one hand kept jerking through the air, as though reaching for something beyond her." This statement brings up valid questions. Was Henry continuously reaching for something beyond Olive? Was his love for her really enough?

Olive visits her neighbor, Louise, and we get a juicy back story concerning Louise's son, who stabbed his wife to death, thus driving his mother to the brink of insanity. Olive has problems, but she's grateful they're nothing like Louise's. Louise claims to live for her son, so he knows he's not alone. This parallel story magnifies Olive's issues with not being needed by her own son. "Oh," said Louise, laughing softly. "You came here for a nice dose of schadenfreude, and it didn't work."

I love some of the author's imagery, and one of the best examples of this is when moving windshield wipers are compared to shaming fingers: "It was shame that swiped across her soul, like these windshield wipers before her: two large black long fingers, relentless and rhythmic in their chastisement."

-------

In the rest of the book, I did a little marking, but mostly I was ready to finish it and get back to my nonfiction foray. Olive attends a funeral, reminisces about a lost love, visits her son in New York with his new wife (while relating the visit to the dubious ear of vegetable Henry), watches her husband pass away, and meets a potential kindred spirit to live out her days with.

Unfortunately for my constant reader, I'm even more eager now to get back to Mr. King's advice on fiction and writing in general, so the rest of this page-turner's meat will stay in the freezer unless you decide to cook it yourself.

quarter in a mud puddle

After reading the first of the 13 stories in Elizabeth Strout's "Olive Kitteridge," I wasn't sure I was going to like this book. How can you like a novel if you can't like, or at least relate to, its protagonist? I was barely into the second story when I started grumbling to myself that this book was too depressing. Olive was just a mean old lady who knew a lot of people who died. Maybe I didn't want to like this book because of the prominent Oprah quote on the cover, or because it's one of those books "everybody" likes. But I kept reading, and at the end of the second story, I knew this book was unlike anything I've ever read. Olive isn't just a mean old lady. She's something completely different to every person she encounters. She's an angel, a fuddy-duddy, a wife who doesn't appreciate her husband, a stern mother. Or is she? Each of these stories reveals a new side of Olive through the eyes of her fellow townspeople.

Pharmacy
The book's opening story gives us some background on Olive's marriage. The focus is on Henry, a pharmacist who watches his way of life mold to uncontrollable circumstances in the progression of modernity. The story alternates between the "good old days" and the "we're getting old" days, and we find that Henry is a gentle, naive soul who just wants everyone to be happy. His reliable old assistant is replaced by a newly married young girl, and Olive teases him that he has a new girlfriend. Denise is sweet and Henry admits only to himself that he is intrigued by her. She ends up leaning on him quite a bit when her husband is killed in a hunting accident, but she later remarries and moves away. Henry's pharmacy is replaced by a brightly lit chain drugstore. "People are never as helpless as you think they are," Olive tells her husband. Denise sends Henry greeting cards for years to come.

Incoming Tide
Wondering why I should care about this woman, Olive, and why she hasn't yet appeared in the second story, I begin to make notes in my book to mark things I don't like. I feel the book is too depressing, and unnecessarily descriptive passages are putting me to sleep: "He squinted hard toward the ocean. Great gray clouds were blowing in, and yet the sun, as though in contest, streamed yellow rays beneath them so that parts of the water sparkled with frenzied gaiety."

But I want to find out: Does Kevin commit suicide at the end? His mother did as much when he was younger, and he left town. Now he has returned to follow in her footsteps. He parks by the water and is approached by Olive Kitteridge, his former teacher who knows of his past and wants to empathize. I get annoyed when the author spells out what should be implied: "It was always sad, the way the world was going. And always a new age dawning." But I appreciate observations on New York: "...he had thought more and more how provincial New Yorkers were, and how they didn't know it." And I give in to the blatant explanations: "He missed his mother. ... But this turbulence in him was torture." He's turbulent like the waves, see?

He is saved from his rising surf when he literally jumps out of the car and into the water to save a woman from drowning. She clutches him more tightly than he thought possible, and he is inspired: "...oh, insane, ludicrous, unknowable world! Look how she wanted to live, look how she wanted to hold on." I don't want to like this, but I love it.

The Piano Player
Angie has played piano in the cocktail lounge for years. She is highly cognizant of her stage fright and relies on vodka to get her through it, to get her to that place where she is alive only inside the music. "...when she played, it was like being a sculptress, she thought, pulling at the lovely thick clay." I can hear the jazzy lounge piano in my head while the author reveals Angie's secrets, and we see Olive and Henry enter. Olive is grouchy, Henry is a breath of fresh air. But our focus remains with Angie, who spies in the crowd a former lover. Simon comes to talk to her, to make himself feel a little better about the life he doesn't love. He's married with children, and Angie hasn't changed. He stabs her with a dull knife of knowledge: Angie's prostitute mother had once sought him out in desperation. That night, Angie decides to stop seeing Malcolm, her married lover, and tells him so. He's angry, but he doesn't hurt her. She has friends. "A face like an angel. A drunk." She thinks of her mother, paralyzed and thin and cared for by attendants who are rough and leave bruises on her frail arms. Tomorrow Angie will mention this to someone kind.

A Little Burst
In the most humorous of the first five stories, we get a glimpse of Olive as a mother. Her son, Christopher is marrying at 38. He's known his wife only a short time, and the reception is being held at the home he and his parents built for him. The author describes Olive "[w]edging her paper napkin into the slats of the picnic table," and I realize that all the little details that had been putting me to sleep are there to help me out. Each story is in a vastly different setting with new characters, so being able to visualize seemingly unimportant details serves to ease the reader's transition into and grasp on the current moment.

Olive isn't fond of her son's bride, or that bride's mother, for that matter. "Don't I hate a grown woman who says 'the little girls' room.' Is she drunk?" Olive is tired of the company and ready to go home and take a nap. She siestas in the master bedroom while Henry says his long goodbyes, and she overhears tidbits of the bride's conversation with a friend. She hears enough to know her dress is insulted and her husband adored. She also hears Suzanne refer to Chris as having had a "hard time," with no explanation. Depression runs in the family, but Olive has taken care of her son. She has loved him. Olive is enraged by the know-it-all bride, and she decides to steal a shoe and a bra from the room, and to draw a magic-marker line down the sleeve of a sweater she knows won't be worn for months. Just to show "Dr. Sue" that she doesn't know everything. "Of course, right now their sex life is probably very exciting, and they undoubtedly think that will last, the way new couples do. They think they're finished with loneliness, too."

Olive knows her body is wearing out, and she believes that her soul is, too. She progresses day to day on the lookout for "big bursts" and "little bursts." Big bursts are obvious, but little bursts can be just as fun. Like stealing a shoe from your daughter-in-law to "keep the self-doubt alive." She figures it's a better solution to life's potential emptiness than her husband's method: "He is an innocent. It's how he has learned to get through life." He prefers his bursts slow and gradual, and not a bit bursting. And just like that, I was fond of Olive.

Starving
Harmon is the owner of the hardware store. His wife, Bonnie, is increasingly distant, so he begins having Sunday rendezvous with Daisy Foster, a widow. "His brief Sunday moments with Daisy were not untender, but it was more a shared interest, like bird watching." He doesn't understand what's happening till he hears a local young couple use the phrase "fuck buddies." Appalled, he halts his sexual activity with Daisy, but continues to bring her a doughnut each week, and they start talking.

The young couple Harmon has been observing starts to have problems. They're busted for smoking pot and kicked out of their apartment. The boy leaves town, and the girl, Nina, loses her cinnamon (doughnut) complexion while giving in deeply to her anorexia. In need of a bed, she ends up staying briefly at Daisy's. When Harmon comes over, he stays longer than usual, talking with the girl. Olive arrives on her Red Cross collection rounds, and a mini-intervention takes place. Olive tries to reach out, telling Nina that we're all "starving" for something, but the girl sarcastically rejects the comment, bringing Olive to tears. "I don't know who you are, but young lady, you're breaking my heart." The conversation continues, and Harmon senses a strange energy, "something astonishing and unworldly," in the room. Nina goes home to her family, who keep Daisy updated on her illness.

Harmon feels his marriage unraveling as he is drawn nearer to Daisy. News arrives that Nina has died of a heart attack, and Harmon realizes he wants more from life than a quarter in mud puddle. He professes his love to Daisy, and rents out the room Nina had shared with her boyfriend.

----

The morals of the book are unfolding beautifully, and I can see the merit a book like this will have in classrooms and book clubs. I could probably devote an exorbitant number of blog posts to answering the questions in the reader's guide. Every person has to find his or her own way to "get through life." Death is imminent, but the way you live is so important because it's all we have. Olive's "little bursts" are the silver linings of her life, and they're no different from Harmon's quarter in the mud puddle. It's no hundred-dollar bill, but it sure might come in handy.

hey, i think i like this whole "true story" thing

My foray into the nonfiction world has begun, and as a result, I want more nature books and a job with the Central Park Conservancy (they're not hiring). Reading "Central Park in the Dark" was like pulling on my old hiking boots, grabbing a bag of gorp and embarking on an adventure through NYC's elegant treetops -- but without the sunscreen, because all of these wildlife dramas unfold after sunset.

I'll never again enter Central Park without turning on my long-lost wilderness senses. I might not know what kind of bird is on that branch, but I'll take a minute to observe it, or to say hello. Marie Winn has inspired me to think back fondly on my days in field-studies class, and to wonder why I didn't get my degree in forestry. Alas, I can school myself indirectly by memorizing everything I learned reading this book and will learn when I become obsessed with its many related blogs. I wanted to whine that there were no maps or photos included in the book, but I'd rather buy my own map of the park to hang on the wall, and I like the optional interactive aspect of going online to see what slug sex looks like beyond my imagination's eye.

I can never bring myself to underline things in a new book, but this one includes a handy index for referencing everything from the history of cars in Central Park to moth bait, pinking time and the Perseids. That means I can verify the Snapple "Real Facts" I started throwing at my friends: "Did you know the scariest-looking wasp is one that doesn't come after people? It's the cicada killer!" I'm not sure my pseudo-knowledge of shooting stars and roosting birds will help me convince anyone to go to the park with me at night, but perhaps at twilight you'll find me pointing out how you can tell the difference between male and female lightning bugs by where they're flying when they flash. Marie Winn does her best to comfort the reader by noting that in a decade of night visits, she's only had two scary experiences, one involving men who want to be cops, the other involving men who actually were cops. But the park has such a bad reputation, I'm not holding my breath till I'll convince anyone to go on a night walk there.

I did not want this book to end, and lucky for me the nature knowledge can continue by following Marie Winn online, and I can monitor the book for a whole month when I make it my staff rec in August. It just came out in paperback, though I was reading the hardcover version I received for free at NYU last year. And if I ever get money, I'll pick up a copy of Winn's other popular tome, "Red-Tails in Love," the story of some red-tail hawks who built a nest on a building on Fifth Avenue and had babies there for something like 10 years.

So I've got a whole heap of nonfiction stacked upon my television set, but I'm compelled to take a tiny hiatus from nonfiction. I happened to have won a free copy of the Pulitzer-winning short-story collection "Olive Kitteridge" from Goodreads.com, and since the point of a contest there is to read and review the book, I'll be starting on that today. It marks the second time I've read an honest-to-goodness bestseller ... the first being "Eat, Pray, Love." I'm not selling out, I'm expanding!

memoirs of a vampire in the dark

I have, of course, a few things going on in my reading world. When I finished "Jamaica Inn," I had a hard time picking what I would read next. There are just too many books on my "to read" list. Just check out my Goodreads account. I grazed the stack and grabbed a Doris Lessing book I found at The Strand recently: "The Memoirs of a Survivor." My radar pinpointed Lessing because we've had "The Golden Notebook" on our Fiction Favorites table a few times at the old Barnes & Noble. I scanned the cover, and decided this might be one of those hidden classics. Turns out it is. There are a lot of people who seem to like this book. It claims to be slightly autobiographical, so I figured I'd give it a go. At 189 pages, it should be a breeze, right? Well if there's anything I learned from Virginia Woolf (and actually, there was a lot) it's that a short book can sometimes take much longer to read than a long book. It's all about cognition. Lessing starts what seems to be a beautifully abstract story, but she philosophizes with the best of 'em, and halfway through this work, I got bored. Obviously, not all philosophical writers are boring, and I think when the mood strikes me I'll return to this book. But it's not quick train reading.

Lessing's genderless narrator tells the reader of the current times, in which Britian is becoming a wasteland. People try to cling to their homes, but government services and consumerism have fallen to the wayside. Bands of young people rove the country, and this narrator is seemingly randomly assigned to become the caretaker of a 13-year-old girl, Emily, and her odd cat-dog. The narrator lives in an apartment building, and begins seeing visions of another person's home on the other side of the living-room wall. This is not a neighbor's home we're peeping into, for on the other side of the wall is actually a hallway. The narrator can step into the other world and roam the rooms, and even spends time cleaning them and otherwise interacting with the space, which we later find to be scenes from Emily's childhood. Emily is no trouble to the narrator, but begins hanging out with some of the gangs that pass through, and the narrator fears she will leave. She does not, though, partially because her cat-dog (Hugo) would be in danger of being eaten.

I attempted to scan the book for a good example of Lessing philosophy, but I got bored. I'd much rather my mind migrate to the next book I picked up, "Let the Right One In." I borrowed this book from a coworker after having seen the Swedish film. This book was quite the opposite of its half-finished predecessor. There's not a lick of philosophizing among the hundreds of pages of vampire-story goodness -- Lindqvist leaves that to the reader. Because I already knew the story, it was easy to visualize the events, if not a tiny bit distracting. I prefer to read a book before I see its movie version, but had I not seen the film, I don't know that I would've picked up the book. I suppose it sounds redundant to say the book was like an expanded version of the film, but it's true. There was an additional subplot and more explanation of what in the movie were mysterious details.

There were a few points in "Let the Right One In" (originally titled "Let Me In") where I could tell the translator had trouble making a sentence flow without repeating itself, but I appreciated the straightforward style the novel uses to lay out the events. That doesn't really mean this was a light read -- the subject matter made sure of that -- but it was quick. The main character is Oskar, a young boy who is bullied at school, which causes him to fantasize about killing more than most, I would think. So it makes perfect sense that he would enter into a passionate friendship with a child vampire who recruits men to do her killing for her. Eli took notice of Oskar because of his violent tendencies, so she intended to exploit him. But like the boy who is dared to date the loser and then falls for her (see "10 Things I Hate About You") Eli finds that her relationship with Oskar is unique. In a moment of potential weakness, she cannot kill him even though she is starving for blood. Her prior blood-seeking sugar daddy, Hakan, was exploited by Eli because of his perversion. He was able to love Eli because of her still-childlike body, and his desire to be with her competed viciously with the conscience that plagued his murderer self. Hakan lost Eli because he could no longer kill, and it's ironic that he wanted so badly to die but instead became a vampire and needed to kill to simply survive. Hakan's eventual demise is outlined in the major subplot that didn't make it into the movie. That scene is more gruesomely played out than Eli's killing of the school bullies, which thus became the peak of gruesomeness in the film.

I'd like to see a sequel to this book, and there may very well be one. I know the author has other vampire books, so I'll have to do some research, because they just may not be translated yet. But I'd like to see how the story plays out. Oskar told Eli he wanted to kill people who deserved it, so the randomness of vampire killing may not suit him, unless he becomes a Robin Hood-esque vigilante vampire. And there's another question: Would he let Eli turn him? Eli offered and Oskar declined, but who says he couldn't change his mind? Eli's cycle of leaching off human killers won't end until she partners with another vamp for eternity, and a child-vampire duo is tragically romantic. In this respect I had hoped for a little more from the book's ending, because just like in the film, the last scene is Oskar taking Eli in a trunk on a train with no known destination. The book did highlight what is only implied in the film -- that Eli was actually born a male. This touch is intriguing but sad because of the mutilation he endured. Oskar is confused but accepting of this knowledge, and in the end I like to think it only makes him love Eli more.

During (though not because of) this reading, something struck me. I knew that next I wanted to read something real. I've ignored nonfiction for a long time, but there are so many great books that I want to add to my "read" list, and I don't mean that book I read about how to find a job ... although I guess that counts. And now, for a list of nonfiction books I've read.

David Sedaris "Me Talk Pretty One Day"
David Sedaris "Holidays on Ice"
Chuck Klosterman "Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs"
Cynthia Shapiro "What Does Somebody Have to Do to Get a Job Around Here?"
Tori Amos "Piece By Piece"
Donald Miller "Blue Like Jazz"
Amanda Hesser "Cooking for Mr. Latte"
Virginia Woolf "A Room of One's Own"
Rick Warren "The Purpose-Driven Life"
Greg Behrendt "He's Just Not That Into You"
Lynne Truss "Eats, Shoots & Leaves"
James Frey "A Million Little Pieces" (yes, I'm counting it)

There may be a few more but that's the gist from the shelves I have here in NYC. That list is too short. A few essays, a few biographies, and a few life lessons. So, I went through those shelves and pulled out the nonfiction that I haven't read, and I stacked the books up on my TV to pick something new. Some highlights I hope to devour soon:

Truman Capote "In Cold Blood"
Mary Roach "Stiff"
Stephen King "On Writing"
David Grann "The Lost City of Z"
Elie Wiesel "Night"
Anne Frank "The Diary of a Young Girl"
Bob Dylan "Chronicles"
Adam L. Gollner "The Fruit Hunters"
David Sedaris "Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim"

You may remember me starting something called "How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read." Yeah, I wanna finish that, too. But for now, I'm reading a few things at once. "The Autobiographer's Handbook" is for inspiration in writing. Wade Rouse's "At Least in the City Someone Would Hear Me Scream" is for entertainment. And Marie Winn's "Central Park in the Dark" is for substance and train riding. Naturally, I could write all day about the book's first 60 pages, but I'll save it for a day when I'm in less danger of being late to work. Let it suffice to say I'm loving every page because it reminds me of field studies in high school, and it's a way of exploring the park I can't experience while just passing through. Which reminds me, I'm also making my way through the poetic essays of Colson Whitehead's "The Colossus of New York." Go, nonfiction!

quick trip across the moor

I left the UK still full of zombies, but I'm confident Darcy and Elizabeth will survive to be old and gray (or grey, as they'd prefer). As will Mary and Jem, the heroes of "Jamaica Inn," the second book I've enjoyed by Daphne DuMaurier. The author is officially one of my favorites now, and I plan to use my B&N employee discount to buy the other volume of hers we carry, a story collection that includes "The Birds." That's right, Hitchcock made films from at least three DuMaurier stories.

Never did I time the reading of a book so well as when I read the final page of "Jamaica Inn" on the 1 train as it approached 207 Street today. It took me no more than a week to read this, and it was pretty fantastic. I still like "Rebecca" the best, but I rooted for Mary even when she ventured where most would never wander. She talked a lot about stereotypes against women, which I appreciated. She would notice that she was treated a certain way only because she was a women, and everyone knows women are fragile and can't handle physical or emotional stress! She also took an opportunity to point out how, specifically, she would be treated in a certain scenario if she had been a man. I like that she made a statement without being obnoxious, and it fit the character well. She proves herself in the end, of course, when she courageously follows her heart and chooses the life that will truly make her happiest -- a life of adventure with the man she loves. She gets the best of both worlds, despite once vowing she didn't require love:

"If loving a man meant this pain and anguish and sickness, she wanted none of it. It did away with sanity and composure and made havoc of courage. She was a babbling child now when once she had been indifferent and strong."

But much of her existence at Jamaica Inn required her to take risks. After the death of her mother, a widow, she went to live with her aunt and uncle at the most loathed and avoided residence known to the people of the moors. Jamaica Inn was no longer serving its nominal purpose, but sat a dark and sinister hub awaiting smuggled cargo from ships wrecked by land-locked pirates. A witness to the illegal activities and a self-appointed guardian of her wilting Aunt Patience, Mary conspired with fate to bring her uncle and his cronies to justice. Little did she know, her sole confidant, an albino vicar, was the leader of the pack, and the man she loved but mistrusted would come through for her in the end.

pride and prejudice and zombies and me

I was sitting in the park yesterday during my lunch break, when the person on the bench next to me noticed what I was reading. "So how is that?" he asked me of "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies." I told him it was actually pretty good -- that I'd made it further than I thought I might. I had wondered if I wouldn't be like my coworker Marcy, who said she'd read the first few pages and given up. Then Johnny Bench asked me how closely the story followed the original. Not being an expert on all (or any) things Jane Austen, I simply told him it was very close -- the same story but with zombie parts added. Secretly, I keep thinking, "Didn't Mr. Collins marry a Bennet sister and not Charlotte Lucas?" But I'm not sure. And I'm not sure if Charlotte suffered from any disease in the original book, but here she is suffering from the "strange plague," meaning she's been bitten and is slowly, over a period of months, turning into a zombie. An "unmentionable." One of the "sorry stricken."

I won't nit-pick over the details of this book, because I'm not an Austen snob of any sort. If it had been "Jane Eyre and Zombies," that might be another story, but with "Pride and Prejudice" I'm just along for the ride. I do still picture Elizabeth as Keira Knightley and Mr. Darcy as Colin Firth, so it was a little bit of an "ouch" to hear her say she'd like to rip out Darcy's still-beating heart, but I'm sure they'll still end up together in the end. In this strange retelling of the classic, the Bennet sisters are highly skilled ninja warriors, Buddha-pleasing disciplinarians and effortlessly violent zombie killers. Their skills in the "deadly arts" add value to their positions as "accomplished" women, in addition to their piano and conversational talents. Of course it's out of place and ludicrous, but it's also pretty fun to read. I haven't been laughing out loud, but that doesn't mean I'm not entertained. I like reading the familiar story because I don't remember how all the romance exactly unfolds, and I like reading about zombies. Seth Grahame-Smith does a pretty good job of creating zombie scenes that elicit a reaction from the reader, and with a novelty such as this, that's pretty much all we can ask for. It's a nice blend of romance and death, and it's much quicker to get through this time around -- reading for pleasure instead of homework. I'll probably be done with it in a few days, and then I'll move on to something respectable. But I'm actually pretty excited to see if the Brits can defeat the strange plague. If Mr. Grahame-Smith can find a way to do that, I'll be truly impressed.

non-spoiler requiem tragicus

So I can't spoil for anyone "And the Ass Saw the Angel." Because I won't even be spoiling it for myself, although part of the reason I'm not going to be finishing this book is because I can see where it's going. I've read enough to not have to read any more. I wanted to like this book, and I don't dislike it, but the reading of it is far too draining. I don't have the time to read books for hours per sitting, so when a book is this hard to get into, I must abandon the mission. These pages require the kind of energy I can't maintain, because the author hasn't made it easy enough for me to care. I can get into the story after reading for about 20 or 30 minutes, but by then it's time to get off the train. And I won't be able to work up that enthusiasm quickly enough in the next sitting to make this a book worth reading. I apologize to you, Mr. Cave, and to you, my brother Daniel. But I'm going to switch gears and pick up something a little more accessible.

I picked up a new bagful of books from The Strand last week. Maybe I'll give Doris Lessing a shot, or "My Friend Leonard." Too many choices! This is why I need to pick up the reading pace.

don't read it, daniel

... this blog post, that is. But read the book, "And the Ass Saw the Angel." I'm definitely going to spoil it for you if you can't resist the temptation to continue reading this before I mail you the book.

So there is a real ass, and there is a real angel. There is already so much to say about this book that I fear I'll make it a jumbled mess. But after the longest prologue ever, I've already gotten to know pretty well the book's protagonist and the town in which he lives. The town produces sugar but experiences a devastating rain pattern in the early 1940s. Euchrid is the baby that survives in the beginning, and his childhood is a tortured one. His father's family is known through "these parts" as the most inbred, violent bunch of hillbilly trash around. I keep picturing them having the same family tree as the killers from the 2003 Eliza Dushku movie "Wrong Turn." Euchrid's father seems to have been the sanest of the bunch, and in trying to escape he was "rescued" by a crazy, drunken mash-brewer who mistook him for her long-estranged husband. Still a far cry from normal, Euchrid's father is a meticulous hunter of small animals and likes to invent traps that maim (but don't kill) them. I haven't yet found out the reason for this.

Some of the book is told from Euchrid's perspective (he's recounting from his position in the sinking mudhole), some of it from a non-character narrator. Incidentally, I like the idea of experimenting with narrators, and I'd like to read something written in second person, but it will have to be the right book. I could try "Ablutions," which came out recently, but I'm not sure I want to envision myself an alcoholic dude in a bar.

Back on point, Euchrid did see an angel, and has since been slowly discovering that he has an ability to understand and influence animals. The family's mule, named Mule, almost died but was rescued by Euchrid's laservision-esque stare. Not the same stare that got his (other) ass kicked for peeping in on a local trailer-trash lady and her sexual exploits. I guess a kid has to entertain himself after being smacked across the face with a flyswatter by his mother all day.

alice ended. beware the filth that follows

I ended up being pretty captivated by "The End of Alice." What can I say? I enjoy spending a little time in the mind of a psychopath. Let me just go ahead and get the plot-spoiling over right now. He's not in jail for molesting little girls -- he's in jail for killing his young lover. The book is written in such a way that it would be easy to translate to a movie. Jumping from present-day to flashback and back again, the narrator takes us through several intertwined stories. In jail, he's the passive and relatively well-behaved prisoner who spends a lot of time corresponding with "fans," one of whom becomes "our girl." Our girl is the 19-year-old who doesn't fight her urges to seduce a 12-year-old boy. The narrator tells her story to us rather than transcribing her letters. He believes he can convey her thoughts and feelings better than she can. He also flashes us back to the story of Alice, whom he is reminded of by "our girl." They're similar because they're sexually twisted -- how can the pedophile resist? And he takes us back to his childhood, where we learn that he was sexually abused by his own mother. The scene in which she molests him is one of many jaw-dropping moments in this novel.

Having been in prison 23 years, our narrator doesn't understand a lot of the references made by the girl. Like Sylvester Stallone in "Demolition Man," he's lost in the gap of time passing without him. But he understands the language of lust and pain, and he revels in the dream world she allows him to enter. He brings the reader back to his world by beginning chapters or new scenes with visions of prison -- the guards calling roll, the library or drug cart slipping him something new, his roommate having his way with him. I one of the book's most surprising and shocking scenes, our prisoner gets fed up with being "the woman" and reverses the situation, violently raping the man on the Fourth of July and singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" during the act.

We learn eventually that the girl is writing to the prisoner because she knew Alice. "I live differently because of you," she tells him. She lived in Alice's neighborhood. He met Alice when she stumbled upon him, the renter of her family's property. She was only 12, and somehow already a mess -- previously molested, he suspects. She teases him, and he falls in love with her. They become lovers, and -- long story short -- she ends up in a rage at him when she believes he has made her bleed. In truth, she has only gotten her first period, but her fit conjures within him old feelings and haunts from his experience with his mother. He had happened to see her menstrual blood after she molested him, and believed he had hurt her -- a fact that was only compounded when she died a short time later. So in an anger pent up from a life of confusion and hate, he stabs the girl to death.

Another book made my jaw drop a few times yesterday. I was flipping through a copy of "Wetlands," which has been reviewed as a plot-less tale that turns women's sexuality and hygiene into a freak show. Is it a statement or just an excuse to be nasty? I'm not one to judge there, but at least "The End of Alice" tells a compelling story. It's sad and detestable, but it's part of understanding the world. And it's well written. A few more Homes books under my belt and I might be on my way to having a favorite author (see "This Book Will Save Your Life"). I enjoyed the suspense that was built toward the end, as the narrator kept being interrupted while telling the story of meeting Alice and how she tied him to a tree. I like how the end was built up poetically, as well, with rhythmic and alliterative prose that I didn't want to stop reading. I like that this book was so different from the one I read from her recently. I like that the author is a female writing from a male's perspective. I like that the image on the cover of the book -- a butterfly trapped in a jar -- was symbolic throughout the book and made physical near the end. I like that this book was so able to transport me out of the real world that when I returned, I could only float, mesmerized, in a fog after reading.

Yesterday I started reading Nick Cave's "And the Ass Saw the Angel," and so far so good. The prologue takes us to a man in quicksand and to the sky as a crow flies over a valley. Then a set of twins is born to a dirty and drunken mother. One twin dies and the other comprehends with supernatural ability. Sounds boring but it's not.

the end of innocence

Faced with a lack of boredom and a little vanity, I'm beginning to incorporate my Twitter feed with my two blogs, the one you're in right now and Pickle Hater. My Twitter feed can be found here. Don't expect anything too out-of-this-world -- I'd hate to disappoint. This is just a way for me to keep things fresh in my mind and find more uses for Twitter. A lot of what I post there has to do with books and food anyway.

I just started reading "The End of Alice," which I received as a birthday present last month. It's the second A.M. Homes book I've read, as the one right there with the doughnuts is hers, too. We'll get to that shortly. So far "The End of Alice" is a little disturbing. I really hope the little girl sitting next to me on the subway wasn't peeking over my shoulder as I read about a woman interested in seducing a child. The book is written from the viewpoint of a man in prison. So far the situation is vague, but it appears he's a sex offender and pedophile. He has mentioned Alice a few times, but at this point I'm not sure who she is. He is reminded of her by another woman who has begun writing him letters. Apparently she can relate to him because she is a pedophile herself, and she's described to him her crimes and feelings in detail. I might re-read the first 15 pages just to make sure I'm clear on what's happening. It's a little fuzzy as I've read from the book so far only in morning grogginess. I was awake enough to make connections to "Perfume," though. Prepare for a monster post today.

Me Talk Pretty One Day
Picking up where I left off the other day, I'm going to share (I hope briefly) my thoughts on a few books I've neglected during the past month or so. First off: "Me Talk Pretty One Day" by David Sedaris. You'll remember I tried "Holidays on Ice" over the winter but was a little disappointed. "Me Talk Pretty One Day" saved Sedaris for me. It's frequently recommended as the Sedaris book to start with, and contains 28 funny essays about his first years in New York and experiences with his boyfriend, Hugh, in France. Also interspersed are poop humor and childhood memories, such as elementary school teachers trying to fix his lisp, and what it was like to live with also-famous sister Amy. I'd like to do a head-to-head Sedaris vs. Klosterman battle. The former is more revealing of himself, while the latter is more of a pop-culture maker-funner-of-er. Preferences are irrelevant though, because either way I'm glad I've brought some essayists into my life. (Did I mention I met Klosterman? That's right. He said I had a cool haircut.) Next on the essay list? Sloane Crosley with "I Was Told There'd Be Cake."

The Reader
"The Reader" was first recommended to me by an older male customer. He said it was a beautiful book, and I was sold upon inspection of the cover. I wasn't aware of the impending movie at this point, so I was elated to find this book at The Strand (for $1, of course). The first half of this book I found to be pretty enjoyable. Although it also involves pedophilia, it wasn't overly descriptive and at least provided some emotion. The book's narrator is a boy who meets a woman and begins a sexual and literary relationship with her. He hides the relationship from his friends, and he eventually believes this is why she leaves. She skips town, and he encounters her again in college, when she is on trial for crimes related to the extermination of Jews in Germany. This part of the book is told from the point of view of him watching the trial and includes little human interaction, so I found it strange and boring. Even the "excitement" of her story didn't make up for my loss of interest. And again, even the "secret twist" didn't save the book.

Hanna's shameful secret is that she cannot read, and when the narrator deduces this, he debates whether to reveal this to the judge in order to save her from a harsher punishment. Whether she spent the rest of her life in jail or was branded illiterate didn't mean much to me. The author couldn't convince me to care. The most I came away with from this book was the oddly romantic notion of an illiterate woman seducing young lovers and having them read to her, which was extended in the end when the narrator spends years making audiobooks for Hanna and sending them to her in prison. Even the narrator is complacent in the end: "Whatever I had done or not done, whatever she had done or not to me--it was the path my life had taken." I wish I was touched more by this book, but ultimately I was disappointed by its dullness.

This Book Will Save Your Life
One woman I work with at Barnes & Noble claims this book actually did save her life. I may not have been convinced to read it, though, had I not seen and bought its U.K. edition in our bargain area at work. The American version on our Fiction Favorites table depicts a large wildcat, a palm tree and the Hollywood hills. It's unfortunately ugly and unappealing. The British version presents the reader with six mouth-watering doughnuts, one from which a bite has been taken (super delicious).

I enjoy recommending this book at work, but, sadly, it turns people off to hear it's a book about a man in a midlife crisis. But this book is so much more than that. A divorced day-trader lives in a fancy house in California. His best friend is his maid. One day he finds that he's experiencing strange pains, and he can't figure out what he's been doing with his life -- literally. Thus begins his strange relationship with emergency services. He ends up saving a horse from the sinkhole by his home and rescuing a kidnapped woman from the trunk of a car, and he becomes a local hero. Less sensationally, he also helps save a crying woman he meets at the grocery store by showing her that life has so much more to offer than the painful draining of housewifery. The doughnuts come into play when he accidentally befriends the owner of a doughnut shop and a semi-reclusive screenwriter. His new group of friends color the backdrop of his reunion with his son. It's a happy book, and I can say honestly that I found myself grinning with satisfaction over the last page. It's one of the more inspiring books I've read. You should read it, too.

Perfume
I really, really enjoyed reading "Perfume." It was unlike anything I've read before in style. It did, however, remind me of "Rosemary's Baby" for a minute because it took a while to get to the hyped parts. The cover reads: "The Story of a Murderer," but I was more than two-thirds done by the time you could really call Grenouille a murderer. Born unwanted by a filthy woman on the street, baby Grenouille was rescued and cared for by church nurses. One returned him to the rectory claiming he must be a child of Satan because he had no smell. Grenouille grows up quietly, keeping to himself and building within himself a sort of library of scents. He commits his first murder early in the book, but even to him it seems a random occurrence. He was out in Paris one day and was drawn for what seemed like miles to find the source of the most beautiful odor he had ever encountered. The source ended up being an adolescent girl -- a virgin at her most pure moment of existence.

Grenouille decides to become a great perfumer, and works his way to that end. He trains under a man who teaches him techniques by which he can extract scents from earthly objects. When he's learned all he can, his master conveniently dies so that he can't profit from Grenouille's talents anymore. Grenouille decides to travel to a place where he can learn even more, but takes a seven-year hiatus in a cave. He finds the place where he can't smell the offensive odor of humans, but eventually has a breakdown when he realizes he can't smell himself. So he sets out again, and when he becomes a journeyman perfumer, he creates a variety of human-like scents to wear. In this way he learns he can manipulate humans via their nasal passages (leads straight to the brain, I suppose). He finally sets a new goal for himself when he smells a virgin again. This time it's the most beautiful one around, and he spends two years letting her ripen while he kills 24 other virgins. He wraps their bodies in oiled canvases to soak up their aroma, and he steals their hair and clothing. He wants to use these scents to create the most powerful perfume in the world.

When he finally kills the last, most potent virgin, he is caught. But not before he has a chance to concoct the potion, which he later uses to save himself from execution. Things are relatively normal for a story about a murderer with extra-sensory smell perception. It's when he unleashes the virgin-laced perfume that the book takes an "exciting" turn. Grenouille's dream is to create a scent that would drive people mad with bliss: "they would love him as they stood under the spell of his scent, not just accept him as one of them, but love him to the point of insanity, of self-abandonment, they would quiver with delight, scream, weep for bliss, they would sink to their knees just as if under God's cold incense, merely to be able to smell him, Grenouille! He would be the omnipotent god of scent, just as he had been in his fantasies ..."

It makes sense that an unloved vermin would dream of commanding the emotions of the masses in order to be idolized, or just noticed. But the climaxical orgy that ensues when Grenouille presents himself before the executioner smelling of virgin rapture proves unfulfilling. He is freed by the court after the entire town is stripped of modesty long enough to bring together in public fornication the most unlikely couples. Grenouille is collected by the greatest virgin's father, who offers to adopt him as a son. But Grenouille has seen that his life's work has been completed, and there is nothing he could pursue to make him happy. So he escapes and returns himself to the place of his birth, where he surrounds himself in the night by the most vile citizens -- beggars and criminals who gather by firelight in the rankest-smelling part of the city. He takes his last vial of perfume and douses himself, knowing full well what the result will be. The urchins are overcome with lust, which becomes a sickening greed, which quickly turns ravenous and cannibalistic. They consume him out of love.

Talk about a book that would be fantastic to fully research. The meaning of love, the meaning of evil, the symbolism of virgins, the complexities of sex and desire, the purpose of life and pursuit of happiness. Not to mention the talent of the translator. This book was translated from German, as was "The Reader." I wonder what a difference the translator makes -- because I feel I was conscious of it during "The Reader," as though I could see how the book might be more beautiful in its intended language. With "Perfume," I would believe it had been written in English initially. One of my favorite passages included this description of the virgin's blossoming: "What a year before had been sprinkled and dappled about was now blended into a faint, smooth stream of scent that shimmered with a thousand colors and yet bound each color to it and did not break."

It is also this idea of a young person blossoming that allowed me to connect "The End of Alice" with "Perfume." The woman who is sharing her perversion with the narrator watched a certain boy over a period of time in order to strike at just the right moment, just as Grenouille allowed his virgin to peak. From "The End of Alice": "She longs to sample him, but has waited, given him first a year and then a second summer of slow roasting, and now has returned, hoping to find him close to perfection, done. She drools." I'm not sure I believe adolescents possess such a magic moment in time during which they are the perfect blend of adult and child. Most children believe they are much more mature than they are, while many adults admit to still feeling like children. If such a magical moment does exist, I feel sure it is for a much more romantic and noble purpose than sex. By Grenouille's standard, the virgin at her pinnacle would be utterly ruined and useless were she no longer a virgin. But these days that's more of a technical term -- certainly nothing that would so tarnish a person who otherwise would be at her most love-worthy. Perhaps that is the hope -- that a person at that moment is exactly half innocent and half ready to be released of innocence, and therefore more receptive to love than either half on its own. But it's like Janeane Garofalo's character says in "The Truth About Cats and Dogs," "Love your pets, just don't love your pets."

from my own room

I'm going to examine as well as memory and concentration will let me the books I've consumed in the last couple of months. Tonight we start with Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own."

So much for thinking it would be easy to get through this skinny classic. I bought it, as usual, at The Strand for $1, and got a little bonus inside: a postcard bearing the author's image. It made a great bookmark, and still holds the place where (dare I admit?) I cut the reading short with only two pages to go. Did it wear me out? Did it prove I'm not enough of a feminist? Pish-tosh. I loved this book. It made me wish I had nothing in the world to do any day but write. I marked a little black arrow on nearly every page, so I won't quote all my favorite parts. I read "To the Lighthouse" in high school, but I forgot how great a writer Woolf is. Obvious, of course, but much of what I marked was simply out of reverence for the phrasing. Her talent makes me want to write. To practice. Her words make me want to write. To have the time:

"... going at ten to an office and coming home comfortably at half-past four to write a little poetry."

If only women had more money, they might be able to live that dream, Woolf says.

She's also not without a sense of humor:

"You cannot, it seems, let children run about the streets. People who have seen them running wild in Russia say that the sight is not a pleasant one."

Or imaginative cynicism:

"I thought at last that it was time to roll up the crumpled skin of the day, with its arguments and its impressions and its anger and its laughter, and cast it into the hedge. A thousand stars were flashing across the blue wastes of the sky. One seemed alone with an inscrutable society. All human beings were laid asleep--prone, horizontal, dumb."

She chases her question, "Why are women poor?" But it eludes her in research: "... the question far from being shepherded to its pen flies like a frightened flock hither and thither, helter-skelter, pursued by a whole pack of hounds." And she doesn't quite solve the problem, either. I noted in the margin that Woolf frequently builds suspense for a point, then interrupts herself before reaching a significant revelation in her search for the "essential oil of truth."

She does, though, decide that "it is fatal for any one who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly."

Woolf's thoughts cover what men think of women, how men write about women, whether women write about men, and how society will view women in 100 years (2029). I'd like to revisit this work periodically for inspiration as a writer. And I'd venture to say Ms. Woolf would be on the list of people, "dead or alive," that I'd invite to a dinner party.

"What one means by integrity, in the case of the novelist, is the conviction that he gives one that this is the truth. Yes, one feels, I should never have thought that this could be so; I have never known people behaving like that. But you have convinced me that so it is, so it happens."

But ...

"Praise and blame alike mean nothing. ... So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say."

Amen.