A Literary Life

All the Pretty Horses (Cormac McCarthy)

As most people who have talked to me about books in the last year know, I love The Road. I’ve often said so with a sigh in my voice and a twinkle in my eye, because despite the seriousness of the subject matter, I fell in love. That novel made me feel as if I was discovering something for the first time: a talent, a voice, a world, an ever-present human story only now articulated.

But I’m self-aggrandizing, I know. The sharp, artful voice and aching melancholy of Cormac McCarthy has been there since he set pen to page, continued to be there as he won the National Book Award and wasn’t discovered when MY eyes met his words. All the Pretty Horses, written in 1992, proves that. However, I can’t help but feel again that I have stumbled upon something momentous, something meant just for me in a small way, something beautiful that will make my eyes twinkle and my voice sigh when I try to convey just how remarkable an accomplishment All the Pretty Horses is.

But McCarthy describes that startling feeling of discovery better than me in his stark, biting dialog.

“I never knowed there was such a place as this.
I guess there’s probably every kind of place you can think of.
Rawlins nodded. I wouldn’t have thought of this one, he said.”

In this case, the two main characters — teenagers from Texas ranches who travel into Mexico looking for work as cowboys — have found a level of pain and misery and degradation previously unimaginable. Their coming-of-age trek has been blown off course by the harsh desert wind, slapped about by the hand of fate, which knocks out of them the idea that they’re entitled success, happiness, even life. It all begins with a chance meeting with a younger stranger who claims his name is Blevins, and that one chance snowballs through love, talent, destiny, friendship, hope and crushing loss until we wind up in a place that’s brutal and bloody yet truthful.

And somehow beautiful:

“He picked out the smallest doe among them and shot her … The sky was dark and a cold wind ran through the bajada and in the dying light a cold blue cast had turned the doe’s eyes to but one thing more of the things she lay among in the darkening landscape. Grass and blood. Blood and stone. Stone and dark medallions that the first flat drops of rain caused upon them. He remembered Alejandra and the sadness he’d first seen in the slope of her shoulders which he’d presumed to understand and of which he knew nothing and he felt a loneliness he’d not known since he was a child and he felt wholly alien to the world although he loved it still. He thought the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.”

Only McCarthy could explain to me this masculine strength and honor and adventure so deftly, me! Who usually shies away from Westerns and is allergic to horses. Even I can see how the stark lines (and again, stark prose) of the landscape and of these characters’ lives are somehow more telling, more primal than every flowery, curl-i-que tale. The latter rely on embellishment and literary trickery to establish depth. Whereas the pure, beautiful depth of McCarthy’s work aches in your bones and raises goosebumps on your skin.

I’m afraid to say there’s going to be lots more Cormac McCarthy on my plate and on my bookshelves in the future. Anyone know which one I should tackle next?

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars - Buy the hardcover

The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz)

It’s been a while since I liked a book this much, since a book actually made me feel as if I were discovering something never before touched by my eyes, a style never conceived of in my tiny little brain. It’s obvious when I really like a book from the beginning solely because I talk about it often — and in some detail — with my non-reader fiance, who listens attentively but will probably never pick up the novel I’m extolling. (I’m just being honest here, Love. I know you have your best intentions.) But I would probably talk about this book to anyone with earshot when I have it in my hands, about how irreverent yet honest the story is, how deep it digs into Dominican-American culture, how funny, how true to life, how simultaneously down to earth and moving.

It is the story — duh — of Oscar Wao, the first-generation son of a single mother from the Dominican Republic. While the Dominicans (especially the men) have a reputation for masculine prowess and womanizing (I don’t know Spanish that well, but the book must have at least six Spanish words for pussy vagina), Oscar is instead an overweight and over-vocabularied nerd of the highest degree. Sci Fi and fantasy novels, comic books, anime: You name it, Oscar loves it, and the narrator inserts these great nerd references whenever humanly possible. Check out the geek speak when describing the binding thread of the Oscar’s family’s story, a supposed curse or fuku placed on Oscar’s grandfather but common in many Dominican stories:

“It’s important to remember that fuku doesn’t always strike like lightning. Sometimes it works patiently, drowning a nigger by degrees, like with the Admiral or the U.S. in paddies outside Saigon. Sometimes it’s slow and sometimes it’s fast. It’s doomish in that way, makes it harder to put a finger on, to brace yourself against. But be assured: like Darkseid’s Omega Effect, the Morgoth’s bane, no matter how many turns and digressions this shit might take, it always — and I mean always — gets its man. “

Yes, this book won the Pulitzer Prize. And yes, it cusses like this on almost every page. And hell yes, I love what the world of literature is coming to. (No sarcasm here. I promise.) Diaz can be simultaneous crass and erudite. While cussing can often be juvenile, Diaz uses it like a cultural weapon and proves he’s doing it deftly, purposefully. The below, for instance, is a description of Oscar’s mother as a girl:

“I mean, what straight middle-aged brother had not attempted to regenerate himself through the alchemy of young pussy. And if what she often said to her daughter was true, Beli had some of the finest pussy around. The sexy isthmus of her waist alone could have launched a thousand yolas.”

An allusion to Helen of Troy and the word pussy on the same page? With vocab biggies like isthmus and alchemy? Wow, or rather Wao.

And while Oscar may be a lumbering, pitiful and heart-rendingly sweet geek, he’s still a Dominican, passionately interested in women, who thinks girls “were the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega, the DC and the Marvel. Homes had it bad.”

I loved joining Oscar on his quest for romance, in his depths of self pity and despair. I loved watching the present and the past of the story unfold, seeing the patterns but being left wanting more, wondering, my mind tripping back over the story to make connections. But perhaps above all, I loved this witty, bantering voice Diaz masters in the narrator. He’s part David Foster Wallace with his footnotes and educated allusions, and he’s part street-level shit talking at its finest, silver tongued and savvy. It’s simply excellent prose, even if you get a little confused at the Spanish sections — don’t worry, everything absolutely vital is translated. Much like Oscar’s life, the novel was wondrous, taking the nitty-gritty everyday and sprinkling some magic dust and cuss words to take it to the next level of meaning.

Can I put this on our wedding registry? Anyone?

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars - Buy the hardcover

Sacred Hunger (Barry Unsworth)

It took me an embarrassing long time to read this book for several reasons: more home improvement (I know, the excuse is getting old), addiction to the book on tape I recently downloaded and the fact that it was overdue at the library. You see, when a book is overdue and can no longer be renewed, you’re paying by the day. At least for me, this makes it more of a challenge and I’ll never throw in the towel. NEVER!

Long story short — unlike my excuse — the book sat with it’s book mark 80 pages from the end for almost two weeks, even though it was an artful and compelling novel, a book worthy of it’s Booker Prize. Tackling vast philosophic and historical issues like imperialism, capitalism, slavery and racism, you might think that the tale would be preachy or snobbish. But instead, the author fleshes out characters that feel right at home in this (to the modern mentality) foreign, brutal and immoral world. The rich son of a trader whose religion is commerce and revenge. His cousin, a fallen-from-society doctor who signs onto a slaving ship, writing himself off into whatever pain he can find. The conscripted sailors, the seasoned and brutal captain, the cringe-worthy depictions of Africans sold into slavery.

All told in a somewhat formal style. In fact, it reminded me quite a bit of the writers of the time period of the book — probably an intentional touch meant to drive the reader deeper into the past. However, the prose lacked the confusing flourishes of the period enough to lull a modern reader in, and the style was often striking and original.

(The slave ship was) a member of a vast fleet sent forth by men of enterprise and vision all over Europe, engaged in the greatest commercial venture the world had ever seen, changing the course of history, brining death and degredation and profits on a scale hitherto undreamed of.

That the ship was a mere corpuscle in this nourishing bloodstream was not easy to imagine for the men aboard her. To them she was a universe of routine tasks and routine sounds — the bell marking the half hours, shouted orders, the way of the waves, the wincing tune of the timbers as they were exercised by the sway of the sea. Forces less tangible but equally determinate worked on the men and they were set in relation to one another in sympathy or antipathy, as happens in all communities.

The title refers to trade, to the blindly ambitious commercial and imperial endeavors of the day, which were sanctioned by king, country and God.

Money is sacred, as everyone knows, he said. So then must be the hunger for it and the means we use to obtain it.

To take something as vile and despicable as slavery and immerse a reader in a world in which the practice is defended, is seen as common sense and morally just — and then to slowly have the characters wake up to a sense of disgust … I believe it takes an author of real talent to succeed at such a large undertaking, especially without denigrating or simplifying the historical figures involved, keeping them human and complex.

Deep? Yes.  Light reading? No. But Sacred Hunger (I agree with what I’ve heard) is just as worthy of critical praise and readership as the other book that shared the Booker Prize that year, The English Patient. And I think it could make just as good of a movie, too, replete with lots of ocean panoramas and violence, exotic locales and people and ideas.

And I think it’s worth the $2.10 I owe the library for the privilege of reading this intense novel.

The God of Small Things (Arundhati Roy)

Meet two-egg (fraternal) twins Estha and Rahel, two kids growing up in the India state of Kerala in the turbulent 1960s. Welcome to the imaginative, confusing, flowing world of two connected siblings, who see the world through each others’ (vibrantly, innocently descriptive) eyes, yet understand only shallowly the events unfolding around around them. Join them as they discover — over the course of childhood and with the distance of adulthood — “the laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much.”

This Booker Prize-winning novel definitely deserved its accolades. Though it took me much, much longer than normal to get through the book (my fault, not the novel’s), I loved every little description, every meaningful encounter, every private thought. Though the story ostensibly revolves around a tragedy of youth where a young relative visiting from England dies, the tale encompasses so much more and paints a thoughtful portrait of India during that time period.

Communism and unions and the division of wealth are seen in the family’s ownership of Paradise Pickles and Preserves. Gender roles appear in the “men’s needs door” allowed in the uncles bedroom, contrasted against his sister who left her drunken husband, who is considered immoral. Westernization: Is everything foreign more valuable than what comes out of India, including people?

But yet, the overwhelming theme is loss, tragedy and guilt. Not an uncommon theme, I admit. But the talent of Roy, her offbeat yet poignant descriptive ability, brings the theme to a higher level. Take, for instance, her description of Estha, who retreats into silence in reaction to his cousin’s death:

Once the quietness arrived, it stayed and spread in Estha. It reached out of his head and enfolded him in its swampy arms. It rocked him to the rhythm of an ancient, fetal heartbeat. It send its stealthy, suckered tentacles inching along the insides of his skull, hoovering the knolls and dells of his memory, dislodging old sentences, whisking them off the tip of his tongue. It stripped his thoughts of the words that described them and left them pared and naked. Unspeakable. Numb. And to an observer therefore, perhaps barely there. Slowly, over the years, Estha withdrew from the world. He grew accustomed to the uneasy octopus that lived inside him and squirted its inky tranquilizer on his past. Gradually the reason for his silence was hidden away, emtombed somewhere deep in the soothing folds of the fact of it.

I absolutely love the irreverence of Roy’s language. Random capitalization. Repetition. Her unique titling of people and things: Estha becomes Ambassador Pelvis with his special-occasion puff; Rahel is labeled a fountain in a Love in Tokyo due to her hairstyle. Roy reaches into the brain to pull out descriptions I would never have dreamed of, but that immediately bring images to mind. For example, the twins’ mother’s appearance is gauged in toothbrushes. As she stares in the mirror, she thinks she could definitely hold one under the fold of her bottom — several even — but her smaller breasts couldn’t support one.

And unlike heavier works by just-as-gifted authors, the words alone are not the only joy of the novel. The story itself will make you ache, both in its occasional sweetness and innocence as well as its tragedy. The guilt, whether deserved or not — in this world, tragedy almost seems inevitable — is palpable. But sometimes the best of books make you feel the worst, right? And despite it being the author’s first novel, this is definitely one of the best.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars - Buy the hardcover

The Remains of the Day (Kazuo Ishiguro)

Let me come out and say it: This book was one of the most inspired, well crafted and brilliant books I’ve read in a while, perhaps since The Road. Easy to read and straight-forwardly told, this story of Stevens — the last of a generation of English butlers with dignity and gravitas — surprised me with its humor and depth.

Every thread, every thought is woven together so gracefully. There was a moment at the kitchen table when I read the last page where the art of the novel hit me full force, making me see how this narrator’s personality and world view effected not only way we are told the tale, but the tragedies and triumphs of the plot beneath. In a way, Stevens is the ultimate unreliable narrator: Without artifice or intentional deception, we nonetheless see that his story is not the WHOLE story. While he spends time documenting the philosophy of his profession and his absolute dedication to it (the persona is a suit one never removes except when utterly alone, he notes), the reader sees what the unperceptive, dutiful butler doesn’t: what is really happening in the world, who the people around him truly are, their emotions, their desires.

Take, for instance, Steven’s experience on the road trip the novel centers around. Having rarely traveled far from his employer’s estate and never for simple pleasure, he observes the “greatness” of the scenery in such a unique way, what becomes a very signature way of the character.

“And yet what precisely is this ‘greatness’? Just where, or in what, does it lie? I am quite aware it would take a far wiser head than mine to answer such a question, but if I were forced to hazard a guess, I would say that it is the very lack of obvious drama or spectacle that sets the beauty of our land apart. What is pertinent is the calmness of the beauty, its sense of restraint. It is as though the land knows of it own beauty, of its own greatness, and feels no need to shout it. In comparison, the sorts of sights offered in such places as Africa and American, though undoubtedly very exciting, would, I am sure, strike the objective viewer as inferior on account of their unseemly demonstrativeness.”

Demonstrative scenery? I say! Another great instance is how, because of the jovial character of his new American employer Mr. Farraday, Stevens attempts to master the art of making witty retorts, something too casual and unplanned to be easy for him.

A certain incident “is as good an illustration as any of the hazards of uttering witticisms. By the very nature of a witticism, one is given very little time to assess its various possible repercussions before one is called to give voice to it, and one gravely risks uttering all manner of unsuitable things if one has not first acquired the necessary skill and experience. There is no reason to suppose this is not an area in which I will become proficient given time and practice, but, such are the dangers, I have decided it best, for the time being at least, not to attempt to discharge this duty in respect to Mr. Farraday until I have practiced further.”

The personality of Stevens is so alive and real, despite the obvious typecasting as “the butler,” partially because he doesn’t see himself as a type. Where he is blind, we can see and we can ask. Has he really reached the peak of his profession? Has he really become the ultimate butler he so lovingly describes? Or has his whole life been subsumed within this duty? Is his success actually a failure? Can we not love this character wholly and completely anyway, even as we ache for him?

As I said, the poignancy of this device hit me hard on the last page, at which point I burst into satisfied tears, confounding The Boyfriend. “I thought you really liked the book,” he said. “Oh yes,” I sniffed and blew unattractively into a tissue, relishing the emotion the book released.

Ishiguro, like a star athlete, makes perfection seem so simple. A good author can take a pile of letters, a collection of words, a string of sentences, and create with these simple tools a unique and solid experience, something as real to a reader as a friend, a memory or a souvenir of an eventful vacation. Though I’m a library rat, this is one book I will consider buying, just so the sight of it on the shelf can renew that flood of emotion and amazement this talented author created in me. Just so the joy — and pain — will never leave me.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars - Buy the hardcover

Oscar and Lucinda (Peter Carey)

I’ll see most anything with Ralph Fiennes in it. Or with Kate Blanchett, for that matter. Combine the two and you’ll know that of course I went to go see this film when it came out in 1997. And I walked out disappointed, frustrated at the disjointed plot and the strange way the characters were just abandoned, stranded at the end of the story.

Despite the stars, I thought maybe it was the movie’s fault. The book, after all, won the Booker Prize, something I hold in very high esteem, too. So I picked it up and — guess what — still a little disappointed.

The characters are certainly wonderfully unique and complex. Oscar, an Anglican priest who pays for divinity school by gambling at the track, is a gawky, awkward and naive young man who is afraid of water. Lucinda is a young woman who lost her parents and gained an inheritance, though she feels so guilty about the unexpected boon that she seems to want to lose the money as fast as possible in various games of chance. The two gamblers are thrown together during a England-to-Australia boat trip and fall in love — and into scandal.

Carefully and artfully told, slowly and surely, the tale is surely interesting. However, perhaps a little TOO slowly, especially near the end. While some great images from the conclusion of the book stuck with me — a glass church floating down a river, for instance — the wrap up left me cold, confused. I felt indignation for these complex characters I’d come to love so much, who I saw as simply being dumped off in the middle of nowhere plot-wise. Just like the movie, the book seemed disjointed. Now I usually like novels that don’t hit you over the head with the moral of their story, but a trail of breadcrumbs is sometimes nice, and I felt I missed (or the book lacked?) some unifying thread, something to make it hum and resonate.

But despite these somewhat minor flaws, I’d pick up anything Peter Carey wrote without a second thought when I come across him in the future. His rich prose is creative and magnetic, unusual and unique. And I still rate the novel …

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars - Book club selection

The Martian Chronicles (Ray Bradbury)

“Mars was a distant shore, and the men spread upon it in waves. Each wave different, and each wave stronger. The first wave carried with it men accustomed to spaces and coldness and being alone, the coyote and cattlemen, with no fat on them, with faces the years had worn the flesh off, with eyes like nailheads, and hands like the material of old gloves, ready to touch anything. Mars could do nothing to them, for they were bred to plains and praries as open as the Martian fields. They came and made things a little less empty, so that others would find the courage to follow. They put panes in hollow windows and lights behind the panes.”Sure, we’re talking about Mars here. But this kind of prose is hardly typical of science fiction, with its “I kanna give er any moore, captain” drama. Don’t get me wrong, such sci fi is great on occasion. But Bradbury easily transcends genre fiction into the realm of magical realism ala Gabriel Garcia Marquez — a realm of shape-shifting aliens who want only a home, where insanity manifests in physical form, where the ruins of alien cities tower over the desert. And yet it’s all so human and tangible and authentic. My personal favorite: a standoff at the first Martian hot dog stand.

Humorous, dark, satiric, warm, compassionate and lyrical, this book of interconnected short stories (written in 1949) has stood the test of time and I’m happy that the National Book Award judges had the good sense to see that, even way back in the day.

But… well, there was one little thing.

(Audience groans, sensing a tangental rant.)

WTF?! We’ve progressed to the point in time where we’ve developed the technology to visit and colonialize the planet Mars, but Martian wives are still cooking and serving dinner to Martian husbands every night? A Martian woman, Mrs. Ttt, answers the door to the first group of astronauts and she says, “If you’ve made my crystal buns fall in the oven, I’ll hit you with a piece of wood … I’ll see if you can have a minute with Mr. Ttt. What was your business?” In other words, I’m busy baking and if you need anything important (read: not baked goods) you need to talk to the man of the house.

Yes, yes. I realize this book was written a long time ago, decades before the sexism in these examples would have been noticed or discussed. But, man oh MAN, if we’re going to dream up a fake future where we see cool new mental abilities and fabulous technology, couldn’t we for one moment assume that there might be one corner of the universe where the men would bake us cookies?

Oatmeal raisin. You hear that, honey?

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars - Book club selection

Goodbye, Columbus: And Five Short Stories (Philip Roth)

“I don’t like Philip Roth,” I said to them, the Roth-y groupies. But their teary eyes and gesturing hands drive me to change my mind, to give the man another chance after the boring travesty that was The Human Stain.

“Try his original, the award-winning, break-through, tour-de-force Goodbye, Columbus,” they told me. “Give him another chance.”

So I did. And now I come back to the teary groupies and I say: “I don’t like Philip Roth.”

He’s so topical, so timely. With Human Stain, he brought up the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal. In this work of years before, it’s mostly about premarital sex and contraception and sleeping with one another versus marriage. It’s about the extended adolescence during and right after college, when we should have grown up a bit but haven’t. And it’s about the choices we make — or nearly make, and then reverse at the last moment — that change everything, from which part of town you will live in to what kind of job you’re going to have. Oh, and premarital sex.

All Roth wants is to tell the reader his point of view on current topics of interest. He couldn’t get a radio show, so he writes fiction. Ok, ok, ok. That is harsh. He’s a good writer of fiction — the use of fruit in the novel to illustrate financial success, for instance. But COME ON PEOPLE! He’s almost a John Grisham, except he tackles more than one theme and isn’t as action-oriented.

His prose touches me in no way, at least not in any way a well-written magazine article couldn’t do. I feel no spark of inspiration or empathy. I feel only coldness and method. Please? Can someone explain it for me? Is it just that Roth is a “man” writer, or what? Or is it just that he’s stumbled on some good insights about controversial issues at exactly the right times to reap all the awards?

Anyone?

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars - Mediocre vacation reading

Housekeeping (Marilynne Robinson)

(Howdy to the Book Trail, who suggested this book for its first online book club selection.)

My threshold for pure words for words sake is pretty high. I mean, I dig on David Foster Wallace. I’m down with Coover. And sheesh, I love a good Ayn Rand book, too. But Marilynne Robinson might be in an entirely different ballpark. She’s Foster without the biting wit and Coover without the post-modern time and perspective shifts. Instead, Robinson’s writing is dense, overly intellectual (honestly, who knows what “lucifactions” are?), claustrophobic, oddly structured grammatically, almost plotless, frustrating, meandering and… well, brilliant.

Though the words seemed to leak out of my ear as I took them through my eye, making me reread paragraphs two or even three times, it was obvious throughout that I was in a master’s hands (or a master’s hands were in my eyes?). The prose may be sluggish and dense, but it’s purposeful in what it doesn’t say, in what the characters don’t do. The main character, Ruthie, places herself and the few people in her life under a microscope, dissecting their every trait, every action or every stillness. Yet at the same time, she brings the most minor incident — a coil of hair kept by her grandmother, graham crackers her mother purchased, the way a woman brushes her hair — into a cosmic, philosophic perspective.

“If I had one particular complaint, it was that my life seemed composed entirely of expectation. I expected–an arrival, an explanation, an apology. There had never need one, a fact I could have accepted, were it not true that, just when I had got used to the limits and dimensions of one moment, I was expelled into the next and made to wonder again if any shapes hid in its shadows. That most moments were substantially the same did not detract at all from the possibility that the next moment might be utterly different. And so the ordinary demanded unblinking attention. Any tedious hour might be the last of its kind.”

Ruthie and her sister Lucille, you see, were dropped off by their mother at their grandmother’s house in the small, harsh and wet town of Fingerbone, where long ago their grandfather was killed when his train tumbled from the very high, very long train trestle over the town’s lake. The girls’ mother, after dropping them on the porch, soon follows her father’s fate in her car, driving her car purposefully over a cliff. The girls eventually wind up in the care of their aunt, Sylvie, a drifter by trade and by nature. (Again, plot is not the books’ strong suit, nor is plot summarization mine.)

This is world inhabited by women, and solely by women of two types: the isolated homebody whose neat, proper actions are the only signs of their identity and their love, and then the dreaming drifter, her head as full of cobwebs as the corners of her parlor, which she’d rather use for her growing tin can and newspaper collection than for guests.

True to the title, the book is about housekeeping, literally and also metaphorically. Some abhor cobwebs, others are thrilled at the way the sunlight sparkles, caught in the spider’s silky net. Some women are about casseroles, peach prom dresses, hair ties, wedding rings and other physical manifestations of life. They turn up the lantern to stave off the dark, not realizing they will see only themselves reflected in their windows, thereby sealing up the mysterious, dank and magical outside world. The latter group stands in the dark just to feel it permeate their skin, to feel themselves soak into it. They look in windows at the trapped souls, shaking their messy heads in wonder that those caged animals don’t realize all their material goods and social niceties mean nothing, vanishing like mist through the fingers, intangible. Thoughts the only commodity of value.
Just as Ruthie’s mother, the suicide, made more of an impact on her daughters’ lives than her presence would have, sometimes the lack of plot actually causes the most dramatic of realizations.

I think that if it’s possible for a reader to get into this thick and marshy style of Robinson’s, anyone who lives a bit more inside their head than in the real world is going to “get it.” Those introspective, pondering, impetuous, romantic and idealistic women who know what it is like to float around the edges of life, who often don’t understand the fervent importance of certain traditions or possessions, and who — most importantly — don’t see why that is such a bad place to be. Who see the freedom in that.

Granted, most of us who fit that description still enjoy a casserole now and then. And yes, hopefully we pick up a rag to dust the essentials every blue moon. But we understand the friction between the halves as well as the freedom of casting off all housekeeping for an afternoon pondering the dew in the cobwebs. We catalog all those poignant moments that “bulge like the belly of a lens,” showing us the underside of reality, which is more transparent and amorphous than most people dare to imagine.

Interpreter of Maladies (Jhumpa Lahiri)

This selection of stories centered on the Indian/Indian-American culture (dots, not feathers) was simply written yet vivid. Though I enjoyed it and read it quickly, I can’t help but shake the feeling that I could have gotten just as much out of it had I been reading it while bouncing up and down on the stair master. In other words, the book seemed to be a placeholder, something to do to keep my eyes busy that didn’t permeate much further into my head. And though I could be wrong, none of these stories will wind up haunting the corners of my mind, which makes me wonder why it received the Pulitzer. But ah well, I don’t give out the prizes. (Or maybe I’m distracted, who knows?)
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars - Vacation reading