Recent Reads

I picked up Jack Kerouac’s On The Road: the Original Scroll at the library recently, for the simple reason that I happened to spot it on the shelves and it has been more years than I care to remember since I read the original (the “unscrolled version” I guess you’d call it now). I loved this book when I first read it, and I loved reading it again, all scrolled out, as it were. Written in 1951 (although not published until ‘57), On The Road is a Beat Generation anthem and a wild ride across America. If you’ve never read it, there’s no time like the present. If you haven’t read it in a while, it’s the ultimate re-read. The novel will remind you that writing can be about life and experience and spirit and a love affair with words. The book is all of this and more: Highly recommended.

Jack K

 Let’s just say that my day job working for a corporate giant in a corporate wonderland is an “experience” and leave it at that. I suppose I should feel pretty good that my boss wanted our entire department (or “team”) to read a book and discuss it. The only trouble is that the book was The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni. Anyone who wants to read this book can do it in about an evening or so and I’m sure get a little something out of it if you’ve never taken even the briefest moment to think about the folks you work with every day. I certainly don’t have anything against this book or its author, but I’m honestly amazed that this book, which is neither particularly challenging nor insightful, has become the business bible of American management: Life is short; don’t waste your time.

Amberville is a nicely strange novel by Tim Davys that takes a look at the troubles of being a stuffed animal. What does a stuffed animal have to worry about? Well, there are the Chauffeurs of death who drive around in their red pickup trucks; there are mobsters and seedy politicians and the pitfalls of love; stuffed animals can literally get the stuffing beat out of them, it turns out. It ain’t easy being a stuffed animal in Amberville, especially if you’re Eric Bear, who has been ordered by the nastiest mobster of them all, Nicholas Dove, to find the legendary Death List and strike Dove’s name from it. Granted, when it comes to backstory and characterization, the author gives in to more info-dumping than I’m normally fond of, but there is plenty of imagination and inventiveness here to engage readers who appreciate clever allegory and a twisted mind: Recommended.

Of further interest…

A fine NPR story about Jack’s On The Road.

Read some interesting stuff about Amberville and the author.

Fav Five

First edition cover, 1935

A question has been bouncing around Facebook for a while asking people to pick their five favorite novels. This is an impossible task, of course, for anyone who loves books as much as I do. I anguished over this question for quite some time, not because I felt the pressing need to answer it on Facebook (I still think Facebook is a huge waste of time, and this after my second time trying it), but because I really wanted to see if I could do it.

I finally narrowed the field to my five favorite novels that made me want to write. This allowed me to cut out armloads of books that were great and powerful and enjoyable and important to me for various reasons, but that I discovered later in life, after my most impressionable years had passed. Regardless, it’s not an easy task, no matter how you categorize the books, especially if you obsess over things the way I do. So here are my fav five, not in any particular order (plus two runners up because I didn’t have the heart to cut them out), almost certainly subject to change at any moment:

Fav Five:

Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
Lord of the Rings Trilogy, J.R.R Tolkien (yeah, I’m counting this as one)

Runners Up:

Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut

Of further interest…

Modern Library’s list of the 100 best novels, flanked by the Reader’s list.

NY Times list of the best American fiction of the last 25 years.

The pros and cons of Catcher: an interesting look at this controversial novel.

Read Frankenstein for free!

Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus (illustration from the 1831 edition)

 

 

 

Philosophy on the Big Screen

I was thrilled to see the thought-provoking documentary Examined Life at the Dryden Theatre, a film by Astra Taylor, a young Canadian/American filmmaker. The premise was pretty simple: what happens when you allow modern-day philosophers to talk to us about some of their big thoughts? Rather than a typical interview-style documentary where someone asks a question and someone else answers it, and then there is another question and another answer, etc., Taylor gives her nine subjects space to run with their own scattered thoughts and ideas while just letting the camera roll.

Okay, I realize that the film sounds dull, and although it was occasionally boring, it was about as exciting, mind-bending, and just plain odd as an all-talk-all-the-time movie can be. Cornel West was the most impassioned, Slavoj Zizek the craziest, and Pete Singer one of the more interesting interviews, at least in my opinion, but I think individual responses will vary. It’s a film that you really need to see two or three times to wrap your mind around some of the concepts, and of course it helps to be in love with the idea of philosophy to begin with. This film premiered at the Toronto International Film Fest in 2008, and a companion book is scheduled for publication by The New Press in 2009. Highly recommended.

Last week I also took the opportunity to see the play Love in the Title by Hugh Leonard. It’s a great premise for a play. Three women from different eras: a grandmother, mother, and daughter, spend an afternoon together in a meadow in Ireland, but the magical twist is that the grandmother is a young woman of 20, the mother is 30, and the daughter is nearing 40 years of age. So in essence, the story is set simultaneously in 1932, 1964, and 1999. Leonard never tries to explain the anomaly of how these women came to be together out of their own times (thank you!); rather, he just runs with the characters, offering the audience an intriguing look at love and morals across generations and unresolved conflicts between mothers and daughters. Is it a comedy? That’s how it’s advertised, but the production I saw, despite moments of levity, seemed more of a drama. I’m sure direction makes a difference here. The play slows toward the end, and I wanted it to resonate more, but it’s worth seeing if you get a chance. Recommended.

Of further interest…

The many plays of Hugh Leonard.

The Examined Life trailer will give you a taste of this very intriguing film.

Zeitgeist films: Examined Life and other movies.

Astra Taylor

While Waiting for My Hometown to Get Warm…

Okay, it has been a long winter. Although most of the snow disappeared about a month ago, Rochester is still entertaining temperatures in the 30s and 40s, and I’m frankly weary of it. Today it took me twice as long to drive to work because of an unexpected run of ice and snow. So here’s some stuff I’ve been doing to turn up my nose at the lousy weather….

Last week I went to the local production of Paul Alexander’s Edge, presented by Method Machine. This is a one-woman show about poet Sylvia Plath’s last day of life. It’s an incredibly well-written, nicely-imagined play, and I learned quite a bit about Plath and her uber-rotten hubby Ted Hughes and the events that led to her suicide in 1963. In the Rochester incarnation, Marcy Savastano delivered a truly fantastic performance. The run is finished here, but if you ever get a chance to catch this show somewhere, someday, jump at it. Highly recommended.

I listened to the audio book version of Peal S. Buck’s The Good Earth. I wept like an idiot at the end of it just as I did when I read it years ago for the first time. It still amazes me that Buck so perfectly nailed the male mind with her main character Wang Lung. The story has such incredible depth and range and force. Some books just plain deserve the Pulitzer; this one nabbed it in 1932 and is still deeply affecting today. (What does the “S” stand for in Buck’s name? Sydenstricker!) Read the novel or listen to it, take your pick. You can’t go wrong. Highly recommended.

I set about reading Jose Saramago’s The Gospel According to Jesus Christ with some trepidation. I’m not a big fan of religulit, but Saramago’s journey into the mind of Christ is worth putting aside whatever misgivings you might have. Saramago pulled me right in with his imagined immaculate conception scene, and once I started reading the book it was hard to put down. You would have thought I didn’t know how it ended, fer chrissakes. The scene near the end of the novel where Jesus and God and the devil have a heart-to-heart in a row boat is absolutely brilliant. This won’t be for everyone, but it will do strange and wonderful things to the mind of anyone who has been rasied Catholic. Recommended.

Not everything I’ve been reading has been good. A friend at work handed me her copy of The Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards. I had loaned her my copies of Bad Monkeys and The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, and she’d loved them both, so I figured, well, what the heck, I owed her one. I can’t say it’s badly written, but I think it’s a lot like reading a year’s worth of Woman’s World Magazine. Not cool.

Of further interest…

Edge in Rochester, presented by Method Machine, starring Marcy Savastano. Here is the NY Theatre review.

The Good Earth, yeah, okay, this was an Oprah book.

The Gospel According to Jesus Christ is “irreverent, profund, skeptical, funny, heretical, deeply philosophical, provacative and compelling,” says Bob Corbett of Webster University. Read more.

More Books to Film

Wong Kar Wai is one of Hong Kong’s foremost New Wave filmmakers. The Dryden Theatre at the George Eastman House recently screened Ashes of Time Redux, the 2008 version, which is basically Wai’s remake of his own 1994 film. Wai took full advantage of technology advances and completely re-edited the movie, making it a colorful and visually stunning cinematic experience. The film is based somewhat loosely on Louis Cha’s martial arts novel The Eagle-Shooting Heroes. It is very much an art film versus the martial arts extravaganza it was advertised as, and this might explain why it didn’t do very well at the box office, but it’s well worth seeing if you get a chance. The music is incredible, featuring several Yo Yo Ma cello solos, which more than make up for the confusing narrative and fragmented storytelling. Recommended.

The film Choke is an odd little picture about sex addicts just trying to get by. If it sounds weird, well, it is. The movie is based on Chuck Palahniuk’s novel of the same name, about a sex addict who works at a colonial theme park and is going to a support group to try and break his addiction. But his mother is dying and he is falling in love with his mother’s doctor, and his best pal (another sex addict) is falling in love with some girl, a stripper, fer chrissakes. The movie doesn’t really know exactly what it wants to be: a farce, a dark comedy, a pseudo drama, or maybe a freako romance. Take your pick. If you can get past the bumpy ride, and you like strange and the occasional uncomfortable laugh, you might enjoy this one. Mildly recommended.

It’s easy to see why Bernhard Schlink’s novel The Reader made such a fine film. Beyond excellent performances by Kate Winslet as Hanna (former SS concentration camp guard) and Ralph Fiennes as Michael, this is a story that speaks of guilt, secrets, illiteracy, the Holocaust, the complications of love, and a young man’s coming of age. And it does so in as tightly knit a short novel as I’ve ever read. Even if the ending felt a little contrived and (forgive me) convenient, it’s an affecting story that makes you think — a big book in a little package — which makes it just about perfect for the movies. Read the novel; you’ll rip through it in no time. Then watch the film. It’s rare to see one complement the other so nicely. Highly recommended.

I think the 70 million people who read Watchmen all went out to see the film during its opening weekend, regardless of several lukewarm reviews. The incredibly high production quality of the film will knock you out. It’s a rich tapestry of brilliant special effects, visually stunning scenes, cool characters, and a grand story. It’s also very true to the original Alan Moore comic book (1986/1987), with a bit more violence for today’s modern audiences and a reworked ending minus the beloved squid. It’s a long film at about two and three-quarter hours, but a director’s cut that is even longer is planned. I went with a bunch of friends, and the odd pop-music selections got mixed reviews, and I’m honestly not sure if people unfamiliar with the comic will be taken with this film, but it’s certainly worth a try: Recommended.

Of further interest….

Chuck Palahniuk is best known for his novel Fight Club, which was also turned into a film (a much better one). Here’s a pretty good in-depth interview with him.

A great article in the Observer about Schlink, The Reader, and the guilt of a generation.

Some words with Zack Snyder, Director of Watchmen and 300.

Alan Moore

Strange Days and Paranoid Meanderings

For those of you who love oddball fiction as much as I do, you might enjoy these two novels I’ve recently read:

Rivka Galchen’s first novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, is not only a fine literary work, but reading it is a quietly and distinctly paranoid experience. In the very first scene, the main character, Leo, a 51 year-old psychiatrist, is certain that his wife Rema has been replaced with an exact replica, a simulacrum, and he spends the rest of the novel trying to figure out who has done this and why. Whether he ever gets any straight answers is open to interpretation. Is there really a secret society called the Royal Academy of Meteorology involved in a clandestine weather-control war against the devious 49? Is the brilliant but dead meteorologist Tzvi Gal-Chen really communicating with Leo through his Blackberry? And how does the dog fit in? Sound nuts? You make the call. The book delves into some interesting philosophical questions about life, death, and our relationship to reality. Galchen is also disturbingly funny at times and seems frighteningly tuned in (especially or a woman) to the squishy ground of male insecurities and relationship fears. As I was reading this book, I was equal parts unsettled, amused, and impressed. This novel will hang with you. Highly recommended.

Of further interest…

You Tube book trailer for Atmospheric Disturbances. Very cool. I wish someone had done something like this for my novels!

In Death and the Penguin we are introduced to Viktor Zolotaryov, a passably good writer who can’t get published. Viktor finds a job for a meager salary writing obits for the newspaper. Or maybe the job finds him. The twist is that he is writing obits of people who have not yet died. His boss is the kindly but mysterious chief editor, Igor. This quirky novel by Andrey Kurkov (translated from the Russian by George Bird) is set in the Ukraine, where secretive politics is the rule not the exception, and we slowly begin to realize that Igor and the newspaper and the job Viktor has taken are not as innocent as they first appeared. Things start to get strange and dangerous for Viktor when the the subjects of the obits begin turning up dead, and Viktor finds himself in the middle of an odd game of espionage and hide-and-seek. Is somone stalking him or not? Does someone want to kill him or protect him? And what is to be made of his boss’s cryptic comments? This book is not by any means a spy thriller or a suspense novel. The story is a slow-moving ship that seems to be on an inevitable course of destruction as soon as it leaves shore. Viktor is introspective and filled with angst about his writing and the meaning of life and death in the freezing Ukraine. His pet, the penguin Misha (adopted from the zoo and chronically depressed), is the only one Viktor seems in the least bit fond of, human connection being elusive throughout the novel. The book jacket claims the story is in the tradition of Mikhail Buglakov, but this is simply not true, at least in the literary sense. You won’t find any of Buglakov’s wild imagination or dangerous social satire here. But this book is stark, dry, cold, and clever, and for those of us who love to write and appreciate the writer’s struggle there is much for us here. Recommended.

Of further interest…

A terrific interview with Andrey Kurkov.

“It took me only several months to write the novel. The problem is that half of my character, especially Viktor in Death and the Penguinand Tolya, they are typical post-Soviet young intelligentsia lads who were very infantile. I mean, they were semi-dissident in the Soviet time, but they inherited genetically all this Soviet passivity, lack of initiative and readiness to accept anything that comes. So, for me, he is quite typical, representative of this generation. But I should say that this generation has gone already, and the new young people are completely different; they’re very practical, they’re very pragmatic. In his case…in the Soviet time, people like this (including me) were spending hour and hours every day in the cafes just talking about philosophy, Hemingway, jazz and things like that.”

U.S. Authors Nipped at the Border

Much to my disappointment, my brilliant editor and good friend Rob Sawyer will no longer be able to publish American authors through his science fiction imprint Robert J. Sawyer Books (RJS). According to Rob, the Canada Council for the Arts has objected to him publishing U.S. authors “while the Canada Council helps to subsidize the costs.”

Rob has published four books by American contributors since he launced the line through Red Deer Press in 2004: Letters From the Flesh, Marcos Donnelly’s brilliant second novel; The Savage Humanists, an excellent anthology edited by Fiona Kelleghan; and my first two novels, A Small and Remarkable Life and Valley of Day-Glo. (As I write this, I believe ten books in all have appeared under the RJS imprint.)

This is an unfortunate development for those of us in the states who have watched good markets for original science fiction and fantasy dwindle over the years. Fitzhenry & Whiteside appeared to be an emerging market willing to take chances on new writers and original voices in the genre regardless of country of origin, although predominately Canadian. I met Sharon Fitzhenry and liked her quite a bit, and I thoroughly enjoyed working with Rob. I’m not sure my first two novels would have found a publisher if Rob hadn’t been willing to take a chance on them. The fact that Fitz is a book publisher (we’ve seen plenty of short-story markets disappear over the years, eh?) makes it even more disappointing to American scribblers. Rob has published approximately two books per year through RJS and will continue to publish Canadian authors.

Of further interest…

The full post on Rob’s blog.

An interview with Marcos Donnelly re: Letters From the Flesh.

Robert J. Sawyer Books website.

The Canada Council for the Arts home page.

Assorted Winter Cool

Trouble the Water is a great documentary film about the Katrina hurricane and flood disaster in New Orleans. The story is told primarily by Kimberly Rivers Roberts, an aspiring rap artist who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time with a video camera. With some incredible professional editing work and good direction, her very rough and personal home video footage taken before, during, and after the disaster tells the story of two young people trapped in New Orleans (no public transportation was organized to help anyone get out) and their struggle to survive not only the natural disaster but the government’s indifference to their suffering afterwards. I saw this film at the Dryden Theatre at the George Eastman House and walked out of it just shaking my head in disbelief. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised at the way the Bush administration botched the entire operation (if you could count on Bush for anything it was to be consistently bad). The film is an Academy Award nominee for Best Documentary. See it if you can. Chilly! Highly Recommended.

The official Trouble the Water website.

 

Yes, I finally did get to the film Revolutionary Road. Director Sam Mendes (Jarhead, Road to Perdition, American Beauty) did a fine job of bringing this challenging existential novel by Richard Yates to screen. It’s a seriously depressing movie about unfulfilled lives and broken dreams, but if you can stomach that, the performances by Leonardo DiCaprio as Frank Wheeler and Kate Winslet as April Wheeler are well worth it. And much to my surprise, the film was remarkably faithful to the book. There probably hasn’t been a better attempt to bring an existential novel to the big screen since Lo Straniero (1967), based on Albert Camus’ The Stranger. If you’re a fan of existentialism, as I am, you simply must see it. Frigid! Highly recommended.

A great interview with Richard Yates published in Ploughshares.

 

For Sci Fi fans, the TV series Battlestar Galactica is in its final season, and the past two episodes have been as good or better than anything I’ve seen on the SCI FI Channel to date. It’s well worth checking out. If you aren’t familiar with the story, you can catch up by watching Battlestar’s What the Frak Recap. Great fun and very cool! Highly Recommended.

Abe Rothberg is A-Friend-A-Mine

 

Dr. Abraham Rothberg was one of my English professors at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, NY (let’s just say it was a helluva lot of years ago and leave it at that). I was always afraid of him because he was so damn smart, and he intimidated me, and I could never get anything better than a C in his classes. I’m sorry to say that back in those days I never knew he was a fiction writer. Only recently, after becoming reacquainted with him through another former teacher/current friend, did I learn that he was an author of some notoriety. All that is a prelude to this: Lots of years later, I finally read one of his novels, A Beast in View, and although I freely admit that it was impossible for me to separate the teacher I dreaded and the man I now know from the main character in his novel, I think I can say with just enough objectivity that I honestly enjoyed his book.

 

Set in the post WWII era, this is a story of several talented writers who all meet in a creative writing class at college. Friendships and alliances are struck, there are love affairs and fights, tragedies and joys, most of it told through characters who have been wounded (some physically and others emotionally) by the war. I found the details about writers and writing absolutely fascinating. Times have certainly changed in the publishing world. Anyone interested in the ways authors were “made” fifty or sixty years ago will immediately see this novel as a treasure. It’s as much about writing and writers as anything else. Sure, there were times when I could see my old professor unable to control his vast wealth of knowledge (I can only imagine having that problem), but only rarely did this bump into the storytelling. Overall I was impressed with how accessible the book was. Matters of the heart, doubts about life and death and God and our place in the universe, and the yearnings and sufferings of the human soul are the same in any era. This novel has all of those things (and a treasured autograph from my tormentor): Highly recommended.

 

Of further interest…

 

Abe’s books have been out of print for many years, but recently a very small press by the name of Edteck republished some of his work. I’m looking forward to reading more.

 

 

Still Great After All These Years

 

The Independent Film Channel (IFC) showed Raging Bull this week. It’s one of my favorite films and I hadn’t seen it in awhile, probably three or four years anyway, so I took the opportunity to turn off my computer and dim the lights and get lost in it all over again, shutting out the world. Every time I see this film I’m amazed at how good it is. Each scene tightly crafted and perfect, the brilliant closeups, the pristine black and white, the documentary style storytelling mixed in with moments of pure emotional angst…it’s Marty Scorsese at his finest. Di Niro and Pesci are fantastic. Their performances will rip your heart out, especially Di Niro, whose uncontrollable rage can be seen in every movement he makes, every expression on his face. The screenplay by Schrader and Mardik is out-of-this-world good, and the fact that it wasn’t nominated for an award is evidence of how badly the award shows can miss sometimes. (For example, it lost Best Director and Best Picture to Robert Redford’s Ordinary People in 1980, if you can believe that, UGH.) Highly recommended.

 

I first read the novel Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates in college. I thought it was all right then, although maybe a fair bit boring. I picked it up again so I could read it before I went to the movie, and it’s amazing what 30 years of perspective can do for a work of art. I have more of an appreciation and sympathy for Yates’ personal struggles now, his difficulties with alcohol and depression, and the obvious affects these struggles had on this classic story of disappointment and loss in America. Although set in the post WWII era, it could just as well have been written today as Yates expertly pulls apart life and society and how we all compromise ourselves to death behind a veneer of comfy cultural conformity. I can certainly understand why the novel might have seemed dull when I was just a kid in college, but today, after having lived, inevitably, some of the disillusionment Yates was writing about, it’s a whole new disturbing ball game. Read it (or re-read it) and reflect. It’s worth it: Highly recommended.

 

Of further interest…

 

See the trailer and film clips of Raging Bull at the NY Times site.

 

NPR story on Revolutionary Road.