Collected Miscellany

Regular readers will know that I have long had an interest in fiction that touches on issues of faith and religion.  On the other hand, I don’t read a lot of historical fiction; for a variety of reasons that I won’t get into right now.

But despite the countervailing habits when I heard about John The Baptizer by Brooks Hansen I was immediately intrigued. Here is the publishers description:

Traditionally, John the Baptist is seen as little more than an opening act—”the voice crying in the wilderness”—in the great Christian drama. In presenting the epic of John’s life, novelist Brooks Hansen draws on an extraordinary array of inspirations, from the works of Caravaggio, Bach, and Oscar Wilde to the histories of Josephus, the canonical gospels, the Gnostic gospels, and the sacred texts of those followers of John who never accepted Jesus as Messiah: the Mandeans.

Gripping as literary historical fiction, and fascinating as a diligent exploration of ancient and modern sources, this book brings to eye-opening life the richly textured world—populated by the magnificently sordid, calculating, and reckless Herods, their families, and their courts—into which both John and Jesus were born. John the Baptizer is a captivating tapestry of power and dissent, ambition and self-sacrifice, worldly and otherworldly desire, faith, and doubt.

A straightforward historical portrayal of John might be interesting in and of itself, but the unique and creative mix Hansen offered put this one on the top of my reading list.

Most of the time the publishers blurb has an element of hyperbole to it – depending on the quality of the book in question this can be annoying or flat out deceptive – but in my opinion this one really does capture the book.

More on why below. Read the rest of this entry »

I enjoyed Girl Factory, and am a fan of the folks at Tin House, so I was interested to read Jim Krusoe’s latest work Erased.  Here is the publisher’s description:

Abandonment, life, death, and, oddly, Cleveland are explored in the hilarious second installment of Jim Krusoe’s trilogy about resurrection.

In Erased, Krusoe takes on a dead mother who mysteriously sends notes from the beyond to her grown son, Theodore, the owner of a mail-order gardening-implement business. “I need to see you,” the first card reads. Theodore does what any sensible person would: he ignores it. But when he gets a second card that’s even more urgent, Theodore leaves his quiet home in St. Nils for a radiantly imagined Cleveland, Ohio, to track down his mother. There, aided by Uleene, the last remaining member of Satan’s Samaritans, an all-girl biker club, he searches through the realms of women’s clubs, art, rodent extermination, and sport fishing until he finds the answers he seeks.

This had me intrigued as I found the balance between absurdest comedy and philosophical questioning in Girl Factory entertaining and thought provoking. Plus, it satirizes Cleveland.  That alone has to be worth some laughs.

But for whatever reason, Erased didn’t quite work for me.  Erased is still the same blend of dream like states and all too real reality.  It still comes with a host of funny quips, entertaining characters, and absurd situations as Krusoe’s previous work.  And I enjoyed that aspect.

But it seemed to me that Krusoe turned up the absurdest and surrealist aspects of the novel to such a degree that the plot or narrative got lost.  I realize that perhaps the plot in the traditional sense wasn’t the point.  But for me there needs to be something that pulls the story forward and also causes it to cohere into something more than a collection of words; no matter how well crafted.

Read the rest of this entry »

I stumbled upon Genesis by Bernard Beckett at the Book Loft and it seemed like a great fit for me: slim YA post-apocalyptic novel with a philosophical twist.  I was inexplicably without reading material and needed to kill some time before a meeting that had been pushed back.  so I picked this up and dove in.

Allow me to steal PW’s plot summation:

Anax, the dedicated student historian at the center of Beckett’s brutal dystopian novel, lives far in the future—the distant past events of the 21st century are taught in classrooms. The world of that era, we learn, was ravaged by plague and decay, the legacy of the Last War. Only the island Republic, situated near the bottom of the globe, remained stable and ordered, but at the cost of personal freedom. Anax, hoping her scholarly achievements will gain her entrance to the Academy, which rules her society, has extensively studied Adam Forde, a brilliant and rebellious citizen of the Republic who fought for human dignity in the midst of a regimented, sterile society. To join the Academy’s ranks, Anax undergoes a test before three examiners, and as the examination progresses, it becomes clear that her interpretations of Adam’s life defy conventional thought and there may be more to Adam—and the Academy—than she had imagined.

It turned out to be a quick entertaining read with some meaty philosophical issues in the middle and twist at the end.  It struck me as a sort of interesting experiment; not entirely successful but worth doing and enjoyable.

Read the rest of this entry »

One of my oft repeated phrases is: “Better late than never.”  The sad fact is that I have all too many chances to utter it.  I bring this up because it seems a perfect application to this review.  Those bloggers who are organized and on top of things tend to offer reviews when a topic, book, or author is in the news and/or the hot topic of conversation.

While The Shack is still the topic of conversation around the country and around the world, the story is by now well know and thoroughly debated. (See this New York Times article for a flavor)

I first read the book back when it was much more a burgeoning phenomenon but never got around to putting my thoughts and reactions down in pixels.  But when my church’s Sunday School class offered this as one of its book discussions I decided to go back and resist it.

For those of you unfamiliar with the book here is a brief description:

Mackenzie Allen Philips’ youngest daughter, Missy, has been abducted during a family vacation and evidence that she may have been brutally murdered is found in an abandoned shack deep in the Oregon wilderness. Four years later in the midst of his Great Sadness, Mack receives a suspicious note, apparently from God, inviting him back to that shack for a weekend. Against his better judgment he arrives at the shack on a wintry afternoon and walks back into his darkest nightmare. What he finds there will change Mack’s world forever.

After a second reading, I found that while its literary merit left a lot to be desired, and its theology was shaky in parts, as a whole it was a thought provoking and worthwhile read.

Below I will look at the book’s literary, theological, and philosophical implications. I’m not sure this matters at this point, but there will be “spoilers” involved. Read the rest of this entry »

Book cover via Amazon

I have been trying to put my finger on why I didn’t like the first installment of the Thrusday Next series by Jasper Fforde.  I mean I like satire and books that blend or bend genres.  But I have now finished another book in the series, Thursday Next: First Among Sequels, and althoug I liked it better I can’t say I am a fan.

So what happened?  Well, I think it has to do with the style and the lead character.  You either like them of you don’t.  And for whatever reason, I got off on the wrong foot and never really enjoyed either.

For those of you unfamiliar with things, allow me crib the plot from Kirkus Reviews:

Thursday Next returns in another postmodern literary detective fantasy from Fforde (The Big Over Easy, 2005, etc.). Once again, the author creates a world in which only permeable boundaries separate truth from fiction, the living from the dead (or extinct: Thursday knits a sweater for her pet dodo, Pickwick). Our heroine revisits places and people from earlier Fforde novels, as well as from an immoderate number of English and American classics-one memorable page contains allusions to The Woman in White, Robert Ludlum, Jason Bourne, Our Mutual Friend, Bleak House and The Mayor of Casterbridge.

Although the Special Operations Network has nominally been shut down, in reality Thursday works undercover with Acme Carpets and on the side runs an underground cheese market, featuring such tempting morsels as Mynachlog-ddu Old Contemptible, “kept in a glass jar because it will eat through cardboard or steel.” Thursday embarks on a dizzying set of adventures through fictive territory. Untoward things have been happening in the literary world. For example, the natural comedy in Thomas Hardy novels has mysteriously been removed-Jude the Obscure originally began as one of the most “rip-roaringly funny novels in the English Language”-and Thursday travels through space and time to rectify this situation. Her contemporaries are not as interested in reading as they are in watching reality TV shows like England’s Funniest Chainsaw Mishaps or Samaritan Kidney Swap. Meanwhile, Thursday has to deal with Friday, her teenaged lump of a son, whose main goals in life are sleeping and forming a band called The Gobshites.

In case you are wondering, yes there is a lot going on in this novel.

My take on the character and style issues noted above below the fold.

Read the rest of this entry »

Image via Wikipedia

In preperation for reading Thursday Next: First Among Sequels I decided to pick up The Eyre Affair (on my Kindle).  It sounded like fun. The plot is not easy to summarize so allow me to do what all lazy people online do and use Wikipedia:

In this parallel world, England and Imperial Russia have fought the Crimean War for more than a century. England itself is a police state run by the Goliath Corporation (a powerful weapon-producing company with questionable morals). Wales is a separate, socialist nation. In the book’s fictional version of Jane Eyre, her story ends with Jane accompanying her cousin, St. John Rivers, to India in order to help him with his missionary work. Literary questions (especially the question of Shakespearean authorship) are debated so hotly that they inspire gang wars and murder.

Single, thirty-something, Crimean War veteran and literary detective Thursday Next lives in London with her pet dodo, Pickwick. As the story begins, Thursday is called upon to investigate the theft of the original manuscript of Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens.

Sounds like a fun mix of sci-fi/speculative fiction and adventure story with a dose of literary references.  And the reviews were very good.  Here is one from the School Library Journal

The novel has the surrealism and satire of Douglas Adams, the nonsense and wordplay of Lewis Carroll, and the descriptive detail of Connie Willis. What sets Fforde’s work apart, however, is its winsome heroine. This is a highly entertaining mystery with social satire, time travel, fantasy, science fiction, and romance thrown in to the well-written mix.

There are tons of positive reviews that say much the same thing, but I never really was able to get into it.  I am not sure why.

One problem was that I was reading it over a rather extended period of time due to a host of outside events.  I was also in a bit of a funk.  Usually books help get me out of such a mood but this one never did.

It wasn’t that the book was a complete bomb but it never really hit my funny bone.  I found it interesting but not compelling.

One aspect that I found annoying was the sort of endless focus on the Crimean War on how war sucks and how the military was convinced victory was just around the corner. etc.  This all struck me as cliched and unimaginative.  Maybe my politics colored my view, I don’t know.

Although I don’t have quite the level of enthusiasm they do, I think the folks over at the Complete Review summed it up well:

Fforde has fashioned a wild, fantastical thriller. There are some terrible missteps along the way, including a dreadful meteorite-catching chapter, too much lingering war-melodrama, the ridiculous time-travel crap, lame arguments about who wrote Shakespeare’s plays, and some Buffy the vampire-slayer knock-off adventures. Overall, however, the novel is an engaging one.

Perhaps, if I had tried to write about my response immediately after having read the book I could offer more intelligent reasons for finding it flat.  But alas that ship has sailed.

Sometimes books, even good books, just don’t work for you at the time and place your read them.  That is my conclusion.