by Margaret Attwood. This is the first novel I’ve read by Margaret Attwood, but it won’t be the last. two novels rolled into one, it is simulatenously the autobiography of a woman in a small town in Canada at the end of her life as well as a bizarre novel of love and science-fiction fable. It was definitely difficult to get into for me, and I think without a 24 hour bus trip in Brazil I would not have been able to finish. It’s just one of those novels that requires long reading periods, not a few minutes here and there.

It is worth the time though. Attwood’s prose is clear and witty, and she is very smart at structuring the jumps between the two novels.

Went to a talk by Joe Sacco, a journalist who works in comic book form. It was pretty interesting, especially the way he works and his take on how comics fit in with the kind of journalism he does, telling people’s stories from places like Palestine and Bosnia. It’s a way of reporting that is more indirect than text and less detailed than photography. The artist gets to choose more closely what you focus on while still giving you a multiplicity of interpretations in a single image.

My new digeridoo technique is eminently stoppable at the moment. I just can’t seem to get a consistent sound out of the thing. But I will keep trying, perhaps when my roommates aren’t around so that I don’t drive them insane.

Sometimes you have a conversation with someone which rapidly degenerates, and it becomes time to end, lest it get ugly. At that time, one invariably makes a graceless exit, hurried and enraged. I cannot put into words how annoyed I was. It’s a pity you can’t have your cake (ending the conversation) and eat it too (end on the moral high ground). They will always call you a quitter.

by Frank Herbert. This book was so much worse than Dune that it kind of hurt. I mean, it had some important bits in it, and I found the mentat-assassin timebomb of Duncan Idaho a pretty intriguing philosophical problem, but not enough in itself to recommend the book. Usually I’m a sucker for series, but this time I’m not going to go on to Children of Dune.

By Lanford Wilson. This play won Wilson the Pulitzer in 1980. There are only two characters: Mike, a 42 year old Jewish accountant, and Sally Talley, a 31 year old nurse, and their romance in 1940’s Missouri. It’s a gem of scenewriting — one long scene in which Mike woos Sally, and each of them is forced to reveal a secret in order to break the eggshells they had built around their lives. I didn’t get bored for one minute, and then suddenly the play was over, and I put it down and smiled. There aren’t many plays I can read which make me feel content afterwards, but this one felt “just right.” He told his story, I learned things about people and humanity, and love, and that was what the play was about. No real “loose ends” on the first reading. I suppose if I look at it again I’ll see more, but I don’t want to ruin the moment now.

By Barbara Hodgson. This is a slim little volume that will teach you a lot about opium, its origins, how it was used, who used it, how it figured into 19th century Sino-British relations, and how it appeared in popular culture. By far the most interesting thing in the book is the pictures — it’s 140 pages of glossy reproductions of book covers, postcards, photos, sketches, and more. A must-read for those intrigued by drugs but who know very little, and fun of cute little tidbits. For example, “to kick the gong around” means to smoke opium. It seems that Minnie the Moocher was also a user. All in all, a fun read for when you need a break.

By Jonathan Lethem. This is a collection of seven short stories by one of my newest favorite authors, Jonathan Lethem. I find Lethem a little hit-and-miss sometimes, and I think the short stories here don’t allow him the space to flesh out his ideas, although the premise is often strong enough to carry the story through. Lethem operates in that netherworld of speculative fiction — not quite full-out sci-fi, but not a slice-of-life either.

In “Vanilla Dunk” we are taken to a world in which basketball players wear exosuits programmed with the skills of famous NBS stars — Vanilla Dunk is a white guy who gets Michael Jordan’s skills. The story is from another player’s perspective. He’s not one of the elites, but one of the solid players who make up the rest of the team. From the hypothesis of a world in which the exosuits exist, Lethem focuses in on the impact on the players themselves. In “Five Fucks” we get a series of vignettes in which reality shifts every time this woman hooks up with this man. It’s like LeGuin’s “The Lathe of Heaven,” but more compact and sketchy, almost as if Lethem was telling you about the story in a bar. “The Hardened Criminals” is about a jail in which the walls are made of prisoners compressed together and laquered over, like something out of an H.R. Geiger painting. “Light And The Sufferer” is about a drug deal gone horribly awry, and these inexplicable aliens who are drawn to troubled souls.

As I said before, the stories are hit-and-miss. It seems like he was writing out some ideas he had before finding one which could sustain a novel. But it’s worth taking a look at if you want to read something reality-bending.

By Philip Pullman. I checked this out of the teen fiction section at the public library, because I had heard it was good, and I know people who rant and rave about Pullman’s His Dark Materials series. The Ruby in the Smoke is the start of the Sarah Lockhart trilogy, and I’m not sure if I will read the other ones, although it wouldn’t take that much of my time. And I’m kind of a sucker for series.

The book is a 19th century mystery surrounding a ruby from India, and the 16-year-old Sally Lockhart’s unraveling of the mystery. To give away more would ruin it, so I’ll just stop there. Superfans of Sherlock Holmes might like this book better than I did. I didn’t find it dull per se, but just unsurprising. It was as if I was watching a story being put through its paces. Of course, I’m not the intended audience, so take that with a grain of salt.

If you’re looking for a gift for a 12-14 year old sibling or cousin who likes mystery novels and Victorian England, it would make a lovely gift. As for myself, I’d take the Dark Is Rising series over this one
any day.

By David Sedaris. I picked this book up off of aBook Crossing drop-off at the I-House in Berkeley. These essays were just the thing for walking around, waiting for the bus, and eating breakfast. I was highly amused. I’ve liked Sedaris’ columns in the New Yorker, but some of these essays are better than anything of his I had read before. Either his life is endlessly amusing, or he “sexes it up” as the Brits might say. I don’t have very much else to say about it — it didn’t open my eyes or cause me to realize things I hadn’t realized before, but the joy of reading it was the way in which he puts things, and his own personal insights did make me wonder what I could say if I looked more critically at my own life.

By Zadie Smith. This is one of the best books I’ve read in the last few months, for sure. Every character has a compelling thread of story, woven together in the complex and brilliant tapestry that makes up this novel. It ranks up there with Midnight’s Children as a Great Novel, in my opinion. I loved the exaggeration of the characters, who, while larger-than-life, were eminently believable and human. But it was that distillation of them, what Smith chose to write about, that makes the whole experience so much fun.

I read this book in two binges of weekend reading — I couldn’t bring myself to read just a chapter a day over the course of time. I needed more, which is another tribute to the readability of this book. It takes a slice of a life in a place I know about only through movies and books (England), and made it more real in a way that I had not experienced before. Probably because the characters were Indian, and the time was when I, too, was growing up (unlike, say, Hanif Kureishi). I really connected with these characters, even though they were in another country.

The most interesting aspect of the book, thematically, was how it came back on itself at the end, that there’s this notion of historical necessity that many of the characters carry around with them the whole time. Hortense, who knows that the Rapture is nigh, Millat, who is obeying a destiny, Marcus, who has his mouse, and others too, I bet. If I had to write a paper on the novel, that is certainly something to think of. Everyone has a destiny to follow. And in writing, that is certainly true — the author has written an ending. The joy is in figuring out how the individual destinies intersect and work out in the end.

by Andrew Robinson. This slim volume is a biography of one of the stranger linguists of the 20th century, Michael Ventris. An architecht by training, he was obsessed for most of his life by the problem of deciphering Linear B, a script used in ancient Crete (and, as it turns out, elsewhere in the Aegean). This book is simultaneously a biography and description of how Ventris came upon his astonishing discovery — namely, that Linear B was used to write an archaic form of Greek (now known as Mycenean Greek). It’s written for a general audience, although some familiarity with how languages work (declension and conjugation) helps. All in all, a fascinating little book, one of the most interesting biographies I’ve read.