Book 41. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

I love history, but I hate the subject.  I was never much for memorizing dates of battles or significant events.  I would never have seen the hot teacher’s boobs in Billy Madison.  And yet, I’ve always been drawn to history, because I find it fascinating.  It’s why I loved listening to my roommate drunken lecture us on WWII.  It’s why I love the books of Erik Larson.  I feel like history needs to be told.  I feel like it needs to be swaddled in the warm blanket of experience and legend and then told.  It’s why I love movies like Slumdog Millionaire and City of God.  If you gave me a history book and told me to read the sanitized version of events, I would probably be asleep five pages in, believing that the Pilgrims and Indians were friends.  But wrap it in something stylized and slick, with a smartass mouth and unwavering brutality, and I’m in.  

Such is the glory of Junot Diaz’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel.  It’s the story of a fatass ghetto-nerd, Oscar de Leon, who’s family hails from the Dominican Republic.  I know nothing of world cultures.  I constantly get myself in trouble with the crewmen at work for calling them Mexican, when everyone’s Salvi or Honduran, or some Dominican or Puerto Rican.  Where I grew up, there were more colors in a box of Crayolas than there were coloreds in town.  I never knew the different histories and flavors. 

Oscar’s story is told almost like a stage play, with different characters taking turns soliloquizing, in their own unique voices.  Oscar’s story is the story of his family, and all the travails that they had to endure — each more heartbreaking than the next — and the story of the Dominican Republic and the dictatorship that crushed it during the late part of the twentieth century.  The story is peppered with Spanish phrasing and tidbits of history, giving it an unbelievable spice and richness.  Learning of the atrocities, and how commonplace and they were, tears the heart out of your chest.  

But it’s Oscar’s story — and his the most tragic.  Oscar is an overweight nerd — obsessed with Dungeons and Dragons and being the Domi Tolkein.  He’s a hopeless romantic, in every sense of the word.  He’s obsessed with women, adhering to this code of chivalry like a knight in one of his stories. He fantasizes about rescuing them from toxic outbreak or sci-fi doomsday scenarios, because that’s the only way that someone like him would ever make a girl love him.  He’s abused by his friends, by his schoolmates, by his family.  They all try to make him lose weight, get some G, live up to his Domi heritage as a playa.  But he’s incapable, awkwardly fumbling, unable to get girls to see past his gordo appearance at the enormous heart within.  

It isn’t called The Brief Life for any other reason that it’s bound to end tragic.  But you pull for Oscar. As you see the other people in his life suffer, try to push him to change his ways, to be a man, you’re crushed by his adventures and the end he’s fated to meet.  Oscar’s biggest fear is that he will die a virgin — a lonely bachelor, playing with his d10s.  

Diaz’s staccato pacing reminds me of old John Leguizamo stand-up, where he’d play the different characters like the excitable school boy and the hard nose thugs.  The narrative is this amazing salsa of spanish slang, nerd references, and straight up history.  He’ll be taking about culocracy and putas, and in the next be referencing a beatdown as a 4d10 pummel while riffing on Sauron and the Watchmen.  

It’s a fascinating book and a relatively quick read, but it will severely stomp your heart flat like a tortilla.  It makes me want to run out and read Diaz’s short story collection, Drown, in the hopes that it’s just as powerful.  The worst part is, like City of God, I can’t tell how much of this story is true.

5K: Miss Lonelyhearts Stomps A Child

Here ye!  I am declaring a 5K for the month of February.  After much deliberating, I decided to keep it basic:  All five books must be over 400 pages.  It’s gonna be a distance run.  (And if the hardcover version is only 368 pages, but the paperback is 500, yes, it counts, it’s fine.)  

The start date will be February 14th and the end date is February 28th.  So for those of you with significant others who expect love and companionship on V-Day, guess you just got hamstrung.  It’s not called the Lonelyhearts for nothing.  

Here’s how it’ll work. Read your books, post your reviews.  The first to five wins.  And please, no cheating.   If suddenly, magically, five reviews pop up on the fourth day of competition, then we know you suck.  

For those of you who wish to compete, but do not have a blog of your own for the Cannonball, simply write reviews and post them in the comments section of this post or on the Cannonball Read section of the Facebook page.   If you post them in other sections on my blog, I will delete them.  If you post them in other places, I will delete them.  Stupidity will be penalized.  

We’ll probably do another 5K some time in April.  

Happy reading!

Book 40. A Clash of Kings by George R.R. Martin

My god, this series just keeps getting better.  It’s a wonderful blend of political and fantasy, and this part of the series leans a little harder on the fantasy aspect.  It’s such an epic story, spanning a vast cast of characters scattered throughout.   Brothers and sisters scattered by a war, allegiances forged and broken.  It’s pretty outstanding stuff.

(This might get a tad spoilery from this point on, and I cannot recommend highly enough this series and think that everyone ought to just go out and snatch up book 1 right now, A Game of Thrones.  They’re in the works to make it into a series for HBO, and frankly, it’s the only thing I can see potentially filling the hole in our hearts left by the departure of Battlestar Galactica and The Wire.  It’s that fucking epic and entertaining.  And even if stories of dungeons and dragons and dorks give you the howling fantods, I think this might have enough steel and intrigue to perk your interest.  So skip the rest of this review, and realize that Book 2 keeps the story as fierce as Book 1.  Go on now.  Get thee to the bookstore.)

After the events of the first novel, and the death of the King, four different factions have declared themselves the rightful heir to the empire:  Stannis Baratheon and his new found god, the Lord of Light; Renly, his younger and more charismatic brother, allied with the Knight of Flowers, champion of the kingdom; Robb Stark, the son of the slain Eddard Stark, and more likely than not the hero we’re supposed to root for; and the sinister Malfoyesque Joffrey Lannister, a shit in one of the finest families of sheer villainy ever to grace the written page.  Seriously, I’ve never wished an entire family such heinous demise since the O’Doyles.  

The four forces waging the epic game of Risk with each other would be enough meat to satisfy the most voracious reader, but there’s more.  We’ve got Daenerys, who is the Mother of Dragons — who’s storyline gets the most insane and fantasyish.  She has three dragons that she cares for, traveling among nomad horselords.  She wishes to overtake the Seven Kingdoms as the rightful heir to the throne, so she’s amassing an army and her dragons.  Plus, we’ve got yet another sniveling shit trying to gain honor and become a king himself.  Not to mention the fact that barbarian wildlings living in the frozen north are apparently gathering a secret magic to lay siege to the lands below the Wall and destroy everything.  

Each storyline is phenomenal, and the characters, good and bad alike, are so much fucking fun to follow.  What works so well is the infighting: particularly amongst the villains.  The Lannisters are a soap opera Springerfest, and watching the chess match play out in King’s Landing is easily the best part of the novel.  Cersei versus Tyrion is why you read novels.   Each of the Stark children have a serious thread to play out, though some get more short shrift than others.  

Martin has promised seven or eight novels, but there are only two more written, so I’m taking my time, savoring each hearty 1000 page tome.  The saddest part though is, truly with each one of the Song of Ice and Fire novels I read, the worse the Robert Jordan novels seem.

Jorb: Inkheart

Words Are Very Unnecessary, They Can Only Do Harm

Well, I liked the book better.  It was a tale full of talent, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.  And it’ll be out of theatres faster than you can say Pink Panther 2: The Shaming of Steve Martin 2.0.

39. Rorschach’s Ribs by Marcus Eder

This novel was the equivalent of someone making a story out of the Pajiban comment threads.  Now, stop for a second, because I can feel everyone getting all excited and thinking how awesome!  But, wait.  It would be like someone taking random non sequiturs, clever little jibes, random soapbox rants, constant drug and drinking references, sexual innuendo, and pop culture and regurgitating it haphazardly.  Forget character, forget interesting plot, just pack your story with twentysomething quarterlife crisis, make a bong reference, and then sit back and smugly await your kudos.  

I really REALLY wanted this novel to be better, because it was written independently and self-published by a friend of a Pajiban, and I love nothing more than heralding new talent.  And Marcus Eder has got talent.  You can see it, hiding behind the Starbucks chic and typical coffeehouse stage ranting.  This novel is the post-modern bastard of Chuck Palahniuk and Quentin Tarantino, godfathered by Swingers.  It is something that I could have written — but in a blog.  While the premise is semi-interesting and original, the general theme is so generic, it makes me angry.  It’s a mannequin covered in tattoos and blue hair, full of anti-corporate rhetoric and Bukowski baptismal font, but underneath it all it’s a really boring snapshot of a lame pothead pushing thirty.  

And that’s what’s so painful about reading this.  You can literally trace the magazine cutouts from the various sources that Eder’s pasting together to make this collage.  It’s as if he thought by making a mix tape out of all the things people of Generation X – Y dig, it would cover up his terrible plot.  And the plot is terrible:  a group of former art students — who sold out to corporate America — get shitcanned during the dot com bubble burst, so they spend their days sitting around their apartment, dubbed “The House of Pain”, smoking pot and drinking at dive bars.  They end up growing a super strain of pot called Glass Jaw, that they sell to earn a living.  Our hero is a dude named Escher Smallwater, who gets monthly tattoos and smokes so much pot that he doesn’t even get high anymore.  And so we gets Escher’s take on life as he just tries to get by.  

I don’t smoke pot and I never have.  The reason being that I’m afraid I would turn out like the characters in this novel.  Boring and predictable and lamely presumptive of their own cleverness.  They are the kind of uber potheads who shop at thrift stores and celebrate 4:20 like a religious ceremony.  They listen to Coltrane and get Bukowski poems tattooed on their arms.  Marijuana is the end-all be-all of their existence. 

And the problem is, Eder’s too smart and clever to be trying to velcro his worldview to characters this boring.  For every neat thing that happens or semi-interesting moment, you get wrapped up in the self-conscious nicknames and boring rants.  I wanted him to distill the crap out of this knock-off Tarantino bullshit and just tell it how it is.  He’s better than this book — but he got it published and it is available in bookstores right now, so what do I know?

The thing is, he’s got a book based on an idea from this novel called “Nobody Puts Swayze In The Corner: The Tao of Swayze”.  It’s written by characters from this novel.  Now, this is something I can get behind.  I would be willing to bet that the Swayze book is a thousand times more profound and interesting that anything from Rorschach’s Ribs — which answers the question what is the next logical creative misstep after writing angsty teenage poetry?  Why, writing a twentysomething coming of age story full of hipster wisdom.  

I want people to read Eder’s stuff, because he deserves a fighting chance.  And it might very well speak to you.  I’m beyond the quarterlife crisis, so I don’t long to read about that crap.  But, I remember when I was younger, I listened to that fucking Jimmy Eat World CD with “The Middle” on it like 25 times a day.  Because at the time, that’s what I needed to hear.  And I wrote a bunch of navel-gazing plays during that period.  Older people in the audience were disgusted and bored.  The kids just starting off in life — it was fucking manna from heaven because it spoke to them.  Eder’s written something like that.  But I personally think he’s capable of more.  I think this is the junk he needs to get out of his system so that he can really have something to say.

Book 38. Inkheart by Cornelia Funke

In preparation for reviewing the movie, and since it was a gift from the lovely and talented Lady Clevername, who previously reviewed it for Pajiba, I decided to read Inkheart.  Since working in the children’s department at Barnes and Noble, I’ve always been on the hunt for great children’s fiction.  Inkheart is like watching a kid with a Michaels’ store worth of craft supplies in their playroom color with one crayon.  There’s so much awesome potential for story that just gets wasted in this tepidly entertaining tale.  

Without rehashing the plot, the premise — that Mo and his daughter Meggie can use their voices to read characters out of any story — gets truly underused.  It reads like a primer for elementary school children only able to stomach a watered-down fantasy tale.   It reminds me, oddly enough, of a Tom and Jerry episode.  Violence never seems particularly threatening, and the story sort of goes around and around for an incredibly long time before actually settling on an expected and boring ending.  For children, they’d probably freak out, because they haven’t read anything better yet. 

The story’s not terrible, so much as just bland.  Despite menacing people with shotguns and knives, no one seems in any particular danger.  As Lady Clevername aptly pointed out, most of the novel is spent with the characters getting captured, running away, and then getting captured again.  For a story where characters can pull from limitless material, there’s nothing going on.  At their fingertips are Peter Pan, The Arabian Nights tales, fairy tales from around the world, and Treasure Island.  And somehow, they manage to make it as exciting as a library scavenger hunt. 

I think I’m being harsh because I’ve recently read better children’s stories, geared towards the very same age group.  Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl, the repetitive Lemony Snicket, and more recently — and sadly on it’s own last adventure — Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians.  These stories are amazing, and fun, and perfect for children.  Funke’s would seem like the kind of books the Flanders ilk would read, except for the constant damns and hells, and the threat of constant gunplay and stabbing.  They’re too wild for the pleated pants crowd, but too tame for kids riding the sugar rush of Harry Potter.  At least there are no secret Narnian or Dark Materialistic religion/anti-religion metaphors.  The motto seems mostly to be books are magical things and should be treasured.  If anything, I hope it gets kids inspired to read things like The Princess Bride, The Jungle Book, and original pirate snuffing Peter Pan.  

I have hope for the movie, because it looks like they’ve sort of done the smart thing: taken the brilliant idea and gone their own way with it.  The casting seems inappropriate for the characters, but I like the idea of the Wizard of Oz and unicorns tattooed with poetic verse.  I’ll still end up reading the later two books, but I don’t know why.

Book 37. Dumbocracy: Adventures with the Loony Left, the Rabid Right, and Other American Idiots by Marty Beckerman

Pink already did an admirable job of reviewing this title, so I’ll just give my guarded nod of admiration.  As I’ve stated many times, I think everybody’s an idiot.  Most debate involves pointing at fringe groups and the outrageous crap they say and do and believe.  There are bad guys on both sides.  For every pro-lifer waving a placard with Little Caesar’s smeared on it shouting about baby-killing, there’s a feminist demanding that college men falsely accused of and detained for rape could stand to learn the thoughtful lesson.  For every bomb the brown people commie kicker, there’s countless peaceniks admiring the decisions of Trotsky and Lenin.  For every person trying to put the Ten Commandments on the blackboard and creationism in textbooks, there are assholes trying to outlaw dodgeball and suspend students for bringing in Birthday Cupcakes.  For every Fred Phelps and Sean Hannity, there’s a Gloria Steinem or Andrea Dworkin.  

The thesis of his book is two fold, and I agree wholeheartedly with the second.  The first is that Marty Beckerman is a funny fucking guy — we’ll get to that.  The second is how about we think for ourselves?  I like that.  It’s a delicate balance, and Beckerman isn’t offering any solutions.  He’s pulling a Bill Maher, pointing at the floor shitters and sneering, “Look at them shittin’ the floor!”  My political leanings are a little more Libertarian.  I think we should return rights back to the states, allow them to legalize and de-legalize what they care to, and then allow people to move accordingly.  I don’t think anyone should be forced to accept others beliefs, and should be allowed to live among like minded people.  I’ve never done an illegal drug in my life but I think it should be legalized.  I don’t support political correctness.  I don’t support hate speech either.  

Beckerman’s pretty convinced that he’s Tucker Max, hilarious and wise and sexy to everyone.  And while he hits a lot, he misses far more.  Some of his jokes are clunkers.   Most of the book is him making purposefully offensive remarks in order to get a rise out of people.  And trust me, I can relate.  I do it all the time, mostly to rile up the coloreds and bitches.  And since it’s supposed to be a humorous discourse, I’m not expecting any glaring insights.  It’s how Republicans feel watching Fox News.  Cringeworthy, but ultimately I agree with Beckerman.  

It’s easily worth a perusal, and you’ll get a chuckle.  Me, I don’t have a sense of humor, so I don’t know.  At least the book was free.  (Thanks, Disinformation!  While I can’t agree with all of your crazy ass political conspiratorilizing, I think at least you’re one of them few continually entertaining and honest outlets for current affairs.)

Book 36. Straight Man by Richard Russo

Nobody does curmudgeon like Richard Russo.  My only real experience is with the movie Nobody’s Fool.  But he’s seems to specialize in this bitter middle to older aged men in small town America.  Russo has managed to create one of modern fiction’s more spectacular bastards in Hank Devereaux, Jr., a loose cannon professor of English at a small Western Pennsylvania college, an insufferable smartass who blithely skips through life being a toolbox.  He’s cranky and lecherous, in love with a wife who tolerates him, has no knowledge of the comings and goings of his own grown children who’ve abandoned the nest, and has spent the past year building a seething resentment for his bastardy among his fellow cognoscenti in the English Department.  

Straight Man was an outstanding read, and a really impressive novel.  It manages to be at times wildly slapstick and outrageous, but still rooted in absolute reality.  It’s also a staggering blow against academia, particularly collegiate, and all the ridiculous red tape and infighting among typical institutional organizations.  It also manages to transcend the most mediocre of genres — that of the writer writing.  While most writing programs give you the first rule “Write what you know” too few follow that up with the more important second statute — “Go out and learn shit so what you know is interesting.”  

Devereaux is a cynical smart ass struggling against what to everyone else views as a midlife crisis, but for him is a tacit insistence on not suffering fools.  He’s quick to quip, to flirt, to beguile with his wit.  He’s instantly likable for being such a dick.  He’s the kind of smart that dumb people hate, because they know he’s totally insulting them.  

The university threatens cutbacks — something they always do — only this time there’s a list.  Supposedly this list involves firing tenured professors and was asked from all the department chairs.  Devereaux is the interim chair of English, a department full of hypersensitive scholars, tempestuous poets, and constant coupling.  On local television, donning a pair of fake glasses and nose, Devereaux threatens to murder a duck (actually a goose) every day until the school gives the departments the money they’ve demanded.  What was obviously a sick joke takes a wild turn.  Again, what would be an unforgivably wackiness on the part of most authors comes across as completely logical in Russo. 

I will assuredly read more Russo, because hopefully the rest of his stuff is just as interesting.  It’s a mildly breezy read, and it’s fun.  It’s got a strange quaintness to it, as if Russo’s never seen a big city.  I’d almost accuse him of sheltered beliefs about inner cities if I didn’t know better.  But again, it adds to the charm of the bizarre cast of characters he’s assembled.

Book 35. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

I feel like I’ve just taken the world’s largest intellectual dump of my life.  Everyone kept telling me to count this mammoth tome as three or four books.  But no.  It’s one.  One massive, glorious, ludicrous, pretentious, fascinating, mind-apocalypsing epic.  It required almost six weeks and two bookmarks to read through this and it’s nearly 100 page footnote section.  And it was worth it.

I feel like I’ve accomplished something.  I feel like I’ve been through rehab.  I feel like I’ve done every recreational drug imaginable.  I feel like I’ve given birth.  I feel changed as a person.  And I feel relieved to finally close the pages. 

This isn’t so much a book as a life-altering experience.  And as such, I can’t recommend it to everyone.  It’s not for everyone.  Most people would heft this monstrosity and sigh despondently trying to wade through it’s dense and cerebral text.  I don’t say that as some sort of holier-than-thou scholar.  Wallace isn’t for everyone.  He’s operating on a level beyond most people’s comprehension.  He’s a fucking cultural elitist, and he knows it, and he’s cool with that.  

I have to compare this to things because you cannot encapsulate the actual plot, because there isn’t really one, but it’s so complexly structure, it feels like there is one.  It’s at times like reading Dosteofvsky, Bret Easton Ellis, Welsh, or especially Joyce.  It’s in it’s own language — a post collegiate, scientific, farting contest.  I’ve never been able to make my way through Joyce, because it crushes my mind.  Same with Pynchon.  But that’s where Wallace roosts.  He’s equally more accessible and less.  

The book takes place in Boston, particularly in the regions where I used to haunt when I was a grad student at B.U.  It’s about a wealthy family who owns a tennis academy, and the students grappling with what it means to be a young athlete.  It’s about art and entertainment, particularly avant garde filmmaking.  It’s about drug addiction, about rehab programs, and AA programs, and casual users.  It’s about what people do to make themselves happy, and whether or not it’s working.  It’s about our battle with Canada.  It’s a slice of life with nougaty chunks of hilarity and sobriety and neurosis.  It’s a hell of a read. 

Wallace takes us in and out of this world that exists about three steps over on the tesseract from our real world.  He operates in this realistic parallel universe, and it’s charmingly scientifically advanced and beneath us in equal strides.  He introduces us to a massive varying cast of characters: bobbing in and out of first and third person, using anecdotal narrative, dialogue snatches, and using a vocabulary that meshes street slang with effete fifteen dollar words.  It’s the second book of his that I have had the pleasure of reading — the first being The Broom of the System, which had a profound effect on me.  So much so that I still vow to get the symbol “….” tattooed on me at some point.  

But again, I can’t say that everyone will love this book and should snatch it up.  First of all, you’ll break your fucking wrists.  It’s well over 1000 pages in massive paperback.  Secondly, it’s densely packed.  I’m a hell of a reader, and I could only go about 30 or 40 pages a night without giving myself an aneurysm.  It wanders aimlessly.  It’s more like a pastiche of these people’s lives that intersect at random.  It’s also high-falutin’ in it’s approach.  

I’m proud that I read this.  This, and East of Eden, are my massive undertakings in the Cannonball.  I’m terribly sad that Wallace passed.  Depression haunts us all.   This book sings with Wallace’s fight.  And while he maintains a pragmatism about the war, you can also see points where the unbearable weight of melancholy sinks him.  It’s not something meant to give you hope or a candle to curse the darkness.  It’s more like hearing voices in the darkness and knowing that there are other people struggling with you, and you aren’t alone.

Book 34. Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell

One of the niceties of doing the Cannonball Read was that a very nice woman from the Hachette Book Group allowed us to have advanced readers of some of their fine books. So I was able to complete this one right before it’s due to arrive in bookstores some time this month (I believe it’s January 9th).

This is the book that movie Pathology really wishes it was. But then again, this novel itself wishes it was a bunch of things that it really isn’t. It’s the story of Peter Brown, a Manhattan emergency room doctor who used to be a hitman for the mob. He used the Witness Protection program to go into medicine, sort of as a penance for all the lives he took. It takes place all during the course of one rough day, when Peter gets recognized by a former mob guy and has to figure out how to get out alive. The chapters alternate between the hospital in present day and Peter recollecting how he became a hitman and the events that led to him selling out the family that took him under their wing.

It’s a fast paced and deviously dark comic novel, really cynical and sinister. Peter Brown’s a little too weirdly Bondlike for me — able to escape any situation, no matter how ludicrous, able to seduce any woman — and yet he’s described more like a Vikings Linebacker. The events in the novel stretch the boundaries of the imagination, but I can imagine a development executive at a studio getting all kinds of sticky in the shorts with the setups. There’s a shootout over an aquarium sharktank for God’s sake.

The mob stuff is the weakest part of the novel, which is sad, because it absolutely had the potential to be the most incredible portion. Instead of the typical “Take My Sweatsuited Son Under Your Wing” coming of don story, it involves a mafia lawyer who’s more of a shark than any character. They don’t do enough with him, instead focusing on his ne’er-do-well idiot of a son Skinflick. Skinflick got his mob name because a videotape of him losing his virginity to a prostitute makes the rounds. (Consquently, Brown’s nickname is Bearclaw. Which again was a particularly brilliant turn of events that kind of fizzled out.) The mob story basically becomes a reverse Punisher: War Machine. The good guy goes on the run after something happens with the woman he loves, and the bad guy vows revenge.

The best parts of the novel are the hospital events. Because Brown is NOT a good guy. He’s a completely narcissistic douchebag. He’s the ultimate arrogant asshole, and it’s what makes his character so fun to read. Having recently spent a bit of time in the emergency room/hospital waves, reading about this seemed eerily familiar. It’s pretty brutally honest, and what makes it all the scarier is that Bazell himself is a medical student. It’s sort of a nasty version of ER, with him not giving a good goddamn if anyone is healthy, just bursting through his rounds while he constantly pops pills.

It’s Bazell’s first novel, and he shows promise. I think if he focuses more on the medical portion of his writing — there’s plenty of room for a Palahniuk-flavored Crichton in the world of writing these days — he’s going to put forward a pretty dynamic career. All in all, Beat the Reaper is a decent novel if you’re willing to kind of absorb the superhuman heroics in stride, and just enjoy the bitchiness of the narration.