Reading is sexy XVI

(image is A Yong Girl Reading by Jean Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806) via Guarda chi legge)
Well, I am home sick again today. I hardly ever take a day off sick. In fact, I hardly ever take a day off period - occupational hazard. I have checked my email remotely and the like. I have my laptop and could be working on the paper I should have finished, but I figure my brain is tired and busy fighting what ever bug it is that has taken up residence in my throat.Plus, I feel like death warmed over. The least I can do though is catch up with my record of what I have been reading... because I have. Been reading. If I don't write it down I feel like I will forget.

6. The Pharmacist's Mate by Amy Fusselman - I bought this book because of the rave review by Zadie Smith and the cover by Marcel Dzama. It is short but moving book. It is a memoir of sorts. She is breathtakingly honest. She grapples with her father's death - the titular Pharmacist's Mate, having been rejected by the Navy because he was in medical school, and doctors were needed, he signed up for the Merchant Marine and ended up in the dispensary - and her and her husband's quest to conceive a child. She intersperses her life, her grief, with excepts of her father's journal while at sea. This is a little gem.

7. The Troll Garden by Willa Cather. This is a book of short stories I bought at the U of T bookstore because a) it was some ridiculously nominal price, like $2 and b) I had not read any of her work, so I thought I might as well. It is one of those University Press editions with erudite introductions. I did not read all of the introduction, because while part of it was helpful, it was bent on systematically spoiling every plotline of everything she ever wrote. The stories themselves are mainly about artists and rustics, civilization and rural existence. They are not vastly different from contemporaries such as, for instance, Henry James.

8. Tortoise by Peter Young. This is a cultural history of the tortoise. A bit Anglo-centric, light on science, heavy on history. I learned some interesting things.

9. The Brie Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz. This book is as good as they say. Read it. Oscar, is an overweight, hapless, scifi-obsessed Dominican nerd, living in New Jersey. Sadly for Oscar, he is not one of those nerds who are oblivious to women- no, Oscar loves women. This is an incredible story. It is the story of Oscar, and his family - his mother, and how and why she left the Dominican Republic, his sister, his abuela, interwoven with the history of the island and its fukú (or curses), violence, love and tragedy. And golden-eyed mongoose. The story is told by a narrator who eventually becomes part of the story and relates the story as Oscar himself might think, in scifi, pop culture metaphors and extensive footnotes- in a gripping, high-energy style. Later part of the story is told by his sister. What I know about the Dominican Republic and its former, brutal, dictator, "the failed cattle theif", El Jefe, Trujillo, I learned from Mario Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat, a novel referenced a few times here, and which I will never forget. This novel explains more of what happened to some people in this community after Trujillo, those who immigrated and those who remained, and how the country is still recovering. Mostly, though, it is about individuals. This novel, amazingly, is about love.

10. The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie. It took a little while for me to get into this novel, but once I did I was hooked. It weaves together Florence under the Medicis with the Mughal Emperor's court. A tall, yellow-haired man in a magician's coat, decorated with lozenges and filled with hidden pockets, arrives at the Mughal court, to deliver a message, tell a story and claim kinship. The story is about what is real, what is make-believe, east and west, religious tolerance, love, beauty, treachery, family and friends. Not 14 pages in, we have Scottish pirates, with what some on the f-list might call slashy angst, and the rollicking tale goes on from there. An enjoyable read.

11. Cloud Atlad by David Mitchell. I got this book on the suggestion of . She is also a Haruki Murakami fan, so I was intrigued. It is quite an amazing book. I do not want to tell you too much about it. You need to read it for yourselves. Its structure is musical in six parts, life stories in different times and places, subtly woven together. The story takes place in the 1850s in the south Pacific, in the early 1930s in Belgium (near Bruges, fresh in my mind having just watched In Bruges and being in nearby Holland while reading), in 1970s Buenos Yerba, more or less contemporary England, and into the future. The story is about humanity, society, consumerism and freedom. Just read it.

12. Scribbling the cat by Alexandra Fuller (author of Don't let's go to the dogs tonight). Scribbling is African slang for killing, as in curiosity scribbled the cat. The hero of the memoir, Bobo, is home in Zambia, visiting her parents (her husband and children, safe in Montana), where she meets their neighbour K. He is a veteran of the wars of the region. He fought in one of the elite corps for the Rhodesians and also for the Portuguese in Mozambique. Bobo gets it into her head that the two of them could return to where he fought these wars. She wants to understand what could make this violent, estranged, born again man. He, for his part, thinks he is in love with her. The narrative voice is strong and recognizable from her last memoir. I am not sure what this will all tell us.... People are rotten? War changes people irreparably? Yet, in some senses, some people (especially men) thrive on it.

Reading is sexy XV

(image: Léopold Batut (1856-1902) Jeune femme au livre. via Guada chi legge)

1. The Radiant City Lauren B. Davis. This is an amazing, though sporadically gut-wretching book. A Canadian journalist, Matthew Bowles, a world-weary war correspondant, recuperates in Paris, after being shot in Gaza. He does not like being the news. This is a man with PTSD, though his depression, of course, has much deeper routes. He re-connects with a war photographer and sometime mercenary Jack, and his friend former NYC cop Anthony (whose career ended when he was hit with a table). Slowly, he is adopted by the Lebanese family who run the cafe across the street from his apartment; mother Saida, shy about her acid-burned neck, frustrated teenage son Joseph, Saida's brother who dreams of a life where he will be more than an outsider, a refugee, and their father. This is a novel of outsiders, and of bridging the gap. The characters seem full and real. Paris itself is a character- and is alive. This book is a real accomplishment- it left me shaken, though there is hope. I am particularly impressed by how she made this rather macho, male-dominated world of war correspondents real- she gets in their skin. Read it.

2. The Disheveled Dictionary Karen Elizabeth Gordon. Apparently, I now read dictionaries. This was fun. Her irreverent and rococco definitions are something else.
coruscation a gleam, glint, sparkle, glitter. Before getting the sack for making a crack about "Molotovian cocktail hours," the captain's recreation and refection officer vouchsafed to the refugees from Bosoxia shipboard romance against nacreous nightscapes, which included pelagic acrobats amidst phosphorescent coruscations glancing off the surface of the sea."

3. Playing Sardines Michèle Roberts. This is a book of short stories. They are clever, but hard to summarize. They are mainly about women, looking for things in the wrong place. And food. Fairy tales and families, Mary and occasionally, obsessions. An enjoyable read.

4. Of Love and Other Demons Gabriel García Márquez. This is a beautiful short work of fiction. I would have read it for the image of the snowing paper cranes on orange trees alone. It tells the story of an eighteenth century young 12 year old girl, Sierva María, the neglected daughter of the less-than-sharp Marquis and his manipulative wife (whose let herself go to her cacao, honey - not to mention adulterous sex - addictions), abandoned to be raised amongst their slaves, who one day is bit by a rabid dog. Five months later superstition wins and her life is ravaged by her "treatment" and her response to the alleged evidence of rabies. The "medicine" is so primitive and painful her response is viewed as evidence of rabies. Ultimately, she is entrusted by her father to a convent, when the Church decides that rabies (which she does not have) is in fact a mere smoke screen for the demon possessing her. Having been raised by the slaves, and being fluent in African languages and religions, her behavious is taken as evidence against her. The Bishop assigns Father Cayetano Delura, to her case. Surprisingly, this is a love story, a story of superstition, human stupidity, ignorance, books, beauty and tragedy.

5. A House Called Brazil Audrey Schulman. This one was usual. Our narrator, remembers the period of her life 20 years previous, in 1970 at age 19, when her called her daily from an unknown location, to tell her all the tales of her ancestors. Her mother left her when she was 14 and she had been living on the family farm in rural Ontario by herself since then- going to boarding school, forging her mother's signature as needed, generally carrying on. The way she copes with this abandonment is touching. The stories of her ancestors are staggering; there are saints and murderers, lovers and thieves, cigar-smoking grandmother entrepreneurs, and hundreds of them living in a house called Brazil in Ft. Lauderdale. This is quite the read- I recommend it.

6. The Pharmacist's Mate by Amy Fusselman - I bought this book because of the rave review by Zadie Smith and the cover by Marcel Dzama. So far, so good...

Who mixes Mr. Brown with Panic in Detroit...

Thinking of books, Gorey-lovers should go here.