Books I Read This Month - August 2012

The Vesuvius Club by Mark Gatiss 

Lucifer Box, painter and gentleman spy in Edwardian England, charms his way through this hilarious novel with both wit and vanity. First in a trilogy by actor and co-writer of Sherlock and a few episodes of Doctor Who (two of my favorite television series) Mark Gatiss, The Vesuvius Club follows Lucifer Box's government mission to solve the murders of a handful of scientists while he simultaneously romps around with numerous lovers and comes to terms with his fading painting career. With fiendishly genius puns interlaced into each sentence, I literally laughed out loud at least once every page. This is definitely one of the funniest books I have ever read. Highly recommended to those with a highly British sense of humor.

Eleven by Mark Watson

Recently emigrated from Australia to England, twenty-something Xavier Ireland hosts a midnight radio show, participates in Scrabble competitions, avoids awkward encounters with his stressed neighbors, and contemplates the way he left things with his three childhood best friends back in his home country. When he fails to stop a teenage boy from being beaten up as he walks home from a speed-dating session (enforced by his stuttering co-host), Xavier triggers a chain of events that will drastically change his life, as well as the lives of eleven other individuals. At once a hilarious page-turner and a moving account of a decent-hearted man's good intentions gone tragically wrong, Eleven is an intriguing read with unique characters. It's a roller-coaster ride of a story, truly enjoyable and highly original.

The Absolutist by John Boyne

An extraordinarily sad portrayal of a World War I soldier's friendship with a fellow soldier, this well-crafted novel is tender and moving, but also gripping and dark. After returning to England, Tristan Sadler visits the sister of the deceased soldier, Will, with whom he shared an intense bond during the war. The narrative unfolds, both in Tristan and Will's sister's conversation and in flashbacks, told in close first person by Tristan, revealing the problems of personal conviction, betrayal, and not just the cruel consequences of war but also of the consequences of unrequited love. I could not put this book down. Elegantly crafted and certainly transcending the lines of war story and love story, The Absolutist is beautiful even in it tragedy. Perhaps one of the most powerful new novels of the year.

Never Let Me Go by Kazou Ishiguro

While the dystopian premise of clones created for the extraction of organs is not an altogether original storyline, Kazuo Ishiguro certainly created a unique novel here. Rather than treated cruelly as if they are inhuman, the clones of Never Let Me Go are raised in a comfortable environment, encouraged to do artwork, and allowed to befriend their peers. The story takes place over the course of narrator Kathy's life, from childhood through her career as a "carer," a nurse for clones taking part in the donation processes, in the final years of their lives. Though the cloned children were raised in a boarding school environment, I could relate extremely deeply to the problems Kathy faced in her relationships with the students and teachers. I was surprised to find myself nodding along to many of Kathy's childhood experiences, recognizing the emotions she felt in dealing with self-righteous Ruth and sweet, troublesome Tommy. Many of the situations she faced were eerily similar to events in my own life. Never Let Me Go, I am sure, is meant to be an exploration of human worth, a question of what makes a human, what defines love, but it had a different affect on me; the tone of Kathy's narrative voice, especially when relaying the events of her childhood, gripped me with its tenderness and connected me to experiences of my own childhood and the close friends with whom I shared that important part of my life. This moving novel taught me a lot more about love and hit a lot closer to home than I thought it would.

Solar by Ian McEwan 

After reading several of Ian McEwan's previous works recently, I picked up Solar solely because it was next on my list. I was expecting it to be like the other McEwan novels: moving, illuminating of human nature, and deeply literary. What I got was a pleasant surprise. In Solar, a middle-aged environmental scientist is struggling through a fifth divorce. A series of unusual events leads this annoyingly self-absorbed and, frankly, insipid man to come across a great scientific discovery, but at the expense of a young man's life, his fifth ex-wife's happiness, and several years of an innocent man's life. Many times as I was reading this book I felt like blurting out, "Ugh, Ian McEwan, how disturbing that scene was! I thought I knew you!" Nevertheless, I could not put it down, no matter how much I tried (though there was one scene in the first third of the book that made me so squeamish I had to take a break from it). A fascinating page-turner with a narrator readers will surely love to hate, Solar may shock McEwan fans with its differences from his previous, highly literary works, but they will certainly still enjoy it and get plenty of good laughs from a man whose books usually induce profundity or tears. 

The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman 

When a young veteran is offered a job as a lighthouse keeper for Janus Island off the coast of Australia, he feels contented, almost excited, to spend six months in isolation, working in tough conditions every day. However, in the town nearest the port, he meets 19 year old Isabel, who he soon marries and brings with him to the island. Young and naive, and after three miscarriages, Isabel, when a boat containing a dead man and a living baby washes ashore on the island, convinces Tom to let them keep the child and raise her as their own. Little do they know, however, the infant's mother lives in mourning on the mainland. Exploring the consequences of war, isolation, and instinctual decisions, this book would best be enjoyed by mothers, especially those with young children.

BOOKS I REVIEWED THIS MONTH

Boomer’s Guide to Stories by Roemer McPhee

Music Box Dancer by Marc Pietrzykowski

Music Box Dancer by Marc Pietrzykowski

Graveyard-shift security guard and college dropout Charlie Price recently watched his fiancée die in his arms. Believing it will help him move past her death, he reads book after book after book from a list they created together during adventures in hole-in-the-wall bookstores. After a particularly irritating work shift, Charlie comes home to read a book, but, in the dead of night, an ice cream truck sits on the street corner blaring its tinkling music. When Charlie approaches the truck to ask the driver to turn off the music, the driver pulls out a gun and shoots at him. From then on, a series of badly thought out decisions leads Charlie on an adventure from his home in Pennsylvania to a terrorist cell in Yemen and back again, throwing the sad, resigned young man into situations he thought he would never be able to handle.

With dark humor and a brilliantly honed command of language, Marc Pietrzykowski has crafted a surprising, hilarious, and touching first novel. His previous poetry publications are evident in his fine prose. After the very first chapter of the book, protagonist Charlie Price already feels like a fully developed character, like a friend (though he is practically friendless) of whom readers will enjoy the company, despite his emotional turmoil over the recent loss of his fiancée and his what-does-it-matter attitude. Pietrzykowski’s prose grasps the reader immediately, thrusting them into Charlie’s head. Not just Charlie comes to life on the page; so too do all the other characters, even those who only appear in a few scenes. The settings as well are developed wonderfully.

The first half of the book is both poetically tender and comically scatological. The second half, however, takes a sharp turn from Charlie’s day-to-day life disrupted by the murderous ice cream man when he is suddenly, and almost inexplicably, kidnapped by terrorists and mistaken for a rogue soldier. Charlie’s dark sense of humor, paired with his existential depression and hallucinations of his deceased fiancée, gets him into more trouble at every turn. The snowball effect of the plot keeps the reader turning the pages, yearning to know what Charlie will do next. And while the unexpected plot twist splits the novel into two distinct halves, the successfully character-driven plot makes Music Box Dancer one of the most entertaining and original novels I have recently read.

It is a rare occurrence for a writer to create a novel that features a wholly developed and likeable—though sad and often lazy—protagonist, a distinct sense of humor that begs a reader to laugh out loud, and finely tuned and poetic prose, but Marc Pietrzykowski has done just that. This is a touching story that makes both a political statement and takes the main character on a touching journey to redemption and recovery. If he continues with his excellent work, Pietrzykowski could become the next Chuck Palahniuk (with the same desperate need of a nom de plume). A highly recommended and memorable experience. 

The Boomer's Guide to Story by Roemer McPhee

Roemer McPhee is obviously well-read and has not only seen but analysed with a keen eye hundreds of films significant to American culture, and he has obvious insight into how these films reflect the Baby Boomer’s generation’s views on society. In The Boomer’s Guide to Story, McPhee has collected his essays on approximately 300 books and movies. This is not a book of reviews, not in the least. In fact, McPhee provides an objective opinion of the quality of these films, looking at their message and techniques through the lens of a member of the Baby Boomer generation.

The book begs the reader to dive straight into the middle, picking and choosing movies they have seen and skipping over the ones they have not. Each essay is approximately one page long, though some of the more significant films, such as Apocalypse Now and The Godfather are given much more room. McPhee’s focus on the most moving aspects of these films searches for insight into the mind of a Boomer, which may cause the reader to feel as though some other important aspects of the films have been glanced over or excluded altogether; however, McPhee’s objective has been achieved. In his analysis of the book/film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, for example, he trains his eye on Nurse Ratched, saying, “An explanation of what in Nurse Ratched’s past might explain her terrible need to dominate and destroy others, particularly men, is a question for a gifted psychologist. One would immediately want to know about Ratched’s relationship with her father and brothers.” A psychological look into the characters in the context of the era to which the audience of these films belongs offers key insight into the Boomers’ societal and cultural viewpoints.

Because the book is organized in alphabetical order, it is easy to navigate, but one simple problem is created with this format. The essays do not link from one to the next, providing no forward momentum through the book. The Boomer’s Guide to Story is more of a reference book where a reader can pick and choose which essays to read and in which order to read them. With no link tying the essays together besides McPhee’s main objective of looking at these films through the Boomers’ lens, some of the overarching themes seem slightly underdeveloped. An epilogue may expand upon the idea, or placing the films in an order that more successfully develops the idea over the course of the book may offer more profound insight, but it certainly would not be as fun of a book to read as it is now.

Any film lovers or critics, not just those of the Baby Boomer generation, will enjoy this book. 

Books Released This Month

Like my monthly “Books I Read This Month” post I write for the last day of each month, I am now beginning another scheduled post, “Books Released This Month,” in which I will list some of the new books being published in the month to come. I’m sure most of them will be novels of the literary persuasion because that is what I read most often, and perhaps most of them will be featured in the “Books I Read This Month” post after they’ve been released, if I read them. Enjoy. :)

The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman 
31 July 2012 - Technically last month, but this sounds like a really good book, so I'm listing it anyway.
Literary Fiction

An ex-soldier takes a job as a lighthouse keeper where he and his wife find an orphaned infant and raise her as their own.

Monster by Dave Zeltserman 
2 August 2012

Thriller 

In 19th century Germany, a man sentenced to death for a murder he did not commit awakes to find himself inside a monstrous body in the lair of Dr. Frankenstein. 

In the Shadow of the Banyan by Vaddey Ratner 
7 August 2012

Literary Fiction

The story of a young girl in during the genocide of Cambodia in the 1970s.

Winter Journal by Paul Auster 
21 August 2012

Memoir 

An unconventional memoir, a meditation on the sensations of the body.

The Orchardist by Amanda Coplin 
21 August 2012

Literary Fiction 

At the turn of the 20th century, a reclusive orchardist risks his life to protect two pregnant young women. 

One Last Thing Before I Go by Jonathan Tropper 
21 August 2012

Fiction

A one-hit-wonder rock star decides to refuse his necessary heart surgery when he learns that his ex-wife is to remarry.

Peace, Aimee