Best of 2010, Update 11

I've read four books since the last Top 10 update and the fourth one, Lies My Mother Never Told Me deserves to crack the list - and I suspect it will be there for a long time. Lies My Mother Never Told Me is the new Kaylie Jones memoir in which she tells what it was like to grow up as the daughter of James and Gloria Jones. James Jones, as most of you know, is the author of three classic WWII novels: From Here to Eternity, The Thin Red Line and Whistle. This is a fascinating read on several different levels.


Top 10 after 22 possibilities:

1. Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese (novel)
2. Lies My Mother Never Told Me - Kaylie Jones (memoir)
3. Man of Constant Sorrow - Ralph Stanley and Eddie Dean (biography)
4. The Opposite Field - Jesse Katz (memoir)
5. The Calligrapher's Daughter - Eugenia Kim (novel)
6. A Fair Maiden - Joyce Carol Oates - (novel)
7. Game Change - John Heilemann and Mark Halperin (political nonfiction)
8. Homer & Langley - E.L. Doctorow - 4.0 (novel)
9. Blind Submission - Debra Ginsberg (2006 novel)
10. T Is for Trespass - Sue Grafton (novel)

The Little Known

The Little Known, a coming of age novel set in the period just after the assassination of President John Kennedy, was written for the young adult market but there is something here for readers of all ages. On the one hand, the novel’s deeply personal portrayal of the harsh nature of race relations of the time is sure to move younger readers who may have only heard about those days in more general terms. On the other, older readers will be reminded that a great deal of progress has been achieved in the last 50 years.

Things are changing very slowly for the black citizens of little Statenville, Georgia. “Knot” Crews does go to school with white kids now, but he seldom, if ever, dares to speak to one of them, and he lives with his hard-drinking mother in the same segregated part of town in which every Statenville black lives. Blacks and whites do not, by choice of both sides, mix in Statenville.

Near the end of the summer, Knot happens upon a bag of cash tossed aside by a bank robber who is trying to escape the policemen closing in on him. When Knot sees the stacks of $100-dollar bills in the sack ($100,000 worth), he carries the money home knowing full well that his conscious will never allow him to spend it - that he will almost certainly be caught if he ever tries to pass one of the hundreds. Little does Knot know, however, that this money will change his life in ways he could never imagine.

Knot is a soft hearted kid despite the fact that his mother spends more money on booze for herself than she spends on food for him. He is often hungry, and he dresses in the castoff clothing of older relatives, but so does pretty much every other kid in his neighborhood so Knot fits right in. He looks forward to Sunday church services because the old church ladies provide him with a community meal there that beats anything else he will eat during the rest of the week. Some of Knot’s neighbors, though, are unluckier than others, and he decides to use some of his found money to make their lives a little easier. That is when he begins to anonymously mail single hundred dollar bills to those he believes are hurting most.

Thus begin Knot’s valuable, but terribly disappointing, lessons about human nature. Seldom is his money spent for the purpose he gives it. Most of the money he gives away is spent on new television sets, bicycles, toys and liquor rather than on the clothing, food, diapers and home improvements his neighbors so desperately need. Knot is, however, happy to learn that a few hundred dollars can be enough money to give some abused women, white and black alike, the courage to leave their husbands behind for fresh starts with their children someplace else.

The Little Known follows Knot and his neighbors for most of a school year during which the little changes he initiates begin to have a big, cumulative impact on the neighborhood. He learns that money is not the most important thing in the world, that it cannot buy happiness or morality, and that the exact opposite is more often the case than not. Knot might never spend a dime of the bank’s money on himself but the money still manages to teach him most of life’s most important lessons.

Some of the sexual innuendos and implied language in the book are, I think, a little too much for middle school readers, making the book more suitable for high school age readers.

Rated at: 4.0

(E-Book review copy provided by publisher)

Pat Conroy on South of Broad

This afternoon I found myself wondering what Pat Conroy might be up to now that several months have passed since the publication of South of Broad. Mr. Conroy writes big books and it takes him a long, long time to write them. His fans learn the real meaning of patience as the years pass between new Pat Conroy novels. I am not a patient person, but Pat remains one of my very favorite writers. More suitable to my lack of patience, I am also a huge fan of a woman who is perhaps the most prolific serious writer in America, Joyce Carol Oates. On the one hand, it drives me crazy how long I have to wait for a new Pat Conroy book. On the other, I can barely afford to keep up with all the new books pouring from the pen of Joyce Carol Oates every year. Go figure.

A search of YouTube turned up one or two Pat Conroy videos I hadn't seen yet - and anything "new" from Pat Conroy deserves to be shared, so I'm embedding an interesting one here. It even highlights one of the reasons it takes the man so long to finish a book (hint: think yellow legal pads and Mont Blanc pens):

13 1/2

Nevada Barr’s 13 ½ has a lot going for it. Right from the beginning of the book, Barr forces her readers to look through wide open eyes at the horrors happening behind the closed doors of two very different families. In a 1970 Mississippi trailer-park, a young girl suffers a horrific rape at the hands of one of her alcoholic mother’s lowlife boyfriends. Meanwhile, up in Minnesota, a small eleven-year-old boy uses his father’s axe to wipe out the rest of his family. An older brother, heavily bleeding from what will prove to be a near fatal wound, manages to survive only by knocking his little brother unconscious with a blow to the head. Barr pulls no punches, choosing instead to describe the rape and murders in unflinching detail - and readers making it this far will feel compelled to learn what else the author has in store for the rape victim and the “butcher boy.”

Unfortunately, the set-up of 13 ½ proves to be much better than the rest of the book. Barr has written a mystery/thriller but seasoned readers will find there is very little mystery to her mystery, and they will be reduced to reading the rest of the book mostly to verify their early suspicions. What happens decades later when Polly Farmer, the rape victim, and the Butcher Boy cross paths in post-Katrina New Orleans becomes more and more predictable and less and less believable as the story races toward its climax.

Barr uses flashbacks for one of the more interesting episodes of the novel, the period during which the eleven-year-old murderer is placed inside a facility for young offenders. He is to be held there until, at age 18, he will be transferred to a men’s prison to serve the rest of his sentence. Because the boy is three or four years younger than everyone else in the center, authorities are reduced to locking him inside a hospital room for his own protection for the first several days they have him. Dylan Raines, though is a perceptive boy, and he easily adapts to the mores and requirements of living among the petty criminals and bullies surrounding him (including some of the guards). He uses his infamy as a mass murderer to good advantage but, as is often the case, jail changes him in ways that make him more a criminal now than he was when he went in.

Flash forward to 2007 New Orleans where Polly is now a respected English professor, divorced with two daughters, and Dylan is a wealthy architect. The two meet in a small city park where Polly sometimes comes to read and they feel an immediate attraction to one another. Will it be a fatal attraction for Polly?

13 ½ has the makings of an exceptional thriller but several of its main characters are so over-the-top that it is difficult to identify with the ones that are intended to be sympathetic. The exaggerated characters often border on cliché and give the book such a strong feeling of unreality, almost parody, that it is difficult to take seriously the dangers faced by Polly and her daughters. That is not a good thing in a thriller that could have been so much better than it is.

Rated at: 2.5

Monday Musing

Do you keep all the books you ever buy? Just the ones you love? Just collectibles? What do you do with the ones you don’t want to keep?

I wish. I really do.

I actually remember when I did keep every book I could get my hands on, but those days are long gone. Still, despite long ago running out of room to properly house all my books, I continue to invite at least ten new ones through my front door each and every month. The problem is that only two or three leave by that same door during any given month.

We have been in this home for ten years now and this is the first place I was able to add some built-in bookshelves to the floor plan before we moved in. I am able to keep about 800 books on the shelves and I have space to hide another 350 or 400 books on shelves I've added to a few spare closets. That's a lot of books, I admit. But I'm to the breaking point again and I really need to cull about 200 books via hospital donations, sales to used book stores, and the like so that I can buy myself a few more months' worth of new book space.

My "keepers" are a combination of the modern first editions I collect, a few sentimental favorites I have had for decades, books on Civil War and country music history, several complete runs of my favorite detective series (James Lee Burke, Elizabeth George, John Harvey, etc.), almost 100 books from the pen of Joyce Carol Oates, a bunch of Dickens published in the 1800s, a small collection of Modern Library editions from the 1940s and 1950s, over 100 uncorrected proofs, plus a lot of miscellaneous "stuff."

This is going to be a challenge - but all that potential free space is big enough a payoff to keep me motivated. I hope.

Thanks to Musing Mondays for the question.

Sleepless

An ultimately fatal disease, one that steals the ability of its victims to sleep, has infected approximately 10% of the world’s population. Not only is there no known cure for the disease, even how it claims its victims is still a mystery. Those infected by the disease generally survive for a year before succumbing to the disease’s final stage, one causing such a painful death that it has come to be known simply as “the suffering.” Long before death, however, victims have lost much of their memory and their ability to focus on the present.

It is the summer of 2010 and Los Angeles is a city under siege. Armed, gated and barricaded communities have sprung up in the wealthier parts of southern California to protect residents from the drug gangs and domestic terrorists that prey on those unable to protect themselves. The sleepless, in their quest for something to give meaning to their lives, dominate the city’s night life, and wander the streets by the hundreds in search of amusement. The only thing that offers physical relief from the disease, even if only for a while, is a new drug officially labeled as DR33M3R, but which has, of course, become known on the street as Dreamer. Unfortunately, the company manufacturing Dreamer is unable to produce it at a pace anything near the demand for the drug.

Into this world comes Parker Haas, an undercover policeman determined to learn the truth about Dreamer and the company that produces it to such great profit. Haas knows, first hand, how desperate the sleepless are to get their hands on Dreamer - his wife suffers from the disease and he fears that his baby daughter may have become infected, as well - and he suspects that the pharmaceutical giant producing it may be up to no good . Parker Haas is determined to bring as much justice back into the world as he can despite the odds against him and the increasing likelihood he will not survive his efforts.

Sleepless is a depressing and complicated story. It is combination science fiction and detective thriller and it is filled with subplots that are not always easy for the reader to follow. Charlie Huston is well known as a literary stylist but his approach to prose in Sleepless is as often confusing as it is effective. For example, he uses two first person narrators to tell his story, something I suspect that most readers will only come to realize after reading a substantial portion of the book in confusion. Huston does distinguish, from the beginning, between the two voices by indenting paragraphs dealing with one and not indenting those of the other. By the time most readers figure this out, however, events will be jumbled enough in their mind that much will have been missed in the reading process.

Perhaps Huston wants to give his readers a taste of the frustration, irritability and difficulty in focusing the victims of the sleeplessness disease feel. If so, he succeeds in spades.

Rated at: 2.5