Book Reviews

In this space I’ll keep an updated list of (most of) the books I’ve read for pleasure. I’ll post a brief capsule review of each one, but occasionally a longer, more comprehensive review if I have a lot to say.

I feel that grading the books with a numerical score or letter grade would be childish, as well as overly specific. Instead, I’ll just tell you whether I recommend the title—Yes or No.

However, if something was terrifically good, or incredibly bad, I’ll give it a letter grade of an ‘A’ or ‘F.’

*** The most recent additions are at the TOP of the list.

BOOKS

~ In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan – No. (full review)

~ The Humbling by Philip Roth – No. (full review)

~ Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro – Yes. Review to come..

~ The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion – Yes. Review to come..

~ Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas – No. (full review)

~ Pygmy by Chuck Palahniuk – Yes. (full review)

~ Independence Day by Richard Ford – Yes. I don’t have much to say here. This didn’t have nearly the same effect on me as The Sportswriter did. That first book was full of life, wisdom on romance, and exciting little adventures. This book, the second in the trilogy, was less riveting. I was never fully gripped, and a lot of that was because the plot revolves almost entirely around Frank Bascombe’s son, who is ultimately an aggravating, unlikeable character. Also, a major portion of the book gives us, in extreme detail, the struggle to find the Markhams (fussy clients of Frank’s) a perfect house. I found this subplot to be really tedious and unappealing. I wanted to see more of Frank’s love life, which drove the plot of The Sportswriter, but instead the central characters were the Markhams and Frank’s son. That being said, it’s Richard fucking Ford, and so it’s a terrific novel. Well-paced and beautifully written (especially the scene of the baseball accident, a knowing allusion to Irving). Just not one of my favorites ever. I can’t be sure I’ll read the final book in the trilogy.

~ The Road by Cormac McCarthy – No. (full review)

~ Downtown Owl by Chuck Klosterman – Yes. (full review)

~ The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta – No. (full review)

~ The Wanderers by Richard Price – Yes. This was a lot of fun, if maybe such a quick read that it feels a bit light. This is no news, but Richard Price is an absolute expert on urban dialect and the language that comes out of his characters’ mouths are dead-on plausible and accurate. The kids in this story are all so similar as a whole, but in the short scope of the novel Price still manages to set each apart and flesh them all out as individuals with different interests, social mannerisms, and ambitions (or lack thereof). This is truly a story of gritty, harsh realism, and yet the moments of real tragedy, such as teen pregnancies and domestic violence, never feel forced or too dramatic. Instead, they feel natural, bearable, and are also occasionally lightened by comic relief. Through it all, the boys continue to bear heavy burdens on their shoulders with casual, matter-of-fact spirit. This book, in which not so much seems to happen, will stay with you.

~ Indignation by Philip Roth – Yes. This is a great little book. Roth is almost perfect (there’s just the problem of the ending) in his pacing with this story. It’s short, and though I suppose it could have been a full-length novel, it needn’t be, and he proves it here by truly painting the entire image of Marcus Messner’s simple life in a brief novella-length tale. Everything is so crystal clear, and yet just as we would hope, the bits that are unclear or confusing in the events feel that way to us because they feel that way to Marcus; his surprise (blowjob, anyone?) is our surprise, and his chagrin and rage with his father is ours. We cannot help but share such feelings with our protagonist when we see firsthand just how unreasonably his father behaves toward him, or just how frustrating Bert Flusser is to live with. The story ends so quickly—I finished it in one day of hungry reading, and so will you—but it’s so exciting, and palpable, that you pick it right back up and blaze through it a second time. Oh, and I love the bits about Marcus working in the butchery for his dad. The graphic, visceral accounts of the meat and the carving process play off of the bonding that Marcus and his father enact as they work, and the result is a very real location that you can literally picture before your eyes, mapped out for you by Roth. My only beef is with the ending, which is such a ruthless downer that it feels perhaps a bit too mean. Then again, if Roth wants to destroy his characters so cruelly, that’s his prerogative.

~ The Sportswriter by Richard Ford – Yes. I’m so happy I’ve discovered Richard Ford. The Frank Bascombe trilogy is obviously nothing new to most avid readers, but as praised as may be, I think it’s fair to say that Ford doesn’t have the “literary rockstar” fame of some other writers from his generation. Anyway, I had never heard of him until I read a review of The Lay of the Land, which is the final book of the trilogy and came out a year ago. I decided to read the first one first, and it was a pleasure. Ford’s writing is simple, but not in the same way as, say, Coetzee’s spare, minimal style. The simplicity lies in the elegant, straightforward way that Ford relays the (admittedly mundane, though not at all boring) events of his protagonist’s world. Frank is a very real person who kind of coasts through life, observantly reflecting on other people’s lives (like athletes) but avoiding self-analysis. In many ways this is a story of isolation, but it doesn’t feel sad. The elements that should hold Frank’s life together—his son, his marriage, his career—are fleeting. Yet with each loss, Frank only becomes more removed and dreamy (too much so) and each little event that befalls him in this novel—a botched interview with a cranky ex-football player, a visit to meet the parents of his Texas bimbo girlfriend, and an awkward moment at which a platonic male friend comes on to him—serves to help build our tough love for Frank. We like him, but there are indeed moments at which we judge him, or don’t identify with him, but it’s okay. Meanwhile, Ford fills the book with elegiac pearls of wisdom about marriage and success. Here’s one I really like: “And finally, when I say to Vicki Arcenault, ‘I love you,’ I’m not saying anything but the obvious. Who cares if I don’t love her forever? Or she me? Nothing persists. I love her right now, and I’m not deluding myself or her. What else does truth have to hold?” Indeed. Oh, and the final scene—in which Frank meets a cute, eager young Ivy league intern at his office—does not feel sordid, but delightful, and it’s perfect for both wrapping up this volume and setting up more. And there are more, two more books in Frank’s saga, and I’ll look forward to reading both.

~ I Was Told There’d Be Cake by Sloane Crosley – No. Sloane Crosley is hot, but her book was not. I was loving these stories at the beginning, but they quickly turned cloying with cutesy one-liners and fond childhood memories. Too much of the same. “You on a Stick,” one of the longest stories, is less funny than it is sad. The tale exposes as socially clueless a girl who made Crosley her maid-of-honor without realizing that they weren’t really friends. I found myself wondering how Crosley was able to put this story in the book—I suppose the only explanation is that she decided she didn’t mind the person seeing it, years after the fact. In a story about working at a butterfly museum, Crosley mentions how children calling them “flutter-bys,” though this very common verbal slip has already appeared in so many other books and television shows for comic effect. “One Night Bounce,” finally, is just implausible. The story is about what Crosley, as a child, thought a one-night stand entailed: “The second I was old enough to know what sex was, I knew I wanted to have a one-night stand,” she writes. But then she explains this absurdly naive image: she says she believed it involved a man and a woman, standing on the bed, trying not to spill their martinis, jumping up and down until the girl bumps her head on the ceiling and passes out. Yes, it’s funny, but it sounds like what it is: an adult trying to imagine what a kid would think. Not a truthful account of what she once believed. Skip this collection, despite all the hype it has attracted.

~ The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga – Yes. (full review)

~ The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz – Yes. There’s no need to add a full length review to the mountain of praise this book has already received, but let’s just say it’s all deserved. That this thing is written in Dominicano slang, rife with curse words and dirty sexual language, and still managed to win a Pulitzer is a testament to its greatness. Here’s a book that, thank god, is being hailed by the ‘high lit’ establishment not because of flowery language or beautiful/daring/groundbreaking prose, but because of the way in which it’s told. The narratives jumps back and forth among different generations, presenting us with deep, complex personal histories of numerous characters (some of whom get more attention than the title character himself), and somehow, every single different history is interesting—though I’ll admit that occasionally I did yearn to return to Oscar and the main narrative. Meanwhile, despite Oscar’s repeated miseries, the book doesn’t feel tragic, in the end. It feels triumphant. Everyone loves anything that will help get kids to read; just look at all the respect Harry Potter gets from critics simply for what it does, which is—like Oprah and her book club—to pull in people who otherwise are not big readers. Oscar Wao will do this, and again, I feel this is its biggest achievement: the book is modern and hip, while also being extremely sophisticated in style and scope.

~ Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk – Yes. Not Palahniuk’s best, but I see why Chuck fans love it. I also think I would have been more impressed had I read it earlier, before I had struggled through the painful tedium of stinkers like Lullaby and Haunted. There are many things the book does well, such as its critique of American celebrity worship (one of my very favorite pet topics) and self-improvement drug abuse (particularly steroids). However, there are also areas that fail, such as the boring descriptions of various “tips” for household chores. This plot element is a tired one that Palahniuk has exhausted to death. In Snuff this trick is exercised through constant, distracting discussions of porn industry “secrets” (such as taxonomies of tricks that porn starlets use to slow aging, like various titty-lifters or vaginal-numbing creams), and in Survivor Palahniuk tries the same gag again, not only with household tips, but also psychological disorders. Many people seem convinced that this is “research,” and are always impressed by all that Palahniuk apparently learns and conveys for each book. But they fail to call it what it is: bad writing that bashes the reader over the head with irrelevant facts about something only marginally connected to the narrative of the novel. In any event, Survivor is a fun read if you like Chuck. But if you’ve never read Palahniuk before, go for Rant. Here’s a brief note about Survivor’s supposed “real ending” presented on Chuck’s web site.

~ Rabbit Redux by John Updike – Yes. What a gorgeous book. Just like its predecessor, the plot can feel like a real depressant as it chronicles the ups and downs of Rabbit’s life, but this time around it does so with more humor, intimacy, and—for lack of a better word—fun. In fact, this book was about ten times more enjoyable than the first, which is saying a lot because I liked that one too. One thing Updike does incredibly well is write about sex. There’s a lot of it in this book, and yet it never feels overkill. His descriptions are at once visceral without being graphic; we easily visualize each encounter, but never to the point of repugnance. Updike pulls this off thanks to achieving a perfect balance between seriously detailed descriptions of every taboo (no sex act is left concealed) and tender, honest accounts of the awkwardness and sad discomfort that follows much of Rabbit’s romantic (or not) episodes. Plus, the single most amazing feat of all is that at the end of the book, even after everything she’s done to our protagonist, you don’t hate Janice Springer.

~ Personal Days by Ed Park – No. (full review)

~ Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje – Yes. (full review)

~ Slow Man by J.M. Coetzee – No. Just as its title promises, the story is slow and dull; it fails to engage us as strongly as the masterpiece Disgrace did. In addition, Coetzee is typically a super-realist, which makes it all the more jarring and strange when the character Elizabeth Costello (straight out of another Coetzee novel) shows up in the protagonist’s life as a stranger who somehow knows his deepest secrets. It doesn’t work. Thanks to this illogical, inexplicably strange book, Coetzee’s writing has worn thin with me, and that’s unfortunate, because I hear great things about The Life and Times of Michael K and his new novel, Diary of a Bad Year. But I think I’m done with him.

~ Timbuktu by Paul Auster – No. Compared to The Brooklyn Follies or The New York Trilogy, this one feels more childish; he pulls off the dog-as-narrator feat but the story is still short, unsatisfying, and unnecessary. It’s mildly entertaining, but falls flat.

~ Snuff by Chuck Palahniuk – No. Welp, after slogging through the shit that (literally) filled the disgusting, artless stories in Haunted, I swore I’d never read another Chuck book. But then Snuff came out, with that provocative, alluring cover, and I caved. Big mistake. Palahniuk is a one-trick pony who has truly run out of gags. Snuff lacks the clever storytelling of Fight Club and Rant. Instead, here he favors gross-out attempts (like in Haunted, though I’ll admit it’s a lot more entertaining than that) and ends the story in a blaze of ridiculous, implausible last-minute twists. I’ll admit it’s an exciting page-turner like all Chuck books, but the incessant corny porn-film title puns, sleazy characters, and lame “dude” jokes are repellent, and thus the good outweighs the bad. Plus, check out this hilarious NYTimes review from Lucy Ellmann, who had a hilariously visceral response to this piss-poor, trashy book.

~ Rabbit, Run by John Updike – Yes. This is a permanent classic that I somehow never got around to reading until I was 20. I can at least say I’ve read it now. Honestly, it’s pretty miserable, plot-wise. The story meanders along, and the lives of the characters go from bad to worse. And yet its beloved place among the best American novels, despite the pain and sadness of its story, is proof that it’s extremely well-written. Updike is a master of beautiful language and subtle details. The story stays focused in the mundane so well that Rabbit truly feels like a real person with whom you or I could have gone to high school. He has grown up now, and this sad life is his, just as it could be the life of anyone we know.

~ Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison – A. There’s a reason this is taught in high schools all over America, and I’m so glad I finally picked it up; it’s exciting, funny, and feels surprisingly modern. You would never know, through all the urban language and riveting plot twists, that this thing was written in 1952. As soon as I finished it, I turned back to the first page and read it again.

~ Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee – Yes. This was my first foray into the world of Coetzee—a world of simplicity, painted in terse, muted brush strokes. Coetzee’s writing took some getting used to for me, because it’s just so spare. But the style works perfectly for the type of stories he tells, and in this case David Lurie’s tale is at once both riveting (at the beginning, as the affair and academic “trial” both unfold) and mundane (toward the end, when he settles with his daughter). Yet I couldn’t put it down. And, strangely enough, I wouldn’t even describe the book as “enjoyable.” The plot, at least, is continually sad and mournful. But Lurie, in Coetzee’s concise prose, is perfectly constructed. He’s a real man with genuine lusts and concerns, and it becomes clear how much he loves life, even if life continually punishes his past grievances. He leaps off the page, and the story is rewarding in so many ways. It’s over so quickly (assuming you whip through it as I did), but stays with you for a long time. It’s a gem.

~ Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk – F. This book is so insanely bad. Really. And having read Fight Club, Rant, and Choke, I gotta say it doesn’t even belong in the same sentence as these other titles. First of all, it’s really not a novel at all. It’s a collection of short stories, all of which are just gross-out attempts that belong on College Humor. The plot throws a bunch of different freaks together in a “writer’s retreat” that is more like a prison, and each one tells a different short story, but as Tom Shone wrote in his NYTimes review, “all of Palahniuk’s writers turn out fiction that bears a startling resemblance to the fiction of Chuck Palahniuk.” Indeed, and that fiction is crap. Additionally, I anticipate that many Chuck fans would respond to bad reviews of the book by saying that the reviewer just couldn’t handle the intensity of the appalling descriptions (Palahniuk has bragged about the hundreds of people who have passed out from shock at public readings of the story ‘Guts,’ in which a kid’s intestines get sucked out by a pool drain), but in fact the book was not too gross for me at all. I’ve seen a lot worse in terms of gorey descriptions, and the others I’m thinking of—American Psycho by Ellis comes first to mind—are both more graphic and better written. The problem with the book isn’t that the stories are disgusting, it’s that they just suck. They aren’t even exciting, they’re just disturbing, morbid, and worst of all, boring. This book was such garbage it actually made me angry. This stuff belongs in the sidebars of those super-disturbing porn sites that show women being defecated on or strangled; you know, the worst ones you can think of, that cater to the lowest, most perverted sickos. Those are the type of people who would actually enjoy Haunted.

~ Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart – Yes. Smart and hilarious, this book is even better than Gary Shteyngart’s first one. New York Jews educated at elite, liberal arts colleges are both the target audience of this novel and also the group implicitly mocked by this inane story. Shteyngart affectionately ridicules Jews in a genuine way that only a fellow Jew could pull off. You’ll love it.

~ Then We Came To The End by Josh Ferris – Yes. (full review)

~ Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami – Yes. This was my second Murakami novel, and I read it immediately after the first. It is more outlandish, surreal, and complex than Norwegian Wood, but it is also impossible to put down. The story probes elusive questions about memory and family, and even as the fantasy spins out of control, it somehow never feels silly, like, say, Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories.

~ Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami – Yes. I found a used copy of this novel in a charming little American bookstore (crazy discovery, right?) in Prague. I had never even heard of Haruki Murakami but the book’s cover caught my eye and delivered like I never could have imagined. From what I’m told, it’s actually the only non-fantasy Murakami novel– which makes it an ironic choice for my introduction to his writing, since it made me judge him based on what is apparently the exception to Murakami’s rule. The story is gripping and sad, and the writing evokes a very familiar hunger for companionship that we know all people must feel. The characters are easy to identify with, and the book left a lasting impression on me.

~ American Pastoral by Philip Roth – Yes. Like so many Roth books, this one starts out slow—very slow. But as always, he rewards the patient reader. Once Swede Levov enters the scene, the story picks up pace, and realistic problems manifest themselves through the characters, and we see a reluctant rage emerge from a hometown hero, and we are moved to feel the same anger, disappointment, and misery as our hero. The story is told so deftly that it is no surprise this thing won the Pulitzer. None at all. But I need to add here that for my money, The Human Stain is still Roth’s best book, and Portnoy’s Complaint his funniest.