Tag Archives: Fiction

Once Upon a River, by Bonnie Jo Campbell (2011)

Comment

Sixteen-year-old sharpshooter Margo Crane leaves home after a family dispute and follows the river, initially seeking male companions of varying quality before deciding to live by her wits.  Though the story starts out with a literal bang, the rest feels disconnected as Margo undergoes a series of strung-together tribulations.  We see her growing up, but the change feels less satisfying since a lot of it was there all along.  The scenes vary in their effectiveness, with some feeling clunky as they follow that literary fiction voice often copied by graduate writing workshops.  In short: nothing too new here.

Rating

Where I Got It:

Bought online in August 2013 for a graduate writing workshop (the last of several books I bought for that workshop but didn’t actually read until later).

More

Author website

The Wicked + The Divine Book 2: Fandemonium, by Kieron Gillen & Jamie McKelvie (2015)

Comment

Is fleeting greatness worth the ultimate cost?  How many of us can reach that greatness?  Furthermore, what happens when we feel that greatness lies within our grasp but just can’t seem to reach it?  These questions feel more pronounced in the Wicked + The Divine’s second collection, where mere mortal protagonist Laura tries vainly to reproduce the teensy little miracle we saw in Book 1 and questions her relationship to the Pantheon of reincarnated gods that the world continues to fawn over.  Fantasy works best when it tackles real-world values in relatable ways, and this series does it beautifully.

Rating:

Where I Got It

Gift from old college friend, Christmas 2015 (along with Book 1).

More

Book trailer on Youtube

Longer review, with pictures

 

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne (1767)

Comment

The whimsical freedom of the seventeenth century led to some of the most innovative fiction ever conceived, and Tristram Shandy is no exception.  Its narrator sets out to tell his life story but goes off on so many tangents that it takes him two hundred pages to get to his birth.  The book itself is chaotically filled with blank pages, scrawled lines, musical scores, skipped chapters, and entire sections written in Latin, plus a whole load of sex jokes for careful readers.  The innovations are fun, but the archaic prose makes for a challenging 650-page slog.

Rating:

3-kafkas

Where I Got It

An old Modern Library edition picked up from the English department free table, sometime in fall 2014.

More

Full text at Project Gutenberg

Quick and Easy Guide to Reading Tristram Shandy (I really wish the person who made this site had kept it up, since it promised to be both funny and down-to-earth about a really difficult novel, and also because it compared Tristram Shandy to a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book)

The Wicked + The Divine Book 1: The Faust Act, by Kieron Gillen & Jamie McKelvie (2015)

Comment

Amaterasu, Baal, and ten other gods from world mythology get reincarnated every ninety years; this time they’re taking the form of teenage pop stars and a little bit of hell breaks loose when Lucifer goes rogue.  The premise promises lots of action, and I loved artist Jamie McKelvie’s style, particularly the splash pages, where there’s always something to look at.  The collection also comes with variant covers and apocrypha that form the graphic novel equivalent of a DVD bonus menu.  Reading more chapters feels necessary to make a more concrete judgement, but I’m definitely liking the start.

Rating:

3-kafkas

Where I Got It

Gift from old college friend, Christmas 2015 (along with Book 2).

More

Kieron Gillen’s Tumblr

Jamie McKelvie’s website

Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf (1925)

Comment

I found Mrs. Dalloway more accessible than other Virginia Woolf novels I’ve read, possibly because it’s also shorter.  The stream-of-consciousness novel shows a day in the life of a fiftysomething socialite reflecting on the mundanity of her married life, the passionate love of her youth, and her deeply hidden feelings for a female friend.  My favorite scenes, though, were the surreal and hard-hitting takes on WWI shell shock in the hallucinatory ramblings of ex-soldier Septimus Warren Smith.

There’s a lot to like here, but it’s still high modernism and can get…dense.

Rating:

4-kafkas

Where I Got It

From a grad school friend who had two copies, Summer 2015.

More

Virginia Woolf on Wikipedia
Virginia Woolf Was More Than Just a Women’s Writer (essay)

The Epic of Gilgamesh (2100 BC), translated by N.K. Sanders (1972)

1 Comment

I like reading myths from other cultures because they capture the familiar spirit of the Greek myths with new sets of heroes.  Ancient Sumer’s Gilgamesh is no exception: our hero befriends a sidekick from the wilderness, journeys through forests to slay a deadly monster, grapples with a jealous goddess, and seeks the prize of eternal life.  There’s even an ancient flood that shares more than a few similarities with the Biblical one.  Editor N.K. Sanders also provides a lot of textual background in her introduction, padding out the Penguin edition since the myth itself is so short (60 pages).

Rating:

3-kafkas

Where I Got It

Bought used at a local book sale, October 2012, making it one of the longest-running books in the stack.

More

Background to the Epic of Gilgamesh on Wikipedia

The entire Epic of Gilgamesh in PDF form

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera (1984)

Comment

Kundera’s prose is just plain beautiful: lyrical, thought-provoking, and melodic, divided into short, powerful scenes that make for lots of page-turning, so an extra kudos to translator Michael Henry Heim for capturing the power of the original Czech.  The plot involves a man who cheats constantly on his wife, but the plot comes second to Kundera’s other subjects: love, the 1968 Prague Spring/Communist invasion by Russia, more love, sex, communication, more sex, fate, dogs, fidelity, being an ex-pat, loyalty to one’s ideals, and old age.  A great read, though a quick warning: the philosophical reflections do get dense.

Rating:

4-kafkas

Where I Got It

Gift from a friend I visited in Columbus, Ohio who was downsizing his book collection and recommended it highly, Summer 2015.

More

Milan Kundera on Wikipedia

How Important is Milan Kundera Today? (2015 article in The Guardian)

The Sunshine Crust Baking Factory, by Stacy Wakefield (2014)

Comment

An indie novel about twentysomething punk squatters in New York City in the ‘90s—where do I sign?  I was really excited to read this book but was disappointed by the plot (which does a fair amount of wandering), the characters (which, apart from the coolheaded but hasn’t-found-her-place-yet narrator, never quite stand out), and some lackluster scenes.  What Wakefield does really well instead, though, is show the hazards of Brooklyn squatting life (which is a lot more organized than I’d imagined) by capturing the mechanics of garbage disposal and squatters’ rights in ways that feel intricate and real.

Rating:

2-kafkas

Where I Got It

Bought new at Quimby’s bookstore in Chicago while on a trip, Summer 2015.

More

The Sunshine Crust Baking factory at Akashic Books

Interview with Former-NYC squatter Stacy Wakefield

Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls, by David Sedaris (2014)

Comment

I like David Sedaris’s writing because it’s funny, easy to read, and poignant, and most things I like satisfy at least two of these.  His latest collection is mostly essays with a few fiction monologues thrown in (the best of which, “I Brake for Traditional Marriage,” features a disoriented right-winger who murders his family and wants to grow a mustache like Yosemite Sam’s), but I enjoyed it slightly less than his earlier work because most of the essays (about, say, losing your passport or picking up highway trash) feel less zany.  It still earns a solid four Kafkas, though.

Rating:

4-kafkas

Where I Got It

Christmas Gift, 2015.

More

David Sedaris’s Website

David Sedaris Reads 50 Shades of Grey (video)

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, by Haruki Murakami (2014)

Comment

With fewer fantastical elements than Kafka on the Shore or Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Murakami’s most recent novel covers more realistic scenarios that still raise larger, otherworldly questions.  The title character, a quiet loner, becomes estranged from his four childhood friends without explanation, and embarks on a quest from Nagoya to Finland to find out why. We never discover the secrets of Tsukuru’s past exactly, but that’s never the point with Murakami.  My one qualm is the flat exposition in the opening chapters, though this (fortunately) gives rise to more significant scenes quickly enough.

Rating:

4-kafkas

Where I Got It

Impromptu Christmas gift (2015) from my brother, who got two copies and gave me the paperback edition while keeping the hardcover (pictured above, much cooler).

More

Haruki Murakami’s website

Wikipedia page

Less Than Zero, by Bret Easton Ellis (1985)

Comment

Bret Easton Ellis’s first novel feels like a 1980s version of The Sun Also Rises with heroin, male prostitution, and at least one snuff film, which was probably the same level of scandal as when Hemingway’s characters got drunk and had premarital sex in 1926. The whole novel evokes a quiet, disconcerting loathing for the fast-paced, aimless LA lifestyle of its post-high school characters, with subdued yet depressing descriptions of everything from desert scenery to shooting up heroin. It’s also a fast read that leaves you with a distinctly unsettled feeling, but in a good way.

Rating:
4-kafkas
Where I Got It

Ordered online in Summer 2015 after having this on my informal To-Read list since college.

More

Wikipedia page