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Pitch Dark by Renata Adler
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Bow down to the collage novel! Long live the hybrid text!





My Love Is A Dead Arctic Explorer by Paige Ackerson-Kiely
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This collection intrigued me and I stuck with it, though in the end, it didn't stick to my ribs or blaze through with an unforgettable line. I think the more colloquial, story-telling prose poems were the most accessible of the collection, though they, too, seemed to deliberately elude a complete grasp.

The Writing Life by Annie Dillard

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Alternately helpful and discouraging meditations on writing; worth it for the portions set in the Pacific Northwest alone.

The Wheel of Love by Joyce Carol Oates
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I admit that by the end of this large collection of stories, I was praying to myself, "please don't go crazy, please don't go crazy." Madness, obsessive thoughts, anxiety, drug use, familial death, and physical disfigurements all feature heavily in these dark pieces, all originally published by 1970. These are stories of their time, too: racial integration, counterculture in conflict with suburbia, trapped housewives, the decline of Detroit.

"Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" is by far the most famous story here, and it's really not overrated, in my opinion. I would group it among the most perfect, unsettling short stories written in the past 100 years. It's a distinctly American classic. Another classic would be "How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Corrections and Began My Life Over Again." Love and sexuality loom as disruptive forces for the men and women of these stories, especially the women. Characters are paralyzed in adulterous hell or transfixed in moments of despair over a life that stretches predictably ahead. On the other side, those who choose the bohemian way fare no better. They are flying dangerously free, unmoored and despised.

Oates' stories depict a culture at a crossroads and railing within it. The smoothness of artistic production can be ripped apart by the intrusion of the other. The burden of performing personality is a sentence of permanent psychic anxiety.

From a stylistic standpoint, these are also worthwhile fictional experiments. Rather than conventional plots, many of the stories in this collection rely on snapshots in time of the same character. Sometimes, they are told backward. Sometimes, groupings of experience and advancing psychological states are captured beneath obtuse or leading subject headings. I enjoyed this organizational ingenuity and the way Oates' distinctive prose lingers on mental states and character impressions. Nothing is described dispassionately; in contrast, everything is experienced as intense, jarring, and grating on the senses. This technique does a good job in creating unease for the reader and illuminating the interiors of Oates almost uniformly troubled characters.

This was my first time reading Oates at length, but I definitely would like to read more of her fiction. I feel after completing The Wheel of Love that I've experienced that time period more viscerally than I have before.


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The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I can't be the only English major or liberal arts graduate who read this book with a fond sigh of recognition. Ah, the college seminars, the days spent reading like it was your job, and that super annoying pretentious guy who always had a point to make in every. single. class. Like Madeleine, the novel's heroine, I was devoted to the unfashionable Victorian texts. Still am. I, too, never felt particularly edgy in my literary proclivities. I just liked to read. Still do. Those little digs of recognition end there, however, and become stymied in frustration. Maybe it's because this novel feels "low stakes." Do we really worry about anyone who's heartbroken at the tender age of 22? Especially if she's  already been accepted into a prestigious post-grad program and has the deposit money on hand for a Manhattan apartment? Is this self-consciously clever investigation and reappropriation of the marriage plot really necessary? It seems, actually, to be far more retrograde than those fusty old novels. Those heroines were so compelling that their marital hijinks were riveting--a sensitive reader is not wrapped up in the "romance" of these books, but rather enmeshed in the diminished possibilities for the brightest and most independent women depicted therein. At the end of Middlemarch, one does not close the book with a happy sigh that Dorothea and Will have been united at last. One closes it wistfully, looking forward to a century when a woman of Dorothea's gifts could *be* a finer version of Will Ladislaw. Now that that century has come, Madeleine disappoints. The men who vie for her affections are both more brilliant, and she is mired in class prejudice. She's not an entirely unsympathetic character, but she's certainly not representative of me or the other talented young women I knew in school. As a final note, the fate of Leonard Bankhead, my favorite character, disturbed me. Eugenides' ending seemed to imply that people who suffer from manic depression are de facto disqualified as stable partners or part and parcel of a happy ending. Haven't we come further than that very Victorian idea of madness?



The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I started this many times, and wasn't in the right zone until now. A more personal and less classical short story collection, View From Castle Rock is nonetheless engrossing and bracing, like everything Munro has ever written. Loved it.


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Tenth of December: Stories by George Saunders
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The best writers truly love people. I mean, really, why write fiction if you don't? Saunders' humanism, compassion, and empathy stand out on every page, as does his absolutely delightful facility with language play, and the voices in our heads. His imagined fantasies within his characters' inner monologues are completely hilarious, while at the same time being that rare something -- true. I laughed out loud many times while reading this collection, and the title story had me weeping. Most of these stories are five star stories, but since not all of them were at the same level, I went with four stars overall. Highly recommended!

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? by Mindy Kaling

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Fun and breezy, though not as laugh-out-loud funny as Bossypants, the funny girl memoir to which all others will inevitably be compared.

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The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss by Edmund de Waal
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

You may want to become familiar with the words "vitrine" and "bibelot" before beginning this marvelous journey into the past and into objects.  They come up a lot.  Indeed, de Waal does not shy away from rarefied diction throughout, but his artistic choices seem altogether suited to his subjects, which include Paris, Vienna, Impressionism, Proust, dynastic families, what it means to be a collector, post-War Tokyo, and what, exactly, happened to his own powerful Jewish family's legacy in the wake of World War II.  Oh, yes, and this is also a book about netsuke--marvelous, rare, and yet simultaneously quotidian Japanese objects.  Their journey into de Waal's hands is remarkable.  His reflections on what it means for them to have been first collected, then displayed, and finally, passed down, are equally remarkable.  Never completely comfortable with the easy angle, de Waal's own ambivalence often soaks onto the page, and while some reviewers have found this frustrating, I found it absolutely authentic.  Trusting the reader to draw his/her own conclusions, de Waal's nevertheless takes us on a entirely unique journey.  I highly recommend this book.

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Tracks by Louise Erdrich
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Another stunning, indelible book from Erdrich.  What can I say, this book saw me through a dark hour.


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Arcadia by Lauren Groff
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Two stars seems a bit harsh for a book that is quite well-written and populated with rounded, unique characters.  However, of the three Groff titles I have read, this novel was the least strong, and though I finished it quickly, I really resisted her choice to tell the entire tale in the present tense.  It made the whole novel, especially the beginning, seem hazy and overly precious.  I'm still waiting for the gorgeous, darker novel that I feel is up Groff's sleeve.  In the meantime, I hope to read more of her sparkling short fiction.

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George Eliot: The Last Victorian by Kathryn Hughes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A very delightful and thorough biography of Marian Evans/Lewes. I'm not sure the lay reader who hasn't read at least two of Eliot's works would enjoy it, but the textual interplay between art and life was really fun to uncover. I think I actually enjoyed the beginning sections of the book when Evans was still finding her way towards fiction the most. Many fascinating letters survive from this time. One real tragedy is that no letters survive between Eliot and her longtime companion George Henry Lewes. Surely one of the most enduring and passionate literary love stories of all time, between such unlikely figures! Alas. I bet they wrote some great letters. However, still highly recommend this biography for any fan of Eliot and the Victorians!

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Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

As anyone familiar with Strayed's advice column at The Rumpus, Dear Sugar, can tell you, Strayed has an immensely appealing voice--the kind that is emotional, but not cloying; generous, but not over-the-top.  I always love her columns, and several of them have brought tears to my eyes with their ability to truly address those in pain with understanding, wisdom, and what can only be described as love: the kind of love miraculous in its non-specificity.  The kind of love that only rare people feel for every other human who walks the earth. A kind of Gandhi Redux, if you will.

I am happy to report that this same appealing voice is present in Wild, Strayed's memoir about a transformative period of her life spent hiking the Pacific Crest Trail.  Appealing, yes, and a book I finished in just a few sittings.  However, Wild pales considerably in comparison to memoirs and travelogues I've read recently that marshaled a more superlative power of description, a more expansive ability to draw conclusions, and an even rawer revelation of the self.  I don't think Strayed intends to enter the company of writers such as Patrick Leigh Fermor, W.G. Sebald, or Maggie Nelson (whose book, Bluets, is far more fractured in its method of excavating a festering emotional wound).  Nevertheless, I think a truly great tale of the road should illuminate all that is visible and something else--something less tangible, but important nevertheless.  They should illuminate something eternal, even within a landscape that is always in flux, or within memory, which is fluid by its very nature.

I'm not even sure what I am asking for...  Wild is a friend you would enjoy hiking with for the day.  The greatest writing on nature and voyages of self and world discovery are like Strayed's cherished copy of The Dream of a Common Language: those are the books that you cannot burn and leave behind, even when the hiking is done.

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The Rings of Saturn by Winfried Georg Sebald

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The past year has been my year of reading European travelogues--Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor, Rebecca West, Lawrence Durrell, and now W.G. Sebald. Except none of these books are actually travelogues, any more than a novel is simply a story. They are compendiums. They are philosophical treatises. They are everything. Only--the writers have composed them while rambling. Place looms down into the works. Place catalyzes.

The Rings of Saturn is one of the most beautiful of all. Temporally, the author walks through an area that I myself have seen, so my love wells a little from nostalgia. Even without a familiarity with the Anglian countryside, however, there is no doubt this book is a masterpiece. I don't use that word lightly, but if a work of art can make one see the beauty and inscrutability and humor and cruelty and cravenness and mechanization of human beings side by side with the mysterious things they have built and created, and condemn the darkness of our souls, while still wanting to live, while still, in fact, loving that most tenuous of gifts--well, then isn't that work of art doing all that it is possible to do? Along the way, I learned about the last Chinese empress, silkworms, abandoned missile silos, crumbling country estates, Joseph Conrad, Chateaubriand, Rembrandt's painting of a dissection...I learned so much. Each section ended with a note of pleasure, like a cello string being plucked deep inside the sternum. I dreamed all kinds of beautiful dreams when I finished the book. I was changed by it.

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The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

As in The Blue Flower, her masterpiece, Penelope Fitzgerald excels at thumbnail portraits. Both novels struck me as exquisite miniatures, with plots that seem to turn on incremental accretions of consequence and opinion that can yet turn the tide of a life. They also abound in aphoristic and eminently quotable dialogue. For a peep into a small bookshop in the Anglian fens, do read. I didn't have my peacock feathers blown back the way I did with The Blue Flower, but The Bookshop is still a good little novella to spend the day with.

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So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A master class in saying everything in just a few words.


The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

If you've read this book, tell me if you wouldn't rather it be called The Deathless Man. I resisted the neat tie-up at the end. I like my packages messier these days, with lots of loose ribbon.


Louise in Love by Mary Jo Bang

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Reading: participation in the construction of an artifice; the construction of a dream.


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The White Album by Joan Didion

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Joan Didion has the same rare and inimitable style as Dame Rebecca West. She coolly observes the scene around her, and when she makes a pronouncement on anything--whether it be Jim Morrison, the Hoover Dam, shopping centers, or her own neuroses--she does so like someone ringing a clear, pure bell. It sounds, and it seems final; it seems bare and essential. I don't know how she manages to do this in such an economy of words, but she does. This collection of micro-essays comes together and does more than simply sketch the end of the sixties in Southern California; it does something more rare, imparts a flavor, a re-animation. One imagines Didion slipping into the background of any scene wearing huge glasses, able to seem both invisible and authoritative. I hope this bell continues to sound.

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Great House by Nicole Krauss

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I read this book very quickly--it has one of those puzzlebox plots, where one awaits a conclusion that ties the intersecting storylines together. I would say it's enjoyable to read, and the prose is very smooth (lots of periodic sentences...don't fear the semi-colon or the dash, Nicole). Somewhere deep down, however, I didn't entirely buy it. The objects and personal failings/obsessions that catalyzed so much repetitive sorrow for the characters didn't seem believable to me. The voices of the characters themselves were engrossing--some more than others--and I believed in the grief of their pasts (except for the lady novelist who writes successfully from her ivory tower but bemoans her ability to connect with others). I don't believe in grief that's entirely organized around an object or destructive fixation, however. By the end of the book, the poor desk of Great House groaned beneath the weight of so much symbolic significance. I would still be interested to read other work by Krauss, however.

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Just Kids by Patti Smith

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a book about the self-fashioning of an artist. A young woman surrounds herself with totems; she bends towards and away from the artistic visions of others; she finds muses and is herself a muse.

This is certainly a love story. This is about being in the right place at the right time (but surely chance meetings with Janis Joplin and Sam Shepard and William Burroughs say just as much about what kind of magnetism Smith herself must possess).

I wept through the end of Just Kids; I found it very moving as a testament to a friendship and a person and another artist. When do we become an artist? Is it when we declare it? Is it when we've been recognized for our art? Is it when we dedicate ourselves to it? Is it simply when we believe it of ourselves?

I also thought about poverty as a purifier for Smith and the circle of creatives around her in NYC during this remarkable time. I've never been comfortable with giving up material comfort for art. Smith and Mapplethorpe begin as young ascetics, and yet they're getting things done; they're making the connections they need to succeed. I believe it's a function of my background: once comfortably middle to upper middle class, forever hoping to keep that standard. But it's not hard to feel a sense of envy or nostalgia for Smith's romantic vision of art-as-sustenance, for this brave girl showing up in New York with nothing but a few possessions and a belief in where she needed to be, and making a go of it. She demonstrates blistering courage. Of course I don't have regrets, but it is provocative to consider the paths of others, especially someone like Patti Smith who began not even sure what medium would be hers, but was so clearly meant to be a VOICE, and now, successful memoirist.

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The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If you are the kind of person who thinks finding a crumbling old manuscript in a dank monastery that turns out to be a fascinating glimpse into a nearly-vanished pagan philosophy on living written in verse would be cool...then you and I have a lot in common, and we both like this book already. We are also both nerds, and that's okay. We should probably travel together in order to avoid irritating our companions.

Greenblatt is clearly a scholar of considerable erudition on the Renaissance and European art and thought. While very engagingly written, I do sense that Swerve was written for the general reader rather than a more specialized audience. Perhaps because I have studied and written on similar subjects in the past, I yearned for more overtly scholarly writing (which does NOT have to be boring--The Age of Wonder and its endlessly-entrancing digressions comes to mind). I would have been happy to read several hundred more pages, especially about the ripple effect in Renaissance art that Greenblatt cunningly traces back to the discovery of Lucretius' poem. More than anything, I realized that going to the primary text--"On the Nature of Things" itself--will be the key to serious explorations of this subject.

So, on the hunt I go, but with some delightful background knowledge to buoy me.

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Drop City by T.C. Boyle

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Sometimes when you are trying to express the worldview and interior, like, tone of your characters, it becomes necessary to write in the passive voice, and then you are writing all of the descriptions of action in the passive voice, and you are relying on that technique pretty consistently. And could it be repetitive? Is asking a lot of questions in a row something a hippie might do? Does that seem like a realistic trope? Yeah, man, because they've got a shaggy dog style of talking and thinking and appending to their thoughts with more and more filler and more and more interjections.

It is possible you are annoying your readers with these stylistic tics, despite the fact that there are vivid characters, strong dialogue, and some appreciated ribald humor in your book.

Whatever, man. Let's get high.

(Drop City recommended for entertaining and briskly plotted look at a band of flower children trying to hack out their Utopian farm ideal in Alaska. Caveat: the annoying prose style cited above.)

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Fantastic Women: 18 Tales of the Surreal and the Sublime from Tin House by Rob Spillman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Great collection entirely comprised of up-and-coming (and firmly established) female writers of fantastical, fabulist, and, well...weird fiction. I loved the presentation and careful curation of this book--clearly exciting things are happening at Tin House. Some of the bigger names (Lydia Davis; Miranda July) were represented by fairly slight (dare I say lazy?) pieces, but there were plenty of other gems and new writers to discover. A few stories tended towards the fey or overly cute--always a risk of this genre--but there was enough unsettling, and indeed, unfeminine, weirdness to go around. I also think the tone of fantastic fiction lends itself well to describe coming-of-age journeys: a freakish time, indeed.

Particular favorites:

Aimee Bender's "Americca"

Judy Budnitz's "Abroad"

Julia Elliott's "The Wilds"

Samantha Hunt's "Beast"

Kelly Link's "Light"

Lydia Millet's "Snow White, Rose Red"

Alissa Nutting's "Hot, Fast, and Sad"

Stacey Richter's "The Doll Awakens"

Karen Russell's "The Seagull Army Descends on Strong Beach" (my favorite)

Gina Zucker's "Big People"

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The Best American Short Stories 2002 by Sue Miller

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is one of the better Best American collections I've read. There weren't any stories I disliked, though as usual, some were far more memorable than others. Here are the gold star stories:

E.L. Doctorow's "A House on the Plains"--So creepy and well-done in its incremental reveal of disturbing information. Pitch perfect voice.

Melissa Hardy's "The Heifer"--Not as striking as some of the others, but great prose and a bit of comedy, too.

Alice Mattison's "In Case We're Separated"--A more traditional relationship story, but very well-done, with a poignant ending.

Jill McCorkle's "Billy Goats"--Worth a read for the communal narration.

Alice Munro's "Family Furnishings"--Of course. And extra intriguing for its glimpse into autobiographical details of this master's life. The finest story of the collection, in my opinion.

The stories by Akhil Sharma, Mary Yukari Waters, and Tom McNeal--all excellent family stories. Quite different from one another, but I enjoyed all three.

Jim Shepard's "Love and Hydrogen"--Sent me straight to Google afterwards to read up on the Hindenburg disaster. Probably my second favorite of the collection. How does he do it?! He enters the past and makes it new, fantastical, and wonderfully human. No small feat when one chooses to write about already word-saturated events.

Also liked Arthur Miller and Leonard Michaels' stories. So, actually, I suppose I'd recommend almost all of the stories.

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Justine by Lawrence Durrell

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Like a banana going soft on your counter, smelling overwhelmingly--cloyingly--of itself, there seems to be something too intense about the prose in Justine, too intense about the destructive love affair it desultorily describes and discards.

I had to throw out the banana. I couldn't finish it.

If that sounds vaguely phallic to you, then I see I've hit the right tone for Durrell's prose. It's a shame, because I can honestly say that his writing in Prospero's Cell--a magical travelogue/sketch diary about the isle of Corfu--was some of the best I have ever read. Just incandescent. The prose here, however, feels bloated. I suppose it mirrors its subject somewhat: Alexandria. Can a city be bloated? Perhaps with trash and tragedy and poverty--the Alexandria inhabited by Justine and the narrator.

Read until you reach the famous line about cities taking on a new meaning once you love someone within the city. Then, honestly, you don't have to continue.

(I may actually pick Justine up again, since it does provide an interesting version of the metafictional novel. It wasn't right for me this time around, however.)

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A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


If Patrick Leigh Fermor were to hold up a sign while hitching on the highway, it might say: "Lovable scamp. Gives good prose. Charming conversationalist. Will cheerfully eat or drink anything you offer. Will feature you in book."

I would totally give him a ride.

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Bossypants by Tina Fey

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This book is exactly what you think: funny, easy to read, and also, funny. Go, Tina!



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As part of my (continuing) self-education about Croatia and Greece, I began these two books before and during my travels, and just wrapped them up over the past couple of weeks. Both were delightful reads, and added so much richness and depth to my experience of these places. A well-read tourist is a happy tourist!

The Impossible Country: A Journey Through the Last Days of Yugoslavia by Brian Hall

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


It is incredible--the feats of understanding and compassion that can be achieved simply by talking to people. This remarkable book holds a glass to the multiple voices of the Balkans, just as the former Yugoslavia was beginning to dissolve into violence and genocide in the early nineties. Hall, like a novelist, presents us with people and their stories first. He asks difficult--sometimes explosive--questions of those he meets while traveling throughout what is now Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, and Bosnia. He doesn't give us an easy "answer," but he provides us with portraits, and in so doing, troubles the notion of nationalism and ethnic divisions everywhere, not only in the "impossible country." It is a deeply moving, lovingly written book.

Prospero's Cell: A Guide to the Landscape and Manners of the Island of Corfu by Lawrence Durrell

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


When the Northerly wind blows, find solace here, in some of the most beautiful writing you could read. You will taste the olives. You will feel the sunshine. Corfu of the late 1930's will come alive. And you will even learn some things about Greece, and about silence.

"Presently the carbide lamp is lit and the whole miraculous underworld of the lagoon bursts into a hollow bloom--it is like the soft beautiful incandescence of a gas-mantle lighting. Transformed, like figures in a miracle, we gaze down upon a sea floor drifting with its canyons and forests and families in the faint undertow of the sea--like a just-breathing heart."

--Durrell, "Ionian Profiles"

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A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888-1889 by Frederic Morton

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I read this book in an effort to give myself a crash course in the histories of some cities I will be visiting this spring. Thematically, this was a perfect book to begin with because we will be visiting Vienna first, and chronologically, the events of 1888-1889 described set in motion a chain of events that would ripple through the Balkan states, and the rest of Europe. We will be visiting Croatia after Vienna, and then Greece, so in a way, we'll be following that ripple effect across Europe.

The author, Frederic Morton, does an excellent job of creating brief but incisive anecdotal snapshots of the strata of Viennese society, from high to low, and the many people, some destined for greatness and infamy, who strolled the Ringstrasse during that fateful year. It is remarkable how many geniuses--thinkers, writers, composers, playwrights--lived in the city at that time: Freud, Mahler, Brahms, Strauss, Klimt, Herzl, Schnitzler, etc. Towards the end of the book, a great scandal occurs involving the liberal Crown Prince Rudolf and his teenaged mistress, and even though Morton sometimes overreaches in connecting this event to everything that would follow in modern life, in many ways he does have a point about rising nationalism, hysteria, and other afflictions of the "modern" era that dog us even now.

Content-wise, this is all very enjoyable and informative, but I feel I must issue a warning about the author's rather florid and repetitive writing stye. His wording is as rococo and baroque as the lavish imperial buildings of the city he describes. It's sort of like Cogsworth (oh, he of Beauty & the Beast fame) narrating an entire novel. If you can handle that, then Nervous Splendor is definitely worth a read.

Now on to the beginning of Black Lamb, Grey Falcon!

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