Wise Children. Oh, why did it take me so long to read this? Books like this one, sitting on my shelves gathering dust because I once thought they sounded interesting enough to buy, but then never got around to reading them, are exactly why I am undertaking this project and reading the books that I have instead of buying anything new.

I loved this book a lot, obviously. It’s the kind of book I want to read again for fun, but it also makes me want to go back to school, to read or reread all of Shakespeare (I am limiting myself to The Winter’s Tale for now), to go back and read some Bakhtin.

This is a novel about the theater, about the romance of family (blood ties and created families alike), about fathers and daughters, about the “hypothesis” of fatherhood and the effects of its denial, about Shakespeare, about bastard children and lost heirs and endless sets of twins (I think there are five sets of twins, all told). Dora Chance, an identical twin and a bastard child and an elderly woman, looks back on her life as a song-and-dance girl on the wrong side of a great theater family that has fallen on hard times, artistically speaking: they now do margarine commercials, game shows, and cooking shows. Shakespearean plots and illusions repeat all through the novel and are sometimes consciously evoked by Dora, and sometimes appear under the surface.

The story is nominally about fathers and daughters and the claiming of paternity, right down to the title: the proverb reads, “It is a wise child that knows its own father,” but Shakespeare turned it around to, “It is a wise father that knows his own child,” in The Merchant of Venice, and in this novel the knowing and not knowing definitely goes hand in hand with wisdom, on both sides of the parental equation. And Carter opens the novel with a quotation: “How many times Shakespeare draws fathers and daughters, never mothers and daughters.”

But I think the novel is about mothers. The absent mother, dead in childbirth or murdered by the father, the adopted caretakers, the grandmothers, the stepmothers, the nanny. Fathers are both larger than life and entirely elusive here, but mothers are everywhere. They crawl out of the woodwork to fill in the gaps Shakespeare left, while the “wise children” are so focused on fathers that they take for granted the mothers all around them. A quote from near the end:

‘Nora … don’t you think our father looked two-dimensional, tonight?’

She gave me a look that said, tell me more.

‘Too kind, too handsome, too repentant. After all those years without a word. Remember that terrible bank holiday when he pretended to our faces that he thought we were Perry’s? And tonight, he had an imitation look, even when he was crying, especially when he was crying, like one of those great, big, papier-maché heads they have in the Notting Hill parade, larger than life, but not lifelike.’

Nora sunk in thought for a hundred yards.

‘D’you know, I sometimes wonder if we haven’t been making him up all along,’ she said. ‘If he isn’t just a collection of our hopes and dreams and wishful thinking in the afternoons. Something to set our lives by, like the old clock in the hall, which is real enough, in itself, but which we’ve got to wind up to make it go.’

And on top of all of that, Wise Children is raunchy and very, very funny. I loved it without a single reservation.

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. I am not a fan of comics in general; I did not grow up reading comic books or graphic novels. I usually find the storytelling confusing and the artwork hokey.

But Jeremy and I have been reading some of the ones we probably should have read in high school or college lately, and so far this is by far my favorite. I’m surprised, because I have not seen a Batman movie since they stopped starring Michael Keaton, and I mostly do not care about super heroes, and I’m fairly immune to the romanticizing of vigilantes in any kind of contemporary setting.

But I loved this. I want to read more. (I’m also reading Watchmen, and not liking it as much.)

You’re an Animal, Vikovitz!, translated by John Casey. I don’t read very much fiction at all these days, and what I have been reading has all been pretty straightforward, so this odd little book wins the title of “Weirdest Book I’ve Read Since Grad School.” The author is a biologist, and this is a collection of stories about a character named Viskovitz who is reincarnated (well, maybe; I think the last story tells us all we know about what’s happening to Viskovitz, but “reincarnated” is as good a word as any) over and over in the bodies of different animals. He is always surrounded by the same collection of souls — his nemeses, Zucotic, Petrovic, and Lopez, as well as his two loves, Ljuba and Jana. Jana is always the one he ought to love; Ljuba is the femme fatale, his mirror image (sometimes literally), the spark for their mutual destruction.

The stories are hilarious, raunchy, and sometimes stupefyingly weird. The reproductive drives of various animals are posited as metaphors for human behaviors and urges, but even though the imagery is far from subtle, the metaphors never annoyed me. Probably because the book is so funny.

An excerpt:

The situation was rendered still more equivocal due to the periodic sex changes that we hermaphroditic sponges have to undergo. It wasn’t easy for me to accept the fact that my father was the wife of his mother, that his daughter (my sister) was his grandfather and his grandmother was also his brother (my uncle). These relations were becoming even more morbid because of the way our bodies were piled together — it was difficult to figure out where you ended and where your immediate family began. And it wasn’t easy to develop a healthy personality when the canals of your flagellate chambers were held in common with an invaginated mother, incestuous sisters and a bisexual father. When the only anatomical features on which you could construct an identity were the gastral cavity and the aperture of your osculum.

The tragedy of being a vegetable was that you couldn’t commit suicide. The advantage of being a sponge was that you could drown your sorrows.

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. The entire time I was reading this I kept thinking that it should really be taught in high school English classes, or possibly even junior high. Then after I finished it I read some reviews and it turns out that everybody younger than I am has already read this, because it was assigned in high school. So, uh, nice work, high schools of America!

I am out of the habit of talking about books so I don’t have a lot to say except that I really loved this collection. You’ve all read it anyway, and written your tenth grade research paper on the idea of memory as an index of social and individual identity, so why do you care what I think?

When We Were Orphans. This was my second Ishiguro novel and I liked this one much better than The Remains of the Day, although I concede that Remains is probably the better book. But detectives are more interesting than butlers, even when the detectives are just as lacking in self-awareness as the butlers are.

I really enjoyed watching the story unfold here, despite the fact that the protagonist and narrator creeped me out a bit from the outset. I got a whiff of Charles Kinbote from him from the very first pages, although it became clear after a while that he wasn’t quite as crazy as all that. Still, I am a sucker for a good detached and deluded narrator.

This was the first adult novel I finished in non-audio form in about a year, I think. That is a depressing statistic, particularly if I confess that I only finished one or two audio books in 2008. And possibly they were all written by Lemony Snicket.

I am going to try once again to resurrect this goddamned blog. I’m getting quite a bit of reading done right now, and I’ve undertaken a bit of a project: I am going through my pile of unread books, which numbers in the hundreds (seriously, there may be over a thousand books in this house that I have not read), in more or less alphabetical order. “More or less” because I don’t have to finish all of the As, I just have to read an A author, then move on to a B, etc. I have my books shelved in a way that makes this fairly easy: post-19th century fiction is all shelved together in alphabetical order, but there is nowhere near enough room on the shelves for all the books, so the ones I haven’t read are stacked in front of the shelved books. (Since I have too many books, possibly I should also undertake to ditch one or two every time I finish one.)

I am allowed to take breaks for pre-19th century fiction or even nonfiction, but I am not allowed to buy anything new except for book club. And then only if I can’t get it from the library.

We’ll see how this goes. Currently working on “Alexie, Sherman,” which was a great first choice.

Divisidero. I read this for my new book club, and I had very mixed feelings. On the one hand I think his writing is beautiful, and I liked the two stories fine. I think I understood what he was doing with the divided stories, but I was less certain that he’d pulled it off — in the end I just didn’t feel that they’d meshed very well.

I also had a lot of nitpicky complaints about the first half of the novel, which is set in a time and place with which I am pretty familiar. The ice storm in Petaluma felt wrong to me; I know it was supposed to be a “freak” storm, but seriously, he might as well have thrown in a rain of frogs. Claire was far too young to have had polio as a child. Nobody would stop for lunch in Carmichael. And I really wish there had been no mention of a California public defender’s office, or defense investigators, because the total unreality of those elements really took me out of the story.

Those little nitpicks made it hard for me to be fair to the novel as a whole. I found myself distrusting the part of the novel that is set in France, and feeling that it was overly romanticized and possibly anachronistic, when really I just wanted to let go and enjoy the damn book. I’m not sure how much of that was Ondaatje’s fault and how much was mine, but either way I was a bit disappointed.

I do want to read The English Patient now; the only Ondaatje I’ve read before this was a book of poetry and that short novella about the jazz musician.

So I took a break from this site, and then I went and had a baby, and in very short order I became very tired of board books and old women whispering “hush.” So I’m going to try this again, but with no attempt to keep track of every single thing I read. We’ll see what happens.

And comments are unbroken, for whatever that’s worth.

Jeremy intentionally broke the comments on this site because the comment spam was killing the server. We have a couple of different spam catchers installed, but that doesn’t lessen the load on the server from the spammers trying to get through. I don’t know how long this will last but for now, no comments. Sorry.

(It’s not like I was saying anything fascinating, anyway!)

Sorrow Floats. Although I am only halfway through the third installment in this trilogy, I can already say that the second installment, Sorrow Floats, is by far the best. I would not call any of these great literature, but Sandlin’s voice is engaging and although his characters seem awfully familiar, they are familiar in a likeable way.

Skipped Parts, the first novel, is narrated by a teenage boy, and Social Blunders, the third novel, is narrated by that same boy as a disenchanted thirty-something. I don’t really care for him as an adult, so the third book isn’t doing much for me, but Sorrow Floats — the book that first drew me to the series — is much more affecting. The narrator here is Maurey, a young mother who slips into alcoholism after her father’s death, and winds up losing custody of her baby as she slides down towards rock bottom. Sounds like a real upper, doesn’t it?

Oddly, it sort of is. As seen through the eyes of the male narrator in the other two books, Maurey is sort of an impossible fantasy girl, but once she is given her own voice, you find yourself wanting to listen. Although this book was written in the nineties, it feels like a seventies road novel (probably because it is set in 1972 and involves a road trip). The characters, like all of Sandlin’s characters, are a little hokey, a little unbelievable, a little straight out of central casting … but I like them anyway. This trilogy has been a nice diversion, and Sorrow Floats is by far the best of the lot.

Skipped Parts. I finally managed to finish this book, which has been on my to-read list longer than just about anything. When I looked for reviews of Sandlin’s work, I saw lots of comparisons to Tom Robbins and John Irving, neither of which I really understand. I guess he’s raunchy like those two authors used to be raunchy, and he has a wacky cast of characters, but his writing is rougher around the edges than either of those two at their best, and his characters are not as wacky as all that.

I liked the book. There is a Salinger vibe here, and from me that is kind of a criticism, but I liked it anyway. Raunchy coming-of-age novels seem to be a thing of the past, and this book was published fifteen years ago so I wouldn’t count on any kind of comeback for the teenage boy sex novel. I got caught up in the stock characters and the way Sandlin shakes up expectations. The novel is good-humored and funny as hell, so I forgave it a lot.

And there were some things that needed forgiving. In particular, I think Sandlin could do a better job avoiding anachronisms. Over and over, I got pulled out of the moment — 1963 Wyoming, specifically. And in either this or the sequel, Sorrow Floats, which is set in 1972 and which I am reading now, a character refers to a woman as thin “but not anorexic,” and I just don’t think that term entered the popular lexicon until the eighties.

And let us not discuss the appearance of the phrase “present company accepted.”

Those nitpicky issues aside, I liked the book quite a bit, enough to move straight on to the sequel and to order the third book in the trilogy so that I won’t have to wait. I want to know what happens to these characters, and I enjoy the way that Sandlin balances tragedy and humor. And I swear I will deny this if the word gets out, but I kind of miss the days when novelists wrote about fucking.

(Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth blurbed this novel. Drew Barrymore blurbed the sequel. Just some trivia.)

Harm Done. This is not a review of the novel, because I didn’t read the novel. This is a review of the audio version available at Audible, and the review could stop right here after these two words: it sucks.

I bought this about a year ago without realizing it was an abridged version. Once I realized that, I set it aside and didn’t listen to it. Then last week I found it in my library, wondered why I hadn’t listened to it, and put it on my iPod. And it was terrible. The reader is Christopher Ravenscroft, and unlike the other readers who have tackled her Inspector Wexford novels, Ravenscroft gives Wexford a hokey, fake-sounding accent that made me wonder if the reader was actually an American.

The abridgement is also just plain terrible. I half wonder if this was originally an unabridged recording, because at times the reading is awkwardly cut off with some phantom sounds remaining, like the reader got cut off mid-sentence with an old-fashioned tape recorder. No attempt is made to smooth out the abridged transitions; nights turn to days, scenes change, new characters show up but aren’t explained or introduced. I suspect that, in its entirety, this book would have been at least twelve hours long, but the abridged version is barely three.

It’s terrible, so bad that I am not going to blame Rendell for what felt like a heavy-handed, unsatisfying mystery involving spousal abuse and cancer patients. (Well, I blame her a little. But as someone recently pointed out, I obviously don’t know what great literature is or what makes a great writer.)

The Magician’s Assistant. The general consensus seems to be that this novel compares unfavorably to Bel Canto, but I disagree. I liked Bel Canto well enough, but I got tired of defending the ending to people who hated it. I thought The Magician’s Assistant was a lovely little novel, oddly hopeful and written with a light touch. I liked it very much, and although it felt sort of slight while I was reading it, I find myself thinking about it now and then, days after I finished it.

And it has a happy ending, Bel Canto haters.

The Black Tower. Another one I have read before, although I thought I remembered a different ending. I must be getting her books mixed up in my head in my old age. I like this one quite a lot; it’s not one of her very best, but it’s much better than more recent offerings.

The End. This entry will contain spoilers, although if you are looking for an actual plot summary you’ll have to go somewhere else.

I finished it this morning, after rereading the entire series, including two rereadings each of The Unauthorized Biography, The Beatrice Letters, and The Penultimate Peril. I was spoiled before I started reading it, and I kind of intended to hate it, but I did not. I liked it very much. I usually don’t like heavy-handed political messages, but this is a book for kids, really, and as young adult books go, this one is subtle enough. You’ve got your anti-sectarianism message, your warning against abistinence-only education, and your warning against stupidity in the name of dogma. (If there was ever any doubt that the message of this series is something along the lines of “knowledge is power,” that doubt was pretty much obliterated when the kids were saved by a snake handing them an apple.)

And a lot less is left unresolved than I was led to believe by the spoilers, but you might only get that if you have recently reread everything. By the time I finished The Slippery Slope, I was pretty sure both Baudelaire parents were dead. Quigley points out to Violet that he is probably the survivor of the fire mentioned on page 13 of the Snicket file, and when you figure that Quigley has probably seen parts of the Snicket file since he was working with Jacques, you can probably trust his information. And I don’t think we were intended to think that one of the parents would be alive after that, because the kids really stop looking for them after that the end of that book. They are still looking for answers, and they still have a dim hope that maybe one of their parents survived via the underground tunnel, but a search for their parents is no longer a focus of the story.

I also read that we never find out who J.S. is, but after rereading The Penultimate Peril, I think we were all making that too complicated. It was Jerome Squalor and Justice Strauss. No further mystery.

I also figured out on a second reading that the letters to Beatrice were not the same as the letters from Beatrice, although first I thought it was just a time difference — that the letters from her were written earlier, when she was a little girl. But that doesn’t work because she mentions Violet, Klaus, and Sunny. So I guessed that there was a second Beatrice, and I figured she had to be a sibling, but I wasn’t sure if she was younger or older. Obviously I was wrong about who she was, but I was right that there were two of them (not counting the boat).

Obviously he left a lot of questions, but a lot was answered, too, even though some of the spoilers I read said that these questions were left hanging. We do know what happened to the Quagmires — they got swallowed up by the great unknowable, whatever that is. We do know that there is another hotel under the one that burned; that was answered in The Penultimate Peril, so it did not really need to be answered in The End. (And Snicket confirms that it is still there, and someone is still cataloguing, and it hasn’t been found.) We know what was in the sugar bowl (and I think it’s clear that Lemony Snicket has it, that he retrieved it from the pond and had it with him in the taxi when he tried to get the Baudelaires to leave the hotel with him). We know why Count Olaf felt entitled to the Baudelaires’ fortune, since their parents killed his parents and all.

We don’t know some other stuff, or at least I don’t, although I suspect I just didn’t figure it out. Who was the woman who retrieved the sugar bowl from the grotto and took it to Captain Widdershins? I think it was probably Kit Snicket, but I’m not sure. What was the message that Captain Widdershins and Phil left in the refrigerator for the orphans when they abandoned the submarine? I didn’t understand the code, but there was definitely a message. (Six lemon-lime sodas, a bit of soft cheese wrapped in wax paper, and a cake that said “Violet’s Fifteenth Date.”) What was up with the Poes?

And who was Bruce? I think Bruce was Lemony Snicket, but maybe that’s too easy, or too much thinking. Maybe he’s just another volunteer, albeit one who is sort of mysterious and who always seems to turn up at crucial moments.

And, of course, we don’t know what happens next. In the Beatrice letters, the poster and the coded message make it clear that the boat “Beatrice” sinks. The whisk, the hair ribbon, and Klaus’s glasses all float up into a cave somewhere, and the boat is in pieces. We know that little Beatrice somehow makes it to civilization, but are the Baudelaires dead? Did the great unknowable thingie get them? How could Beatrice have heard Sunny’s voice on the radio unless Sunny survived? Are they just separated, or are the older orphans dead?

Maybe that all comes in the next book.