I picked up West of Here by Jonathan Evison based on some rave reviews from other book bloggers, so I started with high expectations.  Unfortunately, while I think the novel was certainly ambitious and at times clever and funny, overall it was disjointed and really lacked a clear plot.

The book opens in 1890, as a group of explorers arrive at a small, recently settled Pacific Northwest town of Port Bonita to launch an expedition of the nearby Olympic Mountain range that has thus far  been untouched by white men.  Besides the explorers, there is also a colorful cast of Indians, “celestials”, entrepreneurs, bar owners, prostitutes and social crusaders whose lives and personal struggles we glimpse from time to time. Fast forward 120 years to Port Bonita 2006. The small town has not grown to become a Seattle or Portland as some of the early settlers predicted; instead it and its residents remain as stagnant and dead as the dammed up Elwha River.  Here we are introduced to some of the descendents of the 1890s Port Bonita, plus a plethora of other local denizens who make up this backwater town.  Honestly, it’s hard to go into more detail than this vague summery because there are at least 30-40 characters with their own intricate and nuanced relationships and problems to follow and keep straight (perhaps a table at the beginning labeling the cast of characters would have been helpful?).

My biggest problem with this book was that beside a weakly explained (and ultimately silly) magical element and the fact that some of the characters from 2006 were descendents of those from 1890, there was absolutely no connection between the two stories.  I assume that Evison was trying to show the evolution (or lack thereof) of Port Bonita and the differences between the passionate, hard-working, and entrepreneurial spirit of the settlers and Indians to the pathetic, weak-willed and irresponsible great-grandsons of Port Bonita 120 years later.  However, instead of developing this theme between the two stories, he jumps from one time period to the other, with little or no inter-connectedness. I also disliked that each of the chapters were only 2-3 pages long before jerking you to the next totally unrelated story. Instead of each section coming together as a cohesive story about the community, you get small vignettes of different characters’ lives without really making me care about any of them.  This style of storytelling also made the book unnecessarily difficult to follow.  I would often confuse the characters and forget key relationships because Evison was constantly bouncing from story to story.

I kept wanting this book to commit to something.  To its detriment, the reader is hard-pressed to say what the actual plot is. This is a book about too many things without a central conflict that drives it forward towards resolution.  Plot threads and important twists seemingly disappear or are hastily resolved after a few hundred pages, leaving the reader to question why they were ever brought up in the first place.  I can appreciate that the relationships and simple progression of time are really the driving force of the novel and not a single event, but I really feel like this book would have benefitted by simply focusing on just one of these time periods, since their link to each other is tenuous at best.   This could have been a great historical fiction novel like The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet or Deadwood.  Or it could have been a darkly comic contemporary novel about a group of pathetic losers like Skippy Dies or The Imperfectionists.  Instead, it’s a muddy and unfocused mix of both.

Finally, perhaps this is me being nitpicky, but I really disliked the flood of branded products in this book (in fact KFC ends up playing a central role in this book).  I generally hate any branded products and pop culture references in books because I feel like at best, this dates your novel and at worst it may leave your readers or future readers confused. It’s totally unnecessary and can be avoided by simply being more generic.  I don’t mind if there is an occasional product reference in a book (like a character ordering a Coke at a diner), but I don’t want to feel like you sold space in your book to big companies for product placement.

I will say that there are times I genuinely enjoyed the book. I was actually really entertained Port Bonita 2006, and found myself laughing frequently at some points. And I did like that the city of Port Bonita turns out to be the most important character in the book.  However, I pretty much agree with the New York Times review and don’t think there’s enough pleasurable drama or elegant prose to justify delving into this rather long novel.  It’s epically ambitious, but ultimately falls short.

Like many bibliophiles, I’ve been following this year’s Tournament of Books competition pretty closely. The ToB is a bracketed showdown of the past year’s top 16 novels based on readers’ and reviewers’ top reviews. Then, celebrity judges composed of authors and literary figures read both books that are facing off and pick a winner to advance to the next round. There’s also a zombie round where readers can vote to bring back 2 previously knocked out books to face off against the remaining novels at the end. You can find a list of this year’s top 16 books here. Now, out of these 16 books, I must confess I’ve only read 5 (Bad Marie, Room, A Visit From the Goon Squad, Freedom and Skippy Dies), so some of the face-offs have been less than exciting for me. However, when I checked the brackets on Saturday I was eager to see the results of the A Visit From the Goon Squad vs Skippy Dies since I’ve read both books and have strong opinions on both. Sadly, I was totally shocked and disappointed to see that Anthony Doerr chose A Visit From the Goon Squad over my all time favorite book from last year.

Sometimes I really feel like I’m the only person who didn’t particularly care for A Visit From the Goon Squad. Mind you, it’s not a terrible book, in fact it was a perfectly pleasant way to pass a Saturday afternoon, but I was really surprised that it got so many accolades and so much hype. To me, it was the literary equivalent of watching a Sex and the City marathon: enjoyable but fluffy. The book was neither clever nor as emotionally hard hitting as I was expecting. In my opinion, Egan was trying too hard to be funny and darkly emotional without ever really achieving it and instead coming across as gimmick-y (50 pages of power point slides!). The characters also seemed really one-dimensional and unlikable in a boring way. Skippy Dies on the other hand was hilarious, satirical, clever, engaging and complex in a way that A Visit From the Goon Squad was not. It was an epic adventure that also similarly spread the story between several narrators but in a much more successful fashion because the characters were all much more full-bodied and interesting. Murray’s prose seemed so effortless compared to Egan’s somewhat clunky, forced words.

To Doerr’s credit, he seemed to enjoy both books immensely but for him Goon Squad seemed more relevant to his life at that moment. This is actually a pretty interesting point, because I feel that if I had read Goon Squad even a year ago, I probably would have loved it too. As I’ve been progressing as a reader however, I find myself enjoying less linear, more creative novels that are much more intricate and epic (Think The Instructions or Catch-22), where I feel Skippy Dies could be classified as well. I absolutely know I’ll be voting for it in the Zombie Round. Thoughts?

Inspired by a conversation with several friends on twitter, today’s post showcases 5 excellent books that exemplify each one of the five senses.  In a few cases, I’ve taken some artistic liberties, but overall I think each one of these novels does a fantastic job of engaging your senses.  What books have engaged YOUR senses?  I limited myself to fiction books that I’ve read, but I’d be interested in what non-fiction or memoirs you’ve read that do a great job of engaging your senses!

Sight:
Blindness by Jose Saramago

The title of this book says it all; rather than presenting the reader with sumptuous landscapes and visual fireworks, “Blindness” focuses on the loss of sight and its shattering effects.  A contemporary apocalyptic book written by the late Portuguese Nobel prize-winning author Jose Saramago, “Blindness” follows the social and moral collapse of a society after an unexplained epidemic of blindness strikes its citizens. The novel does an excellent job conveying the struggles of people who have lost both their vision and social order.  The sparse prose and minimal punctuation is very effective at setting the mood for the novel and Saramago does an incredible job at depicting sensory deprivation.

Smell:
Perfume by Patrick Suskind

This haunting book has been a favorite of mine for years. In the slums of eighteenth-century France, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born with the incredible gift of perfect smell. He grows up on the odors of Paris, and becomes an apprentice perfumer, all the while stalking and murdering women in his search for the most beautiful scent. In Grasse, he catches the scent of a young girl whose scent fuels an obsession that drives Grenouille to ever more fantastic and appalling lengths to create a perfect perfume.  The ending is an absolute orgy of the senses and makes getting through the slower parts of the book very much worth it.


Touch:
Delta of Venus by Anais Nin

I’ll admit, I stole my first copy of Delta of Venus from a library book sale when I was 14, and it, um, changed my world.  I had never known erotica existed and promptly spent the next four years with it hidden between my mattresses, to be pulled out on lonely nights when my crush didn’t call me back.  While some parts may seem a little cheesy today, this collection of short erotica stories certainly spans the depravity rainbow (incest! pedophilia! prostitution!) and they exemplify the sense of touch above all.  I guarantee your skin will feel electric while you read these.


Sound:
Metropole by Ferenc Karinthy

Disclaimer: I adore this book, and if I had to pick my favorite book of all time, this may be it. It was written by a linguist, about a linguist named Budai, who is flying to a linguistics conference in Helsinki and falls asleep on a plane, only to wake up in a foreign country that he can’t place.  He gets shuffled from the airport to a hotel and spends the rest of the book desperately trying to leave.  He has very little money left and cannot communicate with a single person, despite knowing many languages.  Things go from bad to worse as Budai is kicked out of the hotel and is forced to earn money on the streets to survive, while still holding out hope of finding his way back to the airport.  Eventually the overwhelming claustrophobia of the city begins to wear you down as a reader.  Buildings are constantly being built and torn down, and the city is a dense mass of winding and maze-like streets and alleys.  This book engages almost all of the senses, but especially sound.  There is so much noise and crushing congestion that even as a reader, you begin to recoil.

Taste:
Belly of Paris by Emile Zola

A classic French novel from the ultimate French author Emile Zola, “Belly of Paris” is a story about Florent Quenu who escapes from Devil’s Island and flees to Paris after being deported from there in 1851.  He returns to a changed city, most notably the new food markets of the grand Les Halles.  To Florent, Les Halles represents a greedy, wasteful and food-obsessed bourgeois society.  Zola exhaustively describes the colorful food markets and the vast amounts of food available to upper class Parisians, and in such painstaking detail that it makes the reader almost nauseous. He uses these lush food markets as the catalyst about the class conflicts and social struggles in Paris in the 1850s and the book actually transcends time and is applicable in many ways to some of the food politics and food excess of today.

Early this morning news broke that Borders was finally filing for chapter 11 bankruptcy after unsuccessfully trying to reorganize and cut jobs to make the company viable. Their demise was avidly tracked and updated frequently over the past few months on twitter by publishing pundits, bloggers and booksellers.

While I do believe that many current business models for booksellers must be reformatted for changing times, Borders’ downfall has had a surprisingly emotional effect on me and many other bibliophiles (check #myfirstborders for memories on twitter). For many of us, it seems, Borders was one of the first places where we really discovered and enjoyed books. Before Borders came to Akron, Ohio in the early 1990s, the only place I could look at and get books was from unappealing and cramped Waldenbooks stores in the mall. Having been an avid reader even as a young kid, it was really disappointing to have to browse there; the selection was limited and the shelves were so high and narrow that I could barely squeeze by other patrons to find books. When the Borders was opened, it was a like a whole new world. Every other Friday, my parents would drive up to Akron as a treat and I would get lost in the spacious bookshelves, where books were neatly organized and I could pick up staff recommendations to discover new authors. And after cramming my arms full of books and magazines, I could stumble over to the café and flip through everything at my leisure with a big hot chocolate and a cookie with my mom and dad. Of course now, this kind of bookstore set up is almost de rigueur in all the big box bookstores, but at the time it felt really unique and special. And while I always try to support local and independent bookstores, the sad truth is that not everyone had or has access to them. I certainly didn’t as a kid. But I had Borders and it still holds a really magical and nostalgic place in my childhood which is why I really do want them to succeed, somehow. Hopefully bankruptcy will force them to adopt a strategy that is more in line with the current market and they will be able to re-discover who their customers are and draw them back in with better marketing and programs.

Borders also released a list of under-performing stores that are being closed in the coming months and Columbus’s 2 stores are slated to close. However, my childhood store will stay up and running for the time being, which secretly makes me very happy (though admittedly, it is not the Borders I remember from my childhood :/)

You can check this website that Borders created concerning the bankruptcy for more updates and details on how it will impact customers and employees.

What are your thoughts about Borders closing? Do you have any special Borders memories?

Confession:  my favorite kinds of books are the ones where boy meets girl, boy and girl get married, girls rips out boy’s still beating heart, girl marries boy’s best friend, boy kills himself and girl ends up having an unhappy marriage anyway. What can I say, I’m a romantic.

Combine my love for incredibly depressing books with Valentine’s Day and you have the subject of today’s post: My Top 10 Favorite Anti – Romance Books! After culling my shelves, I picked my favorite heartbreak stories featuring things like loneliness, cheaters, drunks, felons, murder, insanity, and war.

So here’s to you, my fellow anti-valentines:

10. Women – Charles Bukowski
Your classic love story featuring America’s favorite sex-crazed alcoholic scumbag.  Read if you enjoy debaucherous tales of hairy old men drunkenly banging screeching hags followed by hungover morning hazes where the protagonist describes his beer shits. (link)


9. Naomi – Junichiro Tanizaki
A much more refined story that teaches men just what happens when you marry a teenager. (link)









8. The Good Wife – Stewart O’Nan
Everything is going great for the newly married and pregnant Patty and Tommy until Tommy doesn’t come home one night and is arrested for murder the next day and sent to jail for 28 years. This book follows the struggles of a woman and child that try to live in the shameful shadow of a man in prison. (link)





More after the jump...

 Yikes, I’ve been very MIA so far this year, but I swear I have a good excuse! Because the weather has been so ridiculously snowy, cold and icy, I’ve been hibernating in my room reading like crazy.  I made a goal this year to read 100 books and while that probably won’t happen (I plan on attacking some chunksters this year), I’ve been plugging away at my awesome pile of TBR books.  I also finished a few books that have been lingering on my half-read list, like ‘I, Robot’ and ‘The Instructions’.

I’m going to jump right into a book review

After all the hype that Hannah Pittard’s “The Fates Will Find Their Way” was getting from book bloggers, I pre-ordered my copy and dove in the day it was released. The book certainly lived up to my expectations and is now my go-to recommendation so far for the year.  The book is a very atmospheric, dream-like story that examines the impact a local tragedy has on a group of young boys.  Sixteen year old Nora Lindell vanishes from her upper middle class town on Halloween in the mid 1970s and is never seen again.   Stories surrounding her disappearance and fate multiply and grow into full fledged fantasies.  Was she kidnapped by a smooth talking stranger at the airport? Did she flee to Arizona to stay with relatives, marrying a hard working old Mexican? Or did she find her way to India and take up with a female companion?  The boys spend hours discussing and dissecting her life and family, not realizing the lifelong effect this will have on their lives.  The novel bounces back and forth between their teenage years and life as grown adults with children and families of their own and not only focuses on Nora Lindell, but also on their loss of innocence and fear of becoming an adult.  As you go deeper into the book, the secrets and private drama of the town residents are slowly revealed and you watch as lives are ruined and people die before their time. Adding to the group voice and tone of the story is Pittard’s choice to write in first person plural.  In the end, you realize that the boys don’t really want to discover what happened to Nora and her place in their hearts and minds is slowly drains away.

The novel reminds me very much of The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides; in fact this may be its only fault.  However, while both books are written from the perspective of a group of boys obsessed with the tragedy of a girl(s) in the 1970s, Pittard’s novel also focused on the theme of growing up/becoming an adult and therefore does indeed stand on its own.  I was also reminded, strangely, of the movie “Brick”, though I can’t actually figure out why. The book is neither snappy nor noir like the movie, but occasionally I would be reminded of the movie when the boys would get together and discuss different rumors and gossip about Nora. 

I would highly recommend this book to anyone that is craving a quick, intense read (and really, who isn’t?).  Follow this link for an audio interview with Hannah Pittard, as well as an excerpt from the book.

Mmmm Sundays.  My favorite day of the week to relax with coffee and a good book.  This Sunday was even better because I was joined by my parents' super fluffy kitten, Scooter!  I really haven't had a totally relaxing, stress-free day in the past 4 weeks so this was exactly what I needed.


I'm flying through Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin, based off of the review from The Book Lady's Blog. It's an extremely engaging yet dark and twisty story that takes place in Mississippi.  The disappearance of a local girl prompts the small town police to question Larry Ott, who was accused but never convicted of raping and murdering a girl who also disappeared 20 years ago.  The case causes the constable, who had befriened Ott as a child, to relive the troubled friendship and as the case unravels, so do secrets from their shared past.

I'm only 50 pages from the end and I have a feeling I'll be finishing it within the hour.  It's exactly the kind of southern gothic quick read I was looking for today.  Earlier in the week I asked twitter for their favorite quick but awesome reads. Tell me your favorite in the comments!