Reading Like a Fiend

I picked this one up for the following reasons: 1) he is Israeli 2) he directed an Israeli film that I love 3) I dig short stories and 4) Ira Glass recommended it. How can you not enjoy this? There were probably 40 or so short stories in this collection, some hysterical, some sad, some absolutely bizarre. You never knew what the next story would bring and it was incredibly captivating. Good to read too when you're tired because the stories are so short- you can easily read them all in a day or can easily break them up as well.

The Borrower was also a unique tale- Lucy is a children’s librarian in Missouri and her favorite kid is Ian, a clearly gay ten-year-old with fundamentalist, evangelical Christian parents. Great combination. Lucy ends up inadvertently kidnapping Ian (or is he kidnapping her?) and they travel first to Chicago and then almost all the way up to Canada, getting more and more tangled up in webs of lies and possible charges of kidnapping and child endangerment. I loved the book up until the end- I felt that even though it was told from Lucy’s point of view, it was incomplete because you never really find out about Ian. I found myself wishing that the author would write another book from Ian’s point of view, maybe like 15 years later. Did he ever get out of the clutches of his parents? How did he explain the kidnapping? Did he ever get back in touch with Lucy? All these things were left incomplete and I was left wanting more.

Taft 2012 was hysterical. I found it in a bookstore in Sun Valley a few months ago and have wanted to read it since. It’s nice having a friend working in the library because you get books ordered for you. Taft 2012 begins with the premise that after he lost the election to Woodrow Wilson, William Howard Taft disappeared. In actuality (according to the book), he fell asleep and essentially hibernated until he woke up in 2011 and was shot by a member of the Secret Service who mistook him for someone about to attack the president. People, shocked that Taft had returned, also began to appreciate his conservative politics and his Progressive thoughts and he becomes the ideal candidate for 2012. The story is told both through Taft’s experiences as well as “transcripts” from TV shows, newspaper articles, Twitter comments, notes from the desks of various people and Secret Service logs. I have a far greater appreciation for William Howard Taft after reading this, which I did in about 5 hours. Such a great book. 

My book club this month read Gateway to Women’s Country, by Sherri Tepper. It wasn’t what I expected it to be but at the same time, I’m not sure if I could tell you what I expected. It looks at a post-apocalyptic, matriarchal society where the men are sent to garrisons at age 5 and then decide ten to fifteen years later if they want to stay with the garrison or return home to be a servitor and serve the women who are the doctors, shopkeepers, etc. The story jumps back and forth in time and is a new, interesting look, at a post-nuclear war society. It reminded me a lot of a similar premise told in Califia’s Daughters by Leigh Richards (Laurie R King), but obviously has a different take upon the situation. We had a great discussion though, only once veering off-track into the incredibly inappropriate.

The Family Fang is this great story about two children, Annie and Buster, who seemingly were born simply for the purpose of being a part of their parents living art. Each chapter interspersed with a short chapter about some living art performance that the two were forced to participate in. For example, one chapter told of a vacation down to Florida where the parents pretended they were a couple and the kids were unaccompanied minors. The dad proposed to the mom over the loud-speaker during the flight and on the way down she accepted and on the way back, she refused. The art was the visible excitement and discomfort, respectively, felt by the other passengers on the flight. Annie and Buster, both back at home after some poor adult decisions, are forced to rejoin their parents but, also as adults, now feel more confident in refusing. They find themselves caught up in their parents’ largest and most elaborate scheme. I don’t want to give anything else away because there is a pretty huge twist but the story was compelling and I kept wanting to know more about the different shenanigans the parents got Annie and Buster involved in.

 

And now to the disappointing. I stumbled across The Discovery of Witches the same time as Taft 2012 and found it at the library a few weeks ago. I was really excited about the premise and the descriptions of Oxford and was captivated for the first 200 or so pages. Then it just disintegrated into a hybrid of a romance novel meets Twilight meets Vampire Diaries meets lord knows what else. Eventually, I felt that the author had just put a bunch of ideas into a bowl and just pulled one out and wrote about it for twenty pages before doing it gain. New characters kept getting introduced while old characters didn’t seem to have any real dimension or serve really much purpose. Plot points that had been brought up at the beginning were seemingly abandoned and mentioned only briefly. And then in the end, it seemed like the easy way out was taken in order to set the book up for a sequel. Not one that I will read. Or maybe I will, just to get some sort of conclusion.