Eveningland by Michael Knight

Summary:

Grappling with dramas both epic and personal, from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill to the “unspeakable misgivings of contentment,” Eveningland captures with crystalline poeticism and perfect authenticity of place the ways in which ordinary life astounds us with its complexity. A teenaged girl with a taste for violence holds a burglar hostage in her house on New Year’s Eve; a middle aged couple examines the intricacies of their marriage as they prepare to throw a party; and a real estate mogul in the throes of grief buys up all the property on an island only to be accused of madness by his daughters. These stories, told with economy and precision, infused with humor and pathos, excavate brilliantly the latent desires and motivations that drive life forward.

Eveningland is a luminous collection from “a writer of the first rank.”

My take: 2 looks

I really, really wanted to like this book. An entire book of short stories from my home state was so compelling that I downloaded it immediately. The first story was engaging and I was enjoying it ... until the end. Then the second, third, fourth ... I began to see a pattern. The stories proved to be compelling and drew me in, but the endings of almost all of the stories in this collection were so abrupt as to be disappointing. There was so much more to be investigated, more story to be told, additional nuances to be explored. To be left flat at the end of each story left me feeling that the author had reached his word quota and had to end the story suddenly.

This one is not recommended. However, if you are looking for an excellent book of short stories, I recommend "The Paper Menagerie" by Ken Liu.

Many thanks to NetGalley for a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu

Summary:
 With his debut novel, The Grace of Kings, taking the literary world by storm, Ken Liu now shares his finest short fiction in The Paper Menagerie. This mesmerizing collection features all of Ken’s award-winning and award-finalist stories, including: “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary” (Finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards), “Mono No Aware” (Hugo Award winner), “The Waves” (Nebula Award finalist), “The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species” (Nebula and Sturgeon award finalists), “All the Flavors” (Nebula award finalist), “The Litigation Master and the Monkey King” (Nebula Award finalist), and the most awarded story in the genre’s history, “The Paper Menagerie” (The only story to win the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards).

 

A must-have for every science fiction and fantasy fan, this beautiful book is an anthology to savor.

My take: 5 looks

It took me a while to read this one because I had to pause at the end of each story, sometime for days, to think about it, mentally study it, and allow it to enter my memory stores where it wanted to reside. The stories are varied in length, are wide in range and subject, and are all unforgettable.

When I started with "The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species", I knew this would be unlike anything I'd read lately. And it just got better from there. A sly combination of history lesson, science fiction, revisionist history, and social commentary, Liu deserves every award and accolade he has received for this compilation, which are numerous.

I highly recommend this gem. Here are a few memorable quotes:

• "We have always faced a precarious existence, suspended in a thin strip on the surface of this planet between the fire underneath and the icy vacuum above." Mono No Aware
• "The desire to freeze reality is about avoiding reality." Simulacrum
• "...a boy stands in darkness and silence. He speaks; his words float up like a bubble. It explodes, and the world is a little brighter, and a little less stiflingly silent." A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel

 Thanks to NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for my honest opinion.

Oliver Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

Summary:
At times stern, at other times patient, at times perceptive, at other times in sad denial, Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher, deplores the changes in her little town of Crosby, Maine, and in the world at large, but she doesn’t always recognize the changes in those around her: a lounge musician haunted by a past romance; a former student who has lost the will to live; Olive’s own adult child, who feels tyrannized by her irrational sensitivities; and her husband, Henry, who finds his loyalty to his marriage both a blessing and a curse. As the townspeople grapple with their problems, mild and dire, Olive is brought to a deeper understanding of herself and her life–sometimes painfully, but always with ruthless honesty. Olive Kitteridge offers profound insights into the human condition–its conflicts, its tragedies and joys, and the endurance it requires.

My take: 5 looks
Loved, loved, loved this one. Presented in the form of thirteen short stories, all present a different perspective of the main character, Olive Kitteridge. Written in fluid detail, Olive infuriated, mesmerized, shocked, disappointed, impressed, and touched me. What a beautifully drawn character! To be so multidimensional from the written page puts Elizabeth Strout on my list of favorite authors.

Highly recommended.

Ajax Penumbra 1969 by Robin Sloan

Summary:
From Robin Sloan, author of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, the story of Mr. Penumbra’s first trip to San Francisco—and of how he got entangled with the city’s most unusual always-open enterprise…   It is August 1969. The Summer of Love is a fading memory. The streets of San Francisco pulse to the sounds of Led Zeppelin and Marvin Gaye. And of jackhammers: A futuristic pyramid of a skyscraper is rising a few blocks from City Lights bookstore and an unprecedented subway tunnel is being built under the bay.

Meanwhile, south of the city, orchards are quickly giving way to a brand-new industry built on silicon. But young Ajax Penumbra has not arrived in San Francisco looking for free love or a glimpse of the technological future. He is seeking a book—the single surviving copy of the Techne Tycheon , a mysterious volume that has brought and lost great fortune for anyone who has owned it. The last record of the book locates it in the San Francisco of more than a century earlier, and on that scant bit of evidence, Penumbra’s university has dispatched him west to acquire it for their library. After a few weeks of rigorous hunting, Penumbra feels no closer to his goal than when he started. But late one night, after another day of dispiriting dead ends, he stumbles across a 24-hour bookstore, and the possibilities before him expand exponentially . . .

My take: 3 looks
Another fun book about books from Robin Sloan. My F2F book club is reading "Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore", which I read a year ago. Since I had already read the book, I thought I would pick this one up, a prequel.

This tells the story of Ajax Penumbra and how he comes to San Francisco and to the store that would eventually become his own. A fun read, and recommended...but read the other first.

I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison

Summary:
Hugo Award–winning, post apocalyptic short story by Harlan Ellison.

My take: 3 looks

13 pages of WEIRD.

***SPOILERS***

Here are the characters:

AM, the supercomputer which brought about the near-extinction of humanity.

Gorrister, once an idealist and pacifist, before AM made him apathetic and listless.

Benny, once a brilliant, handsome scientist, and has been mutilated and transformed so that he resembles a grotesque simian, as well as having lost his sanity completely and regressed to a childlike temperament.

Nimdok (not his real name), an older man who persuades the rest of the group to go on a hopeless journey in search of canned food. In the audiobook read by Ellison, he is given a German accent.

Ellen, the only woman. She claims to once have been chaste ("twice removed"), but AM altered her mind so that she became desperate for sexual intercourse. Described by Ted as having ebony skin, she is the only member of the group whose ethnicity or racial identity is explicitly mentioned.

Ted, the narrator and youngest of the group. He claims to be totally unaltered, mentally or physically, by AM, and thinks the other four hate and envy him.

Basically, there is a world war. The US, China and Russia build supercomputers to run the war for efficiently for them. One of the computers becomes sentient, absorbs the other two and annihilates all people on earth, save these five. Because the computer is so angry, it tortures the humans day and night, after being able to extend their lives into an almost immortal state. The story takes place 109 years after their capture.

There are references here to God and Jesus and that got me thinking that this may be an allegory for Christianity. Each character represents a deadly sin:
Lust - Ellen has become a whore
Gluttony - Benny reverts to cannibalism
Greed - Nimdok - leads them on an extended search for canned goods
Sloth - Gorrister - lazy and uncaring
Wrath - AM embodies anger
Envy - Benny's large penis is a point of contention
Pride - Ted is quite sure that he is the only one completely unaffected

With that foundation, AM is God. He creates, destroys, and knows all things. He can get into their minds and manipulate their feelings. In the end, Ted could represent Jesus and his ultimate sacrifice to give the others freedom.

I have no idea if this is what Ellison intended, or if I am full of hooey. After all, sometimes a soft jelly thing with rubbery appendages is just that: a soft jelly think with rubbery appendages.

Recommended for the weirdness factor alone.

Creepy Book of the Day: Love You Forever by Robert Munsch

 

Summary:

A young woman holds her newborn son and looks at him lovingly. Softly she sings to him: "I'll love you forever. I'll like you for always. As long as I'm living, My baby you'll be" So begins the story that has touched the hearts of millions of Americans. Since publication in 1986, "Love You Forever" has sold more than 15 million copies in paperback and the regular hardcover edition (as well as hundreds of thousands of copies in Spanish and French).

My take:
I am going to lose some of you here. This book seems to be very polarizing, and I am on the "this book is hella creepy" end of it.

First, the mother holds her son as an infant. She holds him as all mothers do, in a rocker, gazing lovingly down as he sleeps in her arms.

It is a beautiful illustration and reminds mothers of all ages what it was like to be totally in love with your newborn.

That's when it starts to get weird.

Mom has an unnatural attachment to her child. She creeps in at night, evidently on her hands and knees, and peeks at him sleeping.

She gets him out of bed while he is asleep so she can hold him. Who knows what time it is. It may be 3am. She just feels that she needs to hold him. She probably can't sleep because he is too far away from her if she is in her bedroom and he is in his.

Poor kid.

He grows into the typical teenager, but you can see from this illustration that he probably needed to have his tail beat a little more often. If my teenage boy walked through the house at this age, leaving a wake of grime and dirt behind him, you had better believe that baseball glove in his hand would be replaced with a mop and dishcloth.

The boy finally gets his mama's breast out of his mouth and moves out. By the looks of the mother, this "boy" must be in his 40s. What does the mom do? Drives through town with a freaking ladder on the roof of her car. When she gets to his apartment, she puts the ladder outside his bedroom window,  because of course, it's the middle of the night, and climbs through the window so she can pick him up and rock him as he sleeps.

This poor woman is insane. As you can see from the picture, even the cat is trying to escape. And he must be medicated, because he is not waking up. And does she have on a dress? She climbed a ladder in a dress and Sunday shoes? Man, oh man.

 Mom eventually (and thankfully) gets old enough that she can no longer follow him and cradle him creepily in the middle of the night, so the son cradles her. What gives? This is a seriously codependent relationship. And where is her husband? He either left her craziness, or she killed him in his sleep.

I vote for the latter.

And the cycle continues...as the man-child now looks down at his poor, unsuspecting child.

Norman Bates, anyone?

The sequel could be called "I Love You to Death".

Go the F**K to Sleep by Adam Mansbach

Summary:
Go the F**k To Sleep is a bedtime book for parents who live in the real world, where a few snoozing kitties and cutesy rhymes don't always send a toddler sailing off to dreamland. Honest, profane, and affectionate, Adam Mansbach's verses and Ricardo Cortés' illustrations perfectly capture the familiar—and unspoken—tribulations of putting your little angel down for the night, and open up a conversation about parenting in the process.

My take: 5 looks

Okay, I have to say that this book is hilarious! Yes, it is crude and crass and has the F-bomb on each and every page. But, having three kids in one year, I can assure you that this is how I felt almost every night from their birth to around age 2. You have to read this with a sense of humor to truly enjoy it the way it was intended, tongue-in-cheek and funny as can be.

The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted by Elizabeth Berg

Summary:
Exhilarating short stories of women breaking free from convention Every now and then, right in the middle of an ordinary day, a woman rebels, kicks up her heels, and commits a small act of liberation. What would you do, if you were going to break out and away? Go AWOL from Weight Watchers and spend an entire day eating every single thing you want–and then some? Start a dating service for people over fifty to reclaim the razzle-dazzle in your life–or your marriage? Seek comfort in the face of aging, look for love in the midst of loss, find friendship in the most surprising of places? Imagine that the people in these wonderful stories–who do all of these things and more–are asking you: What would you do, if nobody was looking?

My take: 4 looks
What a delightful book of TRUTH! This middle-aged, female reader laughed out loud more than once and nodded in agreement too many times to count.

Which story did I love the most? Goodness! I loved the title story, and the sad truth that it is, indeed, not as fulfilling as you think or hope it will be when you throw caution to the wind and eat it all.

I loved the story of the 50 year friendship between two ladies who were still so playful with one another that they had a very difficult conversation using a Ken and Barbie doll.

I loved the closure the woman received when the very man who walked into her dating service turned out to be a long, lost love with no memory of her. The closure...and the new beginning with her own husband.

Every story was a good one, a true one, and I highly recommend this book.

Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain by Kirsten Menger-Anderson

Summary:
In 1664 Dr. Olaf van Schuler flees the Old World and arrives in New Amsterdam with his lunatic mother, two bags of medical implements, and a carefully guarded book of his own medicines. He is the first in what will become a long line of peculiar physicians. Plagued by madness and guided by an intense desire to cure human affliction, each generation of this unusual family is driven by the science of its day: spontaneous combustion, phrenology, animal magnetism, electrical shock treatment, psychosurgery, genetic research. As they make their way in the world, New York City, too, evolves—from the dark and rough days of the seventeenth century to the towering, frenetic metropolis of today. Like Patrick Süskind's classic novel Perfume , Kirsten Menger-Anderson's debut is a literary cabinet of curiosities—fascinating and unsettling, rich and utterly singular.

My take: 3 looks
What an interesting book!

The premise is smartly done: A doctor in the 1600s, just after the middle ages, starts the book with his story, then progresses very nicely through the generations of his family tree ... doctor after doctor after doctor. The chapters read as short stories, and indeed, some were published separately in various publications apart from appearing in this book.

Not all of the stories center around the doctor. Some center around how the doctor is treating the main character. There is talk of bleeding someone as a cure, drinking a tincture to become pregnant, shock therapy, a very early lobotomy, and the move away from silicone breast implants. The stories follow the latest in medical procedure and technology, ending in the year 2006. And not all treat physical ailments. The science of phrenology is examined, as is "hysteria" and retardation.

Very compelling, very clever, nice writing and extremely fluid, giving the single thread that weaves through the book. Highly recommended for a different sort of reading experience!

The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad

Summary:
"While I lingered yet, my hand resting lightly on my ship's rail as if on the shoulder of a trusted friend. But, with all that multitude of celestial bodies staring down at one, the comfort of quiet communion with her was gone for good."

The Secret Sharer is a popular early 20th century novel written by author Joseph Conrad. The story taking place at sea, is told from the perspective of a young sea captain. Not knowing his crew ahead of time except for the previous night, he struggles to see if he can life up to the authority role that is a must among captains. The Secret Sharer is a an excellent book for those who are interested in novels dealing with the sea and also those who are fans of the writings of Joseph Conrad.

My take: 3 looks
Not a novel at all, at 62 pages, or even a novella. I would classify this as a short story. A weird little short story. Basically, there is another sailor rescued by the captain in the middle of the night. This man committed murder aboard his ship, and swam (naked, may I add) for his life afterward. The captain of our ship finds him and decides to keep him a secret.

The interesting question in this story is whether or not there is actually another person. The captain speaks repeatedly of their resemblance, stating several times that looking at this man is like looking in the mirror. The captain's actions and communications also seem to be odd and noticable by both the first and second mates, raising additional questions about his mental stability. He turns out to be a very unreliable narrator, and the reader is left with more than a few questions once the stowaway disembarks.

Recommended.