If you already know the Jasper Fforde books, this blog post is not for you. Rather, it's to raise awareness among the millions that are scratching their heads and saying "Fforde? Is that supposed to be Swedish or something? Nah, screw it, let's see what's on Lamebook."
I've reccomended these books to virtually everyone I've run across since the first time I read them. It's not uncommon to find a book that's kinda different, has some unusual element to it, or finds a way to reverse an expectation we didn't even know we had. The two white girls obsessed with flamenco in Sarah Bird's The Flamenco School. The loveable, aimless, semi-alcoholic dad in Tawni O'Dell's Fragile Beasts. The presence of Turner's Syndrome (which I'd never heard of before) in Jennifer Haigh's The Condition.
Jasper Fforde's books are something else altogether. You'll find them miscategorized as mysteries, but they're really about the journey, not the destination.
Thursday Next lives an a sort of alternate reality, similar to our own, but with some key differences. Wales is a Socialist Republic, life is dominated by evil corporation Wal-Ma.....I mean, Goliath, the Crimean War dragged on for decades and claimed thousands of casualties, and literature looms large in everyone's lives. There are WillSpeak machines on streetcorners: put a quarter in, and you get a soliloqy. People attend Rocky Horror-style performances of Richard III ("WHEN is the winter of our discontent?"). And crimes relating to fiction are serious matters.
That's what Thursday starts out doing. Then, she is recruited by Jurisfiction to police matters internal to books. For instance, keeping the Mispeling Vyrus under control (it disfigured Uriah Hope from David Copperfield, who became "cadaverous" instead of "courageous," etc.). She also runs Rage Counseling Sessions in Wuthering Heights and in an inspired sequence, gives a happy ending to a child's tale about a blind dog.
The books are nothing short of brilliant. They're funny, clever and totally original. You can read one in an afternoon. Knowledge of literature is somewhat helpful, but not necessary. It actually inspired me to read several of the classics. After meeting Miss Havisham as Thursday's mentor (who liked to sneak off in her moldy wedding dress to attempt to break the land speed record before Mr. Toad could), I read Great Expectations and found it to be surprisingly funny, much more enjoyable to get through than I ever would have imagined, and actually not terribly different from today's better-written novels.
But if you're not in the mood for a Dickens and are looking for something a bit different, try a Jasper Fforde book. The Thursday Next books are: The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, Something Rotten, and Thursday Next: First Among Sequels. Enjoy!
Showing posts with label Why I Love Him. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Why I Love Him. Show all posts
Monday, August 23, 2010
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
A Nice Summer Read
image from State Library of Victoria, AustraliaI have some pretty specific ideas on what makes a good "summer read." The book should be light, both in weight and in content (I once read the hardcover edition of Russell Banks' excellent novel Cloudsplitter on the beach. My arms were sore the next day). It should be the kind of thing that's easy to put down and leave at almost any point. It shouldn't be shallow, but should make you feel happy.
James Herriott's series of books on his life as a country vet in Yorkshire fit the bill beautifully. The books are a series of anecdotes about his more memorable cases and incidents in his life, so they're very easy to stop and start with. They're short, and out in paperback so they're portable. But the most notable thing about them is the deep vein of happiness that runs through them.
image from amazon.comThere are seven books in the core series. They roughly chronicle his life from a young vet, newly qualified and beginning the hopeless task of finding employment during the Great Depression (an era when the economy and the shift away from farming led to frequent ads in his professional journals that read "Experienced Vet, will work for keep."), settling in to life in Yorkshire, getting married, serving in World War II and having a child. But there's no particular need to read them in order. I just discovered the other day that I hadn't read the first one, somehow.
I took a break from the gloom and doom (thus far) of my library haul to enjoy it. It reminded me of all the things that were good about those books. Herriott's love for his profession and his surroundings seep into every word he writes. This being an animal practice, of course, many of the stories are very sad. Mallock, the "knackerman" who euthanizes large animals and renders their carcasses for a variety of uses, features prominently in the series. But a lot of them are amusing, too, such as his long relationship with his "nephew," Pekingese Tricki Woo, who sends him postcards and Christmas gifts, or their "cat about town" who made a point of attending all rummage sales, Grange meetings, and church socials in the town. Since Herriott had to make house calls at all hours of the day and night, there's ample opportunity for slapstick as well, such as the time he went out to see a cow in his pajamas and Wellingtons, then wandered exhausted and unfortunately penniless into a local diner and tried to get breakfast.
My all-time favorite story was about the small farmer who had an epidemic sweeping through his stock. It looked like he was going to lose everything to this hopeless, untreatable illness when Herriott asked for permission to experiment with a new drug sample he'd just received that was supposed to work miracles. Overnight, the calves all returned from death's door, and antibiotics had come to Yorkshire.
The books I have belonged originally to my grandfather, and were among the last he read. I do hope they're still in print, because they're very enjoyable and pleasant for any animal lover to read.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Showing George Saunders Some Love
It's funny how people can influence your lives, and how the influence spreads out like ripples in a pond and continues to affect you long after you barely think of that person. In college, I had one class with Dr. Janet Groth, Magazine Article Writing. I came to like and respect her a lot and got to know her a bit after college. But she influenced my intellectual life a great deal by requiring us all to get a semester-long subscription to The New Yorker. It's been over ten years since I took her class, and in that time, I've subscribed to it on and off, but mostly on. I look forward to its arrival every week, and I bet you can guess my favorite part! It's the short story.
That was where I first heard of George Saunders. He kind of rose from being an occasional fiction submitter to writing the "Shouts and Murmurs" more regularly. I thought that was too bad, because I don't really like "Shouts and Murmurs" much, but loved his short stories. I always read them.
Saunders is excellent in finding the absurd in modern life. Sometimes, like in his novella "Bounty," he stretches that talent into the near future. Increasingly and alarmingly, he doesn't have to. I think of him every time I drive on the 33, with its huge billboards reading "Get Joint Replacement Surgery" and "The Best Stroke Care Is At Mercy." That's right out of one of his stories.
His stuff has taken on a more political bent as of late, but my favorites are the ones with ordinary people struggling to find humanity in a corporatized, bland world. The one about the professional caveman re-enactor at a failing theme park whose job is threatened by the corporate drones because of his reluctance to violate his moral code by ratting out a co-worker ("Pastoralia"). The one about the teenaged couple with brain implants, raised by a corporation to be product testers, who risk their consciousness for a chance at independent life ("Jon"). Even the one about the grandfather who makes the decision to give in to corporate coersion to give his grandson a shot at freedom of expression ("My Flamboyant Grandson").
When corporate repression isn't the theme, societal repression often is. The characters in "Winky" and "Sea Oak" had the deck stacked against them from the beginning: raised in poverty, with no real models for any type of success, and are repeating the cycle as adults. But there's a hopefulness and humanity to all of his characters. Most of them are trapped by circumstance: the narrator of "Pastoralia" has a special-needs child, and we get the impression that his caveman job was the best one he could find to keep a roof over his family's head, even if he never gets to sleep under it himself. Neil, of "Winky," has his bizarre, born-again sister permanently ensconsed in his house. And the narrator of "Sea Oak" lives in the projects with his sister, his cousin, their babies and his great-aunt, and supports them all by working as a male stripper. But they don't give up. They fight back against a repressive social structure and a bland corporatized landscape the best way they know how: by being themselves, taking joy in the little things, and moving forward inch by inch.
I love George Saunders because he can be both optimistic and cynical enough for these strange times in which we live, and I believe that literary history will judge him as one of the major voices of this era.
That was where I first heard of George Saunders. He kind of rose from being an occasional fiction submitter to writing the "Shouts and Murmurs" more regularly. I thought that was too bad, because I don't really like "Shouts and Murmurs" much, but loved his short stories. I always read them.
Saunders is excellent in finding the absurd in modern life. Sometimes, like in his novella "Bounty," he stretches that talent into the near future. Increasingly and alarmingly, he doesn't have to. I think of him every time I drive on the 33, with its huge billboards reading "Get Joint Replacement Surgery" and "The Best Stroke Care Is At Mercy." That's right out of one of his stories.
His stuff has taken on a more political bent as of late, but my favorites are the ones with ordinary people struggling to find humanity in a corporatized, bland world. The one about the professional caveman re-enactor at a failing theme park whose job is threatened by the corporate drones because of his reluctance to violate his moral code by ratting out a co-worker ("Pastoralia"). The one about the teenaged couple with brain implants, raised by a corporation to be product testers, who risk their consciousness for a chance at independent life ("Jon"). Even the one about the grandfather who makes the decision to give in to corporate coersion to give his grandson a shot at freedom of expression ("My Flamboyant Grandson").
When corporate repression isn't the theme, societal repression often is. The characters in "Winky" and "Sea Oak" had the deck stacked against them from the beginning: raised in poverty, with no real models for any type of success, and are repeating the cycle as adults. But there's a hopefulness and humanity to all of his characters. Most of them are trapped by circumstance: the narrator of "Pastoralia" has a special-needs child, and we get the impression that his caveman job was the best one he could find to keep a roof over his family's head, even if he never gets to sleep under it himself. Neil, of "Winky," has his bizarre, born-again sister permanently ensconsed in his house. And the narrator of "Sea Oak" lives in the projects with his sister, his cousin, their babies and his great-aunt, and supports them all by working as a male stripper. But they don't give up. They fight back against a repressive social structure and a bland corporatized landscape the best way they know how: by being themselves, taking joy in the little things, and moving forward inch by inch.
I love George Saunders because he can be both optimistic and cynical enough for these strange times in which we live, and I believe that literary history will judge him as one of the major voices of this era.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Willie Morris and the funny nature of fame
The arc of Willie Morris's career shows that you never know what your legacy will be. He was the editor of the legendary Texas Observer (well, legendary to Texas liberals and Molly Ivins fans anyway)and also the editor of Harper's Magazine, where he nourished its reputation for cutting-edge content.
Yet, odds are good that none of this is ringing any bells with you. You would, however, instantly recognize the title My Dog Skip. Even if you've never read the book, you've probably seen the movie, or you've at least heard of it. But, as usual, the book is much better. I first read it right around this time of year eight years ago. The cat we'd had since I was a teenager was not doing so well, and I knew it was only a matter of time. Although the book (like almost every book about an animal) has a sad ending, the rest it is a beautiful tribute to the relationship between young Willie and his wonderful dog, Skip. I'm not exaggerating, either: Skip could play baseball and football, purchase his own bologna and even drive a car (if Willie was down on the floor steering and working the pedals for him).
The tale is the very essence of why people own pets, why they put themselves through the hassle of taking in something that can never talk back to them, teaching it how to live in house, cleaning the mess off it when it gets dirty, and all the while knowing that it'll end with you sobbing and digging a hole in your backyard. By Morris' own admission, Skip was the brother he never had in human form. Many pet owners probably view their pets the same way. One New Yorker article on people who spend large amounts of money on veterinary bills stated that something like 85% of pet owners told their pets every day that they loved them, while 90% thought of themselves as their pets' parents (I was actually surprised the percentages were that low). Morris himself described writing about the death of Skip in a subsequent book as one of the hardest things he'd ever written about, including the death of his own father.
Aside from pet ownership, Willie Morris captures childhood very well in this book. It's evocative of a simpler time -- not the post-World-War-II South (decidedly not simpler if you were the wrong color) but of childhood itself. There's an innocence and sweetness to his reminiscenses of camping at the grave of the witch, of finding and trying to nuture a sick kitten, and of all the trouble he got into when Skip followed him to school. Morris's writing is so vivid that you can smell the freshly mowed grass on the football field and taste the Coca-Cola he drank on hot summer days.
I read two of his other books, My Cat Spit McGee and Taps that I really liked. Sadly, these were his last two: he died in 1999. I tried one of his earlier books last year and didn't like it at all, but the reason why I love Willie Morris is for the vivid, evocative, emotional style of his last three books.
Yet, odds are good that none of this is ringing any bells with you. You would, however, instantly recognize the title My Dog Skip. Even if you've never read the book, you've probably seen the movie, or you've at least heard of it. But, as usual, the book is much better. I first read it right around this time of year eight years ago. The cat we'd had since I was a teenager was not doing so well, and I knew it was only a matter of time. Although the book (like almost every book about an animal) has a sad ending, the rest it is a beautiful tribute to the relationship between young Willie and his wonderful dog, Skip. I'm not exaggerating, either: Skip could play baseball and football, purchase his own bologna and even drive a car (if Willie was down on the floor steering and working the pedals for him).
The tale is the very essence of why people own pets, why they put themselves through the hassle of taking in something that can never talk back to them, teaching it how to live in house, cleaning the mess off it when it gets dirty, and all the while knowing that it'll end with you sobbing and digging a hole in your backyard. By Morris' own admission, Skip was the brother he never had in human form. Many pet owners probably view their pets the same way. One New Yorker article on people who spend large amounts of money on veterinary bills stated that something like 85% of pet owners told their pets every day that they loved them, while 90% thought of themselves as their pets' parents (I was actually surprised the percentages were that low). Morris himself described writing about the death of Skip in a subsequent book as one of the hardest things he'd ever written about, including the death of his own father.
Aside from pet ownership, Willie Morris captures childhood very well in this book. It's evocative of a simpler time -- not the post-World-War-II South (decidedly not simpler if you were the wrong color) but of childhood itself. There's an innocence and sweetness to his reminiscenses of camping at the grave of the witch, of finding and trying to nuture a sick kitten, and of all the trouble he got into when Skip followed him to school. Morris's writing is so vivid that you can smell the freshly mowed grass on the football field and taste the Coca-Cola he drank on hot summer days.
I read two of his other books, My Cat Spit McGee and Taps that I really liked. Sadly, these were his last two: he died in 1999. I tried one of his earlier books last year and didn't like it at all, but the reason why I love Willie Morris is for the vivid, evocative, emotional style of his last three books.
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