The Total Environment

Some libraries just feel like magic when you walk inside. It's a rare feeling these days, as more and more libraries forsake their original buildings for newer (generally drab international-style) abodes. In my hometown, the original library was international-style. It also looked exactly like a Pizza Hut, and one year the senior prank was to spray-paint "Pizza Hut" on the top of it. I heard an apocryphal story that there was also a restaurant down the street called "The Pizza Hut" long before the chain existed, and that the developer stole the name from them and the architecture from our library. Anyway. Even that library has moved on now, to a newer, larger building.

Small-town libraries conjure up a range of emotions in me. Around the corner from where I used to live, there was a library that was open three days a week and housed in an old carriage house. They never had a single book I was looking for, and for the first time, I understood how it was possible to have read all of a library's books. The librarians, surprisingly enough, were these grunge-looking young dudes, with long hair, tats and piercings. They oversaw the dust and decay and the comings and goings of the Barbara Cartland and Agatha Christie novels. It made me sad, yet it also made me hopeful: here was a town that could barely afford to have a library, and yet they did anyway.

My all-time favorite library will always be Buffalo's Central branch, despite its outer International-style hideousness. This is Book Heaven, bigger than a Wal-Mart, with two entrances and guards at the doors. It has everything. There's an entire local history room that's the size of a lot of libraries. There's a cafe with a flat-screen TV. There's an escalator, a huge children's collection, a special collections room, a super-special collections room, large banks of computers, self-checkout machines that give you Wendy's coupons, and of course, all of the novels, non-fiction books and DVDs and CDs you could ever want. There's exhibit space and really pretty glass benches that are illuminated from within. Going there is almost overstimulating. I've mentioned my tendency to take as much as I can carry out every time I go to the library, the strange desparate feeling that it'll all be gone the next time I go. It's really bad there -- I want to read every book they have and persist in the delusion that I can get through ten of them in three weeks.



I also went to a really interesting small-town library recently. I met most of their staff and got to see their building, although I didn't have much time to spend with their collections (nor do I have borrowing privileges). The Swan Library in Albion is just pure magic. It's housed in an 1850s mansion with a lot of the original architectural details intact. They have books in the drawing room and the dining room. The upstairs has been renovated to house more books, the offices, the computers and a meeting room. The building's been used as a library for over 100 years. Walk in, and you feel the generations of readers who've gone before you. If there really was a book like Jumanji, if there actually exists a president's book like in the most recent National Treasure movie, it'd have to be housed somewhere like here.





One staff member told me that they've got a serious space crunch, though, and are looking at solutions. At least one scenario involves abandoning this space, and possibly turning it into a museum. I understand the need for it, but at the same time, it'd be a shame. Without naming names, I've visited libraries that are utterly soulless, and I don't think that's the way it should be. What a strange glitch they are in our capitalist, anti-intellectual society, after all. We have a government that's unwilling to provide free health care to poor kids, and a populace that's encouraged seven seasons of Big Brother and made a celebrity out of Paris Hilton, yet in any sizeable town, there is a building where anyone can go and get as many books as they can carry, all free, just as long as they bring them back. They are magic, and they should feel like it.

The Curse of the Vacation Book

There's nothing worse than going on vacation and finding yourself stuck with a train wreck of a book. Last year, I read Citizen Girl on the sunny shores of Florida. This year, in wintry Pittsburgh, it was Gay Blades by Ben Tyler.

My sister told me I had no right to bitch, reading something titled that, about ice skaters. And naturally, I didn't exactly expect Shakespeare. I was at least hoping for something like Candace Bushnell or Jennifer Weiner, something light but smart and funny. But no. I know it sounds like a petty place to start, but I noticed at least two spelling mistakes in the book. "Scheherazade" wasn't even close. Also, it's masturbatory, not "mastebetory." I wondered who the copy editor was and what the manuscript was like as submitted. I'm also pretty sure that "self-mastebetory" is a grammar mistake as well, or at least a redundancy.

I picked up the book not only because it looked like it had real potential to be smart and funny, but because I've always loved ice skating. I went to see the Campbell's Champions on Ice tour three times in high school. I saw Oksana Baiul when she was fresh off her upset World Championship, and then again after her stunning performance at Lillehammer relegated the whole Kerrigan-Harding drama to nothing but backstory. In fact, I saw everyone who won a medal at those Olympics. I understand why people make fun of it, but I do genuinely like it and was interested in a backstage perspective.

The story begins with protagonist Garry getting kicked out of the American Skating Society (or A.S.S. -- why use a sledgehammer when you can use a wrecking ball?) for being too gay in his on-air comments. He's been dumped by his boyfriend the same week, and winds up in a third-rate show along with a man named Jay who freaked out in-air during a competition and landed on Peggy Fleming and the commentators during a quad jump (not possible, but whatever). Garry and Jay become instant best friends. Fictional bronze medalist Amber Nyak becomes a third member of their trio as they trek across the country playing in podunk ice rinks.

Then, Jay and Garry meet Tag. Tag is an Eve Harrington figure, who's hot and sexy and sweet and worshipful and one hell of a skater. He charms Garry and Jay into helping him get a job in the show, then stabs them in the back. His function in the book, however, is not merely as a plot device. Remember, I said he was hot and sexy? He also has sex. Lots and lots of graphic, unappetizing-sounding sex. Who knew there were so many different words for semen? Do gay men really get turned on by phrases like "punished his ass?" I don't know. I skipped through all of them after the first two. It wasn't that I found them offensive, just deeply unappealing and too intimate, like watching someone have a colonoscopy.

The writing in the book was appallingly bad. In the beginning of the book, there's a three-way sex scene that was so muddled I couldn't even tell who was with who at any given moment. The dialogue is wooden. Tag's duplicity is stunningly obvious, which makes the obliviousness of Jay, Garry and Amber all the more baffling. He had plenty of lines like, "I'll see that has-been fry in hell, and before long he'll be kissing my skate blades. Wow, what am I saying about my bestest friend and my idol? I meant, I wish him all the success in the world!" Despite that, Tag's character is the most delectable in the book. Yet, after he gets his comeuppance, in a hilarious scene where every one of his skeletons is aired and his own mother calls him an asshole, all he does is laugh and skate away.

I guess the book is supposed to be a fantasy. With the exception of the A.S.S. stiffs from the beginning of the book, there are no straight male characters in the book. All the skaters, the show owner, the network execs, everyone is gay. Most of them are attractive, too. I'm not sure what Amber's function in the book is. To me, she mostly confuses things. Maybe the book hits its mark with gay men, or with a certain type of gay man. Even so, I can't imagine this as anything but a beach book, and even at that, the writing was just so bad that it was distratcting to me.

During the trip to the library when I got this book, an older man and woman flagged down my car at a stoplight. There was a bus stop at the corner. They told me that there was a girl inside who didn't have any shoes and had been waiting for an hour. She looked to be about 17, and from a foreign country. They asked if I would help her get home, and I did. It turned out she did have shoes, but they were open-toed canvas summer shoes, and on that particular day it was below freezing. I drove her a few miles to her home. You'd think that might've translated into some good karma once I got inside the library, but virtually all the books from this current haul have sucked. Better luck next time, I guess.

The Weekly Meme

From Booking Through Thursday:

Quirky January 31, 2008
Filed under: Wordpress — --Deb @ 1:33 am

This week’s question is suggested by (blogless) JMutford:

Sometimes I find eccentric characters quirky and fun, other times I find them too unbelievable and annoying. What are some of the more outrageous characters you’ve read, and how do you feel about them?

I think eccentric characters are at their best when their eccentricity feels organic. I blogged about young Oscar Schell in
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close a few weeks back. He's a great example of a totally believeable, totally eccentric character, as is Richard Russo's prankster English professor in Straight Man. You feel both like you've met someone like that before and like the character in question is a total one-of-a-kind original.

Eccentric characters annoy me when they're clearly just there for window dressing. In the book I'm reading right now, the main character's sister is clearly meant to be "the eccentric one," yet she's just like anyone you'd find in a small town, with her love of game shows, tarty clothing and men. She's full of folksy sayings and intimate knowlege of lawn mower prices (I'll explain in a few days). But she feels two-dimensional and cookie-cutter. I think it's because you never really get inside her head, or delve into her past to find out what made her the way she always (although I suspect that if we did, it'd be a combination of a fun-lovin' nature and a daddy who didn't pay her enough attention).

An "eccentric character" that's also noteworthy is Anna Madrigal, from the Tales of the City series. I hope I'm not spoiling the series for anyone by revealing that she was not born with that name, nor with that gender. It would've been easy for Maupin to make her into some sort of female caricature, like the drag queens you can see at clubs. But aside from her gardening hobbies (she grows weed and names her plants after famous women), she's pretty ordinary. She's not really eccentric, just a little quirky, like most people.

So those are some eccentric characters that stand out in my mind. What are your favorites?

Dry tinder + gasoline + gunpowder + a match = ?

Just like some ingredients should guarantee a fire, you'd think some ingredients should guarantee a fire novel. Take a pregnant psychic, a sassy best friend, a charming but no-good drunken cheating abusive husband, the American bicentennial, and a dollop of small-town charm, and you should get something amazing, right?

Not in the case of The Saints and Sinners of Okay County by Dayna Dunbar. Aletta Honor is the pregnant psychic -- a real one, who's been able to see into people's lives of futures by touching them since childhood. (To dispense with the inevitable "If she was psychic, shouldn't she have known what an asshole she was marrying?" Dunbar explains that Aletta's gift never did work on her own flesh and blood.) And yeah, she's the one with the rotten husband. At the beginning of the book, he's left her, seven months pregnant, to whore around in order to determine "if that's the life he wants." He decides no, but doesn't quit drinking, and they get into a violent argument about it.

I know it all sounds pretty good so far, but it wasn't. Not to me. The tension in this novel was conspicuous in its absence. I had a hard time staying interested long enough to keep Aletta's kids straight from Joy's kids (Joy is the sassy best friend, BTW)and the other random kids that happened through the novel. The best parts were the flashbacks to Aletta's youth and the development of her gift, but that wasn't enough to keep me going. I abandoned it around page 75. Call it strike two for this most recent library haul.

Booking through Whatever Day This Is

This week's question, from Booking Through Thursday:

What’s your favorite book that nobody else has heard of? You know, not Little Women or Huckleberry Finn, not the latest best-seller . . . whether they’ve read them or not, everybody “knows” those books. I’m talking about the best book that, when you tell people that you love it, they go, “Huh? Never heard of it?”

I like this one a lot, because most of my childhood favorites resonate with no one else but me, then or now. Growing up, my favorite books were Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles (well-known but not terribly hot in my elementary school); L.M Montgomery's The Blue Castle, which may not have even been available in the United States; and several books by Zilpha Keatley Snyder.

In fourth grade, we had to pick one of our favorite authors and write a letter to him or her. I picked Zilpha Keatley Snyder. My teacher had never heard of her, but I was incredibly honored when she wrote back. I got a pre-printed letter with a photo of her and what we would now call a FAQ, but she wrote me a note addressing a question about how a dowsing rod worked, and even drew me a picture! Pretty cool.

From an adult perspective, I would say that the books I liked the best by her (The Egypt Game,The Changeling, and The Headless Cupid) were about older children who played elaborate games and dealt with the real world of complicated friendships, family issues, and just plain growing up through these games. As a kid, though, these books were no less than blueprints. The characters in all of those books, to me, had gotten close to that something else that I was sure was waiting for me, perhaps just through an old wardrobe or maybe even through a picture I drew myself on the sidewalk. I read The Changeling over and over, I tried to become a witch one summer like the people in The Headless Cupid so that I could commune with spirits, and I played The Egypt Game for a little while too.

But for some reason, no one else did. Her books didn't catch on, and I wonder if they're still read, or if she's still writing. I haven't read them in years, but they'll always have a special place in my heart.

Warning!

As a public service to my non-Christian readers, I should warn you that Doesn't She Look Natural? by Angela Hunt is a Christian novel. If your library (like mine) placed the bar code over the God-related blurb on the back cover, you may have missed this.

I took a closer look at the publisher, the summary and the author bio when I'd hit about page 50 and noted the frequent mentions of God, prayer and Jesus making everything all right. I was willing to keep going for several reasons. I liked the book well enough by that point. I liked the concept of a woman inheriting a funeral home and doing her best Tim Gunn ("make it work!") in the face of overwhelming odds. The book had gotten good press, seemed to have some interesting characters and also seemed to be steering clear of the stuff I dislike about organized religion.

Until the middle of chapter 14. The main character, Jen, has intended to fix up this funeral home in Mt. Dora and sell it, but the home's elderly caretaker has convinced her to let him continue operating it while the work goes on. In this chapter, they've picked up their first "DB" as Grissom and Catherine would say (dead body to you non-CSI fans) and Jen gets the living shit scared out of her by the hairdresser. Unaware of her presence in the house, he goes up to the living quarters for a coffee. Now, Jen is justifiably frightened at finding a strange man in her kitchen. Yet, after the caretaker steps in, shoos the hairdresser back to his day job and settles everyone down, Jen's fear continues.

Why? What could be so horrible about this male hairdresser? Have you guessed it yet? She is afraid that Hairdresser Ryan might be one of those dreaded homosexuals -- and she has two easy converts in her impressionable young sons. And the caretaker gently explains to her that although Hairdresser Ryan would, in fact, love to get down and dirty with another man, he lives a pure and chaste life in a rooming house, alone, because that's clearly the way God wants it.

Yeah, seriously. If you don't believe me, check this book out yourself. I started to wonder about how the rest of the book would go. Jen's mother had been constantly chastising her about working too much and not spending enough time with her sons -- was she somehow going to give up working to be a stay-at-home single mom of some sort? Both she and her ex-husband had worked for Senators, and she'd railed about how unfair it was that she had to give up her job when they got divorced. But was that the "before" Jen? Was she going to see how much better it was in Mt. Dora, away from the sinful city and all its worldly distractions, where women are women and gay men are doomed to keep it in their pants for their entire lives?

I don't know. And maybe, by ripping out my bookmark, I'm being just as close-minded as those who believe Hairdresser Ryan made the proper life choice. But the book clearly wants you to sympathize with Jen, to root for her and to enjoy whatever transformation she'll undergo in the course of this book. And she's not so interesting that I could do that anyway, knowing how bigoted she is.

In a larger sense, I wonder why Christians need Christian fiction. They seem to be virtually the only religion that does that (at least in the United States). There are lots of novels about Judaism, but they're more cultural than religious. Why do no other religions try to convert people through fiction? I have some blogger friends who are atheists, and have seen frequent talk on their blogs about how there should be a more defined atheist movement in this country, to help offset the right-wing Christians who are running America into the ground. Maybe this is their golden opportunity: atheist fiction!

I Left My Heart in San Francisco

I've been a fan of the Tales of the City books since I was a teenager. I'm not even sure how I got introduced to them, but I collected them all and got to the point where I barely even needed the actual book anymore to read it. I could just sit quietly and think about it.

The final book of the series ends on a down note. A marriage between two of the main characters ends abruptly when one turns her back on her adopted home city, her friends and her family to pursue a career in New York City. The landlady that linked them all, transgendered Anna Madrigal, has left love in Greece to return to San francisco. But saddest of all, kindhearted gay Everyman Michael Tolliver has HIV, and the burden of confronting his own mortality every day.

So the very title to Maupin's follow-up for the series, Michael Tolliver Lives, was heartening. However, I didn't expect to like it much. I read it in one day and I'm still not sure how I feel about it. The 55-year-old Michael Tolliver is much more bitchy than the one in the series, although the difference in point-of-view could account for that. The original series was written in a third-person omniscient; Michael Tolliver Lives is what I used to call an "I book" long before Macintosh ever developed the concept.

The success of Maupin's original series rested partly on him capturing a cultural moment. The series had its birth as a newspaper serial in San Francisco, and millions of readers could identify strongly with one of the characters, or knew someone just like them. When Michael Tolliver wrote his coming-out "Letter to Mama", some gays and lesbians sent it to their own parents with a note reading "me too." This book captures the way society has changed since 1989 (when the series ended). Sometimes it's effective, and other times it's not. Some of the references feel like too obvious an attempt to stay up-to-the-minute (the constant television references grated really fast) but the overall effect of highlighting a society that's been in a state of constant, radical change since the 70s worked.

Like most of the other fans of the series, I came to find out what happened to everyone. Some of the answers were very satisfying. It was good to see Anna Madrigal again, for example, and Michael himself has arrived at a good place. Brian, though, seems to have stagnated and his daughter Shawna's story was one of those grating references I talked about earlier. Mona's story was very sad, and Mary Ann's, like its original ending, was ambiguous. It was good to see everyone again, though.

The main issue I had was with the plot of this book. In the original series, despite the famed coming-out letter, Michael is essentially a child of the city. We know that he's from Orlando and was raised by ultra-conservative born-again orange growers. We know that they never do really accept him. And we even meet them once, when they come to visit Michael in San Francisco during the week of Halloween (there's a hilarious scene where they meet up with some of Michael's male acquaintances dressed as nuns on roller skates). This book is largely about his family drama. We learn that he has a brother -- who knew? -- and a niece and a great-nephew (who, they unsubtly suggest, may be gay as well, although he's only seven.) Michael's mother is in a born-again nursing home, and is dying of emphysema. Michael gets called in to assume power of attorney, and a family secret explodes, forcing Michael to confront his past.

Therein lies the dilemma. "The past", in this case, has to do with his father. We've met ol' Herb, in the second book, and he seems to an affable, if Archie Bunker-ish figure. Very conservative, lots of prejudices, but somehow despite all of this, a likeable, earnest guy who just wants his son to find a nice woman and be happy and succeed. Somehow, though, he's morphed into a drunken, abusive man who deserved to be abandoned by his wife. In the original series, we see several letters from Michael's mother to him. In between her anti-gay activism, they're all folksy and newsy. She talks about their dog, for crying out loud, and yet she never mentions Michael's brother, who lives right down the street? Maybe it's nitpicky. But it annoyed me.

In conclusion, I would say that this is a book for people who knew and liked the original series, or perhaps for people who've always meant to get into the series and never have. If you've never heard of it and have no interest in it, this book probably won't change your mind. If you hated it, the book won't change your mind. But fans will enjoy this one, despite the fact that it could've been better.