Book 8 : Empire Falls - Richard Russo

I'd always loved to read as a kid, but after I dropped out of college my interest in books waned. 5 years ago I spent a few days in my aunt's home in northern California. She has bookcases in virtually every room and 1,000s of books in all. I hadn't read a book in probably 3 years when I stayed there, but one night I was having trouble sleeping and grabbed a book at random. The book I picked was Empire Falls and I sat up for 5 hours that night reading it.

Not only did this book make me fall in love with literature again, it was responsible for my goal to read all the Pulitzers. After reading this book the first time, I devoured everything that Russo had written, loving all of his work except Mohawk, his 1st book, whose story was re-told again much more compellingly in Nobody's Fool.

Over the years I re-read this book twice and made my brother, his wife and Sara read it. I recommended it to everyone I could think of, being convinced that it was one of the most accessible examples of award winning literature.

I decided to re-read it again this year, as I hadn't read it since I'd begun my 'official' Pulitzer reading goal. I was shocked at how disappointed I was.

The writing is trite. He writes from several different 1st person perspectives throughout the book and he does a terrible job writing women. It was written in 2000 and he has a 16 year old girl unironically calling her boyfriend a 'hunk' and feeling guilty after having held hands with him the movie theater.

There's also some weird internet stuff going on that was really glaring to me. I realize that in 2000 not nearly as many people had the internet as they do today. However, technology had advanced enough that he should have been able to do some simple research to avoid looking like a fool when he discusses, 'installing an e-mail server' on his computer and describing IMing as 'typing keyboard to keyboard'.

The story takes place in a former mill town in a small town in Maine. The town of Empire Falls has become impoverished and everyone is just trying to make ends meet. It's a fairly average story of an average family. However, with about 50 pages left Russo felt the need to insert this bizarre plot line involving a boy murdering his grandmother and then shooting up the local high school. It was really out of place and didn't serve the story well.

I don't know why I enjoyed this book so much the first time and not at all this time. It appears as though my tastes have changed.



6/10
YTD:
Books read : 8
Pages read : 2,166
Currently reading : Rabbit Redux - John Updike & Steal This Book - Abbie Hoffman

Book 4 : Gilead : A Novel - Marilynne Robinson

Although it's probably happened before, I can't think of another book that's ended with me feeling as though I'm a wiser person.

Gilead : A Novel by Marilynne Robinson is one long letter written from a father to a son. This letter was written over a period of time that wasn't specified but felt like a matter of 5 or 6 months.

The father writing this letter is a Reverend in his late 70's. It is written to his son, who is a small child. The Reverend has been told he has a heart condition and limited time. He is driven to write this letter by the terrifying thought of his son growing up and never really understanding who his father was. He starts out intending to share some of the lessons he's learned throughout the years but it turns into something much more personal.

This book is about forgiveness, understanding and the revision of history. Through the months the Reverend is writing this letter, he's faced with a ghost from the past he probably would have rather not seen before he died. We slowly learn the details of this mystery man as the Reverend comes to terms with the fact that, despite his faith, he has never been quite able to forgive him.

There were many things about this book that were compelling to me. First of all, there is a lot of religious business going on here. Although I believe there is no god (which, for the record, is different from not believing there is a god) and do become enraged by religious folks who do terrible things, I am not put off generally by religion. In fact, I have seen it do a lot of good for people.

That said, as he started quoting scripture I was concerned that I'd go through the entire book feeling preached at. Luckily, this wasn't the case. Instead I was fascinated as this man of the cloth admitted to all of the questions he had about his faith, the things he didn't understand and recounted in detail the great philosophers he'd studied (and agreed with), most of them atheists.

There was a particular memory the Reverend shared involving a trip he took with his father when he was a boy. They traveled through the drought ridden prairie of Kansas, by foot, during the Depression. For months they walked with no shoes, no food and no water. All to get to the Reverend's grand-fathers grave. It was extremely moving and almost brought me to tears at several points.

On a personal level, I was really struck by the writing style. I am typically a fan of very powerful prose that is aggressive and hits me over the head with strong metaphors and cynical outlooks on life. When I work on my own short stories or edit my novel, I've constantly got it in the back of mind that while I love the things I write, I will never write on the caliber of The Greats, I will never write profound and moving prose. I accepted that long ago and have focused on simply improving my craft as much as I can, without getting caught up in what I can't be.

This book, however, is the closest I've seen to a writing style similar to my own. While this book won the Pulitzer and I have no delusions that's in my future, it is heartening to know that even with limited dialouge and tight, simple prose, a work can be incredibly moving.

I hope I remember the lessons I learned in this book for the rest of my life.

9/10
YTD:
Books read : 4
Pages read : 1,359
Currently reading : Breakfast at Tiffany's - Truman Capote

"Our dreams of life will end as dreams do end, abruptly and completely, when the sun rises, when the light comes. And we will think, All that fear and all that grief were about nothing."

On being judged : "If a few people did make remarks, I just forgave them so fast it was as if I never heard them, because it was wrong of them to judge and I knew it and they should have known it."

"It was a beautiful thing to see, like something from a myth. I don't know why I thought of that now, except perhaps because it is easy to believe in such moments that water was made primarily for blessing, and only secondarily for growing vegetables or doing the wash. I wish I had paid more attention to it. My list of regrets may seem unusual, but who can know that they are, really. This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it."

"There's a lot under the surface of life, everyone knows that. A lot of malice and dread and guilt, and so much loneliness, where you wouldn't really expect to find it either."

"If someone came to the house and found me writing, generally he or she would go away, unless it was something pretty important. I don't know why solitude would be a balm for loneliness, but that is how it always was for me in those days."

"Thanks God for them all, of course, and for that strange interval, which was most of my life, when I read out of loneliness, and when bad company was much better than no company. You can love a bad book for its haplessness or pomposity or gall, if you have that starveling appetite for things human, which I devoutly hope you never will have."

Book 2 : The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Diaz

This book could have and should have been much better than it was.

The blurb on the back promised me it was a tale of an "overweight ghetto nerd, a New Jersey romantic who dreams of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien, and, most of all, finding love."

From other reviews I'd read, I knew that there was plenty of geeky Simpson's quotes, D&D playing and Harry Potter and Doctor Who references. While I'm not a fan of any of these things, I am a fan of people who are a fan of them. I was definitely intrigued and looking forward to reading it. However, it fell incredibly short of my expectations.

First of all, it's not about Oscar Wao. The narrator, who we eventually find out is Oscar's sister's boyfriend, tells the tales of several different people. Some portions of the book take place in New Jersey, others in the Dominican Republic and they span several generations. This book is rich in Dominican history, which could have been a huge selling point for me - especially because there was a lot of Cuba stuff going on in a portion of the story. However, instead of making this history a part of the text, the author used footnotes. Long, tedious, boring footnotes. Footnotes so long that they sometimes took up several pages a piece. Oscar's portion of the story was really only about 10% of the book, which was unfortunate, as his was the most compelling story.

This book was also written in Spanglish. Now, I speak a bit of Spanish. I've taken around 5 years total and lived only a few miles short of the Mexican border for more than 4 years. I can have a basic conversation, though I'm incredibly shy about it. But this? This was full on paragraphs in Spanish, many of which I believe were incorporating Dominican slang. Besides which, Mexican Spanish differs from Dominican Spanish.

I've read many books before that use a foreign language in dialouge, but are always sure to make it clear what's being said by the context around the other language. This wasn't the case in this book, and it made some parts difficult to understand.

Another problem with this book was the narrator. There was absolutely no consistency in his voice. He'd be narrating along, eloquent and well-spoken and out of no where would start with his ghetto speak. The author tries way too hard to make his narrator appear to be 'hip' but it falls flat with me. The first paragraph of the first chapter is as follows :

"Our hero was not one of those Dominican cats everybody's always going on about - he wasn't no home-run hitter or a fly bachatero, not a playboy with a million hots on his jock."

Then only a few sentences later he's narrating like a literate person. It was distracting and pointless, in my opinion. He also used the word, 'nigger' a lot which, ugh, I just hate. I realize that it can be used effectively and is sometimes necessary when describing certain situations or when telling a story that takes place in a certain time period. However, it felt gratuitous to me in this book.

All of that said, there were some redeeming things about this book. The story was solid, though I think it would have been better if it had been a more linear story, as the jumping around from person to person and decade to decade was a bit jarring to me. The last 10 pages were beautifully written, tight and made me wonder why he couldn't have written the entire novel with the same style.

It was definitely told in an original way, and I give Diaz credit for trying out several interesting literary techniques. However, I don't think he was quite successful.

Overall, it wasn't one of the best Pulitzers I've read, nor was it the worst. The pace was quick; there was never a moment where I was tempted to skip ahead (except during the foot notes, some of which I did skim). I don't regret reading it, it wasn't a chore to get through but I won't be reading it again.

6/10
YTD:
Books read : 2
Pages read : 696
Currently reading : The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow

Book 1 : The Stone Diaries - Carol Shields

The Stone Diaries is broken up into 10 chapters, each corresponding with a portion of Daisy Goodwill's life. The first begins in 1905, the year of her birth, and continues through ~1995, the year of her death. Most of the chapters are narrated from a 3^rd person perspective, but by Daisy herself, except for a few that are composed entirely of letters and newspaper clippings.

I loved this book as soon as I began. We begin by learning about Daisy's parents at the time of her birth, who are both dynamic and interesting characters. I did have a problem with the constant descriptions of how fat Daisy's mom was, only to flip through to the middle of the book, see a picture of the woman and realize that she was really only about 20 pounds overweight. This was in direct contradiction (in my opinion) of the way she was described, which included a detailed description of her husband, 'falling into' her 'folds of flesh'. She was also supposed to be so fat that she when she gave birth she, nor her husband, had any idea that she was even pregnant.

As the story progressed I started to get confused. As Daisy, the protag and narrator, grew older and started contemplating her youth and her first marriage, some of the things she was talking about didn't happen, or happened differently. At first I thought I simply wasn't remembering things correctly. As I went on though, I realized that the story was simply written from her point of view as she aged. The older she got, the more warped her memories were and the more some details were completely forgotten while others were exacerbated.

When I finished this book I was left feeling completely satisfied. This was partially a result of the fact that it began the day she was born and ended the day she died and thus everything was completed resolved by the end. However, it was also partially due to Carol Shields' ability to tell a compelling story.

The only problem I had came with some perspective issues. As I mentioned, most of the book was told from a 3^rd person perspective, but was narrated by Daisy herself. However, occasionally she would slip in some parenthetical information in the 1^st person. I found this to be distracting and unnecessary.

I realize I've left out almost all description of the plot. While there is nothing particularly compelling or interesting in the plotline (girl grows up, marries boy, boy dies, marries other boy, has children, other boy dies, works for newspaper, etc.) the lack of fresh plot ideas doesn't take away from the beauty of this book. For me, it was enough to spend a few days with an average woman and view her entire life through her eyes.

All in all, I'd rate this an 8/10. I read this because it's one of the Pulitzers I hadn't read yet, and one of the interesting things about this particular book as it relates to the other Pulitzers is that it's the first one that is really primarily geared toward a female audience.

"The odd thing about the pictures that fly into Daisy Goodwill's head is that she is always alone. There are voices that reach her from a distance; there are shadows and suggestions - but still she is alone. And we require, it seems, in our moments of courage or shame, at least one witness, but Mrs. Fleet has not had this privilege. This is what breaks her heart. What she can't bear. Even now, eighty years old." Carol Shields - The Stone Diaries


YTD:
Books read - 1
Pages read - 361
Currently reading - The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz