Tag Archives: book club

Book Club: Beautiful Ruins

Posted on January 6, 2025 | Leave a comment

Happy first book of 2014, buddies! As promised, we get to talk about Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walters, a book I would not have read were it not for very, very limited options in the airport bookshop.

This cover does it no favors, but bear with me.

I’m glad they didn’t have much, because I enjoyed reading this, and I wouldn’t have picked it up otherwise! The design of the cover does it no favors, and I think “Jess Walter” sounds like a Confessions of a Shopaholic kind of author name, right? I know I’m being a big jerk, and I guess I forgot about The Financial Lives of Poets or his myriad pieces I’ve read in magazines and liked. Oops.

The story is about a man who keeps an tiny inn on the coast of Italy and the glamorous actress who visits there in the 1960s. No, wait, the book is about Richard Burton and the Donner Party. Ah, no, I’m sorry, it’s about modern day Los Angeles and a disillusioned young woman working in film as a glorified assistant. Forgive me, I forgot- it’s about her boss. Maybe it’s about her boyfriend, or an alcoholic Spalding Gray knockoff. It’s about all of them, together and apart, at once and over time. The word “high-wire” comes to mind when describing the feeling of the novel, and the whole thing feels like a movie from “go.” While reading it (and I tore through like a woman possessed), I felt like I could cue the suspenseful music here or fade to black there; Beautiful Ruins walks a fine line between hokey and workin’ it with play-within-a-play-as-device, and it almost completely succeeds throughout. Dude’s a great storyteller.

I love an ensemble cast, as I mentioned when we read Bel Canto, but I often struggle with feeling like the characters are as round and dynamic as I’d like, and I frequently feel as though I don’t get closure with all of them in the ways I’d like. Beautiful Ruins succeeds at fifty percent of these. By the last pages of the book, I had a great sense of what everyone was about, and could reasonably guess who was a cornflake person and who was a Frosted Flake person, which of these people I’d call to get me from jail, and if any of the characters were the sorts who pronounce it “Tar-ZHAY.” By the same token, I did feel like I got rushed out of a couple rooms in an effort to close all the doors on the way out of the house. I wanted to know more about the outcome of the aforementioned disillusioned assistant, and I felt a little confused about the ultimate motivations of her boss. These were both great characters, and I wanted to know more, which I never will. The outcome of Richard Burton, well, that one is available on Wikipedia. (Spoiler alert: he dies.)

A game I often like to play with pieces of real-enough fiction is this: I ask myself if I can assume that a character can name the principle characters in Saved By the Bell. Not that specifically, but I very often wonder if the world my characters are inhabiting has already upgraded to iOS whatever, or if Barack Obama is president, or if they get their oil changed at JiffyLube. It doesn’t really matter, I suppose, but it’s kind of fun to think about, in the way that Donnie Darko blew your mind in 10th grade (you’re a liar if you say it didn’t.). Beautiful Ruins is a rare piece of art that I feel like I could answer that about (another is Sherlock on BBC, if you were wondering). I have no idea if Harry Potter knows about The DaVinci Code but I am damn sure who is a Verizon customer and who is on Sprint in this book. Jess Walters created a fictional, almost-real world that is both completely fantastical and tight as a drum; if it weren’t for the fact that most of these people don’t exist and that the story is so wow, I feel like I could step right in to it, wearing my Gap jeans, joking in Doge, and not really draw much attention to myself. That’s pretty amazing, when you think about it.

So, have you read this? What did you think? I heard from a reader who loved it infinitely more than his other work, and made a suggestion for a future book club herself (coming soon, miss!). Next week, I’m finishing this, which I’ve been meaning to do for a long time. Please join me! I’d be delighted.

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Book Club: Bel Canto

Posted on December 16, 2024 | Leave a comment

So this week, I read Bel Canto. In an effort to be fully disclosing, a dear friend works as Ann Patchett’s Gal Friday. Probably the only reason this is relevant is that I bought Bel Canto solely because I wanted to read something of length by Niki’s boss.

No one really seemed that upset when I didn't take a picture of my copy last week, so I think we're just going to roll with the Good Reads image from now on.

No one really seemed that upset when I didn’t take a picture of my copy last week, so I think we’re just going to roll with the Good Reads image from now on.

I’ve really liked Ann Patchett’s work since I read an essay she wrote for Vogue about her friend and fellow writer Lucy Grealy. I tried in vain to find that essay and link it here, but suffice to say, it left its mark on me ten or so years ago and I remember it clearly, if not fondly (it’s not a happy essay). My mom read Bel Canto about the same time, I dismiss doing the same because I was 15 and things my mom liked were extremely uncool. I have since revisited this position and am happy to report I have read this book in its entirety!

The basic premise of the novel is that it is that a poor Latin American country has a birthday party for a wealthy Japanese businessman in hopes his company will build a plant of some stripe in their capital city. They invite a lot of dignitaries, and pay a very famous soprano to sing for guests. Things are going pretty well until a terrorist group breaks in through the air vents and holds everyone hostage. Despite the best efforts of the Red Cross, et al, the standoff lasts…a really long time. How long? Hard to say. Months, I think. Patchett never really says for sure, but it’s a really. long. time. A long time. Forever.

Without giving away a ton of plot points (because it’s well-paced and the character development is great), things get kind of weird! Several people fall in love with the aforementioned soporano, Roxane Coss. She falls in love in return, either once or twice, depending on how you count it. Mr. Hosokawa, the gentleman for whom this party is held, comes out of his shell. The Frenchman teaches the terrorists to cook! The vice president of the unnamed nation decides to adopt one of the hostage takers! You get the idea. Finally, everyone gets to go home, which is, I suppose, a foregone conclusion in nearly any given hostage situation.

I love how well Patchett captures the feeling of waiting for the main event to start, and how relationships build and crumble in unpleasant situations. The whole book is a study in waiting, in passing time. It’s months that the hostages are inside the vice presidential mansion, awaiting…something. By the time they’re finally rescued, the reader has worked out a way they could continue on like this indefinitely- the soprano singing, the Russians playing cards, the hostage takers watching soccer on the television, the commanding general playing chess in his stolen study.

The hostages become attached to their captors, who are, as it is revealed, really just kids taken from a remote village and given guns. Since Roxane is the only woman, she becomes incredibly beautiful to the others (I have long called this proximity hotness and I was a beneficiary of this principle on the national quiz bowl circuit long ago [more on this another time]). Everyone, it seems, confesses their undying love to her at some point or another, and she’s really dignified about that, like it happens all the time. By the last pages of the book, everyone is so intertwined with each other, you can’t imagine how they’re going to function outside in their normal lives.

I have just two criticisms of this book, and one is pretty minor. Since it’s a big ole cast of characters (some 60 or so named folks), sometimes they get grouped by national stereotypes that make me a little uncomfortable (the French guy has a scarf and cries often, the Russians are loud talkers, the Japanese are very uncomfortable often). The other is about the epilogue, but that’s for you to make your own mind up about. To me, it felt really confusing- I couldn’t make the logical jump to how the characters wrapped up there and so soon after.

Overall, Patchett has such command over narrative pacing and the English language more broadly, so I can’t recommend this book enough for people who like literary fiction but wish something would happen, damn it. There are guns and SWAT teams and stuff, but also operas. How can you lose? You can’t lose.

Next week, I’m reading this, and I hope you’ll join me! I read it on two short plane rides, so you have no excuse to not be part of my special club.

Okay, so tell me: what did you think of Bel Canto? Am I off-base about the epilogue? What did you love best? Got a favorite character? You have about a million to pick from.

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Book Club: Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore

Posted on November 25, 2024 | Leave a comment

I’ve been trying to fall in love for awhile now. There have been a lot of false starts (sorry, Marcel Proust) and unfulfilled promises (I’m coming for you, too, Fun House) and disingenuous-but-attractive stand-ins for the real thing (Swamplandia!). I just haven’t read anything that I love in awhile. I thought it was different with Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, but I was wrong.

It started, as it so often does, in a bar.

It started, as it so often does, in a bar.

The premise of the book is strong and sounds just like something I’d love: a modern fable, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore features an out-of-work Silicon Valley designer, Clay, who takes a job at a mysterious bookstore to make ends meet. There’s more to it than he initially suspects, and he starts to delve into the mysteries contained within. A Googler, the titular shopkeeper, and a start-up success story join up with our hero Clay on his quest to find answers. We get a little bit of typographical history, half of a love story, and a geeky backlog of affection for the sci-fi novels of the 80s. I don’t want to give a lot away, so I’m going to stop here on plot summary. Suffice to say, the setup is clever: you get some self-conscious winks toward Never-Ending Story structure,and a couple biting asides about start-up culture, and then you’re off.

My litany of woe begins thus: there’s a tech solution to every problem our hero faces. In a book that was sold to me as a love letter to the written word, I feel like it leaned on the god from the machine, if you will. Reading it produced the same sensation you get when you watch CSI:Miami. “That’s not how computers work,” you say. “Scanners don’t do that. You can’t make pixels.” This was like that. A lot like that. For a long time. In contemporary literature, technology is sort of like its own character, but you have to shape it carefully or it becomes a golem, no longer willing to do your bidding. Robin Sloane did a good job talking about cell phones and laptops in a way that won’t feel immediately dated (hello, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), but he let them do too much, and soon they were running around, terrorizing me.

As much as technology was a developed character, most of the others were not. Clay’s maybe-girlfriend, Kat, feels like a plot device more than a person, a handy doorkeeper to Google. Oliver, another employee at Mr. Penumbra’s eponymous shop, has a small cast of satellite characters that attend to his grad student universe; I never even caught their names. Roommates are given unnecessary subplots that are never revisited, and I didn’t care if they were or not. Clay and Neel, his childhood best friend, were likeable enough that I wanted them to succeed, I guess, but I didn’t feel that strongly about it one way or the other. The person I cared the most about was Aldus Mantius, a long-dead Italian typographer of yore: his designs look like a tattoo I’d love to have, and the accompanying message, festina lente, is something that I tacked up on my board at work. Mantius, though, is a specter, and doesn’t have any dialogue, for obvious reasons. Sloane gets so deep into his role as fabulist that he forgets himself; everyone feels like a symbol or a stock character, and no one ends up being that compelling.

I’m done maligning now. I wanted to love this too much, and that was probably my own undoing. The first hundred pages were so fresh, so clever, that I didn’t do the necessary background check. It was just too good to be true, and the undergirding structures couldn’t hold the weight of the narrative.

Next week, I’ll be reading this. Let me know if you want to join!

Have you read Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore? What did you think? Am I completely off base? Not even in the ballpark? Let me have it.

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Book Club: Shah of Shahs

Posted on November 18, 2024 | Leave a comment

I forgot to take a picture of Shah of Shahs before I took it back to the ‘brary, so here’s one I borrowed from the interconnecting tubes.

What a compelling profile!

What a compelling profile for such a brutal man.

It’s tiny, but I think you get the point. Ryszard Kapuscinski was a Polish journalist, and his work is the second-most-widely-translated of any of his countrymen. He wrote extensively about Africa, the final hours of the Soviet Union, and, of course, Iran, but he was also a poet of some renown and a somewhat famous photographer in his day. He was also an amateur boxer of note, so that’s something to file away in your RK dossier. I recommend his Wikipedia page, which I linked to up there; a lot of the criticisms and posthumous observations about his work and person fall neatly in line with many of the questions I had about Shah of Shahs.

The basic premise of the book is that it’s an overview of the the last days of the Shah of Iran and the subsequent revolution through the eyes of an outsider. The literary treatments of this time period (House of Sand and Fog, Persepolis) are varied and interesting; in my opinion, the body of work available in English is one of the richest of any foreign conflict. Kapuscinski’s take is no less striking: he uses material artifacts, like photos, cassettes, and newspaper articles and works backward to try and make sense of the trauma and immense cultural shift that occurred very quickly. Sometimes this is striking and interesting, but other times, it makes it hard to know whether you’re reading a non-fiction novel or a longform piece of journalism or something even less fact-based entirely. Is he extrapolating from what he sees and hears? Is he taking his cues from anonymous interviews? Is this all in a book or a newspaper somewhere that he hasn’t cited? I’m not sure.

The strength of this narrative structure, though, is that it’s unsettling and confusing, which mirrors what I must imagine is the sensation of social structure collapsing. It’s disorienting, but if such a thing is possible, it’s disorienting in a good way. It keeps you on your toes, it makes you unsure. There’s a fascinating passage that discusses the secret police coming to the apartment of someone who has just moved back to Iran after studying in medicine France for several years. The world has changed a lot since this man has been away, and he doesn’t seem to fully grasp the new political climate. They go back and forth about whether or not he should join the party of the shah, and ultimately, the police seem to tell him this isn’t really an invitation, but a mandate. At this point, the young doctor has created an impossible situation for himself: if he says he isn’t against the shah, they’ll just say that he wanted to be. The way Kapuscinski writes communicates this bind perfectly; there is no way to win when blind brutality is the way of your world, and you’re constantly mired in confusion as you blindly grope your way through.

After I’d digested what I’d read and started taking a tour of the aforementioned (and completely infallible) Wikipedia page of our author, I found that a lot of people had the same questions I did about his methods and the truthiness of his work. Kapuscinski refused to update future editions of his books when new information came to light, and a significant number of prominent journalists have called into question his adherence to standards and ethics. There was a lot of talk of him both exoticizing and homogenizing his subjects (Africa, Iran, the Soviet Union) for personal gain, and damning statements like this one about his work: “[The Africa he creates] is a fascinating place. Whether it ever existed as he tells it is another matter altogether.” That’s what I came away with from this book about Iran. Did this happen? I’m not sure. The revolution was brutal and terrible, and this book depicts brutal and terrible things (many of which line up with a lot of the non-fiction I’ve read about this time period), but are the people he’s talking about even real? I felt like he never let us get close enough to anyone to even make an educated guess.

Overall, I think he had a novel idea in both the literal and figurative sense of the word. This reads like fiction, and the form is interesting, but I don’t know that this is non-fiction, or that you should read this as your introduction to the Iranian Revolution. I felt like I learned more from Persepolis, which is a graphic novel, than I did here.

Next week, I’m reading this. I’d love to read it with you. If you’ve read Shah of Shahs, let’s talk about it below. If you’ve read other great works about Iran that I didn’t mention, I’d like to hear more.

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Book Club: Going Clear

Posted on July 8, 2024 | Leave a comment

So this week, I read Going Clear as part of a my In Real Life book club. This is my first real meeting as a member of said klatch, and you know how things are kinda awkward while you’re figuring out what people in your book club are like? Well, turns out mine are smart and like to read interesting things. Apparently, no one told them that I love conspiracy theories and cults in advance, so that’s allegedly a happy accident. Allegedly.

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Truly, there is no good way to take a picture of a book with that library clear plastic on it.

My weird obsession with Scientology began in 2009 when I was briefly bedridden and had tons of time to think about reptilians, Elvis, and staged moon landings. I find the church pretty terrifying, but also believe that everyone’s religious beliefs (including my own) sound kind of weird when overly reduced. Really, Xenu and thetans and whatever aren’t weirder than the prophesy of a zombie carpenter or the contents of stone tablets from the sky or the notion that we were possibly all grains of rice back in the day, so we should just live and let live. Well, you know, Lawrence Wright disagrees and makes a solid case for why.

I first came across Lawrence Wright’s stories about Scientology in The New Yorker a few years ago. I was comletely glued to it; his writing style is at once dense and accessible, smart, but not smart alec-y. If you haven’t read that article, I recommend you start there. It’s a long study of Paul Haggis‘ public split with the Church in 2009 and will give you a pretty workable framework for what this book is going to be like.

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Book Club: Ritz of the Bayou

Posted on June 17, 2024 | Leave a comment

I read a lot. I read a lot of things I like. I read a lot of things I think are very clever and smart. I read a lot of things that I admire deeply and continuously.

I very rarely read something and think, “Jesus, I wish I’d written that.”

That’s how I feel about Ritz of the Bayou.

This book is out of print, and its dust jacket is...not in great shape.

This book is out of print, and its dust jacket is…not in great shape.

I was first introduced to Nancy Lemann via my friend Snowden‘s great essay about her fictional work, Lives of the Saints, which I plan to reread and profile at a later date, since it is also a staggering, unheralded work of wit and intellect. The way this lady writes sounds a lot like the way that I think I talk, and it seems like perhaps our biographies overlap significantly, if, indeed, life imitates art and vice versa.

Onto Ritz.

It’s…creative non-fiction, I suppose. That’s a term I don’t like because it implies that the academic, serious book must always be dull, that research and extensive background is inherently boring, and that non-fiction writers are humorless saps devoted to obscure and facts no one cares about in the slightest. If I could tell you about all the interesting twists and turns I’ve seen non-fiction take, we’d be here until the end of the next Clinton’s administration; I find the term to be as dismissive and insulting as “black writer” or “women’s interest.” And anyway, she hardly sticks to the facts, but everyone knows there can be truth without those.

But creative non-fiction it is. The story, as it exists, tells of the racketeering trial of Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards in the mid-80s and the coterie of attorneys, journalists, bailiffs, etc., that attend to it. She borrows heavily from the style of Kentuckian and genius Hunter Thompson, which is to say it’s a bizarre, heady, colorful, semi-confessional pandemonium spread out over a couple hundred pages. This is, in fact, the only way to adequately consider Southern politics.

Her one-liners, her coy self-reference to beaux past and present, her ability to cut right to the heart of the duality inherent of Southerness: Ritz borders on being a mirror to a culture that would rather be angry than bored, that pretends to be romantic but is really cynical. If someone from Minneapolis wrote this book, I would be livid about the overgeneralizations, the cliches, and the zealousness with which she pursues both, but she isn’t, so it’s fine. The South, as I mentioned, is like your trashy cousin. I’ll hyperbolize and trash talk all I want, but God help you if you agree with me.

There are two things that I hold dear about Ritz, outside the joy of it, the comedy of the Southern political machine. Firstly, she considers the way that impeachment, and corruption more broadly, changes lives. Sure, it changes the accused, but who cares? It drags bureau chiefs out to obscure towns, it fills the public with doubt, it’s a king-maker for the right attorney, and it’s always a veritable circus that provides almost limitless gossip, endless hours of entertainment.

I love that.

Do we see Edwin on trial? Of course. But you could have traded him out for perhaps any governor of any Southern state in the last century: bawdy, flamboyant, ineffective, shrewd, good-ole-boy, the list goes on. Like I said, it’s a culture that picks mad over bored any day of the week.

The other thing, and it’s topical now, is how she talks about the heat. I love the heat of the Deep South: it’s unifying. No one really thinks you’re going to work during the period of, say, 10 July-20 August. There’s no expectation that you’ll wear a suit to work (or keep the whole of it on). Everything moves slowly, and it imbues each and ever action with a sense and depth of meaning that is completely, utterly invented. Yet the actions you take in June seem so much more purposeful, so much more durable, than anything you do in February. Lehmann talks incessantly of the sweltering, merciless heat, and of sweating, and of ice water, and of the stupid, unforgivable things people do in the heat. It’s 102 as I write this, and I’m considering what the next eight to ten weeks may hold; it’s not pretty.

I steadfastly encourage you to read this; it’s funny, it’s easy, but it’s smart, and it’s incisive. If you like me, you’ll like this. I’m giving myself too much credit, but then again, it’s hot out.

Next week, I’m reading this. Please join me.

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Book Club: Encyclopedia of the Exquisite

Posted on May 13, 2025 | Leave a comment

Did anyone I know shop at Borders? I didn’t, but when it was going out of business, I couldn’t help but stop by and check out what was remaining. I found this book, which was on a lot of end-of-year Christmas gift lists in 2010. It was pretty expensive, so I never bought it, but I couldn’t argue with picking it up for $5.

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Such a pretty little thing, isn’t it?

The idea behind the book is that it has little capsule entries of “exquisite” things, which sounds right up my alley. What, exactly, is exquisite, might you ask?

“Enthusiasm.” “Lipstick.” “Silence.” “Fanfare.” “Giochi d’Acqua.” “Gloves.” “String.” You get the idea. I like all those things and the writing is fun and clear, but I was bored to tears throughout.

I’ve got two gripes with this little volume.

First and foremost was the definition of “exquisite.” Can we discuss that for a second? Geishas, yes. Okay, geishas are exquisite. Is string? I don’t know that it is. This book, more than anything, felt like a small collection of things Jessica Kerwin Jenkins (a Vogue editor whose work I like!) found interesting and wanted to research for a few hours.

The other thing I don’t love about this book is how much it skips around. Okay, so I know there’s a disclaimer that this is an anecdotal book, but it’s just…so anecdotal. I don’t doubt that it’s all factual- indeed, it seems to be pretty thoroughly checked out- but my gosh! It skips around so much. I felt like I didn’t really learn anything about anything, and that even the entries that interested me most examined only a teeny facet of whatever it was that was fascinating. Tell me more about Catherine the Great’s love notes! I want to know more about ill-fated hot air balloon rides! I felt like I had to sit through some silly entries (string) and I didn’t get enough of the stuff I had really signed up for by reading this book. Overall, I couldn’t wait to be finished with this book so I could move on to my next thing. I feel like this would work out better as a blog (which it is, and it does!).

Did you read this? What did you think? Did I overpay?

Next week, I’ll be reading this. Please, please join me. I’m really excited to share this one with you.

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