Llew's Reviews

The ever-so-foxy Tara sent me this so I figured that this blog would be an apt place for it
Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
Character? If any of members of The Basic Eight were real I would have been arrested for stalking years ago.

The last book you bought is?
It was a present for someone and you don’t want me to RUIN that here do you?

The last book you finished is
These Demented Lands by Alan Warner.

What are you currently reading?
“Arundel” by Kenneth Roberts and “Snow Country” by Yasunari Kawabata.

You’re inside Fahrenheit 451. Which book would you burn?
Nicholas Sparks oeuvre

Five books you would take to a desert island?
Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past/In Search Of Lost Time (all volumes)
Pynchon’s Gravity Rainbow
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
100 Years In Solitude by Marquez
The Bible

I figure with these books that I’ve been trying to read for years but haven’t ever been able to finish most of them that I’d have no choice but to desperately find a way back to civilization ASAP.

Which book would you memorize if you were on a desert island?
The bible. Yet, nothing like being a raving but delightfully tanned lunatic screaming bible passages to fish to pass the time.

Recently, I was speaking to a fellow about our favorite indie bookstores and he mentioned one in Sebastopol, California. I’ve never heard of Sebastopol, and I can’t pronounce it so I just call it “Cess Pool”. Unfortunately, that’s where the fellow is from so I’d then start subsquent conversations up with a “So back in CessPool was there…”
He has since stopped talking to me.

Which is a shame because Sebastopol (which I still don’t know how to pronounce correctly) is mentioned approximately one gazillion times in this novel. Of course, as it was about the Australian outlaw and head of the Kelly Gang, Ned Kelly, it was Sebastopol Australia not California.

So, yeah it’s a book told from the point of view of Ned Kelly about his life and pursuits. It’s not my type of book at all but it was the first one I plucked from Ben’s friends bookshelves. He was working on computers there, and I was bored while waiting for him. With such a fast paced narrative style, and being short as it is you basically fly through at breakneck speed much like I was hoping Ben would do. I know they talk about wanting a man with a slow hand but FOR THE LOVE OF PETE it took FOUR HOURS already!

Oh, yeah, the book was OK.

February usually takes my family’s lives by the ankles and shakes it heartily while cackling. When this February left us unscathed I did a little happy dance, and felt very much relieved.

It was a premature happy dance.

March left two of my siblings in the hospital, and the madness begun. Then, there was tax season and all sorts of other major distractions. Although I’ve been reading, I haven’t been the best about blogging summaries on here. I will begin again on here and I apologize for my absence.

When I come back, it shall be with a vengenace. Seriously, I’m reading a Japanese novel now where the panamour’s lips are described as a circle of leeches. It doesn’t get any more lyrical and beautiful than that, my friends.

“There was a time when I liked a good riot. Put on some heavy old street clothes that could stand a bit of sidewalk-scraping, infect myself with something good and contagious, then go out and stamp on some cops. … It was GREAT being nine years old.” — Transmetropolitan: Back On The Street by Warren Ellis

Do graphic novels count? I haven’t made up my mind yet so I think I will say that these three I read count as one book. This was a good read so close after the death of Hunter S. Thompson since the main character, Spider Jerusalem, is so reminescent of him.

Breaking for a funny Thompson story: Hunter was running for the sheriff of where he lived, and his opponent had a crew cut. Thus, Thompson cute his hair even shorter than that and started referring to the other guy as his “long-haired opponent.” Tehehe. Man, I loved Hunter S. Thompson.

I also really like Spider Jerusalem who has gone out of his five years of hiding from other people up in the wilderness because he has a book deal that he hasn’t completed. In order to write, he must live in the city. In order to live in the city, he must find a job to support him there. Thus, he finds an old contact and starts writing a column entitled “I Hate It Here” for The Word. In the process of writing the news, he starts to create and affect it. It’s very graphic and violent, but also very good.

Shouts out to Jayward who lent them to me YEARS ago, and I promise I’ll return all the books you loaned me. Really.

“Anyway, I’m sorry for the bum steer, and readers of this column insane enough to have run down to their nearest bookstore as a result of my advice should write to the Believer, enclosing a receipt, and we will refund your $14. It has to say No Name on the receipt though, because we weren’t born yesterday, and we’re not stumping up for your Patricia Cornwell novels. You can pay for them yourselves.”

Nick Hornby is like Ernest Hemingway in that the only way I like to read a book of his is when it’s non-fiction conversational babble. With Hemingway this was Movable Feast, and with Hornby it’s Polysyllabic Spree which is a collection of his columns from the Believer. At the beginning of each chapter, he lists all of the books which he bought that month (a very substantial quanitity which makes me wish he was a regular at my bookshop) and the books which he read. The column then proceeds to explicate on the books he read and what he thought of them. Thoughts which are usually humorous enough that I found myself reading them outloud to whoever the poor chump who happened to be beside me at the time.

My favorite excerpt from the book is from the beginning where Hornby is telling of how when you write books you can’t resist looking around the hotel swimming pool to see if anyone happens to be reading your novel.

“I was cured of this particular fantasy a couple of years ago, when I spent a week watching a woman on the other side of the pool reading my first novel, High Fidelity. Unfortunately, however, I was on holiday with my sister and brother-in-law, and my brother-in-law provided a gleeful and frankly unfraternal running commentary. “Look! Her lips are moving.” “Ho! She’s fallen asleep! Again!” “I talked to her in the bar last night. Not a bright woman, I’m afraid.” At one point, alarmingly, she dropped the book and ran off, “She’s gone to put out her eyes!” my brother-in-law yelled trimphantly.”

“Most fiction about petty criminals, lowlifes, drug users and sexual deviants is so pleased with itself for depicting such people that it never gets around to saying anything interesting about them. Stephen Elliott’s “Happy Baby” brings a rare degree of intelligence and literary accomplishment to the story of Theo, a veteran of brutal Chicago group homes, hopelessly mangled relationships and random violence.”

The above is from the Salon’s Top Ten Book Of 2004 which is what motivated me to pick up “Happy Baby.” Throughout reading it, I kept stopping to admire its binding which differs from other books in ways that I don’t know the technical words to describe. I don’t think any author sits back in their chair in the deep hours of the night hoping that one day they’ll produce a book with such fantastic binding that people are continually in awe of it. However, someone somewhere does have a career where that’s the goal and whoever that someone is – job well done!

I guess my problem with books like this is that they don’t *grab* me, because I can’t believe them. The main character is raped by one of the guards at the juvenile dentention hall he is in. When he becomes an adult, he stumbles upon him and starts to stalk him. When he thinks of the conversation he wants to have with him, he wants to talk to him about the girl problems he’s having. The guard ordered a bigger kid to protect the main character so that nothing happened to him, but he still raped him throughout his detainment at the detention hall. I just can’t believe that anyone – even if they’re from Chicago* – is so messed up that they’d want to talk to their rapist about girl problems.

*hee hee.

“The reading of Dawn is a strain upon many parts, but the worst wear and tear fall on the forearms. After holding the massive volume for the half-day necessary to its perusal (well, look at that, would you? “massive volume” and “perusal,” one right after the other! You see how contagious Mr. D’s manner is?), my arms ached with a slow, mean persistence beyond the services of aspirin or of liniment. I must file this distress, I suppose under the head of ‘Occupational Diseases….” Dorothy Parker’s Review of Theodore Dreiser’s Dawn

My favorite Theodore Dreiser novel (which as the Parker quote would indicate that isn’t saying much) is An American Tragedy which is based on the true story of Grace Brown who was found dead in Big Moose Lake in the Adirondack Mountains in 1906. The boat she had been in with her companion, who rented the boat under the name of Carl Graham, had capsized. It was thought that Graham had also drowned until they searched the rooms of the hotel they were staying at and found letters which indicated that Grace was pregnant with Graham’s (real name Chester Gillette)child, neither of which Graham wanted. Thus, he had plotted to kill her with her unborn child so he could scamper away to continue sewing his wild oats. Only, because of the letters, he was caught and convicted. Reaping a whirlwind indeed.

This plot is set as the backdrop in Donnelly’s “A Northern Light” by having Grace Brown give the letters to Mattie (the main character) to burn. Several of Brown’s letters are used throughout the novel and tie in with Mattie’s story of being the eldest girl in a large struggling family who has just lost their mother. This is one of those books where I just hate to talk about the plot or anything else in fear that I will make it seem any less than it is. It really is a fantastically told story and one I wish I had read before Christmas so I could have hand sold it more.

Plus, the girl on the cover makes me weak in the knees.

The Nanny Diaries

by Two Whiny Wenches

1. Picture the worst job you’ve ever had.

Mine was my summer job in college as a nursing assistant at an infernal fiery pit, otherwise known as a nursing home. I always say that it gave a whole new meaning to the phrase “sweating with the oldies.”

When your main duty is to clean up the incontinent elderly summer break kind of loses it charm. Of course, you get all the added bonuses like having the men’s hall where three of your patients develop a deep attachment to your voice, arms, or general presence so they feel the need to masturbate when ever they hear you, wait until your hands are busy to try and kiss you, or grab on to those lovely arms while trying to pull you into bed. When you – for whatever bizarre reason – don’t acquiesce and go diving in with them they kick you in the head and send you flailing across the room.

2. Now – as I did above – describe that horrendous job in a not particularly witty, clever, or eloquent way but in a style which would most likely make someone else slightly cringe.

3. In the last part of the book, turn up the notch a bit. If you can’t think of any subtle way to do this, just make yourself seem so sacrificing and pure of heart that you give the reader a headache just as large as the job gave you.

4. Get a friend to help you scour over the story with a Thesaurus replacing all of the mundane words with shiny fancy ones.

5. Overpluck your eyebrows with said friend and take a picture which suggests that both of you could benefit from a long trip to powder your noses.

6. Publish the book, somehow get someone famous raving over the overrated piece of tripe, watch it as it zooms to the top of the bestsellers list, and give yourself a long pedicure knowing that you’re now wealthy and your work caused a poor bookshop girl to give herself a headache on a Saturday afternoon because she had to read something recent to keep her father who is constantly ranting, “Why do you only read things by authors who are DEAD? That doesn’t help the bookstore at all!” off her poor hunched back.

The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys

by Chris Furhman

“A touching and surprising coming-of-age story, originally published in 1994. It’s too bad it was published after the author’s death; who knows what we’ve lost?”–Linda Cohen, Little Professor Book Co., Temecula, CA

My answer: A John Irving Hack

The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys is basically a shorter version of A Prayer For Owen Meany with character development as stunted as the title character in Irving’s novel. In short, a Sunday afternoon wasted.

If my Library of America edition of Tennessee William’s collected works doesn’t get in soon, I shall be driven to even more desperate measures!