Unseen Academicals- Terry Pratchett

I was thrilled to see that Terry Pratchett had a new Discworld book coming out; I thought the world might already possess the last one it was going to receive. I was thrilled again--though slightly alarmed--to see it on a right-in-front-of-the-door, new-books-at-50%-off promotional table at Barnes and Noble. I bought the book right away, and returned my library copy, but wondered uneasily if it was on that table because it was not selling well. Or, more optimistically, if it was such a big name that it could be a loss leader or something. I'm going to believe the latter explanation, despite not really knowing what a "loss leader" is or how it works, so please do not tell me if you have information to the contrary.

In my ideal world, Pratchett would write two new books a year, timed to coincide with Christmas and my birthday, and they would all be about the characters in the Watch. I am never very excited when Pratchett introduces a new group of characters, but as I read I come to understand that in his wisdom he has not gone wrong. And in subsequent readings I like the new characters more and more, and realize that he has done the exactly right, best, most perfect thing. This book, which introduces yet more characters, is no exception. I read it with Amy and we enjoyed it very much.

It's hard not to look for telltale signs of the author's early-onset Alzheimer's ("is the loosened-up, slightly...different Vetinari any kind of stand-in for the author himself?") but I suppose that's something we'll just have to deal with from now on. I for one am thrilled to have gotten this next book, and will treasure whatever else Pratchett authors. Apparently he is indeed hard at work on the next novel in the Discworld series. Go, man, go!


PS:
For some reason, almost everyone I talk to has never heard of Terry Pratchett, despite his having sold millions upon millions of books worldwide. Which raises the question: who is buying these books? Is it one person? Where are they?
Anyway, I do a crummy job of explaining Pratchett to people who have not read him. I launch into my paean, and about four seconds in, people go "hmm" in a way that indicates they are hiding their true feelings. I should probably just mention to people that he was KNIGHTED by the QUEEN for services to literature, and leave it at that.
But I just can't help going on! He's a genius! Did you know you could even get knighted for services to literature? I didn't.

The Lacuna-- Barbara Kingsolver

Oh, hooray for Barbara Kingsolver! Hooray for The Lacuna.

Holding the library's glossy new copy of The Lacuna last week, I had butterflies of excitement in my belly but also some kind of creepy bugs of dread. Kingsolver's early novels and essays were a profound influence on me, and I return to them again and again. I also loved her most recent work, the nonfiction book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. (So much so that before I reluctantly returned my much-renewed library copy, bristling with sticky notes, I hastily purchased my own copy and transferred all the sticky notes over.) But her last two novels: not so much. And my anxiety about The Lacuna only increased when I heard an early, unflattering NPR review.

Well, dready bugs begone, and unflattering reviews be damned. The Lacuna delivers, in a big way. The writing is excellent; it is so good that slowing down to savor it is almost painful. The story is compelling, and the structure is flawless. It is everything I hoped for, and nothing I feared. How often in life does anything come through like that?

The Year of the Flood--Margaret Atwood

OK, so apparently the back story of The Year of the Flood sounds eerily like the back story of Oryx and Crake because Flood is Oryx's successor. And here I thought the world was just running out of back stories.

Had I known, I might have re-read Oryx before reading this one. Flood stands alone just fine, though, and reads like a guilty pleasure. It isn't a sequel to Oryx and Crake; I suppose it is the same story from a different perspective. Some characters are in both books. So, read the previous book or jump right into the Flood, it's up to you.

Reaching the Animal Mind--Karen Pryor

I am hogging the library's copy of this book by renewing it constantly. It has lit a fire under me, so that I am:

(1) Cleaning up my dog's understanding of the cues I only half-assedly taught him. For the uninitiated, here's the breakdown: Teaching hilarious tricks with the clicker: fun and awesome. Putting the tricks under precise stimulus control: meh...
And this lack of stimulus control (i.e., my laziness) is why my dog looks like a crazed junkie trying to score his next click when I bring out the clicker. We go along ok for a while, but once he gets one thing "wrong" he goes "OMG, WHAT!!!" and throws everything he's got at me. Unfortunately this is pretty hilarious too, as he hops around looking for anything that he might get rewarded for pulling or pushing, climbing under or sitting on top of, holding in his mouth while he rolls over, etc. He tries anything I have ever taught him TO do, but not bothered to teach him WHEN to do. He remembers things that I have forgotten, that we haven't done in a year or more, and he's creative in applying and combining them. But while I'm laughing and admiring his smarts, he's so excited that he's freaking out a little. So that's not very nice of me.

(2) Training Uh-Oh Chicken to dance.

Plus (3) Writing myself a lengthy little document clarifying all my questions about clicker training.

The Little Stranger--Sarah Waters

I don't like to draw out the time it takes to read a creepy book, so it may be helpful to know that I read The Little Stranger in about a day and a half. (This "compression" method may make such atmospheric books even more overwhelmingly creepy, but for less long, so I keep doing it.)
Waters is known for non-creepy novels about English lesbians in various historical settings.** The Little Stranger is a departure from her previous work in that it is quite plainly creepy, and it contains no obvious lesbians. But fans will certainly recognize her other hallmarks: vivid evocation of place and psyche, and suspenseful storytelling. These elements combine in this book like milk and sugar in tea, to result in a delicious read. (Simile WIN.)

The creepiness in the story is subtle, though, and slips only slowly into the characters' pedestrian lives. We have a somewhat unreliable narrator, though we are not bludgeoned over the head with that fact: very light touches here and there give us insight into his subconscious motivations and feelings. His understanding of those people and situations around him is somewhat at odds with our own, increasingly so as the story progresses. But in addition to its creepiness and psychological veracity, the book has an even bigger thematic agenda: it also manages to explore class in post-war England, a time when the social order was changing.

The Little Stranger also happens to fit into a small post-war-England motif I have going at the moment. Elements of this motif are the book itself, and also my grandmother, who was in the RAF in the war, and with whom I am drinking thrice-daily tea while home. She has lent me another book on the subject, which is much more lighthearted but is rooted in the same truth: life after the war was just as depressing as life during the war. Food and supplies were still rationed, everything was poor and bombed out, and daughters and sons were dead forever, but now life was supposed to return to normal. Its plain inability to do so made some people feel hopeless. Waters also visited this time period in her last novel, The Night Watch. I found that book technically excellent in its Okazaki fragments, but also thoroughly depressing. This marriage of excellence and depressingness is often par for the Waters course. (If you want to put a silver lining on it, the frequency of this combination makes each book more suspenseful. As a reader you never know whether things are going to turn out okay, or--more often--not.)

**Lest this make her sound like a lightweight--she has twice been nominated for the Booker prize, and her first novel was named New York Times Book of the Year.

Birds Beasts and Relatives-- Gerald Durrell

I always check for books by Gerald Durrell at used bookstores, and last week I was rewarded with a library discard of Birds Beasts and Relatives. Durrell, a naturalist, is a close observer of birds, beasts and relatives alike. His adventures with each are hilarious. Like My Family and Other Animals, this book focuses on Durrell's boyhood on the island of Corfu in the 1930's. Originally published in the 1960's, both books were reprinted a few years ago. And good thing, too: each is a book to press on friends, parents and even grandparents. Idyllic and hilarious, these are excellent books for before-bed reading, for reading in waiting rooms, or enjoying with tea. Nothing hair-raising or objectionable...unless you find the specter of laughing out loud in public to be objectionable. In which case, read this book at home!

Wiggity what?!

So many of my favorite authors are dead, or have early onset Alzheimer's, that it is super-exciting when a favorite author has a new book coming out.

Margaret Atwood's new novel The Year of the Flood will be released on September 22. Like her most recent novel, Oryx and Crake, Flood seems conceptually fascinating, and so well-written that I will want to speed through to find out what happens, and simultaneously slow down to savor the language.
Oh: and also like Oryx and Crake,Flood is about a dystopic near future in which mankind's godlike power over science and nature has whipped around and bitten him fatally in the ass. I guess there's a lot of story to get out of that setup.

To be fair to the hardworking Ms. Atwood, she has not been sitting idle since Oryx and Crake. No, since the publication of her last novel she published a nonfiction book about economics, Payback, that I did not read; she published a collection of short stories, Moral Disorder, that I did read; she even published a collection of poems, The Door, that I did not even know about until I looked on Amazon when I started writing this post. Also, my favorite Atwood book for many years was the collection of prose and poems and proems and what-not called Good Bones and Simple Murders, which I never ended up buying for myself. Apparently Amazon has used copies for as low as $.01, so maybe now would be a good time.

As a side note, I once named a dog after Margaret Atwood. Fittingly enough, the story is not a happy one. While I don't blame the name, if I had a do-over I might try naming the dog after A.A. Milne or something.

Milne: "'Oh, bother,' said Pooh."

Atwood (from The Door): "That's what I do:/ I tell dark stories/ before and after they come true."

And she does it so well, you know?

Triple Whammy III: Infinte Jest

Infinite Jest is just about the biggest whammy possible. Coming in at just over a thousand pages, it's a bonerfied giant tome. As Lenz would say.

And those pages are just packed--packed, I say--with content and ideas and six-course meals for thought. So much so that now the book relates to just about everything I read or hear about. For example, BOTH the other books I finished this weekend reminded me in their wildly different ways of Infinite Jest. (Then We Came to the End: group membership vs isolation, and the redemptive or map-eliminating aspects of each; The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (!): pretty much just unasked-for descriptions of chemistry.)

Finishing the book was a mixed pleasure, as I was tired and pressed for time. For several days I had been referring back to the beginning of the book, eying the dwindling number of pages remaining at the end, and wondering how we were going to pack everything in that would apparently need to happen. The answer is: we don't. We don't do that. We leave it as a bizarre puzzle for the reader to figure out. (Or, alternatively, a puzzle for the reader to say "Oh for god's sake" about and look up quickly on the internet.)

Reading this book was work, but a satisfying and gratifying kind of work. I had, like, equipment. There was my pen and special notebook for jotting down notes, questions, & timelines*, plus also I needed the Dictionary app on my iPhone. So much so that I booted the Phone app out of my iPhone's dock to make room for the Dictionary app, the social implications of which are somewhat disturbing.

If you love to read, don't be put off by the book's length or its esoteric vocabulary or its postmodern (post-postmodern? what does that even mean?) sensibilities.** I'm here to tell you: I've read the book and it is good. Dive in!


* Apparently there are good reader's guides available, which probably take care of the note-jotting and question-noting aspects.

** I took a seminar in college on postmodern lit. On the first day of class, the professor asked us for our conceptions of postmodernism. "Oh shit," I thought. "I thought SHE was going to tell US." I had no idea. However, a more prepared classmate offered his idea of postmodernism: "elitist crap." Those two words have really stuck with me. Even the professor acknowledged he was onto something.