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?

What is the What--Dave Eggers

"What is the What? What?" I thought when I saw this title. I found it off-putting: if the title was too difficult for my teeny cranium, I reasoned with my minute powers, I stood no chance with the book itself. Plus it looked like an improving book, which (I must shamefacedly admit) is also off-putting to me.

Turns out it's good though. The book is a semi-biographical tale of a real-life man named Valentino Achek Deng, a Lost Boy of Sudan. The novel's character, also named Valentino Achek Deng, narrates his life in several long flashbacks from the present moment of the story. So from the beginning, the reader knows important information about the end of the tale (e.g., that Achek does not die, that he moves to America, etc.) However there is a surprising amount of suspense along the way.

One thing of note to me was the novel's kind of double-vision perspective on America and American life. On the one hand, the reader can see how she would think about and react to present-day American Achek, and how she would understand the things that happen to him in America. His thoughts and reactions, though, come from a distinctly different perspective. The reader slowly comes to understand his perspective. The experiences that produced this perspective, and especially Achek's reflections on those experiences, are probably unfamiliar to most audiences--they were to me. Not a cheery read exactly, but thought-provoking and interesting.

The Dangerous Book For Dogs-- Rex and Sparky

I ended up buying this book--at full price--because once I picked it up I couldn't put it down. Every page I flipped to made me laugh out loud. Literally. (And not the fake "literally," like when people are like, "I ate so much I was literally stuffed." No: in actual, literal fact, each page made me laugh out loud, right there in the store.)

Plus, I was on vacation. "It will have sentimental value," I reason sometimes in these situations. "I'll remember I got it on vacation."


Be that as it may, there is no need to wait for a sentimental reason to pick up a copy of The Dangerous Book for Dogs. It's just hilarious. Selected snippets that led to my public LOL'ing:

* examples of typically inane dog park statements from history (e.g., "467, Gupta Empire, Northern India: 'Have you heard about this new number, zero? Totally weird. It's not positive and it's not negative, so what the heck is it?'"; "1065, Norman Kingdom, France: 'You think we should conquer England next year? I kinda do. I dunno. My dad thinks we should.'")

* advice for dogs regarding peanut butter and pills ("How do you know if your peanut butter has a pill inside of it? Take this simple test. Is your owner giving you peanut butter? If the answer is yes, then the chances are good that there is a pill in it.")

As it turns out, the book was not really written by dogs named Rex and Sparky. It was written by some geniuses over at The Onion. The Onion newspaper itself does not shy away from hard-hitting pet-news coverage. See for example the landmark story Nation's Dog Owners Demand To Know Who's A Good Boy, and the troubling headline, "War on String May Be Unwinnable, Says Cat General". Unfortunately there is no story to go with the string headline, but there is a picture of a cat general. I'm almost sure it was Photoshopped.

Big Machine-- Victor LaValle

"Who is Victor LaValle?" asks the back of this book. "Well, that's a good question," I thought when I saw it. And then I saw that the likes of Mos Def, Kevin Brockmeier, and Amy Bloom were quoted beneath the question, attempting to answer it. Now: this is a crazy and awesome mix of folks, and I was hooked as soon as I saw it. And though almost all of their answers posit that Victor LaValle is a combination of various OTHER people I may or may not have heard of, I will go ahead and think of him as a combo of these three.

This genre-bender is interesting and suspenseful. Its lack of allegiance to any single genre keeps the reader guessing--anything in the world might happen next! No predicting this sucker. By turns surprising and thoughtful and dark, the book is hilarious throughout. I really enjoyed the writing, too. This was a good read.

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.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao--Junot Diaz

The first thing I have to say about this book is that I was halfway through it before I realized it was called The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, not The Brief AND Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao." There was no "and." There was not even a comma. Why? What was the author trying to convey? Why subtly remove my "and," or my comma? I finished this book a couple weeks ago, but still the question haunted me. Until about thirty seconds ago.

Thirty seconds ago, the most basic possible Wikipedia research informed me that "[t]he title is a nod to Hemingway's short story 'The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber'." So, that answers that question. Obviously it raises the same question about Hemingway's title, but that is not a haunting question. Hemingway's "and"-less, comma-less title is very snappy. And, he's Hemmingway. (<--And AND comma.)

The second thing I have to say is that obviously this book is good. The Pulitzer Prize people think so. The National Book Critics Circle Award people think so. New York and Time magazines think so. A million people think so, and it is unremarkable that I am among them.

The third and final thing I have to say about this book is that if you do not speak any Spanish, get yourself a Spanish-English dictionary. A--most importantly--unexpurgated Spanish-English dictionary. Keep a little vocabulary list and by the end of the book you will be able to make all manner of impolite conversation in Spanish.

Narrow Dog to Indian River--Terry Darlington

Narrow Dog to Indian River by Terry Darlington. A travel memoir in which a septuagenarian English couple takes their skinny dog and their skinny boat down the broad American Atlantic coast. The male of the species establishes a narrative tone and really just...hammers away at that the whole time. The book was printed in blue ink, and the narrative voice is supremely irritating. I didn't finish it and I wouldn't recommend it. Nancy Pearl gave it two librarians up, though, so the book does have some excellent supporters.