New Book gushing over FINNY

It's a really good and rare thing when you read the teaser of a book and think, "This will be amazing!" and then it actually lives up to the hype in your head and actually is amazing. That's what happened with Justin Kramon's debut novel, Finny.

Delphine "Finny" Short is a quirky, smart-alecky fourteen-year-old. And when I read in the teaser paragraph that this novel was going to follow this precocious character for twenty years of her life as she meets all kinds of eccentric, interesting characters, I said, "Ooooh, yes please!" because I love novels that follow a long period in a character's life. As a teen, Finny gets a kick out of inciting a rise from her parents—a father who constantly quotes philosophers, writers, artists, and various other "Great Men," and a mother who is super concerned with the public image of the Short family.

One day, Finny "runs away" but doesn't get very far because she meets Earl, a boy who kind of ends up being a catalyst to the rest of Finny's story. Once she meets Earl and his narcoleptic musician father, one event leads to another, introducing Finny to some interesting people and taking her far outside her rural Pennsylvanian town.

When you start reading a book that has just such an awesome premise and completely lovable, imperfect characters, you want to keep reading it forever. My go-to book with this description is Keith Maillard's Gloria, a little-known masterpiece about a young woman navigating college and convention in the 1950s. And I love love love that book because it doesn't matter what Gloria does—I still love her and sympathize with her and want to follow this character's story until the day she dies. And Finny was kinda like this for me.

To make a great novel, though, there needs to be more than just an intriguing main character. Beyond this person, there needs to be a world that keeps both the character active, growing, and developing and keeps the reader entertained. The author built that for Finny, because as her world expanded, so did the reader's. As Finny began boarding school and met her germaphobe dorm mother, Poplan, and her New York riche roommate, Judith, there was suddenly so much more potential to the story. Not that there wasn't before—I just mean that as Kramon added characters and relationships, it just added layer upon layer of potential in the direction that Finny's life would take. And as I'm already sucked into her world as she's experiencing and questioning and developing as a person, that's exactly what I want as a reader—to have no idea where this character is going to end up, but to love the journey so much that I don't really care.

Kramon writes with purpose. From the succinct chapter titles that resemble elementary Reader titles ("Finny Meets a Boy", "A Trip to the Principal's Office") to his poetic descriptions of inconsiderable emotions and moments, Kramon writes to paint a whole picture, to have you react to each supporting character as much as to Finny—good or bad, as long as you care. You get the impression from Kramon's lovely descriptions that he really cares about this character he has created. And even if you don't want it to end, or know how it will end, or, really, care how it all ends, you trust that he'll let Finny end up okay.


Finny was released by Random House Paperbacks Tuesday, the 13th.
Review copy provided by the author.

Review: Gooooal!

I took a look at Vladimir Nabokov's Glory because I knew that it had a soccer element. And why not, as the world's population is engrossed with the World Cup. Unfortunately the soccer in the novel is ever so slight, a subtle recurring theme - a trophy here, a description of goalkeeping there. Although soccer was underused, Glory itself was an interesting, slow-moving coming-of-age story that seems really more like a John Updike book than a Vladimir Nabokov one.

Martin Edelweiss's parents are separated, and Martin lives with his mother in pre-revolutionary Russia. His father eventually dies, and Martin and his mother are forced to flee Russia when things get tough. Martin takes a liking to the ship that he's on (he's on a variety of modes of transportation throughout the book). His growing up seems airy and ephemeral - from one moment he's sailing the Mediterranean in quest for a new live, in the next he's up at Cambridge reading Russian literature and mocking poets. He befriends Darwin, a jocular, come-what-may kind of student. He falls in love with Sonia Zilanov, a girl from a family he meets out in England. Darwin also falls in love with her. They fight. They recover, even when Sonia rejects both of their marriage proposals. For his college team, Martin stops many balls from becoming goals.

It's kind of a lazy story, as Martin really doesn't have any goals in life. When he gets up to Cambridge, he doesn't know what he wants to study (which is an oddity, as it's usually mandatory to know what one wants to read there). When he graduates, he doesn't have any idea what he wants to be. Even when he receives a soccer trophy as a gift, he's not sure what to do with it - he fingers the stationary ball that's under the soccer player's foot. Falling in love with Sonia seems to be one of the few definitive things he does in life, and yet Sonia wants nothing to do with him, other than be friends.

Otherwise it is a relatively warm story. The characters are well cared for. As Nabokov writes in his introduction to the novel, 'Martin is the kindest, uprightest, and most touching of all my young men; and little Sonia, of the lusterless dark eyes and coarse-looking black hair . . . should be acclaimed by experts in amorous lure and lore as being the most oddly attractive of all my young girls, although obviously a moody and ruthless flirt'. Although Nabokov himself may be employing aplomb, per usual, he's not far off. Martin is a character that you must sympathise with. He seems like a typical 20th century male protagonist, trying to find his way in life without being able to settle down. There seems to be a similarity between Martin and Updike's Rabbit.

Plus, it's a good time to (re-)read Nabokov, as Vintage has taken the time to allow a redesign of all the covers due to the publication of The Original of Laura last year. They're gorgeous.

Notes from a Reading Slacker

My reading has been slacking off lately. Seriously. I would normally tell you, "Summer is the BEST time for reading! Pools and beaches...I read so much in the summer!" But that, I am discovering, is a lie. A dirty lie.

My year goes like this:

• January–March: It's so cold. I hate the cold. I hate New York. I hate the Northeast. I hate life. Why is it so cold?
• April–May: It should be getting warmer. Why isn't it getting warmer? It would be warm by now in Nashville.
• June–August: I LOVE LIFE.
• September: Oh god, it's almost over. Summer, don't leave!
• October: Oh no, it's coming...
• November–December: How much longer til June?

During those nine months waiting for the warmth, I distract myself with books. But during those three glorious summer months, I can barely sit still long enough to open one. Yet, my office desk is filled with STACKS of books just waiting to be read. And I do want to read them...really, I do.

Therefore, I think I'm going to have to do that thing one does when chaos rules and you don't know where to start tackling a project: make a list. If I can just figure out where to start, maybe it will seem a little more manageable.

• Currently Reading: The Partly Cloudy Patriot by Sarah Vowell. This should've been read in about a day, but my slackertude has dragged it out to about a week. Therefore, before I can comment on it, I will have to go back and skim the whole thing again.
• Next Up: Betsy-Tacy and Tib by Maud Hart Lovelace. I've been meaning to read the Betsy-Tacy series because I never knew of it as a child. But because they're so short, I feel I need to read a few before I can write anything about them.
• Sometime After That: Finny by Justin Kramon, Bad Marie by Marcy Dermansky, Everything is Going to Be Great by Rachel Shukert, War Memorials by Clint McCown, the rest of Betsy-Tacy
• And, Thanks To Reviews I Just Read, Added These To the List At High Priority: The Tricking of Freya by Christina Sunley, 31 Hours by Masha Hamilton, I Know I Am But What Are You? by Samantha Bee
• And I STILL Need To Read: New York by Edward Rutherfurd

And since I can barely sit still to read, I surely don't feel like sitting still long enough to blog about it. I am going home next week for a full 9 days (!!) with few definitive plans, which may give me a chance to catch up on some reading. Or, I may forget about reading and spend my time cruising around Nashville in the car I so love and never get to drive. My money's going on the latter.

Maybe you'll just hear from me in September.

June is Audiobook Month

I've been meaning to write about audiobooks and audiobook month for a while now, but as it's still June I guess it's still appropriate. (The World Cup is quite the distraction.)

Until very recently I've had no use for audiobooks. I enjoy reading in my bed, I enjoy reading on the train. If there's background noise, it's probably coming from my iTunes or my new television. The only time I could tune into a narrative was when I was actually concentrating on the page before me. I once tried to listen to Nabokov's Lolita, which is even read by Jeremy Irons, but I could never stay still long enough; I was always distracted, wanting to pick up the text instead.

That of course changed when I got displaced from my apartment. Currently I have to drive to the train station in order to take a train down into the city. It's an obnoxiously long time to commute; however, as you can well imagine, it allows for a lot of sitting time, potential reading time. Three hours a day are open in such a way. So I figured that at the very least I could try listening to books, at least during the car ride to the train station.

And what an experience it has been. In the right hands, with fantastic voice actors and talented engineers, the excitement of reading comes alive. In many ways, it's much more thrilling than hearing an author read from his or her own work, as generally the people who are reading for an audiobook are trained professionals, have directors who are able to assist on cadence and emphasis. It's like being a kid all over again, having a librarian or a parent read a bedtime story to you; you get involved, you laugh along. It's brilliant. You just have to make sure you select a narrative that is perhaps more effective when it's heard, not seen and read.

The first audiobook I was able to get through was Bram Stocker's Dracula, as read by Robert Whitfield. Whitfield was able to do each voice (it's quite the polyphonic novel, with multiple narrators/letter writers) with a different lilt so that you knew immediately who was speaking without having to backtrack. It also doesn't hurt that Dracula itself unravels in such a thrilling and mysterious way. Highly recommended for people starting out in the audiobook world.

I moved on to Ernest Hemingway. I thought back to my high school and early college days, and I recalled that The Sun Also Rises was my favourite of his. So I gave it a go. Hemingway's first novel was read by William Hurt, who was the perfect choice. His deep voice, his emphasis on the full stop - he made Hemingway's masterwork sound like a prose poem, gave it a life that I had hitherto not heard. Very highly recommended to anyone, especially those enamoured by Hemingway's staccato style. I followed this up with A Farewell to Arms, read by John Slattery, which was also a good listen; but I found the narrative to drag along. Slattery makes Lt Henry feel quite strong, against all odds.

This morning I finished the novelisation of Despicable Me: The Junior Novel. Now, you may be worried about that decision, as all novelisations of film fall flat; however, this is read by Tim Curry, which was the obvious draw. It's hysterical. He handles quite the myriad of voices. All with a grand sense of humour. Especially against the American voices - for some reason they sound more like caricatures than real people. Listening to him is like watching someone perform slapstick.

All in all, I have to say I'm hooked on audiobooks right now. That, or I've just been very lucky in my selections. If you have any recommendations, I'd be happy to take them.

World Party: Communist Cuba

Finally...I fiiiiiinally read a book for the World Party Reading Challenge. The country assignment for May was a choice: any one with a Communist history, past or present. Well, I wasn't about to devote months of my time to old Russian literature, so I opted for Cuba with Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban. I don't know much about Cuba beyond Castro, so, why not?

When I opened the book and saw a family tree before the first chapter even began, I knew I was in for some trouble. Oh god, how many people am I going to have to keep track of? Well the answer to that is about 5. No, include spouses; make that 9. No, 10. And include children. 15. 14? I lost count.

There's not much plot, just a set-up of the characters: Celia and Jorge are the head of the family tree. They have three kids—2 girls and a boy, but the boy we don't really hear from so much (unless I totally missed it). The two girls, Lourdes and Felicia, have their own husbands and kids and their own mess of issues. Sometime in the 1960s (I think?), Lourdes left Cuba for Brooklyn, NY, and Jorge eventually followed because of illness. So only Celia and Felicia (and the absent Javier) are left in Cuba. And Felicia is pretty crazy. Certifiably. Crazy as in, she sets fire to her first husband's face, burns a woman's scalp at a hairdresser, and throws another husband off a rollercoaster. She practices black magic; her kids think she's crazy and seek out their dad. Meanwhile in Brooklyn, Lourdes runs a bakery; her daughter Pilar is mostly Americanized and completely late-70s punk; and the two fight all the time.

The meat of the book lies in all these characters and their differences in relation to their homeland of Cuba...mostly their feelings toward the revolution. Celia is very pro-revolution; Lourdes is very anti-; Pilar just kinda rolls her eyes at the whole thing since she never had to live amidst it, and she'd rather just get back to Cuba to visit her grandmother. Aside from the key phrases about the Cuban revolution like "Castro" and "Communism" and "Cuban Missile Crisis," I don't know very much about it. In fact, Castro is never referred to by name—simply as "El Lidar"—and it took me a bit to realize that's who Garcia was referring to. While reading this, I felt like a needed a whole 20th century history lesson so I could understand the full social, political, economic context of it all (that's what Wikipedia is for). While Celia and Lourdes' characters focus a lot of Cuba's politics, Felicia's illustrates more of Cuba's culture—the religion, the spirituality, the relationship between men and women.

Celia is obviously the rock of this novel—rock in the sense that everything kinda radiates out from her. We learn the most about her through her present-day perspectives and a series of letters she wrote for decades to her lover of young adulthood. Between Celia and Pilar, we see two completely opposite representations of what it means to be Cuban from different generations and different lifestyles; every drop of Celia's blood is Cuban, while Pilar lives in American and can't figure out where she belongs.

Each section of the book contains a narrative focused on each family member—Celia, Felicia, Lourdes, Pilar—but sometimes they're told in first person by the character, sometimes told in third person from an omniscient voice. It takes a while to get a grasp on each individual, and I was well into the story before I could focus on what was happening, rather than the structure. I think if I read it again, I'd get more out of it.

I'm often intrigued by stories of multi-generational families, some of who immigrate. My story is pretty boring in comparison...generations of my family have been in one city and are still in one city (not that that's bad...I'm the lone drifter and sometimes I wish I was in that city). I don't have a very colorful palate of experience when it comes to culture shock. So to me, it's interesting to read about the differences between the generations of a family who has come from the same place, because the differences are based on their own experiences. It makes me feel all warm and worldly inside, which may just be the point of this reading challenge.

Review: Vanity in Atlanta

After taking a look at The Bonfire of the Vanities, I decided that it was time to attack Tom Wolfe's follow up novel A Man in Full, which has been sitting on my bookshelf for over six years now. So it was about time for the task to be undertaken.

A Man in Full is very similar to The Bonfire of the Vanities, except that it takes place in Atlanta instead of New York. There's a discussion of the absurdity of the self-made man who indulges in his wealth. High society is placed against the struggling society. Race and gender play a role in the way characters think, perhaps even more so as race divisions and potential riots hang over the novel like a spectre.

Charlie Croker owns Turpmtime (spelt as such), a quail-shooting plantation just outside of Atlanta. He's going bankrupt and the banks that loaned him the money are on his case, looking for him to make his assets liquid. They want his planes (he has more than one!), they want his artwork, they want his horses, they want his plantation. But he won't give it up. He doesn't want to lose face.

Enter Roger 'Too' White, a lawyer who wants Croker to give a press conference for a star football player from the ghetto of Atlanta, Fareek Fanon (is this a nod to Frantz Fanon?), who has just been accused of rape by one of Atlanta's most prominent families. Roger has been asked to defend Fanon. With the mayor of Atlanta, who is afraid that racial division might erupt in violence due to this accusation, Roger tries to get Charlie to give a press conference to talk about the upstanding elements of Fanon. The problem is Charlie doesn't see such elements. In short, Fanon is a punk, doesn't respect anyone, and there's no semblance of good within him.

Meanwhile, Conrad Hensley, a 23-year-old worker who is a part of Charlie's food empire as a freezer worker, gets fired when Charlie decides to cut 15% of his staff. Obviously Conrad doesn't take this well, and ends up in prison for assault after his car is towed. In prison, he finds the philosophy of the Stoics, which is kind of like finding an existential god, and begins practising their edicts. An earthquake destroys the foundation of said prison, and Charlie gets free, finding himself in the Asian underworld, which eventually leads him to the doorstep of Charlie Croker.

Like Bonfire, there's tons going on. A lot of chance events that are all moving towards some sort of explosive conclusion that becomes deflated. With a title like A Man in Full, all types of 'manhood' are discussed. People are judged by their own personal axioms and how they uphold them in the public sphere. When Conrad talks to Charlie about his stoicism, he says:

'the only real possession you'll ever have is your character and your 'scheme of
life'. . . . Zeus has given every person a spark from his own divinity, and no
one can take that away from you, not even Zeus, and from that spark comes your
character. Everything else is temprorary and worthless in the long run, your
body included. . . . You know what [Epictetus, the stoice] calls the human body?
'A vessel of clay containing a quarter of blood.' If you understand that, you
won't moan and groan, you won't complain, you won't blame others for your
troubles, and you won't go around flattering people.'

This is just one of the many thoughts thrown at the reader in this novel. Although A Man in Full may not be as fast-paced as Bonfire, it may not have as many exclamation points (although the ellipses are probably on par), it may not have the energy, but I chalked all of that up to the fact that perhaps he's just describing Atlanta aptly, that it's not New York, that there's something else to be appreciated here. Though I've never been to Atlanta so I couldn't say. But overall, it was a hefty, interesting read.

In Conclusion: Another graphic journey to France

I say "another" because I just read French Milk.

Craig Thompson warns the reader that Carnet de Voyage is not his "next book." Following the successful Blankets, Carnet de Voyage is mostly just a travelogue during Craig's 2-month visit to France and Morocco—a trip that was part pleasure, part publicity tour, and part research for his "next book" Habibi (due out...sometime).

What I couldn't stand about Blankets was how whiney the main character was (and since it's pretty much a memoir, that means it was Thompson that was whiney). Initially, this really turned me off of Carnet de Voyage as well, because now Craig was moping about the girlfriend from Blankets that had dumped him (or as I should accurately title her as he did, his "lover"). Here he was across the world seeing lots of exciting things...but he just complained about how miserable his life was, how he'd rather be in Portland, Oregon, than Morocco, and how ill he felt (because he didn't sleep, because he staying up moping, because he was depressed).

Oy yoy. I'm hitting the battery-operated doorbell we have in our office right now that makes a big "wahhhh wahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh" sound.

So, initially, I was just as annoyed at the voice behind these drawings. But then I thought back to my visit to Spain in 2006, and I recalled how absolutely miserable I was on that trip as well. And it didn't even have anything to do with the trip (except for that whole getting robbed on the first day thing). It had everything to do with Life and all its little details. And when other things are on your mind, it's really hard to completely let them go and enjoy your time in a foreign place; it's easy to wish for comforts of home. I remember walking on the outskirts of Madrid and seeing some hills, thinking the landscape reminded me of California, and wishing I was in California instead of Spain. Now, I yell at that past version of myself and say, "You were in SPAIN! Shutup!"

And then Thompson did this amazing thing where he became really self-aware that he was moping and being a Debbie-downer. Though his brooding was still irritating, at least he recognized he was doing it. And was ridiculous for doing so.

Another reason I'd rate this one higher than Blankets is the art. Thompson's art in this is AMAAAAZING. Because it's just a freestyle sketchbook, he explores a range of styles (probably because of variety of drawing utensils)—from self-aware caricature, to loose sketching of landscape, to detailed brushstroke portraits. His dedication of individual pages to individual experiences added a lot of personalization; otherwise a travelogue of places seen can be nearly the same for everyone who has visited them. His self-mockery while riding a camel, a spontaneous game of laser tag, and a journey down a mountain on a snowboard were some of my favorites.

In this collection of sketches, Thompson had a wonderful eye on the people around him. In my opinion, people are, hands down, the best thing about visiting a foreign place. To see another person in their element, to wonder how they live their life day-to-day, to know that their belief system and value set may be completely different than your own or what you are accustomed to—it's both humbling and fascinating. His drawings of locals, friends, and travel acquaintances provide a much closer look at his experiences abroad. And because he always tried to discover the story behind the person, his experiences seemed more...poetic, or worthwhile, or fulfilling, or [insert descriptive yet subtle adjective here].

According to Thompson's blog, Habibi is on schedule to be completed this summer. I'm anxious to see more of his art, but a little hesitant to read more whining. So hopefully this one won't include the memoir bits about his ex-"lover."