Funky hair, video games, dive bars, subspace highways, broken hearts, and samurai swords. One of the coolest series you’ll ever read.
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#12. The Lumiere Affair: A Novel of Cannes by Sara Voorhees
I’ll be perfectly honest with you: I picked this book up for 50¢ at Hastings while my husband and I were out a few weeks ago. I did not have expectations, good nor bad, only the thought that it was a pretty good deal. I was drawn to the book from its summary of a young film critic covering the Cannes Film Festival despite emotional conflicts about being in France. With my own background in film studies and my somewhat naive delirium over the big festivals, I was sold. (And hey, it was half a dollar.)
Our hero, Natalie, loses her mother at a young age in a bizarre accident which occurs during a picnic in the French countryside. After the event, she is sent to live in New Mexico with a father whom she had never met. Her dad watches movies with her in various attempts to cheer her up and bond with her, and she starts writing as a professional film critic. In her years of press junkets and festival coverage, she never goes to Cannes; it is only the possibility of losing her house which persuades her to accept the well-paying assignment, and once she is there she is in a state of nearly constant turmoil. She misses the mother she never really knew, longs for the French cities she only half-remembers, and doesn’t understand how other people seem to have such a damn easy time connecting to one another. Once she finds a strange link between her mother and an acclaimed French producer, she calls on an old family friend to help her unravel the mystery of her childhood, of her mother, and of the love in her life she feels she has never truly experienced.
It’s a fun, quick read — what you would probably call a “beach read” or a “poolside read,” even though I read it laying on my carpet with a cat on my knees — which gives great insider information about the life of a film journalist while tenderly exploring the things in the past which hold us back from the future. I especially enjoyed the various film and meteorological quotes at the beginning of each chapter; they set a great tone and helped compliment numerous analogies throughout Natalie’s journey to lightning storms and the film industry.
I wound up really enjoying this book, and I am glad I went out on a limb and picked it up.
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#11. The Knife-Thrower and Other Stories by Steven Millhauser
This is my first reread of the year, The Knife-Thrower and Other Stories. It was recommended to me by my good friend and then-roommate Colleen several years ago. At first we just read the title story (assigned for one of her classes) but in no time at all we had consumed the complete collection. It was unlike anything I had read before: it was whimsical while rooted in a reality I immediately recognized, heartfelt and chilling in equal measure.
A review printed on the back cover sums it up so well: “As Gothic as Poe and as imaginative as Fantasia, Millhauser’s deceptive fables are funny and warm. But they’re dark as dungeons, too…He bewitches you.” — Entertainment Weekly
The stories themselves have very diverse settings — quiet American suburbs, Old World cities of Germany, strange swampy houses left in ruin — while maintaining two strong themes. First, the overwhelming “moral” of each story seems to be, in one way or another, the dangerously dark thrill of excess and dreams. The secondary theme, the resounding question, is simply: what can we, as a society, be expected to do about it? Many of the stories are told in a collective voice, an entire town in outrage or a whole generation of people enthralled. This idea of unity in the face of strange realities, of enigmatically quiet young women and underground tunnels and flying carpets and robot theater, make these surreal tales all the more haunting.
My favorite stories are “The Sisterhood of the Night,” “Clair de Lune,” and “Paradise Park.” Cheeky, nostalgic, and mesmerizing. I cannot recommend this book more strongly!
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#10. The Shining by Stephen King
The Shining is, obviously, a modern horror classic. Everyone knows the story in one way or another: isolation, madness, murder, ghosts, all in a grand hotel. Kubrick’s The Shining is one of my favorite films, and I recently saw the documentary Room 237, so my interest in exploring the novel was particularly piqued.
I know King did not like Kubrick’s film adaptation. (This has apparently softened in more recent years, but at the time of the film’s release he was quite angry with the iconic director for tossing his screenplay and leaving huge chunks of familial context out.) They’re actually a bit hard to compare, when all is said and done. They are two entirely different animals, the enigmatic world of the films’ Overlook Hotel and the menacing depths of the novel’s Overlook. One tells a story of grim madness with a ghost and ghoul or two amid unnerving symmetry and sumptuous cinematic detail. One tells the detailed story of a family’s very gradual descent into the dark history of an incredibly haunted place. The tone of the film is one of doom from the very beginning; the book is one of utter suspense, as bumps in the night are interrupted by the mundane tasks of everyday life. And familiar things that become unfamiliar are, in my opinion, far more terrifying.
I really enjoyed the novel. The characters are so easy to relate to in the beginning that it becomes even more sickeningly frightening to see Jack Torrance, recovering alcoholic trying to pull his family back together, truly become consumed by the spirit of the Overlook. The slow build to all the visions and voices the hotel has to offer the Torrance family creates an unforgettable atmosphere of excitement mingled with dread.
It’s an interesting study in how memories are like ghosts, haunting us and causing us to haunt one another.
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#9. Ghost Stories of an Antiquary by M.R. James
This collection is often heralded as the beginning of the modern ghost story. James, a meticulous professor with a penchant for scary tales, began writing ghost stories to read aloud to friends by spooky candlelight. He became highly influential for replacing Gothic tropes with antiquarian aspects, the theme of undying evil that waits for unwitting victims, and picturesque villages or seaside towns. (H.P. Lovecraft was heavily influenced by James.)
He sets a great atmosphere of suspenseful terror by introducing a reserved gentleman protagonist and plopping him in the middle of some mundane business such as sketching an ancient church or going on a golf vacation. From there, some suspicious artifact is uncovered and their day-to-day business becomes much more bizarre and disturbing. Though they all follow this pattern, each story is still uniquely frightening. “Number 13,” “The Mezzotint,” and “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” are my favorites.
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#8. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
I finally read a book that my husband and college friends have been heralding for a long time: the ultimate wink-and-a-nod cyberpunk thriller, Snow Crash. The book weaves together the various bits and bobs of the unlikely partnership of a katana-wielding, pizza-delivering online warrior prince and a sassy teenage street courier with an awesome skateboard and a soft spot for mechanical dogs.
The story gets complicated quickly. Alongside Hiro (our katana man) and YT (our street courier), there’s the Mafia, an entire online social structure known as the Metaverse, a dangerous virus, the Feds, Sumerian mythology, a hydrogen bomb strapped to a motorcycle, religious fundamentalists, and a lot of awful neon franchises from residential enclosures to drive-through liquor stores. It’s a fun, freaky romp through the wasteland of an L.A. that, at this point in time, doesn’t seem so far in the future.
The nearly 500 pages of this book go very quickly. There are lots of fun, futuristic action scenes mixed in with highly cerebral passages about ancient languages and the nature of the brain. If you enjoy sci-fi, linguistics, or just cool storytelling, you’ll really enjoy this novel.
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Irish Breakfast Tea
I initially started this blog not only to talk about books, but also teas I enjoy! My husband and I have been guzzling loads of tea lately; one I have been especially enjoying is Twinings Irish Breakfast Tea. It is a nice, hearty tea that really tastes amazing with a bit of milk added. Good for a morning pick-me-up or for a lazy afternoon.
March 31, 2013 · 11:24 pm
#7. Boys and Girls Like You and Me by Aryn Kyle
I picked up this collection of short stories last weekend from op.cit. books on a whim. It is a pretty neat book. All but one of the stories center around a unique female protagonist: some are children, some are married, some are sisters, some are lonely. (In the one story with a young male protagonist, he is becoming increasingly infatuated with the sweet, outspoken girlfriend of his friend’s father.) There is a dark humor to quite a few of the stories – such as a potentially embarrassing puppet show on an 8-year-old girl’s birthday – but most are just dark. Abandoned mothers, adolescent cruelty. Bad decisions heaped on top of bad decisions, only to see them delicately break apart. Despite all this, the theme seems to be one of rebellion rather than caution, though what kind of rebellion is a little difficult to say.
Each page is full of flawed yet savvy, yearning women who are smarter and more sensitive than the situations that present themselves to them. (Which, if we think about it, is probably how we all look back on most of the unpleasant moments in our own lives.) What is especially telling of the tone for these works is a reading group question in the back of my copy of Boys and Girls: “Are any of these characters actually happy?”
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#6. Paw Prints in the Moonlight by Denis O’Connor
This is another book lent to me by my cat-loving coworker Laura. It is a sweet story about a man living in the English countryside during the 1960s who finds a dying cat and her two weak kittens during a snowstorm. The mother and one of the kittens cannot be saved, but Denis has a feeling he can nurse the tiny black and white fluffball back to health. He does so after lots of sleepless nights and names the cat Toby Jug.
The book is divided into chapters based on the seasons of Toby Jug’s first year with Denis, plus a closing chapter about Toby Jug’s final days twelve years after that blustery winter night that he was rescued. The closing chapter is very touching, and some of the ins and outs of veterinary health and rural English life during the 60s and 70s are quite interesting, but overall the book is a tad dry. I found it to take a sometimes clinical, sometimes overly zealous view of owning a cat, especially after reading Kitty Cornered by Bob Tarte, which is so thoroughly alive with humor and self-deprecating wit. (To be fair, Denis O’Connor is a professional psychologist and lecturer, not a writer per se; he wrote this book after vowing to Toby Jug at his death that he would do so.)
I would recommend it to animal lovers nonetheless, because there are many beautiful details about not just cats but wild birds, forest creatures, and a quite affectionate horse that Denis and Toby Jug take camping with them one summer. It is also a very quick read, so the dry parts often easily give way to cute imagery of Toby Jug chasing moths or a funny neighbor telling Denis how to rid his ancient stone cottage of bees.
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#5. Horns by Joe Hill
This is easily one of my new favorite books. I read his novel Heart-Shaped Box the summer before last, and just this past month read (and reviewed!) his short story collection. Joe Hill can do no wrong for me at this point.
Horns is a novel that picks up on one of the worst days of Ig Perrish’s life: it is the one year anniversary of the brutal murder of his girlfriend, Merrin Williams. Not only is the love of his life dead, everyone in town thinks he’s the one who killed her. He wakes up with a hangover and a set of horns sprouting out of his forehead. The horns at first terrify him — when people see them, they confess their most appalling desires and sins to him. He soon discovers their true power, though, as he realizes his horns are the perfect way to find out what really happened to Merrin that rainy autumn night.
Ig slowly turns into a dark antihero, his horns growing all the time, but you are rooting for him from start to fiery finish. What’s a human without flaws and desires anyway? Ig starts to embrace his demonic new life the closer he gets to the revenge that he hopes will set him free.
This novel is full of sly references to evil, heaven, and hell through youthful flashbacks, cherry bombs, pop culture, trumpet-playing, half-heard church sermons, and a mysterious tree house that seems to somehow hold the answer to everything. While it is thrilling and horrifying in parts, it is also a heartfelt story about Ig’s family, childhood, and the one woman he loved so much, he turned into a devil without her.
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Earl Grey and A Million Words 