Icelander

by Dustin Long
249pp
3/16-4/12

This was a re-read, I guess intended to remind me what I most enjoy about McSweeney's Rectangulars. Back in 2006 when this book came out, I recommended it pretty heavily. It's damned enjoyable, and smart, too. Rereading it, I was pleased to find that it exceeded my recollection. I'd forgotten just how thematically rich the book is, especially to be such a fun book to read.

The book's "fun" comes largely from its setting in the world of Young Adult literature: "Our Heroine," as she's called throughout the book, grew up as the daughter of Emily Bean, who, with her family, solved forgery-related mysteries around the world, and whose adventures were the subject of a series of Young Adult novels with names like "The Greenland Gravestone Robberies." And the author of those books is modeled after Vladimir Nabokov. And the Nabokov-figure is revealed to have been the Bean Family's master-of-disguise archnemesis.

Also, there's a "lost" version of Hamlet, Norse mythology, an uncannily smart canine sidekick, footnotes, a society of subterranean Scandinavian ninjas, and a murder involving a house that doubles as a piece of experimental fiction.

So when I picked up the book a couple of years after my first reading it, remembering it for its zanier flourishes, I didn't expect much in the way of literary merit. I was surprised to rediscover a network of themes and associations holding it all together, such that all of the book's crazy parts are significant.



I heard a while ago that Dustin Long was working on something set in the 18th Century. I can't wait for that to come out.

Arkansas

by John Brandon, 2008
230pp
03/02-03/15

So, I'm one of those people who reads the books of McSweeney's "Rectangulars" line as soon as they come out, even though I haven't really loved one since The Children's Hospital. And, man, I wanted to really like this book.

Call it "deep-fried pulp fiction," if you're fond of corny reductive labels. It follows a couple of sketchy characters into a colorful but logistically dunderheaded narcotics conspiracy spanning much of the Southeast. And that's what I thought I'd like about this book: being a resident of the Southeast with frequent interactions with the criminal element, I'd hoped to recognize the familiar in this book.

To be sure, Brandon gets a lot right, particularly in the "local color" department. Not that I'm familiar with Arkansas, where much of the book obviously is set, but I've lived my whole life in Southern flyover states, even in those state's own "flyover counties," far-removed from cities or even the Interstate. To the extent that they're thought about at all, these places exist as a mystery to educated, urban Americans, and the hipsters devoted to the output of a small San Francisco publishing house. "Here there be NASCAR fans." When I make a road trip across an unfamiliar stretch of interstate, I can't help but wonder about the lives of the people living off every exit. Very often I have this vague sense--"dread" is too strong a word--that the locals are seedy; I am suspicious of the people in these parts precisely because I've never seen fit to give them much thought, even though their territory stretches across most of the map. And Brandon captures the feel of life in these unconsidered places, where people work in factories making everyday objects whose fabrication you'd never once given a moment's thought.

I read this interview with Andrew Brandon shortly after finishing this book, and was disappointed I hadn't liked Arkansas more. I really want to like the book by the guy with nice things to say about Chattanooga, of all places.

But the biggest barrier to my enjoyment had to do with the treatment of petty and professional criminals. I'm a public defender in a small Southern town; I work with the folks who sling dope and carry guns around here. I didn't recognize Brandon's world, where colorful characters operate unwieldy criminal conspiracies that seem designed to maximize potential for betrayal or interdiction. But then, it's entirely possible that Brandon was being 100% faithful to the genre conventions of crime novels, if not to bleaker reality. Never having read a single word of Elmore Leonard or any of the rest, I really wouldn't recognize it. But it's likely I ought to hate the genre, not the writer.



You can't tell, but this is a signed copy. I picked it up at Atlanta's Criminal Records, which itself could be have made an appearance in this book (a flashback, maybe).

Cosmicomics

by Italo Calvino, 1965
153pp
2/11 - 3/02

Calvino's always good for a change of pace. I've only ever really loved one of his books, If on a winter's night a traveler..., but I expect to continue gradually working my way through his body of work, one wild experiment at a time. I seem to be averaging one per year.

This is a collection of short stories, each narrated by "Qfwfq," who transmigrates across a number of forms--well, sometimes explicitly lacking "form"--over the aeons. It's sort of like a set of fables concerned with equations, simple lifeforms, and points in space, instead of barnyard animals.

Qwfwq and his similarly unpronounceable fellow-characters behave in pretty much human ways. Thus we have xenophobia among dinosaurs, jealousy among dense patches of stellar dust, and love among sightless molluscs. It's simultaneously an exploration of our tendency to invest the inanimate with human attributes--seeing a grinning mouth in the grill of a car--and an exercise in storytelling from a radically unfamiliar perspective. I was a little reminded of some old Asimov story about two-dimensional amoebic forms.



I have previously commented on the Harcourt Brace line of Calvino books, with their rather straightforward illustrations for the cover. This one is no exception, taking for its subject the book's first story, which was more of a fairy tale and didn't quite fit with the rest. You can't tell from the front, but the spines of these books all have this uniform band of colors, so that lined up on your shelves they look like a tasteful rainbow, or an array of paintswatches. My three other Calvino's just happen to be different shades of aubergine--conveniently enough for a guy who painted his shelves purple for no good reason--but this one's a brownish-goldenrod that ruins the scheme I had going.

Gang Leader for a Day

by Sudhir Venkatesh, 2008
302pp
01/27/08-02/02/08

Careful readers of this blog will note a one month gap in the reading dates between this book and the book previous. Of course, I wrote that last blog post, oh, about 3 months ago. I can't really account for either lacuna. I remember there being a time where other, less demanding forms of narrative dominated my attention. I believe "The Wire" was on the air at the time. This of course can only partially account for my apparent sabbatical from reading, just as the stresses of work & turtle-ownership, and the intimidation inspired by a growing pile of unblogged, read books can only partly explain my three month silence on teh blogz.

So I guess I'm saying that the next few entries will be rough sketches of Book Reports. The books are already fading in my memory. The witty comments that occurred to me while reading are long gone.

I want to say I picked up this book the week it came out, and grew steadily more irked as its hype expanded across my personal NPR/NYT/elitist bubble. One would rather avoid the conclusion that one buys the same books as one's insufferable peers. I suppose I got what I deserved; this book was essentially spun out of the talked-to-death Freakonomics.

So you're likely familiar with the schtick: "A rogue sociologist takes to the streets," as the dust jacket says. Venkatesh, as a PhD student, ingratiates himself into the world of Chicago's notorious Robert Taylor housing projects. Apparently he studied "the underground economy," and it might be interesting to see some of his more academic writing on that subject. This book, however, is mostly an exercise in shock & voyeurism. Which is not especially groundbreaking; there's a reason we call it "slumming." Still though, the book packs quite a vicarious thrill, and it's fascinating to see the many ways the gangs functioned as quasi-community organizations. It can be eye-opening in the same way as "The Wire."



Venkatesh has apparently managed to parlay his degree (& Richard Roundtree's jacket) into a brisk gig as an authority on the Street. So far, he's been tapped to weigh in on such "hood" topics as The Wire, Grand Theft Auto, Spitzer's call girl, and Barack Obama.