The Liars Club
by Mary Karr

I'm late coming to this one, and probably don't have anything to add. There must be tons of positive reviews out there. I second them all. Gruelling, exhilarating story of Karr's hellish childhood told in a spicy Texan tongue. Caliente! (10.3.00)
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The Street of Crocodiles
by Bruno Schulz

Bruno Schulz lived in relative obscurity as an art teacher in World War II Poland until he was gunned down in the street by an SS officer, and I, among many, am sorry that he died having written so little. We are lucky to have the work that we do, I guess. Nazis and AIDS have undone so much greatness. Schulz's work is eccentric and personal, mostly taking place in the small town where he lived and rarely left. He tells fantastic, imaginative tales about his community and his family, particularly his father. He has an incredible gift for language, and is a master of the metaphor, though occasionally going a wee bit overboard. His writing style is singular; his unusual conjunctions merit close study. (9.30.00)
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Jimmy Corrigan: Smartest Kid on Earth
by Chris Ware

All of the Jimmy Corrigan comics that Ware has been working on for the past four (or so) years collected into one hardcover volume. Ware is a design genius: I almost bought two copies of this book because the dust jacket folds out to become a gorgeous poster. And it is ludicrously underpriced. Well, maybe not ludicrously, but underpriced nonetheless. In a beautiful bleak Chicago setting, the Corrigan men suffer and inflict suffering upon one another. Disheartening, lovely. (9.26.00)
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Consider Phlebas
by Iain M. Banks

Pretty good. Not great. Banks' first science fiction effort as far as I know, if it wasn't Feersum Endjinn. Now, Feersum Endjinn and Excession are my very favorites of the Banks SF oeuvre. More on this book and the others later, as I seem to be unable to articulate what it is that makes Banks my favorite contemporary SF author. If you haven't heard of/read Banks, you should get on it immediately. They're hard to find in the States Banks is a Scottish writer and his stuff is rarely in print here. Try Canada. (9.18.00)
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Stop Stealing Sheep and find out how type works
by Eric Spiekermann and E.M. Ginger

Pretty lite book on typography, (I just love that diet-soda spelling! So low-cal and perfect!) Pretty lite book on typography, good for beginners, can be read in one sitting. I was underwhelmed, had hoped for more since the times I've heard Spiekermann speak he was wonderfully articulate and amusing, given to sudden profanity and bad puns. One thing that was odd about this book was that the information contained in the sidebars was infinitely more useful and insightful than the body text. By the end of the book, I was reading the margins and skimming or skipping the main pages. I'd recommend Elements of Typgraphic Style by Robert Bringhurst, a much more thorough (and not as dry as you might think) typographical tome.(9.17.00)
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Eccentric Spaces
by Robert Harbison

I wanted to like this book very much. The Poetics of Space was one of the central texts of my thesis (on The Changing Light at Sandover, cf favorite books), and I am generally enraptured by the rare poetic architectural book. I loved the Introduction of Eccentric Spaces, and the first chapter. I loved Harbison's writing style, his acute powers of observation, his lucid explanations of sensations. But then the book went downhill and got bogged down in musings on very specific European buildings and architectural monuments, which, if this had been a picture book, might have been enlightening, but lacking any visual reference was just impossible to imagine and thereby dull. Then followed a couple chapters on books I'm sure very people have read (Hypnerotomachia?) I was sad. I really wanted to love it. And perhaps if I were to visit some of these places, I'd pick this book up again. (8.15.00)
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A Tale of Two Cities
by Charles Dickens

Any book that begins with deathless lines ('It was the best of times, it was the worst of times') and ends with deathless lines ('It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done...') and piles it on throughout is just fine by me. Read it for the second time, or third. A great study of revolutionary fervor and chaos, usurpation and revenge, but also, as the Afterword in my Bantam edition tells me, a story about rape. This surprised me, as apparently it has many readers, couched as it is in all kinds of Victorian euphemism and evasion. Read it again with this in mind, and see how it colors everything that follows.(8.8.00)
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Harriet the Spy
by Louise Fitzhugh

Possibly my favorite childhood book, 11-year-old Harriet M. Welsch wants to be a writer when she grows up and so writes down everything that she sees, including some unsavory comments about her classmates. Her classmates find the notebook, and form a club whose raison d'etre is to be a club that excludes Harriet. Her beloved nanny, Ole Golly, a font of Henry James quotes and practical wisdom, leaves and marries now that Harriet is old enough to take care of herself. A coming-of-adolescence book. Harriet is a refreshingly surly child, an anti-Pollyanna. (7.1.00)
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Gravity's Rainbow
by Thomas Pynchon

At first, I was enraptured. I tend to like the kind of book that some characterize as indulging in euphuism. Indulge in euphuism all you like, writer folks! I'll be standing in line at the local Barnes and Noble waiting for you to sign my copy. But what happened with this one was I sat down with the book, and some tea, my dictionary and the Gravity's Rainbow Companion, and began humming along. About 300 pages in I threw it in a corner in frustration. The prose was masterful, and the comic ribald sections had me going chortle chortle, but I just didn't give a damn about anyone in the book, or rockets in general, or the great ominous cockocracy operating the machinery, invisibly, everywhere. Which is sad because I just loved Mason & Dixon. "Women don't like Gravity's Rainbow" I was told. I generally don't believe in such statements since Joyce Carol Oates and I can read endlessly about boxing. But maybe in this case it's true. (Weirdly, that's the 2nd mention of Joyce Carol Oates in the space of four reviews. And I've never read anything of hers, except her book on boxing.)(6.24.00)
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Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang
by Kate Wilhelm

A pretty good science fiction book (I should work out a star system so I don't have to rely on flat praise like "pretty good". But I digress.) A pretty good science fiction book on cloning, prescient for 1976 when it was written. Examines the social ramifications of groups of 10 people all of whom are exactly the same. As you might suspect, this book is a rallying cry for difference, the rights of the individual, and how the ways in which we deviate from one another is our real creativity. All the clones have sex with one another, i.e. the same others of them, i.e. other clones that are just like them and women who are found to be fertile are enslaved in baby factories where they are made to bear children over and over and over, in a grotesque and horrifying fashion. Which you suddenly realize is the way things used to be in the Olden Dayes. I mean, didn't J.S. Bach have 15 children or something?. But I digress. (6.4.00)
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House of Leaves
by Mark Z. Danielewski
A creepy gothic tale, a ghost story told by means of fictitious essays, footnotes, asides, and John Hollander-like poetic transgressions. (I think of John Hollander whenever I think of those poems that form pictures on the page, i.e. a poem about a duck will be shaped like a duck, etc. Maybe there's a better poet to use as an example, but I'm not sure who that would be. Now I remember,Concrete poetry is what it's called.) The story is mainly told by a grungy guy who works in a tattoo parlor and has a lot of stinky friends. The setup is that he's found a collection of pseudo-scholarly works written by a mysterious man named Zampano. The writings are almost exclusively about a documentary movie by a filmmaker who lives a house that has an infinitely expanding region inside it. I couldn't care less about the narrator, Johnny Truant, and wanted to hear more about the mysterious Zampano. For fans of those anti-novel dudes, Georges Perec and other writers of artful convolutions.
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The Bookshop
by Penelope Fitzgerald

Very English, with more subtext than text. This book weighs in at only 123 pages, and I was curious about Penelope Fitzgerald because she started to write at the age of 60. Died recently. This book was a bagatelle. There wasn't enough of it for me to form a strong opinion about it, or Fitzgerald, one way or the other.
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Girl in Landscape
by Jonathan Lethem

Literary science fiction, but also part western, part coming-of-age novel, Lethem is operating in the more experimental regions of genre fiction. I read him because I find his explorations there fruitful, if not completely faboo. None of his earlier stuff is quite up to par with Motherless Brooklyn, which was a helluva good read. I'd give you some stuff from that, but I recklessly lent it to a friend not known for swift returnage. But fear not, another one's bound to be on its way. Lethem's so prolific, Joyce Carol Oates must be getting nervous.
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Music of the Swamp
By Lewis Nordan

Read on the recommendation of several friends, this one was a plum. About growing up poor in the Mississippi Delta, and rising to heights of rapture. Deeply flawed but quite moving.
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The Stone Angel
By Margaret Laurence

I hadn't heard of Margaret Laurence, but when I was up in Banff, I asked a friend to recommend some Canadian writers, and she gave me this. It's one of those books that every Canadian has read. The story of a bull-headed woman living in remote Canada arrives at self-knowledge in her ninetieth year. Great first person crankiness.
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