Telegraph Avenue

TITLE:  Telegraph Avenue

AUTHOR: Michael Chabon

I've now read three of Chabon's novels and each has its own style. This one, revolving around a used record store in Oakland, California, in 2004, is densely written, full of descriptive metaphors and similes that seem to be an attempt to create an underlying soundtrack for the story. It took me a few scenes to get into the rhythm of the prose, but once I did, this became a compulsive read. The story covers race, class, culture, families (fathers and sons, wives and husbands), sins of the past, and trying to hold on to a dream when perhaps a new dream is needed. I came to really care about these characters, the two men who own Brokeland Records and their wives who are partners as midwives, as well as their sons, plus the group of regulars who spend time sifting through Brokeland's stock while hanging out, catching up. A threat of a megastore coming that could put Brokeland out of business sets the story in motion. I was not surprised to read that Chabon created Brokeland and its denizens for an aborted TV show; I was envisioning many of the scenes playing out in front of me. 

Bear

TITLE: The Bear
AUTHOR: Andrew Krivak

It's been a long time since I read a book like this. Relatively short, compelling though not a traditional pageturner, sparse and lyrical, with the simplest of plotlines. A girl and her father, living in a cabin by a lake, surrounded by mountains, perhaps the only two humans left on Earth, the father determined to teach his daughter all she needs to know to survive. And those skills are tested when she's left alone in an unfamiliar place, with only a bear to guide her home. Krivak is a skilled narrator and the book feels as if he's telling a story while seated at a campfire. I happily admit he had me teary-eyed by the end.

Reading this while the COVID-19 pandemic is raging might not have been the best choice, but it's a beautiful book about one girl learning to live in nature, where she'll have to do for herself everything needed to survive, and that's something that resonates at a time when we're all facing an uncertain future. The girl has to learn to listen to the natural world, to the animals and the trees and every living thing between them, something we all should probably learn to do, too.

Slaughterhouse Five

TITLE: Slaughterhouse-Five
AUTHOR: Kurt Vonnegut

I have a lot of classics on my shelves that I've never gotten around to reading. They hadn't been assigned when I was in school and I had so many other things I wanted to read once I was out of school. So I decided to work my way through some of them and started with Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut's anti-war masterpiece.

The story revolves around the Allied bombing of Dresden near the end of World War II, bookended with Vonnegut's own experiences in Dresden during the war and after. The prose is simple and felt dated, but it was still powerful in its ordinariness. The horrors of war are here, as Billy Pilgrim, our hero and Vonngeut's stand-in, goes to war as a chaplain's assistant, gets taken prisoner by the Germans, ends up in Dresden in time for the bombing, then goes home to get married and become an optometrist. He also gets unstuck from time, traveling up and down his timeline, and gets taken prisoner by aliens who put him on display in a zoo, along with a fellow abductee, a former porn actress. Did he really get abducted by aliens? Is he really traveling through time? Or did he wartime experiences leave him with PTSD and a need to make some sort of sense of his life? There is something so mundane in how Vonnegut describes the horrors of war, giving it the same tone and weight as everything else that happened in Billy's life that makes the war scenes worse somehow.

And the repetitive phrase "And so it goes" that punctuates nearly all the paragraphs in the book, a precursor, perhaps, for the more contemporary "It is what it is." There are things that can't be changed, so they can either be accepted or not. To not is to drive yourself crazy. To accept is to, perhaps, stay sane. But war isn't sane, and maybe a sane response isn't appropriate. Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but the story is the sort that inspires introspection. I'm glad I finally read this.

A God in Ruins

TITLE: A God in Ruins
AUTHOR: Kate Atkinson

The first thing I think after finishing one of Kate Atkinson's books is "When is her next book?" I finished this one last night and it's still in my head, almost a part of me. That's what I love about Atkinson's writing: her indelible, almost real characters and her amazing prose that get under my skin and take up residence there. Her characters become part of me, no more so than the Todd family, the focus of two of her books. In Life After Life, Atkinson presented us with Ursula Todd, born in the 1910s, and her family as Ursula lived her life over and over in various permutations, some where she didn't survive childbirth and others were she lived well into adulthood.

This book focuses on younger brother Teddy. In many of Ursula's lives, Teddy didn't survive his exploits as a bomber pilot during WWII. In this book, we encounter a Teddy who did survive, as a POW in a German prison camp. This is a Teddy who married his childhood sweetheart, who had a daughter Viola he never understood and two grandchildren he adored. This is a Teddy who wants to live a simple life, loving his family, loving nature, and being kind to those he meets.

Told non-linearly, the narrative brings us into the cockpit with Teddy on his and his crews' bombing missions, as well as his life before and after the war. The book is about life and death, the cost of war, the choices we make, and the meaning of it all, and probably even more that I haven't quite processed yet, because that's the kind of writer Atkinson is. As with her other books, there are family secrets and how they can affect the lives of the family members, especially the children. There's much about how we treat each other, especially the old and dying. Atkinson packs so much emotion and philosophy into her books and this one is no exception. I cried, not at the twist at the end, but at what came just before. Any author who can bring me to tears (which I admit isn't all that difficult to do as I'm a crier) over characters who really just live in words on a page is someone special to me.

Human Croquet

TITLE: Human Croquet
AUTHOR: Kate Atkinson

Kate Atkinson has been one of my favorite authors for a while now, and since I started reading her books after she'd published a few, I went back and read this earlier tale, which reminded me of her more recent work Life After Life in its time bending structure. It's almost as if this book was a test run for that, yet this stands on its own with its own special take on the flexibility of time.

Isobel Fairfax is an ordinary 16-year-old girl living an ordinary life in 1960, yet somehow, she can slip into the past for brief glimpses of her hometown as it was. Isobel and her older brother have been haunted for most of their lives by the disappearance of their mother when they were young, and Isobel's brother in particular, has been obsessed in recreating her, grasping at any artifact or clue as to who she was or where she is, while Isobel would prefer to regain their mother as a whole entity. Instead, they must contend with their father, Gordon, who returned to them after an absence of seven years; a cranky aunt; and a stepmother with odd obsessions. But how well does Isobel know the adults in her life? Who were they and, more importantly, how did they all come to this place in their lives?

The story unfolds as a historical treatise, starting with the formation of all things, then a brief chronology of the area of England the Fairfaxes have called home, an area William Shakespeare is said to have visited, ending with Gordon's early years, before returning to alternating timelines of present and the past, a past when Gordon, returned from WWII, brought home his bride, Eliza. Family secrets abound as Isobel seeks answers to life's mysteries and her own family's.

As always when I read one of Atkinson's books, I got caught up with the characters and their lives. They're fully realized people, warts and all, and by the end of the book, not everything is what I thought it was, and it's not too many books that can fool me and take my breath away as this one did. I hate saying too much because I'd hate to ruin a wonderful, surprising, amazing, ultimately uplifting, yet poignant reading experience this book is.

Bad Reviews

Publishers Weekly compiled some of the worst reviews of literary classics. Enjoy. I'm partial to the last one for its succinctness.