Bumbling towards the princess

Book: Heroics for Beginners

Author: John Moore

Published: 2004 (Penguin)

Pages: 246

Prince Kevin’s really more of a diplomat (some would say “coward,” but he’d give them a really dirty stare) than a warrior, so when he learns that his love Princess Rebecca has to marry the first guy who rescues her dad’s Infernal Artifact from the evil overlord who stole it for a hefty dose of science-as-magic mcguffin, he leans heavily on a practical guide to becoming a hero.

Becky already loves him and they go to half-hearted sitcom trope lengths to hide their lusty high school-sweethearts-level relationship, so all Kevin really has to worry about is getting zapped by He Who Must Be Named, Lord Voltmeter (ten bucks if you CAN’T name that allusion), beating another flashier hunkier dude to the chase, and getting tied up/seduced by Voltmeter’s evil assistant. Oh and finding his way out of the evil fortress, which is harder than it seems and more helpful to his battle than it sounds.

The writing is funny, using a big dose of wise-assery to make sure the story never takes itself seriously but still managing to wring suspense out of it. There’s nothing too radically subversive—it stays on the “hey, aren’t these conventions a little ridiculous but don’t you love them anyway?” side of teasing—but it’s propulsive and convincing and a great way to ease into fantasy through the gift shop.

Bookshelf! Except somebody else’s because I need something to take with me to a holiday party thrown by an RPG-er.

Big bad wolf of adolescence

Book: The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales

Author: Bruno Bettelheim

Published: Vintage Books (1977 edition; originally 1975)

Pages: 310 (plus lots of end notes)

Fairy tales help us work through our weird bits before we even realize what the weird bits are trying to tell us, in a way that uses an extra layer of symbolism to both aid our understanding and squish the weird bits down to sizes we can comfortably conquer.

Boom. That’s Bettleheim’s thesis, although he uses way more Freud.

It’s a good one, one that restores my faith in stories. I guess—no, I know from personal experience that getting older partially means questioning things that aren’t immediately and obviously useful as we try to figure out what we can and can’t live without. Stories seem frivolous on the surface, but they help us explore what it’s like to be human and all the infinite options of how to deal with that.

He goes through a lot of examples of symbolism, most of which have to do with puberty (Jack and the Beanstalk, Goldilocks and the Three Bears), the Oedipal complex (Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella), and both at the same time (Snow White). This was written in the 1970s, and I dunno if psychologists have proven Freud wrong or severely misguided or something since then, but even if the particulars (like a glass slipper = vagina symbol; it makes sense but I’ve never thought of it that way which then again might be the whole point, right?) aren’t hard and fast, the basic premise of using fairy tales to slay real dragons still has a crap ton of evidence underneath it all.

And it’s fascinating to read. Even if they deal with the same subject, no two fairy tales deal with it the same way, so there are lots of angles to explain and contrast. Everything underlines how complex humans don’t even realize they are but managed to pack into their folklore.

 You’ll be able to follow the psych lingo if you’ve ever had a passing intro reading/class relationship with the subject, so dig right in. Just don’t eat the apple or the housing material or the porridge or the breadcrumbs leading from the forest in case you scar the children for life.

Bookshelf! Yay for growing my nonfiction!

Tear-soaked from the headlines

Book: The Promise of Stardust

Author: Priscille Sibley

Published: HarperCollins (2013--!)

Pages: 399

Here is what I was thinking once this book laid out its central premise and started “building”:

I put building in quotes because everything just spins in place while people pontificate their beliefs at each other.

SO MUCH MELODRAMA, Y’ALL. There’s a lady who watched her mom die slowly from a vegetative state so the lady makes it clear that she never ever wants to be put on life support herself. Cut to an accident that leaves her brain-dead…but she’s pregnant. So the lady’s husband fights to keep her alive long enough to deliver to baby to term because that’s what she would’ve wanted, dammit! Don’t make me speechify all the emotions I’ve ever had for her since we met when we were kids!

He’ll do it anyway. Hint to authors: making emotions louder makes them more ridiculous. If everyone starts lecturing everyone on (1) their fierce emotional bonds with the person in question and (2) exactly how strong that makes their emotional telepathy with the human being who is no longer human, then you smother the human that we’re supposed to care about under, like, legal bickering and overworked sentimentality.

And I so wanted to care about this lady, because she was an astronaut and a little scatterbrained and had trouble carrying pregnancies to term in the first place when she really wanted kids.

But SPOILER ALERT everything turns out okay in the end. I mean, she dies, but the kid comes out okay, and I did keep reading this every day at lunch to remind me of how awesome it is to work in a library and just have advanced reader’s copies lying around on breakroom tables (can I get an “Aw yeah”?).

And it gives me an excuse to get SUPER EXTRA NO SERIOUSLY SPOILER-Y ABOUT THE WALKING DEAD. GUYS, I’M ACTUALLY SPOILING SOMETHING CURRENT. LOOK AWAY IF YOU HAVE NOT YET EXPRESSED YOUR CARE FOR SUNDAY’S EPISODE BY WATCHING IT ON THE TELEVISION.

Okay. I’m done here.

Ongoing source for lit fic fix

Book: The Best American Short Stories 2004

Author: various (editors: Lorrie Moore and Katrina Kenison

Published: Houghton Mifflin (2004)

Pages: 429

The Best American Short Stories series is an annual dose of nicely-written lit fic angst sprinkled with the occasional weirdo and mythical creature plunked into modern society. 2004's edition is no exception. 

Does that make it sound like all the volumes in the series? Well, it kind of is. Does that make it sound boring? Sure, it SOUNDS boring if you put it like that, but the stories are all of the amusing variety. And that is the key to lit fic: take a basic premise and find a (non-gimmicky) way to make it unusual enough to become interesting. Reading the Best American series does the hard work for the you and the me, dear reader, by having its guest and series editors read about a billion short stories over the course of the given year and picking out the best and presenting them in these nifty softbacks with minimal art. 

Standouts in this volume include:

• a homeless Native American trying to raise money to buy back his grandmother's ceremonial clothes only to not realize how he automatically pisses away each dollar he gets when he does get money; first-person narrative is revealing in a way the character doesn't notice even though he's doing the talking
• a teacher who gets her students to write their own evaluations; the unexpected reactions from the parents jar nicely with the teacher's idealism
• little girls trying to win a Biblical Halloween costume contest by going as Salome and John the Baptist; I love how it's conveyed that the girls know enough that they're doing something wrong but not enough to know why they should be ashamed

Great series, good vintage. Bookshelf beside by 2007-2009 collection (to grow soon! I have money and a Barnes and Noble!)

BABY OWL PHOTOS

Book: Wesley the Owl: The Remarkable Love Story of an Owl and His Girl

Author: Stacey O’Brien

Published: 2008 (Free Press)

Pages: 224

OH MY GOD Y’ALL BABY OWL WITH PHOTOS.

The actual story is more in-depth than this. This lady took in an injured baby barn owl and raised it and they become best friends for fifteen years. I’m so glad the author’s a biologist who jokes about owl shit and frets about getting enough live mice to kill for the owl and reluctantly records the owl’s mating screeches while the owl makes it with her arm. For science!

Her science knowledge makes a squishy adorable animal story more authentic and enthusiastic with facts and not sentiment. Although there’s plenty of both, the loving bits are much more believable when she’s so unflinching about how much hard work this is.

There are a few human details that she skims over—when she starts talking about her career and how she got into biology, she’s got a random paragraph about how she and her sister were famous child actors who were also a family singing group, which—what? When? How did this happen with such normal-sounding parents? How did that segue into biology and owl love and, later, ultimately a career in UNIVAC computers?

She presents just enough despair over her dating life to hint at loneliness that is both helped and hurt by her owl, but there’s not enough details to know why she was so in love with this one dude that it put her in a deep depression when it didn’t work out or why it didn’t work out with this other guy who seemed to mesh really well with her owl life.

I imagine that’s just to keep the focus on the owl and to keep the book from becoming the author’s autobiography. She’s got a refreshing straightforward style that doesn’t allow for human nuance but does really well to endear the owl and his growing personality to the reader through a biological understanding that goes into the whole essence of sharing a life with a loved one.

Also, did you know that owls aren’t water birds? They don’t generally go near it because they get all the moisture they need from the mice they swallow whole, and their flying feathers don’t dry as fast or as well as other birds. This owl didn’t know that. He loved playing in the water, and how she eventually managed to blow-dry him is a highlight of face-meltingly cute pet rearing.

Did I mention there are pictures, you guys? THERE ARE AND THEY ARE AWESOME. Sadly, I must return this book to the library. 

Adventurous nesting dolls

Book: Cloud Atlas

Author: David Mitchell

Published: 2004 (Random House)

Pages: 509

This is like five novels dissected and nested into each other in a narrative structure that sounds so gimmicky it should get its own reality show.

But it works! So well! And it’s all David Mitchell’s fault!

A missionary’s Pacific diary gets into the library of a famous decaying composer whose scheming protégé writes letters to a scientist who helps an investigative journalist dig into a radioactive conspiracy whose story becomes a novel manuscript sent to a failing vanity press whose owner…something something, connection I forgot to a cloned servant whose life of awakening and rebellion in a futuristic China is recorded and preserved into the rebuilding of a post-apocalyptic society. And back again.

Each section has a completely unique voice that fits seamlessly into its time period, narrator temperament, and angle of adventure. (There’s always adventure.) This is David Mitchell’s strength—like, he must lift character voice weights five or six times a week because his words absolutely disappear into pitch-perfect dialect and internal monologues of whoever he’s writing for.

The interrupted style of narrative also helps keep the strong verbal ticks of each section from overwhelming the stories here, except in the middle. That one, the post-apocalyptic society trying to rebuild its connections with the rest of the world, is uninterrupted (cascading to the back ends of the others) and also leans the heaviest on self-developed slang.

But it’s so worth it. Each of the narratives touch on the one behind them in natural ways that emphasize the connectivity of time instead of winking and nudging the reader. Each one deals with revolutions and revelations and sends out branches and roots to reach out to each other and sketch out a very rough map of a giant chunk of human history.

The A.V. Club podcast says the movie doesn’t use this structure but is instead like a giant montage sequence, which I now have to see to decide if that’s a genius or terrible way of adapting this. Read the book for sure, though. (In fact, read David Mitchell in general. His Black Swan Green shows yet more of his range through a painful, pitch-perfect year in the life of a British schoolboy during the late 1980s.) Bookshelf! 

What makes a character so annoying?

Book: Kissing Games of the World

Author: Sandi Kahn Shelton

Published: 2008 (Shaye Areheart Books)

Pages: 383

Y’all, I’ve been sitting on this review for like a week trying to come up with a better reason for hating this book than “The characters are really annoying.” But since I’m not going for a grad degree in Comparative Literature here…well, the characters are really annoying. There. I said it. Now let’s dissect.

The main guy is quippy to show how hilariously out of whacky touch he is while trying to reunite with his young son, the main lady is okay except when indulging in hippie artist stereotypes or trying to be anything remotely sexual, their limp half-assed attempts at hating each other so the sex is hotter have no motivations until afterward when the author shoehorns ‘em in, and all the tertiary characters exist solely to have truth-telling talks and witty one-liners that spell out the protagonists’ motivations for them with all the originality of form found in a PowerPoint presentation.

Seriously, the story about a guy who lets his estranged dad take care of his son while the guy goes corporate after his wife dies, and the lady artist who lives with the dad and helps raise his son with her own while being a strictly platonic yet emotionally vital housemate could’ve done all the heavy lifting itself. Not everything has to have a romantic side to it, y’all, and this could have been such an excellent example of that.

Instead, we get hi-larious cranky-kids-be-travelin’ highjinks coupled with slutty yoga instructor sister advice that seriously changes every damn time she says something.

I don’t even know. It’s not good, so I’m going to put it in the donate pile. (Beware Goodwill in two or three months when I’m done weeding the shit out of my current pile. It’s going to be all my annoyed posts concentrated into one plastic bag black hole of sucky literature at 50 cents a pop.) Don’t pick it up, though, unless you want to hunt for motivations. I’m done.