2016 Reads

Starting 2016 on medical leave from a surgically repaired left arm gifted me ample time for reading. In the first few weeks of the year alone, I finished hundreds of pages. The pace slowed after that, but as always, I tried to sprinkle in a few works from outside my comfort zone.

Get in Trouble, Kelly Link
Link crafts short stories with a surreal, dual-reality edge. I need to revisit them – the presence of parallel narratives and realities left me confused at times.

English Creek, Prairie Nocturne, The Whistling Season, Ivan Doig
Yes, more Doig. My broken arm sent me hurtling back to comfort reading. The Whistling Season was easily my favorite, a surprisingly jaunty tale about a widower with three young sons farming the Montana plains and the mysterious brother and sister who join them. Prairie Nocturne had some strong moments but several twists could be spotted 100 pages away (ahem, the love story). English Creek gets bogged down by Doig’s fervent attention to detail but the forest fire climax redeems those laborious passages. I could say I’m Doiged out, but I could burrow back into his historical Montana novels anytime.

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, Raymond Carver
I had not visited with Carver’s cutting tales since finishing Cathedral on a plane in 2007. How I missed his way with ordinary people and the sometimes awful way they behave.

Two Brothers, Gabriel Moon and Fabian Ba
Who better to adapt Milton Hautoum’s tale of twin brothers’ different life trajectories than twin artist-writer team Moon and Ba? Once again pushing the limits of what graphic storytelling can be, Moon and Ba’s adaptation is both brutal and touching, a multi-generational tale grounded on brothers Omar and Yakub. This could convert anyone into a fan of the form.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Raymond Carver
Yes, more Carver. Once I dug into Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, I could not back down. I had to finish off Carver. As with the earlier collection, the brutality never stops the lives of Carver’s characters.

A Doubter’s Almanac, Ethan Canin
The life of a Michigan-born mathematical genius with zero ability to understand other people unfolds with savage beauty and unfathomable cruelty. The novel changes pace and narrator just where it needs to, and the slow descent of the post-prime genius Milo Andret is agonizing and touching at times. The life of Milo’s family, especially his son Hans, is central to the book’s last half but Mile looms large over everyone else in his world. Its endearing line: -"Fuck you, Dad. -"Fuck you, son."

My Name is Lucy Barton, Elizabeth Stroud
This short, sparse novel about a reconnection between mother and adult daughter over the daughter’s hospitalization took a while for me to catch on. What the novel doesn’t tell is almost more important than what it does. The narrator grew up poor and the traumas suffered in those days (being locked in a car while her parents worked and her siblings attended school) never truly leave here. I don’t expect this one to fade from memory soon.

Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather
A classic, this novel traces the life of a French priest in New Mexico through the 19th century. Insightful yet sparse, Cather brings alive 19th century Santa Fe with just a handful of words. It’s give me one quote I long not to forget: “Setting is accident. Either a building is part of a place, or it is not. Once that kinship is there, time will only make it stronger.”

Blue Highways, William Least-Heat Moon
An old travel book that I didn’t know I needed, Blue Highways loops around the country, visiting towns barely on the map from forgotten roads. The America that Least-Heat Moon traversed in the late 70s no longer exists. Many of these tiny communities have shuffled further along toward ghost town status.

Everybody’s Fool, Richard Russo
One of my favorite authors returns with a sequel to Nobody’s Fool, bringing back Sully and the denizens of North Bath, N.Y. From the off-kilter police chief to the exotic reptile dealer and his missing cobra, it’s entertaining although not on par with the original. But Russo’s characters are always worth revisiting – Paul Newman played Sully in the film of Nobody’s Fool, and it’s hard not to hear Newman’s soothing, gravelly tones whenever Sully speaks.

The Regional Office is Under Attack!, Manuel Gonzales
At first a conflict between competing teams of metahumans, Gonzales’ novel evolves from a Die Hard-like siege to something more poetic and personal. We see the failings of super-people and that life for those who succeed doesn’t necessarily work out better. A good spin on an age-old superhero story, with tragic consequences for the dead and worse for the survivors.

D.C One Million, Grant Morrison, many others
Today’s event-driven comics could take a cue from Morrison’s mini-epic about legacy superheroes visiting from the 853rd century (when Action Comics would reach its one millionth issue) and the revenge of a sentient sun building over millennia. Good characterization and occasionally light-hearted despite the stakes, D.C. One Million didn’t set out to change the world, just to tell a great Justice League story.

The Boys in the Boat, David James Brown
I haven’t thought about crew since freshman year of college, when most of my dorm joined the team. Brown’s book tackles a lesser-known chapter in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, when crew of blue-collar Pacific Northwest men beat the elite rowing schools of the northeast then won Olympic gold. At the center of it all is Joe Rantz, whose brutal childhood shaped him into a man of quiet, steely depth. Brown also deserves credit for recreating 1930s Seattle, when a person of average means could own property on Lake Washington and the town thrived on lumber, shipyards and farms east of the Cascades.

Soul of an Octopus, Sy Montgomery
 Four hundred million years ago, ancestors of humanity and the octopus diverged, yet the most intelligent of invertebrates still has much to teach us. Montgomery recounts her relationship with a number of octopuses at the Boston Aquarium, revealing inquisitive, playful and complex creatures that sadly live no more than four or five years. Despite being a personal story, Montgomery centers the story on the cephalopods. When tragedy strikes, you feel it through her and the team of experts that tend to the octopus. You also learn not to underestimate these wise creatures and to stop fearing them as monsters of the deep.

Guided by Voices : A Brief History - Twenty-one Years of Hunting Accidents in the Forests of Rock and Roll, Jim Greer
A good look at the cult Dayton band that is suitable for fans and those with casual interest. It’s an impressive story, how Bob Pollard’s home-cooked cassettes eventually turned into a venerable indie rock band known for lengthy, raucous live shows. Pollard can write a rock hook like nobody’s business, but an endless stream of albums from GBV and side projects sometimes make the band impenetrable. Greer’s book opens up the gates for easy entry.

Listen, Liberal, Thomas Frank
Couldn’t finish this – in short, the Democratic Party failed working people. The author makes this point with a sledgehammer. Given the election results and flip in parties seen across the Rust Belt and Appalachia, it’s hard to disagree.

Before the Fall, Noah Hawley
Fargo’s showrunner crafts an excellent tale of a plane crash, what led every person to the plane and how life unfolds for the survivors. He dives deep into the heads of the pilots, crew and the passengers, showing us how minute and monumental episodes in their lives all led to this point. Gradually the mystery unravels as powerful friends of the deceased make life painful for the survivors. I blazed through it in 3 days and remember everything.

The Pier Falls, Mark Haddon
I only finished three of these tales before the library demanded I return it. But The Pier Falls and Bunny both tell tales I might not have encountered otherwise. Haddon has a gift for peculiar characters like Bunny, and The Pier Falls takes a journalist’s eye to disaster striking a haven of fun.

Lovecraft Country, Matt Ruff
Ruff finds the intersection of horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, his ugly strain of racism, Jim Crow and a fictional version of a travel guide that helped African-American travelers avoid trouble. The danger is palpable for the extended family of African-Americans in 1950s Chicago as they contend with a series of dark forces drawn to them.

Heroes of the Frontier, Dave Eggers
Josie, a disgraced dentist, takes her two kids to Alaska on trip that moves from one disaster to the next. Well-written, fully drawn characters, this is not the Alaska of dreams but of overpriced food, ancient RVs and roads closed due to wildfires. Eggers’s frontier is as far as Josie can run, but it isn’t far enough to escape legal woes left behind in Ohio.

Crow Fair, Thomas McGuane
Think Carver crossed with modern Montana – McGuane’s characters jump off the page. Another author I should have discovered a decade ago. McGuane gives us real people, from contractors to unemployed bank employees to a former state senator intent on catching his wife in a lie. The title story is a riveting tale of two brothers, a dying mother whose dementia reveals she might have been unfaithful to their father. Masterful storytelling.

The Way West, A.B. Guthrie
Finally, I return to Guthrie’s frontier in his followup to The Big Sky. This novel won a Pulitzer, and its depiction of wagon trail reality. A layered novel with multiple characters taking center stage as the train encounters rivers, Indians, death and other obstacles, Guthrie creates an epic in just 350 pages. Anchored by Dick Summers from The Big Sky, the train members are a complicated bunch, and the little moving community they create is rife with conflict.

Tabloid Dreams, Robert Oren Butler
A dream assignment for any fiction writer - take headlines from tabloid newspapers and craft stories from them. Boy Born with Tattoo of Elvis, Woman Uses Glass Eye to Spy on Philandering Husband and Jealous Husband Reincarnated As Parrot are standouts but the whole collection is masterful. Butler imparts dignity on characters who would only receive mockery while waiting in the supermarket checkout line.

Thunderstruck, Elizabeth McCracken
McCracken’s stories are filled with understated magic and loss. The Lost and Found Department of Greater Boston unveils the life of a disappeared mother and how her orphaned son carries on. The title store finds a family moving to France for the summer only to face tragedy when things don’t change ys much as the parents believe they do. In Peter Elroy: A Documentary by Ian Casey, a man whose life is torn down by his friend’s unflattering documentary pays his former friend a last visit. Juliet tells of a library patron’s murder from the librarians’ perspective. A cereal sweepstakes changes a boy’s life in ways he cannot anticipate.

One More Thing, B.J. Novak
The actor-writer unleashes of a deluge of exceptionally humorous short stories (many only a few pages long). I stopped around halfway, feeling somewhat overwhelmed by the enormity of content. It might be better digested in short bursts than attempting to tear through every entry at a library book pace (three weeks).

One Man’s Owl, Berndt Heinrich
Naturalist Heinrich finds an abandoned owlet from a nest destroyed in a winter storm. Definitely a “don’t try this at home” book, Heinrich nurses the raptor to health and eventually independence through a number of seasons. This is an abridged edition pulled from a more technical, scientific original work, but the days that Berndt spends with Bubo the great horned owl fly by (no pun intended). Bubo is no pet and scarcely a companion but a quirky creature nonetheless.

Finders Keepers, End of Watch, Stephen King
Horror maestro returns to the impromptu trio of detectives that headlined Mister Mercedes. Finders Keepers returns to the themes of Misery with an obsessive fan tracking down a reclusive author and young boy using a cache of hidden money from that crime to save his splintering family. Unpublished books also figure into Finders Keepers. In the second, the mass murdered of Mister Mercedes returns in a more powerful incarnation, stepping into King’s more comfortable environs of supernatural horror. Even without his supernatural abilities, Brady Hartsfield is among King's most vile creations.

A Life in Parts, Bryan Cranston
Lacking the dreaded “with John Doe” that signifies a ghost writer, the book is all Cranston and pretty well-written. Having read many interviews with him during the Breaking Bad years, I knew many parts of his past, which he expounds upon here. It’s less than 300 pages, doesn’t spend anymore time on most issues than it needs to, deals with his stumbles and personal struggles in candid detail.

Invisible Planets: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese SF in Translation, Multiple authors, translated by Ken Liu
This anthology shook me from my comfort zone – I haven’t read any Chinese translations in recent memory, let alone speculative fiction. TongTong’s Summer follows a young girl after her grandfather moves into the house with a robot helper. In Year of the Rat, green soldiers hunt down colonies of intelligent rats. Unfolding Beijing depicts a future city partitioned by class zones and one’s man risk to give his child a chance at a better future. Taking Care of God brings home the elderly beings who seeded the Earth with life and nearly destroy their descendants with their mounting needs.