I am not ADHD or anything, but I sometimes see a shiny before I finish a book, even ones I like, and don't get back to it. Happens to most readers, I think. So here are a few, some I first opened years ago. All novels this time out, because collections and anthologies can be returned to at any time without issue (except reviewing).

 

1. Name of The Rose, Umberto Eco

 

This is ridiculous. I've been reading it, off and on, for about five years. It's long, dense, and translated, mostly. There are still chunks of Latin, as well as religious jargon and lore. But the prose is gorgeous, and the combination of books, monastic life, and murder keep bringing me back.

 

2. Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry

 

There aren't a lot of 1,000 page Westerns out there, and this is probably the only one to ever win a Pulitzer. Beautifully written without being showy, but it takes a good while to get going. Still, I miss the characters.

 

3. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke

 

Okay, a lot of these are doorstops, and this is another with seriously dense, intricate prose. The Victorian England setting also ensures many of the well-to-do characters are stuffy and dry. Still, the magic theory and use of Faery, along with Norrell's cantankerousness, are big draws for me.

 

4. The Eight, Katherine Neville

 

Chess, computer programming, and DNA are the cornerstones of this one, and it is fascinating. The characters are a little dull sometimes, and there are some doldrums that set in, but the story is intriguing enough that I need to find my way back.

 

5. The Alchemaster's Apprentice, Walter Moers

 

One of Moers's Zamonia novels, this one about a cat-like creature being fattened up for it's magical lard by an evil genius and learning alchemy while trying to escape. Fun, but a little too cutesy sometimes. Still, the flat-out weirdness and nifty lead, as well as my love for the author, keep scratching at the back of my brain.

 

6. Brittle Innings, Michael Bishop

 

SF/Horror with a golem, kinda, playing baseball in the Forties. He is, of course, a power hitter, but also a great fielder. It sounds perfect for me, yeah? The rub comes from the ineffectual narrator and rape as a major plot point. I tend to avoid that. But the core concept is still awesome.

 

7. The Well of Ascension, Brandon Sanderson

 

This is a different kind of thing. The book is second in a popular series, and quite good. The magic systems are deep, the story clever and twisty, and the characters are almost all engaging. I didn't stop because of the book itself, or even because of a shiny. It's because I saw Sanderson in an interview and disliked him terribly. A pompous, superior and mean-spirited if that hour was anything to go by. Still, I believe you should separate the art from the artist in most cases. He hasn't done anything to except him from that, and I didn't stop reading Harlan Ellison or Piers Anthony because they were jerks, and the books really good, so I need to just get over it.

 

That's the list. What books are crying out for you to come back?

Bye!

 

He could see the story taking form in bone and muscle

After reading a few Sherman Alexie books a few years ago, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony started popping up in my suggestions, and for some reason, I thought it was poetry rather than a novel. Once I read the description, I put it on my wishlist, where it languished for several months until I finally bought a copy last summer at The Last Bookstore in downtown Los Angeles on a long lunch break from jury duty. I’ve pulled it off my bookshelf a few times when looking for my next read but never quite pulled the trigger until now.

Half-white Tayo has returned to New Mexico after surviving World War II but without his cousin and best friend, Rocky, whom Tayo carried until he died during the Bataan death march. Haunted by Rocky’s death and the other horrors of war, Tayo suffers from what they then called “shell shock” but what we now call PTSD. His life is kind of a mess, and it’s only getting worse. He can’t sleep, can’t keep anything down, has flashbacks to the war, and like many of his compatriots who went over as heroes and came back as nobodies, he drinks too much and gets himself into trouble, like stabbing another man in the gut with a broken beer bottle during a fight. Tayo’s family tells him he needs help or he’ll have to go back to the army hospital, so he relents and goes to see Old Betonie, who performs a ceremony for him and tells him what he needs to do to get himself well. No small task, since Tayo is burdened not only by his own circumstances and mixed heritage but also the history of his whole people.

Though it is a novel, it does contain a great deal of poetry, both in the form and language of small interludes of Native American legends, and in the prose itself, some of the most beautiful I’ve read, such as:

“. . . he waited to die the way smoke dies, drifting away in currents of air, twisting in thin swirls, fading until it exists no more.”

And:

“It took only one person to tear away the delicate strands of the web, spilling the rays of sun into the sand, and the fragile world would be injured.”

And:

“He wanted to fade until he was as flat as his own hand looked, flat like a drawing in the sand which did not speak or move, waiting for the wind to come swirling along the ground and blow the lines away.”

For a book published in the 1970’s, it’s remarkably (and sadly) relevant today. In a few brilliant paragraphs about three-quarters of the way through, Silko throws down a fireball of a critique of white people and their role in racial injustice that is one of the most insightful and scathing I’ve read. Even beyond that, the whole book just feels very modern. The storyline is non-linear and fluid and dreamlike, reflecting Tayo’s physical and psychological torment. It’s very dense, with thick paragraphs and no defined chapters, only extra line breaks and bits of poetic legend now and then. It’s not the easiest story to follow and took me quite awhile to read, given its relatively short length, but it was very much worth my time.

(This review was originally posted as part of Cannonball Read 10: Sticking It to Cancer, One Book at a Time.)

He could see the story taking form in bone and muscle

After reading a few Sherman Alexie books a few years ago, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony started popping up in my suggestions, and for some reason, I thought it was poetry rather than a novel. Once I read the description, I put it on my wishlist, where it languished for several months until I finally bought a copy last summer at The Last Bookstore in downtown Los Angeles on a long lunch break from jury duty. I’ve pulled it off my bookshelf a few times when looking for my next read but never quite pulled the trigger until now.

Half-white Tayo has returned to New Mexico after surviving World War II but without his cousin and best friend, Rocky, whom Tayo carried until he died during the Bataan death march. Haunted by Rocky’s death and the other horrors of war, Tayo suffers from what they then called “shell shock” but what we now call PTSD. His life is kind of a mess, and it’s only getting worse. He can’t sleep, can’t keep anything down, has flashbacks to the war, and like many of his compatriots who went over as heroes and came back as nobodies, he drinks too much and gets himself into trouble, like stabbing another man in the gut with a broken beer bottle during a fight. Tayo’s family tells him he needs help or he’ll have to go back to the army hospital, so he relents and goes to see Old Betonie, who performs a ceremony for him and tells him what he needs to do to get himself well. No small task, since Tayo is burdened not only by his own circumstances and mixed heritage but also the history of his whole people.

Though it is a novel, it does contain a great deal of poetry, both in the form and language of small interludes of Native American legends, and in the prose itself, some of the most beautiful I’ve read, such as:

“. . . he waited to die the way smoke dies, drifting away in currents of air, twisting in thin swirls, fading until it exists no more.”

And:

“It took only one person to tear away the delicate strands of the web, spilling the rays of sun into the sand, and the fragile world would be injured.”

And:

“He wanted to fade until he was as flat as his own hand looked, flat like a drawing in the sand which did not speak or move, waiting for the wind to come swirling along the ground and blow the lines away.”

For a book published in the 1970’s, it’s remarkably (and sadly) relevant today. In a few brilliant paragraphs about three-quarters of the way through, Silko throws down a fireball of a critique of white people and their role in racial injustice that is one of the most insightful and scathing I’ve read. Even beyond that, the whole book just feels very modern. The storyline is non-linear and fluid and dreamlike, reflecting Tayo’s physical and psychological torment. It’s very dense, with thick paragraphs and no defined chapters, only extra line breaks and bits of poetic legend now and then. It’s not the easiest story to follow and took me quite awhile to read, given its relatively short length, but it was very much worth my time.

(This review was originally posted as part of Cannonball Read 10: Sticking It to Cancer, One Book at a Time.)

I spent the last eight weeks with the Hat Creek Cattle outfit, going with them on their epic adventure, a cattle track from Texas to Montana. And what a journey it was. At times funny, at times exciting and at times heart breaking. This book made me feel so emotional and I caught myself welling up with tears more than once while reading this novel.

 

It isn´t a perfect book by any means. It takes about 200 pages before the story hits its stride and the way the (few) women gets treated in this novel didn´t sit well with me, although the depiction might be a realistic one for the time the novel is set in. And in one way I loved the bittersweet ending, but I would have wished for a more satisfactory ending for some of the characters.

 

Despite these faults, Lonesome Dove is one of the best books I have ever read and immersed myself in the world of Lonesome Dove.

This book...

 

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