Karen Russell is one of my favorite authors. She’s unbelievably creative, and I love how her stories come together at the ends. Usually, when I’m reading one of her short stories, I’m like, “Where is this going?” and then I suddenly get it. All of the pieces click together in an awesome way. The stories have a lot of humor and weirdness, but they also have a lot of depth. I’m rarely disappointed in them.

Vampires in the Lemon Grove is a collection of eight longish short stories. Like all short story collections, some of the stories are hits and others are misses for me. These are the four stories that stand out in my mind:

In “Proving Up,” a young boy confronts greed and death while he rides across the prairie to deliver a window to his neighbors.

In “The Barn at the End of Our Term,” former US presidents are not sure if they are in heaven or hell, but they do know that they have the bodies of horses.

“The New Veterans” is about a massage therapist who learns that she can alter her client’s memories by touching the tattoo that he got after he came home from war.

The final story that stands out is “The Graveless Doll of Eric Murtis.” This is my favorite in the collection. A group of school bullies discovers a scarecrow version of a boy they used to torment, but they have no idea who made the doll or why.

I like the themes of the stories in this collection. Many of the stories have to do with time, memory, and regret. If you could alter time, would you do it? If you suddenly found yourself in a vastly different body, how would you choose to live the rest of your life? Is it ethical to change a person’s sad memories to happy ones?

I didn’t like this collection as much as the author’s other collection, and I felt like a few of the stories dragged on a little too long, but if you’re a lover of magical realism, then this is a must-read. I highly recommend it.
 

I wasn't really impressed with this collection of short stories.

Vampires in the Lemon Grove: This was one of the stories I sort of liked. Interesting premise.

Reeling for the Emipre: This seems to be the favorite of a lot of people, but I couldn't get through it. Nothing grabbed me about it. I found the descriptions grotesque and then there's that whole white author writing characters of color thing that I'm not really into.

The Seagull Army Descends on Strong Beach, 1979: I also quit this story. I found the main character really unlikeable.

Proving Up: I thought this was the best story in the collection (except for the ending). That's probably because until the ending it's a pretty realistic story. Then the dark ending killed my enthusiasm for it.

The Barn at the End of Our Term: I didn't care for the premise of this one (presidents reincarnated as horses) so I skipped most of it.

Dougbert Shackleton’s Rules for Antarctic Tailgating: This was another good one. It's entertaining, and I liked imagining all those optimists cheering for Team Krill. Only problem is the story doesn't go anywhere.

The New Veterans: I ended up skipping most of this story since I'm not into reading about people getting blown up. I liked the premise though and it seemed like the most complete story (beginning, middle, end).

The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis: I felt free to stop reading this story at the r-slur. There's something about a scarecrow and I don't really care.

In the end there were very few stories in this collection that kept me reading until the very end. I'm just not into Russell's particular aesthetic.

Stalled out, I had to return it to the library. I'm now waiting on its return before finishing

Lemon sucking vampires,Why is it that I can't stop laughing at the visual of them puckering ?

My youngest loved this author and asked me to read this one of her favorites.

What is one to make of the book-as-artifact?

Since it is usually discussed regarding the superiority/eventual triumph of eBooks, I try to keep to practical considerations and try to avoid getting too sentimental about the book as an object, but the truth is I love books almost as much as I love reading. When I worked at a used book shop I enjoyed flipping through the volumes and finding boarding passes, pictures, postcards, and ephemera from any number of locations and events.

I write my names in the back of all my books and I enjoy the thought of the book telling a story. There is the copy of The Snow Leopard I was given by an ex-girlfriend who was not nearly as impressed as I was, a paperback Vampires in The Lemon Grove that I leant to a friend before I finished it and now resides somewhere in her apartment, or the copy of NW that had come damaged and that I appropriated even with the front cover torn off. Though I joke around about people disrespecting books, I love to find old dog ears and underlined passages—it is really best if you keep this to your own books and spare those of the school or library.

I was recently enjoying a day free of commitment and went for a stroll through Center City. I headed toward a place I had heard of during the Bloomsday celebrations. The Rosenbach Museum and Library, a modest place tucked among the row houses near Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square, is the home to Joyce’s manuscript for Ulysses as well as a first edition copy. That is what brought me. They had an exhibit held over from Bloomsday about the Shakespearean influences on Joyce. That is the kind of thing I go for. Now you know why I have a blog on books.

The Rosenbach isn’t very large, there are three exhibit rooms, but their collection definitely makes it a cool stop. They have Maurice Sendak’s papers as well as a mural he painted in a friend’s home in one exhibit and the delightfully morbid collection of early American children’s books in another. The tours are the most interesting thing though. The free tours take you through the brothers’ house, not particularly compelling but certainly nice, then you get to the Library. Here are Joyce’s manuscript pages on display, here are Joseph Conrad’s papers, a first English edition of Don Quixote, John Ruskin, letters of Lewis Carroll, Dylan Thomas’s manuscript for Under Milk Wood, and more. There are some 400,000 volumes in all.

Marianne Moore’s papers are there too, also her living room. The whole room. Recreated and arranged just as it was in her East Village Apartment.

I went on a second tour. The hands-on tour gets you access to some of these materials in a guided presentation by the librarian. I hopped on to the hands-on tour of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The librarian talks about interesting features about the story behind the story. Bram Stoker’s terrible handwriting for instance, little drawings, reading notes from his research—mercifully typed.

There is something particularly appealing to writers in this experience. It brings things closer to life. Even biographies and apocryphal stories have plots, they are selling you a story, but the notes, the manuscripts, they are just chaotic enough to be real. Stoker was as methodical as anyone in his research, but then there are notes with a shaky outline of a castle, a phrase or two, something about a character that never makes the story, something about three characters that kind of merge into one in the final draft.

I think there is still something to be taken by passing a day considering art and books. It has an effect on us that is more than just clicking through images, it is a communal experience. The small museums especially are great for talking with intelligent, interested people. It was a day outside of the apartment, outside of myself.