The story takes place somewhere in Georgia in the 1930′s, and it starts with a downright Of Mice and Men feel to it, beginning with two deaf-mutes who live together, John Singer and Spiros Antonapoulos; Singer is the calm, rational one, and Spiros is the big clumsy oaf.  McCullers has a nice, simple prose style — reminiscent of the other southern literature I’ve read — and I was drawn in instantly.

Then things just went off the rails into boringtown.  I am sad to say it, given the universal praise this book seems to have garnered, but it bored me to tears.  After the first chapter ended and we moved on to some other characters — Mick Kelley, the young tomboy, Biff Brannon, the cafe owner, Jake Blount, the loudmouthed laborer, and Dr. Benedict Copeland, the up-in-arms African American doctor — I just got bored and lost.  I was plodding through, just waiting for the story to take an interesting turn, or for me to start caring about any of these characters, and it just didn’t happen.

I would speculate that when this book was written in 1940, when McCullers was 22 years old, much significance was given to her age and her attempt to portray the various dynamics of the old south and the alienation that its inhabitants felt.  But that was just lost on me.  Call me a modernist, or hearken back to my short attention span; either way, the struggles and challenges of these characters didn’t resonate and I was thoroughly disappointed.

• We used excellent hard-cover blank books from McSweeney’s/McCMullens Author-Illustrator Starter Kit to better withstand the rigors of an active little brother.
• We started the book (after the title and dedication pages) with this excellent super hero ABC graphic.
• We closed the book with this nifty picture of the Avengers drawn in the style of Maurice Sendack

Book Time with Meg: 07
[See post to listen to audio]

Broward County, Florida removes Fifty Shades of Grey from their library shelves in response to the SNL skit. (I’m guesssing.)  So does Gwinnett County, GA.

Omnivoracious has book ideas for mom that don’t involve Fifty Shades of Grey

An infographic with the top 10 most read books in the world. Ever.

A less fun infographic on illiteracy in America.

New York Times shows Tumblr its “morgue”

Top 10 Pseudonymous Books

Flowchart: What is weird fiction?

Plan your next trip to Westeros with these Game of Thrones travel posters

The tone of the novel is set from the start:

Whatever’s wrong with us is coming off that river.  No argument: the taint of badness on the city’s air is a taint off that river.  This is the Bohane river we’re talking about.  A blackwater surge, malevolent, it roars in off the Big Nothin’ wastes and the city was spawned by it and was named for it: city of Bohane.

Bohane is a jumble of insular neighborhoods that generally range from bad to worse.  They are ruled over by a lawless gang, the Hartnett Fancy,  headed by the Long Fella, Logan Hartnett.  The criminals in this Irish coastal town are nattily dressed and pass the time listening to old ska and calypso records.  It is a surprise to learn well into the book that the action takes place in a future Ireland that pines for The Lost Time of peace and prosperity (more or less now).  In this future Ireland, electricity is not a given on any particular day and violence is generally brought about by fists and knives.  Were it not for a few anachronistic features, the novel could just as well have taken place at anytime over the past 200 years.  It has the feel of a timeless story and that has to be by design.

The tension in the novel comes with the sudden reappearance in town of the Gant, the previous gang leader of Bohane who had been long exiled to “the Nation Beyond.”   There is a history.  Hartnett replaced Gant as the underworld leader, and he married The Gant’s old flame.  The entire city is instantly on guard.

Gant is remembered in his youth:

The Gant was a slugger of a young dude and smart as a hatful of snakes.  Sentimental, also.  He had washed in off the Big Nothin’ wastes, the Gant, and it was known in Bohane there was a good mix of pikey juice in him.  A rez boy – campfire blood.

See him back there:

A big unit with deep-set eyes and a squared-off chin.  Dark-haired, and sallow, and wry.  The kind of kid who wore his bruises nicely.

The descriptions in this novel are solid gold.  ”Smart as a hatful of snakes…”  What does that even mean?  Barry let’s us know that the Gant “washed in from the Big Nothin’” the same as the Bohane river, the source of the city’s badness.  He’s not a man to be trifled with.

As the plot thickens, plans are made, sides are taken, challenges accepted and met, bribes paid and received.  Intrigue a’plenty.  The very future of Bohane is at risk, and everyone has a stake in its outcome.  Plot twists and surprises abound as the struggle for Bohane plays out.

One may wonder why everyone wouldn’t just pack up and moved to a more civilized part of the country.   The civic pride that runs throughout Bohane is very much of the “this place may be a cesspool of violence and danger, but it’s our cesspool”-variety:

Oh give us a grim Tuesday of December, with the hardwind taking schleps at our heads, and the rain coming slantways off that hideous fucking ocean, and the grapes nearly frozen off us, and dirty ice caked up top of the puddles, and we are not happy, exactly, but satisfied in our despair.

It’s as though we can say…

Now!

D’ye see, now, what it is we are dealing with.

As you may have gathered, Barry writes the story in a tough guy argot that takes a few chapters to get a handle on.  It’s the language that sells the story and sets the novel apart.  (I’ll again compare it The Sisters Brothers in this specific regard.)   This novel completely kicks ass, but it is also sentimental and completely charming.  And literary, too.  It’s almost too much to ask for.  I couldn’t put it down.

Sherlock Holmes: Punch me in the face!

Dr. John Watson: Punch you?

Sherlock Holmes: Yes, punch me in the face! Didn’t you hear me?

Dr. John Watson: I always hear “Punch me in the face” when you’re speaking but it’s usually subtext.

Episode 1 is available to stream on Netflix if you need to get caught up.

 
Book Time with Meg: 06

 
[See post to listen to audio]
 

A nice overview of how green your e-reader really is.

The most underlined passage of all time in an e-book (according to an Amazon) is from The Hunger Games.  Where’s your Shakespeare now?

The fantastic Neil Gaiman get the By the Book treatment in The New York Times.  Gaiman on what writer influenced him most:

C. S. Lewis was the first writer to make me aware that somebody was writing the book I was reading — these wonderful parenthetical asides to the reader. I would think: “When I am a writer, I shall do parenthetical asides. And footnotes. There will be footnotes. I wonder how you do them? And italics. How do you make italics happen?”

Ben Tanzer, longstanding friend of the blog, get the Book Notes treatment on Largehearted Boy:

There is looking back and then there is looking back on looking back. Which is to say that it is somehow the five-year anniversary of the release of my debut novel Lucky Man and I have this new anniversary edition coming out. The release is forcing me to look back, and I have an endless array of feelings associated with doing so, especially because it is Lucky Man, which like so many debut novels, involves looking back itself, to the people we once were, how we changed, what happened along the way, and the music we were listening to as it all went down.

Time for mixed grill?  HBO has decided to pass on a TV adaptation of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections written by Jonathan Franzen.  (Thanks and apologies to Dr J for the tip.)

What did make it to HBO is Hemingway and Gellhorn

Speaking of adaptations, Rooney Mara is set to star in the film adaption of Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn with a screenplay by Nick Hornby.

Cory Doctorow says the death of DRM in e-books is a good thing, and Timothy Egan says e-books are leading a reading renaissance.

Meanwhile, Target says Kindles are no longer welcome in their stores.  A market analyst says Target carrying Kindles is “like Starbucks selling Dunkin’ Donuts gift certificates.”

Buildings made of books.

Actually, if you do have any questions, read the story on this cool poster at Galleycat.

Ok, Judgy McJudgerpants, before you get all high and mighty on me, let me explain. I will read almost anything that is getting a lot of attention just so I can be part of the conversation. That’s it. Now that that is out of the way, let’s get started. This book is way out of the realm of my typical read. Based on the pictures on the covers of other romance novels (which is the category I assume this book falls within, but I’m basing that categorization solely on the fact that the book contains a lot of “love” scenes).   I expect the plot line to go something like this: high society gal falls for sweaty, muscly stable boy and forbidden love ensues, married gal falls for wind swept, muscly sailor man during an ocean voyage and forbidden love ensues, etc.

Fifty Shades of Grey definitely has a forbidden love, not in the expected social or marital status clash one might typically expect, but more of an internal screaming at the main character “Are you out of your f’ing mind! Didn’t you see the Dateline specials on this!” kind of forbidden love. With the disclaimer of my minimal exposure to romance novels in mind, it is possible that I expected too much from this book (like a believable romance or a main male character worth fantasizing about). But I didn’t like it, and I don’t see why it has become such a sensation.

Bear with me as I give you the basic plot. Inexperienced in love heroine, Anastasia, meets the young, incredibly handsome, mysterious, billionaire, Mr. Christian Grey, during an interview for her college newspaper, and it is sexual tension love at first sight. Anastasia soon finds out, though, that Mr. Grey has a dark secret and that, in order to have a relationship with Mr. Grey, she must agree to his terms. Mr. Grey presents Anastasia with a contract in which Anastasia will agree to essentially follow all orders given by Mr. Grey, those that you would expect in this kind of book (i.e. sexual activities – read whips, bondage, etc.), as well as orders regarding what to eat, when to sleep, what to wear, and spare time activities. Failure to follow any order given by Mr. Grey results in punishment. Anastasia is consumed by her intense sexual desire for this man and need to form a meaningful relationship, but she struggles with not really wanting to participate in the control/punishment aspects of the relationship that Mr. Grey so desires.

I have heard a lot about how obsessed women have become with this book. The radio station that I listen to in the morning did a segment on this book and caller after caller raved about this book and the rest of the series. Frankly, I don’t get it. Some of the “love” scenes are kind of hot, but that’s about it. Mr. Grey’s need for control is, in my opinion, just plain creepy, and I don’t think it is believable that an intelligent, witty young lady would fall for this man. At one point in the book, Mr. Grey spanks Anastasia for rolling her eyes at him. I’m not talking about a playful swat on the rear. He bends her over his knee and hits her multiple times accompanied by the very condescending conversation where he asks her to repeat why she is being spanked as if she were a child.

What I really hate about the book is that it seems to encourage this tendency that women have to give into their insecurities and create a beautiful vision of who a man is, or could be, based on isolated positive events while overlooking more obvious warning signs. In order to get wrapped up in the story line about Anastasia’s struggle with loving this man on a basis deeper than his money, good lucks, and sexual prowess, you have to focus on the positive attributes that the author gives Mr. Grey’s character. It seems that he really does care about Anastasia on some level. He certainly gives her a lot of attention and doesn’t want her to leave him. He gives to charity, so maybe he has a good heart deep down. He tries new life experiences as his attempt to try to give her more of a relationship. But, oh ya, didn’t he just order her around like a child? And isn’t she always fearful about what mood he’s going to be in when she sees him or how he will react to things she tells him? And aren’t most of the gifts he gives her for purposes of keeping track of her? She can’t even tell him a joke for fear that he might not think it’s funny and will get angry. Run for the hills, Anastasia. Run…for…the hills.

There’s also a subplot about discovering what has happened in Mr. Grey’s past to turn him into this control crazed man, but this book barely scratches the surface of that issue. I suppose you have to read the second and third books to get those answers, but I have a feeling the final answer won’t be all that interesting. Feel free to give me a spoiler alert in the comments if I’m wrong.

All of that is hard to do, which is why short stories aren’t as popular as they otherwise would be for people with short attention spans like me.  I have found myself repeatedly disappointed in short story collections, but I Am An Executioner: Love Stories by Rajesh Parameswaran came highly recommended by the Barnes & Noble store.  So I gave it a shot.

The first story, “The Infamous Bengal Ming”, blew me away.  It’s told in the first person by a tiger in a zoo who realizes that he loves his keeper.  When he accidentally mauls the keeper to death, he is lost in the confusion of the situation and recounts his tale of trying to fix things.  It was a brilliant idea, brilliantly executed.

The second story, “The Strange Career of Dr. Raju Gopalarajan”, was also fantastic.  It’s the story of a man who, secretly from his wife, sets up a medical practice (even though he has no medical training).  The story progresses and climaxes with an O. Henry-esque twist.  Really well done.

But then Parameswaran’s attempts at tackling unique situations or perspectives begins to falter, and several of the next stories were either incomprehensible or completely forgettable.  The only other story that I thoroughly enjoyed was “Narrative of Agent 97-4702″, an interesting take on an Orwellian society in which everyone is under top-secret surveillance by everyone else.

In the end, I’m not sure what to say.  I don’t know if the entire collection was worth it just for the three that I really, really liked, or if the fact that he front-loaded the book with the best story set me up for disappointment.  I suppose if “The Infamous Bengal Ming” had been buried in the middle of the book I might not have read it, because if some of his middling stories had led off the collection I likely would have bailed.  But the brilliance of that first story was enough to keep me hopeful throughout the rest.