I tried really hard to hate Super Sad True Love Story. My past experiences reading Gary Shteyngart have left me feeling vaguely offended and greasy. So when I dove into this new novel, the darling of just about anyone who dares open its cover (including Christa), I was extra wary and hyper vigilant.

But try as I might, I could not help but fall in love with this near-future love story. This was not a grown-up kind of mature love filled with secret smiles and a sense of security. Oh no. This was the fifteen-year-old kind of puppy love where you bring up the object of your affection into every conversation you have regardless of if your love is germane to the topic at hand or not.

Lucky for me, Super Sad True Love Story covers a lot of ground — finances, consumer debt, sexuality, technology, books, youth and body image, self-worth, the internet, class, and just about everything else you might discuss with people. And make no mistake, I did.

“In that book I’m reading, Lenny is on a plane reading a book and the guy sitting next to him complains about how bad it smells. It has like a book smell that people find offensive.”

“In this book I’m reading, people are judged by their credit scores and not only is it public information but there are these poles that you walk by and your credit score flashes for everyone to see.”

Gary Shteyngart Reading
7:30 p.m., Tuesday, September 21
Magers and Quinn, 3038 Hennepin Ave. So
Minneapolis, MN

“This book I’m reading takes place in a ‘post-literate’ America where people aren’t taught to read anymore, but to scan for information. It’s super scary.”

“In this book I’m reading America has gotten over race and gone back too good ol’, blatant classicism where people low-net-worth individuals are routinely discriminated against.”

Make no mistake though, this book is awful and offensive but only because the future Shteyngart is writing about isn’t so hard to foresee. While reading, I often felt as though Shteyngart was more psychic friend than storyteller.

For those of you who love the plot synoposis: Lenny Abramov is a nearly forty-year-old dude, son of Russian immigrants with a big, crooked nose who works in the Post Human Services division of the Staatling-Wapachung Corporation. While on a sort of sales trip to Europe he meets and falls in love with Eunice Park, daughter of Korean immigrants with an eating disorder, an abusive father, and no post-college plans whatsoever.

The two fall in “love” (or whatever passes as love in this fucked up world where woman where onion-skin jeans and a person’s fuckability is constantly rated whenever they go in public) during the waning days of the American “democracy.”

Here’s the thing, this book is good. Really fucking good — so good that it kicked the ass of my pre-book ill will towards Shteyngart’s writing, which is not an easy thing to do. It’s the kind of good that gives you acute post-book depression because nothing else seems to be as compelling or vibrant or important.

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In the days after reading the entire Scott Pilgrim series, I, like many people who went nutso for the scatter-brained Canuck in ironic T’s, suffered something like the delirium tremens.

I’m a total tourist in this graphic novel genre, and wouldn’t know where to begin to look for more like it. Everyone from iO9 to geeky friends recommended Craig Thompson’s Blankets as a sort of graphic novel-flavored methadone. And while it was great and charming and I spent large chunks of the 582-page illustrated novel smiling, it just didn’t have the level of “great” and “charming” that I found with Bryan Lee O’Malley’s six-book parade of Ramona Flowers’ evil exes. In fact, if I’d read this first, I probably wouldn’t have bothered ever reading a graphic novel ever again.

Okay. I get that comparing Scott Pilgrim to Blankets is like comparing The Ramones to Bjork. But what I was looking for was a similar level of satisfaction. Becoming entranced.

This one stars Craig, a young Wisconsinite with superstrict, religious parents, who shares a bed with his younger brother Phil. He gets his ass kicked at school; Diddled by the babysitter at home. He finds respite in dreams, drawing, and snow games. Even among the grunts at church camp, he struggles to find friends. Until he discovers a pack of misfits who have banded together. This group includes Raina.

Books & Bars discusses Blankets
Tuesday, September 14
Doors 6 p.m., Discussion 7 p.m.
Bryant-Lake Bowl
810 West Lake Street
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Raina is this beautiful character, from the soft lines, delicate fingers and soft pout she is rendered in, to the way she is holding together her family. Her parents are on the cusp of divorce. The loving way she handles her special needs siblings, and her baby niece. The way she maturely recognizes that she doesn’t want a life like her older sister with a baboon of a husband and skewed priorities. After camp, love letters and phone calls, Craig goes to stay with her family in Michigan for two weeks and they fall into a swirling version of young love. They stare the sky. They cuddle. They write and paint together. They play house. But there are also moments when Raina pulls back and questions the “why bother” of a relationship with someone who lives eight hours away.

I’m just going to put this out there: dude there is a lot of bible in these here pages. Instead of feeling like I was reading one man’s coming-of-age through the filter of religious fundamentalism, I sometimes felt like I was reading light tracts from Jack Chick. And I get that he is laying the ground work for how he went from point A ( high school student considering the ministry) to Point B (adult with no religious affiliation, who masks this from his family by saying he hasn’t found the right church). But the dark lines, panel after panel of bible verses, and scenes featuring heavenly and hellish creatures were a bit much.

It is also overwrought, with metaphors about blankets and trees and the sky. Scrawled poetry that has the embarrassing feel of a teenager’s puppy journal.

“I studied her,” he writes after they strip down to their skivvies and roll around in Raina’s bed. “Aware that she had been crafted by a divine artist. Sacred, perfect and unknowable. And with reverence, I covered her body with the quilted blanket she had made me.”

And then he wanders back to the guest room to stare at Jesus’ portrait on the wall.

I feel like a dick for not liking this book more. It’s certainly something that is relate-able, considering the Midwest setting, and all-consuming young love. The familial relationships, and Raina singing a Cure song in bed. That this is a memoir-y novel type thing, that religion shaped who he was socially and sexually as a teen. A disinterest in the foundation of the plot represents a taste preference, of course. I guess if I’d done my homework better, I wouldn’t be dissing this book. I just wouldn’t have been interested in it to start with, and so I wouldn’t have read it.

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It might be fair to say that Daphne du Maurier wrote the book on suspense novels. That book would be Rebecca her 1938 romantic mystery that set the bar for its many predecessors. It embodies many of the genre’s tropes – twisted love affairs, a sprawling manor, breathlessly rendered settings – and proves that in literature, as in the rest of life, the first is often the best.

Rebecca begins slowly, with the unnamed narrator’s launch into British high society courtesy of a marriage proposal from the aristocrat Maximilian de Winter. Gentility does not become her, and about a third of the book is simply her acclimatizing to her newfound wealth and status. Once things get percolating, though, it’s evident why Rebecca was an instant literary sensation. Manderley, the enormous de Winter estate, is revealed to be a refined mortuary, where relics of the first Mrs. de Winter – some tangible, some less so – haunt every room. Slowly, the heroine realizes all was not as it seemed with the first Mrs. de Winter – the Rebecca of the title – and that the questions about her strange death are not content to lie unanswered.

A novel as old as Rebecca is bound to show its age. Certain aspects of this story are too dated to appreciate. The narrator’s tremulous tone and the many long, drawn-out passages about the pitfalls of upper-crust etiquette, for example, bored me. But for a book written in 1938, its darker elements retain their freshness and ability to interest.

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It has probably been two years since I read  In the Miso Soup, which I consider more than just Ryu Murakami’s flagship novel, but one of the few pieces of literature that I still draw on regularly when I want to ush and gush about fiction. I can still conjure what it feels like to read that book: Dreamy, terrifying and lonely, with a touch of nausea. And whenever I get into a conversation about books with someone I know can handle the dankest of dank, and the sourest of sour, the bloodiest of bloody – something that should be packaged with it’s own air sickness bag — I recommend it.

Since then, I’ve been working my way through his canon, but cannot find another instance of where Murakami gives the literary equivalent of a kidney chop like he did in Miso Soup.

Piercing, which was the followup to the greatest book of all time has moments of sublimely ishy text, but just doesn’t have plot flow that it requires. It’s like using fresh ingredients on day-old bread. Or, in this case, using freshly sanitized puncturing tools on a seasoned cutter.

Murakami gets to his trademark grit on impact, with Kawashima Masayuki watching his newborn daughter sleep in her crib in the middle of the night. Within three pages, he is caressing her cheek with an ice pick. Imagining what it would feel like to puncture the baby’s skin. Instead of following his brutal instincts, he makes himself a promise: He will instead stab a prostitute with the ice pick. Get it out of his system, and save his little family. Kawashima begins filling a notebook with elaborate plans involving gloves, a change of clothes, a falsified accent, and the size, shape and skin color of the victim.

“The woman must be not only young, but petite. A large woman would be more difficult to control in the event of any unforeseen glitches,” he writes after a dry-run with an aged masseuse.

Turns out this isn’t the first time that Kawashima has experienced such a craving. While he has gone on to become a successful graphic designer, a father, the husband of a woman who teaches classes in bread and pastry making in their home, he has had a troubled past. Abused, neglected, eventually raised by a foster family. When he was in his late teens, he got embroiled in a relationship with an older woman. A stripper old enough to sometimes mistaken for his mother, and who openly mocked him by bringing home strange men. One night, in a snit, Kawashima stabbed that woman in the stomach with an ice pick. The police were never involved. The woman lived. They broke up, but she did tell him that it really hurt during a few conversations they had in the aftermath.

When he makes the call to the escort service, Sanada Chiaki’s perspective comes into play. The young OCD prostitute is a cutter who has recently misplaced her sex drive. She’s got her own tales to tell, and when it finally comes down to go-time, things fail to follow the plans Kawashima sketched out so carefully.

Murakami – a Japanese novelist, musician, TV talk show host – still manages to write better-than average fiction even at his worst. He creates worlds that look normal on the outside, but when you lift the lid you find it oozing with lawlessness. Well dressed sociopaths camouflaged with manners and hygiene, and bystanders who don’t just turn a blind eye – they don’t pay close enough attention to notice that anything might be amiss in the first place.

This one is filled with black humor and picturesque words, combined in a way to provide ample opportunity for barfage:

Inspired by a magazine article he’d read and photocopied in the library, Kawashima had decided to buy a knife as well as an ice pick. The article was about a thirty-two year old ‘soap tart’ who’d been found murdered in a hotel room, with her Achilles Tendon severed. An anonymous police detective had volunteered this explanation: ‘When you cut the Achilles tendon, the sound it makes is as loud and sharp as a gunshot. The killer must have known that and taken pleasure in it.

Delicious and visual words, but the apex of the novel is long with frequent perspective shifts that make it a little clunky. So it’s good. It’s just no Miso Soup.

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I think I came at Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man with the wrong approach. I saw the movie adaptation before I read the novel (I know. I know!) so I was expected some sort of eulogy, a soft and mournfully worded ode to a life about to end.

What I did not expect was a polemic, a collection of vehement little diatribes studded onto a thin skeleton of literary fiction.

A Single Man reminded me of the kind of books I was assigned to read in high school, books where characters took pains to spell out their (i.e. the author’s) views on social or political topics. It moves forward in fits and starts, pulses of plot serving only to move the main character, George, forward to another scene and another character to whom he can spell out his opinions on any of a number of issues. The novel format here was seemed utilitarian. This is not to say there weren’t good parts – the opening pages felt like being hit with a lead slug, so powerful was the sense of being deadened and devoid of life – but style and grace weren’t Isherwood’s motives for writing A Single Man.

That being said, I was startled by how fresh some of Isherwood’s attitudes remain. A Single Man was first published in 1964, yet some of Isherwood’s positions on higher education, American culture, suburbia, and social acceptance of gay men and women seem like they could have been made today. Reading it made me wonder if we’ve really come very far in this past half-century.

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Unable to read Mockingjay until three days after its release, I stayed off Twitter and Facebook to avoid spoilers. I ignored emails with Mockingjay thoughts or links to book reviews. I didn’t even read the book jacket. When I’m looking forward to a book, especially the last in a series, I want to dive in with a blank slate.

If you loved the first two books of The Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins, you should do the same. Stop reading this review and dive into Mockingjay. It’s worth it; you’ll adore it. It may even make you cry.

If you haven’t started reading The Hunger Games series (Jodi, are you listening?), you should also stop reading and go get the first book. What’s not to love? A country divided and ruled by the ruthless Capitol, and a strong, smart girl challenging them at every turn. Succumb to peer pressure and start reading already.

If any of you made it this far, you’re the diehards, the ones who loved the first two books and have already finished Mockingjay. This review is for you.

The last time we saw Katniss, she was again defying the Capitol and living through the Hunger Games. The fight-to-the-death games, forced upon each District of Panem by the cruel Capitol and broadcast live across the nation, were just as violent as ever, but these games ended with half of the surviving victors whisked away to safety and the other half captured by the Capitol. Little did Katniss know, these games were actually a critical part in the uprising against the Capitol.

Mockingjay opens with the aftermath of the Capitol’s retaliation when we follow Katniss through the wreckage that was her home, District 12. Walking over skulls and on ashes, Katniss blames herself for those who died and she contemplates whether or not she can do what they’re asking of her in District 13.

District 13, thought to have been destroyed years earlier, is the home base for the uprising, and they need Katniss. Beloved because of her defiance in the Hunger Games, District 13 believes Katniss can unite all the districts and encourage them to fight.

Making Katniss the face of the uprising doesn’t necessarily sit well with her. Are they just using her as a pawn in a game, just like she was during the Hunger Games? Throughout Mockingjay Katniss questions this and the cruelty of war, from both sides of the conflict. Where do you draw the lines for what is acceptable in war? Can that even be defined?

Mockingjay is a great ending to The Hunger Games series, though it is unsettling and has its share of sorrow. Some of your favorite characters may die and the final question – will she choose her best friend Gale or her Hunger Games partner Peeta? – will be answered, though nothing really ends happily here. You will have some hope, but I just felt overwhelming sadness for Katniss, so the little bit of hope I had wasn’t enough. War is a bitch.

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Last week at Grumpy’s, a few of my classmates from The Loft’s Short-Short Fiction class were celebrating the our last session. Over some tator tots and jalapeno bacon we got to talking at Gary Shteyngart and how he’s coming to read at Magers & Quinn on September 21, which is the same night Jonathan Franzen is going to be at The Fitzgerald.

I mentioned how I’m in the midst of Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, which is kind of unsettling and creepy (in a very good way so far) and Will agreed that the book was kind of sad and depressing but that he mostly stopped reading it because of the author photo. Apparently he has issues with “neckwraps.”

“What the shit is a neckwrap?” I asked.

Will went on to fumble through a description of this alleged “neckwrap.” We were all confused. I was convinced it was something Mr. Furley had worn in “Three’s Company” (though I mistakenly claimed it was something Larry would wear to the Regal Beagle).

Last night, Will emailed me a picture of this alleged “neckwrap.”

I replied, “That’s a scarf. This, this is a neckwrap.”

“YOU LIE” was his reply.
“Dude, I am totally going to ask the internet,” I said.

So internet. Which would you consider a neckwrap and and which a scarf?

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Nathaniel is an eleven-year-old apprentice to a mediocre magician. Thinking he isn’t be taught fast enough, Nathaniel trains himself on more difficult spells well beyond his abilities. When an accomplished adult magician humiliates Nathaniel in front of a huge crowd, he skillfully summons a powerful djinni, Bartimaeus, to help him enact revenge.

Djinnis have been summoned by magicians for thousands of years, and often it is they who carry out the most dangerous, creative deeds magicians need, but Bartimaeus has never been summoned by one so inexperienced, which causes problems for both of them.

Nathaniel’s continued missteps and Bartimaeus’ wit made me love Jonathan Stroud’s The Amulet of Samarkand, the first book in The Bartimaeus Trilogy. With chapters told in the first person by Bartimaeus mixed with third person chapters focusing on Nathaniel, this is a great fantasy involving revenge, magician conspiracies, and some fabulous magic.

The story is enough to keep anyone intrigued, but the cleverness of the world Stroud created is why I will continue reading the series. I loved things like magicians having to change their birth name during their apprenticeship because knowing a magician’s birth name is something that can be used against him in the magical world. You can probably guess that Nathaniel isn’t exactly the best at keeping his name secret.

Or the fact that djinnis, while being somewhat slaves to magicians, have their own power struggles against each other as we see between Bartimaeus and other djinnis he fights. Djinnis come off as way more powerful than magicians, so the struggles between them seem odd since they should band together to overthrow magicians. But bound to magicians they are, so against each other they fight.

I also love the fact that Stroud used footnotes in the chapters told by Bartimaeus. I love reading the clever footnotes where Bartimaeus gives historical context or where he directs snarky comments towards me, like this one where he further explains hitting his head five times on a pebble:

Once each on five different pebbles. Not the same pebble five times. Just want to make that clear. Sometimes you human beings are so dense. p. 12

If you’re looking for a great fantasy novel that will make you laugh along the way, this is the one for you. You’ll love Bartimaeus and look forward to the two other books in the trilogy.

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About a month ago I stumbled on a sidewalk sale where, between cheese curd vendors, a 5-year-old magician with a stunning vocabulary, and hippies juggling sticks, I found some castoffs from the public library: $1 for trade paper; $0.50 for mass market. I was in a rush. There was an Italian sausage calling my name half a block away. (“Meat me. Meat me.”) But I like books. And typically I spend 25 times more for them than what the library was asking. So I deferred to my nemesis “thrift,” and I dove in.

This was easy. Three carts filled front and back. I scanned the titles quickly: Dud. Dud. Religious fiction. Airport lit. Around me, people were carefully browsing, yanking books off shelves, reading the back, building piles. I was lapping them, two, three times over.

The fools, I thought. You have no idea. Cheap crime novels and menopause lit. WHO ARE YOU PEOPLE? DO YOU EVEN THINK ABOUT THE WORDS YOU PUT IN YOUR HEAD!?

And then I found Zadie Smith’s On Beauty. I liked White Teeth, although ask me what it was about and I’ll distract you with a coughing fit. (Sometimes “good” isn’t enough to keep me from plot amnesia). I handed over my buck, happy to help the library buy something nice and hopefully put my name on it.

As I made tracks toward the meat stand, I was super impressed with myself. There I was, on day three of a book sale, eyeing the picked over remains. AND I found something good. Something the dull, untrained eyes of my fellow readers had passed over for whatever reason that is none of my business. I re-visited the entire scene. My dexterity with the task. My skilled gaze, like someone who scouts antiques or appraises art. The way my hand instinctively made a grab for the gem of the collection. My poker face as I handed over the single bill, never revealing that I would have gone as high as $3, maybe even $5.

At the root of On Beauty are two fundamentally different families running parallel: The Belsey family is liberal, and they find religious affiliation laughable. Father Howard is a white Englishman, married to Kiki, who is black. Their children are Zora, an overachieving college student, more right brained than left, although bent on living an artistic life; Levi, a high school student interested in street culture; and Jerome, who is trying to filter through his upbringing to figure out what values to take into the real world.

The Kipps, who are more in the background of the story as foils to the Belsey family, are black, conservative Christians. Monty argues against affirmative action and conducts family breakfasts. His ailing wife is a “stand by your man” figure. His daughter Victoria is operating under a chaste, virginal facade, but is a stunning-looking head-turner of a woman. His son finds a shiny woman who accessorizes with a cross necklace to marry.

Both Howard Belsey and Monty Kipps, the family fathers, are involved in art critique, and teach at the college level. They spar publicly over differences in opinion about Rembrandt. Their worlds collide when Jerome Belsey takes a job with Monty Kipps and becomes enamored with his family. The exposure leaves him hungry for Christianity, and throbbing for Victoria — whom he intends to ask to marry him in a quaint Jane Austin-meets-technology sort of way. The shit hits the fan, there is some humiliation involved, and Howard extracts his son from the Kipps’ world.

Throughout the book, the families become even more entwined when Monty Kipps takes a job at the small liberal arts college where Howard doesn’t have tenure. Their wives develop a supersecret friendship, despite and because of their political differences; Victoria Kipps oozes into Howard’s art history class and tries to, ahem, befriend the instructor.

Adding to the layers of plot: Howard Belsey is in the doghouse over a three-week fling with a lifelong friend, a creative writing instructor at the university. His daughter Zora uses this info to get into the woman’s class; Levi Belsey has taken up with some Haitians and becomes embroiled in the community’s political struggles; A street poet named Carl becomes Zora’s pet project, and a reason to wear unflatteringly tight clothing. Monty Kipps, meanwhile, has a few shady secrets of his own.

This is such a meaty, layered and satisfying story told from multiple perspectives. There are some flinchingly honest scenes capable of making a reader squirm. When Kiki and Howard finally address his infidelity, Kiki screams at him about sleeping with a woman who is her antithesis: “You married a big black bitch and you run off with a fucking leprechaun?” she cries. As meekly responds: “Well, I married a slim black woman, actually. Not that it’s relevant.”

Yowch.

And when Howard is damn-near forced to stick it to a young coed, she performs a choreography of grunts and dirty talk, a truly embarrassing show of what she seems to think is sexuality.

Now she began to unbutton his shirt slowly, as if accompanying music were playing, and seemed disappointed not to find a pornographic rug of hair here. She rubbed it conceptually, as if the hair were indeed there, tugging at what little Howard possessed while — could it be — purring. … And then came more of this purring and moaning, although his hands had not yet reached her breasts …

Zadie Smith is so so good at building a story, forming characters, and developing a mix of honesty, realism and humor. Although this might be to a fault: It is so genuine, that I’m not sure I’ll remember this one any better than I remember White Teeth. But it is a fantastic ride when you’re nose deep in it.

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Grand Prize (Books, Buttons & a Replacement Press T-shirt)
#2 Beth

First Prize (Books & Buttons)
#8 Melissa

Button Winners
#9 Jordan
#21 Erin
#18 N. Jeanne Burns
#25 John Vollaro
#19 Serena Asta
#6 Amy

I’ve sent an e-mail to all the winners, but if you haven’t gotten it send your address to me (jodi@iwilldare.com) and I’ll get your prize out ASAP.

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