Vampires in the Lemon Grove

Anything I can say about Karen Russell's latest short story collection, Vampires in the Lemon Grove, has to begin by going back to my evolving reaction to her acclaimed novel, Swamplandia! When I first read the latter, I wasn't a fan. It was creepy and strange and not at all what I had expected it to be from the way in which it was marketed. But after a year passed, I begin to appreciate it as one of the more memorable books I've read. All of the strange qualities that threw me at first were exactly what made such a strong impression that stuck with me over time. Having gone through this change of heart regarding Swamplandia!, I felt much more prepared going into Vampires in the Lemon Grove. With a better idea of what to expect, I found myself really enjoying the stories in this collection.

I probably should clarify that last sentence. Even though I had a better idea of what to expect from Russell's writing going into this book, that was only in the sense that I was braced for anything and everything. There was no way in which I could have predicted any of the specifics of the quirky, widely varied, stories that are included here. They're by turns fascinating, terrifying, and funny. I found myself comparing Russell's writing to the best possible (if unlikely) combination of Stephen King and Haruki Murakami. Some of her stories have classic horror elements to them, like vampires or a mysterious, self-mutilating scarecrow. The knot in my stomach that I had as I read Swamplandia! was out in full force again. Yet I also found myself surprisingly moved by one of the funnier, more unexpected stories in which dead U.S. presidents are reincarnated as a group of horses. It sounds so cliche to say that there's "something for everyone" in a story collection, but I think that might actually be the case here, at least for everyone who is willing to get pulled into a series of odd, vividly imagined fictional worlds.

Astray

Despite hearing good things about it, I'd never read any of Emma Donoghue's work, largely because the subject matter of her most well known novel, Room, seemed too harrowing for my taste. Then I picked up the short story collection Astray and got my first taste of her writing.

All of the stories in the collection deal with the theme of being unmoored in some way. Each is centered around characters who are about to leave their homes, in transit between two places, or just arriving somewhere new. They're all short works of historical fiction, set in time periods that span from the 1600s to the 1960s. Donoghue's brand of historical fiction takes the phrase a bit more literally than some authors might. She doesn't just pepper her stories with period details of a specific time and place, but basis the circumstances of each of her stories on events that actually transpired. She follows each story with a short explanation of the historical facts that inspired it. In some cases, it's a fairly well known incident involving famous figures like P.T. Barnum or Charles Dickens. In others, it's a piece of local news that was unearthed by some obscure historical record or newspaper clipping. In all cases, it's clear that Donoghue has a passion for digging through history. The stories she creates from her findings give new life to all but forgotten bits of the past.

The opening story, "Man and Boy", is my personal favorite in the book. Its first few pages are quite disconcerting, with the narrator addressing the reader in the second person. Slowing you realize that the narrator is the elephant keeper at a London zoo, and the "you" he's addressing is his charge. A surprisingly touching story unfolds as the one-sided dialogue--relatable to any pet owner--reveals the affectionate bond that exists between the elephant and the keeper, who's an otherwise hardened curmudgeon. Most of the stories in Astray provide interesting reading, and I'd highly recommend this one if you only have time for one or two of them.

Look on the Sunny Side

Since I'm afraid that all of my Winnie-the-Pooh experience is of the Disney variety, The Sunny Side was my first encounter with A.A. Milne's writing, adult or juvenile. Prior to gaining fame for his children's books, Milne was a contributing writer to the British humor magazine Punch. This book is a collection of short stories and essays taken from that period of Milne's life.

Although the collection boasts both stories and essays, the line is very blurred between what is pure fiction and what is a fictionalized account of Milne's own life. The pieces are loosely grouped according to theme, such as home life, wartime, etc. Throughout all of them, Milne writes with a voice that's sweet, funny, and a pleasure to read. His tone has a tendency to be self deprecating, with several stories poking fun at personal mishaps that get him into trouble, from minor white lies, like pretending he's read a book that he hasn't, to more absurd situations, like posing as a bird expert during a weekend holiday in the country...until an actual bird expert unexpectedly joins the party. At other times he writes with a slightly more serious undercurrent, like in he wartime story "Common" about a little stuffed dog that serves as a good luck charm in the trenches of World War I. It's by no means a heavy or sombre story, but it manages to mix a poignancy in with its humor. 

Oddly enough, this is a collection that has grown on my over time since finishing it. I think I made the mistake of reading it cover to cover, which caused many of the pieces to blend into one another. Looking back, I would have preferred to read just one or two stories at a time to let them sink in and give myself more time to appreciate little gems like this quote from the book:

"We all have one special book of our own which we recommend to our acquaintances, regarding the love of it as perhaps the best passport to our friendship."

While I'm not sure that one book can make or break an entire friendship, I do think that a commonly loved book can help forge a bond, even more than a shared taste in music or movies can. Do you have a favorite book that you'd consider to be a ticket to your friendship? 

Shakespeare's Kitchen

I didn't intend to take a week long break from blogging, but the kick-off of the holiday season got the better of me. Between eating leftovers, decorating my apartment, and causing undue stress for myself on Cyber Monday as I spent the night watching a site I wanted to order from crash, my thoughts about Shakespeare's Kitchen kept getting pushed to the back of my mind. There appears to be multiple books with that title, so to be clear, the one I'm talking about isn't this cookbook, featuring Renaissance recipes for the modern cook, but rather the short story collection by Lore Segal.

The stories in this collection are all linked and build upon each other, very much in the vein of Olive Kitteridge if that book were less poignant and more quirky. Segal's stories follow Ilka Weisz, an academic who leaves her New York City circle of friends to take up a position at a university in a seemingly bucolic Connecticut town. There she slowly finds her place within a new circle of friends, at the center of which are Leslie and Eliza Shakespeare of the book's title.

The first stories in the collection chronicle Ilka's feeling of loneliness and her attempts to ingratiate herself with potential new friends. The writing style throughout the book, and particularly in these early stories, allows the reader to experience some of the same feelings that Ilka experiences. Names and brief descriptions of supporting characters are presented one after another, creating a sense of confusion that is much like Ilka's when she is first dropped into a large set of new acquaintances. Segal seems to view everything with a wry sense of humor and uses many unique, almost gleeful descriptions of mundane things, like when Ilka eats a "triangle of pizza that behaved like Dali's watch and kept folding away from her mouth". At first, this writing style alone made the stories delightful to read. As the larger narrative of the linked stories progressed, however, I found myself getting more and more annoyed by Ilka. In the beginning, her fumbling attempts at making new friends are sympathetic and relateable. I viewed her as the character to root for as she butted up against other characters' eccentricities. Once Ilka found her footing among her new group, my attitude began to change. Her own eccentricities and shortcomings became apparent and at certain times I found my loyalties shifting to favor the supporting characters over Ilka. Although this fact made me lose reading steam the further I got into the book, I can't really disparage it because in some ways it's just another example of my earlier point, about how the writing style mimics the emotional experiences of the characters. Over the course of the stories in the collection, we see Ilka as a lonely outsider, then as the new friend in the group, who delights and is delighted by everyone around her, and finally as a settled insider, who has deep relationships, both good and bad, with various members of her circle. The evolution of my feelings toward her during the course of my reading very much matched the fictional evolution of characters' attitudes toward each other as the plot progressed. I can't help but think that's an impressive feat for a story collection to achieve, regardless of the personal enjoyment I got from reading it.

Nothing Nice to Say

You know that old adage, “If you have nothing nice to say, don’t say anything at all"? For blogging purposes, I’ve decided to reinterpret that as, “If you have nothing nice to say about a few books, say it all in a single post to get the negativity over and done with at one time”. I’m just coming off of an unlucky streak of having read a few books in a row that, at best, fell short of my expectations and, at worst, really annoyed me. Here are the culprits:

Treasure Island!!! by Sara Levine was the worst offender of the bunch. It actually prompted me to go into uncharted territory and give it a meager one star rating on Goodreads. This book was a complete impulse purchase for me. I hadn’t heard anything about it until I saw it on the bookstore shelf one day and was amused by its premise: A recent college grad, struggling with her job, her boyfriend, and life in general, has an “Aha!” moment while reading the classic Treasure Island and decides that she needs to start living her life according to the adventurous ideals that Robert Louis Stevenson sets out for his characters. It sounded like a fun spoof and the narrator promised to be one of those unlikeable heroines who’s actually a little bit lovable in the way that she bungles everything she touches. I can now safely say that this was not the case. It’s definitely a satire, but one without much actual humor, and the protagonist was purely unlikeable and extremely annoying. I found it to be an extremely depressing read, not because of any tragic subject matter, but because of its bleak and boring point of view.

 

The Reading Promise by Alice Ozma was another book that I had high hopes for based on the premise alone. A memoir, it’s about a reading streak that the author and her father start when she’s a young girl, when they set the goal of reading aloud together for 100 nights. They meet that goal and continue on, then continue on some more, and finally end their streak by reading together one last time the day the author leaves for college. The idea of the reading streak is very sweet and I wanted to like it solely based on that, but I felt like the author didn't connect the reading theme to the rest of her life as strongly as she could have. Anecdotes about the quirky ways she and her father found time to squeeze in reading (in a parking lot after a late night play rehearsal, or just before leaving for the prom) didn’t provide enough of a narrative arc to tie the book together, making the various chapters feel only loosely connected and only vaguely interesting.

And finally, Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever is a short story collection by Justin Taylor that garnered a fair amount of critical praise. A lot of the writing was quite good. Some of the stories, when taken individually, had the feeling of something that you might read in a writing workshop, written by the best student in the class. That probably sounds like the most backhanded of compliments, but I actually did think it added a nice quality to some of the pieces. Where the real problem lay was in the fact that I didn’t find much meaning in the characters or in the themes the stories explore, and was left feeling pretty disinterested by the time I got through the collection.

Since I don't want to be the only Negative Nellie today, tell me, have you been disappointed by any books lately?

New Jersey Noir

Have you seen the [Insert City Name Here] Noir series of books? They're collections of short stories, all set in a particular location, meant to capture different aspects of noir fiction. From the expected cities like New York and Los Angeles to exotic locales like Mumbai, they have one for just about every place imaginable. They even have collections for places that are usually the butt of jokes, like Staten Island and, yes, New Jersey. I was quick to grab New Jersey Noir when I saw it on the shelf at the library. I had read and enjoyed Boston Noir  a couple of years ago and was interested to see how the series would translate to my home turf. 

Joyce Carol Oates edits the volume and opens with an introduction that talks about the different elements that define the noir style. She points out that it can involve classic crime elements, like world weary detectives, but it can also involve less traditional forms of plot twists and betrayal. Most of the stories that followed fell into this less traditional category. There were some interesting pieces, like a quirky story by Jonathan Safran Foer in which a disgraced Princeton professor gets sucked into an alternate reality via Google Maps, and some creepy pieces, like a story involving a stalker set, of course, in the town where I live (luckily the twist at the end of that one was a big enough surprise to turn the story on its head and save me from having to look over my shoulder as I walk around my neighborhood!), but none really captured that dark, misty, mysterious feeling that I usually get when reading more traditional types of noir fiction. I know that trench coated private investigators lurking among dark shadows may be some of the more cliche elements of noir, but I found that I missed some of those cliches when they were lacking in this collection.

Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm

Cold Comfort Farm was one of the first books I ever blogged about, waaay back when this blog was only a few months old. Recently I was in the mood to read something with a holiday theme, so when I found out that Stella Gibbons had written a Christmas companion to her hilarious novel, I knew I had to read it.

Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm is actually a collection of nicely varied short stories by Gibbons, only a few of which revolve around Christmas. Many touch on themes of social conventions and the fallout that occurs from awkward interactions between mismatched sets of characters. There's also a sort of detective story with a great twist in "The Murder Mark" and a sweet, holiday tale in "The Little Christmas Tree". The title story itself actually serves as a prelude to Cold Comfort Farm and offers a peak into the Starkadder clan's Christmas before the era of Flora Poste. Not as blatantly clever as the original novel, it's the kind of piece that's probably only interesting if you're already familiar with the oddball characters.

I don't think this will ever be a widespread Christmas classic, but I do think it's a fun holiday read for anyone who's a fan of Gibbons' other work.

Amy Bloom's Stories

I've heard so many great things about Amy Bloom's writing, so I was excited to get a taste of it for myself with the story collection Where the God of Love Hangs Out.

I was afraid I was going to be disappointed after the first series of four interconnected stories got me off to a slow start. I just didn't like or connect with anything about the characters in the grouping. Luckily, once I got past that, I ended up loving every other story in the collection. Bloom covers a lot of ground with the variety of characters she writes about- a man who spends his life being a cold and violent father, only to turn around once he becomes the charge of a Polish caretaker during his failing years; a girl whose roommate has been kidnapped and murdered; and, in another linked series of stories, a mother and stepson whose relationship is both disturbing and compelling. The common denominator among all of the pieces is that they dwell on sometimes unlikeable characters in often-times uncomfortable situations, but are so realistic and engrossing that it's impossible to look away.

Stories

I just finished reading the Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg . She's strictly a short story writer whose work was highly recommended to me. It was a recommendation that was right on target, because the stories were all really good.


The stories are all really different, but what they do have in common is the way that Eisenberg captures the voices of a variety of characters, typically kind of quirky, and focuses on in small but pivotal moments in their lives. The massive 900 pages of this book are comprised of three or four of the short story collections that she's written over the years. I like her earliest and most recent stories the best, but I admit that I skipped over a few in the middle. Going from one story right into the next made it a little hard to fully digest some of them. I'd likely go back and reread some of these, one at a time, and at a slower pace.

Final random fact: Deborah Eisenberg is married to Wallace Shawn, from Clueless and, more recently, Gossip Girl.

Castle Rock

I just spent several hours on trains to and from a work trip, so get ready for quite a few new book posts over the next few days. First up is The View From Castle Rock by Alice Munro. I guess the best way to describe these stories would be as fictionalized biographies since the collection is based around the author and her ancestors.

I picked this book up on the bargain table at B&N because I had heard good things about the title story, which follows the author's Scottish ancestors as they sail for America for the first time. I enjoyed that story, as well as most of the first half of the book, which stays in this time period, chronicling the settling of her family in North America. The stories in the second half of the book left me feeling a bit disconcerted, though. These feature Munro herself as the narrator and main character during different stages of her life. I couldn't quite fully enjoy these, possibly because I was too wrapped up in wondering just how much of the character in those stories was truly the author and how much was pure fiction.

Olive Kitteridge

Olive Kitteridge falls into a category of books that's critically acclaimed, but also really popular and bestselling. I'm not sure why, but these are books that I tend to pass up. I probably wouldn't have read this one either, except for the fact that it's my book club's latest pick.

This is a series of connected short stories, all set in a small Maine town and all featuring the character of Olive Kitteridge. Sometimes the stories are told from her point of view, and other times she's merely mentioned as a peripheral figure in another character's story. At first I was a little skeptical about this setup, thinking that in some cases, the author just threw some reference to Olive into an otherwise unrelated story to make it fit into this collection. The stories grew on me, though, as I read further into the book. Each one deals with a seemingly ordinary aspect of life, yet is really complex and illuminating about the character of Olive. She's a blunt, no-nonsense woman, and it's interesting to see how her personality evolves, both as she progresses through life in stories that revolve around her, and as we see her perceived by others in the stories that feature other characters.

Despite not being that excited to read this, I think it may be one of my favorite book club picks so far.

A Little Night Music

I just love when I think of nerdy, vaguely-pun-like titles for my posts, like this one about Kazuo Ishiguro's Nocturnes. Perfect for a book made up of five loosely connected stories revolving around music and nighttime, right?

I'd been looking forward to reading this for a while because I love the other two books I've read by the author, Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day. The premise of this one made it sound like a cross between one of those and Bel Canto. Instead, I was surprised to discover that the stories were all actually pretty funny. Not quite what I was expecting, but still a pleasant reading experience.

Cozy Winter Reading

The freezing weather this weekend has been the perfect excuse to hang around my apartment and be lazy. Staying inside (with the exception of a trip out to see Sherlock Holmes) has of course translated into lots of reading.

I'll admit it- I've become a complete sucker for young adult books. They're my guilty pleasure of choice. And when I get one using a B&N gift card that was burning a hole in my pocket? Even better. This one, Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater, is a romance between a teenage girl and a boy who's a werewolf- but not the usual kind. A fun book and an entertaining way to spend a few hours on a chilly winter afternoon.

On a slightly more sophisticated level, I read the collection Boston Noir. I'd heard of other titles in this series before- Brooklyn Noir, Los Angeles Noir, etc.- and when I saw they had one for Boston I snapped it up. Not only did it deal with one of my favorite settings, but it was edited by Dennis Lehane, author of The Given Day, which I really loved, and other books that I've enjoyed the movie versions of, like Mystic River. The stories in here didn't disappoint. Set in various parts of the city and covering different time periods, from colonial times to post-WWII to present day, they all share a really great atmosphere and a sense of eeriness and foreboding that fit right in on a winter's day. I'll definitely be keeping my eyes open for some of the other cities in this series.

Dorothy Parker

I've had The Portable Dorothy Parker sitting on my shelf for several years just waiting to be read. This past week, I finally got around to it.

Parker's reputation as a witty, sarcastic writer is so widely heralded that I was interested to see if her work would live up to the hype. At first, I didn't think it was going to. The Portable Dorothy Parker is made up of short stories interspersed with sections of poems, and rounded out by excerpts from some of her book and theater reviews. I'll admit that I didn't spend too much time on the poems, but the first section or two of stories left me disappointed. Her tone seemed a bit over the top in satirizing her female protagonists. As I got to the later stories, though, I began to enjoy her writing more and more. I'm not sure if this is reflective of her having grown as a writer throughout the years or me becoming more attuned to and appreciative of her writing style.

Her reviews were also quite enjoying to read. Some of the plays and books she reviewed have long since fallen into obscurity, but that doesn't even matter. Her reviews are so funny that it's of little consequence whether or not you are familiar with the subject matter at hand. It struck me that it's pretty amazing how caustic and sarcastic she was about things she doesn't like. I feel like it's very rare to see that in book reviews written today when, in the name of being PC and objective, reviewers try to keep from revealing strong personal preferences for or against specific authors. Not so, Dorothy Parker. Even from reading the sampling of review included in this volume, it's blatantly obvious which authors of her time she respected and which she disdained.

This cover is from a different, more current, edition of the book than mine. I'd be interested in flipping through this one next time I'm browsing at B&N to see the illustrations, which were done by a graphic artist.

More Murakami...in alphabetical order

I recently read an interesting book of short stories, After the Quake by Haruki Murakami. After reading and enjoying After Dark, I was intrigued to read more of his work. This didn't disappoint. The stories are all very different, yet are all loosely tied to the aftermath of the massive earthquake in Kobe, Japan. A really interesting concept, overall. And I really like this weird book cover too. Like with After Dark, reading these stories makes me more interested in Japanese culture....and makes me want to read more of his work. I'm considering working my way through his books in alphabetical order by title since it seems that I've unintentionally started out that way.

The Nerd Herd

I was recently sent an advance readers copy of the YA book Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd. Not something I would have necessarily sought out on my own, but I decided to give it a quick read since it fell into my lap for free. It's a collection of short stories by various writers, all dealing with teenage characters who are involved with some type of "geektastic" activity like quiz bowls, sci-fi conventions, and fantasy games. They don't chart any new territory plot-wise, but most of the writers bring a sensitivity to their characters that make for surprisingly sweet stories. Most successful are those that don't fall into the stereotypical treatment of geeky kids versus cool kids. Aside from one or two stories that missed the mark, I found myself enjoying this collection more than I expected to.