Damon Garr

I listened to this one on audiobook, and this seemed like a very appropriate way read it because so much is about audio. And the recording uses a variety of voices and some inventiveness in its technique that all seemed appropriate. Though I do want to look back to see how some of it was handled in the text. I enjoyed it and, though the subject matter is moving, the novel itself didn't move me much.

This book of short stories examines the lives of the working class, primarily, across the neighborhoods of Chicago with a precise eye. The brief pieces drop us in to witness their lives in small moments and then often leaves them without much of a resolution. It is done without moralizing, without trying to make some point. I enjoyed it very much.

How much context should we bring to a novel? Should we consider the writer's other works? Should the author's biography inform the reading of a particular novel?

I would like to read a book independent of its context. While the text may have an historical context that comes from without, what we should care about is within the text. Yet, when I read John Cheever's Falconer I couldn't help but consider the author's other work. The novel is so different from what I think of as John Cheever.

The novel centers on an upper-middle-class heroin in Falconer prison for murdering his brother. Other than the upper-middle-class part, there is little in common with the characters that inhabit most of Cheever's writing. But it goes beyond the setting and the protagonist. The writing itself is loose, casual, colored with flourishes. At times it is brutal, infused with violence and obscenity, and at others it is dreamlike, fantastical.

Falconer is not a suburban novel. It is a prison novel, filled with the things that make up prison life. Shocking, naturally, but even more shocking in contrast to Cheever's other work. At the same time, it never feels like the other is trying to shock us. He doesn't show us the violence and sex in order to make us gasp about the awfulness of it or to prove that he can shock. Falconer is given to us from the point of view of a character who has, in a way, given up. He is not shocked by what comes his way. Not resigned, but not amused. He doesn't completely accept his fate, but his attempts at change are only derived from desperation. Even when he experiences strong emotion, he seems to be documenting it in order to make it true. At the novel's ending, he has gone through change and maybe we can believe that he is capable of the emotion he describes, but he is so over the top that we can help but doubt him.

In all, context or not, more like Denis Johnson than John Cheever, the novel was a good read.

This novel is sharp and smart, observant and funny and thoroughly enjoyable. I had heard great things about the book and was immediately taken with how honest the narrator was. And it kept getting deeper and smarter. The social commentary was honest without overtaking the story.

My only criticism is that despite the introspection of the narrator, she gets herself into a situation that deserves a little more reflection than I think it was given.

It may only be January, but I think the chances of my reading a better book this year are slim.

I started out really enjoying the book, finding it funny and absurd, but then it just continued in that same way without ever progressing. I suppose part of the point is that nothing really happens, but nothing really happens. Even in the end, when we're supposed to find some resolution and the year comes to an end, I don't feel like anything was solved.

First, let me say that this is great one to listen to as an audiobook. Special credit should be given to the voice narrator of the book, Nicole Lewis, for being able to voice a two-year old and the wide variety of characters. I also appreciated the way the book handled the issue of race, which is central to the book. It was both nuanced, showing contradictions and ambivalence, and spot on in showing the racism that exists in people who might not even realize it, who might even think that they're doing the right thing.

Though I enjoyed the book, it was also melodramatic at times. I may have laughed out loud and said “oh no,” but I wanted more out of it.

Barkow lays out here the case for criminal justice reform that should be common sense. It is hard to believe that we could've gotten ourselves to such a place where we give all the power to prosecutors and politicians, with a total disregard to public safety. The case is well made and the path for reform well mapped out.

I've been following Laura Lippman online for years, but I think this is the first time I've read one of her novels. Generally, I steer away from mysteries and thrillers, but I'm trying to read more of them. This seemed like a good way to start.

I enjoyed this quite a bit. The writing is strong and not entirely driven by the plot. The various perspectives and voices and an unlikable protagonist add depth. My trouble here is actually with the plot. I'm a believer in the theory that what happens in the end is both a surprise and something we saw coming the whole time. Here, though, the end contains so many twists that it is just too much. Maybe I missed clues, but I don't think all of the twists are even necessary for what has been accomplished through the length of the novel.

I am all for the experimental, for tearing up the standard forms when necessary to deliver something that is unique. The uniqueness should not be the point, though. Jane Alison's exploration of the variety and possibilities in form, seems to push against the notion of linear narrative. Any story, in whatever fragmented form, progresses linearly. It is how we experience things, whether it's the line across the page or time itself. What succeeds in the telling of story, what's required of fiction, is some sort of transition. We start in one place and end up in another. This can be done in any number of ways, as the author shows in many examples, but let's not believe that we're locked into some hierarchical form, some trace of the millennia of patriarchy, that we should now throw aside. We will always have Freytag's triangle, because it is how we experience things, because this way of storytelling is fundamental to our human needs. So, rip it up, cut it up, mix it up, but don't think that we can escape human nature.

Maybe it's that I'm not in my early twenties anymore, but Kerouac has lost his luster. Maybe it's just that Dharma Bums is not On the Road. Whatever the issue, this novel had no real draw for me. Nothing that compelled me to keep reading, nothing really to say that is was any good at all. Okay, I don't mind reading about hiking or about Buddhism. I'll give it that.

Tactile and lyrical, Dillard's writing is evocative and personal in this telling of her life in Pittsburgh. The city has changed over several times since the era about which she is writing and so has society. This made me wish that my children had the freedom to chase each other through the neighborhood, freely crossing though backyards and parks without fear.

What does it mean to be “insane?” This book not only looks at how we define and determine what it is to be schizophrenic but also the horrors the opaque nature of diagnoses. However horrible the experience is to be mentally ill, to have the science behind it be so vague forces many to live without real determination of what is actually wrong. Wang shows without fantastical language just how horrible mental illness can be.

The book is a collection of essays and by its nature lacks a cohesive through-line. In fact, even within each essay, I found the writing haphazard. In some ways I wanted the book to provide the reader a way to see behind the mask of schizophrenia and better understand the experience, but what we see instead is that each experience is unique to the individual. Wang makes up for this, though, with both research and personal anecdote.

Maybe it would've helped to know something about Kathy Acker before reading this novel. Or maybe not. Without that knowledge, though, the scattered nature of the writing was even more fragmented for me. I appreciated the sentence-style here, the interjections and anxiety over the news, but I would have liked a little more punctuation.