CotW: Summer Reading, Had Me a Blast Part 1

Well, summer is done and fall is here, so it’s time to take a look back at how I kept myself busy this summer. I’ve been advised by my attorneys (of which I have legions) that I cannot discuss any matters pertaining to investigations in progress, so that leaves…books. Other stuff, too, but for the sake of this piece, let’s just focus on books, shall we?

Click

By Nick Hornby, Roddy Doyle, Gregory Maguire, Linda Sue Park, David Almond, Tim Wynne-Jones, Ruth Ozeki, Deborah Ellis, Margo Lanagan and Eoin Colfer 

In this oddity, each of the above listed authors writes only one chapter of the story. The plot concerns a family, specifically the son Jason and the daughter Maggie, who are the recipients of a pile of autographed photographs and a set of seashells from their recently deceased globe-trotting grandfather Gee. The gifts seem to exert an influence on their lives and we see how the kids change and grow as they orient themselves around these simple inheritances.

I picked it up for Nick Hornby and Roddy Doyle, as I love them much, and a mild curiosity about how it could all possibly work. Oddly enough, it does, for the most part. The divergent styles fit nicely with the rotating focus on different characters. Thus, any noticeable differences in approaches feel less like writing by committee and more like a specifically chosen stylistic approach.

However, the reading experience was not without flaws. The book left me wanting to know more about the characters, to stay with them longer. In some ways, this may seem a compliment and so it is. Still, part of that desire to know more is born of the shallowness of detail given to them. It is an intriguing shallowness, to be sure, but shallow it remains. Perhaps if the admittedly impressive roster of writers had increased its size or each writer took two chapters instead of one…I do not know. As it stands though, this was the kind of hunger born of good food in far too small quantities, not of excellent food that filled you up and still made you want seconds.

What really kills Click, though, are the final two chapters in which the story jumps forward several decades. The first of these is inoffensive enough, giving us a hint of a much older Maggie still pursuing her shell related mission. It feels a bit off, but not horribly so, with Maggie having a nice moment with an a newly met young relative that echoes Gee’s death and gifts in the first chapter. The closing chapter, though…this is the wide misstep. 

It is not just because it takes a depressing, dim view of humanity’s future in a book that had, up until now, seemed shot through with a steadfast optimism, although it does have that and it is a bracing tonal shift. No, the real issue is that in grounding the final chapter in a science fiction future, the author falls in love with building the world. There are references to personal recorders that are always running, a possibly corrupt government that monitors everything all the time, New York City Two (apparently the first one was lost to flooding), weird weather phenomena, and the loss of photography. While the novel does feature a global perspective from moment one, all the visits to foreign lands were about the people there, not the scenery. The close of the book misplaces that perspective, falling in love with a dystopian futurescape at the cost of giving the readers some satisfying last moments with the characters we have come to care for.

Still, it is an interesting failure, and one that just barely misses, and I’ll take that over “successful” mediocrity any day. Plus, a portion of the purchase price went to Amnesty International, and charity is nice thing, you know?

Dead Famous

By Ben Elton

I got several used Ben Elton books on the cheap—like pennies a piece—so expect a few more of his to come on this list. 

This book, like seemingly all of Elton’s recent offerings, is preoccupied with the current voyeuristic/exhibitionistic culture promoted by entertainment and social networking applications like reality TV, Twitter, and Facebook. He is far more interested in the “seen” side of the equation, the exhibitionists, and how the spotlight changes them—and I suspect, how he believes it would change almost any of us.

The focus of that concern here is a Big Brother-esque TV show in Britain called House Arrest. The setup is familiar, as are the character tropes. However, this is no simple character study and Elton quickly throws a murder—witness by all watching and yet, seemingly, unsolvable—into the situation. Inspector Coleridge is convinced that his only hope to solve the crime is to allow the show to run its course. Thus, the Inspector finds himself rubbing elbows with an industry he finds loathsome and engaging in a game of cat-and-mouse that seems very much over his head.

Like most Elton stories, this one is nimble with flashes of wit, although a bit fewer and more far between than one might be used to from previous novels like High Society or Inconceivable. There are a lot of characters to wade through and rarely, with the exception of the Inspector and his partner, do they step anywhere outside their clichéd roles.

It’s also a bit of exercise in cynicism, so if that bothers you, steer clear. It is an interesting thesis Elton presents, that in this “reality”-obsessed world, our “real” selves, the ones that used to only be visible behind closed doors, are now only revealed when we step upon “the stage,” and that the spotlight is a seductive element that can corrupt even the most pure of us. But, like I said, cynical.

The White Tiger

By Aravind Adiga

India is a place of great opportunity. Or so Balram Halwai, the titular White Tiger, would have us believe. Over the series of several letters written to the Premier of China, Halwai relates his life from his first day of school in a poor Indian village to his rise as “A Thinking Man and an Entrepreneur” in Bangalore. You see, the Premier is coming to India and Halwai wants to show him the true face of his native land, not the sanitized version that the government would prefer you see.

The book is a compelling look into India that does not focus on the nearly technology devoid villages or the tech heavy economic centers, but instead shows how they exist side by side. It is rich with the politics of class that continue today in India and the country’s insecurity regarding its past and future, especially in comparison with China and the United States. Halwai is a seductive unreliable narrator. It is clear from moment one that he is probably not a “good man,” but his refusal to confirm or deny this outright allows him to draw the readers in and win them over. His misdeeds are many, but when all is said and done, he makes it hard for you to right him off or let get him out of your head.

Blind Faith

By Ben Elton

There are certain works that make you feel, well, gross, for lack of a better way to put it. They leave a layer of grime on you that is hard to shake after the lights come up or the final page falls. Requiem for a Dream, the film from Director Darren Aronofsky about drug use, abuse, and its victims, is an example of a work that induces this kind of feeling. Gamer, from the genius team behind the Crank movies and starring the Gerard Butler (the actor anointed star and sex symbol before we actually evaluated him for either), is one on the other side: it makes you feel lousy and, well, it is lousy, too—scene of Michael C. Hall doing Sammy Davis Jr notwithstanding. Blind Faith is quite a bit more Gamer than it is Requiem and boy did it leave me feeling dirty.

It takes place in a nearish future where society has been consumed by the triple threat of flooding from global warming, the embracing of ignorance as a virtue, and a wholesale rejection of privacy. Books are not banned, but if you bother reading anything but celebrity tell-alls or self-help books designed to help you “big up” yourself, expect to be regarded with suspicion. If you forgot to post a video of the most recent time you and your husband had sex or graphic pictures of your child’s birth, a Confessor will visit you and politely remind you that only perverts keep secrets. And so on. Every trend today that someone might find distressing (anti-vaccination advocacy, our voyeur/exhibitionist streak via Twitter, Facebook, etc., fundamentalism, trusting the government, the politicization of facts, the pornization of our views of sex, the sexualization of damn near everything, etc) is blown up to horrific proportions. In a lot of ways, Blind Faith is a less funny, far bleaker cousin to Idiocracy, with all the good and bad that that implies.

In the end, I can’t recommend Faith. There are aspects of it I respect, but overall, it feels too…easy, if that makes sense. It may be a horrifying future, but it is the most predictable kind where everything we dislike consumes us, not passes like just another fad.

Things I’ve Learned from Women Who’ve Dumped Me

Edited by Ben Karlin

Features Essays from Andy Richter, Nick Hornby, Stephen Colbert, Larry Witmore, Dan Savage, David Rees, and many others…

Funny stuff, but with the range of talent, not as funny as I would have hoped. The essays are most satisfying when they go beyond what you might have expected, as when Larry Witmore discusses the number of ways his newborn daughter finds to break his heart or Neal Pollack’s complicated relationship with his cat. Other highlights include Rodney Rothman reconnecting with his first crush, Tom McCarthy writing back to a letter from a girl he met at bible camp some twenty-five years later, and a month in the life of David Wain and the woman stringing him along. There are some entertaining, occasionally touching pieces here and the book is worth a read, but, as I said, not as funny as I was expecting.

Come back tomorrow for the rest of my summer reads!

As always, Tim can be reached at parallax2 [at] juno [dot] com, followed on Twitter at UnGajje, or friended on Facebook. Please feel free to do so or comment below.