townesvanfaulkner

Top 100 Ranking: 100

Writing Style-8.2
Originality-7.4
Plot-7.9
Literary Merit(whatever that means)-7.4
Overall-8.2

This was another buck-fitty McKay’s special that rocked and is apparently out of print for some reason. The author has a pretty stupid name, maybe he should have come up with a smarter sounding pseudonym than Hobbie.

This is great dicklit. Philip Roth blurbs it, in fact. And it says on the cover that it won some award that I’ve never heard of.

All the classic dicklit/Rothian clichés are there. The main character is a struggling writer, trying to get stuff published, hates teaching English, cheats on his wife, is very competitive with a male friend, feels emasculated, etc., etc. The only thing missing is that he never cheats with a student. I guess that would have been over the top or something (though his 40 year old friend does cheat with a 25 year old).

The main character is Charles Boomfell who I just described. He pretty much gets fired from teaching and gives up writing to become a real estate agent. I wonder if Richard Ford read this before he wrote Independence Day because a lot of the funny things about being a realtor and how sad it must be are contained in this book also.

Boomfell’s friend while he is teaching (the one that he is very competitive with and feels inferior to in many ways) is Eliot Singer who when the book starts he hasn’t seen in roughly seven years.

The book starts out as though it’s going to be about Boomfell feeling inferior to Singer especially when his wife informs him that she and Singer had a year long affair back in the day. But then, Singer calls late one night and he’s out of his head because he’s deeply in love for his 25 year old mistress. And she is refusing to see him again.

The movie revolves mainly around Boomfell though Singer’s relationship to Boomfell and his wife is very important. But strewn throughout the novel are chapters entitled April that are first person narratives written in stream-of-conscious. April is a girl in her early twenties who works for Boomfell’s wife cleaning houses. She tells about the people that she cleans house for and her infatuation for Boomfell’s wife (she’s bisexual). I’m not real sure how April’s story fits in with Boomfell and Singer, but it’s interesting none the less. And Singer is so out of his head crazy that it really keeps you turning the pages to find out what he is going to do next.

The book is brilliantly written. You really feel everyone’s unique depression and lust (April wants Boomfell’s wife, Singer wants his 25 year old mistress, Boomfell starts thinking about his old mistress, the Boomfell’s next door neighbor wants Singer). There’s the obvious contrast between Singer who is full of himself and just takes whatever he wants in life but is driven crazy by his lust and Boomfell who’s essentially given up on his ambitions of being a writer and settled down into family life with kids, a wife of 16 years, and a terribly pathetic job. Which one is better off?

I solidly recommend this book for dicklit fans. Though, don’t get me wrong, April and Boomfell’s wife are solid characters. I wouldn’t necessarily dismiss it for the ladies (Amy started and promptly quit the book, though she didn’t quite get to the more interesting parts involving Singer’s manic depressive episodes).

Writing Style-3.2
Originality-7.5
Plot-3.8
Literary Merit(whatever that means)-4.6
Overall-3.4

This book was moronic. There were two good things about it, (1) the legend of the hound of the baskervilles was cool and (2) it was a very short book.

This is the longest Sherlock Holmes story that Doyle wrote I believe. I always thought I should try Sherlock Holmes. The idea seems intriguing, a classic mystery. The thought of hanging on every line at the edge of your seat, tracking clues, trying to figure out who done it. But, in practice, it wasn’t interesting in the least.

Like I say, the legend is pretty cool and potentially scary. It’s about this hellish hound that was brought on by the acts of an evil Baskerville many generations ago and this curse has haunted every generation since, leading up to the mysterious death of the latest Baskerville. But, you quickly learn that Holmes has a very scientific, skeptical mind and Holmes is almost never wrong about a deduction, so therefore, it is certain that any tale of the supernatural is simply superstition and that Holmes will get to the bottom of it and the explanation will be something mundane and stupid.

Also, all of the clues feel so contrived. You know that Doyle is just placing them there with something in mind for Holmes and Watson to cleverly figure out later. The storytelling just lacks the ring of truth. Nature is never that orderly and human nature is never that predictable.

This felt like a book for 10 year olds. Like it’s a glorified Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew. I don’t see any justification for anyone older reading this. All the clichés are there. Why bother?

Writing Style-6.0
Originality-5.5
Plot-5.0
Literary Merit(whatever that means)-5.4
Overall-5.2

Blah. Meh. Hmph. Those are the first three words that come to mind to describe this book. It’s mediocrity to the nth degree.

This is not an Oprah book club selection to my knowledge, but it is what most people would probably stereotype an Oprah selection as being like (which is pretty unfair seeing as how The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen and One Hundred Years of Solitude were Oprah selections). It’s girly as all get out and not in a cool way. I thought maybe it had potential because Kingsolver is a southern writer from Appalachian Kentucky.

It’s about this chick who for no apparent reason, early in the book before we even fully understand her motivations, she buys an old vw bug and drives west with the thought that wherever the car breaks down, there she will live for awhile. As she’s crossing through the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma some random lady puts a Cherokee baby in her car. It’s been horribly abused and she decides to keep it. She drives on to Arizona and finds a roommate who’s recently divorced and has… guess what... a new baby!! So they live together, become best friends, and take care of their babies.

If you are a feminist who loves babies (which doesn’t make much sense, though my sister comes to mind) then you would probably like this book. Otherwise, don’t waste your time.

The one redeeming quality that I like about the book is that it makes a nice argument in the end for alternative families. I think it’s an important point. But, other than that… On to the next book!

http://www.hemispheresmagazine.com/fiction/2005/faulkner.htm

Top 100 Ranking: 85

Writing Style-7.8
Originality-8.1
Plot-8.4
Literary Merit(whatever that means)-7.8
Overall-8.4

This book was a very pleasant surprise. I bought it because it had a cool picture on the cover and it was only a buck-fitty at McKay’s. I hadn’t heard anything about it. Amazon doesn’t have a picture of it on their website, so it may actually be out of print now.

It’s about the Texas/Mexico border country (fitting that I was reading it in conjunction with No Country for Old Men) and illegal immigrants crossing into the U.S. The main character is an ultra rich, as in tens of millions of dollars are nothing to this guy, Catholic who’s wife and only son are killed in a car wreck. He drives south and randomly ends up in a Texas town near the border and is strongly affected by seeing what a desperate state immigrants are in as they attempt to illegal cross the border. He spends lots of money to set up a safe haven and provides food, health care, and shelter for them.

At first, I thought that this book was simply a journalist/non-fiction writer who is familiar with the region and its problems and so he (the author) just wanted to write a novel about it based on his research, and that there would be just barely enough plot to justify the writing of it. And then I got a little further and it seemed like maybe he was a guy with strong white, liberal guilt having a fantasy about what he would do to help these people if only he were the heir to hundreds of millions of dollars. It held my attention but still not necessarily anything to write home about.

However, in the second half of the novel it really takes off. The main character, Adrian Northwood, is a painter and he is painting a series of pictures of the immigrants and a series of religious images. One of the immigrants staying at the shelter steals his paintings one day and crosses back into Mexico. This prompts Northwood to set off after him to retrieve his paintings. His spiritual journey through Mexico, complete with a run-in with the corrupt Mexican police and an extended stay in their horrific penile system, is very Cormac McCarthian.

The cover of the book says that this is the story of a modern day St. Francis if that means anything to you. I didn’t really know anything about the life of St. Francis before I read this book, but he seems pretty cool.

At any rate, I loved it. It’s got a great message and I think it probably paints a pretty good picture of the region. The author writes in the foreward that none of the characters are based on reality but that it is a realistic portrait of south Texas, Mexico, and the people migrating into the country (interestingly, he states that he was too kind to the Mexican police, which is hard to believe because he makes them seem pretty darn horrible).

Top 100 Ranking: 56

Writing Style-8.9
Originality-8.0
Plot-8.9
Literary Merit(whatever that means)-8.3
Overall-8.6

'How to prevail over that which you refuse to acknowledge the existence of. Do you understand? When I came into your life your life was over. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is the end. You can say that things could have turned out differently. That they could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are not some other way. They are this way. You're asking that I second say the world. Do you see?'
-Anton Chigurh

Alright, there’s no question, I’m a McCarthy fanboy. So writing a review of this book is going to be hard.

I LOVED IT!!!!!! IT KICKED ASS!!!!!!!!!

Ok, enough with the gushing, I’ll try to move on towards some semblance of objectivity now.

At first glance this is a huge departure from anything else McCarthy has done.

What’s different:
-It’s crime noir
-There might be more sentence fragments than run-ons
-There are probably no more than 3 words in the entire book that you would need a dictionary for, as compared to Suttree where you pretty much can’t get through a sentence without a dictionary and there are even words that you’d be hard-pressed to find a dictionary that included them.
-There are no lengthy, poetic descriptions of the landscape or people.
-The plot is simple to follow, there are no hazy, Faulknerian sections where you have to puzzle through what is actually going on.
-It’s feels fairly contemporary, set in 1980.
-I don’t recall a metaphor with the words “like some” in it.

What’s the same:
-His patented grim determinism
-It’s set in Texas near the border
-There’s a really, really bad mythic dude. What Judge Holden from Blood Meridian was to the late 1800’s, Anton Chigurh is to the late 1900’s.
-Lots of violence
-Its dripping with masculinity
-There’s a lot of respect for the old timers and great sadness in the fact that as the world changes, their ways of life and values and morals no longer apply
-Great dialogue with regional euphemisms

The writing is pared-down a lot with a strong focus on moving the plot along. Whereas he used to write long beautiful descriptions with very long sentences to set the scene, but then the dialogue would be extremely sparse, simple, and straightforward. Now everything, not just the dialogue, is economical. I recently read The Cold Six Thousand by James Ellroy and at times it reminded me of that; electing to write a series of very short sentences in place of one long one and the fixation with describing the guns and the gunfire and the bullet wounds and so forth. It’s as though he’s proven his whole career that he is a masterful “prose stylist” (as everyone, even his detractors, will admit) and now he wants to prove that he can write a classic noirish thriller that is a page-turner and will make a good movie (he’s already sold the rights, btw).

This may sound like a bad thing or that he’s sold out, but he’s so good, it works. It is, in fact, a fast-paced whirlwind novel. I almost read it in one sitting the same night I bought it, but I finally conked out at 2:00 AM.

And there’s just so much classic McCarthy in there. It’s so romantically manly, Chigurh is such a great bad guy, Sheriff Bell and Llewelyn Moss are such likable-yet-flawed-and-ultimately-helpless good guys, and the dialogue is touching, stark, at times funny, and subtle.

I don’t want to get too much into the plot (you can read the inside cover synopsis on Amazon if you wish) because I suspect more than one of my readers plans to read this book regardless of reviews or what it’s about, and I think it’s more fun sometimes to go into a book or movie without knowing too much about it.

But very briefly, there’s a drug deal that goes south and everybody dies leaving a bunch of heroine and ~2.3 million dollars. Moss finds the money while hunting. Chigurh is a sort of hired hand/assassin-type bad-ass who sets out to find the drugs and money and kill anyone who messes with him. Bell is the good ole boy sheriff who’s trying to solve the murders, find the bad guys, and save lives, mainly Moss’, before Chigurh gets to them. The action is interlaced with sections of italicized monologue from Sheriff Ed Tom Bell.

Bell’s monologues were particularly problematic for me at times. I had to ask myself, ‘How much of the author is in Bell’s character?’ because there were times that I just didn’t agree with Bell. Let me explain.

McCarthy has repeatedly written about the decline of a society and has repeatedly written about people pining for the good old days. Por ejemplo, John Grady Cole going to Mexico because too much of Texas was fenced in or the orchard keeper shooting at the big metal government water tank standing on the horizon and ruining the landscape or the growing filthiness of Suttree’s Knoxville. But this was subtle and romantic and had to do with days that were long before my lifetime. No Country for Old Men, however, is set within my lifetime and the manner in which Bell speaks on the causes of his world going to hell in a handbasket is far from subtle. He talks about the difference in getting in trouble in school during his days as being things akin to chewing gum or talking in class, whereas today there’s drugs, rape, and shootings in schools. He talks about young people with green hair and nose piercings and how you can tell that society is shot when people stop saying maam and sir. At times, he just sounds like a crusty old curmudgeon like my own grandfather or Zell Miller who think that our biggest problems are hippies smoking pot, gangsta rap, violent video games, and baseball players using steroids. As opposed to my opinion that our biggest problems are the lack of a truly independent news media, conflicts of interest that arise when you combine lawmakers and their campaign costs and large amounts of money from companies and organizations pimping their agendas, or an education system (particularly in the south and middle of the country) that fails miserably at producing adults who can think critically.

So, in short, connecting Cormac to Bell and then to Zell is something that I just can’t deal with. So, I’m gonna give him (Cormac) the benefit of the doubt and say that he’s just being true to his character. Because lets face it, a good ole boy cop from BFE, Texas is probably gonna be more than a little bit Zell-like. There, no dilemma. But still, Bell does get a bit preachy about contemporary issues, which distracted me a little. Overall, he’s a good, smart, very kind guy though, don’t get me wrong. It’s not like he’s total hick or anything.

Okay, there you have it. I think the last two that McCarthy’s written, No Country and Cities of the Plain, are nowhere near as good as the rest of his books. I liked Cities of the Plain a little bit more because of what I had already gone through with the characters from All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing. But I still loved No Country. It shows a new facet of McCarthy’s talents and it makes a nice complement going from Blood Meridian (his first western novel) through the Border Trilogy and up to 1980 and No Country.

No Country for Old Men

After a seven year hiatus, today is the day.

Just picked up my copy. About to go start it. Will post my thoughts when done.

check it:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0375406778/qid=1121812477/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-5631442-5131931?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

Writing Style-6.9
Originality-7.0
Plot-6.5
Literary Merit(whatever that means)-8.4
Overall-7.3

It’s unbelievable that this was written by a 13-14 year old. Simply the fact that a 13 year old could write 300 pages that hold most people’s attention is amazing. It shows an uncanny grasp of storytelling, pacing, and language.

I recently read Henry and June by Anais Nin, which is a section of Nin’s diaries that deals with her relationship with Henry Miller and his wife June. And I have to say that I think a 13 year old Anne Frank writes every bit as well and is in many ways as mature as an adult Anais Nin. In fact, I was repeatedly reminded of Nin’s diary while reading this. Particularly, Anne’s description of her feelings for Peter and one entry where she candidly describes exploring her own genitalia, which could have easily been an entry in Nin’s diary.

I’m sure most of you know the story. Anne Frank and her family are hiding in a secret apartment, or annex, with another family and some other random guy. She falls in love with Peter, the son from the other family.

Those people who would only seek to read this book for sensational violence of the holocaust should be forewarned. None, of the diary is written inside a concentration camp. There’s no physical torture, gas chambers, or mass graves. It’s more subtle than that.

It’s simply a real life snapshot of how people rather manfully persevered and did their best to carry on with their lives under the most horribly oppressive conditions. For instance, they celebrate holidays and birthdays (often writing each other poems as presents) and they take correspondence courses and continue their studies and work from before they went into hiding.

Even without the tension of the war and holocaust going on just outside their door, this is a brilliantly written diary. Even compared to diaries and memoirs written by adults whose lives are tumultuous this could stand up on its own.

However, I think the big catch of this book is that it’s so hard to come to grips with the fact that there was this brilliant young girl living with her friends and family all the while leading rather mundane, regular lives waiting for a war to end, and then they got caught one night. And of the eight of them, only Anne’s father survives the concentration camps. It’s this sudden, inexplicable end to so much that we recognize and value in people that leaves us shaking our heads at this book and the circumstances that come about to make it reality.

Writing Style-6.2
Originality-7.2
Plot-7.0
Literary Merit(whatever that means)-7.1
Overall-7.1

This book was pretty good. I read its 320 pages within 24 hours so it obviously held my attention.

It’s a post-nuclear holocaust book with a fairly clever twist. It was published in 1957 at the height of nuclear war terror, but the action takes place in an imagined future in 1961-1962.

China, Russia, Europe, and the U.S. have dropped over 4,000 nuclear bombs on each other effectively wiping out the entire population in the northern hemisphere. The southern hemisphere is insulated from the radioactivity, at first, due to the winds that swirl in opposite directions on each side of the equator in the tropics. However, the radioactivity will slowly diffuse through these winds and only give inhabitants in the southern hemisphere a brief, less than 6 months, respite from certain death.

The book is set in and around Melbourne, Australia which is geographically significant because this is the most southerly situated major city in the world. So the citizens of Melbourne will be among the last survivors of the human race.

There are four main characters an American navy man, his love interest in Australia, an Australian navy man, and his wife. The love story between the American and the Australian girl is actually quite nice. The Australian man’s wife is a complete idiot that I wanted to bitch slap into next week.

I wasn’t completely sold on the way people were reacting to the end of the world. For instance, the American goes shopping for several items within a month or two of the end and there’s no inflation? And no looting? And all the shop owners are working regular hours knowing they are about to die? Everyone’s fairly calm and their provincial manners, speaking, and attitudes in the face of this situation gets pretty annoying.

The book attempts briefly to answer the question of how we could have avoided nuclear war in this excerpt which I thought was cool:

“Newspapers,” he said. “You could have done something with newspapers. We didn’t do it. No nation did, because we were all too silly. We liked our newpapers with pictures of beach girls and headlines about cases of indecent assault, and no government was wise enough to stop us having them that way. But something might have been done with newspapers, if we’d been wise enough.”

The writing is pretty pedestrian, but in the end I was affected by the book. There are no plot twists, it is what it is. Several times it seems like it will veer into something different, but it’s pretty much about the last living people in the world dealing with a creeping cloud of radiation. If that’s your cup of tea, it’s a pretty good book.

Writing Style-6.5
Originality-7.3
Plot-7.9
Literary Merit(whatever that means)-6.8
Overall-7.3

This is a really fun, exceptionally funny book that was also surprisingly smart with a swiftly moving plot. This book is in a series of books called the Discworld series that I don’t believe you have to read in sequence. This one is somewhere in the middle of probably a couple dozen books set in Discworld.

If you haven’t already guessed by the fact that it’s part of a series of at least 20 books called the Discworld series, it is in fact fantasy/sci-fi. This book (I can’t speak for the series) is religious satire. Sort of like if you took James Morrow and Douglas Adams and smashed them together, they would write a book something like this.

It starts off in the land of Omnia, a theocracy that worships the god Om. Om unwittingly manifests himself in the form of a tortoise who is dropped into a temple by an eagle. All gods have power based on the number of followers they have. Om is now a pretty impotent god and in the form of a tortoise because he has only one true believer.

Om meets his one true believer, Brutha, and speaks to him about his problem, namely being a powerless turtle. Brutha is the main character of the book and is set on a dual quest to 1) act as a diplomat with Omnia’s neighbor and enemy, Ephebe and 2) restore Om’s power by hiring one of Ephebe’s ubiquitous philosophers to help.

Though the story is set in an alternate world in an alternate universe, the author makes it obvious that he intends it to be allegorical. For instance, Omnia has a group of bishops that torture and kill non-believers, this group is called Quisitors. Discworld is actually a flat disc and the Quisitors kill those that believe that the world may be round.

Other examples of the humor:

‘And you were going to be a bull?’ he said.
‘Opened my eyes…my eye… and I was a tortoise.’
‘Why?’
‘How should I know? I don’t know!’ lied the tortoise.
‘But you… you’re omnicognisant,’ said Brutha.
‘That doesn’t mean I know everything.’
Brutha bit his lip. ‘Um. Yes. It does.’
‘You sure?’
‘Yes.’
‘Thought that was omnipotent.’
‘No. That means you’re all-powerful. And you are…

And:

‘Uh, I want to find out about gods,’ said Brutha.
The philosophers looked at one another.
‘Gods?’ said Xeno. ‘We don’t bother with gods. Huh. Relics of an outmoded belief system, gods.’
There was a rumble of thunder from the clear evening sky.
‘Except for Blind Io the Thunder God,’ Xeno went on, his tone hardly changing.
Lightning flashed across the sky.
‘And Cubal the Fire God,’ said Xeno.
A gust of wind rattled the windows.
‘Flatulus the God of the Winds, he’s all right too,’ said Xeno…
…
…The philosophers looked very embarrassed. Then Ibid said, ‘Foorgol the God of Avalanches? Where’s the snowline?’
‘Two hundred miles away,’ said someone.
They waited. Nothing happened.
‘Relic of an outmoded belief system,’ said Xeno.
A wall of freezing white death did not appear anywhere in Ephebe.
‘Mere unthinking personification of a natural force,’ said one of the philosophers, in a louder voice. They all seemed to feel a lot better about this.
‘Primitive nature worship.’

I’d recommend this book highly to fans of Douglas Adams or any fantasy/sci-fi fan that likes satire and poking fun at religion.

Writing Style-8.0
Originality-8.2
Plot-7.3
Literary Merit(whatever that means)-8.5
Overall-7.4

I love it when you read a book that is not at all what you had in your head that it was going to be like. It’s a good argument for why everyone should every now and then force themselves to read something that is far outside the scope of their normal reading habits.

I figured that Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte was surely a girly book about some romeo named Heathcliff. I couldn’t have been more wrong. This is a dark, gothic, at times terrifying book. And Heathcliff is a terrible, vengeful, evil person. It is a love story of sorts and tragic which I had assumed, but there’s far more revenge than romance in this book.

It starts with a very scary ghost story, which piques the narrator’s interest into delving deeper into the history of Heathcliff and the Wuthering Heights home. Then it gets into the main story that revolves around Heathcliff.

His (Heathcliff’s) background is pretty mysterious. He enters the household as an orphan. In his adopted family he becomes the father’s favorite, a rival of his “brother”, and falls in love with his “sister”, Catherine. After overhearing Catherine’s plan to marry Edgar Linton, a wealthy gentleman who lives at Thrushcross Grange (the other important household in the story, near Wuthering Heights), Healthcliff runs away for 3 years. What he does in this time is also shrouded in mystery.

He returns having transformed himself into a wealthy gentleman as well and basically plots revenge on the Linton’s at Thrushcross Grange. He (Heathcliff) is not a likable character and it’s hard to feel sorry for him even though he does it all for love I suppose.

It is one of those books like The Sound and the Fury and One Hundred Years of Solitude where it is very helpful to either make your own family tree as you go along or find an edition that includes one because there are multiple marriages, a character (Catherine) has a child also named Catherine, and the story passes over a couple of generations. There are two households, Thrushcross and Wuthering Heights, and the two respective families, Linton’s and Earnshaw’s. So, by looking at the family tree you notice some nice symmetries and can better follow the plot.

It reminded me a lot of The Count of Monte Cristo with the main character returning from exile, transforming himself, and pulling off a complex revenge plot over the course of many years. Except, that Heathcliff’s revenge is not as morally justified.

So, it’s a pretty interesting book, it ends very well, returning to the ghost story. It’s particularly good if you like diabolical characters. The mood is extremely dark and gloomy.

It was originally published in 1847 and it reads like a novel published in 1847. So, if you are not already a fan of the classics of 19th century literature I wouldn’t say that this is the best place to start. I think War and Peace or Liasons Dangereuse would be much more gripping for a contemporary audience.

My debut EP:

My Sunny Tennessee
Hard Winter
Hand In Hand
Point of No Goodbye


All songs written and performed by enoch and copyright of Bassless Accusations Music 2005