read a book every week

The Sun Also Rises
by Ernest Hemingway

I loved it. A story about the happenings of and between a group of travelers and expats in postwar France and Spain, it seems to be an exploration into both the interactions between people and the motivations behind them. A sad, romantic and refreshing book; I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to read a Hemingway novel. Definitely won’t be my last.

In the past month I’ve read, Nine Kinds of Naked by Tony Vigorito, The Brilliance of the Moon by Liam Hearn, Born in the Year of the Butterfly Knife by Derrick Brown, and Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut. So I’ve been keeping up my average; I’ve just gotten lazy about posting.

I recommend all of the above books.

Hey Nostradamus!
by Douglas Coupland

Moving exploration of the aftermath of a school shooting on four connected individuals. Sad and listless, but I was left with a sense of optimism and hope at the end of it, like so much of Coupland’s writing.

Everything and Nothing
by Jorge Borges

Brilliant. Reminded me a lot of short stories by Poe. I think “The Lottery” was my favorite. Quick read and one that makes you feel smarter after reading it. I hope to be able to read this in the original Spanish someday.

Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders
by Neil Gaiman

It’s like finding Neil Gaiman’s notebook at a bus stop. Stories, snippets, poems; the only thing missing is doodles in the margins. Dark, funny, sad, beautiful, macabre, cutting and need I say well-written and compiled. Good sense of pacing with the order of the stories. Both utterly engrossing and the perfect thing to read when distracted because the stopping places come so often.

Diary AND Invisible Monsters
by Chuck Palahniuk

Diary has a plot like a dimestore pulp fiction novel from the fifties, but like a Shakespearean play, it’s the language that grabs you. The anatomy of expression is revoltingly dissected to really punch up the emotion and add to the general feeling of unease about the entire book.

A former painter’s husband has made an unsuccessful attempt at suicide that has left him in a vegetative state. His wife begins to keep a coma diary for him, so that he may know all that has gone on in his absence. Meanwhile, homeowners who have paid him for work done on their homes are discovering whole rooms in their houses missing. When they are eventually found to have been walled in, the walls covered in obscene and prophetic writings, the woman starts to learn how little she knows about her husband and the small island community he grew up in and brought her to after they wed.

Invisible Monsters is a disturbing quest for the meaning of modern beauty and happiness, a glamorous grotesque journey for attention and acceptance. It felt like the evil doppelganger of a Douglas Coupland novel.

A model’s face is blown away by a high-powered rifle and she finds her fiancee leaving her for her best friend, one or both of whom may be complicit in the incident. Her face is so ravaged that her plastic surgery options are lengthy, expensive, painful and not guaranteed to work. She instead embarks on a road trip with a transgendered woman and her lover, stealing pills, money and makeup from mansions for sale. Along the way, the plot twists and turns as more and more secrets and histories are revealed about all of the characters, fleshing out an unsettling narrative about intentionally hitting rock bottom in order to find one’s self.

Both of these books were interesting, but I didn’t feel as though they were breaking the mold by any means.

Sputnik Sweetheart
by Haruki Murakami

Sweet, entrancing narrative that at times is utterly predictable and at times is a complete enigma. Lights on a few interesting ideas about mirrors and split selves, but doesn’t explore them enough for any kind of intellectual satisfaction.

Narrator is in love with his best friend, a nonconformist writer who doesn’t share his feelings. She in turn, falls in love with an older married woman for whom she begins to work. The two women embark on a business trip to Europe and all seems well when the narrator is awoken in the night by a frantic call from the older woman pleading with him to depart for Greece immediately. When he arrives, he finds that his friend and love has disappeared without a trace. The novel then takes an unexpected twist and glosses over some interesting themes before ending neatly.

Choke AND Fight Club
by Chuck Palahniuk

Fan-fucking-tastic. Both of them. I mean, Fight Club wasn’t much of a surprise seeing how I’ve watched the movie who knows how many times. It did add a lot of nuances to the story that were lacking in the film. But Choke. Holy moly! I was gasping through this book; it literally left me breathless. I couldn’t put it down and upon reading the last page, I collapsed into a sweaty heap on my bed and took a three hour nap.

The Good Fairies of New York
by Martin Millar

Excellent book. Great characters, great plot, a nice solid light read. A friend of mine picked it up another friend’s apartment and was so sucked into she bought her own copy which I borrowed.

Synopsis: Two Scottish fairies with a knack for fouling things up terribly wind up by accident in New York after being chased out of their homeland. Not being able to stop arguing and assigning blame they attach themselves to humans and plot to improve the humans’ lives while one-upping each other and figuring out how to get back to Scotland.

Meanwhile, the Cornish fairy prince and princess that came over with them are being hunting by their father the king because they are the figureheads of a rebellion through Cornwall against the recent fairy industrial revolution.

Playing catchup on entries:

The Little Prince
by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Excellent, simple, short.
I decided to read it because a friend of mine is getting a backpiece based on this book. I really enjoyed it and felt more childlike after reading it.

Synopsis: A pilot crashes in the African desert in WW2 and is visited by a small mysterious boy while trying to fix his plane who, in telling the pilot stories of his travels, teaches him about life.

Grass For His Pillow
Book Two of the Tales of the Otori series
by Liam Hearn

I read the first book Across the Nightingale Floor in December on a bookstore clerk’s suggestion and loved it. I finally got around to getting the second one and devoured it in one reading last night.

Synopis: A continuation of a storyline involving war, love, duty, heritage and destiny in medieval Japan.

I probably do this anyway, but I keep drawing from my own library. I’d like to get my library card and then get in the habit of reading a new book every week, in addition to whatever dog-eared favorites I’m moseying through. I figure this is probably a good way to keep track of it. This week is mostly over, so I’ll start next week with Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon by Jorge Amado and just go ahead and finish JPod by Douglas Coupland this week. A friend of mine lent it to me a little while ago, but with Flipside coming up, I put it aside in a special place to start reading when I got back and then forgot about it until the other day when I found it again. Also, my usual method of reading new books is just buying them outright and I’m trying to cut back on my spending. There’s really no excuse anymore since my bus stop is right in front of a library branch.