Spring Break Book Reviews

I was on vacation last week, which meant I spent large chunks of each day reading. After a dreary winter during which I couldn’t contemplate any Serious Fiction and turned instead to Robert Parker’s Spenser detective novels (a great diversion), I came back around and read a few novels. Now that it’s starting to look like spring, what with the blooming trees and daffodils, I’m ready to handle fictional angst in a way I wasn’t for the last few months. So, here’s what I read:

The Anthologist, by Nicholson Baker

Quiz to help you determine whether you might like this book:

a) Do you like poetry?

b) Do you enjoy books where very little in the way of plot actually happens?

That’s it. It’s a short quiz. If you answered no to either question, this is probably not the book for you. If you said yes to both, chances are you might enjoy it. You might learn something about poetry, too. And if nothing else, the book is full of these weird and wonderful moments, as in the following two excerpts:

God I wish I was a canoe. Either that or some kind of tree tumor that could be made into a zebra bowl but isn’t because I’m still on the tree.

There’s something narcissistic in the phrase “collected poems.” Who’s collecting them? The poet. How hard is that? That’s not a real collection. Now if he had made a collection of water fountains, or of oven mitts, that would be a collection. Or if he’d collected editions of Festus, the long mad poem written somewhere in the nineteenth century by a lost soul named Bailey–that would be an achievement. But collecting your own poems? What’s so great about that? And mixing and mingling them in with some new? New and Collected Poems? Oh, well! Good job. Nice going.

The narrator of The Anthologist is a schlubby, past-middle-aged, largely unsuccessful poet. He putters around, and pines after his ex, and muses on rhyme schemes and his favorite poets. The most dramatic thing that happens is a rather mundane finger injury. But the character is likable and clever, with frequent enough moments of insight that I didn’t mind at all how little happened over the course of the story. I read the book in two days (before I went on break actually, so it’s an especially fast read), and I liked it quite a lot. It’s also put me in the mood for National Poetry Month, which starts in a few days.

Little Bee, by Chris Cleave

Little Bee is a wholly different reading experience from The Anthologist– though coincidentally, both involve finger injuries. Cleave’s novel is very readable and compelling, but it is by no means a light read; actually, I think “harrowing” would be an accurate descriptor. The book is told in alternating chapters by two different narrators– a teenage Nigerian girl, and an upperclass British magazine editor, whose lives improbably intersect in what turns out to be a life-changing encounter for both of them. While at times the book is hard to read because of the dark subject matter, its seriousness is punctuated with levity, particularly in the form of a Batman costume-clad little boy named Charlie (who, for instance, walks in on his parents having sex and asks “Is you fighting baddies?”). I very highly recommend Little Bee

Good for: a weekend when you won’t have to put the book down much, because you won’t want to. An entirely absorbing literary experience.

Not so good for: light beach reading, this is not. I read this on vacation and kind of raced to finish it so I could move on to something a little more frivolous, even though it was a beautifully written, remarkable book.

Imperfect Birds, by Anne Lamott

I’ve mentioned Anne Lamott here before. She’s wonderful– funny, irreverent, charming, liberal. Imperfect Birds is her latest book, and her first novel in several years. I have to say, I like her nonfiction better. Her honest voice comes through so strong in her essays that something seems lost through the filter of fiction, but at the same time, this was a very good read.

Selected quotation: “Some of the young men converging at the kiosk had cultivated the look of homelessness, but without the inconvenience and hardship: car keys dangled from their belts as they drank four-dollar lattes. Some looked like star athletes, because they were or had been. But you saw a feral, dark energy in some of the young here”

Themes: teenage drug use, parental worries, non-traditional faith, parent-child relationships

Good for: making you feel better about your own youthful indiscretions, maybe, because at least you weren’t abusing that many different illegal substances? Making your parents realize they didn’t have it that bad, raising you, maybe?

Bad for: prospective parents, for whom the message seems to be something along the lines of “even if you do your best, your kid will probably hate you and be an ungrateful, dishonest asshole for most of his/her adolescence.”

Contact Lady Blaga at ladyblaga@veritiesandvagaries.com