This Week in Trashy Reads 2012 #3

Trashy Read 2012 #3: The Governess Affair, by Courtney Milan

I read a couple Courtney Milan books back in January, and I loved them.  So when I heard she just  released a new novella that's meant as an appetizer for a trio of novels out later this year, I jumped on a chance to read it.  I downloaded The Governess Affair and read it within a matter of hours.  I flippin' loved this little story. 

Serena is a former governess who was raped by the horrible Duke of Clermont.  Now pregnant and broke, she sits outside his house everyday, hoping to force him into providing a life for her child.  The Duke sends his right-hand man, Hugo Marshall, to deal with Serena.  Hugo has fought (literally, at times) for everything he has, and he will do whatever it takes to make the Duke happy enough to keep making money off of him until he can start his own business.  But he finds he cannot "deal" with Serena as well as he would like, especially once he realizes what has happened to her.  Instead, the two of the fall for each other, etc.

I loved the two protagonists, even if the novella form doesn't allow them enough room to be fully fleshed out.  Serena is determined by not stupidly so, and Hugo tries really hard to tough out any soft spots he fears he might have, a well-worn romance trope that I adore.  Their relationship feels organic, despite happening in only a third of the space of a normal romance novel.  Milan is a very good writer (she's second only to Loretta Chase as being my favorite historical romance writer), and she knows that humor and pathos must be balanced out just right in order to create a winning story.  Also, she writes some of the more original sex scenes I've seen in romance - not dirtier, just better-told.  The foreplay scene in this one is so sweet and charming that for once I actually did more than just skim it, which is really rare.

So yeah.  I loved The Governess Affair.  A lot.  You can bet your sweet bottom that Milan's next book, a continuation of this series, will be on my Kindle the day it comes out.  And in the meantime, I'll be catching up with some of her back catalog. 

Poetry Round-Up

Books Reviewed: Father of Noise, by Anthony McCann; Mercury, by Ariana Reines; Bluets, by Maggine Nelson

I read so much poetry these days that I can't possibly blog about each book.  So every once in a while, I do these round-ups to let you know what I've been reading lately. Here are three books I've read recently:

Father of Noise:  I picked this book up at the AWP conference bookfair in March, probably because I liked the factory buildings and the man on fire on the cover.  I'm a sucker for industrial imagery.  When I started Father of Noise, I wasn't sure what to think, but eventually the book taught me how to read it.  I didn't love this book the way I've loved some of the poetry I've recently read, but I certainly liked it.  McCann has a very natural, laid-back style and a strong central voice.  The poems have a really easy sense of place, which I appreciated.  Poems like "Stark Weather" and "The Young Investigators" get at the American landscape by using very simple imagery and condensed space.  Whether writing about Nebraska or New York City, McCann is always in control of his words and white space.

Mercury:  Oh boy.  Our poetry professor assigned this book for workshop, and none of us liked it.  Reines is a big deal in the contemporary poetry world, but this book just doesn't quite work.  It's huge (230+ pages!), overreaching, and not particularly interesting.  That being said, I've been told to read Reines's The Cow this summer, so you'll find out how that goes in a few weeks. 

Bluets:  My much-better-read poet friend, Drew, gave me a pile of books to read as homework this summer.  The first one I picked off the pile was Maggie Nelson's little collection of lyrical essay-poems about the color blue.  This is more than just a study of color, though.  Nelson writes about a lost lover, a friend's spinal injury, and depression through the prism of her obsession with the color blue.  It's really beautiful in parts, and it has a kind of working logic that's completely natural.  Nelson is smart and honest about emotional states, but she never teeters over the border of becoming precious.  There's a lot to like here, and I will probably be recommending this to a few people in the coming months. 

Note:  With summer and its unlimited reading possibilities here, as well as the lists of poetry books friends and professors have sent my way, there will probably be a lot of these Round-Ups in the next few months.  Consider that advanced warning for all of you non-poetry-reading Not Your Mama followers out there.

Contemporary Noir Done Again

Book Reviewed: Driven, by James Sallis

In January I read James Sallis's neo-noir Drive, and I loved it.  It was fun, expertly paced, violent, brutal, and surprisingly moving at times.  Since then, I have also become a big fan of the film version of the book.  The film version of Drive is really stylish, and although it differs greatly from the novel, it managed to pin down the awesome noir tone just right.  Rarely do I love a book and its film adaptation equally; this may the only time that this has happened to me.  Anyway, I was surprised to find out that Sallis just published a sequel to his now-famous book.  I saw it sitting on the New Books shelf at my library, and I grabbed it right up.  When classes ended last week, I knew Driven had to be the first book I would read for fun. 

Driven takes place seven years after Drive ends.  Driver has now taken up the name Paul West, and just as he thinks his life has gotten somewhat more normal (including an engagement to a super-understanding girl), things go bad again.  Driver looks for revenge and finds that things aren't quite what he thought they were, much like in the first book. 

I have to admit I didn't enjoy this sequel as much as I enjoyed Drive.  The writing is still excellent - with those brisk and cutting little sentences, but I just didn't get the same feeling of total immersion here.  I know I will love a book when it makes me ache inside - not necessarily with emotion, but with the ache of being so completely inside someone else's creation and knowing I no longer have control over what it does to me.  Drive made me ache.  Driven does not.  The plot wasn't quite as tight, even hard to follow in spots.  And the bittersweet tone that Drive managed so well felt a little more forced in this book.  It was fun to read, but it wasn't as satisfying.

Note:  I thought the ending of Drive was great, that it ended the book on the exact right emotional and intellectual beat.  So I wasn't exactly clamoring to know more about Driver, even though I loved him as a character.  Maybe that's why this sequel just didn't quite get to levels of greatness for me?

Poetry Round-Up

Books Reviewed: Whim Man Mammon, by Abraham Smith; The Drug of Art, by Ivan Blatny; Bandit Letters, by Sarah Messer

I read so much poetry these days that I can't possibly blog about each book (plus, I know very few of you Not Your Mama readers out there are poetry people anyway). So every once in a while, I do these round-ups to let you know what I've been reading lately.  Here are three books I've read and enjoyed lately:

Whim Man Mammon:  In my last round-up, I mentioned that my workshop professor had given me a stack of books she thought might relate to my own work.  One of these was Abraham Smith's Whim Man Mammon.  I read this book over my spring break, and I really liked it.  Smith writes in a peculiar and particular rural voice, and his poems often mention backwoods staples like guns and crops and ramshackle houses.  When you read Mammon, you feel like you're in a very specific world, which is something I really admire, particularly in contemporary poetry (which can often feel so urbanized).  Smith's strange and musical voice have given me a lot to think about in terms of how I employ voice and sound in my own work.  If you, like me, are a Maurice Manning or Richard Hugo fan, you might enjoy this cool little book as well. 

The Drug of Art:  This collection of Blatny's selected work over his lifespan was assigned for my workhsop, so I probably read it more quickly and passively than I might normally.  That being said, I still found it fascinating.  Blatny is a Czech poet who was exiled from his homeland during the Soviet upheaval.  He found refuge in a mental institution.  My class is still debating whether or not Blatny's work reflects actual insanity or if his work is overtly political.  I personally think there's a kind of unease that comes into his later poems that reflect the way the external world of politics and the internal world of the unmanaged mind both wreak havoc on a poet's work.  These are some fascinating poems, and occasionally, they are very beautiful as well.  I'm a particularly big fan of Blatny's earlier work, which displays a strong sense of place and nostalgia.

Bandit Letters:  Messer's book was another one in the stack my poetry prof handed to me.  As a writer, one of the simultaneous best/worst feelings in the world is finding writing that amazingly does exactly what you're struggling to do.  Bandit Letters is this type of book.  Messer inhabits the voices of criminals, victims, and the lovers of both in order to get at the mythos of the great American West and how that mythos still plays into our modern lives.  The poems here have a lot to say about narrative-making, gender, and attachment.  They are really something - easy to read and digest but just disturbing and gorgeous enough to keep you thinking.  I have to give this book back to my prof soon, but I think I'm going to have to go out and buy a copy for myself.  I really loved this one, and because its so deceptively "simple," I recommend it to both experienced and new poetry readers alike. 

This Week in Trashy Reads 2012 #2

Trashy Read 2012 #2:  The Gladiator's Honor, by Michelle Styles

This semester I'm in a class called "Martial Masculinities in Cinema," and it's exactly what it sounds like.  We watch a lot of action films and then talk about the importance of warrior-like masculinity to different cultures.  Early in the semester, we watched Spartacus and read articles about Roman gladiators.  I became fascinated by the gladiator culture, particular the kind of fan-girling that took place around gladiator schools and competitions.  Women were crazy for gladiators, writing love stories about them and scrawling graffiti on the walls of gladiator schools.  As someone who has been known to be both a fangirl and a hopeless romantic, this had me thinking: Are there any historical romance novels out there about gladiators?  It seems like such a rich area, that I couldn't imagine there wasn't at least one out there somewhere.  For help, I went to my romance goddess, Sarah Wendell of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, aka the best romance genre website on the internet.  Because she is amazing and knows her stuff, Wendell emailed me back within 48 hours to give me the names of some gladiator romances on the market.  One of them, Michelle Styles's The Gladiator's Honor, looked good, so I downloaded it to my Kindle at once.

Admittedly, this book took me a while to get through.  I am swamped with work and school right now, but the book's glacial pacing certainly didn't help matters.  The book centers on Julia Antonia, a young woman who recently go divorced from her brutal asshole husband.  Julia is still haunted by the crappy things her ex-husband did to her, including physical and emotional abuse.  She's moved back in with her father and stepmother to recover, but it looks like her future only holds another marriage with a prestigious Roman who won't make her happy either.  Then she meets Valens, a famous gladiator with his own messy past.  Valens is the son of a senator, and he was always expected to take his father's place in the elite Roman political world.  Unfortunately, some shenanigans happen and he ends up kidnapped by pirates, made a slave, and eventually forced to become a gladiator in order to win his freedom.  His father believes he's dead, but Valens thinks the old man just simply abandoned him.  One of the reasons he fights for his freedom is so that he can then return to his father and prove himself again.  Then he meets Julia, and he has a whole new reason to wish for freedom.

This is not a great book by any means.  It's extremely well-researched, with Styles having obviously done some homework.  But the writing is simply serviceable, and the plot turns can be seen from a mile away.  Also, I had some problems with the hero and heroine.  Julia has a couple of brave moments, but overall she's too good to be true, and her weakness got on my nerves after a while (weak, Mary Sue-like heroines are the living worst).  Valens is a classic good guy hero who is also incredibly strong and masculine, but his stubbornness got a little eye-rollingly predictable by the end.  Emotionally, I just couldn't get too invested in this relationship.

There is one saving grace in this book: the last gladiator fight between Valens and his mortal enemy.  Oh man, did I get into that - the physicality of the fight itself, but also Julia's emotional reactions up in the stands.  I unabashedly loved everything relating to gladiators in this book, but I couldn't get into any other aspect of it.  While reading the book, I kept joking with friends that I would love to write my own kick-ass gladiator romance.  Considering how flimsy this particular book was overall, I might just still do that.  My secret dream in life is to now bring along a trend of gladiator romances. 

Poetry Round-Up

Books Reviewed: Killing Kanoko, by Hiromi Ito (translated by Jeffrey Angles); Poison Sonnets, by Joseph Heithaus; The Descent of Alette, by Alice Notley; Skin Horse, by Olivia Cronk

I read so much poetry these days that I can't possibly blog about each book (plus, I know very few of you Not Your Mama readers out there are poetry people anyway).  So every once in a while, I do these round-ups to let you know what I've been reading lately.  I've actually read way more than these four books the last two months, but most of them made so little impression on me that I don't even feel the need to hate on them in this space.  They weren't good or bad; they just exist and I had to read them for class.  So these four books are ones that actually made an impression, for good or bad.

Killing Kanoko: My workshop professor assigned us this book at the last minute because Ito was coming to campus to read with her translator.  I am so glad she assigned it because I loved Killing Kanoko.  Ito is a Japanese quasi-feminist poet who writes about motherhood and language and the human body in grotesque and startling ways.  The title of this book even comes from a poem about the fantasy of killing her infant daughter.  Most of these are older poems that are just now getting translated in the States by Jeffrey Angles, who does a great job.  These poems are weird, but they're also fun and thought-provoking.  And Ito and Angles make a great reading team.  That was one of the best readings I've been to in a while.  Side Note:  This book was published by my workshop prof and her husband (who I will have for workshop next semester), who run a press called Action.  They put out really lovely-looking books, and this one, with its bright pink cover, is just one example of why small presses put out the prettiest poetry books. 

Poison Sonnets:  There is no way I can fairly review this book.  Not only is it by my favorite undergrad professor (and the person that turned me toward poery in the first place), but I also get a shout-out in the acknowledgements!  So I will just briefly mention that this is a lovely book and one that Heithaus worked his ass off to put together.  It finds what is both beautiful and terrifying about nature, meaning both the natural world and human nature.  There's poems about death and life, and Heithaus never shies away from big ideas in his work.  A joy to finally read after having seen these poems in so many different forms over the years. 

The Descent of Alette:  This is one of those "big-deal" poetry books that everyone on my campus has somehow read and digested.  That being said, I kind of hated it.  Notley did a reading on campus last semester (she's a kind of god for my workshop prof), and she didn't make a great impression.  She is a VIP in the contemporary poetry world, and she's a decent reader, but she has that weird dreamy elitism that only poets seem capable of possessing.  So much so that she's become something of an in-joke among some of us Notre Dame MFAers.  My workshop prof assigned this book over our spring break, and none of us seem overly excited about it.  My poet friend Drew and I texted our displeasure at having to read it just yesterday.  I finished Alette right away so I could read more fun stuff the rest of break, which was a wise choice.  Alette is an allegorical epic in which the title character goes down into a kind of hell-like space where people are stuck riding subways all day.  A tyrant rules over them all and keeps them from going up in the light, and at the end, Alette must fight the tyrant.  The book relies heavily on second-wave feminism (my least favorite kind of feminism) and a lot of tired cliches of oppression.  This book started out being interesting and somewhat enjoyable, but eventually I began to resent the way it clobbered me over the head with a dark hammer.  Sorry, Alice Notley.  I don't think we can be friends.

Skin Horse:  I'm a big believer that the conditions under which you read a book greatly affect your enjoyment of said book.  Olivia Cronk's Skin Horse (another Action book, and given to me by my professor because she thought it held a connection with my own work) is a great example of this.  I had actually started Skin Horse a couple weeks ago and just couldn't get past the first few pages.  Then I went back to my hometown for a couple days and started the book over again on my last night there.  Suddenly, I couldn't keep my eyes away from the broken language and I finished it in a big rush that night.  It's very strange and eerie, with erasures that add to a sense of forboding and brushed-aside terror.  I'm not exactly sure I can pick out the family and place narrative of the book, but I don't care.  After having spent a couple days in the weirdness that is Walkerton, Indiana, hearing creepy family stories, I suddenly "got" Cronk's sun-seared visions of parking lots and sketchy people on the edges of the speaker's vision.  I knew I'd like this book as soon as I hit the phrase "trees typewritering."  Skin Horse is not a book for everyone, but it's a book for me.  I'm so glad my prof forced it into my hands.  

How to Be/Not to Be Funny

Book Reviewed: You're Not Doing It Right: Tales of Marriage, Sex, Death, and Other Humiliations, by Michael Ian Black

If there is one show I can accidentally end up watching all day long, it's VH1's I Love the... specials.  I can literally sit in one spot and not get up for hours if I Love the 80s is on.  Watching talking heads joke about the ridiculous aspects of a decade's pop culture is like gravy for me.  After all, aren't I basically starring in my very own version of I Love the 2010s in my daily life?  Hmm, it's possible I have admitted too much here...

Anyway, one of the best things about those shows was Michael Ian Black, who is also famous for being a part of the beloved comedy act, Stella.  Also, he got to bang a young Bradley Cooper in Wet Hot American Summer, for which he will always be famous in my mind.  Michael Ian Black is very funny.  He's capable of a self-obsessed irony that is both distburbing and charming in equal measure.  I especially love him in the podcast Mike and Tom Eat Snacks, which he does with Tom Cavanaugh, his co-star on Ed.  When I heard that Black had a new book out, I was fairly interested and put a hold on it at my local library.  But when I read the great reviews the book was getting, I knew I had to drop everything else I was reading so I could get to it right away.

You're Not Doing It Right is a surprising book, and I mean that in all the best ways.  It's funny, obviously, but it's also quite dark.  Black is incredibly honest here, telling stories that often show him in a bad light.  And yet, the book never feels too bleak, even when Black is talking about his marriage problems or the way he sometimes resents his children.  There's a perfect balance here of pathos and humor, making Black seem like the kind of person we might actually meet out in the real world, standing in line at the grocery store.  He only casually mentions his career once or twice, and he never mentions any specific projects he's worked on, which only added to how realistic this book felt.  This is not a book about a middle-aged comedian.  This is a book about a middle-aged man with a life that never quite feels like his. 

Along with being a brutally honest collection of essays, You're Not Doing It Right also happens to be a very breezy read.  Black has a very light writing touch, one that I really appreciated it.  I knocked this book out in a matter of days with very little effort.  It's the sign of a good writer when he can make you care enough to stick with him despite the piles of homework laid out right in front of you.  Not that I ignored any homework or anything to finish this book....Okay, I did.  And it was worth it.