The Voice from the Other Room

(Audio)Book Reviewed: The Raven Boys, by Maggie Stiefvater; read by Will Patton

I've never enjoyed being read to, not even as a kid.  Sometimes, I'll pick up a nonfiction audiobook if I know it's going to be funny and well-read (like a Sarah Vowell book or Tina Fey's memoir).  But despite my love for podcasts and comedy albums, I couldn't get into the sound of people reading me a fictional story.

Well, friends, things have changed.  Forever.

A few weeks ago, I picked up both the print and audibook versions of Maggie Stiefvater's latest YA paranormal-esque novel, the first in a planned series of four.  The Raven Boys came recommended already by a good friend (the ever-dependable and oft-mentioned librarian, Amy), but I assumed I wouldn't have the time at the end of the semester to actually read it myself.  I figured I'd give the audiobook a spin, not expecting to actually enjoy it.  The second it began, though, I was hooked.  I'm not sure who to give more credit to - Stiefvater for writing such a kickass story, or narrator Will Patton (aka the white coach from Remember the Titans!), who made an excellent reader.  Either way, I fell absolutely in love with this book.

Initially, my plan was just to turn on the CD player while I did my hair in the morning or cleaned the ktichen on the weekend.  Instead, my obsession became so fervent that I turned the book on with any chance I got.  Making a quesadilla?  Raven time.  Painting my nails?  Raven time.  By the tenth and final disc, I had run out of chores and excuses.  I turned the book on and paced the house.  I laid down on the floor and took it in.  I sat on the couch for awhile and almost cried.  It's been a few months since a book took me in so completely.  This more than made up for the dry spell.

The Raven Boys hits everything on my teen book must-have list.  Sensible and ordinary heroine?  Check!  Angsty prep school boys?  Check!  Male friendship and socioeconomic-class-related guilt complexes?  Check and check!  I don't normally do books that involve psychics and ghosts and love triangles, but Stiefvater balances the natural and supernatural aspects of this book so artfully that I couldn't help but be impressed.  Blue Sargent, the daughter of a psychic who lives in a house full of other psychics, finds out the name of a boy who is supposed to die soon: Richard Gansey, a student at the local fancy private school, Aglionby.  When she gets caught up in the world of Gansey and his friends - Adam Parrish, Ronan Lynch, and Noah Czerny, things change irrevocably in all their lives.  Gansey and his friends are studying ley lines, hoping to find the spirit of a dead Welsh king with whom Gansey is obsessed.   Blue joins their search, but her ability to increase psychic energies (although she herself does not have psychic powers) makes things more intense and fraught.  This is a dangerous world, and there's no way it won't eventually crash down around these five teenagers.

Despite all the paranormal storylines, The Raven Boys is primarily concerned with relationships.  There's the mother/daughter bond of Blue and her single mom, Maura.  There's the intense and poignant friendship between the rich Gansey and the poor, proud Adam.  There's rough Ronan and the baby raven he's adopted.  And of course, there's the hint of a love triangle between Blue, Adam, and Gansey.  I have never, ever, ever been a fan of love triangles, especially in YA.  But I admit that I'm genuinely intrigued by this one.  The thing that impresses me most about Stiefvater's storytelling and writing is that, despite putting some pretty unrealistic balls in the air, she never lets her characters make unrealistic decisions.  Every terrible, heartbreaking thing that happens in this book feels completely natural to who the characters are and what they've experienced in their lives thus far.  Adam Parrish, in particular, is a well-made character, a product of environment and force of personality both.  He feels like a genuine, struggling teenager, and his friendship with Gansey feels organic, if increasingly shaky (which, admittedly, is part of that organic feeling). 

I really loved this book, both in the story itself and in its presentation via audio.  As I mentioned above, Will Patton makes an excellent narrator.  The book takes place in Virginia, and almost all the characters are natives of the state.  Patton does his dialogue in accents based on where the charcters come from, both in physical and socioeconomic place.  Gansey, with his wealth and power, has less of an accent, while trailer-park Adam has a Southern bite that comes out when his defenses are lowered.  And despite this being a book mostly about a teenage girl, Patton's gruff, middle-aged voice never felt out of place, a trait I found especially admirable. 

I think The Raven Boys has turned me into a double convert: I now can say I like audiobooks.  And I'm most definitely a Stiefvater fan now.  I'm not sure how I'm going to make it a whole year until the next volume in this series. 


Note:  I chose this book as the next read for Book Club Revisited, so you will hear more about in another month or two!  And obviously, it's gonna make my Top Ten list at the end of the year. 

The Problem of Taste

Book Reviewed: Let's Talk About Love, by Carl Wilson (vol. 52 of the 33 1/3 series)

So when I decided a couple months ago to start reading the 33 1/3 series, I knew I was going to have to get to this one early.  Carl Wilson's volume on Celine Dion's 1997 album Let's Talk About Love is one of the most famous books in the series, and it has taken on a life on its own because of its broader-scope view.  This book is about a lot more than Celine Dion.  It's about the nature of personal taste.  Wilson is adamently a non-fan of Dion and her music, and he spent years thinking that was one reason that he had better taste in music than most other people.  But as he got older, he realized that taste, while still one of the defining aspects of anyone's personality and individuality, might not be a great value judgment. 

Wilson is a strong writer (better, say, than Rob Trucks, who wrote the last 33 1/3 book I read, about Fleetwood Mac's Tusk).  He spends a lot of the book's first half contextualizing Celine Dion as a uniquely French-Canadian artist and what her national identity means to her fans and her nation.  A fellow Canadian, Wilson lays out this cultural background in a way that is fascinating and informative, shining a different light on everything else in the book.  He never makes fun of Dion and whenever he can, he adds stories that paint her in a positive light (for example, Elliot Smith's vehement defense of Dion because she was nice to him once backstage at the Oscars).  But neither does he give her a free pass.  Her music is often boring, overly loud and histrionic, and very sentimental.  Even then, Wilson still contextualizes this mode of music Dion operates in: sentimental schmaltz.  He traces a brief history of sentimental music in modern Western culture, and these types of historical details really add to the book as a whole.

Unlike Trucks, who went on and on about his own life as a contrived device to talk about Fleetwood Mac, Wilson manages his own presence in the book quite masterfully.  He frames the idea of musical taste with his own experiences, from snobby young journalist to divorced, middle-aged man.  Taste helped define him for years, and he certainly believes that taste makes up a large part of everyone's individuality.  But he wishes the us-versus-them aspect of taste could be lessened, and his experiences with hating Celine Dion show just how hard it is to do just that.  He meets Dion fans and respects them greatly, and he finds that he is more open to sentimental music, music that he knows he spent years cultivating a hatred for that might not have been deserved.  There's some really interesting things happening here about the way we can learn to appreciate emotional responses to art.

I liked this book a lot, although I wish I had been able to read it in just a few sittings instead of over several weeks' time in between homework sessions.  I think it would have connected with me even more than it did had I done that.  That being said, I did have an emotional reaction to this book.  As a kid, I loved Celine Dion, and as I got older, I learned to hate her.  And while I can never go back to liking her music, I can appreciate what it is that people like about her work.  It makes them feel things.  And there is nothing wrong with that.  Just yesterday at lunch, my friend Katie, a fellow writer, said that she's spent the last few years wanting fiction to be innovative and exciting in form.  But now, she said, "I just want it to move me."  She hit the nail on the head.  While I go to my poetry classes and pretend I just want to experiment and applaud all my classmates for being clever, secretly I just want good writing to make me feel something.  It's what got me into this art business, and it might be the only thing worth keeping me in it. 

Dark Hearts

Book Reviewed: Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn

This summer, Gone Girl was THE book to read.  Every website, newspaper, and book critic threw praise at Flynn's domestic mystery novel, making it impossible to escape.  After hearing a lot of people I trust tell me it was worth the praise, I finally started it in August.  And just finished it yesterday.  I know.  School got in the way, as did work and book club and a million other things.  But the real reason I didn't finish Gone Girl was because I kind of didn't want it to end.  I wanted to just stay inside it for as long as I could while never actually committing to the bizarre plot twist it took halfway through.

It's hard to talk about Gone Girl without giving anything away, so this might be a short review.  It's a great book: dark and mean and incredibly involving.  Flynn hooks you right away with her charming (bordering on lulling at times) writing style and two characters who are full and complex but also feel like people you've known your whole life.  Nick Dunne and his wife, Amy, seem like a couple I might consider friends, but as things in their lives unravel and their true sides show, they become the last people in the world you'd want to actually know.  The book's first half revolves around Amy's disappearance on the Dunnes' fifth anniversary.  Each chapter is told from either Nick's perspective from the day of the disappearance onward or from Amy's perspective through a diary that begins with the day she met Nick seven years earlier.  Then the book takes a dark little turn halfway through and goes to a place I was not expecting at all.  I am not easily fooled by narratives.  I've been reading books and watching TV for far too long not to see endings coming from a mile away.  But I was not expecting anything that happens in the last 200 pages or so of Gone Girl.  Not even a little bit. 

Gone Girl is not a comforting read, although I found Flynn's casual but tight style to be quite wonderful and involving.  I do recommend it, though, if only for the roller coaster ride that is the plot.  I also think Nick Dunne might be my favorite character I've encountered in literature in months.  He is so similar to the actual Midwestern men I've known my entire life that I felt all his strengths and weaknesses (of which there are many) right in my gut.  In fact, this book makes an interesting litmus test for how a reader might feel about the East Coast versus the Midwest.  In the first 200 pages, who do you find more interesting: Amy or Nick?  Answering that question eventually becomes problematic, but at first, I thought Flynn was creating one of the best books about regional perspectives that I've ever read.  There's a lot going on in this book, and the idea of where we come from - place, family, past experiences - is maybe the most important trait of the entire story.

So if you have a chance to read Gone Girl, please do.  And if you can avoid spoilers beforehand, please do.  This story is best told fresh and without any expectations, so that you can't be disappointed.  I can't say I loved this book completely (as I said, the weird twist almost got too weird for me), but I'd go out on a limb and say it's the most fascinating book I've read all year.  There's no way this one's not making my Top Ten list for 2012. 

Lindsey Buckingham, Genius

Book Reviewed: Tusk, by Rob Trucks (vol. 77 of the 33 1/3 series)

I love Fleetwood Mac.  I mean, I really love Fleetwood Mac.  When I was a kid, I remember watching The Dance tour live on TV and wanting to know more about this strange band with its apparent romantic entanglements, the self-mythos they scattered around themselves on stage.  As I got older, I learned to appreciate the music for how pretty but robust it was.  I listened to Rumours and thought I understood Fleetwood Mac as a band interested in melody first and last.  But then I really listened to the song "Tusk" and realized I didn't know this band at all.  Have you listened to "Tusk" lately?  It's an incredibly weird little song.  And it comes from an even weirder album.

When I saw that the 33 1/3 series, a brilliant little series of short books about famous or influential albums written by writers who aren't necessarily music journalists, had a volume on Tusk, I decided I had to read it.  It made a nice antidote to the heavy poetry and theoretical lit stuff I have to read for school.  Instead, it let me bask in the glow that is a mishmashed band making mishmashed music.  Trucks's central premise is that Lindsey Buckingham is the real genius behind Fleetwood Mac and that Tusk is Buckingham's album more than a regular Fleetwood album.  I don't think he's going to meet a lot of criticism on that point, although I might be biased.  Buckingham isn't just my favorite member of Fleetwood Mac, he's one of my favorite rock stars period.  (Note:  If you have never heard the 1997 live version of "Big Love," then you are not a real person.  That specific version of that song has been firmly in my Top 5 Favorite Songs of All Time list for years now).

Trucks admits from the book's first page that a hardcore fan of either Fleetwood Mac or the Tusk album will probably be disappointed by his presentation here.  Trucks uses moments from his own life as a framework for his feelings toward Buckingham, the band, and the album.  I have to admit that while I sometimes enjoyed Trucks's asides, I had a rather difficult time connecting them to the narrative at large (the narrative being that Tusk is secretly a stroke of genius and that the genius is all Buckingham's to own).  Sometimes, things would just start getting interesting and then Trucks would break in and ruin the moment a bit.  For that reason, I tended to most enjoy the "What We Talk About When We Talk About Tusk" chapters, in which other musicians (including a student from the USC marching band that played along on the original recording of the song "Tusk") talk about the album and the band.  It's cool to see how many people the band has influenced over the years, particularly Buckingham.  Wolf Parade's Dan Boeckner in particular said something that made me think about Buckingham in an all-new way:

Lindsey Buckinham has a way of putting together a song that's kind of heartbreaking...I think [his strength] is this unquantifiable way of delivering the melody and the words at the same time, so somehow the delivery and the timbre and the tonality of the voice and the way the notes are shaped and the way they break off, like in 'The Ledge,' you know, it sounds kind of fragile.  And then he kind of pulls it back together.  And these events just happen in microseconds.  That's something that not a lot of performers have.

So while Tusk didn't always deliver the way I wanted it to, mainly due to Trucks's frequent diversions, I admit it made me appreciate Fleetwood Mac and their strangest album in a whole new way.  And it reconfirmed my admiration of Lindsey Buckingham's contributions to one of my favorite bands. 

Note:  I know you're wondering what my 5 favorite Fleetwood Mac songs are.  Here they are, folks: "Big Love," "Tusk," "Rhiannon," "Dreams," "The Ledge."

Book Club Revisited: September 2012

Book Club Revisited Pick #5: The Age of Miracles, by Karen Thompson Walker

Corey chose this month's book, and he chose well.  Karen Thompson Walker's debut novel, The Age of Miracles, was actually on my to-read list, so it felt nice to kill two birds with one stone (or book, if you will).  All four of us members loved this book; it might be our favorite BCR read so far. 

The Age of Miracles takes place during a time known as "the slowing," when earth's days start getting longer and longer with each passing moment.  Day and night begin to mean very different things.  People sleep when the sun is shining.  "Real time" communes dedicated to following circadian rhythms rather than the more obtuse "clock time" spring up all across the country.  The world is ending; everyone knows it and no one can do anything about it.  But the book isn't worried about the world so much as it concerns itself with an adolescent girl whose normal concerns about friends and boys clash with her worries about death and decay.  Narrator Julia is in middle school, and the title comes from the fact that Julia and her classmates are changing exponentially as human beings.  It just so happens that the world around them is changing as well.

This is one heartbreaking little novel.  Julia is likable, and it's hard to read her story and not remember an age when I too felt so terrified and lonely.  Loneliness, in fact, is one of the major themes of this book.  Being that I've been thinking about loneliness a lot lately, about how it is almost a personality trait more than a condition, Julia and her problems resonated deeply with me.  When Julia strikes up a relationship with the mysterious and lovely Seth Moreno, you want to cheer for her.  But then you remember what is happening around her - "gravity sickness" that might be fatal, the large-scale deaths of birds and whales, the fact that the prolonged sunlight is making people a little crazy.  Nothing can be normal.  Tragedy is waiting around every corner.

Walker's writing is strong, and her characters feel fleshed out without becoming heavy or taking the focus away from Julia.  What amazes me about Walker's work here is the way she treads the line between sentimentality and cruelty.  At every minute, things feel like they could be taken away.  And yet we still feel comfortable enough with these characters and the graceful storytelling to continue to root for Julia, her family, and the disarming Seth.  During our book club chat, all of admitted that we cried at some point.  I actually managed to make it until the very last page of the book before I finally teared up.  It's a quiet little book that tackles big subjects with just the right tone.  I look forward to seeing what Walker does in the future. 


Up next for Book Club Revisited:  Mike picked Salman Rushdie's children's novel, Luka and the Fire of Life.  I know absolutely nothing about this book, so it should be interesting. 

Book Club Revisited: August 2012

Book Revisited Pick #4: Howl's Moving Castle, by Diana Wynne Jones

Amy chose our Book Club Revisited read for August, and she picked a children's "classic": Diana Wynne Jones's Howl's Moving Castle.  It was an interesting choice, in that all of us seemed to drag our feet a bit when it came to actually picking up the book and reading it (or didn't read it at all, i.e. Corey).  Amy herself said the book wasn't at all what she was expecting, although Mike and I were a bit more enthusiastic about the story. 

Despite the book's genuine weirdness, Jones does some really interesting things with this narrative.  At the beginning, 17-year-old Sophie is cursed to be an old woman by the Witch of the Waste.  Hoping to beat the curse, Sophie journeys away from her family hat shop and encounters the titular moving castle, owned by the simultaneously charming and cold wizard Howl Jenkins.  Howl has struck an agreement with a fire demon named Calcifer, and they live in the castle with Howl's apprentice, the kind-hearted Michael.  A lot of weird and convoluted adventures happen, lives are imperiled, and hearts are won.  I had a little trouble following the plot at times, but the strength of the characters - Sophie and Howl in particular - made up for the structural shortcomings.

Our club found the book a little hard to discuss.  I'm not sure why we had so much trouble finding interesting things to say about Howl's Moving Castle, but alas so it was. (Admittedly, our giddiness - a book club trait that is always getting us into trouble - did not help matters).  We all agreed that there is something kind of fascinating about this material, and we all had trouble believing that this book could actually be considered a children's book rather than a YA novel. 

Personally, I am obsessed with some of the romance novel tropes Jones is playing with here, although I don't think she meant to do such a thing.  Howl is a very typical romance novel hero, just a few years younger.  He's a little cold-hearted but also charms the pants off women.  He loves his family but is also unsure of his place in their lives.  He has a love/hate relationship with the heroine (Sophie).  He is "reformed" (kind of) by the end.  Sophie defies the romance heroine type because of her old-age curse and prickly personality, but by the end, she's fulfilled the dutiful heroine role of reformer-of-man.  To see this all happen in a kid's book kind of blew my mind, to be honest.  I will definitely be giving it more thought throughout the future.


Up next for Book Club Revisited:  It's Corey's turn again, and he chose Karen Thompson Walker's new book, The Age of Miracles.  I'm excited, as I was planning to read it anyway.  We also added an additional goal of discussing the film Melancholia, as it shares some end-of-the-world themes with Walker's book.  Should be a good time.

Could Have Used More Changlings

Book Reviewed: Some Kind of Fairy Tale, by Graham Joyce

When I was a kid, I hated fantasy.  I had absolutely no tolerance for magic or mysticism or anything that wasn't completely tactile.  Sure, I could watch a Disney movie and be perfectly happy.  But when it came to playing or reading, it was reality or nothing.  I realize now just how weird that is.  Most people enjoy fantasy as children and then grow out of it.  Instead, I grew into an appreciation for the fantastical after college.  After discovering a love for urban fantasy and mash-ups (in particular, Neil Gaiman's novels for both adults and children), I began to open up to the genre a bit more. 

That being said, there are some fantasy tropes I will never love.  One of those is the idea of fairies.  They bore me, and the whole concept always creeps up on the border of being cutesy.  So when I read a good review for Graham Joyce's new book, Some Kind of Fairy Tale, I assumed it wouldn't be for me.  After all, this book is deep in the fairy stuff.  But the fact that the book was about the aftermath of a tragic disappearance got to me, and I went ahead and read it in a couple days.  And while I actually did like the book, I had this weird feeling that my worst beliefs in the silliness of fairy-fantasies might just still hold true. 

Here's the problem.  In blending the almost-boring realm of domesticity with the out-there fantasy world of woodland sprites, Joyce is attempting to say all sorts of semi-profound things about humaniy.  But in the long run, I am always going to be more interested in the domestic.  As a kid who used to re-enact the most boring scenes from film and television (the part of Mister Rogers where he changes his sweater, the opening of The Little Mermaid where Sebastian lays out his music score on a rock), I am still more interested in the emotional significance of the day-to-day drama of human life than I am in the strange things we can't actually see.  It's not that I don't like a touch of supernatural in my life (I am all for ghosts and Harry Potter and whatnot), but the fantasy has to be interesting to me.  And again, fairies just aren't interesting in Bethland.

Some Kind of Fairy Tale begins with the return of Tara, who disappeared as a teenager twenty years earlier.  She comes back to her parents and now middle-aged brother, Peter, looking almost exactly the same as she did two decades ago.  She was kidnapped by fairies, she claims.  And now she's back.  The book deals with this dramatic return in a fairly realistic way - Tara's parents are glad she's back and are trying to avoid the drama of knowing where she really was, Peter is concerned about the truth and takes his sister to a psychiatrist.  The relationships between people really count here, especially Tara and Peter's relationship with Richie, a down-and-out musician who once dated Tara and was Peter's best friend before her disappearance.  Richie is the book's most interesting character (although I quite liked Peter as well), although Joyce doesn't flesh him out as much as I would have liked. 

Joyce does do a few interesting things here.  For one, he never tells the reader what to think or believe, which adds genuine tension to the plot.  He also does a good job in using Peter's family life as an entry point for the story.  His son Jack plays an important role as a kind of reader/writer surrogate, and by making Peter a farrier who lives in a cottage, Joyce gets extra mileage in his concept of the modern fairy tale.  Most importantly, he makes a sort of beautiful and unsaid claim at the end about what the passage of time does to the ones we love.  Every body changes, and if you don't see someone for a long period of time, even a lover or child or friend can become a complete stranger.  Strangely enough, I think Joyce could have used the idea of a changling - a creature taking the place of a real person, also related to fairy legend - to a larger degree.  He makes the point quite well, but the book's ending left me feeling a little unsure of what just happened.  I wanted more closure, and I can't decide if Joyce should have given it to us or not. 

This book is so close to being really good and original, but it never quites get there.  Joyce uses too many points-of-view, too many voices to get his story across.  And by making Tara so mysterious, he makes her a bit annoying as a character.  We can't know her because to know her would be to figure her out, and the story won't let that happen.  I think the things Joyce does well - the domestic stuff, the theme of loved ones changing over time, etc - he does really well.  I just wish the book had felt a little more substantial by the end.  I think I've had my fill of fairies for awhile.