You Shall Know Our Velocity

Dave Eggers bugs me.  I can't put my finger on the reason why exactly, but he does.  I didn't enjoy his Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and I didn't enjoy this, his first novel.

Problems: for the hardcover edition of this book, the front cover (see left) is the the first page of text.  The inside front cover is the second page.  The first actual page of paper is the third page of the story, and so on.  Which is all well and good, except there's no reason for it.  It adds nothing to the story.  And the fact is, I enjoy the conventions of books, like when they have title pages, and copyright pages, and chapters (by the way, this book doesn't have chapters either.)  At one time,  I found the incessant quirkiness of McSweeney's charming.  Now, I find it wearying.  

Second, there's the plot of the novel, which concerns two friends,  Will and Hand (yes, the character name is Hand.  See what I meant about the incessant quirkiness?) who get a sudden windfall of money and decide to spent a week traveling around the giving it away to random people.  Right of the bat, the premise of two white middle class American men giving money to third-world citizens should raise a host of economic, racial, political, and ethical issues in most readers' minds.  And Dave Eggers strikes me as a pretty intelligent guy, so he's probably aware of these issues.  But during the course of story, he completely ignores them, never addressing the fact that there might be something flawed with his protagonists' good intentions.

Instead, Eggers uses endless pages of his narrator, Will, whining about his life.  Will has a host of problems:  His friend died.  He was beaten up by a group of strangers.  He has some sort of vague heart condition.  He broke up with his girlfriend.  His parents divorced.   One time when he was a kid, he sadistically killed a cow, and now he feels bad about it.  How all of these problems are supposed to be related, or why the reader is supposed to care about any of them, is beyond me.  By the time Will has his fourth or fifth crying breakdown in the book, I was ready to give up on it. For a book that's supposed to be about rapid travel, it has a ton of passages that drag.  

Will's eventual solution to his problems is to decide to keep travelling,  dealing with his problems by running away from them instead of facing them.  Doesn't seem like much of solution to me.  Top it of with the fact that this novel seems like it was edited by one of Dave Eggers's friends in exchange for thirty bucks and a six pack of beer:  continuity errors and logical inconsistencies abound.  I've heard that Eggers's What is the What is better, but I think it will be a long time before I try that one.

The list begins.

This has been a weekend of achievement. 3 books in one weekend! Now, I can't say I started all of them this weekend. I can't give myself that much credit. I can claim though, Handmade Nation, started and finished in such a small amount of time.

About a month ago, I started Vintage Munro. A collection of Alice Munro's short stories. I've been wanting to read Munro for some time now after seeing Sarah Polley's cinematic adaptation of Munro's short story, Away From Her. So, I picked a collection of short stories from various collections of hers. After reading Vintage Munro, it is clear that the film captured the purity in her writing. She writes complex stories simply and personally with depth and curiosity; something you surely want from a writer of short prose. The last short story in Vintage Munro ended my favorite. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage is also the title of another collection of her short stories. I loved how it opened slowly, uncovering deceptive school girls, and displaying the desperation of Johanna in such a humane way.

I also finished How Sassy Changed My Life by Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer. I had forgotten about this book and luckily came across an old review of it in an old magazine. A library check out, I was surprised at its large print and its lack of visual history of Sassy. I was expecting to see covers of old issues and photos of staff and contributors. It offers many testimonials and rounded Sassy's life and its meaning to not only to teenage girls, but to women and men alike, and to the indie community or music, art, and DIY. Don't mind me, for some reason it took me a month to read a book a little over a hundred pages. The only thing I regret is not finishing it earlier. Well, like I said, I wanted more pictures. I guess that's the child in me.

Lastly, Handmade Nation by Faythe Levine and Cortney Heimerl. I am excited to see the doc version of this. The book of course is easy to flip through and I couldn't help but be excited that DIY culture of art, craft, and design like this exists. I am unhappy that Minneapolis and St. Paul are not properly represented, but I am sure it's not on purpose...I think it's handy for inspiration and I will keep it next to my (new) sewing machine (thanks to Nils) when I get frustrated or depressed when I can't get the thread through the needle or when I prick my finger for the hundredth time...

Keep reading,
Jessica

Bonfire of the Vanities

Hi, welcome to our blog.  The first book I read this year was Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe.  It's perhaps most famous for being adapted into a film version with Bruce Willis and Tom Hanks, which was a notorious flop.  I have never seen this movie.  

When I started reading this book, I was expecting it to be a Wall Street satire like American Psycho. In the context of our current financial mess, I thought that reading something like that would be interesting.  Instead, I found the book to be more like a John Grisham style courtroom procedural.  Sure, Wolfe has a good eye for realistic, journalistic detail.  He's also got a conservative streak a mile wide.  The female characters are all portrayed as manipulative, while the closest the book has to a villian seems to be modeled on Al Sharpton.  The Wall Street bond trader at the center of the story, meanwhile, comes off as the hapless victim of the circumstances around him.  Maybe the Wall Street mess of 2009 makes the Wall Street greed of the eigthies seem quaint in comparison. 

At any rate, I bought this book at a discount when the Borders in downtown Minneapolis was going out of business, which seemed appropriate.