Small Things Like These

I’ve been exploring my Irish roots through some recent writing workshops, so it’s perfect timing for Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan to become available on CLAMS.

Keegan’s stories always make me think, which is the whole purpose for immersing oneself in a book. I learn a great many Irish/British expressions along the way, too. The real draw for me, however, are Keegan’s thoughtful, realistic characters. I despise reading about contrived, stereotypical people.

This time, I had great empathy for the main character, Bill Furlong, the hardworking, steadfast owner of a heating fuel delivery company. Bill, his wife Eileen and their five daughters are salt-of-the-earth, faithful members of an Irish community sometime in the 1980s. Bill is a thoughtful man who often reflects on his family’s circumstances, recognizing and appreciating the fruits of his solid, working class lifestyle. His work puts him in contact with all manner of people, and he is especially mindful of those not doing as well as he.

Keegan offers insight into Bill’s perspective with her tight, honest prose. Who among us cannot relate to this quick bit?

“When he reached the yard gate and found the padlock seized with frost, he felt the strain of being alive and wished he had stayed in bed…”

And, here one of my favorite sentiments is echoed.

“Always, Christmas brought out the best and the worst in people.”

A shocking discovery one day causes Bill to dig deeper into his own consciousness. As he does, he contemplates his wife’s simple philosophy, “If you want to get on in life, there’s things you have to ignore, so you can keep on.” I can relate to that myself. The world is full of horrific news, but to become overwhelmed by it, can lead to hopelessness and inaction. 

The soft-hearted Bill, however, can’t shake off the weight of what he has witnessed. His inner conflict brings him head to head with the Catholic Church and leads him to this revelation, “was there any point in being alive without helping one another?”

I’ll conclude with this quote that pretty much sums it all up.

“People could be good, Furlong reminded himself, as he drove back to town; it was a matter of learning how to manage and balance the give-and-take in a way that let you get on with others as well as your own.”

Keegan’s writing invites us to ponder our own inner angst as well as how it relates to our connectivity to humanity. That certainly makes for a worthwhile read.

All Fours

 

I really need to become more discerning in my choices of reading material. Information overload and overwhelm is real, especially these days when I let myself ponder how few years I realistically have left. I know that sounds dark, but I’m really just being realistic. I probably shouldn’t have wasted my precious time reading All Fours by Miranda July, but once I made it halfway, I was committed to completion.

I also probably should’ve recognized the sexual connotation of the title too, but again, no, I missed that clue that the book would lurch into full-blown soft-porn with the main character awkwardly exploring her sexuality and questioning her life choices. 

In case you’re thick like me, toward the end of the book you’ll be treated to this pearl of wisdom, “Everyone thinks doggy style is so vulnerable…but it’s actually the most stable position. Like a table. It’s hard to be knocked down when you’re on all fours.” So says the unnamed protagonist’s long-suffering artist friend when describing her sculpture of a green marble, headless woman on her hands and knees! And by long-suffering, I’m referencing her putting up with her annoyingly, self-indulgent 45 year old friend throughout the book.

I wish I could recall how this book came to be on the long list of selections I wait patiently for on Libby. Could have been the Titcomb’s newsletter or New York Times bestseller lists. If I could remember, I’d avoid future recommendations from that source.

It’s never good when you can’t wait to finish reading a book, hoping all along a tornado comes along and wipes out all the characters or they all die in a house fire. No such luck. I finally made it to the end and was left scratching my head. Somehow the irritating main character was still going, like a demented Energizer bunny, searching and grasping at life in her aggravating, self-aggrandizing way.

Shark Heart

Shark Heart: A Love Story by Emily Habeck is a weird-ass book raved about by the woman leading the weird-ass poetry workshop I took at the Sandwich Library in February. I actually participated in three free workshops offered, and the poetry was my least favorite for many reasons. Unforgivably, the teacher was totally unprepared. And yet I did heed this book recommendation from her.

As so often happens with weird-ass books I read, I kind of like it, but it needs some tweaking/editing. It is a quick and easy read so that’s nice.  I originally rated it harshly, 3-stars on Goodreads, but after reviewing my highlights and writing this summary, I would change it to 4-stars.

The idea is a good one, creative and original, but the orchestration of all the pieces misses the mark for me. The structural elements, choppy chapters, and awkward transitions between viewpoints distracted me from the profound declarations, such as this one.

“Joy and grief are human birthrights, but mostly, being alive is everything in between.”

And this one.

“Truth and Love were complicated concepts on their own, and patching the two words together created a significant tangle Lewis could not unwind.”

The setting is an otherwise realistic world where it appears normal for some humans to contract an ailment that causes them to transform into animals. The main character named Wren, who is not a bird but a woman, reflects on how her life has been impacted by these transformations. The story begins as her husband is diagnosed with a Carcharodon carcharias mutation. Thus, begins the couple's misadventures as he gradually transitions into a great white shark. While the physical changes and adaptations he endures are shocking, his psychological journey proves to be the most unsettling. 

The characters and even their animal counterparts, impart a great deal of wisdom as they are forced to reckon with their unusual circumstances in this book. Their interactions are all a bit poetic and metaphoric. Maybe in its own weird-ass way reading this helped me connect to my own inner love of figurative language.

Maybe life has no ceiling, no floors, no walls, and we’re free-falling from the moment we’re born, lying to each other, agreeing to make invented ideas important, to numb ourselves from the secret.” “What’s the secret?” “Maybe what happens between birth and death isn’t as precious as we think.”

Tell Me Everything

 

Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout should have been subtitled, But Leave Out the Uninteresting Parts Please. If I wasn’t so stubborn, I’d have given up on this book. Instead, I put my Kindle on airplane mode and dug in my heels to complete it. 

It took a month.

I cannot say I enjoyed this reading experience. The characters are wearisome, the dialogue is ponderous, and the plot is meandering. The best part for me was the ending. To think I would’ve missed it if I hadn’t persevered. Actually the beginning kind of hooked me too, but everything in between was just meh. Here is how the story grabbed my attention and drew me in. 

“This is the story of Bob Burgess, a tall, heavyset man who lives in the town of Crosby, Maine, and he is sixty-five years old at the time that we are speaking of him. Bob has a big heart, but he does not know that about himself; like many of us, he does not know himself as well as he assumes to, and he would never believe he had anything worthy in his life to document. But he does; we all do.”

Full disclosure: Strout has written about this town and its inhabitants before. I’ve read and enjoyed some of their stories, and have felt not so much love for others.* Many of these characters make an appearance in Tell Me Everything, and therein lies a big part of the problem for me.

When these characters are introduced in this story, they  don’t have enough depth to them. For instance, I hated the book, Oh William and couldn’t really remember the backstory between Lucy Barton and her ex-husband William, so the continuation of their relationship in this novel didn’t resonate with me. Apparently, Strout also wrote about Bob and his brother Jim in The Burgess Brothers which I haven’t read. That background knowledge would’ve been helpful, too. 

On the other hand, I love the scene where Olive Kitteridge sits and observes everyone at Bob’s birthday party. Olive is the one character I appreciate, and I’m a huge fan of Strout’s other books that centered on her storyline. Added bonus: Imagine Francis McDormand in the television miniseries version bringing the curmudgeonly, down-home-Maine character to life!

The plodding, run-on-sentence style of writing also got on my last nerve. To me, it reflects the demeanor of the Lucy Barton character, who is supposedly a writer. Or maybe it’s just meant to capture the folksy familiarity of people from the Pine Tree State.

Whatever the reason, this stylist distraction ruined my enjoyment of even the intriguing plot points such as the concept of Bob Burgess being a “sin-eater” because of his compassion for others. Similarly, the relationship between Olive and Lucy when they tell each other stories about the “unrecorded lives” of people they had known, would have been more poignant without the clumsy wordage. Here is an example of the kind of superfluous description I find annoying.

Bob bumped into Katherine Caskey on the street. “Bob!” she said, and he said, “Hello, Katherine.” They continued walking till they reached Katherine’s car. Katherine unlocked the car and took the package from Bob and stuck it into the backseat, then turned to Bob.

Here is a little, obtuse statement that I can really sink my brain into. 

“And yet, as is often the case, those of us who need love so badly at a particular moment can be off-putting to those who want to love us, and to those who do love us.”  

Here’s a little taste of why I relate so much to Olive. 

Olive was silent for a long moment. Then she said, meditatively, “It’s quite a world we live in, isn’t it. For years I thought: I will miss all this when I die. But the way the world is these days, I sometimes think I’ll be damned glad to be dead.”

Everything good about this book (finally, sort of) comes together in the last two chapters. “Love is love” seems to be the message, but even this universal theme is diluted by Lucy’s simplistic words, “Love comes in so many different forms, but it is always love.” 

*This in itself is a strange occurrence for me. How can the same author inspire such polar opposite reactions from me with just a simple change of focus on the characters?

I had a similar experience with Fredrik Backman’s work. Loved: My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She’s Sorry and A Man Called Ove. Couldn’t get into: Anxious People or Bear Town. 🤷‍♀️

The Quick and the Dead

The Quick and the Dead—A Collection of Stories by Harry Van Sciver is a book with a remarkable story of its own. After the author’s untimely death at age 65 his widow decided to publish his writing posthumously, “As a way for him to stay with us a bit longer.” She extended copies to family friends to thank them for their support. A friend of mine  received a copy as a thank you for her kind words at the funeral, which she passed on to me to read.

Nestled between a heartfelt foreword written by his wife and a recipe for his excellent version of a perfect Manhattan with a Twist, are two complete and three incomplete short stories that reflect the percipience of a gifted writer, taken too soon.

Despite never having met the author myself, while reading his  words, I couldn’t help but feel the heaviness of the tragic circumstances surrounding his death. I have no intention of critiquing a dead man’s work, nor is it necessary. I enjoyed both of this completed stories and can only imagine how more time could have enhanced this writer’s body of work. Let the cocktail speak for itself.  

Bad Monkey

Phil Cunningham was the first to mention the book Bad Monkey to me recently. It jogged my memory about the author Carl Hiaasen whose writing I’ve been a fan of for quite a while. Then Wayne sent me these photos and said he was enjoying the book for its many uses of the word cunt. 

Years ago, prior to Bonnie’s Book Blog, I read either Skinny Dip or Sick Puppy. I can’t remember which. This is par for the course with this author's work. His writing is a tad formulaic and over-the-top, but funny as hell. As a teacher I loved Hoot and enjoyed sharing Hiaasen’s other young adult books with my students.

Turns out Bad Monkey is also an Apple TV miniseries now starring Vince Vaughan. Might be time for another free trial ;)

I’m not going to lie, about halfway through, I lost interest in the book’s trajectory. The location in the Bahamas and the island dialect got tedious for me. I didn’t care for the Voodoo Dragon Queen character, and I even began to worry about the fate of the bad-tempered monkey. Also, the constant introduction of new characters and shifts between different locations became dizzying!

I found myself laughing more at the beginning of the story and then the quirky bits got old. An unexpected twist energized me toward the end, and of course, I needed to know how it all wrapped up. A quick two-week read that I ultimately enjoyed more than I didn't. 

Maybe these quotes will help explain my synchronicity with the main character, Detective Yancy. "He wondered if something was mentally wrong with him for being content with what he had . . ." Yes, the same thought often goes through my head. "Usually when making love he strived for a purely sensory, uncomplicated experience. Incorporating a game or skit seemed too much like a class assignment." Ditto that, let's not make sex into work. And finally, "All I want out of a relationship is neutral buoyancy. Is that asking too much?" Really, it's a simple concept. Why is it so hard to find?

Fun fact: there’s a character named Bonnie in the story who is a sexual felon, but she's not the cunt!

Edited to Add: Yes, I sprung for the cheap three-month subscription and was not disappointed by the Apple TV version of Bad Monkey. Vince Vaughan really brought Andrew Yancy to life, even though he's not at all how I envisioned the character in the book. Many other characters were more appealing to me onscreen as well, especially those in the Bahamas, and a few plot tweaks changed the story's overall tone for the better.

The Dog Who Followed the Moon

It’s apropos that I listened to the audiobook version of The Dog Who Followed the Moon by James Norbury, the day Uncle Ron died, on his birthday, at age 87. It is a sweet story about a lost dog named Amaya who is rescued by an old Wolf who joins her on a quest to find her parents.

As one review states, “Eerie woods, forgotten cities, and other obstacles await Amaya and the Wolf on their adventure. As they make their way through the wilderness, the two learn profound lessons about love, sacrifice, and the importance of embracing change.”

I was moved to tears by the story’s gentle commentary on life’s journey, loss, grief, and death. This quote especially spoke to me and my particular search for meaning:

“Somewhere inside you is a poem that you alone can write—a unique blend of what you love, what you fear, and all the things that only you’ve experienced.”

Here is more of the Wolf’s Zen advice:

“Most of our lives are spent doing the traveling, and the arrival is only a tiny part of that journey. We should do our best to enjoy every part of the adventure. Maybe we will never get to where we want to be, and wouldn’t it be sad if we had not even enjoyed the ride?”

“How do I do that?” asked Amaya. 

“Slow down, look around, breathe, take in the sounds and colors. Imagine you’d chosen this moment as your destination, not just a point along your journey.”

Finally, the Wolf reflects on his circumstances: “He’d led the pack to great victories and bitter defeats. His life was a tapestry of successes and failures, and he wondered what different choices he could have made that would have saved him from dying on this mountaintop exiled from his pack.”

The Wolf’s contemplation of his life is not so different from that of most humans in the end. As it turns out, the wolf was exactly where he needed to be, in a moment that would forever impact his new friend Amaya and countless other lives moving forward. It’s reassuring to know that a life well lived will lead each of us to the same place.

At first, it was disappointing listening to the audiobook because I missed flipping the pages and seeing the stunning illustrations. By the end of the hour-long reading, my weeping eyes would not have been able to focus on the beautiful pictures. I plan to treat myself to a hardcover copy of the book.