Books – Page 5 – Just Giblets

January 5, 2015

2014, The Year in Reading: Graphic Novels

In preparation for my list of the best books I read in 2014, I wanted to call out a particular category that deserves mention, but didn’t feel right to include on the list proper, and that is the graphic novel, or more specifically, the collected editions of monthly comics. I’m a big comic book reader, and most of the reading I do in this genre is of individual issues on a monthly basis. Occasionally there is a title I’ve missed that I later catch up with when they are collected and published in bound editions. If I included these collected editions as part of this list, then Saga, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 would have made the Top 5.

The latest ongoing work by notable comic writer Brian K. Vaughan, with dynamic assistance from illustrator Fiona Staples, is a science fiction space opera cum Romeo & Juliet. A soldier and a rebel from opposite sides of two warring planets, fall in love and flee with their infant daughter with the governments of both factions, and a particularly a couple of wild bounty hunters on their tails. Saga is just that: a prose narrative of achievements and events in the history of a personage, family, etc. Sagas are all about heroism, and while there is something inherently heroic about Alana and Marko’s forbidden love and their refusal to follow the prejudiced and hateful viewpoints of their respective worlds, their heroism is shown on a much smaller scale, and that is they desire to raise their daughter despite the odds against them.

Vaughan, whose work in such comic titles as Y: The Last Man, Ex Machina, Runaways and the stand-alone graphic novel, Pride of Baghdad, is known for this thoughtful explorations into the human condition, while telling a compelling adventure story, whether in the context of a dystopian society, a world of super-heroes, or against the backdrop of war. His partner and co-owner of Saga is talented illustrator Fiona Staples, whose imaginative designs of alien races and starships lends both a whimsical fantasy and hard science fiction element to her work. Her gorgeous, hand-painted covers, and hand-worked lettering are also widely-praised by critics and fans alike.

If you’re a fan of high adventure, fantasy or science fiction, but not a comic reader, I would recommend you give Saga a try. If you’re a comic fan, but not so hot on the science fiction/fantasy elements, i would also suggest you pick up Saga, Volume 1. This is top notch work, and worthy of a place in my list of Top Reads of 2014. I only gave it a category all its own to make room for more books to spotlight.

January 8, 2014

Favorite Books Read in 2013 – #’s 1 & 2

My top books read in 2013 is topped by an old favorite and a new debut. Helen Wacker’s debut novel, The Golem and the Jinni is a powerfully gorgeous fantasy novel disguised as historical fiction. Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane is gorgeous, Gaiman-fantasy at its best. A couple of really great books.

#2 – The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wacker

I find it interesting how wrapping a fantasy in historical fiction allows a novel to transcend genre and suddenly appeal to a wider audience. It’s a neat trick that worked for Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, and if there’s any justice it will work for Helene Wecker’s lovely and highly original The Golem and the Jinni.

The setting is the oh-so appealing turn-of-the (20th) century New York City, and the protagonists are, surprisingly enough, a golem called Chava, and a Jinni called Ahmad. Both find themselves in a difficult situation with no one who truly understands their respective plights. Chava was created to serve as a wife for a Polish peasant. Despite admonitions to the contrary, the peasant awakens Chava on the journey from Europe to America, then promptly dies of a massive heart attack. The golem is suddenly alive, but without a master, and while she possesses nearly limitless strength and endurance in her body made of clay, her strange ability to sense the desires of those around her threatens to drive her mad.

In traditional jinni style, Ahmad finds himself in Arbeely’s shop after the young man begins work on a copper flask. Ahmad has been trapped in said flask for centuries, but his release only adds to his torment, for on his wrist is an iron cuff that traps him in human form, and prevents him from accessing the full range of his fiery powers. His memories of how he found himself trapped thus have been wiped clean.

Eventually, the woman of earth and the man of fire meet and form a grudging friendship. Wecker develops their relationship beautifully, and it is the interplay between Chava and Ahmad that scores the highest points with me. In fact, Chava is a fascinating character, and while archetypal, she is also refreshing and delightful to root for as the novel’s main heroine. Wecker also uses the Jewish and Syrian communities to strong effect, adding a rich cultural element to the fantastic story.

#1 – The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman is just the master of telling archetypal stories involving childhood, magic, evil, myth, and the world. In The Ocean at the End of the Lane, a middle-aged man returns to his childhood home in rural England and stumbles across a farmhouse at the end of the lane that sparks certain memories that he didn’t know he had. These memories spin back forty years to a terrifying time when something dark and menacing was almost turned loose on the world thanks to his fears.

Gaiman has such a talent for straddling the line between that type of fantasy the instills wonder and delight and a dark horror that works on all ages. He taps into the terrifying things that scare both adults and children. The monstrous caretaker in this novel taps into many of the fears we have both as isolated children and as worried parents. Gaiman’s creativity and imagination is vivid and powerful, tapping into something we all feel from our youth, and he imbues real menace into his stories that somehow still manage to work for both kids and adults.

January 7, 2014

Favorite Books Read in 2013 – #’s 3 & 4

Interestingly enough, the next two books on my list both employ humor to tell their stories. I admittedly have a somewhat tough sense of humor. I find a lot of humor to be forced and that always puts me off. These two authors use humor so deftly, often intertwined beautifully with sadness or real heart. Here are a couple of really great reads.

#4 – The Good Luck of Right Now by Matthew Quick

Characters in novels are often flawed: they drink too much, they’re short-tempered; they flirt a little two much, but the characters in Matthew Quick’s (Q’s) novels suffer from slightly more serious cognitive challenges. What potential mental disorder Batholomew suffers from is never explicitly stated, but it certainly seems like slightly more than a socially-awkward 40-year-old who has never held a job and has lived with his mother all his life. In fact there’s a very angry man in Bartholomew’s belly who rages in frustration and belittles his host with such taunts as “retard,” when Bartholomew is faced with challenges. As his mother succumbs to brain cancer, Bartholomew begins to channel her favorite actor, Richard Gere, in order to make her happy in her last days. After she dies, he decides to start up a correspondence with the actor, inspired by his mother’s stories about Gere’s kindess and need to help free Tibet.

The Good Luck of Right Now is a remarkable novel; each chapter structured as a letter written to Richard Gere. It’s the story of a damaged man who suddenly finds himself without the person who was his world, struggling to makes sense of what is supposed to happen next. His only help include a self-defrocked Catholic priest, a grad student therapist assigned to help Bartholomew even when she can’t help herself, a similarly troubled man named Max who can’t get over the death of his beloved Alice, and the Girlbrarian, who Bartholomew has watched shelve books at the library for months. Quick’s characters are funny and sad at the same time. They deal with challenges from within and without, and somehow seem truer and more authentic than 95% of the rest of the characters in fiction today. He writes moving prose without seems sentimental, and knows how to keep the pace quick and satisfying. I highly recommend this novel.

#3 – The View From Penthouse B by Elinor Lipman

Is there a better contemporary novelist than Elinor Lipman when it comes to delivering a charming, witty, modern-day novel about adults? If so, I need to be reading their books. Elinor’s The View from Penthouse B chronicles the lives of two sisters stuck in a bit of social limbo; one widowed suddenly over a year ago, the other a divorcee and victim of a Ponzi scheme. The two sisters become roommates, and take in a boarder in the form of a young gay man, also unemployed, and in his own state of limbo. While the story eventually gets around to the two sisters trying to move forward in their lives, Elinor’s observations and writing are so delightfully witty and honest that it almost doesn’t matter whether or not Gwen and Margot regain their social lives. The journey is so entertaining, so much fun to read that it’s almost enough by itself. Then add a beautifully realized plot that sees a lovely ending that actually moved me enough that I got choked up, and you realize that with deceptive simplicity, Elinor has delivered a masterpiece of contemporary fiction. I adore Elinor’s novels, and look forward to each new one with giddy anticipation.

January 6, 2014

Favorite Books Read in 2013 – #’s 5 & 6

It’s a testament to the quality of books at the top of this list, that such talents as Claire Messud and Karen Joy Fowler are coming in at #5 & 6 of my favorite books read in 2013. Claire Messud’s book is so multi-layered and complex, and Karen Joy Fowler is one of my favorite writers, never doing the same thing twice, always incredibly original. I also love how both of these books are not for everyone, in fact, some people might be quite put off by the stories they tell.

#6 – The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud

Claire Messud’s latest novel is a complex examination of a woman who becomes swept up in a relationship with an exotic family from Europe. Nora is an elementary school teacher who had always expected to become an artist. She is solitary, capable, and a well-respected teacher. But when the Shahid family, Skandar, Sirena and Reza, their beautiful son who is in her class at school, enter her life, something inside her responds and unleashes long-controlled feelings and the artist buried deep within. Messud tackles a subject that few authors do, the anger of women. We’re not talking the histrionic, violent, over-the-top anger that you might see in a revenge movie or a soap opera. This is the anger that many people live with every day. The anger born out of disappointment, or injustice. It is an anger that is not debilitating. It is the anger that is concealed. An anger that might lay coiled deep within the woman who teaches elementary school and you chat with pleasantly at the coffee every morning. This is the complex portrait that Claire Messud explores in The Woman Upstairs. It’s as unsettling, as it’s engrossing.

#5 – We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

Karen Joy Fowler’s novels are a joy to read. Best known for The Jane Austen Book Club (certainly the most straight-forward of her books) Fowler got her start writing science fiction, and she first caught my eye with the complex, challenging novel, Sarah Canary. With We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Fowler tackles the challenges of a family torn apart by grief and lies, and a burgeoning animal rights movement in the 1970s. To say too much about We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves would be to spoil its somewhat shocking moment revealed about one quarter of the way through. It’s enough to know that Rosemary is our narrator, one member of a family forever changed by the loss of her sister Fern. As Rosemary informs the reader, her story starts in the middle, while she is attending college at UC Davis, then leaps backwards and forwards to unspool a tale rooted in a part of our country’s recent history that was both sensationalistic and little known. But at its core, Fowler’s novel succeeds winningly as a family tale, and one young woman’s difficult difficult journey to adulthood. I love that Fowler’s novels always possess a sliver of unreality or otherworldliness even when rooted in realism. I look forward to each and every one of her books.

January 5, 2014

Favorite Books Read in 2013 – #’s 7 & 8

Coming in at #’s 7 and 8 I’ve got a favorite author who has appeared on this list before in previous years, and a novelist new to me with an imaginative story that really captured my heart. It’s so hard to rank these books in any kind of order because the best ones are all joys to read.

#8 – The Illusion of Separateness by Simon Van Booy

With compact yet masterful prose, Simon Van Booy’s latest novel explores the connections between strangers, and how seemingly random interactions can have a profound effect on a life. Spanning decades and oceans, the varied characters in The Illusion of Separateness are all struggling with loss of a kind; loss of sight, loss of family, loss of wholeness, loss of innocence. There is love, war and family. They struggle, they feel, the move unerringly forward. And how they unknowingly help strangers whose paths they cross gives this novel its coherence and its joy. In the hands of a lesser writer, The Illusion of Separateness might have come across as gimmicky… let’s find out how this character relates to that character. Fortunately, Simon is leagues beyond that kind of convention, using words to paint images and to make the reader feel the emotions coursing through the characters. In past work, Simon’s focus has often been the love between two people, and while there is still that element in some of the individual tales in this book, he has broadened from love to life, and perhaps how one informs the other. If you’ve never read Mr. Van Booy, I highly recommend you give him a try. His short stories, Love Begins in Winter are essential, and his previous novel, Everything Beautiful Began After soars (it was my #8 book read in 2011). . I look forward to each new work this talented author undertakes.

#7 – Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend by Matthew Dicks

Matthew Dicks has created something marvelous and original, the story of the life of an imaginary friend. Imaginary friends are limited only by… you guessed it, the imagination. Budo is lucky; he looks and acts like a real little boy. His friend Max, imagined him with a level of detail that most imaginary friends lack. Sometimes it’s just ears that they are missing, but other times they are just a hair bow with eyes, so they can’t speak, not even to other imaginary friends. Budo is special in other ways as well. He is old for an imaginary friend. Some imaginary friends only live a few minutes or hours. Some last a year or even two. Budo has been alive for five years. And he’s smart too. Max imagined him as very smart.

It’s possible that Budo has been alive for so long because Max is autistic. He has trouble interacting with people; even people he loves like his parents, and his favorite teacher, Mrs. Gosk. Whatever the reason, Budo has learned a great deal and is concerned because he has watched imaginary friends fade away when their human friends stop believing in them. He is afraid of the moment when he fades away as well. But when Max is placed in danger and there is little Budo can do to help him, he learns that there are worse things than fading away. With heart-felt creativity, Dicks tells the story of love and loss, sacrifice and heroism, all through the lens of an imaginary friend. His tale is funny. It is sad. It is suspenseful. It is exciting. It is the story of a life. It is the story of the lessons we learn and the lengths we will go to to help someone we love.