Let's play catch up

I'm a delinquent blogger.  I've read SIXTEEN books since my last post in March.  Twelve since class ended in late April alone.  I was pretty serious when I decided to go on a reading rampage between the end of spring semester and the beginning of summer school.  It's helped that I've had some lazy weekends spent sweating out the sun on my balcony and a few nights of nothing on the old tv.  I guess maybe I'll recap just a few of the last ones I read.

Little Bee - Chris Cleave.  I was really excited to read this book because the copy on the book jacket promised a powerful, searing piece of art.  And I really am a fan of the cover art itself.  It started off strong.  I really loved the story - chapters alternating between the voice of a young Nigerian refugee and an American young mother/widow.  The downfall for me was that I just felt really sad at the end of reading it.  I was like, "Oh, I don't really want it to end that way."  And then my enjoyment of reading it was dampened by that feeling.

A Voyage Long and Strange - Tony Horwitz.  I am very much obsessed with Tony Horwitz after reading his book Confederates in the Attic.  He combines two things I love: travel writing and history.  For this book, Horwitz writes eloquently about all of the visitors, explorers and settlers of North America that came before the well-remembered Plymouth landing.  This leads us into histories of Vikings arriving, living and then leaving Canada / Maine; detailed adventures of Conquistadores like Cortez and Coronado.  It was amazing to me how much of the United States had actually been visited and explored before the whiteys from England came over.  But since we're Americans, we like to rewrite our history to have us as the explorers/pilgrims/adventurers in a new and unknown land.  This book gave me a really good understanding of the complicated relationship that the early explorers had with the Indians.  It seems that by the time the Pilgrims arrived, the Indians already knew plenty about the outsiders' propensity to kill with disease and violence.  I can't wait to get all of his books - I'm hooked.  You can read an excerpt from the prologue here.

A Gate at the Stairs - Lorrie Moore.  I wanted to love this book.  I really did.  Lorrie Moore has written some of my favorite short stories; stories that make me turn dog-ear the pages and wish that I had written something as striking.  However, this book almost seemed like it was written by a different author than the one I so fondly remember.  It nicely captured the feeling of post-9/11 life for a drifting college student in the middle of the Midwest.  The big themes were there: love, war, self-deception...it was not a bad book.  I thought some of the characters were interesting and it was well-written - it just didn't do anything for me, really.  It took almost half the book for me to even feel like something was happening.  Then towards the end more things started happening but truthfully, it was all slightly depressing.  I didn't even dog-ear a page until almost the very end, and that was for something that just made me chuckle.  "If we were still English," said my father, "we'd be drinking more and driving on the wrong side of the road - pretty much what people do on the Fourth of July anyway."

My Name Is Red

I got this book from the farmer's market in Pilsen in the summer. While I was browsing the book table, a woman and I started talking about which books we had already read, which we loved, etc. I pointed out Suite Francaise and mentioned that it was one of my favorites. She recommended a massive tome called My Name is Red. She said she loved it and encouraged me to take it. I saw that the first chapter was titled "I Am A Corpse" and said, hey why not.

Well, it did not make my favorites list. It also didn't really make my recommendation list either. I have never read anything in this genre before and it was an interesting experience. The book is set in 16th century Istanbul. And the main plot premise is that a group of miniaturists commissioned by the Sultan (miniaturists are artists) begin to earn the wrath of others because of their attempts to paint like the infidels of the West. This infidel style involves painting images of people and things in a way that makes them identifiable (what we know of today as portraits). This style is said to be against the Sultan's and the Koran's will. Anyway, there is a murder of one of the artists and the book takes 413 pages to reveal the identity of the murderer. Along the way there is a love story between a man and his cousin and much historical and social commentary about life in 16th century Istanbul. I did find some of it interesting; however sometimes the tangents about artistic style completely lost me.

My favorite part of the book was its use of multiple narrative voices to tell the story. As I mentioned before, the first chapter was told from the point of view of the murdered artist, laying dead at the bottom of the well. Some of the narrative voices are from the drawings, yes the drawings, themselves (including a tree, the devil and a gold coin).

So, it was interesting to read a story like this. Not really my style though.

Favorite Passages:

Before my birth there was infinite time, and after my death, inexhaustible time. I never thought of it before: I'd been living luminously between two eternities of darkness.

I hear the question upon your lips: What is it to be a color? Color is the touch of the eye, music to the deaf, a word out of the darkness.

This is what occurred to me the moment before I was beheaded: The ship shall depart from the harbor; this was joined in my mind with a command to hurry; it was the way my mother would say "hurry" when I was a child. Mother, my neck aches and all is still. This is what they call death. But I knew that I wasn't dead yet. My punctured pupils were motionless, but I could still see quite well through my open eyes. What I saw from ground level filled my thoughts: The road inclining slightly upward, the wall, the arch, the roof of the workshop, the sky...this is how the picture receded.

Confederates in the Attic

Who would have thought that I would enjoy reading a book about the Civil War and the people who love it as much as I did? I sure didn't. I love travel writing, and historical travel writing at that, but I often overlook books written in and about my own country. Tony Horwitz's book Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War was a tremendous eye-opener to some of the beliefs and passions of the lower-half of this country. I had heard of Civil War reenactors and knew that people were still attached to the Confederate flag - enough to stand screaming in the streets to protest it's removal from this or that state's capitol dome. However, I really hadn't given much more thought to them than that - until this book. Living in a liberal, urban city like Chicago, it is easy to forget that at least half of the population of this country is vastly opposed to my politics.

Horwitz is a clear Civil War and history buff, and his travels throughout the South and major landmarks of the Civil War are refreshingly eager and passionate. Even when he disagrees with the people he meets, Horwitz portrays them in an even and honest light, not allowing his personal views to influence the reader's experience, and not turning the people into caricatures. This book was not only an engaging historical overview of the Civil War and major battles, it was a great insight into the mentality of those who still remember and revere the Confederate States of America and men like Jefferson Davis and Robert E Lee.

On his tours throughout Alabama, Virginia, Georgia and other southern states, Horwitz befriends a hardcore Civil War reenactor and spends many a night in filthy, stinking period piece clothing, marching towards Gettysburg with other hardcore reenactors. He visits the last living widow of a Confederate soldier and sits in on many a Sons/Daughters of the Confederacy meeting. Horwitz visits a town in Kentucky torn apart by a recent murder of a white man (by a young black man) sparked by the flying of the Confederate flag. He discovers that certain cities in the south rebuilt themselves with little to no recognition of their divided racial history, while others still revel in their rebel status.

I most appreciated the historical lesson about the Civil War that this book provided. I remember covering it in middle school but don't remember much about the war, a problem that Horwitz discusses in the book. The staggering amount of blood shed and lives lost is almost unbelievable. Horwitz also clears up many myths and misconceptions about the war (on both sides) for the reader.

Definitely a good book and a recommendation from me...if you like this sort of stuff.