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By Bryan, September 5, 2010

The Savage Detectives
by Roberto Bolaño

I am always few a years behind in my fiction reading, so next year around this time, I’ll probably be reading Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. This summer I did manage to get around to reading Roberto Bolano’s The Savage Detectives, the rambling tale of two poets who forge an avant-garde literary movement in 1970s Mexico. The poets in question, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, might be serious writers or they might be dope dealers. Is their movement, so-called Visceral Realism, a literary front or just a front, period. Besides stirring up trouble, the duo are on a mission to find Ceserea Tinajero, the female poet they consider to be their spiritual founder. It’s a picaresque novel and the poets’ misadventures carry us up and down South America and much of Europe.

Arturo and Ulises are only two in vast cast of characters. The novel starts with Juan Madero, a 17-year-old student, who is asked to join the Visceral Realists after he demonstrates an extensive knowledge of classical forms. Initiated into a beehive bohemian artists, he learns a lot of other forms too. Arturo and Ulises orbit around this circle of literati like to elusive, numinous stars. The novel then shifts radically, jumping around in time, each chapter being a first person reminiscence by a different character before and after the period when the Visceral Realists were lighting things on fire. We meet a cross section of Mexican society: lawyers, architects, publishers, professors, writers, baristas, pushers, pimps and whores. The same sliding scale applies to the sanity of any given character. Through this kaleidoscopic approach we learn more about the Arturo and Ulises than they know about themselves. The final third of the novel flashes back to the glowing center of Visceral Realism. Juan, Arturo, Ulises and whore named Lupe are fleeing from Lupe’s pimp in a stolen American car, and of course, the crew is looking for Ceserea Tinajero.

I’ve used the term diffuse in an effort to describe Bolano’s writing style. Others have described it as centrifugal. The plot begins on the outer edges of binary star system that is Viseral Realism. Then it spirals out across the universe, only to zoom back to the bulls eye of Mexico City. The all over approach perfectly captures bohemian Mexico in the 1970s. Not like I was there, but I feel like I was after reading The Savage Detectives. My favorite chapters take place in a near mystical vineyard in Germany where Arturo shows up in the middle of the night to reunite with one of his lost lovers. Hans the German work boss is eerily similar to Hans the would be killer Bolano’s other sprawling opus 2666. Yes, The Savage Detectives is an opus. What the book really does best is simulate the experience of falling in love with literature, in falling in love period, in falling apart for literature, in falling apart period. What it really does best is simulate the experience of falling.

The best book I read all summer.

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By Bryan, August 9, 2010

Gentlemen Broncos

Fifteen year old Benjamin (Michael Angarano) is an aspiring SF writer whose manuscript is ripped off by Chevalier (Jemaine Clement) his aging literary hero.  Getting his manuscript back is hilarious business as Benjamin also has to moonlight for mother’s custom nightgown business to make ends meet. Chevalier isn’t only person that wants Benjamin’s story. A local film production company is also trying to pervert his precocious novel. Gentlemen Broncos is a story within a story. Besides Benjamin’s quest to get his words back, we see his book, The Yeast Lords: The Bronco Years, envisioned by three different minds on three different budgets. Yes, The Yeast Lords is as funny/awful as it sounds. Imagine the rad doodlings of Napoleon Dynamite’s notebooks come to life. Brought to us  by the same creative team behind Napoleon Dynamite, Broncos hilariously spoofs pompous SF writers and their geeked-out conventions (both literary and hotel-bound). You’re allowed to laugh if you are a nerd. Come to think of it, you probably won’t get it otherwise. I laughed the covers off my paperbacks.

The opening credits are a buzz inducing collection of trash surreal SF paperbacks with the lettering altered. If you appreciate that kind of thing you might enjoy:

Good Show Sir: Only the Worst Sci-fi/Fantasy Book Covers
The name says it all.

Awful Library Books
Yeah, the worst books ever offered up to be chortled over before hitting the dustbin. All genres, but tends to lean to outdated nonfiction.

Rad Book Covers at My Library
My own blog feature interesting (sometimes good, but mostly corny-bad) design found on book covers at NPL.

- Bryan

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By Bryan, August 2, 2010

Blood and Guts in High School
by Kathy Acker

Kathy Acker is a burning hot razor blade. She can disembowel you. She can purify you. Defining the aboutness of her books is a difficult task due to her aggressive methodology, but here goes: Blood and Guts in High School is nominally about Janie Smith, who begins life as a sex slave to her “father” in Mexico, only to escape (or be abandoned) to New York were she discovers true poverty and punk rock. From there, her life lapses through a dream sequence of enslavements and rebellions by and against various masters and complexes of power. She goes to Paris, and then north Africa, stumbling closer and closer to Egypt, the womb of Western civilization. Where she goes to die.

It’s the story of a woman’s body flung into textile mill of capitalism: body as natural resource, controlled by others. It is also a metaphor for being trapped in cycles of repetitive behavior due to our childhood experiences. Who can related to that? How ’bout everybody! Each episode has a dream-like repetitive quality reminiscent of the “psychodramas” of 1950s experimental films. Times merge. Every lover/father/hero/boss figure bleeds into the next, as if they are just a place holder in macrocosmic template. Even Acker/Janie’s literary outlaw hero Jean Genet loves/betrays her in equal measure. Seeking the secret to this cycle of use and abuse, birth and death, leads her to Egypt.  Perhaps she has to die to learn the secret. Perhaps she has to die to have any relief. Perhaps she has to die to be free.

Having no choice, being born into this organism/machine/economic-system/psycho-biological myth complex, Janie is more free/happier when she rebels, even if such rebellion is, literally, self-abortive. Doing what she wants with her body and mind always takes its toll. There are only so many natural resources to go around. Literally bleeding/bursting through the text is visual dream material. No matter how oppressive the physical circumstances, one’s inner life pulses on though it might be distorted, perverted, altered. Despite the roles we inhabit on our social relationships our inner life is always churning with psycho-mythic dough. Blood and Guts in High School exhibits Janie’s PTSD-suffering physical and mental state.

Acker is a sex-positive feminist and her words and pictures will affront some readers. Especially those feminists who feel her methodology is, well, self-abortive.  There is a large potential for misinterpretation, especially by men. This is why Acker’s work is dangerous. A female person, any person, can be silent (erased), or write (do) what they want and prepare themselves for the consequences. Of course the deck is rigged, the possible consequences are predetermined, so why not rip it up? The form of Blood and Guts in High School echoes it’s function. Acker writes:

As far as I know, “terrorists” are people who use chance methods to hurt people in a society in order to get the rest of that society to realize a particular political situation. I’m not sure you do that with books. I’ve never taken someone by chance and hurt them, or killed them, in a way that would wake a society up. What I did in Blood and Guts in High School was to attack a certain relation between a political situation and literature. It seemed to me that in high culture there were certain presuppositions behind high culture and these were political presuppositions that had a lot to do with class structure. What I was interested in was attacking the very close relations between a fairly rigid class and structure and high literature. I don’t think that’s terroristic. That is, I wasn’t kidnapping someone by chance. (Milleti, 2004)

The book is actually quite funny in parts, offering hilarious send ups of both Erica Jong and Nathaniel Hawthorne. To appreciate all these aspects you do actually have to read the book, as opposed to just flipping through the pages and scoffing at the “dirty” parts (much like librarians used to do with Mark Twain). Spoiler alert: the killer is you.

If you enjoy a challenging read like Blood and Guts in High School you might be interested in the Down the Rabbit Hole Book Club here at NPL. We read avant-garde texts, cult classics and literary graphic novels. Click the link for more info. Cut.

- Bryan

Milletti, Christina. ”Violent acts, volatile words: Kathy Acker’s terrorist aesthetic.” Studies in the Novel 36.3 (Fall 2004): 352(22).

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By Bryan, July 26, 2010

The Vinland Sagas

The Norse colony in North America always fascinated me. Why not go right to the source? These documents were once thought legendary, then proved to be (at least partially) true by the archaeological record. Included in this collection of “Vinland Sagas” are the Book of the Icelanders and the Book of the Settlements, which chronicle of the colonization of Iceland; and the Greenlanders’ Saga and Eirik the Red’s Saga, which chronicle the colonization of Greenland and subsequent excursions to North America.

Written in 13th century, I was afraid these would be dry and boring, but boy was I wrong. They are full of personal details and fascinating anecdotes, only occasionally bleeding into the fantastical. There’s a lot killing and a lot ice. The texts are rich enough that we are transported into another world. A world that existed a millennium ago. We learn about what the Norse wore, ate, and worshiped. Most fascinating are the tensions between the traditional religion and Christianity. The conversion of Europe to Christianity happened so long ago, it is often just a line or two in a school book, but in these sagas we have records of what that conversion was like, the tensions it caused, and how communities dealt with said tension. Did I mention the killings and the ice?

Another surprise was that the Iceland sagas we’re often more interesting than the Greenland ones. In these we find majority of material about the pagan-Christian problem. Did you know there were people (not the Inuit) on Iceland before the Norse? Did you know Iceland had a parliamentary government centuries before other European countries? This is not to take anything away from the Greenland sagas. As is pointed out in the brief notes which accompany it, the Eirik the Red’s Saga is a masterpiece of European literature.

If you have a library card, Vinland Sagas is downloadable for free from Netlibrary with no DRM-restrictions. They are read by Norman Dietz and the inimitable George Guidall.

I can recommend two novelizations of the same material. The first, William Vollmann’s The Ice-Shirt, focuses on Eirik the Red’s daughter Freydis and her role in founding of the North American colony. This is the first of Vollmann’s Seven Dreams sequence which explores the European conquest of the North American continent. It includes ink drawings by the author and contemporary accounts of his travels through Greenland.

The second is the award winning Voyage of the Short Serpent by Bernard de Boucheron which imagines what the dwindling Norse colony on Greenland must have been like in the 14th century. You can read my original review here.

For those not book oriented there is Severed Ways, Tony Stone’s dreamy yet realistic portrayal of two Vikings stranded in Newfoundland. Even if your not interested in the Norse, this is one of the best, truly independent, American films I have seen in recent years.

None of these titles are for the squeamish.

- Bryan

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By Bryan, July 19, 2010

Born to Run: a Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World has Never Seen
by Christopher McDougall

You don’t run. You hate sports. You should read this book anyway. Not focusing on running celebrities or ego-maniac endurance athletes, McDougall profiles the Tarahumara tribe of northern Mexico. With a cultural tradition of ultra-distance running (i.e. 50-100+ miles), the Tarahumara are some of the best runners in the world and seem to do so simply for the joy of it. He compares the Tarahumara with a handful of American ultrarunners who have a similar approach, and, you guessed it, are some of the best in world. People who choose to run 50-100+ miles are kind of nuts. Born to Run is a kaleidescope of lovable whack jobs (in this it shares some resemblance to John Waters’ recent Role Models).  We meet Zen kickboxers, self-declared Victorian sports experts, and sex cultists. One such turned-on-tuned-in-dropped out runner, “Caballo Blanco” dreams of organizing a race between the Tarahumara and like-mined Americans. The story of the race is an inspiring as best sports tales without devolving into the pity fest cliches which ruin so many other true life sports stories.

A significant portion of Born to Run is a lot of science about human physiology and nutrition. McDougall aims to prove we are literally born to run. Many of the ideas are controversial within running circles. McDougall makes a good argument but definitely presents only one side of the evidence. I’m neutral towards the science. Much of the nutritional evidence is backed up in Racing Weight by Matt Fitzgerald, though said book is coming from a diametrically opposed philosophical direction. I don’t know if we were born to run. I’m not an evolutionary biologist. Isn’t it obvious though our lifestyle and food choices have sky-rocketed rates of cancer, diabetes, and heart disease? As was pointed out in the 1970s when running exploded with popularity, running helps prevent the aforementioned diseases. An uninterested reader could skip these passages and stick to the dramatic narrative about the race and larger-than-life racers.

As someone who has ran until I hallucinated and loved it, I loved this book. An ode to the joy of running, this book will not only inspire you to run more and have more fun doing it, but motivate you to get off your tukhus and accomplish other goals you thought were impossible.

- Bryan

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By Bryan, May 17, 2010

Can’t get enough of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy? Can’t wait for the third book to come out in the U.S.? Check out these Stieg Larsson read-a-likes…

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By Bryan, May 10, 2010

Beautiful Losers

Beautiful Losers chronicles a loosely knit group of “street” artists who conquered the commercial and fine art worlds. Featured artists include Ed Templeton, Geoff McFetridge, Shepard Fairey, Margaret Kilgallen, Harmony Korine and others, all of which embody a punk-DIY spirit. Most interesting is the connection between contemporary art and skateboarding. If you are snickering you’ll swallow it when you immediately recognize the work. These artists (some of them anyway) are paid large sums to sell you diet cola. As a teen, Templeton was my favorite skater. I never liked the lines of his paintings but thrilled over the lines he cut with his skate. In the interim, his work has grown by light years. N-ville’s favorite cringe monger H. Korine is mostly on good behavior, filming his talking head shots in Fannie Mae Dees Park. He laments the lowered crime rate. Tricky implications of outsiders becoming insiders are glossed over, but Beautiful Losers is an inspiring film that can enlighten people as to where the art and design that surrounds them originated.

I assume the title of the film, and the group show it accompanied, is borrowed from Leonard Cohen’s great novel of the same name. Do it… yourself.

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By Bryan, May 3, 2010

Chronic City
by Jonathan Lethem

Chronic City concerns Chase Insteadman, a washed-up-by-choice ex-child actor who lives off royalties and gourmet chow at Manhattan dinner parties. Though he has no paying roles, his life his is public theater as his fiance Janice is stuck in orbit above Earth in a failing space station. Her government censored love letters to him are published in the New York Times for all the world to read.  Succumbed to being the public’s emo boy, Chase’s life is revived when he meets Perkus Tooth, a washed-up-by-force counter culture film critic. Via Perkus, Chase also meets Richard Abneg, an ex-squatters rights advocate turned enforcer for the billionaire mayor, and Oona Laszlo, an ex-protege of Perkus, who now ghost writes celebrity biographies. Ironically, these are the most authentic people Chase knows in Manhattan.

Chase, Perkus and company sit in Perkus’ rent controlled apartment smoke up (the chronic of the title), chug coffee, and literally deconstruct the universe. On one level it is a bromance between Chase and Perkus. On another level it is an exploration of the relationship between mental space and physical space. As more plot altering truths about the nature of the city are revealed Chase’s life begins to solidify while Perkus’ begins to disintegrate. This where Philip Dick’s influence on Lethem comes into play. Reality is a pastiche. It can be cut and pasted, melted, recycled. It’s a dream Manhattan. It’s winter time all year. The skyscrapers on the cover are the tiny golden books compacted in your laptop– the things we write ourselves in and out of existence with– the things those who live who live further up town than us write us in and out of existence with.

Lethem has created an unclassifiable book that doesn’t fit in any easy categories. I loved it.  Chronic City recommend it to anyone that has ever sat around with friends geeking out over books, movies and music, and to anyone who fears they are slowly only living their life through the internet.

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By Bryan, April 19, 2010

NPL recently supplemented its music collection with recordings by some of the most forward thinking composers. If you are willing to try something new, or you think you have heard it all, or (if you are like me) this is your favorite music already, check out the following titles:

Ever Present
By Alvin Lucier

Featuring pieces for bagpipe, flute, triangle, and koto, each instrument is warped into a droning soundscape that will sooth and startle you in equal measure. Lucier is primarily concerned with acoustic spaces and chance overtones. When the most recognizable sound on an album by a Western composer is the koto it is needless to say you have never heard a triangle played quite like this before.

Records
By Christian Marclay

The original vinyl scarifying, four+ turntable improvisational composer par excellence is represented here with a collection of super-limited cassette and LP recordings compiled for CD. Marclay mixes decayed/destroyed thriftstore castoffs on four to eight turntables simultaneously. This is the new music, the rest is memory.

Stimmung
By Karlhienz Stockhausen

Experimental song-cycle from the high priest of tape manipulation, St. Stockhausen drops the voltage control and writes an acoustic piece for vocal sextet. A droning B-flat is interspersed with erotic poems and the shouted names of pagan gods. Think Glass’ Einstein on the Beach but actually about something and of tolerable length.

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By Bryan, April 12, 2010

Mama Black Widow
By Iceberg Slim

Iceberg Slim’s has the dubious distinction of being the bestselling African American novelist in American history. The cultural impact of his novels Pimp and Trick Daddy would be hard to underestimate though this is probably more visible to Caucasians in cinema and music than fiction. With the explosion of urban fiction, Slim has engraved himself a permanent place in the cultural canon. One of Slim’s final novels, Mama Black Widow is the fictionalized autobiography of Otis Tilson, aka Sally, a drag queen surviving in early 1960s Chicago. I was drawn to Mama Black Widow being curious about the pre-Stonewall transgender experience. In that regard it is something of let down, but in other ways it is a Molotov cocktail.

The first fifty pages explode as Tilson’s heterosexual relationship falls apart and the Chicago race riots blossom around him. He runs through the chaos back to his Mama’s house. We soon realize their mother-son relationship is anything but healthy. Before we can learn more, the plot flashes back to Tilson’s childhood in the de facto slavery of the sharecropping South. Stop me if you have heard this one before, this is the one slow moment in the novel. Soon enough the family moves north to the slums of Chicago. Then the book falls into the urban fiction template Slim himself created: good girls gone bad,  bad boys getting worse, drama in the church, heinous crime, heinous injustice, seriously politically incorrect social attitudes and dirty sex.  Papa Tilson’s transition from patriarchal country preacher to disenfranchised manual laborer destroys him. Mama Tilson becomes the head of the family and makes sure bills get paid by any means necessary. The journey north seems to obliterate Mama’s moral compass even if there is always food on the table.

The plot roars along with the pace of the best pulp fiction. The catalog of nightmares that is Otis’ childhood rivals Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. Granddaddy of the Beats and Granddaddy of Street Lit have a lot in common. I kept thinking of Naked Lunch when reading Mama Black Widow. You need a strong stomach for both. Cringe-factor-ten and pedal-to-the-metal plot do not make up for the lack of character development in key instances. There is a big lacuna between Otis’ skewed childhood and his adult double life as a drag queen. We are not privy to when he realizes he is gay, or how he is initiated into the underground gay scene in Chicago.

Moral ambiguities abound in this book. Social hostility between blacks is a major theme. Mama Black Widow is much more a book about black on black crime than overt racism. Slim’s implied attitude towards homosexuality will also be a sticking point for many. Though the narrator is gay, this is not pro-gay novel. Every reader will have to decide for themselves what is art and what is trash; what is realism and what is exploitation. As if any of those categories are cut and dry. The library’s version of Mama Black Widow is a reissue under Norton’s Old School Books imprint. Any qualms a major publisher may have had about touching Slim’s work in the past has apparently been overcome by a chance cash in on the popularity of urban fiction. An artifact much too volatile for many to sit comfortably with, Mama Black Widow remains a dispatch from the margins between what is acceptable and unacceptable.

- Bryan

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By Jenny, April 3, 2010

Cyberpunk is a subgenre of SF which features a mash-up of high technology and underground culture. The “cyber” is derived from cybernetics, nominally the study of control and communications in machines. The “punk” refers to cultural attitudes typical of the characters (if not the authors themselves).

Cyberpunk proper exploded and died in the mid-1980s with a handful of loosely associated authors. William Gibson’s Neuromancer, the Mirrorshades anthology, and the Cheap Truth fanzine were the cornerstones of the scene. Never before had a SF genre movement attracted as much media attention or ultimately have as much cultural influence (no  cyberpunk = no Matrix films).

This list includes edgy SF works that cyberpunk authors drew inspiration from, classic cyberpunk texts, and books by some of today’s best SF writers whose work evolved from the cyberpunk meme.

Check out cyberpunk books

- Bryan

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By Bryan, March 30, 2010

This Ain’t the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk
By Steve Waksman

Waksman demonstrates the formal give and take between metal and punk. He successfully illustrates that within the music itself there was always a dialogue between the two as opposed to the malignant verbal snowball fight took place within the media starting in the late 1970s. Not that said dialogue was always as hot and heavy as a teenage makeout session. In early chapters Waksman contrasts ideological strains by comparing artists: the Runaways vs. the Dictators; Iggy Pop vs. Alice Cooper. The word “grunge” appears nowhere on the book’s cover, yet Seattle’s finest is Waksman’s great synthesis.

Waksman’s own unsaid ideology is that even in rock, that most populist of mediums, there is an underground, critically fecund history that differs from the mainstream narrative. The underground hidden channel is where new forms are born and therefore the specimens that get canonized are made. Waksman knows that the critics that know best wrote in zines not magazines. Another emerging thesis: any label that released Black Flag’s My War, Minutemen’s Double Nickels On the Dime, and Husker Du’s Zen Arcade all in the same year has a claim to best rock label of the 1980s (or maybe any other decade for that matter). The label: SST Records. The year: 1984.

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By Kyle, March 26, 2010

Despite the Bible being one of the most widely read pieces of literature, many novelists have felt a desire to write about the life of Jesus. There are many variations on what has been called “the greatest story ever told.” Some authors try to stick as closely to the Bible as possible, while others try to portray events as they think they might have occurred, and some simply go off the chart entirely creating fantasies or comedies of the well known story.

Check out Novelizations of the Life of Jesus

- Bryan

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By Bryan, March 1, 2010

Man In the High Castle
By Philip K Dick

Blade Runner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)
By Philip K. Dick

With the success of his recent novel Chronic City Jonathan Lethem seems everywhere these days. A huge influence on Lethem was novelist Philip K. Dick. Lethem edited Library of America’s  Dick reissues which became the best selling titles in the popular imprint .  It is a good time to find out what the fuss is all about and check out where Lethem got a lot of his inspiration. I want to talk about audio versions of two of Philip K. Dick’s most well known novels Man in the High Castle and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. The latter being the basis for the film Blade Runner.

Man in the High Castle is set in a speculative future where the Axis powers have won World War II and the USA has been divvied up by her enemies. Japan occupies the West coast and Germany occupies the East. Set within the occupied Pacific states, the novel presents a cross section of the post war population: a high level Japanese bureaucrat with a taste for American antiques;  an antique dealer who tries hard to please his Japanese rulers; a working class counterfeiter of said antiques; and the counterfeiter’s ex-wife who lives off the grid in the small  rocky mountains towns. Through hints from a metafictional novel within the novel and use the Chinese I Ching oracle all the characters have slow revelations about not only the veracity of the antiques, but reality itself. By the end some characters can’t deny there must be another world where the Allies have won the war. It’s a complex book that will have you thinking until your brain sprouts new wrinkles.

It is also a short book and Dick packs far too much conceptual content inside such a meager page count (or disc count as the case may be). I’ve only listed about half the characters and ignored a number of subplots. None of the characters are really developed fully, and subtle philosophically ideas fly at you like tennis balls shot from a machine. It’s hard to keep up.

If ever there was a book that did not lend itself to audio version said book is Man in the High Castle. The reader Tom Weiner does his best, but really the material he has to work with is raw. Especially awkward is his rendition of Robert Childan, the conflicted antique dealer, who is constantly second guessing the social implications of his every action in the stilted phrasing of someone thinking to himself in a second language. Credit to Weiner to for capturing Childan’s false consciousness though.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a seemingly more straight forward affair. Weary, working class bounty hunter Rick Deckard must “retire” six Nexus One androids. He must do this because his electric sheep has ceased to function. He needs a load of cash to buy a real life animal to cure his wife’s depression and restore their place in the social hierarchy of their run down apartment complex. What we get is a hardboiled detective story that also causes us to question the role of television and religion in our lives, not to mention what we are willing to sacrifice or deny to remain happy, to ensure those we love remain happy.

What makes a good spouse? What makes a good lover? Deckard himself might be an android. God might be an android. If yourself and God and the lead character in the book you’re reading all androids what’s the difference between an android and a human?  What separates us from animals? What separates us from God? What separates us from… each other. This is a profound novel. It contains the best pitch for owning a pet goat I’ve ever heard.

Despite that characterization the plot is straight forward. Deckard goes after his androids one by one. Its a harrowing adventure that makes him question himself in very literal ways. The reader is forced to ask themselves the same questions. Having a single narrator lets us identify with Deckard more and it lets Dick flesh out the character far more than any of the cast of Man in High Castle. There is a moment in most Dick novels when reality falls apart. By making Deckard so real (forgive the pun), when this moment hits it is all the more effective. Similar moments in High Castle fall flat.

The book’s emotional resonance is helped by a tremendous reading by Scott Brick. Brick is kind  of the Matt Damon of American audiobook readers. He nails the haggard, arguably misguided, Deckard perfectly.  Brick’s Deckard is far more fragile than the Marlboro man portrayed by Harrison Ford in Ridley Scott’s film. Also spot on is Brick’s interpretation of the “special” J.R. Isidore, a man so lonely he’ll let himself he used by heartless robots just for a wee bit of friendship, or something like friendship. Brick  has narrated hundreds of novels and when asked what his favorite was he responded Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?.

It is strange a book as disjointed and uneven as Man in the High Castle won the Hugo Award in 1963. Even then an alternative history novel in which Nazis win WWII was old hat. It was Dick’s epistemological acid hit that blew readers minds. Written four years later, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a far better read. I often wondered if Do Androids Dream was so popular because of its association with Blade Runner. Now I know it is one of Philip K. Dick’s best books. I highly recommend it in print form and CD read by Scott Brick. Man is High Castle is intellectually stimulating enough to check out, but I only recommend the CD version owned by the library to hardcore Dick fans.

- Bryan

[Editor's note: since the release of the film Blade Runner most editions of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? have been published using both titles printer on the cover, as does the version reviewed by Bryan. Searching the library catalog for either Blade Runner or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? will retrieve the audio book.]

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By Bryan, January 4, 2010

Home
By Marilynne Robinson

Home was only the third novel by Marilyn Robinson in thirty years. It was definitely worth the wait. Home chronicles the return of prodigal son Jack Boughton to the family farm in Gilead, Iowa. His aged father Robert, and Glory, Jack’s baby sister, now middle aged, anxiously await Jack’s return after twenty years of non-communication. Glory, a former school teacher, who by chance or unconscious design has slowly crashed back to Gilead to care for her fading father. That father, the Reverend Robert Boughton, spiritual lighthouse to the town of Gilead for much of his life, is now a wisp of his former self. He clings to life in the small hope he will once again meet  his estranged son. The Lord giveth; Jack returns.

Polite but unrepentant of his past transgressions, Jack torments his father by simply being himself, the black sheep of the family, also a drunk, and maybe a coward. Glory accepts Jack wholeheartedly, hardened liver and all, while the Reverend Boughton becomes tortured by his life’s one failure: his anti-social communist sympathizing son.

In case you are thinking you’ve heard this one before, you’ve never heard it by a writer as talented as Marilynne Robinson. In her hands the sleepy Boughton household becomes a boiler engine of psycho-spiritual pressure. The tension between father and son permeates the house like sunlight. Fate, sin, free will, and the capital “eff” Fall, are all weapons in the psychic warfare. Robinson illuminates both the positive and the negative nature of piety with clear effortless prose. If you are afraid this is just a book about a bunch of churchies in need of a little grease, all the characters have secrets and there is a surprise ending. The reader, and author, always know that rural Iowa in the late 50s is a serious bubble, outside of which are horrors that don’t permit the luxury of theological angst.

Literati may recognize the Boughtons and the town the Gilead as it gave the title to Robinson’s previous novel which earned her a Pulitzer Prize. Gilead and Home are companion pieces that take place in the same town at the same time but inside different households. I can’t recommend both novels strongly enough. On a personal note, Home is the last book I will get to read with the 2nd Wednesday Book Club, a reading group I’ve led here at the library for the past two years. To all my book club members, I thank you, and apologize for all the pretentious literary crap I’ve convinced  you to read. Though it is sad to have to move on, I am happy the last book we read together was one as powerful and meaningful to me as Home.

- Bryan