by ELG Gray

A Visit from the Goon Squad

Pager turner: 8/10
Heart tugger: 7/10
Thought provoker: 9/10
Overall: 5 stars
Readability: 5 stars

A Visit from the Goon Squad is fab. It’s a good read. An award-winning book that I read that I would periodically would forget was award winning. Which (perversely?) is a good thing. I think.

Jennifer Egan’s writing style for Goon is just so solid. And unpretentious. The book doesn’t have any of that slightly nose-in-the-air *worthy* feeling that so many others on this list seem to. It was refreshing, as well as just awesome.

I could describe this book a being ‘about’ sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Or I could describe it (somewhat more loftily) as about time. Either would be accurate, and you can read the book on either level and enjoy it.

A Visit from the Good Squad is sort-of like Love Actually meets Sliding Doors meets six degrees of separation … in the fourth dimension. One chapter kicks off with a character from the last, but you don’t know which character and you don’t know at what point in his/her life. It bounces around. And it is interesting if you read each chapter on its own, but it Makes Sense if you read them together, and are paying a bit of attention. Of course the lives of the characters interweave in mundane and meaningful ways. And of course the characters themselves are flawed, human, loveable, and frustrating.

Did I mention there is a whole chapter told from the point of view of a 12-year-old who keeps a powerpoint diary? Amazing. Resonant. Fun.

Read it.

05.05.14

by ELG Gray

The God of Small Things

Page turner: 7/10
Heart tugger: 9/10
Thought provoker: 9/10
Overall: 5 stars

I savored The God of Small Things. And savoring a book is a hard thing to do for a person not Reknowned for her patience. Someone whose personal tastes, normally, probably weight the page turner category a bit more than she should in the overall liking of a book. But not this time.

Cover of my copy of The God of Small Things. Check out the quote.

Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things is a masterpiece. I admit that I’ve nicked the word from the cover of my copy of the book which has a quote from a review that calls it ‘A masterpiece, utterly exceptional in every way’. But still.

The book is about the childhood lives (or really, a week in their life) of twins Esta and Rahel, their immediate family, and the not-so-immediate consequences of tragedy and loss. It is heartbreaking – but you know it will be from the start – so you have time to prepare. And time to be swept along with the current of the book.

When I first started thinking about what I would write about this book, the analogy that popped into my head was a lazy river. Where you sit back, close your eyes, and when you open them again you’ve got a heck of a lot further than you thought you had. You moved and didn’t realize, as you were so set focusing on the here-and-now. The Small Things. And yet there you are. At the end.

The imagery and the language of this book carry you along. I (obviously) like the use of the occasional capital letter for Emphasis. So does Roy. Who also mixes sentence length, type, and rhythm enough to give variety, but consistently enough to give unity. The book is lyrical.

The plot itself at first doesn’t seem to have that much to it, but it deepens and thickens (remember that river? the depths? murky waters?). Rahel has Returned ‘home’ after years and years away, at precisely the same age as her mother was when she died (a vi-able dieable age). And the story is told in flashbacks, only they are so seamlessly interwoven around Rahel’s interactions with the main characters that ‘flashback’ is far too jolting a word. The story unfolds as Rahel remembers and rediscovers. Again, you almost don’t notice.

The God of Small things is beautiful and profound. You know those people who unwrap presents tortuously slowly, not tearing a single bit of paper? It’s painful, but you can’t tear away your eyes. This book is sort-of-like that. It’s a gift.

02.11.14

by ELG Gray

Brave New World

Page turner: 8/10
Heart tugger: 7/10
Thought provoker: 10/10
Overall: 5 stars

Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, is brilliant.

In my head, I thought it would be a sort-of precursor to 1984: author creates totalitarian regime for political point. Point made well and clear, and good story along the way an added bonus. (Not to diminish from 1984, which I will certainly get to and give proper consideration in due course!) A Brave New World is so much better than that. Huxley, in 1932, publishes a book that creates an entirely different planet- full of crazy rocket technology, syntethetic experiences, and sky scrapers- that hasn’t, really, aged. And this new planet isn’t really the result of an intentially extreme political party gaining world dominination. Instead, it is an entirely new culture. A new world. One that I had never even considered feasible.

The brave new world which Huxley writes about is a world of ‘decanting’ rather than ‘birth’; where happiness, consumption, and stability reign at the price of passion, liberty, and independence. Imagine a world where ‘pneumatic’ is the highest of compliments. It’s so very, very backwards from what we all take for granted. But it takes not-very-long before you get into it. Even as I read about the conditioning that people go through in order to create this society of solidarity (think Pavlov … on crack), I felt for them. You feel the pressures of thier invisible constraints. And you empathize.

The appropriately eerie cover from my edition of Brave New World

Really, I think this book should have been in the curiculum on one of my university anthropology courses. Talking about seeing things through different lenses. It’s nurture trumping nature – but playing by totally different rules.

Meanwhile, it’s still a good story. Lots of sex (not too explicit), drugs, love, death, and a bit of adventure. And the accessories of the world itself is more novel and fascinating than plenty of ‘modern’ science fiction books.

It’s also incredibly well written. Concise but descriptive. Clever but functional. And, not to be too blunt, a very readable length. Well edited.

Brave New World is really a commentary about what happens ‘for the sake of progress’. When technology gets us so far – then what? You can see why what happens happens. And simultaneously you can totally comprehend the perspective of ‘ancient’ Shakespeare (his works feature) and of the folks of a ‘Savage Reservation’ whose way of life resembles that of Native Americans at the turn of the 20th century. Sort of.

I will admit that by a somewhat surprising turn of events the two main locations of the book- London and Malpais, New Mexico – are places that I hold rather personal connections with. But that probably just makes it a cheeky 6 stars for me, and a 5 for everyone else. So, if you are looking to read a Great Book, getting many virtual brownie points for high school English teachers the world over, go with Brave New World.

09.24.13

by ELG Gray

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

Page turner: 9/10
Heart tugger: 8/10
Thought provoker: 7/10
Overall: 5 stars

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon is, to date, one of my most favorite books. As such, it seemed the perfect first entry to this endeavor. And it gave me an excuse to re-read it.

It is a wonderful book. The plot – it is about two Jewish men who decide to storm into the comic book industry in New York, starting just before World War II – fulfills the criteria of being easy to explain, but also taking you to places that you didn’t expect to go. Perhaps, sometimes, uncomfortably. But it is an adventure story. It has pizzazz. And it’s great.

The beginning is by far the best part of the book. In the first 100ish pages you get up-to-speed with Czech-born Joe, and Brooklyn-boy Sam, where you learn about becoming magician, comic books, and pre-War Euro-American relations and tensions. The language is vivid (to the point where I felt I could actually see the books they start creating, and by the way I am Not a particular fan of comic books), the characters believable, and totally overall it is unlike anything else I have ever read. It was refreshing. Heart-warming (if occasionally sad) and endearing as well as racy and vibrant.

I am sure if you were to read Spark Notes (or whatever) you would discover the books themes are escapism, loss, and love. I would agree. But I encourage you to think of escapism as an art-form. Think, “Acts of self-liberation” as one character calls his exploits, think fast-talking and lock-picking. And think about what you would do if you were to lose your entire family, or part of your identity; your main reasons for being.

As the book progresses and as the layers of things the characters (and their comic book characters) are trying to escape get to be a bit much, there are some peculiar plot twists. They ‘make sense’ if you think about it, but a few parts also left me with my head cocked to one side, with one eyebrow arched with increasing frequency. Time blurs. I am sure it is all very meaningful, but it gets to a point where it’s peculiarity becomes a bit much. Frankly, my feeling of disorientation was enough that I didn’t give the book straight 10s. But i wanted to.

The good news is that any moments of oddity get redeemed at the end. In fact, the last page is a bit of cleverness that I am still in awe of. So simple, so *obvious*, and yet I definitely didn’t see it coming. And no, that isn’t an excuse to flip to the last page at the beginning. Better to consider it a reward for getting through the slightly peculiar bit in the middle.

I will say again that this is a wonderful book. So if you are looking for a ‘great’ book – I don’t think starting here would be a bad choice.