Walking on the Moon

Gary Pomerantz has put together a nice piece of sports journalism in Their Life’s Work.  Sports journalism, by its nature only matters to you if you care about the sport, and in this case the team, involved.  Because the topic is the late-1970’s Pittsburgh Steelers,  it’s probably the team and era I most care about in sports.  Pomerantz covers the emergence of the 1970’s Steelers with a raconteur’s touch, spinning out the yarns well known to football fans of the era with fresh aplomb.  All the largest figures of the era, management and players, are brought to life – most in their own words from interviews.  He retells the myths without completely overshadowing the blemishes.

In the second half of the book, Pomerantz looks at where these men and the Steelers institution have come 40 years later. Those monumental days have cast long shadows into most of the lives involved, and he does a good job capturing the many paths that led from being one of the greatest football teams in history. Some have been destroyed by the game – Mike Webster’s life after leaving the NFL was a prime driver for the current crisis in understanding traumatic brain injuries.  Some have flourished in ways that the game never touched.  And many are still part of NFL.

As interesting and important as following the players is, I was equally interested in the state of the team itself.  How the sons of storied owner Art Rooney came to terms with deciding who would run the team and how held my interest and I generally couldn’t care less about boardroom politics.  Keeping the Steelers as a franchise that conducts its business in a way that fans can be proud of is essential to the team’s appeal.  It’s revealing to see the difficulties involved with doing that when egos collide.

Many people will not care about any of this.  I do primarily because watching these men perform heroic feats on the field was a key part of my childhood, reinforced by my family’s closeness with the city and football culture there.  I idolized these guys, and some of my earliest reading was biographies of key players.  It’s equally interesting to look back on those times from a more mature perspective, and to see what became of these men after they fell off my radar.  Pomerantz brings it all to life.

Strongly recommended if you have any interest in the era.

Argentinian writer Angelica Gorodischer has put together a winning collection of short stories in Kalpa Imperial.  As with much interesting writing, the genre defies easy classification.  If you’re a SF reader, these might be light fantasy; if you’re more literary, they might be stories of magical realism.  I came to them from a recommendation from Jo Walton, so someone thinks they’re SF.

Regardless of which genre bucket you put them in, the stories are rewarding and enjoyable.  Each is a tale of some facet of an imaginary Empire told by a different anonymous storyteller.  Gorodischer gets the most out of those constraints, showcasing different storytelling styles and kinds of stories.  Each storyteller is different, and visible in the text, though how and why differs widely.  Most tellingly, each has a different reason for telling the stories.  There are compelling reflections on the reasons we tell stories and methods we tell them.

The stories range from the personal to the political.  There are stories of individual lives that shaped the Empire and histories of cities that make it up.  Each has a point without being overly didactic.

The writing itself is beautiful.  There are well-turned phrases and perfectly textured paragraphs embedded in these well told stories.  Ursula Le Guin did the translation, and did the writing justice.

Recommended.

I wasn’t very far into The Storied Life of A. J. Fikrey before I expected to hate it. Set on a small island off New England, a widower book store owner is presented with a set of unlikely challenges that push him back into the life of his small community with his only asset being his dormant love of books. It is perhaps the most twee set-up for a novel one can write, and I haven’t even mentioned the adorable, precocious moppet.  I don’t like twee, predictable books, but I liked this.

Gabrielle Zevin has done an impressive piece of writing here. Everything about the plot and the character summaries is predictable and right out of the first literary novelist’s playbook. And there are no tricks.  The plot never twists so much as it turns like a well lit country road.  While there is a pleasure seeing what’s around each bend, there are no sudden wrenches of the wheel, or hard leans to take a surprising turn.  The reader ambles along a conventional plot.

Without propulsion from the plot or novel skeletons for the characters, it’s hard to see what’s interesting about Fikrey.  Zevin writes beautifully.  The meat she puts on the bones of her characters turns them into interesting folks to spend time with, even if their CV’s are pedestrian.  There are not a lot of phrases that provoke fireworks here, but all the writing engages the reader, making them see the characters’ world as the characters do.  Whether our CV’s are unique or common, we are all the stars of our own lives and that’s the impression Zevin creates here.

In addition, Zevin’s love of reading and storytelling is evident throughout. Given the set-up, she wants to comment on how books and stories influence our society.  Though the environment cries out for blunt commentary, Zevin never quite overplays her hand.  She does create a world of readers – some of them unlikely ones – and just lets them speak.  The result is more heartfelt than preachy.

Taken together, all this results in a very unlikely thing: a hangout book.  I’ve heard a hangout movie described as one that you watch to spend time with the characters, not to see the plot resolve.  You can put a hangout movie on in the background and enjoy your favorite parts without focusing how the characters you enjoy get out of a particular jam.  Fikrey is very much that kind of book for me.

Strongly recommended.

I love Kurt Vonnegut’s work.  At his best he sees the world with surprising clarity and expresses those sights with simple, clear language.  He can make the problems with the world look simple and comprehensible.  Not prefectable, or even improvable, but tractable.

If This Isn’t Nice, What Is? is a short collection of graduation speeches that Vonnegut gave.  It’s a good format for him.  He comes out, gives a bit of pithy advice and wishes the graduates good luck in this horrible and wonderful world.  He also keeps it short.  Lovely little mini-essays.

What’s probably most surprising are the mid-2000’s speeches that make many direct comments on current events.  I think of Vonnegut as a timeless figure, and hearing him bitch about US foreign policy brings him surprisingly down to earth.

A lot of this material is available on the web and other places, but I found the collection worth a couple dollars on Amazon.

Recommended.

Will Not Attend is a well composed set of personal essays. Adam Resnick tells each story with a careful pacing and a clear narrative.  They have tone appropriate to the incidents and he tuns many clever phrases.  These are beautifully written memoir essays.

While I got a lot out of the collection, I never got to the point where I was rooting for Resnick.  These are all necessarily told from his point of view, but I really can’t call him a protagonist.  Even after spending a book with him, I never come over to his side.

I also get the feeling this may be intentional.

He writes so well, that he may be trying to make these the memoirs of an unlikeable man just to show he can.  That’s not easy to pull off.  People want to be liked. Writers know how to manipulate sympathies.  If he indeed set out to write these pieces to achieve that effect, it’s an impressive feat.

I’m impressed, but not delighted.

It didn’t take long to read Douglas Coupland’s Worst. Person. Ever. He has a breezy, snarky style, turns a clever phrase, and keeps his plot twisting and turning alluringly.  The short chapters are like potato chips, easy to down and pick up the next. It would have been a great book to have on a transcontinental flight.

There are a lot of similarities between Person and Irvine Welsh’s Filth. Both feature reprobates from the United Kingdom.  They take some joy in taking the reader on a tour of the seedy side of their point of view character’s psyche, and both take no prisoners doing it.  Coupland, however, is writing a more superficial book.  There’s none of the subtext and misdirection that turns Filth on a dime in the last third.  None of these characters change meaningfully, nor do they ever garner much sympathy.

There are pleasures to be had in Person, for sure.  This is some quality snark and some snappy dialogue. The coincidences bring a demented bit of Dickens into the mix, and there are moments of enjoyable satire.  But as a whole, Coupland’s targets are a bit to east to skewer and his brush too broad for me.

More importantly, his characters are all pretty insufferable.  While it’s always clear who he’d like us to be rooting for, I wasn’t ever convinced.  I didn’t connect with any of these characters.  Hiaasen also writes some broad and often unlikeable characters, but he always sinks enough of a hook in me so that I have a stake in their fate.  I don’t much care what happens to any of the characters in Person.

I don’t regret reading Person at all – it was good fun while it lasted.  I suspect I won’t remember it in a month, though.

Samuel R. Delany’s Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand is a classic of SF that I hadn’t read.  It was nice that Jo Walton reminded me it was out there and added her compelling thoughts on what makes it worth reading. I recall seeing it as a kid, but didn’t know anything about it beyond the evocative title.  And it’s evocative indeed if I remembered it after 30 years.

Delany builds a truly alien society in Stars and drops us into the middle of it to slowly sort it all out. It’s alien across the board, from the species co-existing on the worlds, to the mores of the societies, to the use of pronouns.  I’m not going to get into more plot details or specifics than that, because the disorientation of working through the setting is a considerable amount of the experience.

I’m oversimplifying when I say Delany builds an alien society.  He actually builds multiple distinct alien societies that his protagonist takes us through.  That protagonist is a diplomat, which means Delany gives the reader more of a drive-by view of the societies, but the reader always gets the impression that there is a full society that underlies the glimpse.  One feels that there is a galaxy (or more) of people who interact.

The plot turns on some fairly world-shaking events, and should one focus on the galactic politics one suspects that there is plenty to ponder –  Jo Walton says this is a book that rewards rereading – but I found myself more consumed by the interplay of customs and interpersonal interactions.  “Interpersonal interactions” covers everything from professional negotiations to the inevitability of a hookup to the possibilities of love to welcoming a stranger to a beloved passtime. Similarly “customs” covers everything from the formal etiquette of an alien state dinner party to wondering if a particular visual tic is a subconscious comment or an explicit insult.

This focus on the interplay of characters and customs forces one to reflect on the analogues in one’s own society.  One of the great powers of SF is to lead a reader to see the world we do inhabit in a new way, and Stars did that for me spectacularly. Despite the disorientation of being dropped into a world where he and she work differently, the changes always led to interesting patterns of thought about our world and our people.  This is SF that makes you think about people, not equations.

I suspect that there is more here to find on a rereading as well.

Strongly recommended.

I’m probably a somewhat unusual Daniel Handler fan.  I fell in love with his writing in The Basic Eight, not his more lucrative children’s literature. I haven’t picked anything of his up for a while, but Adverbs finally bubbled to the top of my queue.

Adverbs is kind of an experimental piece of work. It’s constructed as a series of vignettes circling around similar, but maybe not identical, characters who are all confronting love, catastrophe, taxis, and pop music to varying degrees.  The book is definitely an odd reading experience. Each vignette is thematically connected and written in a similar style, but the particulars are mostly echoes and allusions rather than a sustained narrative.  Each succeeding interlude subtly changes the players, focus, and stakes without changing tone and style.  The whole thing feels rather dreamlike.

If you’re a long time reader of the Legion of Super-Heroes, this is a recognizable feeling.  That franchise of DC Comics has been restarted and its most popular tales retold many times.  Each restart and retelling comes from different continuity and features different interpretations of its sizeable cast. Each vignette in Adverbs feels like a rebooted continuity from comics. The reader can see how it all relates, but a lot of the fun is seeing what’s different.

It helps enormously that Handler turns a brilliant phrase and is a keen observer of people.  Adverbs doesn’t follow characters through a conventional growth arc and hit the reader with emotional revelations.  Handler can break your heart with a one-line simile though, and he does.

Overall, it reads a little like Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish in that simple forms give way to powerful drama.  Adverbs never builds on itself the way Love does, though, so it remains an interesting diversion more than a literary event.

Recommended.

What Makes This Book So Great is a collection of  Jo Walton’s blog posts about rereading works of SF great and obscure.  While the essays are insightful analyses of works of SF, this is not really a critical work.  Walton is quick to point this out herself, and the missing element is any sense of distance.  While she consistently marshals considerable insight about the specific works she’s reading and about SF and literature in general, she’s unabashedly a fan of the genre and a skilled writer as well.  As you can tell from the title, there are no negative reviews in the set.  This is about neat books she found while rereading.

One of the first things Walton makes clear is that she is always rereading.  If you poke around SF and reading in general, you’ll eventually run into someone like her.  They are always reading something.  They can easily read 10 books a week and usually do.  For those of us nearer the mean of the books per week curve, it can be daunting to see and hear.  But the truth is that folks like Walton are tearing through a frightening amount of text at all times.

While there are readers with Walton’s appetite, there are few with her insight and enthusiasm for SF.  Her reviews are honest, well informed and accessible.  The balance between the latter is particularly helpful.  She knows a lot about writing and SF history and puts the various works into useful juxtaposition with one another.  But she does it in a way that’s inviting and interesting.  She’s not showing off that she can make these connections, just pointing out what she saw and inviting you to play along.  It’s a very tricky line to walk, and she does it consistently.

I came away with a list of new things to read and an appreciation for the breadth of SF.  If you have any interest in that, have a look.

Recommended.

Teju Cole has created a beautiful, low key, memoir of a visit to his home country of Nigeria.  Each chapter is a short vignette capturing a facet of himself or Nigeria, or both.

Cole write clearly, beautifully and almost hypnotically.  Each chapter captures a moment or a day in his time there cleanly and clearly without unnecessary fireworks.  The overall feeling is that you have joined Cole on his trip invisibly and intimately.

He speaks of his concern for the country’s corruption and shallowness, but the condemnation is not one of an angry activist.  His goal seems to be illumination, not rallying.  The result is a powerful view that leaves the reader more interpretive space than I expected.

Recommended.