Since I am a slowpoke at discussing books I read, I am making a concerted effort these days to write about them as soon as I am done. I read 7 books while on vacation in September and have only discussed 2 of them so far. So this is just a brief run down of what I read and what I thought.
After I finished Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, I started on Shadow of the Sun by famed Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski. Amassed from over 4 decades spent as a correspondent in Africa, it chronicles a diverse continent as it grows and changes. It’s actually a great complement to Howard French’s The Continent for the Taking, as they visit many of the same places, so you can see how much has changed or not changed in the course of 50 years. I found Kapuscinski a wonderful and skilled writer.
After that, I read The Burn Journals by Brent Runyon. This was hard, as I had just read about a continent of people who eat maybe once a day if they are lucky. And to go to a book about a troubled and depressed 14 year old who sets himself on fire, well, I found it hard to empathize with him. Perhaps if I had not read these books in the order I did, I would have felt differently. Regardless, Runyon writes the teenage mind with great accuracy, at least in my experience.
I really enjoyed the next book—it’s probably one of the better books I’ve read all year. Sarah Hall’s carefully crafted novel The Electric Michelangelofollows Cy Parker, the electric “Michelangelo” of the title, as he becomes a tattoo artist. Hall pays careful attention to how each word sounds and fits together, writing a lyrical novel with ease. We see Cy Parker grow up in a seaside English town at the turn of the century, apprenticing with foul-mouthed binge drinker Eliot Riley, and eventually moving to Coney Island. Hall’s long, energetic sentences and imaginative power make this a beautiful, engaging novel about pain and beauty and I loved reading it.
I found a nice mass market edition of Jonathan Lethem’s Gun with Occasional Music while in Barcelona. I devoured the book. I liked the warping of the classic noir novel and the bending of the detective archetype. Conrad Metcalf, a down on his luck private inquisitor in 21st century Oakland, gets reluctantly drawn into investigating the murder of an affluent doctor, whose wife he just happened to be paid to follow a week previous. There are a lot of thought-provoking elements thrown in–drug use to control emotions, genetic engineering, government control. It was a fun read.
I wanted to love Willful Creatures by Aimee Bender, which I read on the plane home, however, I felt disappointed with some of the stories. Some of them worked, and some fell flat. Bender is an engineer of language and she constructs some great stories, but I felt like she was trying too hard in several of them. It’s still worth a read though.
And that wraps up the books I read on my vacation in September. I was happy with my choices and glad that I could finally read some of these books.

It’s a cliche I realize, but I find Sarah Waters books immensely readable, meaning that once I start one, I have a hard time putting it down. Fortunately, her new book The Night Watch continues this tradition. She’s made a career writing about sex and love in Victorian era England, but this new book she set in London during the 1940’s and moves backward through time. Beginning in 1947, we move through 1944 and end at the beginning in 1941. It follows 4 Londoners, 3 women and 1 man, whose lives connect in both small and large ways: Kay, an ambulance driver during the war, dresses in mannish clothes. Helen, sweet and honest, harbors a secret. Glamorous Vivian remains loyal to her married soldier lover through hard times. And Vivian’s brother Duncan has his own demons to battle.

The mastery of the settings is one of Sarah Water’s greatest strengths. You can picture and smell the London streets from her descriptions. She also understands the intricacies of relationships–the jealousies, the feelings of unworthiness one can feel, the intensity of a new love. Another strength of this book was her choice of telling the intertwining stories backward. It doesn’t take away from the book, it enhances the stories. While the depth of her main characters strengthen the story, some of the minor characters did not seem developed enough, especially where it might have helped the plot. But even with its flaws, I enjoyed this book immensely.

Since I liked Revolutionary Road so much while in Spain and having enjoyed his short stories, I grabbed a copy of The Easter Parade by Richard Yates last weekend. This might be the most depressing book I’ve ever read, or at least in the top 5. Here, Yates follows the Grimes sisters for over 40 years from their parent’s divorce in childhood through old age. Younger sister Emily, who searches for happiness through various jobs and men in her peripatetic life, provides the eyes through which we watch them. Sarah, the elder, seems happily married throughout her life, at least to Emily, but all is not as it seems of course. As it turns out, Sarah’s husband, the genial English Tony, beats her. The other major character in EP is their divorced mother “Pookie” who moves them around from house to house as children. Both sister’s resentment for her is palpable and she dies alone in a home, having lost much of her mind to drink.

Why was this book so depressing? Perhaps it’s Emily’s bad relationships that she falls into one after the other. Each man comes with huge problems (who doesn’t?) and none of them seem to see Emily as herself, but as an answer to their troubles. They gravitate to her because she doesn’t know herself and therefore though she appears she’s always listening to them, it’s more that she has nothing to say for herself. In the end, Emily ends up alone and bitter, in the same position she found her mother at the end of her life. Lives never stepped into, that’s what I kept thinking, the constant yearning for something and not even knowing what to look for. I finished this book very late one night and it kept me awake most of the rest of the night.