Author Archives: bookdwarf

Boston Globe Review roundup

Spring finally arrived in the Northeast this past weekend (but only for a few days of course) and I think the Globe people were affected. That’s the only explanation I can think off for the how uneven the review section was on Sunday.

As most know, April 1 brings the start of baseball season. The first game at Fenway wasn’t until yesterday however (we beat the Yankess 8-1!) and they decided to make Katherine Powers (an otherwise great columnist) write this long, and I mean long, breakdown of 16 books on the Red Sox. I love baseball and I really love the Sox, but even I was bored to tears by this article. There were too many books! She spent the first column (because of course they devote the whole first page plus a quarter of the third page) on just a few of the books, then she must of lost heart. It becomes 2-3 line synopses. The whole thing felt sloppy and like they were doing it just because….well, I don’t know.

But the reviews got a little better after that. Page 2 started with Richard Eder’s review of The Face of the Naked Lady: An Omaha Family Mystery by Michael Rips. Eder finds the book ambiguous and puzzling. One of the other good things this week was Gail Caldwell’s review of Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro’s new book, which I loved. She sees past the sci-fi aspects as did Kakutani last week, though she finds it frustrating that the mystery of how the modern world got that way is never explained. I also found Amadan Heller’s ‘Short Takes‘ column particularly well-written this week. She managest to both let you know in a sentence or two the basic plot as well as her impressions of each. This week she covers Jonathan Lethem’s The Disappointment Artist, Marina Lewycka’s A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian, and Suburban Safari: A Year on the Lawn by Hannah Holmes.

Page 3 starts with a Sandra Shea’s review of Empire Rising by Thomas Kelly. Next to it, is David Waldstreicher’s impressions of A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America by Stacy Schiff. Frankly, I am getting a bit tired of these tomes that keep appearing which want to convince me how the dead white men responsible for founding our country are great. Got the message. This one does have a different take, since it follows Franklin to France.

The last page has only 2 columns, since the runoffs from the tedious baseball book article and the Ishiguro review are continued here. But I was really excited about Caroline Leavitt’s ‘A Reading Life‘ this week. She discusses 2 books featuring Arab heroines in America. One I have read and loved—The Language of Baklava by Diana Abu-Jaber, which Leavitt found “passionate and playful, rich with memories of relatives and friends, all hungry ‘for home, for family, for the old smells and touches and tastes.'” The second book is Towelhead by Alicia Eran, a coming of age tale. The more I hear about this book, the more I want to read it. Leavitt’s column was one of the highpoints this week as she covered books that sound interesting and have not gotten as much coverage as they maybe should. The BGBR section ends this week with ‘Pop Lit‘ by Diane White, which is a monthly column about ‘new light and popular fiction’. She enjoyed Lucky Strike by Nancy Zafris and Can’t Get Enough by Connie Briscoe, but found Oh My Stars by Lorna Landvik “needy” and the voice “phony”. Honestly, these books are in not my cup of tea, and I didn’t leave the review wanting to read them, but White’s coverage is well done.

So that’s it for this week. Two stars in a sea of mediocrity. The ratio was 7 fiction (2 long, 5 short) to 21 non-fiction, albeit 16 of them were, as I said before, barely covered. Still, it would be nice to see some translations or books from smaller publishers. At least Joshua Glenn, in ‘The Examined Life‘ column in the Ideas section, usually gets some of the smaller publishers. In fact, this week, he discusses a book from Johns Hopkins University Press! Here’s hoping that the BGBR gets better.

Exciting New Developments

I’ve been invited to participate in The Litblog Co-op to help select a book for Read This! Check out the nice looking website for more information about this. I’ll post information as I learn mroe about it. But I am looking forward to some good discussions on books! Maybe I should just rename the site Bookdork.

Current reads

Since I’ve been so busy with the move, I haven’t had a chance to update the Current Reads section to the left. I finished Francine Prose’s Blue Angel last week and was too angry to write anything about it. I hated it. But it still might be a good book, if that makes any sense. I found it so well-written that I found it too maddening and I had to skim parts. The characters were all awful human beings and the ending made me want to toss the book out the window. Did anyone else have this reaction? I know Prose is a great writer. I have a galley of her new book and am wondering if I should try it. Is it her writing or her story that I disliked so much?
Next I grabbed a copy of Blue Clay People: Seasons on Africa’s Fragile Edge by William Powers. Powers’ memoir about his time spent in Liberia as an aid worker beginning in 1999 unveils the corruption and violence scarring the country. Typical to the aid worker memoir, he starts out naive, wide-eyed and full of ideas about fighting poverty and saving the environment. And of course, reality sets in at some point. His outrage comes throughout the memoir and I found that tiresome. I enjoyed the passages where he immersed himself into the Liberian society, learning the lingo, enjoying what’s left of the rainforest, etc. In the end, when he leaves for a new assignment, you know that it was probably best for him. His earnestness and naivety were only leading him down a dark spiral. I wish he had spent more time discussing the plight of the Liberians than listing his constant shock, but the book was still a good read.

Not what it seems

For once I actually agree with a Kakutani review. Her comments on Isiguro’s new novel mirror my own, she’s just able to articulate them. Many have seemed to object to the ‘sci-fi’ aspect of the book, but I barely thought of it as traditional sci-fi. And other’s complain about the big ‘reveal’, but I thought he kept parcelling the clues throughout the book. You know from the first chapter something isn’t normal. It’s really a lovely, wonderful book.

And it keeps on comin’

As I’ve remarked before, I have been out of the loop. Luckily, Scott at Conversational Reading posted about this article by Allen M. West of New West the ‘Voice of the Rocky Mountains’. He responds to Sarah Boxer’s article on bloggers from last week where yours truly was mentioned along with many other fine writers. Some have bristled at West’s article. It’s sort of a mixed article. On the one hand, he says that “the notion of a fresh community, a network of discussion that adds just a little note of vibrancy to a staid and stale industry.” But on the other hand, he thinks none of us has any credentials. What kind of credentials does one need to review books? I am not some crackpot throwing opinions around (okay, a bit of a crackpot). Not only do I read a lot, but I also work in the buying office of one of the best bookstores in New England (in my opinion). Those are my credentials. Do I need a degree or something? And some of the other bloggers mentioned are real writers!
And I am not sure if I like this part: “The left margin is chock full of literary journals, blogs, and the nice little expected idiosyncratic links of a creative mind left to its own devices (IE: “bitchiness”; “the world according to me”; etc.).” Yes, my categories have dumb names, I am the first to admit it. He also seems a little too snide in places. But I do love the last 2 lines: “Give it a few years, let the less legitimate drop away for lack of attention, wait for the cream to rise, and we’ll soon be noticing how the careers of various reviewers are built or leveled based on a few well chosen words from Beatrix or Bookdwarf. Won’t that be the day.”
Hahahahah, as if one word from me could ever accomplish so much. I can’t even get my cat to stay off the fucking counter.