Life : Keith Richards

Read from Monday, January 9th to Friday, January 13th, 2012

What a fantastic memoir by Keith Richards.  He is my namesake!  My mom loved him as a teenagers in the sixties and seventies, and named me after him.  After reading the memoir, I am honored.  Keith was a shy kid growing up in England, and he never lost that innocence.  Of course he was very susceptible to addictions, but I feel a strong connection to him.  He just wanted to sit there and pick at his guitar and play the blues.

Keith described his childhood in England, and his rocky relationship with his father, who he reconnected with in the 1980's.  He described meeting Mick and putting the original band together.  They scraped together shows, just enough to get by, until they grew enough of a following to start touring.  Then they were able to start recording, making hits, and make it to America and around the world.

Keith told the stories about traveling through America, and how many times they barely dodged the law.  He described the drugs, the groupies, the parties, the relationship among the bandmates.  Being kicked out of England because they had to pay too many taxes, so they were exiled in France, where they recorded Exile on Main Street (of which I am listening right at this moment.)  The Stones were the biggest band for the longest time, since the Beatles went their own way in the 1970's.  However, Mick and Keith had issues, and Mick went for an unsuccessful solo career, before rejoining the band for the megatours of the 1990's. 

Keith described the song-writing process, as well as the meaning behind many of the lyrics.  He is incredibly talented, and also humbled to have met many of his heroes.  Keith also described the difficult process of becoming sober and clean from the heroin, and reconnecting with his large family.  Ever since finishing the book, I have been listening to the Stones constantly, and have watched a few documentaries.  I find the whole story of the rock star epic life fascinating.  Four out of five stars.

Skippy Dies

Read from Thursday, December 16th to to Monday, January 9th, 2012

Skippy Dies, by Paul Murray.  I read this book mostly by Kindle on the treadmill.  It is a tragicomedy about an Irish prep school, Seabrook.  Shortlisted for many awards, it is a recent novel that deals with a lot of current events, but feels timeless.  It took me awhile to get into the flow of the book, but once I did, I really enjoyed it.  The protagonist is Skippy, AKA Daniel Juster, who dies in a donut eating contest in the opening pages.  The rest of the long novel deals with events leading up to the event, and then the aftermath.

Skippy is a shy, awkward 14 year old boy.  His mom is sick, and there is a tension with his father.  He is on the swim team, but also takes pills to ease the stress of life.  But he falls for a girl in the neighboring school, Lori, the frisbee girl.  Skippy's best friend and roommate, Ruprecht, is a complete nerd, and obsessed with astrophysics and string theory.  He believes he can open the portal to another dimension, and almost thinks that he does at one point.  There are other boys, all obsessed with sex, girls, making fun of teachers, and pills and booze.  Murray does a great job of capturing the obsessions of young teenage immature boys, and girls as well.  There is also Carl, a drug dealer and aspiring sociopath, who is also madly in love with Lori, and will not tolerate any other competition.  He had been hooking up with Lori for a little while as he was giving her diet pills.  Also, a history teacher, Howard the Coward, a former Seabrook student who was disgraced for allowing a star athlete to get paralyzed in his place, factors into the plot.  Howard lives with his American girlfriend, but he is dissatisfied, and becomes infatuated with a new French geography teacher.

At the Halloween dance, Howard hooks up with the geography teacher, Aurelie, and he breaks up with his girlfriend, throwing all the eggs into that basket.  During the dance, Skippy escapes with Lori and they take pills and hang out and kiss, to the disbelief of most of the other students.  Skippy and Lori begin an awkward relationship, in which it is eventually revealed that Lori is just using him to make Carl jealous, even though she does like Skippy.  Also, on the Howard front, Aurelie has a fiancee and she leaves the school to get married, leaving Howard heartbroken and alone.  He has to deal with the Automator, the acting principal Greg, who is obsessed with renovating the school and breaking many of the Catholic traditions.  There are still priests teaching there, such as Father Green, who has to grapple with the guilt of molesting boys in Africa in the past.

Carl finds out about Skippy, and tries to beat him up, but Skippy miraculously manages to land a solid punch and knock him out.  However, Carl retaliates by hooking up with Lori, videotaping a blowjob, and sending the video to Skippy.  The shock of the video, and all the other stress of life, send him over the edge, and he collapses during the donut eating contest and dies while writing 'tell lori' in jam on the floor. 

Ruprecht is obviously devastated, and he gives up all nerdiness and physics and just becomes a drone that gets picked on contstantly.  Lori becomes depresses as well because she is wracked with guilt.  Howard tries to rally the students by taking them on an impromptu field trip, but this gets him fired.  The other friends rally around Ruprecht in the end at a school concert, and convince him to try one last time to communicate with the other dimension, where Skippy is believed to be.  Ruprecht plays music while also running a machine he built, and Lori sings a song from the clinic where she is held.  The story ends with a little bit of hope, as Ruprecht connects with Lori, and Skippy's memory is able to live on among them.

It was an enjoyable and well written novel.  Very accessible and stylized.  Murray is very talented, and  tells the story from all the main characters' points of views.  He uses great imagery and different styles, and is able to create both a comic mood and a tragic one.  I feel terrible for Skippy, and I also hate the people that did it to him, but I also hope for their redemption.  I would recommend checking it out.  Three and a a half out of five stars.

Treasure Island!!!

Read on Wednesday, December 15th.

I read Treasure Island!!! by Sara Levine and December's Rumpus Book Club Selection, in just a day.  This was a very interesting, different read.  It is lighthearted, but also morbid, and it is forgettable, but in a good way.  I could definitely relate, to some extent, with the unnamed narrator, a recent female college graduate.  She is in a solid relationship with her boyfriend Lars, and works at a Pet Library.  When she reads Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, the narrator becomes obsessed.  She is passionate about interpreting this old book and applying the core values of Boldness, Resolution, Independence and Horn-Blowing to her own life, which she views as pathetic.  

The narrator becomes crass, fiercely independent and quite bitchy.  She is very unsympathetic as she delves further and further into the madness of the book.  Eventually, she is fired from the Pet Library for buying a parrot, and then Lars breaks up with her.  She is forced to move back in with her parents, along with the annoying talking parrot.  The book takes another turn as we meet her sister Adrianna, who is older, larger, and having an affair with her elderly boss, a man who also had a brief affair with the sister's mother in the past. 

The family around the narrator descends into a partial anarchy, but she still remains inside her precious book and alienating those around her.  At one point, she kills the parrot and makes it look like it died of natural causes.  Finally, the family and Lars and others have an intervention for her, and try to convince her to give up the book.  She refuses, and stabs her sister in the hand.  She realizes how unbearable she has become and finally throws away the book, leaving hope for the future.

It is a funny book about literary obsession (which I hope I don't have to worry about, even though at many times I find myself emulating the books I am reading.)  The narrator is unlikable, but that is okay because we are entertained and curious about what she will do next.  I was pleasantly surprised by my reaction to the book, and I am sorry that I missed the author chat online due to work.  Four out of five stars.

American Gods

Read from Tuesday, December 6th to Wednesday, December 28th, 2011.

I started American Gods, by Neil Gaiman, as an audiobook, downloaded for free from Audible.com (I'm sure you've seen the ads.).  I wanted to try out an audiobook for the first time in my life, but I wasn't too thrilled.  I'm sure it would be great if I commuted to work, or drove a lot, but I do neither, so when I wanted to continue the story, I most often just picked up the book (borrowed and recommended by my co-worker Sue).  I read a lot faster than the spoken version.  

American Gods is a different genre than I normally read.  A little simplistic and cliched at times, Gaiman often writes for children and I could tell.  So the story took awhile to grow on me, but it did mostly thanks to the fascinating plot.  It begins with Shadow being released from prison.  His wife, Laura, was killed in a car crash while giving road head to another guy, and so Shadow got out early.  While traumatized, Shadow is a quiet guy and the narrator.  On the trip home, he is coerced into working as a kind of assistant for Wednesday, a strange but charismatic older man who knows everything about Shadow already. 

The conflict lies in the premise that all Gods imagined by humanity actually walk the earth, most assuming everyday, boring lives.  They came over with Americans from the Old country, where they flourished, but in America the Gods are slowly dying out as people slowly forget.  They are not Gods like Jesus and Allah, but more like the Norse Pantheon, the Hindu Gods, African animal gods and Pagan symbols, like Easter in human form.  Wednesday is Odin, the Norse King God, and he thrives on human sacrifice to him, which has been lacking in recent years.  The old Gods are threatened by the new Gods of America, those of Media, the Internet, Television and Commercialism.    Wednesday and Shadow travel across the country, (with beautiful scenery and imagery), trying to recruit the reluctant old Gods to join together with him to fight off the threat from the new Gods.  They meet characters like dwarves, elves, leprechauns, the Russian God Czernobog, Anansi from Africa, the Zorya from Russia, and Egyptian gods of the dead.  Also, Laura is reanimated as a zombie that helps out Shadow from time to time.

They are pursued by the new Gods and a government group comparable to the FBI or CIA.  Laura kills two agents that were detaining Shadow, and Wednesday hides him in a small town in Wisconsin.  This is a strange little detour in the book, as Shadow assumes a fake identity and befriends some of the quaint, nice townsfolk.  They have a tradition each winter of sinking an old car on the lake, but also a weird coincidence of kids going missing each winter. 

Soon, Wednesday is murdered by the new Gods, and all the old Gods are galvanized into action.  They retrieve his body, and Shadow agrees to hold vigil, which consists of hanging from the World Tree in rural Virginia for nine days.  While on the tree, Shadow dies, and enters the Underworld, where he is judged by Anubis, and learns that Wednesday was his mysterious, unknown father.  Shadow is brought back from the dead by Easter in time to make it to the final, climactic battle held at Rock City.  Shadow has realized that the whole thing is just an elaborate con set up by Odin and Loki.  The battle between the gods would be dedicated to Odin, and he feeds on the sacrifice, and Loki feeds on chaos.  Both gods would become incredibly powerful.  Shadow arrives just in time to convince all the gods, on each side, to just accept that America is not a good place for them, but they should make do with what they have.  Thus, the battle is averted, and Odin's ghost fades.  Laura kills Loki as well, before finally being able to rest.

Afterwards, Shadow returns to the Wisconsin lake town and discovers there a kobold in the form of Hinzelman, an old man who protects the town from economic ruin in exchange for the sacrifice of one child each winter.  Shadow and a cop defeat him, and his house burns down.  Since Shadow is Wednesday's son, he is part-God himself.  He spends the rest of his life wandering the world. 

It was a very interesting book.  Took me awhile to get into the story, but I flew through the second half of this large book.  Although Gaiman is technically a foreigner, he captures the soul of small-town America very well (almost no action happens in cities).  I purchased my own copy after returning it to Sue.  I am also interested in the HBO adaptation coming soon.  Four out of five stars.

Lord of Misrule

Read from Wednesday, December 7th to Tuesday, December 14th.

I've got eight open posts right now for books that I have read, or are currently reading.  The backlog is getting quite extensive.  As you can tell, I've been reading multiple books at a time.  I do this because I can have something on my Kindle for the treadmill, and a physical book for other places.  And then when the Rumpus Book selection comes in, I try to read that as quickly as possible for the discussion.  So I'll down a Monster, listen to some Stones, and try to bust out as many as these reviews as possible.

I've been meaning to read Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon for a while now, as it won the National Book Award for 2010.  I like reading books that offer a different perspective on the world than the one I live in, and this is one of them.  It is the story of a pair of outsiders, Tommy and Maggie, that show up one day at a run down horse track in rural West Virginia in the 1960's (I think).  Tommy is a naive, but experienced horse trainer, and he has come into some quality horses that he hopes he can use to make a quick buck at the track.  The idea is to come in quickly, race the horses and win money before anyone can catch onto the quality of the horses.  Maggie is his younger girlfriend, and they have a very abusive, but animalistic relationship. 

However, they run into problems of course.  Maggie is very attached to her animals, and when some are put in danger or sold off, she gets in over her head.  There is another trainer, a gypsy named Deucey, and a groom Medicine Ed, and Maggie buys a horse with them, Little Spinoza.  Maggie also falls under the gaze of the head trainer at the track, Joe Dale Bigg, who is a small-time mafioso.  She is protected by a loan-shark uncle, Two-Tie, but he is murdered in the woods by Bigg's henchmen.  Tommy also slowly starts to lose his mind the longer they stay at the track.  He often leaves for long periods of time, and makes irrational decisions.  Eventually, Maggie must become the heroine and confront Joe Dale Bigg after a climactic race with the legendary Lord of Misrule, and she defeats him and escapes, with a little help from Tommy, who ends up in an institution.

The story is told in four sections, one for each of the main horses, and each ending in an important race.  It is also written in a heavy dialect, which can be hard to decipher sometimes for a city boy like me.  Lord of Misrule was a great book, and I can understand why it won the award.  Overarching themes of luck and fate combine with some foxhole humor and tragedy. But such is life.  Four out of five stars.

Love and Shame and Love

Read from Sunday, November 20th to Tuesday, December 6th.

Love and Shame and Love, by Peter Orner, is another book from the Rumpus Book Club.  I haven't been getting around to reviewing the books as soon after I read them as I would like, so it will be brief.

This is the story of three generations of the Popper family from Chicago.  It mostly follows Alex Popper, and starts off with his relationship with Kat in college in the late 1980's.  Popper is a quiet, reserved kid that has a problem remembering too much.  Kat is the first girl he ever really connected with, and for half a decade they spend in bliss in their apartment, until Kat becomes pregnant and it forces her to evaluate her relationship and who she wants to end up with.  They break up, and Popper gets visitation rights to his daughter and ends up a lawyer.  Most of this story is resolved at the end of the novel.

In the middle, we learn about the modern origins of the family.  Seymour is the paternal grandfather, with his wife Bernice.  Seymour went off to WWII to fight in the Pacific, and he ended up the commander of a large battleship.  His experience in the war is told through one-sided letters to Bernice that are spread throughout the novel.  After the war, Seymour and Bernice set up shop in Chicago and host many celebrities at their house, like the Rat Pack.  The Poppers are deeply involved in Chicago politics, and they are allies with Mayor Daley.  Seymour's son and Alex's dad Philip is a rich lawyer and he makes an unsuccessful bid for political office.  Philip and Alex's mom Miriam end up getting divorced after she has an affair with one of the family friends, and the story follows Alex and his brother Leo as they navigate school living with their mom and becoming estranged from their father.

It's a beautiful, although sad story, and the technique is the most interesting part.  There are dozens of chapters, each one only a few pages long, and each one telling a short story or anecdote about the family.  These are mostly sequential, although it reads more of an oral history of the most compelling parts of Popper's life.  The ending with Kat I found especially tragic as I had hoped for more of a happy ending, although the reader is able to feel the cyclical nature of lives.

Supposedly mostly autobiographical, according to Peter Orner in his author chat, it reads like excellent fiction.  Orner does an especially good job of showing things to the reader, and letting them figure it out themselves, rather than telling them what is going on.  It can be difficult to follow along, since each chapter is a new setting and time and characters, but you eventually get the hang of it.  Really recommend it, and look forward to more by Orner.  Four out of five stars.