There’s a buck mounted in my living room, but it’s not a head: it’s a large photograph of one standing at a stream in the woods, dawn light softly illuminating the morning mist. I find deer, second to horses, utterly beautiful creatures – -at least, provided they aren’t standing alongside the road on dark winter nights, threatening to bolt at a moment’s notice and destroy whatever vehicle is passing along. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas shares that admiration for deer, and makes a habit of feeding the population that lives in the New Hampshire woods near her house. Her interest in them, though, goes beyond merely giving them something to eat in exchange for the joy of watching them as she might a group of hummingbirds: instead, she’s intently curious about them, a genuine student who pokes through their winter stools to gauge their health, and yearns to know the land as intimately as they do. She identifies four distinct groups in the population around her, which she labels Alpha, Beta, Epsilon, and Tau, and most of her study is on social dynamics: the four groups all have interior hierarchies, with clearly dominant females who guide the feeding. Curiously, lower-class females in a group will stop eating and move with the group as soon as the dominant female decides it’s time to move on, even if they haven’t had their fill. Amusingly, though, some lower-status deer will use alarm signals to spook the group into hiding so they can scarf some food down before joining their mates: I’ve read of similar behavior among primates who use predator alarms to frighten their troopmates away from choice fruit. Thomas’ observations aren’t strictly organized the way Leonard Rue’s Whitetail Savvy was (the only book on deer behavior I can find that’s not hunting-oriented) , but she covers the basics: how deer change through the seasons, their methods of communicating, etc. The back half of the book is less about deer and more general nature observations. Thomas identifies as a tree-hugger, and her approach is a quirky mix of serious scientific approaches (poring through scat) and references to Gaia ‘setting forth a path’ and ‘telling deer’ what to do. I enjoyed the volume as a reflection on nature, but for more serious content Rue is still the go-to source — and he’s referred to consistently.
Related:
Giant Whitetails and Whitetail Savvy. The first is bowhunting stories; the second is a more comprehensive study of deer intelligence, behavior, etc.
Sloane is a librarian in her late twenties, idly drifting into a contented if wholly nondescript and unsatisfying life. One of the few things she genuinely looks forward to are visits by an old crank, Arthur, a verbose curmudgeon whose erudite insults and cantankerous attitude frighten most of the library staff. Sloane gives back as good as she gets, and the sparring brings a little excitement into her day: he’s also one of the few people who genuinely says what’s on his mind, and as someone who lives within a shell of politeness, surrounded by people who are similarly polite and artificial, it’s a breath of fresh air, however artic. Then, Arthur begins failing to show up, and a concerned Sloane investigates. She will find him bedridden and attended to by nurses, having endured a recent fall, and invite herself further into his life. Despite his protests, the old man not only tolerates but enjoys her company, and around these two will grow a little collection of drifting souls who bond over their arguments with books and searches for something else in their lives — including Arthur’s estranged grandson, his neighbor who is struggling with her own daughter, and one of Sloane’s coworkers. The result is an utterly sweet story of friendships blooming, lives changed, and love manifesting itself beyond romance.
I instantly love curmudgeons, the more cantankerous the better: I want to be one when I grow up, and am constantly practicing my harrumphing and scowling at everything from cellphones to what passes for slang among the Z-types. Naturally, then, I took to Arthur and Sloane’s curious friendship from the start, and it only got better once Arthur’s curious neighbor entered the picture. Each of the book club’s members are struggling with different life issues: Mateo, for instance, is stuck living in the shadow of his mother; Arthur’s neighbor has a daughter who regards her contemptuously and is planning on moving across the country with her father; and of course Sloane is trying to ignore the fact that as comfortable as her life could be with her fiance, it would also be empty. She is drawn to Arthur for the same reason that some people find clay inexplicably tasty: he provides something she is missing. His shocking perspective, wakes her up to her own life, dispelling the cozy cloud of empty comfort that had steadily grown around her. Each of the characters plays a part in the growth of the other. What I liked most about the book, beyond its crank and the people who turned his home into a book club, was how Gilbert explores different aspects of love beyond romance and eros: indeed, all the different aspects of love that the Greeks had words for (agape, eros, storge, filia, and even xenia) are present here as Gilbert explores bonds of all kinds, and even mocks the way romance is overemphasized — through Arthur, of course. This is especially interesting and amusing given that Gilmore appears to be an author of ‘contemporary romance’.
I wasn’t looking for a “Valentine’s Day” book, but this one found me and I loved it. I must say, nonfiction is going to have to get its pants on and get moving this year if it wants to maintain its usual dominance..
I was introduced to Flannery O’Connor perhaps twenty years ago when taking English 101 & English 102 at the community college, and I have never quite forgotten the two stories we discussed — “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and “Good Country People”. Or rather, there are startling elements within those stories that seared themselves into my head, even I’ve forgotten the plots in detail. As it turns out, Flannery O’Connor is good at that — provoking, shocking, horrifying. A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories collects ten of O’Connor’s stories, a third of her work in that area of literature. The collection is saturated with race and religion: at least two characters masquerade as figures connected to religion (a Bible salesman, say), and if you made a drinking game out of racial epithets then I hope your will is current, because if you survive the alcohol poisoning your liver won’t be long for this world. O’Connor’s stories are filled with characters rendered in strange and frequently ugly detail – sometimes both at the same time. Horror of varying degrees is present throughout, but especially in “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, as the reader realizes what is happening far more quickly than the grandmother who features so prominently: as one progresses further into the collection and sees the sorts of things that happen, then tension starts mounting the moment a stranger shows up. There’s no obviousness to what will happen in any story, though. The most interesting new-to-me story was “The Displaced Person” in which an aging widow takes on a Polish refugee and his family as a farmhand: his work ethic, either natural or need-driven, immediately leads to tension with the widow’s other help (poor whites and blacks), and the widow is torn between benefiting from his work and her desire to keep her ‘people’ content. Violence makes its face known in this story and in many others. This is a collection to return to, in part because there’s more substance to them than mere plot-happenings, and in part because I’m still recovering from an illness and not thinking all too clearly.
Nick is a commercial diver who, as a side gig, volunteers with a rescue organization to save people during flood disasters. There are a lot of those these days: rising waters, frequent hurricanes, and people who continue to build houses on the coast (presumably because they have taxpayer-funded flood insurance to support them in their moronic decisions) mean there’s no shortage of people to save. During one op, Nick rescues a woman whose daughter is involved with a commercial venture on the moon, creating a new lift system that will reduce the coast of shipping materials from Luna to Earth enormously, and she offers him a job. Nick’s stamina, resilience, and quick-fix engineering skills would be perfect for their current project, and so presently he finds himself amid that magnificent desolation, working to create a new future. Unfortunately, he and the crew are unwitting pawns in a fight for power and money between multiple corrupt corporations and an equally corrupt government, none of whom mind breaking a few dozen eggs provided they can claim the entirety of the lunar omelette for themselves. Nick and company land without all their needed kit and are soon racing against the clock to complete their work, all the while accidents and emotional volatility claim life after life: to the inherent challenges of living and working on the moon are added the stress of not knowing what’s really going on, and the ever-real spectre that they’re pawns who will be abandoned to die as soon as their work is finished. The Eighth Continent is a ‘hard’ SF novel because of its heavy emphasis on detail — a bit like The Martian, but with dread pervading instead of humor – but also hard because there’s so little to enjoy. It’s all death, gloom, and stress, and I found the deeper I got into it, the slower I moved – -rather like I was struggling through the over-mounting piles of lunar dust. Although I like the idea of this, particularly since lunar developments are more plausible than Martian ones, as a story it was too grim to enjoy. Perhaps in a different mood and another time it would have landed with me better.
Keiko has known since she was a little girl that she wasn’t quite normal. Her reactions were not like those of her peers, and they were different enough to cause her family alarm. Upon discovering a dead bird, her first thought was that it might be good for her father’s dinner: when one of her teachers was in an emotional uproar, Keiko addressed the situation by pulling down the teacher’s dress. So far, so quirky. It’s a little more disturbing when, annoyed by a crying baby, she ponders a nearby knife as a solution. Fortunately, Keiko has found a place where her strangeness is not disruptive: where her need for social scripts and routine is perfectly matched — the Convenience Store. There, she finds a literal manual for how to behave. There, she finds a consistent array of things that need to be done properly, with enough variety that she doesn’t lose interest. She is a perfect cog in the machine, and she lives and breathes its needs and atmosphere. There are converging factors, though, that will combine to disrupt her place: her age, for once, as she continually reflects on how the Convenience Store’s worker-cogs are replaced once they’ve worn down, just like unsold rice balls; her family’s continued prodding that she should really get a real job or at least a husband after eighteen years of the convenience store routine; and the final of an utterly obnoxious and soon-to-be-fired coworker who nonetheless prompts her to try something new. This is not, however, some predictable novel about love and inspiration.
Given its length (scarcely over a hundred pages), I suppose it’s not saying much that I read this in one sitting. But perhaps it is saying something that I didn’t even bother to freshen my drink, or to go outside and have a look at the moon as I do when I’m reading at night and get restless just sitting. I read it in one go, utterly spellbound, and then I began listening to the audiobook version just to see what it had to offer. (Totally worth it. Not only did I get to hear the pronunciation of “Irasshaimase!”, which is a staple of the book, but the narrator Nancy Wu also portrays the difference between Keiko’s ‘real’ voice, the flat narrator, and her public voice, which was modeled on listening to her coworkers’ cadence and expression.) Although the novel’s blurbs and some reviews refer to this as comic, I don’t get that at all. For me, it was a thoroughly sympathetic and engaging account of a young woman whose brain is not set in the same mold as everyone else’s trying to be normal – in part so people will stop prodding at her to be normal. She doesn’t want to be an object of such interest and distress to her family. Because she doesn’t think or relate to people and the world around her the way that most do, she relies on acting to lower her profile and not be noticed: she labors to discern social scripts and follow them, she imitates the voices and emotions of those around her, and she relies on her sister for tips on what to say to avoid various lines of inquiry. She also thinks about society in a very abstract, detached way, which is one of the few things she has in common with a character who is otherwise an inexplicable connection for her. As obnoxious and abhorrent as he is, they’re both outsiders in their way. As mentioned, though, the novel does not settle for a nice ending, which I appreciated. This joins Ready Player One and Cold as Hell as books I had to experience in two mediums.
Convenience Store Woman was a fascinating little novel — tragic, sympathetic, and compelling.
I’ve recently been in a mood for books about bookstores and libraries, and so discovered a series by Shaun Bythell, owner of Scotland’s largest secondhand book shop. Most of Bythell’s books are diaries of his day-to-day activities, with one of exception. I’ve been slowly poking through Remainders of the Day for the last few weeks, and finished it today along with a shorter volume that is also the outlier in Bythell’s works.
The format of Remainders of the Day is a diary, and appears based on a literal diary Bythell keeps on his computer — monitoring the number of online orders received, the amount of till intake and customer – – which is sometimes altered by his assistants with amusing results. The volume takes us through a year (early 2016 – early 2017) in the life of a Scottish bookseller in Wigtown, a municipality in Scotland known for its book trade and annual literary fairs. (It’s so known that it has an airbnb called The Open Book in which guests pay for the privilege of …running the bookstore.) This presents multiple avenues of interest: first, there’s the inherent attraction of experiencing (vicariously) a year in the life of a Scottish village centered on books, with the full array of eccentric characters that bookshops attract — like Sandy the Tatooed Pagan, who is described thusly every single time he comes into the shop. Bythell’s stories range from commenting on community goings-on, like the plight of one of his friends struggling with mental issues, to recording the antics of bizaare and sometimes awful customers. Bythell straddles an odd place: he’s a community fixture who helps organize the literary festival and is an integral part of Wigtown’s economy, but he’s also a bookseller on the global market, and frequently has to ship to Germany and even the United States. The only secondhand shop I’m intimately familiar with (Selma’s Broad Street Books) is more of a watering hole for the town’s bookish sorts and less a commercial venture, so getting a look at the business end through Bythell’s eyes was interesting. He encounters so many frustrations with Amazon, for instance, that he more or less gives up on trying to sell there. The shop varies widely in activity from day to day, sometimes only taking in £20 or so, but once taking in nearly £700 during the festival. Bythell stays very busy and despite his age has the schedule of a college student — often not going to bed until well after midnight, sometimes in the middle of the night, but invariably opening the shop by nine am or so. His shop has a large selection of obscure and rare books — first editions, complete series known for their superior binding, that sort of thing — as well as the airport fiction tourists are prone to pick up. I was frequently surprised by how obscure his collection could be, and how obsessive collectors were: there were people in Germany and the United States ordering books about Scottish birds, for instance, and so many mentions to people buying railroad maps and books on particular train engines and the like I that I lost count. I knew trainspotting was more common in Britain than the United States, but being confronted with such aggressive interest was surprising. All told, I enjoyed the book but had to take it slowly, and will probably delay reading the other book(s?) in the series until it feels fresh again.
The Seven Kind of People You Find in Bookshops, though pulling from the same well of experience, is an altogether different approach: instead of monitoring a year in the bookshore, Bythell focuses on the customer angle and divides visitors to the bookshop into seven broad categories, with an eighth extra one commenting on the bookshop staff. It’s more or less just commentary on different types of people attracted to the shop — SF fans, conspiracy theorists and occultists, pedants obsessed with one particular subject like rail gauges of Cornwall or waxwings of Yorkshire, annoying whistlers, parents who mistake the bookstore staff for babysitters, etc. Librarians also get mistaken for babysitters, so I sympathized. Amusing collection on the whole: I was glad to see that SF fans cut a good figure. Interesting, Bythell comments that most of his trade in genealogical books is to American tourists, who seem obsessed by it.
Coming up…I’ve been (and remain) wretchedly sick this week from some respiratory thing that’s not COVID, strep, or flu, so I’ve done very little reading until today. Mostly I’ve been trying to listen to audiobooks between naps and coughing jags. Blew through five days of leave time, so there go my plans for going out west this year. I have two SF books that I’m puttering through, as well as a history of Saturday Night Live that I may or may not finish: I was only interested in the first five seasons, but that’s barely a third of the book.
Jack Diller is a loser in denial, a failed actor who keeps the bills paid (barely) by delivering food to Los Angeles’ upper middle classes, staring in awe at their mansions while trying not to think about the tiny rental house filled with old pizza boxes and empty Mountain Dew cans that waits for him after twelve hours of driving. Jerry spends much of his shift staring at his phone, and one night sees an obnoxious ad for an audiobook. It’s a self-help book by Hector Bruno, an action movie star from the 1980s. Although Jack isn’t much for audiobooks, out of curiosity he gives it a shot, and……finds Hector talking to him. Jack’s not just listening to a washed-up actor give vague life advice, he’s being confronted and coached by a man with such an audio presence that he can’t help but listen — and as Jack does, he finds something rising in him: THE KILLER INSTINCT. The polite pushover finds a sudden and inexplicable fount of self-confidence and cunning, and is soon well off the straight and narrow, culminating in a flight to the desert with a young hostage. (Not to worry, Iris, Jack’s really a nice guy. Really. )
Self Help made me hurt with laughter, though it helps that I’ve been in bed for several days with a savage chest cold so any amount of laughter hurts a bit. The voice acting in this is utterly brilliant, and I’m sorry that there’s no excerpt on YouTube to share, and that the ‘sample’ on Audible only demonstrates Wil Wheaton’s performance, and not Ron Perlman. I know Perlman chiefly through his role on Sons of Anarchy, where he plays King Claudius in a Hamlet-meets-bike-gang crime drama, and it was hilarious to hear him here, hamming it up with a soundtrack and turning a listless failure into an assertive if bumbling criminal. Wil Wheaton has never disappointed me in his audio performances — he is, in fact, the reason I’m an Audible member at all – and he’s up to his usual standards here. Although there’s some interest from the reader/listener wondering what the nature of the audiobook is (is Jack hallucinating? Is it some some of AI?), given that it appears to be conscious and reacts to Jack’s real-world choices, the meat is Wheaton’s delivery of a man-child discovering how to assert himself and move toward a goal, but quickly going off the rails and rationalizing all along the way. It’s dark, funny, sometimes surreal, and always thoroughly entertaining.
