All I can say is TMI on Steve Jobs. Yes, he’s an interesting character…but I didn’t realize that he’d appear on every other page of this memoir. Next time, a book more about actual small fry or French fries or who Lisa Brennan Jobs is without her dad.
The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolaño, a fantastic counterpoint to Asymmetry, by Lisa Halliday. Both in 3 parts. Both about the process of writing, dialogs/beefs/paeans to other writers, and both set in a variety of locales. While Bolaño is, at times, coarse & tedious in a young man’s voice (sex, drugs, profanity), and at other times very funny (a woman who spends the takeover of the University of Mexico in a bathroom stall, the story of which goes viral in pre-internet terms). I suppose I was also partial to the book as the characters are traveling (escaping) around the world in the 1970s (mainly), when I was also visiting some of the same locales. And Bolaño does a great job bringing Mexico City to life. So much so, that I’m ready to go again. Maybe some day my Spanish will be good enough to read The Savage Detectives in Bolaño’s language. I’m sure that would be an incredible treat.
I wonder if I would have enjoyed this book better had someone other than Sam Lipsyte read it. I can understand an author wanting the extra royalty, and so committing to read a work to be published as an audiobook. Maybe some have told Lipsyte that he’s a great reader. And, maybe in person he is a great reader. But, for me there was a lack of drama in this audiobook. You had to search for the important in what sometimes seemed like a barrage of clever words. While the book has a narrative arc, it’s mainly about day to day ups and down of married life with kids in LA ~2010, while trying to find a creative center and/or spiritual meaning amidst the cacophony of day to day routines. Many have liked it (according to reviews), for me, “meh.”
A quick little book about reading, writing, and love…is there more to life? Le Mystere Henri Pick, par David Foenkinos (yup, read it in French), is set largely in contemporary Brittany, a young woman editor is searching for a book to publish that is going to establish her reputation. She finds it in a library of unpublishable manuscripts (rejected manuscripts). The mystery is who wrote the book – the name of the manuscript’s cover doesn’t seem to comport with the actual man, deceased, who ran a pizzeria and seemed (to his wife and daughter) barely literate. Foenkinos has barbs and kudos for actual writers near and far, as well as the publishing world. I happened to open the Goodreads page on the book and saw rave reader reviews in many, many languages. Also a movie will be forthcoming.
Admittedly, I’m late to the party. If anyone read To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, in Spencerport, NY during the 1970s, he or she wasn’t assigned it in my English classes. In February 2019, I got the opportunity to see the Aaron Sorkin remake of the play, To Kill a Mockingbird, starring Jeff Daniels. The play did an excellent job of presenting the confusion of childhood about issues of race, class, and oddball-ness in the 1930s. But the audiobook, read by Sissy Spacek, outshone the play (my cousin Linda had recommended it). I so admire the way Harper Lee/Sissy Spacek was able to capture a young girls’ voice: the small hurts and anger, the bravado, the warmth and sensitivity as well as the obliviousness. The confusion of growing up among wonderful and terrible people, as we are all capable of great and awful things. I’m not sure if I would have loved this book at age 15 as many did, but I certainly appreciated it this past winter.
I think I’ve now read the last of Erik Larson’s books written to date. I’d put off The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America for quite a while because I’m not so big into gore & I knew this was a tale of a serial killer. It’s hard not to call In the Garden of the Beasts my favorite (who can resist family drama and intrigue at the American Embassy in Berlin as the Nazis came to power?). But the The Devil in the White City really is a marvel. There’s the invention of the Ferris Wheel, the birth of modern landscape architecture, Chicago’s heyday, unionization and muckrakers, and more. The post script alone is worth a look. Was Walt Disney’s Magic Kingdom based on The White City (Disney grew up close to the Fairgrounds & his father worked building the Fairgrounds). Frank Lloyd Wright worked for Adler and Sullivan, who also worked on the Fair. How did the Fair influence his later works….The attached photo is from one of FL Wright’s designs in Oak Park, within a couple of miles of Jackson Park, where the Fair of 1892 (400 anniversary of Colombus finding his way to the “New World”) was held.