The Golden Apples of the Sun, by Ray Bradbury

One of Ray Bradbury’s most famous short stories, “All Summer in a Day,” is about a classroom of nine-year-old children who live on Venus. Brought there by “rocket men and women,” these children can’t remember the sun; it rains on Venus for seven years at a time, thousands of days of drumlike rainfall that crushes a thousand forests at a time. They were two the last time they saw the sun, but their classmate Margot was four. She was brought to Venus later than the rest of them, and her classmates hate her; she misses things, she dreams about the sun, she’s weird. One day they lock her in the closet because she annoys them, and then all of a sudden the rain stops–”it was as if, in the midst of a film concerning an avalanche, a tornado, a hurricane, a volcanic eruption… something had gone wrong with the sound apparatus, and then ripped the film from the projector and inserted in its place a beautiful tropical slide that did not move or tremor”–and the sun comes out. The children play in the sun like wild things, shouting, running, and at the end of two hours the sky darkens to midnight and the rain falls in tons once again. They remember–Margot is still in the closet.

 I recently picked up The Golden Apples of the Sun, an old collection of Ray Bradbury stories, and found that nearly every story in it is this good. Like Kurt Vonnegut, Bradbury writes science fiction about nothing more complicated than the little ironic, bittersweet, horrible aspects of human nature. The stories in this book, which were all written in the forties and fifties, all seem to touch on the relationship between domesticity and wonder; the possibility of establishing security and comfort amidst total unknowns, the fact that new worlds don’t mean new desires. While reading I was reminded of the extremely obvious fact that America at that time was so different than it is today–and the book’s combination of innocence, straightforward inventiveness, aggression, fear and hope is a really wonderful reflection of this state of things.

 Here are some of the stories. One where a company pioneers time-travel tourism and allows you to go back and kill dinosaurs, but only the ones that were determined to have died no more than ten minutes later, and only if you stay on the hover path, or else you might set a chain in motion that would ruin the world. One where a girl is exposed to radiation and doesn’t die, but finds sex and religion and happiness in her blood for the first time. A dozen different ones about people building suburbs on Mars, building rockets in their garages, loving people who are far away and might never come back.

 It’s a great book.

Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, by Paul Theroux

“Most writing about travel takes the form of jumping to conclusions, and so most travel books are superfluous, the thinnest, most transparent monologuing. Little more than a license to bore, travel writing is the lowest form of literary self-indulgence: dishonest complaining, creative mendacity, pointless heroics, and chronic posturing, much of it distorted with Munchausen syndrome. Of course it’s much harder to stay at home and be polite to people and face things, but where’s the book in that?”

 This is on the first page of Paul Theroux’s satisfyingly fat travel book, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star. You know when you start a book and immediately realize that you are going to enjoy it, and settle down with it not to pass the time but to savor the feeling of intake? I love that feeling, especially now, and I think for me it comes from a recognition of honesty in an author–a frankness about what’s going on, a lack of artificiality or posturing. Which, as Theroux says, is rare in travel writing.

 In fact, writing my own emails home and living here among other volunteers–many of whom came ready to deliver authoritative observations on the entire country of Kyrgyzstan within the first week–has made me conscious of the full ambivalence of even the idea of travel writing. For example, I generally hate all Peace Corps books because they are mostly instructive in the area of how much the author is obsessed with him or herself, and they’re full of generalizations about people whom the author presumes to “know” but likely does not. But I also recognize that this impulse to generalize is part of making sense of things, and that travel, especially the more extreme kind, is a meditative and potentially character-stretching experience that causes a person to become conscious of himself as someone with–at the very least–something to say. To make a narrative out of travel is to make a narrative out of a week, a month, a year in your life: something we try to do unconsciously anyway, and a task that is equal parts natural, necessary, masturbatory, useful, and deceptive.

 Still, a travel book without the lens of the author becomes a textbook, so maybe the best idea if you’re interested is just to pick the author whose lens you find the least annoying. Theroux–incidentally, a former Peace Corps volunteer–has an open curiosity, a naturally intellectual method of observation, a functional cynicism and a perfectly evocative way of writing. He admits the dubiousness of what he’s doing, and then negates it by producing books as good as this one. If you want to learn about other countries, do it by reading his travel books–you’ll enjoy it.

The Shipping News, by Annie Proulx

I don’t really get Annie Proulx. I like her stuff a lot, but she generally writes from perspectives I could never even imagine being able to imagine, particular splinters of Western life that are difficult and largely forgotten: for example, Brokeback Mountain is based on one of her short stories. And The Shipping News, her 1993 Pulitzer Prize winner that tells the story of a lumpy newspaperman who tries to forget his humiliations and get a new start in Newfoundland, is not the friendliest of novels at first. Why would you want to write a novel set in a far-north sinkhole of abuse and accidents, where every sky is steely and where the coffee tastes like wood and fish? Why would you want to spend your time, writing or reading or living, among these words?

But the answer is apparent once you reconcile yourself to the color scheme; Proulx’s writing is just that good. “Later, some knew it as a place that bred malefic spirits. Spring starvation showed skully heads, knobbed joings beneath flesh. What desperate work to stay alive, to scrob and claw through hard times. The alchemist sea changed fishermen into wet bones, sent boats to drift among the cod, cast them on the landwash. She remembered the stories in old mouths: the father who shot his oldest children and himself that the rest might live on flour scrapings…”

 Another bit that got me: “Quoyle thought of Partridge. He’d call him up that night. Tell him. What? That he could gut a cod while he talked about advertising space and printing cost? That he was wondering if love came in other colors than the basic black of none and the red heat of obsession?”

 A lot of good writers make you feel as if the story is happening as you read it. But to me, the slow, weird power of Annie Proulx’s style is that it makes you imagine not the story as told, but an untouchable, ineffable reality–separate from the story, which is just a retelling, vivid as it may be. You don’t understand the characters but you feel them to be real and unlike you as so many people are. If I was a gay cowboy, an accordion, or a Newfoundland fisherman, maybe I’d feel differently, but whatever–Annie Proulx is good.

Eragon, by Christopher Paolini

Two of my best friends here in the Peace Corps are avid fantasy readers. And while I’d peg quite a few of the people in the Peace Corps as fantasy readers–after all, this is an endeavor that ensures that for two years you will have nothing resembling a normal social life–my friends don’t very much seem like the type to go on dates to the Renaissance Fair, and thus I have lessened my scorn and have recently been asking them to educate me about fantasy books. This education was fruitless, as apparently all my stereotypes were correct, and fantasy books are all set in some vague medieval past and contain magic, elves, forests, swords, quests, wineskins of dew-water and what have you. I did read Redwall when I was little, and liked it. I have also read Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, although the latter shouldn’t count. But I am really not into this kind of thing.

 It was against my better judgment that I picked up Eragon from the Peace Corps library, but I saw John Malkovich on the cover (apparently he was in the movie adaptation) and that tipped the scales. I later learned from Wikipedia that Eragon the movie is the highest-grossing film with a dragon at its focal point–awesome–and that the book was the second-best-selling paperback of 2005. I then actually read the book and again, died of disappointment that something so boring became so popular. I don’t even want to explain how bad this book is. It was written by a fifteen-year-old, which is impressive, since when I was fifteen all I wrote were diary entries about how my cheerleading uniform was getting too tight. But it’s clunky and unoriginal and all I got out of it are the following observations.

 Page 480: “White mist wafted up from the water, like blood steaming in winter.” Oh. Good. How helpful, using something no one has ever seen before to explain something that everyone’s seen at least once. Also I never knew that white mist looks like STEAMING BLOOD.

 Page 671: “Plain black leather clothed her shapely frame, poor raiment for one so fair.” Yes, of course. Plain black leather, the ubiquitous peasant fabric of twelfth-century Imaginary Earth. The junction of fantasy books and sexual fantasies is something I hope to never begin to understand.

 Page 735, the glossary of “Ancient Words”: “Fethrblaka, eka weohnata neiat haina ono. Blaka eom iet lam. Bird, I will not harm you. Flap to my hand.” I… can’t possibly do justice to how funny this is on its own. FLAP TO MY HAND.

The Rule of Four, by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason

The Rule of Four is supposed to be a well-written version of the Da Vinci Code. This to me sounds extremely unappealing, but I get it–we like Dexter and Law and Order and Sudoku and all those things that allow us to “use our minds” without using them. This novel has been translated into 25 languages and in 2007 was the best-selling debut of the decade up to the point. Unfortunately, it’s super, super boring.

Before this becomes rude, I should say that it’s not horrible. You get the sense that these authors are probably aware of the things that denote good literature (where it appears to me that Dan Brown spent his formative literary period watching Nicolas Cage movies). But to be frank, my threshold for boring has sunk pretty low. These days, I can spend a fascinating two hours detailing my eyebrows. So the fact that this book made time slow down to a maple-syrup pace–not good.

The Rule of Four is about a book called the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Here is a nice sample of two sentences to start: “For it wasn’t the seals that would undo Rodrigo and Donato. It was the heavy black wax in which those seals had been pressed.” The series of riddles at the center of the story concern, naturally, a history-changing secret (I’ll give the authors credit that they didn’t try to set their stakes quite as high, and had the decency to leave Jesus and secret societies out of this), an “ingenious” code buried within this Renaissance text, some murders, and the inner workings of Princeton–this last being by far the most boring aspect of the book. At one point the narrator freaks out, with mixed metaphors, about a tradition where a bunch of sophomores streak in the snow (“Mere thoughts of the Nude Olympics usually lights a fire under the cold months of college, but this year, with Katie’s turn coming around, I’m more interested in keeping the home fires burning.”) I read that and I was like, bitch would’ve had an aneurysm at UVA.

The New York Times Book Review called this “the ultimate puzzle book.” I’ll admit that maybe I was too impatient to get into it, or too bored to try very hard, but that’s the book’s fault. Like I said, I’ve got a good attention span. To me this book’s most puzzle-like aspect was the fact that these authors completely lack the ability to combine words and spatial logic. Every time they describe a room, a building, a path, or kind of anything that has to do with space and direction–and there was a lot of that, considering that this was a mystery plot set at Princeton–I got the semi-pissed feeling that I used to get in level 9 of Tetris, like, I have no room for all this bullshit that doesn’t fit together and I’m trying my best, goddammit!

The Sportswriter, by Richard Ford

Most writers, I think, most fiction writers currently publishing, are reader’s writers. They’re inventive (J.K. Rowling), they’re snappy (Stieg Larssen), they tug at heartstrings (Nicholas Sparks, Jodi Picoult), they cater to idiots (Stephenie Meyer), whatever. They write so you’ll read faster. On the other hand, I think of writer’s writers as the ones who write so that you’ll read slower, which few people are interested in doing save those unfortunate people who want to understand how writing itself is done. And I can’t think of very many bestsellers or even moderately popular bits of recent literature whose authors I would categorize as writer’s writers.

Richard Ford is one of them. He’s not particularly recent (The Sportswriter was published in 1986, which makes it, like a lot of things, older than me), and he, like a lot of writer’s writers, is just as well known for short stories as for anything else. And it’s funny to me that the American short story canon, something that I freely and full-dork-ahead admit that I live for, might be just the thing that exposes people to writer’s writers and turns them into reader’s writers. The proliferation of creative writing programs, the sort of generic grooming process in which anyone with a brain can learn to churn out a narrative that is at least bearable–case in point, Water for Elephants, drafted in a month–it’s this that maybe gets people in a big hurry to publish something, and keeps them from ever becoming Richard Ford.

The Sportswriter is full of moderate genius and extreme delicacy. It’s set in New Jersey, a place that the narrator staunchly defends as being “literal”–an un-deceptive landscape that keeps him from getting too dreamy, a condition that visits upon him in times of crisis and has had unfortunate side effects like ending his marriage. The whole book unfolds along these two lines of literalism and dreaminess, as he remembers his past and tries to make it through an Easter weekend full of minor conflict. And the brilliant thing is that Ford’s writing itself seemed to me to be this amazing treatise on literalism and dreaminess and what they can mean together as a continuation of the realist tradition. To inhabit a moment, to expand it, to trace a character’s becoming heartsick and happy and angry and free during five minutes of watching his new girlfriend’s face move as she talks to him–I don’t know. Reading it, I wondered why more books can’t be like this, but as with anything singularly good, the answer is apparent: not many people have gifts like this.

Water for Elephants, by Sara Gruen

I had noticed this book popping up as required reading for some of the high schoolers that I tutored this fall–and they all grunted “It’s all right” in response to my asking how it was, which was a considerable step above the usual “Dunno, I thought you would have read it Jia”–so I felt favorably towards this little guy. It’s about the circus, which is cool, and it’s a bestseller. But then I looked it up and saw that Sara Gruen wrote it as part of National Novel Writing Month, something which I have ill feelings towards, and then saw that there’s an upcoming movie adaptation starring Robert Pattinson and Reese Witherspoon, which is just… unfortunate. And then I read it. And then it sucked.

I will proceed in “negative sandwich” form–positive, negative, positive–the Peace Corps-approved method for giving any sort of criticism. Pretty much any person who has ever gone through school, rush, voting, debate, or life of any sort will automatically give feedback like this and probably not have to give it a silly name. Except for me when I write book reviews, and the format basically goes–bullshit, bullshit, three sentences about the book. Sorry.

Positive about Water for Elephants: there must have been a lot of awesome research that went into this book. Depression-era circuses, interesting for sure. Negative: I’d a thousand times rather read the research than read this book. Positive: there are a few great pictures at the end of really cute girls in circus costumes.

Positive: this book is long but not boring. Negative: this book has not a stitch of original writing in it. Positive: this is a good book for people who read bad books or no books, and who are unnerved by original writing anyway.

Well, I’m out of positives, so I’ll just leave you with a taste of the skills of Sara Gruen. This is literally the first paragraph I saw upon reopening the book. “Her throat is delicate, her shoulders square. A few curls of light brown hair peek from beneath the brim of her hat. She kneels on a cushion to pray, and a vice grip tightens around my heart. I retreat from the church before I can further damage my soul.”

The Glass Castle, by Jeanette Walls

It’s now or never. Whether this is an inappropriate thematic connection or not, my much-delayed commencement of Peace Corps book reviewing is going to begin with The Glass Castle.

I had always intended to read this book, but I’ve been slightly scared of how so many memoirs seem to involve abuse (nearly always of the sexual sort) since the day when I was 8 and read all of A Child Called ‘It’ while I was waiting for my mom to pick out an appliance in Best Buy. (Does Best Buy still sell books? You know what I also read in Best Buy when I was little? A Night Without Armor, which is to say Jewel’s book of poetry. Not going to be reviewing that one.) Anyway, I’ve been putting this off, and I picked it up from the Peace Corps library with the knowledge that at some point, I would need something to remind me that my life doesn’t suck at all.

Which, up until just now, I was kind of thinking that it does. I mean, I have come to really love this country and I recognize that I’m in a position of privilege here (teachers make $30 a month in Kyrgyzstan, etc, etc). But things have been fairly stressful. I have seen more guns in this four months than I’ve ever seen before (and I’m from Texas) and than I ever care to see again. Half the volunteers left because of the violence and I spend 95% of the day in complete silence. WHICH IS ALL FINE until Peace Corps decides to ground me in my village until October because of an event that wouldn’t have gotten me a spanking at age seven. Ground me! The bitches.

So I was sitting around in the rain watching my hair fall out, monitoring my fever, and generally feeling real sorry for myself when then I decided. Buck up young lady, it’s time for The Glass Castle.

I’ve never read a less maudlin account of more maudlin events. The parents in this book are doubtlessly mentally ill–delusional, negligent, manic-depressive, purposefully homeless. They brainwash their children into thinking that life on the run, without food or warmth or shelter, is an adventure. From toddler age, their children raise themselves, provide for themselves; they get their mother a job as a teacher and correct her students’ tests because she can’t spell. The children aren’t allowed to say they’re hungry. Yet the book is a series of anecdotes strung on the strange fact that the parents do love their kids, and they do understand–perhaps because of their own past abuse and disenfranchisement–how resilience is an incredibly precious quality, and how it can last, and last, and last. Just like Jersey Shore ensured that I would never again call myself a waste of life, The Glass Castle has stopped up my complaining, for now if not for good.