January in Review

Boy, am I running behind. Blame it on February being a short month....

First of all, I "re-listened" to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. If you don't already know what a genius Jim Dale is, then I'm not sure I have anything else to say to you!

New Year's Day, my husband allowed me to be a complete slug, and I sat in a chair by the stove with a mug of cider and a cat and ripped through Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I thought it was great. Nothing groundbreaking, I don't suppose, but it's what thrillers used to be back when James Patterson was still writing his own books. It's a good, solid story, carefully built with interesting characters, and I was hooked from the beginning, which is saying something, since Larsson launches the story with some corporate espionage/fraud. (Sorry, that's just me, but I need bodies - missing jewels, industrial spies, and military plots don't cut it.) It was a pleasure to read; not a literary novel, perhaps, but a strong story told well. I'm saddened to learn Larsson only left us with three before his untimely death.

Seems it was a month of good stories, or started that way. I moved on to Hannah Tinti's The Good Thief after that. I'm a little concerned that it's being billed as historical, because the historical details were hazy and sketchy enough that even someone with a decent grasp of early American history and material culture would have had a hard time placing the story definitively. But that's because it's a story! An orphan who lost his hand, a stranger with questionable motives, giants, dwarves, brawls - this has it all. Reading Tinti's debut tale was like sitting around the fire, listening to a storyteller spin a yarn with odd characters, larger-than-life adventure, and spellbinding twists and turns. It might say everything about this novel to say that I kept picturing it in my mind as a terrific project for Tim Burton....

After that I picked up Bottomless Belly Button, the graphic novel by Dash Shaw. This was my first graphic novel, or at least my first graphic novel that was more about "novel" and less about "graphic." It was a good choice, because although I've not exactly been converted to a graphic novel fanatic, it was an introduction to the subtleties that the medium can convey. In the right hands, I can see that it's a beautiful blending of books and film - delicate emotions and nebulous events that don't always translate well in either format (your book would be too wordy and your movie would have no plot) are dealt with so well here. It's actually the opposite of a story in some ways, more like little glimpses of how a family deals with the end of a story, and at the end, I realized it could only have been done justice as a graphic novel. Which is, I suppose, as it should be.

At this point, I took a brief break from my "best of 2008" lists to catch up with Linda Fairstein's Alexandra Cooper series in Killer Heat. What can I say? Linda Fairstein. If you've read one, you've read them all, and if you've read them all, odds are they've stewed into a composite novel in your head. Body, investigation, turbulent relationship with Mike Chapman, danger in isolated historic New York spot, and a last-minute rescue and resolution. Acceptable way to kill a little time, and her newest release, Lethal Legacy, takes place in the New York Public Library, so I had to get caught up for that!

Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout's latest, was another "best of" title that I picked up, and I'm glad I did. "Gentle" might be a good word for the story, but not for the character. Olive is brusque, loving, cold, passionate - she's just a human, a normal person, who if treated as a survey topic would probably have an even smattering of responses in the love, like, dislike, and hate columns. She's us - average people who have good days and bad, who occasionally does something right, occasionally does something mean, and as often as not does one or the other completely unwittingly. All of that averages out to the human experience, and Strout's work is almost like a series of short stories, many NOT from Olive's point of view, that are strung together to give us a picture of who she is at some of her best and worst moments. It's almost as if a camera crew followed her around for her whole life, collecting bits and pieces that were edited together by someone with a well-balanced sense of things. You like Olive Kitteridge, not because she's likeable, but because she's very human, and we can all identify with her fits of generosity and viciousness.

After that literary pause, I took a complete turn off the beaten path and picked up Daniel Everett's Don't Sleep, There are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle. I liked it, I think, although in some ways there are two works here - an anthropological one and a linguistic one, and they might have been better served by actually being two books. I fell into the anthropological track, and I felt jolted about quite a bit when late in the work the writing shifted to a more technical linguistic discussion, but regardless, the Piedans are people worth getting to know. They are truly unlike any other group of people I've ever read or heard of - they don't import knowledge, they have a remarkably simple language, and they seem to be so unconcerned with the distant past that their language doesn't even allow for a discussion of it. Everett raises a philosophical question - are we who we are because of our language or is our language what it is because of who we are? A "chicken or egg" question, one that leads you to wonder if a culture doesn't have war because their language wouldn't allow for the expression of it or if their language doesn't allow for the expression of war because they've never had one. Fascinating, but ultimately, not quite fulfilling. Perhaps I just need to go find a linguist to quiz at length to satisfy my curiosity....