Truman Brown
The poems from this collection are simply beautiful. Michael's work in After Earth doesn't conform to modern convention—rather, his poems seems to unfold in language and style that feels natural and familiar, as if it's been with (and part of) us all along, yet never captured on paper until now.
Too difficult to pick just one favorite, but below are the titles of some of my top selections.
Instead of a Lullaby
Andromache's Lullaby
Coda
The Task
Will Exult over You with Loud Singing
Patmos Revisited
Invective against Stars
The Rustle of Hemlock
That to Philosophize Is to Learn to Die
Favorite passage:
(only selected this one because it's a beautiful sonnet and short enough to fit here)
Coda
From the garden rose the sound of bees
that lurched and wobbled through the peonies.
We ate eggs and toast with milk that warmed
in minutes in the sun while fat drones swarmed
and looped like bullets misfired from the fields.
It was the sound the mind makes when it yields
to glutted blood. I didn't understand,
until one smelled the syrup on your hand,
and in a gold-encrusted drunken strut,
smeared pollen from its mandibles and gut
along your wrist. That morning you had tied
your hair, and as you rose and ran inside,
it gently bounced, and loosed, and then unfurled.
If the next is better, I'll still miss this world.
Annie Dillard's Holy the Firm is a uniquely pleasant and simultaneously jarring read. The language and imagery pays a graceful homage to earth—nature—and life, while stringing along with it a loose narrative of thought that braves questions and ideas too large for promise of a single answer.
Favorite passage:
Part 3, Holy the Firm
“I see a hundred insects moving across the air, rising and falling. Chipped notes of birdsong descend from the trees, tuneful and broken; the notes pile about me like leaves. Why do these molded clouds make themselves overhead innocently changing, trailing their flat blue shadows up and down everything, and passing, and gone? Ladies and gentlemen! You are given insects, and birdsong, and a replenishing series of clouds. The air is buoyant and wholly transparent, scoured by grasses. The earth stuck through it is noisome, lighted, and salt. Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand in his holy place? ‘Whom shall I send,' heard the first Isaiah, ‘and who will go for us?' And poor Isaiah, who happened to be standing there-and there was no one else— burst out, ‘Here am I; send me.'”
“Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed”
Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop is a beautiful narrative on the beginnings of westward expansion in U.S. It follows the journey and friendship of Bishop Jean Marie Latour and his vicar, Father Joseph Vaillant as they organize a new Catholic diocese in New Mexico. Though the novel lacks a strong plot line, Cather's ability to effortlessly immerse the reader into a new world with her striking imagery, practical authenticity, and brilliant storytelling, makes this book well worth the read.
Favorite passage:
[Book I - The Vicar Apostalic - Chapter IV]
“‘Where there is great love there are always miracles,' he said at length. ‘One might almost say that an apparition is human vision corrected by divine love. I do not see you as you really are, Joseph; I see you through my affection for you. The Miracles of the Church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.'”
I think what I enjoyed most about this book (warranting a 4-star rating, rather than 3) was the writing. Andrew Greer is very talented, especially in his ability to capture the unique and authentic voice of the protagonist. I enjoyed the wit and humor that peppered nearly every page without sounding overly forced.
Also, Arthur Less is just the most relatable guy ever. Peak imposter syndrome struggles; aversion to any change; hopeless romantic. Loved the relatability and rawness of the main character.
Ultimately, the plot took a little longer than it needed to (could have ended about 100 pages earlier) and I disliked the cliche ending. Cut the plot of the last 10 pages and it would have left a much stronger impact. Break the garden wall, The End. I understand that Greer likely ended the book the way he did so as to drive what he envisioned for book #2, but that was just a poor choice of direction in my opinion.
Favorite passage:
Chapter 7 “Less Indian”
“It was nothing like he expected, the sun flirting with him among the trees and houses; the driver speeding along a crumbling road alongside which trash was piled as if washed there (and what first looked like a beach beside a river turned out to be an accretion of a million plastic bags, as a coral reef is an accretion of a million tiny animals); the endless series of shops, as if made from one continuous concrete barrier, painted at intervals with different signs advertising chickens and medicine, coffins and telephones, pet fish and cigarettes, hot tea and “homely” food, Communism, mattresses, handicrafts, Chinese food, haircuts and dumbbells and gold by the ounce; the low, flat temples appearing at regular intervals like the colorful, elaborately frosted, but basically inedible sheet cakes displayed at Less's childhood bakery; the women sitting roadside with baskets of shimmering silver fish, terrifying manta rays, and squid, with their cartoon eyes; the countless men standing at tea shops, variety stores, pharmacies, watching Less as he goes by; the driver dodging bicycles, motorcycles, lorries (but few cars), moving frenetically in and out of traffic, bringing Less back to the time at Disney World when his mother led him and his sister to a whimsical ride based on The Wind in the Willows—a ride that turned out to be a knuckle-whitening rattletrap wellspring of trauma. Nothing, nothing here, is what he expected.”
The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey
An aging couple receives their lifelong dream of raising a child, but with a twist—this child belongs to the snow.
Jack and Mabel, an old, childless couple, move to the Alaskan wilderness to start a homestead on their own. They've just buried their newborn and their grief has become immobilizing; they hope a change in scenery will help them move on. As their silent grief slowly tears the two apart, the first Alaskan winter hits, bringing a deep snowfall with it, and Jack and Mabel come together to build a little snow-child in the yard. They lovingly shape a young face with stark features, dressing it with coat, scarf, hat, and gloves, a wild berry to stain the lips deep red. The next morning, their little snow-child has disappeared, taking the winter clothing with it and leaving only mysterious footprints in the snow. After that day, Jack and Mabel catch glimpses of a young girl in the forest wearing the same winter clothes and eventually build trust with her and raise her as their own. They learn her real name—Faina—and attempt to accept her mystical relationship with the forest and snow. Faina comes and goes with winter, staying only until the first signs of Spring. Mable and Jack plead with the young girl to live with them at their homestead, stay through the summer, and go to school like a normal girl, but Faina refuses with determination and conviction to remain a child of the snow. This conflict continues throughout the rest of the book and only runs into complications when Faina starts to befriend and fall in love with a young boy from the neighboring homestead.
Eowyn Ivey writes with beautiful imagery that pulls the reader into the world of the Alaskan frontier, while also providing a nearness with the characters by writing through several of their perspectives. The plot is filled with multiple elements of magical realism that leave a lasting impact on the reader. The main characters of the story, Mabel and Jack, struggle themselves to accept the mystical elements that their snow child exhibits. Faina thrives in extremely cold temperatures, lives perfectly fine on her own in the wild, snowflakes don't melt when she touches them, she comes and goes with winter—all these elements and more are expertly interwoven within reality to make the characters and the reader view the lines between the mystical and real as increasingly blurred. This book will have you invested at every page and leave you with a new vision of the world and family—a must-read.
Ivey does such a great job bringing the mystery and natural magical realism of Alaska to her readers. This book is quite a different experience than The Snow Child (which I did enjoy more), but I thoroughly enjoyed the medium in which this one is told (entirely through letters, journal entries, newspaper reports, etc) and was easily drawn in to the story throughout the entire read.
Favorite passage:
page. 138
“There is a mythical element to our childhood, it seems, that stays with us always. When we are young, we consume the world in great gulps, and it consumes us, and everything is mysterious and alive and fills us with desire and wonder, fear, and guilt. With the passing of the years, however, those memories become distant and malleable, and we shape them into the stories of who we are. We are brave, or we are cowardly. We are loving, or we are cruel.”
Predictably quaint, Fredrik Backman's A Man Called Ove is worth a read at least once in your life, and at worst will inspire you to check in on your neighbors, your grandparents, and the stray cat in your yard.
Robert Frost claimed that one of the most important rules of good writing is to be surprised in your own work; “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” For me, this is the only problem with A Man Called Ove—it is almost too predictable. The book was heartwarming and maybe even eye-opening, but it lacked an element of unpredictability that would have added to its candid charm.
Favorite passage:
[Chapter 30, pg. 305-06]
“‘Loving someone is like moving into a house,' Sonja used to say. ‘At first you fall in love with all the new things, amazed every morning that all this belongs to you, as if fearing that someone would suddenly come rushing in through the door to explain that a terrible mistake had been made, you were actually supposed to live in a wonderful place like this. Then over the years the walls become weathered, the wood splinters here and there, and you start to love that house not so much because of all its perfection, but rather for its imperfections. You get to know all the nooks and crannies. How to avoid getting the key caught in the lock when it's cold outside. Which of the floorboards flex slightly when one steps on them or exactly how to open the wardrobe doors without them creaking. These are the little secrets that make it your home.'”
A gentle masterpiece that doesn't beg for attention, My Ántonia is a transformative experience bringing each reader back to its pages again and again.
To write well, and simply, is a remarkable accomplishment. Even greater is the ability to capture both the complex and simple without disrupting the reader. In her novel, My Ántonia, Willa Cather finds a simplicity beyond complexity that envelops the reader in pure, untainted life. Cather brings the rugged beauty of untamed Nebraska into the hands and hearts of every reader, leaving each entirely happy and complete. For “...that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”
Favorite passage:
[Book II - The Hired Girls - Part XIV]
...
“We sat looking off across the country, watching the sun go down. The curly grass about us was on fire now. The bark of the oaks turned red as copper. There was a shimmer of gold on the brown river. Out in the stream the sandbars glittered like glass, and the light trembled in the willow thickets as if little flames were leaping among them. The breeze sank to stillness. In the ravine a ringdove mourned plaintively, and somewhere off in the bushes an owl hooted. The girls sat listless, leaning against each other. The long fingers of the sun touched their foreheads.
“Presently we saw a curious thing: There were no clouds, the sun was going down in a limpid, gold-washed sky. Just as the lower edge of the red disk rested on the high fields against the horizon, a great black figure suddenly appeared on the face of the sun. We sprang to our feet, straining our eyes toward it. In a moment we realized what it was. On some upland farm, a plough had been left standing in the field. The sun was sinking just behind it. Magnified across the distance by the horizontal light, it stood out against the sun, was exactly contained within the circle of the disk; the handles, the tongue, the share–black against the molten red. There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun.
“Even while we whispered about it, our vision disappeared; the ball dropped and dropped until the red tip went beneath the earth. The fields below us were dark, the sky was growing pale, and that forgotten plough had sunk back to its own littleness somewhere on the prairie.”
I read this small book before bed and then couldn't sleep the rest of the night. The contemplation of eternity is always daunting, but Steven L. Peck's work here made this a truly visceral experience for me, despite it even being a finite “eternity” driving the main premise of the book (see excerpt below).
Definitely worth a read if you can stomach a “short stay in hell” during your read.
Favorite passage:
“Could I keep living like this forever? How could I continue existing in this Hell? And yet there was no choice. Existence goes on and on here. Finite does not mean much if you can't tell any practical difference between it and infinite. Every morning the despair gripped me, a cold despair that reached inside, creating a catatonic numbness.”
Housekeeping was hauntingly beautiful. I was moved at every page and impressed with Robinson's ability to take such control of the reader throughout. The book felt like the kind of overcast day that blocks all color from even sunset and sunrise—yet I found myself wanting to experience more and more of it, despite its dark tone.
Favorite passage:
Chapter 2, page 34
The town itself seemed a negligible thing from such a distance. Were it not for the clutter on the shore, the flames and the tremulous pillars of heat that stood above the barrels, and of course the skaters who swooped and sailed and made bright, brave sounds, it would have been possible not to notice the town at all. The mountains that stood up behind it were covered with snow and hidden in the white sky, and the lake was sealed and hidden, yet their eclipse had not made the town more prominent. Indeed, where we were we could feel the reach of the lake far behind us, and far beyond us on either side, in a spacious silence that seemed to ring like glass.
Adam Johnson's The Orphan Master's Son, is a creative telling and interpretation of what life may be like in the DPRK. As not much is known about the day-to-day lives of the North Koreans, Johnson sensibly weaves enough fictionality (loosely based on real experience) to communicate to the reader one person's interpretation of life in the DPRK, rather than attempting to communicate it as fact.
While many aspects of the book led to my “mildly-disappointed” 2-star rating, my strongest dislikes came from 1) a lack of strong, authentic voice, 2) an overly congested plot line, and 3) an emphasis on corruption in the DPRK with no “normalcy” to balance it out—a missing theme that could have provided meaningful dissonance when pinned against the symptoms of dystopian decay.
Favorite passage:
“‘A name isn't a person,' Ga said. ‘Don't ever remember someone by their name. To keep someone alive, you put them inside you, you put their face on your heart. Then, no matter where you are, they're always with you because they're a part of you.' He put his hands on their shoulders. ‘It's you that matter, not your names. It's the two of you I'll never forget.'”
Unprecedented in its time, Kathrine Kressmann Taylor's Address Unknown is a remarkable literary accomplishment. A stunning novella told solely through letters between Max Eisenstein, a German-American Jew living in California, and his friend and business partner, Martin Schulse, who recently relocated to Germany with his family during the rise of Nazism. A strong message, well-structured and brilliantly concluded, is well worth the quick read.
Favorite passage:
“Max, I think in many ways Hitler is good for Germany, but I am not sure.
He is now the active head of the government. I doubt much that even Hindenburg could now remove him from power, as he was truly forced to place him there. The man is like an electric shock, strong as only a great orator and a zealot can be. But I ask myself, is he quite sane? His brown shirt troops are of the rabble. They pillage and have started a bad Jew-baiting. But these may be minor things, the little surface scum when a big movement boils up. For I tell you, my friend, there is a surge — a surge. The people everywhere have had a quickening. You feel it in the streets and shops. The old despair has been thrown aside like a forgotten coat. No longer the people wrap themselves in shame; they hope again.
Perhaps there may be found an end to this poverty. Something, I do not know what, will happen. A leader is found! Yet cautiously to myself I ask, a leader to where? Despair overthrown often turns us in mad directiodns.”
William Faulkner's Light in August is a sobering, yet beautiful, story surrounding the complexities of human nature and human identity. The novel captures glimpses within the lives of Lena Grove, Byron Bunch, Joe Christmas, and Rev. Gail Hightower as they navigate their unique, yet somehow universal, struggles. Faulkner masterfully highlights the complexity of human nature—the pull of the self-possessed and calm, pitted against the frantic, delirious, and uncontrolled. The constant battle of both, and the hopefulness that springs from the one overcoming the other, flows through every page.
Revered as one of the greatest authors in all literature, Faulkner's work alone in these 500-some-odd pages clearly sets him apart. The turn of the last page will have you wishing for the first, again and again.
Favorite passage:
[Chapter 20]
“In the lambent suspension of August into which night is about to fully come, it seems to engender and surround itself with a faint glow like a halo. The halo is full of faces. The faces are not shaped with suffering, not shaped with anything; not horror, pain, not even reproach. They are peaceful, as though they have escaped into an apotheosis; his own is among them. In fact, they all look a little alike, composite of all the faces which he has ever seen. But he can distinguish them one from another: his wife's; townspeople, members of that congregation which denied him, which had met him at the station that day with eagerness and hunger; Byron Bunch's; the woman with the child; and that of the man called Christmas.”
~ Rev. Gail Hightower