Book Review: You Like it Darker

   By Stephen King

• Pub Date: 2024

• Genre: Short Stories

• Where I bought this book: Barnes & Nobel, Florence, Ky. 

• Why I bought this book: If you have to ask ...  

 *****

  

   Random thoughts that arose while reading King's latest collection. (May contain spoilers, but I tried to make them non-specific.)

    It's a collection of stories by Stephen King, so tropes will abound. But aliens? Aliens who save us? 

    Indeed, some of King's worst flaws -- overwriting, repetition, and echoes of and references to  previous tales -- abound and get a little tiresome after a while. An editor could fix that. Perhaps listen to her?

    Geography nitpick. If you live in Upper Manhattan, you cannot walk nine blocks to Central Park. 

    Too many of the stories centered around the fears and meanderings of an old white guy. (OK, some were about middle-aged white guys.)  Rattlesnakes, the sequel to Cujo, highlighted this trend. It went on and on and on and on -- and on and on -- sort of like the original. 

    The bizarre "I had a dream" alibi in the midst of a police procedural led by a bizarre police detective was, well, quite bizarre.

   Starting a story about a man named Finn (should have been Fionn) with a nod to the Pogues is brilliant.

     Laurie -- an oddly overly detailed story about an old man getting a dog -- may be the worst King story ever written. And yes, I believe I have read them all.  

     The final two stories, Dreamers and The Answer Man, are easily the best of the lot. They bumped the number of stars to the midpoint. 

    The title made little sense for this collection. I didn't find any of the stories particularly dark. King has written quite a few, but these don't measure up.

Book Review: The Glass Hotel

The Glass Hotel,  by Emily St. John Mandel

    If you're into historical fiction from the early 21st Century, have I got a book for you.

    This is the tale of Bernie Madoff, writ large. But it's a slow, meanadering narrative, wandering around Canada, New York, and the high seas before reaching its climax -- then ambling off again. And yet, its main character -- a lost, lonely soul who becomes the second wife of Madoff's stand-in, Jonathan Alkaitis -- is resilient and strong enough to sustain the trek. 

    

    We first meet Vincent as a 13-year-old girl living in the remote northern half of Vancouver Island with her aunt and half-brother. Her mother is recently dead, and Vincent's father is away at various jobs. In the beginning, we are led to believe her half-brother Paul is going to the driver of the story.

    But he mostly fades away as Vincent, through a series of coincidences, finds herself working as a hotel bartender, and meets Alkaitis. She eventually moves in with him, and becomes a citizen of what she calls the country of money. She is unaware of -- and doesn't particularly care -- how Alkaitis uses his financial acumen to become fabulously wealthy. But others do, and the walls come crashing down.

    Vincent moves on. She is, shall we say, adaptable. She is a wonderful character.

    I really liked this book, despite its flaws. It's a tale of money and power, which Vincent accepts but doesn't let rule her. The story is familiar for anyone who paid attention to the business world in the late aughts. But it's well told, with perspective from the participants and the victims of the scheme.

    Sadly, all of the other characters are mere vessels. A few are given life, but not enough that we know or care too much about them. Alkaitis has some interesting traits, and seems like a nice guy who doesn't take advantage of Vincent, and we know he has led an interesting life. But we are not told enough to care very much about him. He's pretty much a non-descript, corrupt businessman.

    And Paul seems rather pointless. He pops in and out of the story -- I suppose to let us know he's still around -- but his only other life is being a drug addict and a bad musician.

This Year in Books: 2019 Edition

My Best Books of 2019

I like to begin the year reading a favorite story about one of the greatest baseball players of all time. Roberto Clemente died New Year's Eve 1972 when he boarded a plane to take supplies to Nicaragua, which had been recently devastated by an earthquake. The plane crashed, killing the 38-year-old Clemente, the pilot, and three others.

Fifteen years later, writer W.P. Kinsella, working off the idea that Clemente's body had never been found, wrote "Searching for January," in which a tourist sees Clemente coming ashore in 1987. In a touch of magical realism, they discuss what happened and what might have been.

Ready for breakfast and the yearly reading of Kinsella's work.

OK, that's a long intro/aside to my first Year in Review blog post, featuring the best books I have read this year. According to my Goodreads profile, I read a book a week, which, according to one estimate I have seen, means I read about 50 pages a day. Sounds about right.

Anyway, of those, I have selected eight as my books of the year. Why eight, you ask? Why not, I respond.

So here were go.

The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek, by Kim Michele Robinson. This novel, about a WPA project that paid women to ride mules into the hollers of Eastern Kentucky, became one of my favorite of all time. The writing is extraordinary, vivid, and sensitive. Richardson reaches perfection in her use of dialect -- just the right amount to give flavor to the speech of the people, but never too much. In addition to her keen ear, Richardson has a keen heart and mind in creating and letting her characters live their lives. Full review.

The Bees, by Laline Paull. Paull gives us a hive of honeybees that are feminist, pro-labor, and loyal, and presents them to tell a story of love, hope, and commitment. It's a book not about bees, but about us. It's about how we are locked into a caste at birth and struggle mightily to escape. Full review.

Washington Black, by Esi Edugyan. With powerful and explosive writing, Edugyan tells the tale of George Washington Black, who begins life as a field slave on a plantation in Barbados in the 19th Century. From that beginning, she follows Wash through the United States, Canada, and England, as he tries to escape slavery and live the life of a freeman. But melancholy and a haunted, hunted existence follows him. Full review.

The Testaments, by Margaret Atwood. This is today's story of what happens in the years of The Handmaid's Tale and its government of Gilead. It is told in various voices, from a top aunt in the organization to members of the resistance. They include children, who only know Gilead after the revolution, as they are taught little about the previous life. It's an inspiring tale from a top-notch writer. Full review.

Elevation, by Stephen King. This is an unusually short Stephen King book, but it's also the ultimate Stephen King book. It has great characters in a great story that's well written, with a little supernatural sprinkled in. It's a short novel packed with intensity and issues. Full review.

Unsheltered, by Barbara Kingsolver. Kingsolver melds past and present into a sentimental yet unsparing tale, exploring how our present determines our future and influences interpretations of the past. In her literate prose, with a gift for the narrative of empathy and understanding, Kingsolver touches on what moves us all -- our family, our homes, our beliefs, and our hopes for the futures. Full review

Night Boat to Tangier, by Kevin Barry. In the long, extraordinary history of great Irish writers, Barry is finding himself among the elite. Night Boat tells about  two old Irish drug dealers and wanderers, who have made it good, then lost most of it. As they wait in a Spanish port for one character's daughter, Barry tells their story in writing that is ravishingly beautiful. He makes every word count, and causes you to use your five senses to take it all in. Full review.

Music Love Drugs War, by Geraldine Quigley. Quigley introduces us to a group of young friends and acquaintances in Derry, Northern Ireland, at the start of the 1980s. Most of them are in their late teens and on the cusp of adulthood, but unsure of their futures. They live in a city where jobs are scarce, the violence can be thick, and the hope can be slim. Their pleasures lie in drugs, music, and each other. Their fears and realities lie in the violent struggle that has engulfed Ireland for 400 years. Full review.

Book Review: Going the Distance

Going the Distance: The Life and Works of W.P. Kinsella, by William Steele

Kinsella's life was successful, yet uneven. The same can be said for this biography.

For starters, it was filled with too much minutia. I do not need to know about every date Kinsella went on in high school, nor every address where he lived.

Instead, I would have liked more information about the reviews and responses to Kinsella's works, especially the debate about the fiction he wrote in the voice of indigenous people. The view that Kinsella was guilty of cultural appropriation grew throughout his life -- particularly as he became more popular for his other works -- but was treated as an afterthought in the book, spread out amidst the pages, rather than as an idea that should have been evaluated as a specific criticism of a portion of his work.

Perhaps the structure of the biography dictated how it was handled. Instead of categorical breakdown, it was written in a strict chronological order.

Still, the book presented a wealth of information about Kinsella's life and writings. He set his goal on being a writer at an early age, and despite feeling hampered and discouraged throughout those early years, made good on his goal. The book also showed how incidents in Kinsella's upbringing on an isolated farm outside of Edmonton, Canada, affected his prose. He used other experiences in his life in his stories and novels, but denied his works were biographical. Again, this issue could have been explored in a chapter, instead of interspersed in the book.

Kinsella, who died of assisted suicide in 2016, also had a disjointed private life. He hated most of his early government jobs, because he hated government and bureaucracy. He became a university professor for a span, but for the most part, he hated teaching. He hated all forms of religion, but his description of religious people could mirror a description of himself.

"... (T)here is a smugness about every one of them, a condescending sense of superiority, which the more they try to hide it, the more it shows."

The book is at its best when it explores Kinsella's growth as a writer. That may be because the growth went along Kinsella's timeline -- for the most part, he got better as he grew older and more experienced.

He was a prolific writer, often having five or more stories and books in process. He often would expand his short stories into novels -- a criticism by people who thought he was unduly padding out his stories -- but one that I would argue produced some of his best work. Shoeless Joe, for instance, started out as a short short, then a novel, and later became the movie Field of Dreams.

Steele spends a lot of time describing how the book traveled its path and grew into a cultural touchstone. He also discussed the impact it had on Kinsella and his life as a writer.

Kinsella's death in 2016 came as a shock, but his health had long been poor, and he went out as he wanted. He spurned life-extending measures that would have caused much pain and suffering, and choose to end his own life.