5 posts tagged “george saunders”

I already wrote the Stuff I've Been Reading post for May, but then I accidentally went and read three more books before the month ended.  There are still a couple days left before June begins--and I suppose I could read another book over the weekend--but I've seen into the future and I know that I'm not going to get any reading done in the next couple days.  I'm going to watch the entire second season of The Doctor House Show.  I'm also going to drink a lot of iced coffees and maybe go to the record store.  But anyway, here are three more books for the month of May: 

In Persuasion Nation--George Saunders
In Persuasion Nation is the third short story collection by real life genius, George Saunders.  All three of his collections make for fantastic, enjoyable reading, but In Persuasion Nation didn't impress me as much as Pastoralia and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline did.  I actually found one of the stories to be a bit on the boring side.  "Commcomm" was still better than most short stories written by other authors, but it definitely stood out as one of Saunders' weakest efforts.  The fact that it was the last story in the collection sort of colored my opinion of the book as a whole.

Of course, I am willing to admit that I might've just missed the point of "Commcomm".  George Saunders is, after all, a real life genius.  I am not.  I was supposed to be one, but it turns out that I was misdiagnosed.

Breaking & Entering--Joy Williams
Breaking & Entering had an intriguing synopsis and sounded like an interesting book.  Who wouldn't want to read about a young married couple who drift around Florida breaking into vacation homes?  Willie and Liberty live in the homes for a few days and then move on.  That sounds like fun, right?  That sounds like a worthwhile read.

Nah, the couple only broke into two homes and the rest of the book was downright snoozy.  Most of the time they just sat around with their freaky white dog and thought about their depressing lives.  Willie was pompous and everything he said sounded like it came out of a fortune cookie.  Liberty couldn't get over the fact that her parents abandoned her when she was a kid.  There was some stuff about retardation, animal mutilation, abortion, and suicide.  Depressing.  And then they broke into a house and met a 75 year-old female bodybuilder.  Willie disappeared near the end of the book and I have no idea what happened to him.  Then a minor character got stabbed and that was it.

I found Breaking & Entering on the $2 shelf.  Now I know why.   

Serious Drawings--Marc Johns
Marc Johns is a Canadian artist who used to be on Vox as Draw.  He dumped his Vox blog earlier this year in favor of his own fancypants website.  (It's worth a look, and unlike Vox, you don't have to wade through tons of smut and spam to get to the good stuff.)  I bought a couple of Marc's ink & watercolors back in the Vox days, so I had to buy a copy of his new book to see if either of my purchases made the cut.  I'm happy to say that "Shoot the Rabbit" is on page 59 of Serious Drawings.  Of course, that's just a printed representation of the original.  The real one is sitting on a shelf in my room.  I feel like such a hip art collector now.  I think I'm going to start smoking a pipe.  Or maybe I'll get some of those big hoops and stick them in my earlobes.  Maybe I'll do both.

But anyway, Marc Johns is great and his book is definitely worth picking up.  It's super cheap on Amazon, but if you buy a copy directly from the artist, he might scribble something arty on the front page.

I usually have brief reviews and cover art for each of the books that appear in the "BOOKS READ" section.  I'm too lazy to write much of anything right now, but I wanted to post this today so it would appear in 2008 instead of 2009.  I'll probably eventually get around to writing about each of the books (for completion's sake), but I have no idea when that'll be.  Come back later if you must know my thoughts on The Railway Children, etc.  Until then, here's what I have so far.

BOOKS ACQUIRED:
(* = Christmas gift)

• Harold Lloyd's Hollywood Nudes in 3-D!--Suzanne Lloyd
• McSweeney's #29--Dave Eggers (editor)
• Star Wars: Shipyards of Doom--Henry Gilroy
• The Pulchritudinous Review--Renee Zepeda (editor)
• Ulysses--James Joyce
• Cloud Atlas--David Mitchell
• Betty Page Confidential--Bunny Yeager*
• Bettie Page: The Life of a Pin-up Legend--James L. Swanson & Karen Essex*
• The Magic Mountain--Thomas Mann*
• The Walking Dead, Book 3--Robert Kirkman*
• The Walking Dead, Book 4--Robert Kirkman*
• An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories: Volume 1--Ivan Brunetti (editor)*
• An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories: Volume 2--Ivan Brunetti (editor)*
• From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweller--E.L. Konigsburg
• The Passion--Jeanette Winterson
• The Master and Margarita--Mikhail Bulgakov

BOOKS READ:
Stories in the Worst Way--Gary Lutz
I don't know what to make of Gary Lutz.  Some of his sentences--even some of his paragraphs--are brilliant, but he never once carries that brilliance through an entire story.  Just when they start to get interesting, the stories abruptly end with a completely random image or comment.  Not one of these stories features characters with names doing anything meaningful or progressing through anything that even slightly resembles a plot.  Someday there will be a robot that writes short stories.  It will eventually put the human writers out of business.  It's going to take awhile for the robot to work out all the kinks, though.  I'm pretty sure its early rough drafts are going to read like the stories of Gary Lutz...all literary trickery and no soul.

The Dain Curse/The Glass Key--Dashiell Hammett
The Dain Curse and The Glass Key were my third and fourth Dashiell Hammett novels of 2008.  To be completely honest, the four books have mixed-up in my mind with The Maltese Falcon (which I read a couple years ago) to form one big, hard-boiled detective novel full of opium, jewel heists, violence, and murder.  All the plotlines and characters are muddled together, and I can't remember what happened in which book.  Regarding The Dain Curse, all I can remember is that it started off with the Continental Op investigating some missing diamonds.  Before long, he's looking into the Scientologists or some such nonsense.  Of the five novels, it's probably my favorite.

As far as The Glass Key goes, I think it's safe to say that the Coen brothers were inspired by it when they made Miller's Crossing.  When I say they were "inspired by it", what I really mean is that they blatantly ripped it off.  That's fine with me, though, as their movie is much better than Hammett's book.   

Star Wars: Shipyards of Doom--Henry Gilroy
This little comic book came as a bonus with the special edition of the Star Wars: The Clone Wars DVD.  The sole purpose of the comic (and the movie) is to convince today's children that in a galaxy far, far away, there once lived a clone trooper named Rex who ran around without a helmet and shot up droids with a pair of pistols.

The Railway Children--E. Nesbit
This is a children's book originally published in 1906.  It's about three young siblings who move to the English countryside with their mother after their father mysteriously disappears.  The family no longer has the money it once had, so the children have to find ways to entertain themselves that don't involve the expensive toys they had back in London.  The local railway station becomes their playground.  I know it sounds unsafe, but I guess children were allowed to play on and around trains back then.  The kids make friends with the locals and have numerous train-related adventures.  It's not all fun and games, though.  In the back of their minds, they're wondering what happened to their father and if he'll ever return to them.

Chapter 11 didn't make any sense to me, but the rest of the book was first-rate.  I'm not sure if today's children would be interested in this book, but I would highly recommend it to adult readers with an interest in children's literature.

McSweeney's #29--Dave Eggers (editor)
Taken as a whole, this was one of the best McSweeney's in recent memory.  Highlights included "It's Nice When Someone Is Excited to Hear from You" by Brian Baise and "The Land of Our Enemies" by Nathaniel Minton.  I also enjoyed "The Painting" by Roddy Doyle.  The best short story in the book was "A Record of Our Debts" by Laura Hendrix.  It's about a town dying of a mysterious illness that seems to have originated with a little girl.  The story featured one of the best sentences I've read in a long time.  Here it is:

Lon shuffles his feet as we walk.  I have always admired his gait, and though to some it might make him look ill or lame, I love the look of it, the lines his toe drags in the dusty road, so that when we walk together and I look behind us I can see the proof of where we have been.

Unfortunately, some of the book didn't meet the standard set by Laura Hendrix and the other authors I've mentioned.  One story was so bad that I would feel remiss in my duties as a half-assed book reviewer if I didn't point it out.  I am referring to "My Crush on Hilary Duff" by Blaze Ginsberg.  With the possible exception of the story David Foster Wallace published under pseudonym, "My Crush on Hilary Duff" is the biggest waste of paper in the history of McSweeney's.  I'm guessing Dave Eggers lost a bet.  

The Braindead Megaphone--George Saunders
I'm not usually a big non-fiction reader, but I decided to give The Braindead Megaphone a try because I love the short stories of George Saunders and the collection came highly recommended by people I respect.  Although a couple of the essays fell short (specifically "A Survey of the Literature") most everything in the book was interesting and well worth reading.

I got the most reading enjoyment out of Saunders' travel writings, but the best essay in the collection was probably the one that opened the book.  I am, of course, talking about "The Braindead Megaphone", the twenty page media-skewering essay that gave the book its name.  I would like to officially declare that everyone who works in the field of news media should be required to read that one essay.  Maybe then the talking heads and those who pull their strings would think twice about the quality of the stories and the manner in which they try to pass them off on the public.  Oh, and everyone in government should also be required to read the same essay... just so they could contemplate this line:

The shortfall between the imagined and the real, multiplied by the violence of one's intent, equals the evil one will do.

Wrap your chimpanzee brain around that one, W.  

The Lottery and Other Stories--Shirley Jackson
This collection was called The Lottery and Other Stories and that's really a good way to look at it...in two parts.  The first part is "The Lottery", a spooky story that was supposedly shocking when it was first published in 1948.  I found it to be a bit on the predictable side.  Once the boys started gathering rocks (on the first page), I could see how things were going to end for the lottery's "winner".  Not much there.

Fortunately, the "Other Stories" part of the collection was consistently better than "The Lottery" itself.  Although Shirley Jackson's reputation was made by "The Lottery", I much preferred her non-spooky tales.   

So Long, See You Tomorrow--William Maxwell
In William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow, the elderly narrator looks back on a murder that took place in his neighborhood when he was a child.  Although he knows the ramifications of what happened, he doesn't really know much about about the actual murder itself.  In an attempt to come to terms with the murder and the effect it had on his own life, he imagines the events that led up to it.

So Long, See You Tomorrow won the American Book Award in 1980 (not to be confused with the more prestigious National Book Award).  It must've been a slow year as the book seemed to me like a slightly less enjoyable Kent Haruf novel.  It's a good book, but nothing special.

Harold Lloyd's Hollywood Nudes in 3-D!--Suzanne Lloyd
I bought this book solely for the pictures in the chapter entitled "Jiggle All the Way".  I've always had a thing for women dressed up in red velvet and white fur trim.  I'm festive that way and don't feel the need to apologize.

CURRENTLY READING:

• From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweller--E.L. Konigsburg

[UPDATE: I eventually finished this post on 1/2/09.]

The first two books I read in November were The Best American Comics 2008 and A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley.  My reviews for those two books can be found here.  This post covers the rest of my book-related activities for the month.

BOOKS ACQUIRED:

• The Lottery and Other Stories--Shirley Jackson
• Stories in the Worst Way--Gary Lutz
• So Long, See You Tomorrow--William Maxwell
• Parade's End--Ford Madox Ford
• The Railway Children--E. Nesbit
• The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil--George Saunders
• #$@&!: The Official Lloyd Llewellyn Collection--Daniel Clowes
• Peepshow: 1950s Pin-ups in 3-D--Bunny Yeager

BOOKS READ:

Knockemstiff--Donald Ray Pollock

Donald Ray Pollock is from the real town of Knockemstiff, Ohio.  His first book is a series of 18 short stories featuring a group of interrelated characters from the town.  Most of the characters have issues.  There are alcoholics, drug addicts, prostitutes, and down-on-their-luck losers.  Most of the individual stories are worth reading, but I came away from the book with a feeling of disappointment.  My complaint about Knockemstiff is that it didn't feel like there was any progression to what I was reading.  With the exception of the first and last stories, just about everything in this book could've been read in any order.  I usually don't have an issue with that in a short story collection, but this book featured related characters and I think it would've been more powerful if the book had been designed in a way that it told a larger story.

I don't even know what that means.  Maybe I'm just jealous of Donald Ray Pollock because I wasted a good chunk of my life trying to write a similar book about a group of interrelated losers from Ohio.  Pollock actually finished his book and it's far better than anything I could've ever come up with.  (And I just ended the previous sentence with "with".  I think that's against the rules.  And I just started a sentence with "and".  I'm pretty sure that's against the rules, too.  I actually did that one twice.  Dang.) 

What We Won't Do--Brock Clarke

One of the highlights of Brock Clarke's collection was a story called "She Loved to Cook but Not Like This".  The last line in the story was:

And since I was lonely and scared of repeating myself and sick at the thought of telling, revising, retelling this story of my life, I promised to never tell it again, and this is the last time.

Of course, Brock Clarke later went on to rewrite and expand this short story into the novel, An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England.  I wish he'd taken his own advice and worked up a different story.  The novelization isn't anywhere near as good as the story he adapted it from.

My favorite story in this collection was probably "Plowing the Secondaries".  It's about two reckless brothers who drive around town plowing things with their snowplows other than snow.  "Up North" was also a highlight.  Like Glen David Gold's "The Tears of Squonk", this story deals with a town that decides to hang an elephant after a circus-related mishap.  Gold's story is the better of the two, but Clarke's has a great last line (also the last line in the collection) that really packs a punch.

Overall, I'd say that Brock Clarke is a much better short story writer than he is a novelist.  If you feel like reading some of his work, I'd recommend you start with this collection.

The Baron in the Trees--Italo Calvino

Sometimes a book's title provides a better synopsis of the book than any reviewer ever could.  This is one of those cases: The Baron in the Trees is about a baron who lives in the trees.  As a boy, the character gets into a fight with his family over having to eat snails for dinner.  He climbs up into a tree to sulk and decides to stay there.  Fortunately for him, there are a lot of trees nearby and he can climb from his tree to the others.  In this manner, he's able to move around the town and the countryside.

Years pass and the Baron stays up in the trees.  He manages to lead a full life up there.  He has a pet dog.  He reads books.  He makes friends and has adventures in the war.  He even has relationships with some of the local ladies.

This was my third Italo Calvino book.  I liked it a lot more than Invisible Cities, but not as much as If on a winter's night a traveler.

The Enchantress of Florence--Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children is one of my all-time favorite books, so I thought I would give his latest a try.  I read it over the course of a week or so, and can honestly say I wasn't able to follow it very well.  I enjoyed it, but I really didn't know what was going on half the time.  I was at about page 150 before I finally figured out who the titular character was.

As best I can tell, The Enchantress of Florence is about an Italian who shows up at Akbar's imperial court with a strange story to tell.  I'm not going to go into much more detail than that because I gave/lent the book to someone and I don't want to spoil things for her.  Let's just say that the book is full of mystery, magic, four giant albinos from Switzerland, and about a hundred characters taken from the real world historical record.

This is one I'd really like to read again.  My concentration was off and it deserved better from me. 

The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil--George Saunders

I read this novella on a plane trip from Seattle to Cincinnati.  It's a political satire about the residents of a tiny country named Inner Horner.  The country is so tiny that only one of its residents can be there at a time.  The rest have to wait in a containment zone in the surrounding country of Outer Horner.  An Outer Hornerite named Phil gets it into his demented little brain (which keeps falling off) that the Inner Hornerites are evil and deserve to be exterminated.  He usurps the presidency of Outer Horner and then uses his new-found powers to attack the helpless Inner Hornerites.

But wait...Outer Horner is itself entirely surrounded by a country called Greater Keller.  Will the Greater Kellerites sit back and let Phil disassemble the Inner Hornerites?  Will they let Phil's unprovoked aggression stand?  Or will they ATTACK!!?!

Oh, and the "people" in the book are made out of tin cans, ball bearings, and blinking lights.  You figure it out.

#$@&!: The Official Lloyd Llewellyn Collection--Daniel Clowes

This is just another Daniel Clowes collection.  I'm not a big fan of his Lloyd Llewellyn character, but I thought I'd buy this one anyway because it was only $8 and I'd never seen it before.  I think it's out-of-print.  I also really liked the cover art (different than the one shown here).  It features Lloyd and a woman who looks like she could have been an early prototype for the Enid character from Ghost World...if Enid had been an incredibly tall, busty gal with crooked teeth.  Very strange cover art.  As far as the stories go, they were alright.  My favorite was "Crawl, Worm!"  In that one, Lloyd lusts after a lady and she rewards his attentions by biting off his fingernail and turning him into a worm.  You know, the usual.

Peepshow: 1950s Pin-ups in 3-D--Bunny Yeager

This is really just a picture book, but I'm including it here because it's fun and I did actually read the intro (really, I did).  As the title would suggest, this book is a collection of photographs of pin-up models from the 1950s.  Each picture is printed twice and when the "reader" looks through a pair of fold-out glasses, the images appear in 3-D.  I found this strange little volume at Half Price Books while looking for books about Bettie Page.  She actually makes two appearances in Peepshow, so I'm glad I found it.  I just hope no one saw me looking in the nude photography section.

CURRENTLY READING:

• Stories in the Worst Way--Gary Lutz

I'm a tiny bit ashamed to admit how late I am in getting into the writing of George Saunders.  I read Pastoralia last year and recently finished up his first short story collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline.  Both were amazing and I really need to track down the rest of his books.  In the meantime, I have decided to write out brief synopses of the stories and the novella included in CivilWarLand in Bad Decline.  Maybe they'll sound good to you and you'll want to check it out.

• CivilWarLand in Bad Decline

The story from which the collection takes its name is about what happens when a struggling Civil War theme park hires a sociopath to deal with its gang violence problem.  We don't need to go into the details, but let's just say that's not a very good idea.  "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline" features a beautiful last sentence.

• Isabelle

"Isabelle" is about a man and his handicapped daughter.  It isn't a touchy-feely Hallmark movie-of-the-week story, though.  It's full of murders and suicides and bags of human ears.  Try making a movie out of that.

• The Wavemaker Falters

The third story in the collection is about a man who accidentally kills a boy at a water park while oogling an all-girl glee club lying around in their bathing suits.

• The 400 Pound CEO

"The 400 Pound CEO" tells the story of an obese man who works at Humane Raccoon Alternatives, a company that claims to release captured raccoons into an idyllic wild, but actually beats them to death with tire irons and dumps them in a burial pit out back.

• Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz

This is my favorite story from CivilWarLand in Bad Decline.  In it, a man overwhelmed by guilt uses technology to make life easier for himself and his elderly companion.  This story is similar to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but predated it by almost 10 years.  If you think George Saunders is too weird or distant or dystopian or Pynchonesque, then you must read this story.  The last few paragraphs will break your heart.

• Downtrodden Mary's Failed Campaign of Terror

This story is about a woman in her 90s who works in a museum.  Her name is Mary.  She's downtrodden.  She engages in a campaign of terror.  It fails.

• Bounty

"Bounty" is the novella included at the end of CivilWarLand in Bad Decline.  It's one of those post-apocalyptic tales I like so much.  In it, America has bacome a country in which people are divided into two groups, the Flawed and the Pures.  The protagonist in "Bounty", a Flawed with claws on his feet, heads out on the road to find his vestigial-tailed prostitute sister, who may or may not have been sold into slavery by a rich client.  His journey brings him into contact with a strange assortment of rubes, slave catchers, and Flawed revolutionaries.

So there you go.  That's it.  Six short stories and a novella packaged together in one 192 page collection.  If you keep up on short stories, you've probably already read CivilWarLand in Bad Decline.  If you don't, or if the book managed to slip by your radar, you should probably remedy that right away.

BOOKS BOUGHT:

• Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans
• Story of the Eye--Georges Bataille

BOOKS READ:

• Jar City--Arnaldur Indriðason

I spent some time in Reykjavik a few years back, and came away with an interest in Icelandic culture that remains to this day.  I've read Icelandic authors as diverse as Halldór Laxness (yeah!!) and Hallgrímur Helgason (boo!!).  SteveP mentioned Arnaldur Indriðason's Jar City a couple months back, and I knew I had to track down the book and read it.  I'm glad I did; it's one of the best crime novels I've read in a long time.  I look forward to reading the rest of the Inspector Erlendur books.      

• Goodbye, Columbus--Philip Roth

I originally purchased Goodbye, Columbus as a present for my brother's birthday.  Then I remembered he hadn't bothered to give me a present for my birthday, so I ended up keeping the book for myself.  Of course, keeping the book meant I had to read the thing.  I was a bit hesitant as I haven't always enjoyed the Roth I've read.  I liked Goodbye, Columbus a lot, though.  The titular novella was excellent.  The remaining five stories were also impressive.  They all dealt with Jewish culture and the problems of assimilating into post-war America.  It's not subject matter I thought I'd find interesting, but I did.

My favorite was "The Conversion of the Jews" which had a young boy named Ozzie questioning some of the illogical tenants of his religion.  I don't want to spoil it for you, but Ozzie ends up on the roof of his synagogue while his classmates down below encourage him to jump off.   

• Pastoralia--George Saunders  

I first became interested in George Saunders when I watched the second season Christmas episode of NBC's The Office.  In it, Ryan buys a Saunders book to give to Toby for Secret Santa.  I thought to myself, "What kind of book would Ryan buy for Toby?"  I had to find out.  Unfortunately, the episode wasn't clear as to which book Ryan actually bought.  I picked Pastoralia because it was short and had a deer and a caveman on the cover.

Pastoralia is a collection of six short stories.  They were all hilarious and weird.  (The stories reminded me a bit of the work of T.C. Boyle.)  In the first story--also named "Pastoralia"--a man and his co-worker while away their days in a live caveman exhibit.  The thing is, no one ever comes to see the exhibit.  Would you act like a normal person if no one was looking, or would you spend all day in character just in case someone showed up?!  These are among the questions Saunders asks the reader.

Oh, while I'm writing about Pastoralia, I feel I must quote from the story "Sea Oak".  In it, some of the characters watch a television program called The Worst That Could Happen.  The show is described as follows:

...a half-hour of computer simulations of tragedies that have never actually occurred but theoretically could.  A kid gets hit by a train and flies into a zoo, where he's eaten by wolves.  A man cuts his hand off chopping wood and while wandering around screaming for help is picked up by a tornado and dropped on a preschool during recess and lands on a pregnant teacher.

If you can find the humor in that, then you'll probably enjoy Pastoralia.        

• Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans

The full name of this book is Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans: The Best of McSweeney's Humor Category.  As the name would suggest, it's a collection of humorous bits from the McSweeney's Quarterly Concern and website.  I bought this collection because it made me laugh outloud in the bookstore four times.  The collection of lists at the end of the book was particularly funny.  The best part, though, and the part that made this book worth purchasing, was the essay by J.M. Tyree called "On the Implausability of the Death Star's Trash Compactor".  Yes, this guy wrote four whole pages on why it didn't make any sense for the Death Star to have a trash compactor.

• I Am Legend--Richard Matheson (reread)

All the kids are talking about the upcoming movie version of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, so I thought it would be a good time to revisit the book.  For a science fiction/horror story originally published in the 50s, I Am Legend stands up better than most.  (It occurs to me now that I have no frame of reference here.  I Am Legend is probably the only science fiction/horror story from the 50s that I've ever read.  I'm just assuming it's aged well.)

I had a couple issues the first time I read I Am Legend, and those issues remain even after the second read.  First of all, I think Matheson did a poor job of explaining the differences between the two types of vampires.  This comes into play during the story's ending and left me a bit confused.  Second of all, the parts where Neville tries to scientifically explain the vampire phenomenon are just flat-out boring.  Other than those two issues, I Am Legend is an exciting and interesting take on vampires and one of the best post-apocalyptic tales out there.

My copy of I Am Legend features some of Matheson's short stories tacked on at the end.  I read the stories the first time I read the book and hated them all.  They are among the worst stories I've ever read.  I didn't bother reading them a second time.      

• Angle of Repose--Wallace Stegner

I was on a reading roll at the beginning of November.  In fact, all the books mentioned above were read in the first ten days of the month.  My roll promptly crashed to a halt when I picked up Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose.  It took me twelve days to read the first chapter.  At that rate, it would have taken me 416 days to finish the book.  Most people would have dumped the book and moved on to something else.  I'll quit jobs and relationships without a thought, but I've never quit a novel once I've started reading it.  I plow on through.  It's what I do.

I'm glad I didn't quit.  Angle of Repose turned out to be one of the top two or three books I've read this year.  It tells the story of Lyman Ward, a historian struggling with the results of a divorce and a bone disease that have left him crippled and immobile.  He settles into his grandparent's old house and begins writing the story of their marriage.  He uses his grandmother's letters, old newspaper articles, and his own childhood memories.  The story that results is sad and beautiful.

Here's one of my favorite lines (it's Lyman speaking to Shelly, a neighbor who works as his secretary):

How do I know what you should do?  You'll do what you think you want to do, or what you think you ought to do.  If you're very lucky, luckier than anybody I know, the two will coincide.

I like that.

Angle of Repose won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1972.  I'm not exactly sure what other books were up for the honor that year, but I'd have to say the board got it right.        

CURRENTLY READING:

• The World Without Us--Alan Weisman
• A Bend in the River--V.S. Naipaul