Used Books Blog

Magical Thinking by Augusten Burroughs is an over-the-top memoir that walks the tightrope line between magnetism and repulsion, between curiosity and the desire to know more and the impulse to shout ‘too much information’ and cover your ears while loudly singing ‘la la la’.

There’s a lot to like in Burroughs’ writing and in areas you feel like you’re making a connection with the author, that it is a true memoir. The topic of whether a memoir is ‘real’ has been a hot topic lately. Starting with James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, bouncing off of David Sedaris and now squarely on Augusten Burroughs, the idea that memoirs are factual is highly subjective. In fact, reality is highly subjective which is why two memoirs of the same event could be and most likely are very different.

So, I don’t ding Burroughs for writing through the filter that is his mind and experience. All good writers do this and no one should be surprised at the differing views on a subjective experience. But is it evocative and effective for the reader? I’m still inclined to believe that fiction is a better proxy for relating real life experience than the memoir format. I definitely subscribe to the axiom that there’s more truth in fiction.

I enjoyed most of Magical Thinking, though being a Sedaris fan it’s difficult not to draw some comparisons between the two. And I’d choose Sedaris hands down. I find Sedaris to be more steady and even in his most shocking, there’s something … else going on that anchors his text.

Burroughs starts out strong, with back-to-back winners about his childhood with ‘Commercial Break’ and ‘Vanderbilt Genes’. These are quirky, insightful pieces that are both hard and tender at the same time. He scores again with ‘Debby’s Requirements’ a very interesting story about relationships and work life balance. ‘Holy Blow Job’ walks the line but works; ‘Ass Burger’ is another gem and isn’t at all what you think it might be about. Finally, ‘Life Cycle of the North American Opossum’ and ‘Magical Thinking’ are both excellent vignettes. See, there’s a lot to like!

But then there’s ‘The Rat/Thing’ which is just a bit too ugly and drawn-out. It was clearly traumatic, but honestly, I don’t want to hear about it. I’d cozy up and ask an exterminator to tell me his greatest hits (pun intended) if I wanted this type of story. There’s also ‘I Dated an Undertaker’ which is more shock-and-awe, and feels like a poorly done Six Feet Under spin-off.

There are references to a very disturbing childhood and a laundry list about his love life and personal habits which make him seem quite shallow. In some ways, reading Burroughs is like hanging around after a fire or a train wreck. You’re interested in seeing how it all turns out and asking officials how it happened. But you don’t do this in real life, instead you move on and give people their space and feel better for doing so.

Burroughs shines when he doesn’t grandstand and when he’s not over-seasoning his text with shock value. At times he presents himself as a card-board cutout, when what I really want is his real-self invested in the pages. All at once, Burroughs complains and promotes this type of over-sharing shock-value material with his reference to Dr. Pepper. I won’t relate the details here since the story will attach itself to the drink for a long time. I can’t help but flash on the topic when gazing into the drink case.

I recommend Magical Thinking by Augusten Burroughs but only for those with an iron-cast stomach.

Whale Season by N.M. Kelby aspires to be a Carl Hiaasen-like romp. This Florida tale is populated with quirky characters, film-like dialog, and a pretty standard humor-crime-drama plot. (What is that? ‘Drimor’?) It’s good summer reading, that reaches - and fails - to be more.

There’s nothing wrong with N.M. Kelby’s Whale Season - except that she’s in the shadow of Carl Hiaasen. I like Hiaasen. His work is straight and tight, slick but not overly so. His characters seem real enough and the insight provided isn’t forced. The goal is to entertain, not to challenge the reader to higher thinking or to arrive at some epiphany. This is where Whale Season loses it’s focus.

Kelby walks the line between beach reader and a more introspective read. The plot revolves around a serial killer who passes himself off on Jesus, who lands in the tangled lives of Dagmar, Leon, Jimmy Ray, Trot and Carlotta. Dagmar and Leon are divorced and there is real tragedy in their background. Carlotta is the new girl in town, and is dating Leon, much to Trot’s chagrin. Thing is, Trot and Leon are best friends. Jimmy Ray is a blues musician, and Buddhist with a penchant for sage quotes, who has taken Dagmar under his wing, and vice versa.

Jesus as serial killer moves things along and it is Leon who turns into the central character of Whale Season. It’s here that he recalls his childhood, fraught with conflicting emotions about his family’s now closed alligator tourist attraction, and his recent family life with Dagmar. Here’s where Whale Season misses in my opinion.

There’s good stuff here that could be developed into a rich and vibrant story about Leon, a ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom type character of Florida. Instead, you only get small bits and they collide strangely with the tone of the rest of the story. Ditto the death koans that Jimmy Ray employs in his dialog. It’s interesting but seems like it belongs in a different book.

It wasn’t that I didn’t like Whale Season. It was a good breather between heavier books. I simply think there are far better summer reads. Whale Season is a fast food book that’s using whole wheat buns, soy cheese and organic lettuce to obscure the real meat at the center.

A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby is a novel about four very different people who unexpectedly meet on the top of a high-rise building on New Year’s Eve. Great rooftop party perhaps? No. As the title might give away, all four found their way to the roof to commit suicide. Sounds depressing, but if you’ve read (or seen) any of Hornby’s work you’ll know that it will be a (dark) comic romp.

Sure enough, A Long Way Down is a hyper-glib rim-shot of a novel that uses humor to explore the topics of loneliness, desolation and loss. Nearly all of Hornby’s work has a dark, troublesome theme residing at its core. His work is about how people find their way in the world, how they deal with hardship, how they … manage, which at times seems tough at best and impossible at worst. Laughter seems the best medicine.

Hornby has a bit of real-life experience to draw upon in this arena, given that his son is autistic. It’s tough for me not to read some of that background into his portrayal of Maureen, a middle-aged single mother with a severely handicapped son who keeps her housebound most of the time. The difficulty of that love shines around the wit of the words like an aura. You can’t help but feel it there.

The three other characters are Martin, a scandalized daytime tabloid star; JJ, a rock musician who believes his life is his career and his career is finished; and Jess, a young foul-mouthed girl without an emotional filter who lives in the shadow of her missing older sister. None of the four jump from the roof that night. Don’t worry, that’s not a spoiler! The book is about how they get on. It’s about how they band together and continue to live, despite their differences and despite any real fairy tale ending.

I like Hornby’s work and picked him up when High Fidelity was in paperback. I find it notable that his work translates extremely well to the big screen. While High Fidelity the movie was good, About A Boy the movie may be better than the book given the great performance by Hugh Grant. Speaking of Hugh Grant, it might be a stretch but the character of Martin seems like it could be loosely based on the scandalized actor.

A Long Way Down also covers some of the same material as Douglas Coupland’s Eleanor Rigby and there are similarities in wit and tone. However, the plot and format of A Long Way Down is somewhat formulaic. And even the interplay and dialog, while funny, doesn’t quite encapsulate the book. In the end, it’s a mood and a determination of life that is extracted.

It feels good, and at the end of the day that’s what most of Hornby’s work seems to wish upon the reader.

You Suck by Christopher Moore is funny, dead funny. That’s a bit of a joke since the main characters are vampires. This is actually the sequel to Bloodsucking Fiends, so we are reacquainted with Jody, the hot red-headed vampire and Thomas C. Flood, a sexually charged, slightly nerdy Indiana native who came to San Francisco to be a writer and now finds himself a vampire instead. Like all of Moore’s work, the plot is quick and snappy, the descriptions vivid, the dialog crackling and the satire first-rate. And while I enjoyed You Suck, it felt a bit like paint by numbers.

I couldn’t help but think that this was something Moore just came up with in between new material. It felt like the product of fans pestering him for a ‘what happened next?’ scenario, leading to a supercharged week of caffeine induced writing. The beauty of most of Moore’s work is that he creates these believable but ludicrous worlds that are rich in surreal nooks and crannies and populated by a side-show like zoo of characters. None of that is on display in You Suck because all that good stuff has already been developed.

Don’t get me wrong, there are still a few characters who rise to the occasion, including Abby Normal, an attitude laden Goth-like teen who gives the fuzz all they can handle, a hooker who is entirely blue and a shaved cat named Chet. See, if you haven’t read Moore before you’re already thinking this is one crazy dude - and you’d be right! Moore is not for the feint of heart, easily offended or politically correct. Everything is in play and nothing is sacred.

For one reason or another the following quote stuck in my head and still makes me smirk.

“Oh, someone made a comment about his cape being gray when we first got here, so he went home to redye all his blacks”

You’ll do your fair share of chuckling and smirking with You Suck, but dive into his other books for the full-on treatment.

Jasper Fforde’s The Well of Lost Plots is third in the Thursday Next literary detective series. Thursday (our hero and literary cop) is pregnant by a husband who no longer exists and is hiding out in an unpublished murder mystery (something like a poorly constructed blend of Patricia Cornwell and John Grisham.) Makes perfect sense right? Well, if you’re a fan it does and I am a fan.

To enjoy Jasper Fforde’s novels you should make sure you have a funny bone. Once that’s been confirmed you might want to brush up on your classic literary works. While the plot is generally of the soap opera or spy thriller genre, it is wrapped in a literary fun house where you’ll meet Heathcliff from Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and speak frequently of Shakespearean works. Fforde’s alternate universe includes time-travel, a menacing corporate entity aptly named Goliath, and is populated by Neanderthals and dodos which have been genetically re-engineered.

Fforde uses the absurd for both comic effect and astute social commentary. And he’s keenly interested in the act of writing and reading. That is perhaps the highlight of The Well of Lost Plots. The plot surrounds an upgrade to how a book is read, aptly described as an operating system. The new version is UltraWord, which would help books gain market share on a populace that is reading less and less. One of the benefits of the upgrade would allow the reader to do away with all of the ‘he said’, ’she replied’, ‘he shouted’ and any other identifiers of who was actually speaking each line of dialog. To me, I can image Fforde exasperated with these markers, but at the same time chiding readers for the inability to simply engage and partake in the reading experience.

The Well of Lost Plots is Fforde’s most ambitious thought exercise into the creation of a book world. On this level the book is the best of the series. From a plot and narrative perspective, it is just this side of satisfying. While I recommend The Well of Lost Plots, any reader should read the series in order, starting with The Eyre Affair. For a sneak peek at the oddities you will find, visit the fabulous Jasper Fforde website.

I’d heard quite a bit about The Curious Incident prior to picking it up - which may have tainted my reading of the book. I know many others had the same problem with Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genuis. Thankfully for me, I didn’t have that problem with AHWOSG, and picked it up after seeing someone reading it on BART. That was not the case with The Curious Incident, which I’d heard many a person gush over.

Sure, it’s quirky and stylistically interesting given the point of view of the main character. But other authors have tackled similar territory far better, most notably in Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn. Yes, the story does take a few mild turns that might raise eyebrows but they weren’t altogether unforeseen. I mean really, you didn’t see a few of those twists coming?

It was enjoyable, but simply that.