What I Did : Blog Tour Review



Find it at indiebound or Amazon.


If you've read Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime or Matt Haig's The Dead Fathers' Club or Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and you found Christopher or Philip or Oskar fascinating, you'll likely find What I Did, with its six-year-old protagonist Billy, equally intriguing. This new novel by British-American Christopher Wakling promises a stellar read for fans of close first-person perspective and for those who enjoy inhabiting the mind of a singularly unusual child. 

Because voice is the primary element here, I'll offer a longish excerpt from the introduction. Here's how Billy begins:

This is the first bit and shall I tell you why?  Okay I will.  It is to make you read the rest.

Don't worry, it isn't a trailer.  Trailers are the first bits before films which are actually really adverts and Dad says adverts are where they try to get you to buy something probably don't want.  Then again Mum says maybe you do.  I often want it.

          You want this story.  It has already started...

When you're watching a trailer it won't even be before the right film!  That's great, I love that it looks fantastic, let's watch that.  No, we can't.  It's not here.  That is called frustrating.

Dad says they put all the best bits of a film in the trailer to reduce you to watching it, and that quite often the rest of the film isn't up to much, but he is wrong.  They don't put the best bits in there, not always.  There's no bit where Luke actually blows up the Death Star in the trailer for Star Wars but they do have light savers which are magnificent.

Sadly there are no light savers in this story.  It is all real.  It is about a terrible thing which happens to me.  But watch out because the thing you think is the terrible thing isn't really it.  Other things come later and they're worse.  I'm not going to tell you what they are yet because now isn't the time.  That is called suspension.

I also have to warn you that nobody is bad or good here, or rather everyone is a bit bad and a bit good and the bad and good moluscules get mixed up against each other and produce terrible chemical reactions.

Did you know cheetahs cannot retract their claws?

Here is the real beginning.

His website's christopherwakling.com.

As you can see, the humor of this novel emerges from Billy's at once precocious and impulsive character and his free-associating voice.  Plus, Billy's an enormous fan of David Attenborough's nature videos, and his naively humorous yet often trenchant comparisons of human behavior to that of predators and prey add a dimension that enriches his internal monologue.  This novel is chock-full of hilarious malapropisms and aural/oral linguistic confusions as well, so those of us who embrace both the complexity and the absurdity of the English language will find laugh-out-loud passages on nearly every page.  (I learned that misheard and thus misunderstood words or expressions may also be called "oronyms" thanks to Isabel Costello, who also offers a thoughtful response to What I Did.)  If you're looking for more hilarious samples of Billy's worldview, complete with "Billy"-drawn illustrations, hop over to Wakling's website and "Billy's Blog".

But don't think that this book is just one gag after another: far from it.  In fact, it's also a harrowing tale of partial understandings, of multiple truths, of missed opportunities, and of unfortunate choices when they count the most. 

Dramatic irony fuels narrative tension here: we as readers understand far more than Billy does; his self-absorbed blunders and willfulness - worsening an already bad situation - make us cringe with concern.  And, clearly, the apple hasn't fallen far from the tree:  Billy's dad follows the same pattern as he reacts to an unfulfilling job situation and to Billy's constant drama.  The novel's major conflict - and one that aggravates tensions between Billy's Mum and Dad as well - is initiated when a nosy pedestrian reports Billy's dad to Social Services for (what most readers will see as regrettably yet understandably) spanking him after he ignores repeated warnings and runs out into a busy street.  And because Billy's one of the most accident prone/ADHD six-year-olds ever, his continued impulsive actions lead to a number of additional personal injuries, exacerbating misunderstandings with the "ChildSafe" social services team investigating the family.  How Mum, Dad, Grandma Lynne, and Billy respond to "Butterfly" and "Giraffe" from "ChildSafe" provides the central conflict in the narrative, with plenty of tense moments among Billy's family members emerging in response to this crisis.

The novel's most salient strength - Wakling's Billy - may also be its liability for some readers:  What I Did takes place over just a few days, and - to be honest - whatever tension could be developed between the inciting incident and the intense final forty pages is undermined by Billy's incessant digressions and by his realistic focus on the present moment coupled with his ignorance about his own plight.  Thus, the tension that mounts among the other characters related to the main plot is experienced obliquely.  Personally, I enjoyed the entire novel, but I did want to offer a heads-up to those who prefer more intensely single-plot-driven works.

On the whole though, I found much to appreciate here, and recommend this novel.  I would think that my IRL book group would find plenty of fodder for discussion in What I Did,  as it's mostly young moms for whom the central issues of raising a child would hit quite close to home.  I suspect that many book groups would enjoy it too, regardless of the life circumstances of their members.

Many thanks to TLC tours and to Mr. Wakling's publishers, HarperCollins, for offering me the opportunity to be part of this blog tour.  To enjoy others' responses to What I Did, simply follow the schedule for the rest of this tour.

MFB,
L

My action:  I'm going to review the developmental psychology of six-year-olds, because I've never raised one and often found myself wondering, "Are six-year-olds normally this willful?  This out-of-control?  Do they tend to pee their pants a lot? Is this kid some sort of autistic-savant?"  And then there's Billy's cousin Lizzy: she's three years old and not yet speaking at all.  Where is her silence on the spectrum of language acquisition?  Clearly, I need a review!

Telegraph Avenue Read-Along : "The Church of Vinyl" Edition



Reserve your copy at indiebound.org!


Well huzzah and praise Buddha, Chabon's finally hitting his stride.  After a first chapter stuck in first gear, weighed down by a freightload of expository and stylistic baggage, "The Church of Vinyl" slams on the gas and takes off into a full-fledged, multi-faceted plot while deepening our understanding of independent record store owners Nat and Archy, as well as Archy's pregnant midwife wife, Gwen. We're even treated to a few pages inside the venerable dome of Mr. Randall "Cochise" Jones, the Hammond-genius jazzman who's both wise and eccentric in equal measures.  Now Chabon's focusing on just a few core characters rather than bopping around among a crowded cast as he did in the first section: Again, huzzah.  And his authorial stylings seem far less obtrusive than they were in "Dream of Cream": More matter with less self-conscious art.  Yay.

There is much to applaud in this chapter, so in the interest of time - and with the hope that those not participating in this read-along will purchase the novel when it debuts in September - here's a trio of passages that raised an appreciative smile:

• Of the oily yet powerful councilman Chan Flowers, funeral chapel owner, erstwhile best friend of Blackspoitation star Luther Stallings, and ominous presence in the Brokeland neighborhood:  "A smile opened, thin as a paper cut, at the bottom of Flowers's face."  (So much shown, so much characterization implied, so economically.)
• I just kept chuckling and shaking my head during Nat's first COCHISE neighborhood meeting. It seemed painfully realistic (given Nat's email list) that 90% of his crowd turned out to be white Berkeley-esque types, that he had to "bribe" Singletary to be there, and that he forgot to tell Archy about the meeting.  The "Juddhists" among the aging hippies in attendance codged a particularly broad smile too as I thought, "If such a New Agey hybrid religion exists, it would have to be born in Berkeley."  Then I looked it up.  It's real, sort of, and the term was supposedly coined in 2005 at Thich Nhat Hanh's "Peace Today" retreat at Stonehill College in Massachusetts.  Then I found this light-hearted thread with "Juddhist" sayings: Zen Juddhism.  It made me wonder if Chabon himself might have found this religious hybrid personally appealing.  Enjoy.
• And here's a lovely extended analogy that also feels organically right. It's Aviva Jaffe reflecting on the impeccable manners of teenage, Texas-bred houseguest, Titus Joyner:

She had to admit that she loved the "sirs" and "ma'ams" that aflowed from his lips so readily, drawled out like pats of butter smeared across a biscuit.  She remembered hiking in Yosemite with Nat and Julie a few summers back.  Climbing to the top of the Mist Trail up a preposterous stairway of stones proposed, cut, hauled, and fixed immovably into place, proof against time and earthquakes, under the auspices of the WPA.  She remembered feeling grateful to those long-dead men, the planners and the workers, for their foresight, their labor,  the heroic absurdity of that granite stair.  That was how she felt, whenever he would "ma'am" her, toward the dead grandmother of this boy.

What?  I'm Not The Only Reader In The Blogospheres?  To find out if other book bloggers shared my enthusiasm for the second chapter in Telegraph Avenue and to enjoy their trenchant, humorous, and thought-provoking commentary, just hop to the linky-list over at As The Crowe Flies (and Reads).  Last week's "conversations" provided a wonderfully welcome diversity of perspectives on this novel, and I trust that the same will be true today.

A Prediction and a Question for Read-Alongers:  Call me crazy, and I've been wrong once already, but I'm guessing that "A Bird of Wide Experience" is Fifty-Eight, and I was indeed wondering what would become of him.  Will Titus take him on?  Will Archy?

MFB in The Church of Vinyl,
L


Report from Film School:  We Netflixed the 1973 Coffy, Pam Grier's first film, from the list of Kill Bill influences in "Dream of Cream".  Well.  Now I have a new reference point for many action films today, and I can certainly see how it might be a Tarantino influence.  Not exactly deep or well-acted, but plenty of violence and sexiness and funky music.  In the "Coincidence? I think not." realm, when we finished watching Coffy, Cat Woman starring Halle Berry was just finishing on TV, and the parallels in both the action and the characters were too many to ignore.  Then on came Hustle and Flow.  I loved that film the first time around, but saw so much more cinematic history behind it after watching the '70's flick. So thanks to E. at As The Crowe Flies (and Reads) for hosting this read-along and to Michael Chabon for piquing my interest in Blacksploitation films, which in turn led to a fully fulfilling 'night at the movies'.  Next in the queue from the Kill Bill syllabus: Vincent Minelli's 1953 musical The Bandwagon.  I'm intrigued to see what that film might have contributed to Tarantino's choices.

TA Pilgrimage Update: I've been planning my Telegraph Avenue trip via Google Earth maps.  Even though I've visited the Berkeley end more than once, I had a completely inaccurate mental picture of what the Neldham's/Brokeland Records neighborhood looks like.  The bakery actually closed and was re-opened by its workers as Taste of Denmark.  You can bet that'll be stop number one!

Leaving Things Unfinished : Poem In Your Post

As the black wings close in on you,

their circling shadows blighting the sand,

and your limp legs buckle, far

from that shimmering oasis

on the horizon,

as you face the implacable,

hoping for one more lucky reprieve

which you feel in your quivering heart

will arrive a moment too late,

still,

even after the first white pill,

you will not surrender,

for back there somewhere,

safe from the hovering vultures,

is that sketchy

grand design, that revolution

on the drawing board—no,

all these years you've resisted

that sleek seducer, Completion—and now,

as the mask snugs over your face, you feel

your legs go young again, heading out

for the shimmering palm trees

they will never reach,

and you suck in great welcome gulps

of the endlessly possible.

                                      - Philip Appleman

A friend of mine had brain surgery this week.  It was postponed for four hours, and then took six hours to complete.  When she awoke, she encountered unexpected complications: paralysis of one arm, serious seepage at the site of the sutures.

She's been in ICU for days, cautioned not to move lest she worsen her state. 

Yesterday, after some smart maneuvers by her ICU professionals, she was able to move the fingers of her previously paralyzed hand, and the seepage slowed.  She's not entirely out of the woods, but she's on the path.

She's a writer and a musician.  I hope that when she's allowed to raise her head, she'll read this poem and it will speak to her experience.  I find it rather beautiful and offer it as a token toward the gods to conjure her continued recovery.

MFB,
L

p.s.  Thanks to Bill Moyers's website, where he recommended a number of poetry books.  I hopped to his interview with Appleman, and enjoyed the five poems read aloud during the original broadcast.  From there, I went to Appleman's page on Poets.org, and found three stellar offerings.

Telegraph Avenue Read-Along: Dream of Cream Edition

Order your advanced copy here at Indiebound.

  

Welcome to the second installment in our Telegraph Avenue read-along hosted by the fabulous E. Crowe at As the Crowe Flies and Reads.  If you're a Michael Chabon fan, or if you think you might enjoy a novel based in late 2000's and 1970's Oakland, CA (hence the title), I hope you'll drop by each Tuesday in July to follow me and our gaggle of fellow bloggers as we sample this promising new offering.  You'll find my first post in the series here.

Note: This installment won't contain any plot or character spoilers, but does include both kudos and questions about the first section of this novel, which is titled "Dream of Cream".


So.  Here it is, with apologies for formatting quirks as I'm traveling and using unfamiliar computers & browsers:

Well.  Hmmmm.  I'm feeling quite ambivalent about my experience with this novel so far.

Thumbs up right now for:
* The sections in which character and conflict drive the writing.  Those were utterly engaging.  The section related to childbirth was particularly engrossing for me (vague to avoid spoilers).
* A unique time period to revisit (however wee we were when the '70's hit the scene).
* Jazz and film as indispensable elements of the mise en scene/zeitgeist of the novel.
* Occasional "ah ha" insights into human nature that coaxed a nod of agreement or illumination.
* Moments of much-appreciated humor.
* Vivid evocations of Telegraph Avenue itself.  Setting seems to be emerging as a character, as one might predict from the title.
* I enjoyed the section that contained the chapter title reference, and I'm hoping that the Dream of Cream is a real thing (vague to avoid spoilers) so I can enjoy it for myself at the end of the month when I'll be in the Bay Area! And, all you blog-alongers, I was way off on my guess about what the chapter title refers to, wasn't I?  


Thumbs reserving judgment:
* The execution of some stylistic elements and narrative choices jarred me out of the fictional world on a regular basis.  I'm hoping that as I grow more accustomed to Mr. Chabon's patterns in this novel, these elements will integrate into the flow of the story more gracefully for me.  If others in our read-along are comfortable with more detail on this, I'd be happy to elaborate, but I'll wait for the A-OK from Ms. Crowe before I critique!

I do want to express that I'm pleased to have committed to this read-along with the fabulous E. Crowe of As the Crowe Flies and Reads.  In my previous experience with such cyber-conversations, my commitment to the group has led to perseverance through novels that, in the end, were some of the most rewarding reading experiences of the past few years.  I trust that this one will turn out to be equally valuable, and can't wait to hop on over to the other bloggers on this read-along to see what they're thinking about Telegraph Avenue today!

MFB,
L

p.s.  My Action Reader action is to view at least two of the films on the "Kill Bill" syllabus for the community education course in which young Julie Jaffe meets Titus Joyner.  (These two being my favorite characters in the novel so far.)

Insomnia and the Seven Steps to Grace :Poem in Your Post

 

 

Insomnia and the Seven Steps to Grace

 

 

At dawn the panther of the heavens peers over the edge of the world.   

She hears the stars gossip with the sun, sees the moon washing her lean   

darkness with water electrified by prayers. All over the world there are those   

who can't sleep, those who never awaken.   

My granddaughter sleeps on the breast of her mother with milk on   

her mouth. A fly contemplates the sweetness of lactose.

Her father is wrapped in the blanket of nightmares. For safety he   

approaches the red hills near Thoreau. They recognize him and sing for   

him.   

Her mother has business in the house of chaos. She is a prophet dis-   

guised as a young mother who is looking for a job. She appears at the   

door of my dreams and we put the house back together.   

Panther watches as human and animal souls are lifted to the heavens by   

rain clouds to partake of songs of beautiful thunder.   

Others are led by deer and antelope in the wistful hours to the vil-   

lages of their ancestors. There they eat cornmeal cooked with berries   

that stain their lips with purple while the tree of life flickers in the sun.   

It's October, though the season before dawn is always winter. On the   

city streets of this desert town lit by chemical yellow travelers   

search for home.   

Some have been drinking and intimate with strangers. Others are   

escapees from the night shift, sip lukewarm coffee, shift gears to the   

other side of darkness.   

One woman stops at a red light, turns over a worn tape to the last   

chorus of a whispery blues. She has decided to live another day.   

The stars take notice, as do the half-asleep flowers, prickly pear and   

chinaberry tree who drink exhaust into their roots, into the earth.   

She guns the light to home where her children are asleep and may   

never know she ever left. That their fate took a turn in the land of   

nightmares toward the sun may be untouchable knowledge.   

It is a sweet sound.   

The panther relative yawns and puts her head between her paws.   

She dreams of the house of panthers and the seven steps to grace.   

                                                - Joy Harjo

 

 

Yup.  I'm sitting pretty in Albuquerque today, and chose this New Mexico poet for today's post.  She's also a musician, songwriter, social activist, and professor.  She even has a blog, so check out her prose style there.  And visit her Poetry Foundation  page to find more of her gorgeous poems.

 

MFB in The Land of Enchantment,

L

Telegraph Avenue Read-Along : What Luck!

Sometimes you get lucky, and sometimes your friends make your luck for you.

Why not reserve your copy early through
your local independent bookseller at
indiebound.org?

I got lucky.  And a blogista-pal went out on a limb to help me out.  I couldn't be happier.

I'm going to read Michael Chabon's upcoming novel Telegraph Avenue, along with our fabulous host Emily at As The Crowe Flies and Reads plus a gaggle (a business? a clump?) of stellar bloggers for a July read-along!


Plus, by happy coincidence, I'll be trodding the titular Telegraph Ave. in Oakland/Berkeley just as our read-along wraps up, so my action step will be quite literal this time. That means fictional experience meets real life, inward meets outward travel: nifty, eh?

I've read and enjoyed a number of Chabon's books; his popular Wonder Boys and young adult read Summerland, which I listened to on CD, have endured as favorites in my memory.  And I've explored Telegraph Avenue itself more than once in my day, so the locale appeals to me as well.  I too grew up in the '70's so many of the pop culture references should hit home as well.  So what's not to like about this unique opportunity to preview an accomplished author's latest?
I hope you'll stop by each Tuesday in July (and then blog-hop along with us) to check out the latest installments in what promises to be a thought-provoking discussion of this major novel, due out on shelves September 11, 2012.

Rockin' the MFB, '70's-style,
L

p.s.  The first section is titled "Dream of Cream".  What's your best guess on what it will refer to?  I'm putting my money on that fabulous '60's rock group where Clapton landed after The Yardbirds.  Wagers, anyone?

Book Group Books : Best American Short Stories 2011



Find it at Amazon or Indiebound.


It's pretty dark down there.  But groping through the darkness and into the light together can be just the challenge to ignite a stellar book group conversation.

In fact, that's what just happened when our local book group got together over appetizers and The Best American Short Stories 2011.  Although we all agreed that this was a rather bleak collection - with occasional and welcome rays of light - we had so much to talk about (twenty stories, to be exact) and the content was so diverse that our conversation soared. 

Our favorites in this collection included Irish writer Claire Keegan's gentle, affecting "Foster", the tale of a poor young girl sent to spend a summer with a couple who've recently lost their own young son; George Saunders' speculative "Escape from Spiderhead" (think "Harrison Bergeron" set in a human testing lab for psycho-active drugs); "To The Measures Fall" by Richard Powers, a piece about how one's shifting responses to the same novel over the course of one's life reveal more about who we are than about the story itself; and Caitlin Horrocks's "The Sleep", which intrigued the English teachers in our group with its third person plural perspective and provided plenty of grist for the conversational mill with its core premise: a town so depressing in winter that its citizens begin to hybernate from Thanksgiving through Easter.

And then there were the stories that stymied one or all ("Gurov in Manhattan" in particular); these, in fact, led to some of the most animated and thought-provoking discussions of all.

Even with its somewhat sobering overall tone, I would heartily recommend this collection - or others in this series - to book groups.  Most of our members noted with enthusiasm how much they enjoyed exploring this genre, one they don't usually indulge in, but we all agreed that the best way to read a grouping like this is to ration: read one per day and let it "sink in", percolate through your consciousness a bit, before moving on to the next.

I give this a five-star rating for book groups who welcome a diversity of opinions to match varied but high quality content.

MFB,
L

p.s.  My action on this one is actually creating this review and posting it on Goodreads and Amazon, because I hadn't planned to do so yet I do believe that other book groups will enjoy it.

And for, It's Monday, What Are You Reading blog hop at Book Journey, right now I'm 3/4 of the way through the light and fluid international romance Random Placement (I realized too late that it would be a terrific read for a plane trip, so I forced myself to stop until tomorrow's trip to ABQ), re-reading sections of Danny Dreyer's Chi Running for my second week of C25K training, and starting Michael Chabon's latest Telegraph Avenue for the read-along at As The Crowe Flies and Reads that begins tomorrow.