Isla McKetta, MFA, Author at A Geography of Reading

Red Horses and the Art of the Prequel

July 3, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA 5 Comments

Can you ever read a prequel for its own sake? Reading Red Horses by Donna Lynch, I knew it was a prequel for Lynch’s debut novel Isabel Burning and that it elaborates on the history of the Grace family. But having not read the other book, I was interested to see if Red Horses could be successful on its own merits.

Does the Book Stand on its Own?

The first few pages of the book are very compelling. You are introduced to Anastascia Millerovo, a “carrier of souls” days after her father’s death in Victorian London. She visits his attorney to find that she has inherited a large sum of money, her father’s journal, and a husband should she choose to accept the young Mr. Grace. I presume that’s where this book ties to Isabel Burning in that this is the origins of that family. It feels like Lynch chose for this prequel to go straight to the ancestry without mucking about interweaving this story with the last. I’m grateful for that, because it did allow me to read this book on its own, even though the fact that it is a prequel never left my mind.

Is the Writing Good?

Lynch creates some compelling characters in this tortured family saga. Much of the action of the book takes place inside Vladimir Millerovo’s journal as he meets and falls in love with Anastascia’s mother. But it’s not a simple love story and there is as much hate as there is love between the characters. It’s interesting to watch the lovers travel from hardship to hardship across Europe and eventually to the Caribbean. I did wish I got to know Anastacia more throughout the book, because the introduction to her was so compelling.

The description can be a little over the top sometimes with it’s magical moodiness, especially if you’re used to literary fiction, but it doesn’t go too far for my tastes and I enjoyed reading this type of book again for the way that magic opens up a world. Sometimes I even wanted it to be more magical and to really see what Anastascia’s powers could do.

And there were times when I wanted to slap Anastacia’s mother for not taking more control of her life, but it’s never fair to judge a Victorian woman’s circumstances by modern standards.

Will You Want to Read More?

Yes. I’m not quite sure how Isabel fits into this whole scenario. I did want to see if Anastascia’s powers develop more in Isabel Burning and now that I’ve read the backstory, I’m very curious to see where Lynch’s initial inspiration lay.

Red Horses will be released in August, so you have time to read Isabel Burning first if you want to, but it’s not necessary. The book is currently available for pre-order directly from the publisher.

War, Sex & Antonio Lobo Antunes in The Land at the End of the World

June 30, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA 10 Comments

There are a very few writers I turn to when I really need something that is guaranteed to blow my writing mind. On one end I turn to Italo Calvino for the prismatic layers beneath his concise language and on the opposite end is the lusciously messy work of Antonio Lobo Antunes, and neither has disappointed me yet. I often hold back from reading these authors, admiring them for months before ever opening them. I’m always slightly worried that this will be the book that lets me down. The Land at the End of the World by Antonio Lobo Antunes rocked my world.

The Experience of Being a Soldier

“Listen. Look at me and listen, I so need you to listen, to listen with the same anxious attention with which we used to listen to the calls on the radio from the company under fire.” – Antunes

I’ve never been to war, but Antunes has. He was a Portuguese medic during the war in Angola, and through his writing, I got a different sense of how war affects a soldier than I had from soldiers turned writers like Tim O’Brien and Joe Haldeman. Both O’Brien and Haldeman convey the arbitrariness and unending quality of war along with a kind of stony acceptance as they write about being inside a war.

By setting this book (which draws on his own experiences) after the war, Antunes shows the lingering after effects of war on a human life. Along with some realities of the field hospital, the narrator shares how the war undid him as a person, stripped him of his family, and left him in this bar night after night telling the same tale.

“That’s what I have become, that’s what they have made of me, Sofia, a cynical, prematurely old creature laughing at himself and at others with the bitter, cruel, envious laughter of the dead, the silent, sadistic laughter of the dead, the repulsive, oily laughter of the dead, and all the while I’m rotting away inside, by the light of the whisky I’ve drunk, just as the photos in albums rot, regretfully, dissolving very slowly into a blur of mustaches.” – Antunes

One passage reminded me directly of the epistrophe in the opening of O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato, which reads in part, “Pederson was dead and Rudy Chassler was dead. Buff was dead. Ready Mix was dead. They were all among the dead.” Antunes writes, “It was late January, it was raining, and we were going to die, we were going to die and it was raining, raining.” Instead of simply repeating words at the end, Antunes twists those repetitions into something even more magical, but the results are still devastating and they linger in my mind.

In the Land of Sex and War

“I’m traveling the gentle geography of your body, the river of your voice the cool shade of your hands.” – Antunes

What surprised me most about this book was how sexy it was. But the more the narrator tries to lose himself in this woman he’s brought home from the bar, the more his memories are drawn back to the war which makes the liaisons in Portugal seem sadder and somehow makes the ones in Angola (as the narrator and his fellow soldiers try to find comfort in the arms of women) sweeter. The language is gorgeous as the inception of life merges with the end of it.

“I like the way breasts perform a kind of flanking maneuver and rise indifferently to the tremulous, eager height of my kisses.” – Antunes

The Voice of Antonio Lobo Antunes

“The novels as yet unwritten accumulated in the attic of my mind like ancient bits of apparatus reduced to a pile of disparate parts that I would never manage to put together again.” – Antunes

Antunes has a way of weaving two (or more) spaces in time together in the same breath that is unequaled, so I wasn’t surprised to see him do that here with scenes from the war in Angola and moments years later in a bar. What I was surprised by was the images he created with words like “cotton syllables that dissolve in the ear just as the remnants of a piece of candy do on the curled shell of the tongue” and drumbeats that are “concertos of panicking, tachycardiac hearts, only restrained by the darkness from galloping wildly off in the direction of their own anxiety.” Of course, some of this has to be due to the marvelous translation of Margaret Jull Costa, but every sentence made me reconsider my own language. I read the book very slowly because of this, but I loved every second of it.

The Aftermath of War

Did you ever have a dessert so delicious you couldn’t bear to eat another bite for fear of spoiling the flavor on your tongue? I tried to open another book after The Land at the End of the World, but I knew nothing would be quite as good. I leafed through a book of poetry but had to put it aside because I knew I was still immersed in Antunes. Even now, a week later, I had to resort to reading a really familiar book just to have something to read that wasn’t going to compete with his writing. Read this book, if you dare, but know that it will change you and likely your writing forever. I’m looking forward to it.

If you want to get lost in this book like I did, pick up a copy of The Land at the End of the World from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Exploring The Global Soul with Pico Iyer

June 23, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

Readers of this blog will know that I almost never write about nonfiction, but in reading My Bookstore, I fell for the writing of Pico Iyer and I wanted to know more about his jet-setting lifestyle. The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home did not disappoint. In fact, the book, like the very best literature, helped me understand something fundamental about who I am. More on that later.

What is the Global Soul?

Iyer posits that globalization is turning us into transnational villagers. It’s certainly true of him, a man of Indian descent, born in England, raised in the US, and living in Japan. Plus he travels widely. What Iyer seems most interested in are these amazing confluences of culture like LAX where not only do peoples from all nations exist at one moment as they travel through, but it’s also a place where Ethiopians from opposite sides of a civil war can find themselves working together.

Iyer is also interested in how travel and motion are breaking down the traditional national barriers. He introduces us to his friend who rests in Hong Kong but seems to live in transit between European, American, and Asian offices.

All of these people are global souls, according to Iyer, but I wondered often what was the difference between them and my Ukrainian and Welsh great-grandparents who came to live in America. Certainly travel is faster now, but this mixing of cultures is not new. But either way, the sociologist in me enjoyed his stories of how cultures come together and how the way people look is no longer a good indicator of where they come from.

My Global Soul

“I begin to feel increasingly at home in big cities… Perhaps because big cities have become the place where people of different backgrounds tend to congregate.” – Kazuo Ishiguro

Born in Idaho, I lived in Chile for all of second grade. I remember thinking before we traveled there that everything was going to be exactly the same as at home, except for upside down. I was neither wrong nor right about that. In Chile I met people who were like me but not and I learned another tongue. Because I was with my family, it all felt like home. I did feel somewhat different in that I was blonde and we were privileged under the dictatorship by our American nationality.

“Almost any immigrant who arrives today at the place he’s hoped for will find it’s become somewhere else.” – Pico Iyer

Later, when I lived in Poland on high school exchange, I also felt at home even though I was with a new group of people in a new country and speaking a new language. This opportunity to see people in their own cultures made me accept a wide variety of norms instead of looking at them as alien. I learned to observe and interpret instead of judge, something that I pride myself on now.

“A true cosmopolitan, after all, is not someone who’s traveled a lot so much as someone who can appreciate what it feels like to be Other.” – Pico Iyer.

I settled in Seattle and we’ve chosen for a lot of reasons to stay here for now. Sometimes the world calls to me and we travel, but I have this sense that home is inside of me. I was talking with my dad about it as he visits this weekend and about whether home really is where the heart is, but some of my closest friends live in Asia or Australia or Europe or the Middle East. The people I love live in Seattle. They also live in Moscow and Boise, Austin, DC, Denver, Rochester, Portland, and somewhere in Maine. You can even find one or two in LA, Boston, and Richmond. So I can’t say that having my people around me is what makes a home for me. That would make my home the Internet, but I don’t accept that. I really do think that home is a sense of self and that can be on any continent or even in transit.

“One curiosity of being a foreigner everywhere is that one finds oneself discerning Edens where the locals see only Purgatory.” – Pico Iyer

Bodies Rest and Motion

That said, we are in constant motion and I wonder whether that activity more than anything keeps us from feeling restful and settled. I read portions of this book in Cal Anderson Park and in the Frye Art Museum. I turned some of the 300 or so pages in various rooms in my house, on the bus, and in the car (nasty habit I should stop). Even as a fast reader, I couldn’t find a few hours of peace to just read this book in one place. I realized as I started counting the locations I read this book how important those solid blocks of time are for me, no matter what continent they are on. Some of the best moments of my life were walking through Rovinj, Croatia with my husband when we had nowhere to be.

“The unhappiest people I know these days are often the ones in motion, encouraged to search for a utopia outside themselves.” – Pico Iyer

I learned from this book about how much home is inside of me. I learned about other cultures that share values with me that don’t quite conform to American norms (particularly the Japanese sense of private passions and public face). And I learned that I like my life.

The book is a bit dated, it was written in 2000 and the Hong Kong he visited was British Hong Kong, although not a lot had changed when I visited eight years later. But a lot of the principles of the book hold true. We are still in motion. We are still converging, even if we always were. I am grateful that our lives converge, dear readers, in person and over the Internet. I’m glad that we can share our love of books.

I think you’ll enjoy reading about how Canada is striving for a mosaic rather than a melting pot. You’ll be intrigued by the parallels between refugees and businessmen and perhaps concerned by shopping malls that contain so many facets of daily life you never need to leave them. You might even find a mini essay on what makes Ondaatje so enjoyable.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of The Global Soul from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

My Bookstore, My Community: A Love Note to Indie Booksellers and My Dad

June 16, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA 4 Comments

With any luck, the Postal Service delivered a package to my dad yesterday. He will have opened it by now and found my standard Father’s Day gift to him, a book. I send him books instead of ties because books are a language my dad and I share, and this year I was especially excited to be able to send him My Bookstore: Writers Celebrate Their Favorite Places to Browse, Read, and Shop edited by Ronald Rice. This book helped me understand just what it is I love about independent bookstores and even better, it filled me with happy memories of a childhood spent in bookstores. So this post is for you, Dad. Happy Father’s Day!

The Bookstore I Was Raised On

I couldn’t possibly tell you the first time I entered Twice Sold Tales in Moscow, Idaho. It was a used bookstore in a craftsman cottage on the edge of downtown. The store was filled, and I mean packed, with books (in shelves and piled on the floor) and because it was my first bookstore, the one my dad took me to often, it all seemed wonderfully normal. In fact, the office where I write today has many things in common with that little house (including book piles in inappropriate places and a closet turned into a bookshelf).

Before I remember my dad introducing me to Betty, the owner, I remember him loading stacks of paperbacks on her counter. She would tabulate the number of Xs stamped on the top of each book (each denoted $0.25 of value) and then pull out a plastic recipe box filled with 3×5 cards and subtract my dad’s purchase from the amount of credit he had on file. One summer, about the time I became engrossed in horror novels, I started going to the bookstore on my own. I was there so often that Betty offered me a job, to be paid in credit. I never did take her up on that, but I loved taking books out one day and returning them for credit the next. I used that store like my personal library and I was glad to pay the fee.

My dad took me to other bookstores too. There was the Waldenbooks in the mall where we waited in a long line (there must have been 20 people) every time a new Patrick McManus came out. It was such a family tradition that my brother and I have both laid claims on my dad’s stash of signed McManus books. We frequented Brused Books in Pullman and often ran into Bruce, the owner, at garage sales around town as he was replenishing his inventory. We spent time in BookPeople of Moscow (even before it moved across the street) although I never got to know Bob as well as the others. It’s a shame because I think he and I would have a lot to talk about now, but I wasn’t ready for that bookstore just yet.

We even had bookstores as destinations when we traveled including Half Price Books in the U District in Seattle (and every other used bookstore on the Ave). And of course, Powell’s in Portland. But Twice Sold Tales holds the most special place in my memory.

My Bookstore(s) Today

Now I live in Seattle and am surrounded by bookstores. It’s easy for me to go to Half Price Books in the U District or Capitol Hill (which is closing or moving) or Lynnwood. I still take my dad there when he visits. He thinks I’m humoring him, but really it’s for me. And not just because he sometimes pays for my armloads of books. I have boxes of books in the basement that I trade in on a semi-annual basis, but I get cash instead of little Xs on a card, so it’s not quite as romantic and the money often gets frittered away.

Bookstores are changing and so am I. The art books that draw my husband and me to the University Bookstore on the Ave are fewer in number. I rarely visit Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park (which has the best essays section) since my writing group up there dissolved. I nip over to Ravenna Third Place as much for the cafe as for the books. The monster Barnes and Noble at U Village that so excited me when I moved here has since closed, and the Barnes and Noble at Northgate (within walking distance), that I was thrilled to see go in now prominently features a Nook display next to the toy section. I most often do not find the books I’m looking for there.

The bookstore I most love is Elliott Bay Books. For over a year I held a weekly writing date with myself there. I wrote more letters than fiction, but that was good too, and invariably I came away with a book (or five) to add to those piles of books on my floor and in my shelves. I’m shy, though, and I don’t know the booksellers like I’d like to. I recognize their faces and they are always kind to me, but it’s hard for me to build relationships with many people at once. Maybe I’m waiting for my dad to introduce them to me (or me to them). And recently, I’ve been really busy, so I’ve been allowing myself to order a hard to find book from Amazon instead of asking at the bookstore like I know I should. Yes, I was seduced by Prime and I hate myself for it.

My Bookstore, the Book

What I loved about this sampler platter of writers’ favorite independent bookstores is that it reminded me of how central bookstores had been in my life. It showed me the community I was allowing to slip by not engaging with it. There are writers you’ll recognize in this book (Wendell Berry, Isabel Allende, Ann Patchett, and more) and some you won’t. Each writer gets a few pages to tell you about their favorite bookstore and four of the stores I named above are featured. There’s a kind of stilted insider lingo that develops in some of the essays (maybe because these writers know they are writing for devoted readers) that it took me some time to get over. It was good to read about other parents who have instilled a love for reading and bookstores in their kids, and that I’m not the only one who gets her books paid for.

But even when the stories start to sound the same (and some are wildly different), the collective voice is saying something I needed to hear. The bookstore, especially the independent bookstore, is the center of my community. It’s where I grew up and where I learned to love books. And it needs me to stay alive.

This book made me trek over to Elliott Bay Books where I bought an armload of books and then walked over to the park, sat in the sun, and read a book by Pico Iyer whose work I first encountered in My Bookstore. And that hour I took for myself to browse and read was a moment of stepping back into myself when I really, really needed it. And I’m grateful to all the people who have supported Elliott Bay Books so it could be there when I needed it. I will return the favor.

I learned this week that Write Bloody will be publishing a book of writing prompts I co-authored with Rebecca Bridge. Maybe that will force me to go in to Elliott Bay and all my other wonderful local stores and introduce myself so I can start building those bookseller relationships that my dad has in his home town.

Why Independent Bookstores?

If you don’t know what the fuss is about Amazon, you’ll understand by the end of this book. You can also read the Melville House blog. A quick summary is that they (legally) evade taxes, squeeze profit margins, and don’t exist in a physical space. I do buy from Amazon (movies, bags for dog poop, and other random items), but when I was looking for an affiliate program, a way to make a small amount of money off the many loving hours I put into this blog, I chose to work with Powell’s instead. And I realize that Half Price Books isn’t an independent bookstore either, but my family comes from Austin and my brother-in-law worked at the store in the U District for years, and I still know people there, so it still feels like home.

About My Dad

My dad’s coming to town next weekend. I’ll let him pretend he’s dragging me to Half Price and Elliott Bay if he wants. I’ll even let him pay for my armloads of books. Or maybe I’ll pay for his. I hope he’ll read My Bookstore: Writers Celebrate Their Favorite Places to Browse, Read, and Shop (which I purchased at Third Place) and remember some of the same wonderful moments I did.

Thank you, Dad, for sharing with me your love of books and bookstores. We’ll miss the Third Place Semi-annual Sale (June 15-16), but we should check out Magus and all the others next weekend and then Tattered Cover in September.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of My Bookstore: Writers Celebrate Their Favorite Places to Browse, Read, and Shop from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Nicole Hardy’s Confessions of a Latter-Day Virgin

June 9, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

nicole hardy confessions of a latter-day virgin cover

If I told you Confessions of a Latter-Day Virgin by Nicole Hardy was about a single, Mormon woman wrestling with her faith and her choice to remain a virgin, I wouldn’t be doing the book justice. Saying that it’s a memoir based on her touching Modern Love column might lead you to think the book was more about throwing off that faith and rebelling in the big city. But that isn’t true either. Let me explain…

About the Mormon Thing

Bur first, here’s my confession. I grew up with a lot of Mormons, but not the pious-types; instead, I ran around with the Jack Mormons. The first boy who broke my heart talked for months about how we would lose our virginities to each other, and then he slept with someone else. His brother swore he’d pledged his love to me with his CTR ring, but that had to be some other girl, too. So a tiny, ugly part of me hoped this book would reveal stories of weird Mormon conspiracies.

Instead, Hardy paints a loving picture of her childhood faith, even when you can tell she feels rejected by the doctrine and the way that “questioning feels, to them, like betrayal.” I won’t spoil the tender ways she deals with her faith. If you’re looking for a tell-all Mormon bashing, this isn’t that book, but you should read it anyway. She reminded me of the humanity of the church and how, a very long time ago, Mormon missionaries helped my family get life-saving vaccines when we were far from home and how they made us part of their family. Reading about someone parting with something they still love so deeply is much more nuanced and interesting than a hate-filled tell-all, and I learned something about compassion from the way Hardy handled the church.

What Does it Mean to be a Woman?

Hardy wrestles with many of the same issues all women face. Will I have children? Will I find someone to love me? Will I find someone I love and will I learn to love myself? And the stakes are raised by her Mormon upbringing with its expectation that the fulfilling life for a woman is as a wife and mother. Hardy writes, “There cannot be only one way to be a woman. My identity cannot be something I’ve never felt.” I loved the way she explored myriad paths to self-fulfillment and how she never impugns others for their choices even as she makes different ones.

“Not everyone has been raised to believe silence should accompany doubt. Not everyone has been raised in a culture of perfection: they don’t see a benefit in the shellac required to keep up appearances.” – Nicole Hardy

Dealing with Sexuality

One of the things I loved about this book is how unabashedly sexual Hardy confesses to being. From reading The Joy of Sex in fifth grade to becoming captivated by a discussion of frotteurism while at BYU, she writes openly about the sexuality that most girls feel but aren’t supposed to talk about. She shares her desperation and her successes and failures as she dates, still in search of the one. The book is open without being salacious. Of course I wanted to know if she finally lost her virginity, a question I felt revealed a lot about the weight that virginity carries, and I was glad she gave me the space to contemplate my cultural prejudices rather than immediately satisfying my curiosity.

Story of Becoming

“This is how it feels to stand at the precipice of a different, dreamed-of life. To know, even as it’s happening, that this is the day that changes everything.” – Nicole Hardy

Confessions of a Latter-Day Virgin is also the story of becoming a writer, and the day that Hardy decides to apply to Bennington, she writes simply, “There is a master of fine arts program for creative writing, which admits nine to ten students per genre twice per year. I decided to become one of them.” I wanted to stand up and cheer for her and the matter-of-fact way she embraced herself as an artist.

It’s also the story of becoming Nicole. You should read for yourself about the brave choices she makes along the way and how she becomes more and more of herself with every one. I learned from her courage every step of the way.

But What About the Writing?

True story: I was so immersed in reading this book on my way to work that I read it all the way from the bus, up the escalator, into the building and to my desk. And then I wanted to hide in the bathroom and read it some more. The writing is good and the story is engrossing. I was sometimes thrown by the use of present tense in flashback, but that didn’t interfere with my enjoyment at all.

Whether you’re a Mormon housewife who chose kids and the church at a young age or a proudly heathen and poly-amorous (or anyone in between), you’ll be touched by this funny, sweet, and candid book and you’ll fall in love with Hardy at the same time.