Books Archives - Page 34 of 51 - A Geography of Reading

Reading Locally with Lidia Yuknavitch and Jamie Ford

January 13, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

Jessica Prentice created the word “locavore” to mean one who eats locally, but I propose a broader meaning—one who consumes locally. The Latin roots support this (“loca” is related to “locus” or “place” and “vore” means “eat” but also “devour”). Because I devour mostly books, I wanted to look at the benefits of reading locally using Dora: A Headcase by Lidia Yuknavitch and Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford as examples. Both books are set in Seattle where I make my home.

First of all, let me say that I’m unusually blessed living in Seattle. Other cities star more frequently in novels (New York and Paris come to mind), but something about Seattle—maybe because it’s smaller or because I feel like part of the amazingly rich and diverse literary community here—is more intimate. Or maybe it’s because you have to go out of your way to get here, so (unless you’re writing Twilight) authors usually visit the area to get to know the place before writing about it.

I could have written this post about any number of Seattle authors like Sherman Alexie or GM Ford (both of whom I’ve loved), but these two novels by Northwest authors crossed my path this week and they speak to such different geographies that I want to look at each of them here. So we’re on the same page, when I say geography, I mean the location and also the people who affect (and are affected by) the place.

Dora: A Headcase by Lidia Yuknavitch

Nearly every review you read about Dora: A Headcase begins with some version of the following phrase, “contemporary coming-of-age story based on Freud’s famous case study.” If I had known this, my reading of the book might have been more nuanced. But I didn’t. I went to the store in search of Yuknavitch’s memoir, The Chronology of Water, which I was unable to find. What they did have were several copies of Dora. I like the serendipity of discovering a book, so I bought and read this one without considering the back cover or the introduction. I may have missed a dimension of the book in doing so, but it didn’t dampen my enjoyment.

Yuknavitch’s characters capture the spirit of Seattle. Smart and angsty teen Dora showed me just how active a protagonist can be as she teams up with the wild gang of Obsidian, Ave Maria, and Little Teena to rage against convention and authority. I’ve seen people just like each of them on Capitol Hill. Dora has that well-to-do hipster with an angry edge vibe that is uniquely Seattle and the others are equally authentic. Dora’s uptight parents and more-rigid-than-he-ever-thought-he’d-be Dr. Siggy were also familiar and well-drawn, and it was easy to imagine them pushing carts through Trader Joe’s on Queen Anne.

Although the specifics of some locations in the city were treated with creative license, the essence of the neighborhoods is well portrayed. And when the action of the book moves to suburban Renton, the characters stand in even starker contrast to the landscape. I won’t spoil the story, but the shift in setting adds a whole new, very important, dimension to the book—a peek at what all us crazy city folk look like mere miles beyond our border.

The book is a very wild ride and I’d recommend it for those occasions when you are looking for a (legal) way to indulge in revenge.

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford

Jamie Ford’s Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet showcases a very different but equally real Seattle. Set primarily in the International District during World War II, the book tells the story of Chinese-American Henry and Japanese-American Keiko and a love that could not be.

The layered complexities of racial relations that Ford presents rival Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer, though this is a very different book. The detailed scenes revealed an aspect of Seattle history I’ve managed to mostly ignore until now. I’ve known about the Japanese internment for a long time, but only in an abstract way. Ford made the events and their impact real for me, even if the love story was a bit pat.

I have always been interested in World War II, but I usually read about the Holocaust and the European campaign. This book helped me put names and faces with experiences—wondering about the Moriguchi family (owners of Uwajimaya, which was in Tacoma until after the war) and what their life must have been like during the war.

I came away from this book with a deeper appreciation of Pioneer Square where I work and the International District where I sometimes shop. In any city, we are surrounded by more strangers than friends and books can help us understand a place even if we can never meet all of its characters. This is a great book to pick up if you want to find out more about events that rocked Seattle during an era that many people are still not talking about. It will make your next visit to the Wing Luke Museum (or even through the bus tunnel) all the richer.

My Writing

Geography was very important to me in writing my first book, Polska, 1994, as I tried to understand the people of Poland. My characters are shaped by their location in the smaller city of Toruń just as Dora would have been a very different book if it was set in Ballard rather than Capitol Hill, and Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet needed to be set in the International District.

Perhaps that’s why my next book (a work in progress) feels unmoored at the moment—it currently has no setting and is instead entirely about the characters in relation to each other. I like the amorphous nature this gives the characters, but it is also far outside my comfort zone for them to not have a place that shapes them and which they play against.

I am grateful to both Lidia Yuknavitch and Jamie Ford for reminding me that good stories happen at home, too, and that by devouring local books, I might get that extra layer of enjoyment of learning about my city. Do you read locally? What books would you recommend about your city?

If this review made you want to read either book, pick up a copy of Dora: A Headcase or Hotel at the Corner of Bitter and Sweet from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Anderson Cooper Dispatches from the Edge

January 6, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA 4 Comments

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about living abroad and why I don’t. I have plenty of international experience—from living in Chile and Poland to extensive travels on four continents. Despite my wanderlust, something keeps me on home soil, and a week spent with Magic, Science and Religion by Bronisław Malinowski, Travels with Myself and Another by Martha Gellhorn, and Dispatches from the Edge by Anderson Cooper taught me something about the kind of writer I want to be and helped me understand why I choose to live in the US these days.

Magic, Science, and Religion

A random reference in another book led me to finally pull this tattered paperback from my to-read shelf. I have a cultural bias toward Poles and though I had no real idea what this book was about, I was in.

I wish I had known what the book was about. I have a degree in sociology, so observing cultures should be my thing, but Malinowski’s book made me profoundly uncomfortable. I appreciated how he started out by validating more primitive uses of science (even though I hated the use of the word “primitive”). I did not like anything thereafter. Magic, science, and religion should be fascinating topics, but when a culture’s most precious myths are told with complete scientific detachment, I’m out.

They tell how a malicious being of human shape, but not of human nature, went into a piece of bamboo somewhere on the northern shore of Normanby Island. The piece of bamboo drifted northwards till it was washed ashore near the promontory of Yayvau or Vakuta. A man from the neighboring village of Kwadagila heard a voice in the bamboo and opened it. The demon came out and taught him sorcery. This, according to the informants in the south, is the real starting point of black magic. – Bronisław Malinowski

It wasn’t Malinowski’s fault that I hated this book—he wrote a very classic anthropological study. He taught me that I am not interested in detached observers in life or in writing. I like narrative. I want my readers to engage with characters and details and story.

Travels with Myself and Another

Ann Hedreen turned me on to Martha Gellhorn in a recent post about curiosity and one of my favorite travel companions bought the book for me for Christmas. I really enjoyed Gellhorn’s independent spirit. She is famous for being one of Hemingway’s wives. She should be famous for picking up and doing whatever she wanted all over the world. The book covers trips she took to China (while it was under attack from Japan), the Caribbean (while it was under attack from Nazis), Africa (during regime change), and the Soviet Union (where she visited a literary dissident). Need I add that she took these trips mostly for fun?

My favorite chapter was about her time in China. She visited many of the same places I have and I enjoyed thinking about how in such a large country we all end up in the same places. She was there before the communists were in power and it was interesting to see how much has changed and how much has not.

Though I hate to admit it, I am not a resolute traveler, and this is something Gellhorn and I have in common. But whereas I blame myself for a miserable few days spent in the wrong part of Bangkok (there’s a reason western tourists stick to Khao San Road), Gellhorn seems to expect all of the world to live up to her standards. Perhaps Gellhorn and I are too much alike for me to love her. We have perfectionistic expectations and are disappointed when they are not met. Except that I would never have the balls to take off across Africa essentially by myself.

[Hemingway] considered me thoughtfully. “The trouble with you, M., is that you think everybody is exactly like you. – Martha Gellhorn

Reading Gellhorn’s interpretations of the world made me crave the chance to form my own opinions in the way that you get to when you are seeing a new way of life for the first time. I think if Gellhorn had described some of her cultural interactions (especially in Africa) for me instead of sharing her reactions to them, I might have spent less time questioning her opinion and more time focusing on her story. I realized that this engagement is essential for me as a reader though I am sometimes guilty of trying to shape a reader’s experience rather than trusting them to make their own.

Dispatches from the Edge

The highlight of this nonfiction binge was definitely Anderson Cooper’s Dispatches from the Edge. Cooper found a way to marry a straightforward reportage of some pretty horrific war and devastation with a frank look at the trauma of his own life. For the majority of the book, he keeps his own emotion out of the narrative. He paints the scenes in enough detail that the reader can easily interpret and react to the facts on their own. This book hit exactly the right tone.

On the plane, a flight attendant asks a Sri Lankan passenger if she’s comfortable.

“I just lost three people in my family,” the passenger says.

“Oh, that’s terrible,” the flight attendant says, pausing for a moment. “No duty-free then?” – Anderson Cooper

This pulling back on reporting emotion during the most poignant and trying moments is something I learned in grad school, but it still strikes me how powerful omission can be. Cooper trusts his reader to experience regional events like the tsunami in the Indian Ocean and the genocide in Rwanda as well as personal events like his brother’s suicide. By not telling us how to feel, he allows for a much more complex array of emotions.

Even as Cooper seems to come into his own emotions during his outrage at the handling of Hurricane Katrina, he carefully balances journalistic distance with the story of his family’s relationship to the area. This is a deeply personal book and I found a deep respect for Cooper as a reporter, writer, and human being.

Why I Still Live in the US

I envy those living abroad, but I shouldn’t. Living in the US has been my choice. All the things I love about living abroad—the fresh way of seeing, the deepened cultural understanding, and the special feeling of otherness—are transitory. The heightened awareness that comes with living in a foreign country helped make me a writer, but when new countries become home, my observation curve plateaus until I pick up roots and move again. Settling in one place has helped me internalize those skills and turn them toward subtler contrasts.

In my life, and not always by my choice, the idea of moving to another continent was often tied to the idea of running away. As a result, my enduring feeling of living abroad is restless homelessness and transience—you cannot stop lest the adrenaline fade and all the feelings you are fleeing catch up with you. I don’t want to live on that expat edge anymore.

I wanted emotion but couldn’t find it here, so I settled for motion. – Anderson Cooper

Of course, escape is far from the only reason to live abroad. Opportunity and adventure have shaped migration patterns since the beginning of time. I am lucky to have had the chance to learn that home can be anywhere you make it, and I have friends who are happily making homes on other continents on a more permanent basis who I can live vicariously through. But for me right now, the greatest challenge is learning to stand in place and face myself where I am. That happens to be in the US. I may move again someday (my husband and I still cherish that artistic dream of Paris), but when I do, it will not be because I am running away. It will be because I am on steady footing with myself—because I have learned all I can from home and am ready for the next adventure.

If this review made you want to read one of these books, pick up a copy of Magic, Science and Religion,Travels with Myself and Another, or Dispatches from the Edge from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Will Augmented Reality and E-Readers Kill Paper Books?

December 31, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA 6 Comments

As 2012 closes and 2013 dawns, it seemed a good time to enter the fray on a popular discussion: will e-books be the death of paper books? I’m a confirmed Luddite (no dedicated e-reader yet, though I do finally have a smart phone) and I love my paper books, but even I have to admit e-books present exciting new opportunities. In the right hands, e-books have come a long way from the poorly-formatted and typo-ridden uploads we came to expect in the early Kindle and Nook days.

One of the most exciting things I see writers exploring on paper these days (it’s not actually new, but I’m just now discovering it) is hybrid forms. Writers like Michael Ondaatje and W.G. Sebald blend poetry, prose, news clippings, images and more. These narratives come alive in new and interesting ways as the writers and readers fill in gaps between these forms to create a different kind of story.

E-books have infinite potential to take hybrid forms to a new level.

Enhanced E-Books as Illuminations

Melville House has been experimenting with HybridBooks. These e-books contain additional materials from maps to curated text that are meant to illuminate the stories they accompany. This series has been well-received and I’m intrigued by the ability to immediately follow intertextual linkages (without the trudge to the bookstore). And I’ve always loved the maps inside the covers of books, so I suppose this is an extension of that and I can definitely see applications.

Reinventing Publishing with New Media: Augmented Reality Books

My husband received The Art of Journey for Christmas. Using an app, his smartphone turns this illustrated companion to the PlayStation game from a paper book (art by Matthew Nava) to a four-dimensional world as characters literally fly off the page accompanied by a haunting soundtrack.

Though this “augmented reality” only works for a few pages in the book (I imagine the animation is insanely expensive), daqri, the company behind the technology has already been using it to take scientists inside the protein shell of a virus. The possibilities for turning a book into a high-tech immersive entertainment experience are endless.

Will Paper Books Still Exist?

Paper books will always exist in my house as long as I can get them. Sure, there are times when it’s great to be able to click through to understand a reference I hadn’t quite gotten or to see an illustration of what someone else envisioned a creature to look like (this would have been very helpful to me with Lovecraft). But the beauty of black ink on white paper is that I get to participate in the experience of creating the stories and images. If I had a clickable Les Misérables, I would never have spent hours in a British Consulate library looking up new words in the full-length OED and discovering how much I love language and etymology.

I have to admit, though, that for the right project, HybridBooks and augmented reality are very intriguing. Would either of these options enhance the manuscript you’re working on? I’d love to know more. And if you know about other new ways people are re-imagining the book, please share.

Dinaw Mengestu Builds Beautiful Things with a Sense of Place

December 23, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA 3 Comments

One of the things I like most about a book is the possibility of completely inhabiting a new culture or rediscovering a familiar one. Dinaw Mengestu gave me that gift this morning in the novel The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by allowing me to explore DC and Addis Ababa through the eyes of his narrator, Sepha.

Changing Landscape

Stories are supposed to take place during times of change, and Mengestu takes that adage all the way to his setting. Sepha has lived and run a small store in the Logan Circle area of Washington, DC for nearly two decades. It was cheap when he moved in and it’s cheap now, but signs of gentrification are appearing and the longtime residents are not pleased.

It would be far too simple to call this a novel about a poor neighborhood being fixed up by newer, whiter residents. Instead, Mengestu has beautifully woven the social and economic changes of gentrification into the storyline so that the pulse of change in the neighborhood becomes an important element of the setting.

Juxtaposing Cultures

Sepha immigrated to the US from Ethiopia after his father was brutally killed by rebel forces nearly twenty years before, and Sepha’s closest friends are two other African immigrants of a similar vintage from the Congo and Kenya. This setup allows Mengestu to create a world where Sepha is living the American experience (whatever that is) at the same time as he reflects on an almost shared history with his friends. Though they each come from different countries, the game the friends play of naming a coup leader and then coming up with the details speaks to the commonalities of their background, even as they experience the US in very different ways—shop owner, businessman, and waiter. The genius of having the friends not quite share an experience is that each notes and reflects on the differences between them, e.g. the Ethiopian way of kissing as a greeting.

“This country is like a little bastard child. You can’t be angry when it doesn’t give you what you want… But you have to praise it when it comes close, otherwise it’ll turn around and bite you in the ass.” – Dinaw Mengestu

Both the US and Africa are ever-present in the novel as they are in Sepha’s life. My favorite example of this is when he wanders into a park in DC and remembers a park in Addis Ababa that he visited with his father a few days before his father was killed. Sepha’s memory of seeing “traitors’” bodies that day shapes and colors how he sees his current neighborhood and it gives the reader an amazing wealth of depth to read into.

Writer as Observer

It is often said that writers are observers. I am so pleased that Mengestu devotes so much of his observation to how culture makes place. The novel is often quiet, but there is much happening beneath the surface and his characters are setting in place the events that will create the change in their lives (as should be). What is special about The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears is how Mengestu observes the relationship between macro-scale events like gentrification and the micro-scale of people who are both causing the events and experiencing their aftermath.

I wondered at times if Mengestu’s experience as an immigrant helped him see so clearly the cultures of these places. Though his story is very different than Sepha’s—Mengestu came to the US as a very small child—I wondered to what degree his family integrated into their new community and how that shaped his powers of observation or whether he was a born observer. I know my experiences living in Chile as a child and Poland as a teenager enhanced the observation skills I developed as a shy child. Recreating that jarring and unmoored memory of seeing a new culture so quickly for what it is and yet never quite understanding it is why I seek a strong sense of place in a book. It is also a sensation I aspire to create in my own writing.

What experiences shaped you as a writer and how do they show up in your work?

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

This post was amended on July 2, 2013 to correct a factual error.

Writing Advice from Authors Steve Almond and Orhan Pamuk

December 16, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA 4 Comments

On days when I’m feeling more like a book reviewer than a novelist, I read books about writing instead of novels. This writing advice from authors usually helps me get back into the writing spirit. When talking about their relationships with their writing, almost everyone hits at least one note that feels familiar, and I find comfort in the camaraderie. This week I had the wonderful luck to catch two completely different takes on writing from Steve Almond and Orhan Pamuk. Though wildly divergent, they were perfect complements to one another.

This Won’t Take But a Minute, Honey

I first found out about Steve Almond through The Lit Series at Richard Hugo House. In preparation for the event, I watched his video about Toto’s “Africa.”

And then I watched the video again. And again. And again. Almond’s reading at Hugo House was thoughtful, creative, and irreverent, and I picked up this tiny, self-published book, This Won’t Take But a Minute, Honey without even caring what precisely it was about.

About the Book

I finally started reading the book this week because I had 20 books left to read to meet my 2012 reading goals and I thought I could power through the 70 pages and move on to the next thing. I was so completely wrong.

Instead, I found myself immersed in these sassy essays about what it means to be a writer. Starting with the wonderfully self-deprecating “Potentially Truthful Statements Regarding My Other Books,” the comments on creativity were not only spot-on, they were hilarious and useful for artists of all stripes. The book was too good not to share, so I read most of it aloud to my husband. When he left the room, I read it to myself first and then read to him again when he came back.

Steve Almond Kicks My Writing Ass

Almond calls us writers out in true tough love fashion on the things that make us writers—the messianic ego and withering self-criticism—and on the things we must cultivate—the bullshit detector. But he’s not standing on the sidelines telling us to be better writers, he’s condensing all the things we already know and he’s saying, “I’ve been there. And you really do have to fucking do this.” That’s not actually a quote, but it could be. Foul-mouthed and real, the essays bleed into one another and build toward this fantastic and tiny writing boot camp.

”For the rest of us, writing is basically flagellation, an undertaking that promises ecstatic release, but mostly feels like torture. I will do anything to avoid writing. I hate every second of it. The only part of the process I like is having written” – Steve Almond

Once you’ve read all the essays, you’ll realize you can flip the book over for a quick selection of stories.

The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist

I picked up The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist by Orhan Pamuk later in the week because of the author, not because I thought I still needed a shove towards writing. If you have been reading this blog for a while, you know how much I love Pamuk—in fact, there he is, quoted at the very top of this page, just below “A Geography of Reading.” He is perhaps the writer I feel most akin to in all the world—an intellectual who struggles to find his inner artist and who blends politics and humanity in his work. I kind of love him. Mostly I want to be him.

About the Book

I’ve read nearly everything Pamuk has had translated into English, but I hadn’t yet read The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist, his collected Norton Lectures. It was the right size to finish during this reading challenge (I can read about 200 pages in a day) so I stopped saving it for later and dove right in.

Orhan Pamuk Appeals to My Inner Reader

Pamuk starts out from the point of view of a reader and looks at how we experience books as we read them. As writers, we are first readers and all the books we have ever read have been teaching us, but sometimes it’s easy to forget that we are building experiences for people like us. We don’t have to write with our audience in mind, but we should be aware of the effects we are creating on the page.

Pamuk goes on to talk about the ways we blend fiction and reality and whether we really want to even separate the two. He also covers topics like experiencing the world through the eyes of a character unlike you, how we visualize when reading, and writing to the center of the story as a search for the meaning of life. It’s a beautiful book and also very personal. My copy is heavily underlined already and I look forward to visiting it again and again.

“The experienced novelist goes along knowing that the center will gradually emerge as he writes, and that the most challenging and rewarding aspect of his work will be finding this center and bringing it into focus” – Orhan Pamuk

I have 12 books left to read this year, and then I’m going to get back to writing that next book. Pinkie swear.

Other Resources for Writing Kinship

Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. If you are a beginning writer, start here. She will teach you that you have a voice and all you need is to start putting words on a page, one by one.
The Paris Review Interviews (also collected as Writers at Work). For fifty years The Paris Review has been interviewing the big names in fiction, poetry, memoir, screenwriting ,and playwriting about what it means to be a writer. Whether you read them individually or read a slew at once, you will see yourself on the page.
Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke. Generations of writers have taken solace in and courage from these thoughtful letters from a master to a novice.
The Triggering Town by Richard Hugo. These essays on writing and poetry could only have been written by a teacher who loved teaching.
Other writers. If you do not have a writing group or buddy, find one. Surround yourself with people who challenge you but also get you. I have both a critique group and a writing buddy, plus I am lucky enough to be surrounded by writers. These are the people who remind me that I am not alone, even though my work must be completed in solitude.

Leave me a quick note in the comments to share your favorite sources for writing kinship and then get your ass back to writing.

Pick up a copy of The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.