What can be said about Claudia Schiffer? She’s a living legend at this point. She’s an iconic face. Why is she so enduringly popular? It must be the guileless combination of Bardotesque sex appeal and Bavarian milkmaid goodness. It must be the way her assets – definitive blonde hair, curves like no other – balance out her relative shortcomings - noticeable overbite, average looking legs – making her seem like a realistic total package; perfect but not too much.
Last month I was without my good friend the internet for three weeks. It was a sad and painful time of separation. Not being able to look up anything in the world at the drop of a hat, no videos, no music except via iPod, no Lolcats, and no blogging. On the other hand, I did get a lot of reading done. So much reading, in fact, that I’m having trouble remembering off the top of my head what-all I have read this year. It’s much too overwhelming to do a series of full book reports at this late date, so I’ll simply do quick rundown. This is six books, all I can remember at this moment. I’m pretty sure more will come to me…
Tom Robbins has long been one of my favorites, even when I was at an age when most of his big ideas made no sense to me. His latest, Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates is…vintage Robbins, to use a cliche. Exuberantly irreverent and deeply philosophical and dead-parrot absurd all at once.
Gillian Flynn’s new novel Dark Places, although it does not achieve the same feverish level of grotesquerie as her debut Sharp Objects, has its own cold Midwestern Gothic appeal. It’s a mystery, a didhedoneit, and a macabre portrait of hopeless small town life, dead end people, wasted years, and other dark things.
For those of us who reluctantly enjoyed the Twilight series, the power of the story rose above the clumsiness of the execution. I’m happy to report that The Host, Stephenie Meyer’s first book for grownups is unequivocally excellent. The concept is truly golden: Invasion of the Body Snatchers from the aliens’ perspective. And although Meyer’s prose will never be called poetic, she’s improved dramatically as a writer. The simplicity of her style works in her favor this, and she drives the story along with vivid intensity. Meyer’s strength is her grasp of emotions – especially female ones – and she’s finally written a heroine with a complex (but not distracting or annoying) flow of thoughts and feelings. And, of course, a totally awesome sci-fi concept.
After I enjoyed Natsuo Kirino’s Grotesque so much, I was very eager to find more of her work. Although Kirino has written over a dozen novels, only four of them have been translated to English. Real World is slighter than Grotesque, both in size and in depth. The story concerns a disturbed young killer and four teenage girls who, each for her own reasons, are drawn into his orbit. Each girl struggles with her own problems, and the suspense is in discovering which ones are survivors and which will flounder. Though none of the characters are as deeply damaged as the ones in Grotesque (barring the murderer), and none of them have such dark lives, it is still a compelling and oft unflattering window on contemporary Japan.
Tom Rob Smith’s Child 44 is a thriller about a serial child murderer and the one man who can track him down and end his reign of terror against all odds, etc. Yes, it’s a fast paced, violent tale about sick minds, honor and justice. What makes it worth reading for those who don’t like to read about child-killing maniacs is the milieu, meant to be exotic, but to me depressingly familiar. The story takes place in and around Moscow during the dark final days of Stalin’s regime, when the mustached one was engaged in a game of mass murder against his citizens that would’ve made Hitler squawk with envy. The hero, a disillusioned MGB officer, has to solve a series of murders while everyone around him insists that crime does not exist. From what I can tell Smith did his research and he captures the toxic paranoia of the period. It would have been dramatic enough reading without the fisticuffs and daring escapes (or disemboweled children for that matter) but there are thriller conventions to be fulfilled as well here. I thought Smith’s transitioning between povs is clumsy and the choice to print dialogue Russian style – that is, sans quotation marks – doesn’t really make any sense. Using Stalin’s death as dea ex machina in the final act is also a lazy move. But overall, I would recommend it – it’s the old serial killer chase mystery in a very different setting, one that presents a unique set of problems.
Meanwhile, I’m still working to conquer Kurt Vonnegut’s formidable oeuvre. Galapagos is not one of his top five bestest. Maybe not even in the top ten. But this is Vonnegut, who couldn’t fail to be entertaining, witty and wise even had he wanted to. I only have three novels left unread, and when I’ve done that, I’ll decide once and for all which ones aren’t in the top ten. Today, I think I’ll start Bluebeard.
The Doors are unusual because nobody has ever had any success copying them. They were and still are very popular. Certainly, they’ve been an influence on thousands of people. But nobody sounds like The Doors. The other interesting facet of The Doors is that they didn’t sound like anybody before them, either. Sure, they had influences like anyone else. But they rarely showed their roots. For most popular bands, even vastly influential and groundbreaking ones, it’s easy to glean from their songs exactly who their musical forebears were. The usual track to creating an original sound is by failing to adequately reenact someone else’s. Not so the Doors. Anomalous as that is, they were not without their own plagiarism, but Jim’s interests being of a more literary nature, the average listener could be counted on to miss whichever Dionysian dead French guy was being referenced. For the highly edumacated, the game of ‘name the source of that riff’ becomes ‘name the book Jim just read and regurgitated’. Me, I’m not highly edumacated, and I’m sure there’s lots that goes right over my head. Anyhow, here we find a song based on a recognizable musical source, which does happen. It’s not the only Doors song that shows off a classic blues beat, don’t get me wrong. I am not suggesting complete originality sprung from a drunken void. But I could name some groups for whom each and every song is an attempt to resurrect Elvis (or whomever), so I do admire The Doors for not being too beholden to their elders.
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