Lazy Self-Indulgent Book Reviews

I guess I should start by mentioning that this is neither the real name of the book, nor the real name of the author.   Apparently, he’s Samuel Youd, and it’s “The Death of Grass” for the original UK audience.   One of those weird situations where the American title is much, much better.  The opposite of the notorious “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s/Sorcerer’s Stone” abomination.

I mean, how offensive is it that someone assumed that children would be so outraged by the notion of a philosopher that they would refuse to read a totally awesome book about wizards?   Children become outraged by the study of philosophy through survey classes in college, and rarely before.

“No Blade of Grass” is kind of like a J.G. Ballard book, in that some guy was sitting around wanting to write a book about a weird future, and just started throwing darts at a board.  For Ballard, this resulted in surprisingly fantastic sf novels with premises like “okay, what if a guy got trapped on a highway median and couldn’t get out?” or “what if, uh, it got really really really windy and didn’t stop?”

For Christopher/Youd, the dart eventually hit “what if some weird virus destroyed all the world’s grasses and then all the grazing livestock ground to a halt (this was before the term ‘cornfed’ really took off, I think), and we were stuck with mostly potatoes, and bought guns and set up compounds in our grandfather’s valley?’”

It’s likely just me, but I have, forever after, really scoped out new locations for their usefulness in a world where grass is gone, and it may have played some small part in my decision to move from a house NEAR the mouth of a large canyon to a house IN the mouth of a large canyon.

I did the Women’s Ski Clinic at a well-known old-timey resort a few years ago, promptly decimating my left leg two turns after lunch on the first day, which is now mainly titanium and screws, and the old, wizened owner joined us for breakfast.  He started off with a fairly benign “look at all these lovely ladies, skiing, it’s so great, we love having you here,” and then fairly swiftly transitioned into: “The world is tending towards destruction, and you lady skiers are our family, and when the end comes, I want you all to know you can hole up here in the canyon, and we should be able to hold off the zombie hordes for as long as it takes.”  To which we all went uhhhhh, and clapped very nicely.

But, you know, in retrospect, he was probably a “No Blade of Grass” fan.

“Freedom” is currently rocking a three-star average rating on Amazon.   This is an indication that people are fools.  

I read the first chapter of “Freedom” a while before I seriously committed to the book.  This is because I took an embarrassing hiatus to read Jeff Pearlman’s “The Bad Guys Won!  A Season of Brawling, Boozing, Bimbo-chasing and Championship Baseball with Straw, Doc, Mookie, Nails, The Kid, and the Rest of the 1986 Mets, the Rowdiest Team Ever to Put On a New York Uniform - - And Maybe The Best.”

I in no way regret that decision; Pearlman’s book is totally awesome and I recommend it to everyone who likes books about baseball, which should be all of you.  And I finished it on the plane to New York, celebrated by going to a game at the new Citi Field with some dear friends, ate myself almost-sick at Shake Shack, and then dutifully re-cracked “Freedom” for my flight home.

I read it in a sitting, not counting the drive to my home from the airport, and fell into a terrible existential funk that lasted about four hours (I am blessed with very brief bouts of ennui.)

It was the usual sort of “I have just read the first great novel of X Century” angst, mostly composed of “why am I not the sort of person who could have written this book?” and a healthy dose of sorrow that, you know, I won’t get to know anything else about characters who have become important to me.   I had a brief digression on the idea that the unpopular name “Patty” has been given to the protagonists of two of my very favourite books:  “Freedom,” obviously, and “Saul and Patty,” until fact-checking revealed that the latter is actually “Patsy.”   So you can ignore that.

I don’t want to hop on the “screw you, Jodi Picoult, you untalented hack, why on earth would the New York Times bother to review your trite, awful books?” bandwagon, partially because Franzen himself has been so gracious about it (which is easy to do when you have written such a Great Book), but I truly wish that her point had been made by a good female writer.   There are actually quite a few of them, really.   I’m not going to get into a list situation, but I would recommend Kate Atkinson and Lionel Shriver, just off the top of my head. 

But before you do that, you should really acquire and read “Freedom,” which is almost tediously excellent, and certainly better than whatever winds up winning the National Book Award.

Update:

Further reflections here.

Harlan Ellison’s 1967 speculative fiction anthology was the most important book of my adolescence. Note that I use the term “speculative fiction,” as do most women who have ever dated an individual who attempts to write the stuff. I don’t recommend that, personally, but eventually you will enjoy the genre again.

I had been extremely close to my father, a homemaker, for most of my childhood, but our edges had done serious damage to our relationship through my teenage years. Personally, I think we as a species are too dismissive of the breach of common decency that marks adolescence. It serves a very serious purpose, in that we are supposed to look at each other upon reaching sexual maturity, and say, “my God, I must leave your home and build my own life, farewell.” Regrettably, the strange indoor-cat-like domestication of humans between 12 and 18 means that we must continue to live and friction with our parents for an interminable amount of time. Deeply unnatural, seemingly unavoidable.

But I was about 17, anyway, and had recently began sleeping with my boyfriend, who did, it must be said, write terrible speculative fiction, despite being excruciatingly nice and introducing me to the Replacements. (Peace be upon him.) My father and I had not spoken in approximately six months. This had nothing to do with sleeping with my boyfriend, as my parents had delightedly and Canadian-ly whisked me off to get oral contraceptives four seconds after the idea had been casually floated. It had to do with Stalin. I was con, my father pro. He has always romanticized the Soviet Union in a way which continues to puzzle me, but, then, I find books about the antebellum South rather fascinating, and it is surely a small leap to saying “gosh, wasn’t that sort of a nice pretty way to live?” So we had had a vigorous argument about Stalin, which I was on the side of the angels in, obviously, and then we just didn’t speak for six months. Drove my mother crazy.

My boyfriend, whose name was Jay, gave me “Dangerous Visions.” It’s completely transporting, and you should all immediately read it, and resulted in me tracking back the individual contributors and thus being introduced to Philip Jose Farmer, and Philip K. Dick, and Samuel Delany, and Roger Zelazny, and Poul Anderson. And some of the stories are dreck (naked women in space!), but most are phenomenal little nuggets. I was about halfway through “Dangerous Visions” when I ran into my dad in the hallway one morning during Month Six Point Five of not-talking, and heard myself say: “Hey, Dad, did you ever read ‘Dangerous Visions’?” At which point he almost fell over with readiness to end our detente, and informed me that it was the single most important book of his adolescence. And then he offered me a ride to school, and I pretty much remember being an adult after that.

This is the sort of middle-brow non-fiction read that usually happily clogs my Kindle.  I will buy literally any book for the Kindle, since my husband’s credit card is hooked up to that account, and he can’t tell if I’m using it to buy “Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln” (which is very good, like anything John Stauffer writes), or “The Secrets of Skinny Chicks” (they don’t eat anything at all, they don’t use the elliptical, they cannot read magazines during their workout).

There was far too much about surfing in Susan Casey’s newest.   But I did appreciate that she fleshed out more details on the tsunamis in Lituya Bay, which have always fascinated me.   What do you do, psychologically, with a 1,720 ft wave?   You can say, oh, well, it’s like x times the size of y, but that’s not particularly interesting.   You can say, well, it’s bigger than the wave in “Deep Impact” that took out Tea Leoni and her dad, but, really, it’s so much bigger than that.   It’s like the sort of wave you see in your dreams, if you dream about waves.  I personally mostly dream about graduate school, and suddenly realizing I have forgotten to go to graduate school, and being terrified and lost, and then I wake up, panicked, and realize that I have absolutely zero desire to attend graduate school.

I had really enjoyed Susan Casey’s previous book, “The Devil’s Teeth,” about the great white sharks off the coast of Northern California, as I enjoy any book about sharks.  Or, for that matter, any Wikipedia list about fatal or near-fatal shark attacks.  Before the internet, when I was a young, weird Canadian child, my father used to go to the Kingston Public Library with me several times a week.  While I was relegated to the tedious child section upstairs, he would dutifully photocopy pictures of sharks from large, grown-up picture books, which I would then study intently. 

It reminds me of nothing so much as the account by serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer’s father of his son’s early fascination with a dead bird found on the sidewalk.  It’s such a fine line, he pondered, between “oh, wow, our son is going to be a naturalist!” and “he does love those dead things, doesn’t he?”

I am neither a naturalist nor a serial killer, but I do love rogue waves and deadly sharks.

It’s probably not.  Enjoy it while it lasts, it will almost certainly be shuttered at some point due to laziness, privacy concerns, boredom, an over-filled DVR, or horror as my college contemporaries receive book deals for actual books.