On the Road

I've had this on my bookshelf for so long I don't even remember when I got it or if it's even actually mine and not one I snagged from a friend. I've been meaning to read it forever but other things kept coming up. I brought it along on safari because it seemed like the right sort of book for that. It wasn't. That's not to say it was the wrong book, but Facing the Congo would have been much better for safari.

I have one important comment up front: reading this book is like taking a dose of Benzedrine. You don't need any uppers for at least the next half hour after you're done reading. They say Kerouac wrote the thing in three weeks (to which some eminence, Tom Wolfe I think, said, "That's not writing, that's typing.") and that manic energy flows off the page and directly into your brainstem as you read. I even talked faster after I'd read a few pages. People remarked on it. This may not happen to you but be forewarned.

The book is divided up into five parts. The fifth is just a few pages of summary. The fourth is about a trip to Mexico. The first three are… well, frankly, they're all the same. And that really bogged me down. Took me three weeks to get through part three (didn't finish the book until I was home for Christmas, and by then it felt like work).

I don't know why this bothered me so much. I really expected to like this book; people who've read it and who know me, said I'd really like it. And the truth is I absolutely loved part one. Loved it. I felt like I could read it three more times and it would be just as great… and then I did. The rest of the book was basically part one again, with minor changes in setting and tertiary characters.

For such a slim novel to seem so repetitive, so devoid of new material, seems odd, but the plot is as thin as an old dress sock: a couple guys get on the road and beat around the country bumming rides and money and working odd jobs. Towards the end I was starting to think Kerouac wrote it in three weeks because his memory was hazy and he just kept writing the same thing over and over.

But that's not fair, because it's not the same thing over and over. It's incredibly similar things, broken up by some really awesome description. And that's, ultimately, what has to carry you through the later chapters. In part one I was thrilled by the newness of the concept, awed by the vitality of Kerouac's words and sentences, and caught up in the excitement of the characters—the characters' own excitement about America, about going out and seeing it, really experiencing it, their absolute joy of and love for this country and its freedoms.

In part two I was still excited about reading the book, but I realized that the characters were not different than they had been in part one. Dean, I'm sorry to say, is a jackass. Sal comes across as a little dimwitted, although I don't think that's really the case. I think really he's just along for the ride, for whatever the ride may be. That's the point, after all, the point of the book—life is about the experience, about going out and seeing and doing and trying and learning and failing and living. This was a reaction to the notion that life is a certain specific thing, that you are supposed to live a certain way, do certain things. Nah. That's not life. This is life, hitchhiking across the country, working at different jobs, scrumming for your dinner, trying to figure out how to get by on wits alone and still have enough left over to go out, to experience what's out there.

I had a very strong connection to Sal Paradise throughout the book. Sal is the somewhat older, somewhat wiser guy (only somewhat), and he doesn't always initiate the travels so much as he has a yen to do them but needs someone to provide him with a destination or an excuse. Dean Moriarty does both, but as I said he's a jackass. Far be it from me to criticize someone else's lifestyle (except for all those times when I do), but you can't have three wives and five kids and not be able to support a one of them. There's a line somewhere between going out and experiencing all the weirdness life has to offer, and being an irresponsible shitheel. Both are equally fun but only one is remotely honorable.

The other characters apart from Sal and Dean are sketches. We spend some time with them, but what separates them? One has a wife he leaves. One lives in New Orleans and does a lot of drugs. One lives in San Francisco and Sal manages to piss him off but good. But really, what's different about them, one from the next? What do they matter? I'm not sure. They're pretty much the same people from one scene to the next, one voyage to the next, and at the end I'm not real sure they'd changed much. But they were real people, and Sal and Dean really went out there and really met them and hung with them and experienced them, really dug them, grooved with them, whatever sort of beat phrase you want to do. That's what it's all about, is getting out and really digging a guy, you know?

All well and good, but by book three I was just damn tired of the whole thing. There was no change, no real difference in the characters, nothing new. The point—get out and see what's out there, you know, hit the road--was already made, the beast was cooked, the horse was beat. Man, that was a beat horse…

At least in the fourth act we got to go to Mexico, and it felt sort of new again, but only sort of, and Dean was still a jackass. I was tired by then. I was beat. Beat, man. Beat.

But throughout the book there was description, the kind of description that wraps itself around your brain stem and beats itself into you and makes your eyes water and your hair burn and your teeth rattle around in your mouth from the sheer presence of it, the very nearness and certainty and clarity. Awesome stuff. Early on you notice the place descriptions, towns and cities and houses and farms and the road, just the road itself. Later on the descriptions are of people and what they're doing, of jazz music and jazz musicians. Even in the depths of part three when I was sick of the whole damn thing there would come along this amazing, fascinating description of these jazzmen and their tunes. I'd put in some passages but man it doesn't work unless you've already been reading for five minutes and you've got the cadences and the spirit and the feel, man, just the whole beat language and rhythm, rhythms like the jazz that so exulted Sal and Dean, and Jack and Neal in real life. It's amazing.

Sorta sounds like I really dug the book, you know? Only I didn't. Except when I did. It was like that.

But I gotta tell you this, man. I don't get it, you know what I mean? Here was this great piece of American literature, and it was cool, and it was beat, and I liked parts of it, and I just don't feel like I really got it. Why? Why was it so great? As a chronicle? As philosophy? As the new American writing par exemplance? I don't know. Was this supposed to change my life? Affirm it? Transport to a land of ecstasy? Or just, you know, was it just supposed to be a good read? I have to admit it came closer to some of the former than it did the latter.

Have you read On the Road? What did you think?

Knight Life

I finished Peter David's Knight Life and One Knight Only while on safari. These had been mailed to me by the incomparable Lucky Bob, who has already reviewed both of them. His reviews are better, so the links above just send you straight over to him for the full story. Suffice to say I enjoyed both of these, as you might suspect being sort of a political junkie with a slight affinity for the truth. The notion of King Arthur returning in the present day to run for office and what that might entail… it's a gold mine.

I will say that, Peter David being a fantasy writer and not a political writer, the books—in particular One Knight Only, tended much more toward fantasy than political fiction usually does. Had I written them they would have gone off in an entirely different direction, and readers like me who don't do a lot of fantasy literature might wish Mr. David had spent more time considering how King Arthur reacts to modern politics and less time on the dirty doings of Morgan le Fey and Gilgamesh. But that's just me. I still had a good time.

River of Grass

I finished this book in November the day before the safari. Like Some Kind of Paradise, this is a book about Florida history—at least to some degree. Published in 1947, this is really the original Florida history, the first important popular book about Florida to attempt any decent coverage of the pre-Columbian period. And it set the tone, in many ways, for every Florida history that was to follow, by drawing its narrative around the state's ecology.

Marjorie Stoneman Douglas was for many years after this book's publication regarded as the foremost Everglades scholar, historian, and protector, and she fought for Everglades restoration until her death a few years ago. River of Grass was not so much the end of a long studied interest in the Glades as it was the start of a career. The book also started a lot of other careers, got a lot of people in South Florida and elsewhere interested in the unique patch of ground we have at the end of this state and have been trying to destroy for two hundred years. For that alone the book deserves high honor.

But it was written in the 40's. New scholarship and new ideas have changed the way we think about some parts of the state's early history, and this can be jarring if you're up to date on what we now think about Ponce and the Calusa and everything else. But Douglas was the first writer to say in any popular format that Ponce de Leon was not, in fact, looking for the Fountain of Youth, and indeed may not have even known the myth. It was added later by Spanish romantics looking to idealize what was a brutal and difficult conquest (and one that didn't exactly pay off for Spain).

The first few chapters are about Glades ecology, and here it is clear Mrs. Douglas really knew and loved the Glades, had spent time in it and talked to the people who'd lived in it. And it's clear how important it was to her to make the Glades seem like more than some God-forsaken swamp at the end of the Earth, which for most people at that time it still was. Occasionally the prose is a bit florid, the description just a mite too romantic to be entirely real, but it's still wonderfully evocative.

After the first five chapters, Mrs. Douglas settles down into a linear narrative, something Some Kind of Paradise could have used a bit more of. She is a gifted storyteller, and that is the key requisite for a popular historian. Though River of Grass covered much of the same material I'd read just a few months earlier, I found this book a faster read, more like a story, less a witty retelling of facts than a gripping old-fashioned yarn. That's what popular history should be.

The book focuses exclusively on south Florida, south of Lake Okeechobee for the most part with occasional notes about goings on elsewhere in the state but nothing in-depth. For this reason it's not the best available history of the state, if that's what you're looking for. But it is hard to beat River of Grass for a good historical adventure, and you'll get a great insight for the Glades and the people who've sought to tame them.

If Chins Could Kill

I was sent Bruce Campbell's autobiography, If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B-Movie Actor, by the inestimable Lucky Bob, who encouraged me to read it someplace where I wouldn't be concerned about laughing out loud. I am never concerned by such things, and I am already regarded by many people here as not fully sane. But the end of October seems to have reduced my ability to laugh out loud, even in private, at least for a while. So I didn't laugh out loud that much at the book.

But in any other month… well. This is a great book, a great read, funny and warm and full of passion. Mr. Campbell did what most people don't think they can really do—he followed his dream. He wanted to be an actor, because being an actor isn't really very much like working. Or at least that’s how it seemed. For Bruce Campbell, at least, acting turned out to be very much like work, hard sometimes, unpleasant, crazy, not especially remunerative. But throughout it he was what he wanted to do, what he had always dreamed of doing, and so the hardship and the struggle were never so bad, and what might have been grueling work seemed much more fun.

You may not have heard of Bruce Campbell. He admits this much on the back cover. But he also points out that his book isn't just for his fans. It's for anyone who wants to know what life in Hollywood is like for the majority of actors, for the working stiffs who come in every day and do the small roles and don't command $20 million per picture, who don't feed the tabloid machine and don't go testify before Congressional committees about their dimwit political opinions and don't headline summer blockbusters. There are lots of such people, far more than there are big stars, and to some degree Campbell is speaking for all of them.

If Hollywood is a hard place to make a living, but a kid from suburban Detroit with a big chin can make it, then what's to scare the rest of us off from trying our hand at what we really want to do? That's the message that underlies the whole book, and what a great message it is. Bruce Campbell may not be a household name, and you don't get the impression he wants to be anymore, but the friends he ran with as a kid all went out to Hollywood to make their way, and one of those friends (who appears throughout the book) is Sam Raimi, the fellow who made those little movies called Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2. I don't know if you've seen those; they're only the best superhero movies ever made. Clearly you can do well doing what you really want to do.

I could philosophize a while here about how this was exactly the right book for me to read right now, and it was. But I'll spare you. I may not have laughed out loud every other page, but I wouldn't have laughed out loud at much the last couple weeks; doesn't mean I don't appreciate the humor. And whether you're a fan of Evil Dead or Army of Darkness or Brisco County, Jr. (or The Hudsucker Proxy, one of my favorite movies of all time) or not, Bruce Campbell is a funny man, a down-to-Earth guy with a great story to tell and a great way of telling it. You're going to like this book. Go read it.

O Pioneers!

I bought this book, along with Goodnight, Nebraska, earlier this year when I was planning a long trip to Nebraska and wanted some background reading. That trip—the Nebraska Hedonism Tour, which was to begin with an old friend's wedding and included stops at nearly all of the state's dozen wineries and which I was greatly looking forward to—fell through when the trip I'm currently on came up. Consequently O Pioneers!, by Willa Cather, languished on my bookshelf for a while. It being a bit of Classic American Literature such as you might read in high school, it might have languished there for a long time (high school literature and I have had a bad relationship ever since Mrs. Foust's interpretation of Silas Marner), so before I left home I placed it among a pile of books to have my folks send me out here when I ran out of other reading material.

I've never read Willa Cather before. She was apparently quite the interesting character in her own right. O Pioneers! follows, in bits and pieces, the life of Alexandra Bergson of Nebraska and her family, of how the high plains were tamed by the hand of man and the plow. Actually, in this case, it's the hand of woman that does much of the work. Cather's Alexandra is a strong-willed woman who makes her way by her own wits. She may not get her hands dirty with the farm work, but she is one of the first large-farm managers in history and in an era when women weren't expected to manage anything and even their rights to property were suspect. Parts of the critical commentary that lead off the book—as it must lead off all "classic" literature as if readers cared what some literary critic has to say about a book who's value is adequately proved by its staying power—describe it as one of the first important pieces of feminist literature, as if somehow O Pioneers! is less about the strength of ingenuity, the American spirit, the truth that all individuals have power and worth, and instead is some sort of proto-chick lit, Bridget Jones on the High Plains.

But I digress. Had I read O Pioneers! in high school I might have hated it, because it is somewhat slow. Cather's narrative jumps years at a time, sixteen years at one point, and glosses over the most interesting bits, the specifics of how Alexandra and her wit and her brothers and their work managed to make something out of the harsh terrain of the Nebraska plains: one chapter ends with Alexandra convincing her brothers to go along with her scheme, and the next begins with the statement that the scheme has worked brilliantly.

Of course I may be interested in how they got from A to B, but Cather knows better that the story doesn't hang on how exactly the transition occurred, only that it did, and how it affected the characters and the country and the people around them. This doesn't mean the narrative is fast paced. But the book is short and it moves along, the characters are well-drawn if always somehow a bit distant, and the writing is not heavy or difficult (the book was written in 1913). I read the whole book in about four days without spending undue time doing so.

The editor's occasional footnotes and endnotes can be annoying, and seem entirely random. One page has four footnotes, elaborating on the local flora Mrs. Cather names without description. Another page has more local flora treated in the same way by the author, but without the footnotes, as if the editor though we poor readers would be flailing about wondering what a snow-lily was but wouldn't be bothered by the mysterious marsh-trumpet. None of the footnotes add a thing to the story and their inconsistency is more annoying than anything. When possible, it's best to find copies of classic literature that are simply presented as they are and not beaten into submission by editors and critics; this is not always possible when purchasing books online, which is why bookstores are still so much more fun.

Ultimately the book brought to mind the truth that we have no more real frontiers in America, and that being in such control of the land as we are we as a people tend to forget what it took to get us to where we are. Alexandra Bergson's America was not a global Colossus bestriding the seven seas, and the simple questions of existence, of food and shelter and survival, were much more in her mind and the minds of her fellow Americans than they are in ours today; reading the book reminds us of that. For that reason if for no other O Pioneers! deserves a wider audience.

Understanding Iraq

I bought Understanding Iraq, by William Polk, at the beginning of this year when I expected to deploy there. That deployment fell through, and there is no Understanding Djibouti. So I read this book instead. We could all use a little understanding.

Unfortunately, I can't review this book and adhere to my "no political content" policy, so I won't try. The book is interesting; it is slim and well-paced and written by an old hand with no need to prove his academic credentials to anyone, so it's easy to read. That said, the author, a trained historian, has very well-defined political opinions, and it is hard not to see that from the first section of the book, on ancient Iraq. It's tempting to say his opinions are formed by years of study, and of course to some degree they must be—and the author has spent a significant amount of time living and working in Iraq and so knows the place well apart from his study—but two people can look at the same set of facts and draw different conclusions. Readers inclined to Mr. Polk's point of view will find this book a quick read and a useful resource in discussions of the topic. Readers on the other side of the aisle will not be so inclined.

The Prophet and The Messiah

I don't know how to review this book, The Prophet and the Messiah, by Chawkat Moucarry, which is I have not reviewed it before now. The book was written by an Arab Christian who has made a career teaching Muslims and Christians about each other. That such a job is both vitally important and woefully neglected is undeniable. The book was written to reach people the author cannot reach himself.

It is certainly a good book and absolutely worth a read by any Christian, any Christian at all whether he or she engages with Muslims or not. There are too many myths, too much shouting, too much demonizing and burying of truth in our society. Shouting pundits and crying televangelists do nothing to bridge the yawning gap between our faiths and in fact simply make it wider. We American Christians foment hatred and false truths about Muslims just as surely as Middle Eastern Muslims do so about us.

The book is valuable especially to Christians working in evangelism. Moucarry does not begin his discussion by claiming Islam is wrong and its practitioners evil, as so many evangelists do. It's hard to minister to a people you think to be demons, doubly so when you don't understand where the people are coming from. Muslims are justifiably proud of their faith, and any attempt to evangelize to them that starts with "you're wrong and here's why" will cause offense and close ears and minds and hearts, and is a waste for both parties.

Moucarry starts by discussing the differences between Islam and Christianity; this discussion is clearly geared toward a Christian audience and seeks to put to rest the myths Christians tend to hear about Islam. He then goes on to discuss the myths Muslims are taught about Christianity, at some length, and where they come from and why they are myths and, to some degree, how Christians can explain these things to Muslims without offending them. He then goes into specific doctrines of Islam that Christians can question validly, and why similar doctrines of Christianity are defensible against questioning by Muslims. Finally he treats the question of the truth of Islam, of whether there is genuine revelation in the faith and what we might learn from it.

It can be a difficult book to read, especially in the early going when Moucarry cites Islamic false claims about Christianity in one chapter and only in the next chapter gets around to laying out the truth. Reading with an open mind is absolutely vital, and a Bible is a necessary resource. But difficult though it may be, the book is a worthy read and I recommend it highly.

November Novel Update

It's been quiet lately at work and I've been doing a bit more reading in the evenings than the last week or so. One of the books I started was Bruce Campbell's autobiography, which has been great fun. And lately I've been engaged in a fierce (well, not really) debate about the correct taxonomy of one of the common trees on this base, Conocarpus lancifolius, which doesn't have an English common name but is called ghalab by the Somalis. It's quite a nice tree but there's a dearth of agreement as to what, exactly, it is. I'm going to post a couple pictures shortly along with a long and rather dry explanation of the naming controversy, which is not as yet settled (I've brought in the New York Botanical Gardens and the University of Florida Herbarium to help, and may have to try to get myself a wood sample to bring home). This is fair warning.

And I've been pecking away at my 50,000 word novel for National Novel Writing Month. I haven't quite managed the word count I'm going to need to reach 50k, and what with the safari coming up the last week of the month I'm thinking I need to at least give myself the first four days of December. Just to be fair, you know.

As of this writing I have 2778 words, not counting the title. I cheated, though, because the main character--acutally, it appears he's going to be peripheral--is named Ivan Marion Cartwright Harrison Templeton van Arden Telemann Romanostovich-Spastiziczisikowski. That's ten words right there. Of course, he goes by Van and his full name is only reported once.

This book has not led in any of the directions I considered in the last post. It's clearly straight farce. The action takes place in the city of Porktown, which is a state capital. The climate is uniformly warm and breezy because of the high proportion of state legislators and advertising agencies that call the place home, such that none of the characters are actually sure what time of year it is (it's the month of Checkuary). One of the other characters is named Melllllllody, although she doesn't pronounce the extra six L's (unlike her mother Ellllizabeth). Like all fifteen year old girls dream of doing, Melllllllody ran away from home and took work on the tugboats and garbage barges that ply the Dreary River, which runs into Gabba Gabba Bay at Porktown. The character I now suspect of being the central character in the story so far doesn't have a name. He goes about in a tweed smoking jacket and blue velvet cape and calls himself The Reporter. Clearly he's some sort of superhero, although at present his only superpower seems to be predicting traffic accidents.

Remember when I said, it doesn't have to be good? Right. I do take my own advice, even if no one else does.

Write a novel in a month?

My esteemed friend mentioned over on his blog that November is National Novel Writing Month, the goal being to write a 50,000 word... um... piece of fiction, in the month of November. This boils down to 1667 words per day, which is significantly less than I did on Lauderdale on good days. But "good days," on Lauderdale, were days in North Carolina on the porch where the only thing I had to do all day apart from writing was fix and consume meals. I could put in 10,000 words on such a day if things were going well.

Now I have a job that keeps me busy from 0730 to 1700 or so. I should at least be able to get 1667 words a day at the speed I type. But what to write about? I've decided this is the perfect opportunity to explore science fiction, cyberpunk, or noir, all three of which I've considered trying my hand at.

Since the goal of National Novel Writing Month is not to produce a good novel, but just to write for the sake of writing (something too few people do), it seems a great opportunity to give one of those genres a shot. And I think everyone else should, too. So I'm challenging my readers--well, my readers who blog, and my other readers who have any sort of emotional connection to the little silhouetted tree there on the right and didn't just give birth, and my other readers who think it sounds fun--to join me, and apparently also Scanime, and at the end of the month we'll see just exactly how ridiculous the things we've come up with are and pass them around and have a good laugh. Come on, you know it sounds like fun. Admit it. Even if you don't hit the 50,000 word mark, you can at least try, right? Right. So it's settled then. And since the 1st is already almost over for me you all have a head start.

Remember, it doesn't have to be any good. It just has to be.

Memoirs of a Geisha

I wasn't sure whether I was going to like this book. I don't know why I wasn't sure, I just wasn't. But it was insanely popular and they made a movie out of it. Arthur Golden is no doubt a reasonably wealthy author now (he should help out his brother Al with that Temple football program...) and he managed it by completely ignoring that old saw "write what you know."

So of course I was interested in what the book was like, but as I said I wasn't sure I'd like it.
And the truth is were it not for the stationary bikes in the gym I might not have gotten past the first ten chapters or so. It was the only thing I had that I could read there (the rest of my books at the time were all larger format) so I read it.

It does start a bit slow, at least to me. This is the problem I'm having with Lauderdale right now, in fact, is figuring out how to increase the pacing in the early part of the book without sacrificing the myriad setups to later events. I'm actually rather happy to see that Memoirs has a bit of the same problem, but it seems that millions of Americans were willing to keep reading without benefit of a stationary bicycle, so perhaps there's hope for Lauderdale, too. Not that I'm done working on it, of course.

After the first fifty pages or so, however, I was sufficiently absorbed by the characters that I was quite happy to continue reading. This is true skill, taking characters with whom most readers have nothing in common and making them not just interesting (of course they'll be interesting), but sympathetic as well.

Truth is, I rather enjoyed the book. I'm still a little confused by that. Not much actually happened; there was very little action. I had an inkling what certain of the characters were going to do before they did it, sometimes quite some ways out. But that didn't make the book any less enjoyable.

I'll be putting the movie on my Netflix queue, if only to see how the filmmaker portrays Gion. But the book was good. It was well worth the read; I'm glad I picked it up, and glad I set aside my doubts.
But I'm also glad for the stationary bike.

Plainsong

I picked up Plainsong from the local library. I was attracted by the pretty picture of stormclouds on the front and the fact that it been nominated for but not won an award (I have nothing against awards, and would like to win one myself some day, but as a general rule I find that I don't enjoy award winning books, especially Pulitzer winners, so I don't generally pick those up). One ought not to judge a book by its cover, of course, but books contain lots and lots of words and the only way to know if one is any good is to read the whole thing, which is untenable, standing there in the library. So yes, I buy books based on whether I like the cover or not. Of course I buy books for other reasons, but I daresay a huge majority of people sometimes buy books because they like the covers.

The picture of the author, Kent Haruf, on the second page makes Mr. Haruf look almost exactly like one of the people I work with. Scary, actually. Anyway, that's beside the point.

The point being that this book was outstanding. And I'm almost surprised I can say that. Mr. Haruf has a very particular writing style, very spare and simple (almost no adverbs at all, which you may have noticed I use rather a lot), never a longer word where a shorter one will do, hardly a comma to be found, sentences that might be called run-on if you were in fourth grade. For example:

He went out into the hall again past the closed door and on into the bathroom and shaved and rinsed his face and went back to the bedroom at the front of the house whose high windows overlooked Railroad Street and brought out shirt and pants from the closet and laid them out on the bed and took off his robe and got dressed.

I could never write a sentence like that. Not because I wouldn't deign to run a sentence on so (this one here is going to be plenty long), not because I would be afraid of neglecting my friend the comma, but because I simply couldn't pull it off; I'm not good enough. Maybe someday.

Plainsong is written like that. Haruf tells you plainly what his characters did. And, he tells you what they said. That's a key point—the narrator here tells you what characters said. The characters don't say these things themselves, not in the immediate sense. Of course you have no doubt as to the narrator's veracity; it's just that there's no proper dialogue. Such as like here:

…Presently she stopped cranking the machine and put in another master.
What brings you here so early? she said.
Crowder wanted to talk to me.
What about?
Russell Beckman.
That little shit. What'd he do now?
Nothing. But he's going to if he wants to get out of American history.
Good luck, she said. She cranked the machine once and looked at the paper. Is that all that's bothering you?
Nothing's bothering me.
Like hell it isn't. I can see something is. She looked into his face, and he looked back without expression and sat smoking. Is it at home? she said.
He didn't answer but shrugged again and smoked.

I don't know how to tell you how amazed I am that I liked this. Loved it.

I set down and stopped reading The Shipping News because I didn't like the writing style Annie Proulx used in the book. The Shipping News won the Pulitzer. It was a great book, loved by millions. I didn't get past chapter two. Haruf's conventions in the writing of Plainsong are no less idiosyncratic and certainly I would have expected not to tolerate them. Instead I loved them. But for the fact that it's been done I'd try it myself. I don't know how or why, but this spare writing makes the book that much more beautiful.

And that's what the book is, beautiful. There are not many characters, not many important ones anyway. They all lead their own lives; none is central. Of course the story would hardly work if they didn't all connect, and they assuredly do. One of the advantages of setting a book in a place like Holt, Colorado (a town not at all unlike Goodnight, Nebraska) is that characters are plausibly all connected one to the next, because the town is just that small. Of course Victoria and Guthrie will intersect. How can any two people in the town not?

The story is itself beautiful. It's also hard; the characters do not have it easy. Things get worse before they get better. People hurt one another, not meaning to. And other people do mean to hurt one another, and succeed, and in the succeeding betray their own worst impulses and hurt themselves. But amidst the hardship and hurt there is love, there is the discovery of new relationships. People grow up. Some people change in ways they never thought they would, or would have to.

What Haruf has done here is no small feat: he's gotten everything right. The whole book feels right, the setting, the characters, their trials—it all smacks of life and it draws you in. And he did it while ignoring one of the most common writing conventions. I still don't know how he pulled it off, but I'm glad he did. This is one of the best books I've read this year.

God's Smuggler

It's rare I read two books at once that are both outstanding, but I got lucky this time I suppose. I must thank AMS again for sending this one to me, as otherwise I might never have heard of it.

If you haven't heard the story, it's fairly simple. God's Smuggler, a fellow known as Brother Andrew (who at the time of publication for obvious reasons didn't care to announce his name to the world), felt called to do missionary work behind the Iron Curtain during some of the hottest parts of the Cold War. He delivered Bibles to the struggling churches in the communist countries of Eastern Europe at a time when the Church was under attack and distributing religious materials apart from the aegis of the state was a criminal offense likely to be punished by a long prison term if not summary execution. This is his story of that period of time.

I can't possibly do this book justice in a review. Like Brother Andrew himself the book is absolutely filled with the Spirit; you can feel the presence on every page. It is an amazingly uplifting read; this man has given himself over entirely to the Spirit, to God's will, and has done remarkable things because of it. It is an inspiration to read the story and I'm going to have to get my own copy so I can read it again, and again and again. This is a book every Christian should read, and more it's a book anyone curious about Christianity should read. Brother Andrew's story is nothing less than proof of the real power of God in the modern world.

The book is sitting in my room. I feel bad about that; it doesn't want to be sitting here collecting dust, it wants to be in someone else's hands right now. I might bring it to church on Sunday and pass it on for a few weeks, but I'm sure the book's owner wouldn't mind at all if I mailed to it to one of my readers…