There’s a (Slight) Chance I Might Be Going to Hell
Laurie Notaro
In her first non-fiction novel, Laurie Notaro writes with her same funny, off-kilter and slightly neurotic voice she has recorded her life with in her fabulous autobiographical short stories. Although a bit slow to get off the ground, once she hits her stride the story takes off on its own strange little path. Notaro’s heroine Maye has just moved from Phoenix to a small town in Oregon and is desperate for just one friend like her – desperate to enter the town sewer pipe queen pageant. Notaro gives a very accurate description of a small college town, full of tree-huggers, left-over flower children ...
Jpod and Deep Storm
Douglas Coupland and Lincoln Child
Coupland and Child are two of my favorite authors but I was rather disappointed by both of their newest books. Jpod seems slightly stale, though the base story is pretty interesting. For some inexplicable reason, Coupland felt the need to inject himself as a character in the newest book. What seemed like a silly self-referential joke in the beginning soon becomes irritating and confusing. The addition of pages and pages of numbers and words to illustrate puzzles the Jpod geeks play with each other merely bulks the book up making it look far larger than it is. Coupland IS a very good author – check out anything earlier ...
High Fidelity
Nick Hornby
You know what is really funny? Dogs, with socks on running. You know what else is funny? I actually read this book years ago and had no memory of it until I got about 7/8 of they way through. Then I realized “Oh, this is that book about a loser with a shop and a nice girlfriend who gets his act together.” And it was, too.
Hornby’s characters are instantly recognizable. I have run into numerous Robs of various stripes; nice people who landed in a job and/or relationship and just aren’t quite sure what they are doing there. These are middle of the road folks who are doing ok, but vaguely displeased with life. However, things never seem dire...
Anybody Out There?
Marian Keyes
The latest installment in the Walsh family soap-opera is a doozy. Anna, the youngest Walsh girl (the spacy-new age one) gets her act together with the help of her brother-in-law Garv and moves to New York to work in marketing. The story picks up with Anna back in Ireland -recovering with a torn kneecap and a cut up face. Slowly the story reveals where the injuries come from, what the picture is that shows up in her mailbox, where her mysterious man Aidan has gone and why the strange woman keeps encouraging her dog to poop on the Walsh’s yard. All of Keyes’s books are excellent and engulfing. This is by far the biggest tear-jerker, but also funny and...
A Long Way Down
A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby
This was an excellent recommendation from Mike H. Reminding me of Douglas Coupland’s writing, the story is wry, funny and depressingly accurate. The plot follows four mismatched people who meet on a rooftop, New Years, to commit suicide. The middle-aged mother with a son in a vegetative state, the former morning -show TV host (fresh out of jail), the very messed up and angst ridden teenager and the former musician with a bad case of CCR. Stunned to find so many other folks with the same idea, they put off their run at death for awhile. The strange group forms a friendship of sorts, bound by their experience. The disparate group fights, argues, tries to help one-another, picks on one another and fights some more. When all...
The Mermaid Chair
The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd
The third of the “Books by Authors I Really Dig” is Sue Monk Kidd’s new book The Mermaid Chair. Kidd made quite the splash a few years ago with The Secret Life of Bees (so much so that one of my friend’s left the tech sector to start an apiary). The Mermaid Chair is a bit slower and sadder than Secret Life, but beautiful and tense. Her main character, Jessie, goes home to take care of her mother on a small island off of South Carolina. While trying to take care of her cantankerous and possibly mentally ill mother, Jessie falls in love with a monk at the nearby monastery. She swings from guilt to happiness, inspired to paint for the first time in years and at the same time fearful that she will destroy...