Geez, I didn't know anyone actually read this.

This one's for Hotpants.

FEBRUARY
7. Douglas Adams: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe 2/3
8. Augusten Burroughs: Dry 2/6
9. Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman: Bones of the Dragon 2/15
10. John Steinbeck: Travels with Charley: In Search of America 2/26


The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Pick:
I picked this because I needed to read a good book. I needed to read a short book, too. I needed to read a short book that I absolutely positively knew would be good, and light-hearted, and well-written. So I went with a book I've read before but not for many years, in my massive Douglas Adams compendium.

Story:
This and Hitchhiker's Guide are the two of Adams's books that I've read several times before, so there weren't a whole lot of surprises for me. But it was as enjoyable as I remembered, and there were a few things that I was able to enjoy even more now, at my advanced age and with my sage-like wisdom. Mainly the man who rules the universe: I get now that he is a nihilist, questioning even the reality around him and the evidence of his own senses -- maybe a Cartesian extremist would be a kinder term than nihilist, because he's extremely happy in his imagined real world. I agree with Adams that a man like that would be the best choice for ruler of the universe, since the one man you don't want for the job is the man who wants to do the job. So naturally, you should look for the man who doesn't even believe the job exists.

I also got to be more horrified this time by the people trapped on the delayed airliner for 900 years waiting for lemon-soaked paper napkins, who are woken from their stasis sleep once a year to have a cookie -- and who wake screaming. Made me think of the Stephen King story "The Jaunt," and the whole column I wrote about that. I had greater dislike for Zarniwoop and so I liked what happened to him, and the Dish of the Day cracked me up, though I wish there could have been more of the End of the Universe show. I loved the host. I also appreciated the message of the Golfrincham freighter, its goal, and the end result: when you try to simply get rid of the people you don't like, it turns out you needed them after all.

Thoughts:
This is a wonderful book in more ways than I thought, because it is not only hilarious, it is very smart and even sometimes very wise. I will definitely be reading the others in my compendium -- though I need to focus on the TBR shelf for a while first.


Dry

Pick:
I found this one at the Scappoose Library book sale, my favorite semi-annual event -- or is it three times a year? How do you say a third of a year? Triennial is three years, not four months. . . . Anyway, I read Running with Scissors and thought it was decent but not great -- a little too disturbing and a little lacking in purpose apart from, "Wow, what a fucked up life." I already knew some people shouldn't have children, and I would think that the moral, ":Don't give your kids away to your wacko psychologist just because you're too narcissistic and shallow to handle them" was a gimme. But this one seemed more adult in nature, and the back says wonderful things about Burroughs's use of humor to describe his brutal experiences. Plus it was fifty cents, so what the heck?

Story:
The book is about Burroughs's attempt to get sober. It starts with him as a drunk, and good lord, what a drunk that guy was. The first chapter is completely denial, as he spends every night utterly pickled and then tries to act like nothing's out of the ordinary at work the next day -- he works in advertising. But the guy drinks so much that he sweats alcohol: he has to go to a client meeting the first morning after, but he ends up staying out the entire night before and only dozing briefly before he goes. So he showers, shaves, puts on clean clothes, douses himself with cologne and sprays some on his tongue, and throws down a handful of BreathAssure to prevent any fumes from coming out of the depths. But what happens when he meets his ad writing partner and the clients? She chews him out for smelling like a distillery because she can smell the alcohol coming out of his pores. So he goes home that night and drinks himself into oblivion, and misses the meeting the next morning.

So his coworkers have an intervention and convince him to go to rehab. The rehab actually works, surprisingly enough, and he comes back after thirty days totally sober. He signs up for therapy, both individual and group, and he starts going to AA meetings. Everybody he knows compliments him on how good he looks, a friend from rehab comes to New York and moves in with him so they can support each other in staying dry -- all is well.

But then things start to go wrong, just a little bit, and then a little bit more. One of the best things about this book, and about Burroughs's writing, is that he builds the mood perfectly. When he is downing ten or twelve martinis a night, and then topping it off with half a liter of scotch and some hard cider before bed, he doesn't act like it's any big deal, which only emphasizes how big a deal it is. You know that his plans for covering up his alcohol breath are not going to work because he's still drunk. But it seems like a big joke, which is how it felt to him: no big deal. Everybody drinks, he thinks. He's young, in his mid-twenties; he's supposed to party a lot. What's the big deal? And that's how it reads. Then when he goes to rehab, it seems utterly absurd and stupid at first -- they have this ritual where they give a pair of stuffed animals, named Monkey Wunky and Blue Blue Kitten (These are grown-ups, remember. Grown-ups with chemical dependencies and real problems and terrible lives.) to whoever needs them most, so that person can sleep with them for the night. You feel his horror and deep, deep discomfort. And then, as things start to come together in rehab, you start to realize as Burroughs does in the story that there's something to this, that the counselors here are good at what they do, and that there is a real need for Burroughs to be there. During the drinking chapters he doesn't give the whole story -- he's concealing it from us as he concealed it from himself -- and the whole story is pretty appalling. Not only does he drink more than a human being should be able to live through, but he has to take seriously high doses of Benadryl to do it -- because he's allergic to alcohol. Plus he never throws out his liquor bottles, and so there are, literally, hundreds of empty, unwashed Dewar's bottles all over his apartment, covered in a layer of dead fruit flies. Horrifying. And wonderfully well written.

So when he gets out and things are going well, he stops going to AA meetings, and you're thinking, "Yeah, that's okay. He's doing great, not having any real problems staying sober and dealing with the problems he does have. Those meetings do seem pretty stupid." And then her has a problem at work, with a feud with a coworker -- who leaves a bottle of gin in his office, and then soaks his carpet with scotch in order to get him in trouble; what a scumbag -- and a difficult client. He meets and develops a serious crush on a member of his therapy group (and he absolutely cannot date anyone in his therapy group) who is a recovering crack addict with an abusive boyfriend, and yet the man is wonderful, and Burroughs starts falling for him. Then his best friend, who has been living with AIDS, suddenly takes a turn for the worse for some completely unfathomable reason -- he starts hiccuping and can't stop -- and things fall apart. Burroughs finally starts the relationship with Foster, the wonderful man from his group, and then Foster starts using again. His friend has to go to the hospital, and then comes home to die. And he isn't going to AA, and he's ended his therapy.

So he falls off the wagon. Hard. And there is a brutal but riveting few chapters when he sinks as low as he can go, using crack himself, losing his job and staying in his apartment for months on end, doing nothing but drinking, all day every day. Until he finally hits rock bottom, with a thud, and starts to build himself up again. The book skips ahead a year into his new, more serious sobriety, when he is helping his former drinking buddy to sober up, too, and then it ends.

Thoughts:
Burroughs is an outstanding writer, truly, but the books are almost too real, too easy to fall into. It was all right with this one, because his first drunk stage is almost funny, and then the sober parts are hopeful -- but that last drunk stage was very hard to read. His first book, about his childhood, was just ridiculously sad and disturbing. So I think in future, I will only read his books if the subject matter has at least some ray of hope in it.


Bones of the Dragon

Pick:
Jaime brought this one to my classroom -- a special delivery book! -- I think because she read my review of the last pile of hogsnot I read for her, that Magician's Apprentice hooey. I was much more excited about this one because I've read Weis and Hickman; I got four books or so into the Death Gate cycle before I got tired of trying to find the next one in time to read it before I forgot the last ones; that was before I had easy access to new books. This is the first in a new series, and it's got dragons, vikings, and dead gods in it -- who could ask for anything more?

Story:
I read some of the criticism of this book on Amazon, and I was trying to think of problems I saw, flaws I could pinpoint, but I couldn't do it. I also can't rave about the book, because there is something missing, some intangible element that would make this a great book, which it isn't. The basic theme is an interesting one: what would you do if your gods abandoned you? Perhaps even -- died? The story is played out in a character several reviewers had trouble with: Skylan Ivorson. I had trouble with him, too, but only for the reason I was supposed to: Skylan is an idiot. He is a beautiful young man with flowing golden locks and piercing blue eyes; he is the son of the chief of his tribe of the Vindras people, and their war chief, as he is the greatest warrior. Skylan has been blessed by the gods, and he knows it. So throughout the first half of the book, Skylan assumes he can do anything, have anything he wants, and his patron deity, Torval, will help him to get it, since he honors Torval with every conquest, every victory (all of which -- coincidentally, of course -- honor Skylan as well). So Skylan, who is one of the point of view characters (and a very well-written one, since he is a fool but not a bad guy and that is how his narrative voice sounds), has very little patience with people who want to do things differently, who want to think instead of charge ahead, who want to negotiate instead of fight. He has especially little patience for the woman he loves, because she keeps being coy -- because she is actually in love with his best friend, Garn, the smart one; an open secret which everyone in the village has figured out. Except Skylan.

So when ogres invade, telling the Vindrasi that their gods have lost a war in heaven and died, Skylan wants to kill them all, and eventually he gets his wish -- though that, of course, is the question: do the Vindrasi succeed in driving off the ogres because their gods are not dead, but supporting them in their struggle? Or is it the greater fighting ability of the Vindrasi, combined with the might of the dragon who takes their side? We are not sure.

This is really only the beginning of the story; the Chief of Chiefs of the Vindrasi is an atheist, and (coincidentally, I'm sure) an incredible scumbag who betrays his people for the sake of his cowardice; he is dealt with in a very surprising way, and it leads to a whole new plot line that I wasn't expecting. I suppose if I had an issue with this book it was there: I didn't really like the direction Skylan went, or the choices he makes. But that can't be a criticism of the book, since I wasn't supposed to like either one. I did really enjoy the magical creatures in the book, the druids and the Fey and the giants, especially -- though I didn't care for the dragons, which was certainly a problem, as they are rather important to a book called "Bones of the Dragon," first in the Dragonships series. They seemed too pat, too easy, almost too mythical; their origin story and their reasons for helping the Vindrasi are less interesting than if they had simply been left as a question mark, their motives and history mysterious. I would also criticize the women in the book, who are shallow and silly and evil, except that I liked the Owl Woman character enormously, and the girl Aylaen, whom Skylan loves, is great, except for the way she and Garn deal with their love triangle problem, and for the way she acts at the end of the book.

Thoughts:
I liked the book, but not really enough to want to read an entire series on the same story line. Especially not one that delves deeper into the dragons' story. In all honesty, after all the years I've been reading fantasy, I think dragons are pretty well played out. The most interesting dragon story I've read recently has been Naomi Novik's Temeraire series, and the most interesting thing about it is how the dragons are taken out of a traditional fantasy setting and plopped into the Napoleonic Wars. But Eragon? Yech. This book is far better than Paolini's, but still not good enough to make me want to read three more just like it.


Travels with Charley: In Search of America

Pick:
I wanted to read a good book, and I was also thinking I might write an example essay for my seniors, since they have a new alternative book assignment. They have to compare two similar books -- similar inasmuch as the two books have to be of the same genre. Since I want to encourage non-fiction reading for pleasure -- and I want to do more of it myself -- I decided I would write an essay, if I do one, on two non-fiction books -- Dry, and this one,. which I was very excited to find at Goodwill because John Steinbeck is one of my great literary heroes, and this book seems right up my alley -- plus his dog has a good name. So I've been looking forward to reading this one, on some level, for years.

Story:
It didn't disappoint. In fact, this book was so good that I'm going to keep it and read it again, probably more than once -- well, I'm going to buy a new copy of it that wasn't written in by a college student who was almost, but not quite, as smart as the dog. Though I found the George-and-Lenny comparison between Steinbeck and his commentator often amusing and strangely appropriate, considering it was Steinbeck who wrote Of Mice and Men.

The book follows John Steinbeck on his drive across America and back at the age of 58, accompanied only by his ten-year-old standard poodle, Charley. He started at his home in Sag Harbor, Long Island, and drove up to Maine and then across just under the Great Lakes through Montana to Washington, and then down through California and the Mojave to Texas, and then back again through Louisiana and Mississippi, Arkansas and the Virginias. The whole trip was made in a custom-built camper truck that Steinbeck named Rocinante, because he was a genius.

There are too many good parts of this book to set down here, since I'd like to keep these reviews a little shorter, this time, except for the Advaced Reader's Copies Jaime gives me. That's why I want to read it again. He had incredible insights and observations about people, though I think the America he goes in search of, as well as the one he finds, are both dead now. Still, I'd like to make my own trip like this, though I'd rather bring Toni than my Charlie -- or maybe both. But a part of me is afraid that it would be just too depressing to see what has been made of this once-beautiful land.

Thoughts:
I will read this one again.