God is Dead by Ron Currie

It’s odd that the last book I read last year is easily in contention with The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafron as the best read of 2008.

But God is Dead by Ron Currie Jr. is that rare, frenzied yet slow, angry but gentle, repudiation of naivety and faith without the drippings of cynicism you’d expect.

As we start out, God has taken the form of a Dinka woman in the northern region of Sudan. His mission to earth is twofold.

First, he wants to experience the suffering that His indifference over the centuries has caused and second, he wants to help.

He roams from village to village, from refugee camp to refugee camp carrying a bag of never-ending sorghum.

He can pass out as much as he wants to the starving masses, yet the bag never empties.

Kinda like the loaves and fishes trick, I mean miracle.

Unfortunately for the universe (and who could’ve seen this coming?) God, in the form of a Dinka woman is killed.

It takes a while for the news to spread and even longer for the world to figure out what exactly this means, but God is officially dead.

The rest of the book is really a compilation of shorts juxtaposing the extreme reactions of diverse, clashing cultures and characters.

In one chapter, we find that holy wars can take place very well without the presence of a God, thank you very much.

Even when everyone realizes that God is dead, they kill each other over the right way to put this knowledge into a pragmatic context. In another chapter (my favorite) a group of friends, weary after weeks of hedonism because what are you gonna do when God dies, enter a suicide/murder pact.

The way it plays out is funny, disturbing, heartbreaking and revolting in turns.

We also get to meet the dogs who, after feasting on the corpse of the Creator, have not only human, but godlike intelligence.

They’re not quite omniscient, but they’re close.

From the title and description on the cover, I hoped this book would be thought-provoking and it is.

Actually, I’m not sure if Currie is criticizing the stringency of religion or the potential chaos that can go with a godless worldview.

Maybe it’s both.

But what was wonderfully surprising was the humor. And not all of the laughs come from dark places.

Even in a universe where humanity is the highest power, a terrifying thought, Currie seems to believe that there is room for hope nevertheless.

American Gods

American Gods by Neil Gaiman, sat in my ‘to-read’ pile for like a year. First, before Evil Darien starts calling for my head, let me say that I loved this book.

It’s now on the very short list of book I’m likely to read more than three times before I die. I had the thought when I read Coraline, with its many elements of The Thief of Always that Clive Barker had to be a huge influence on Gaiman, which is odd since they’re contemporaries, give or take a decade or so.

Reading American Gods, with so many ideas lifted straight out of The Great and Secret Show, (easily one of my ten favorite novels of all time) cemented the notion.

Ever since I first read Imajica, I’ve insisted that Barker is much more than a genre writer and I’m confident that I’ll be proven correct when he’s still being read after most of his peers are forgotten.

So, here’s the deal. Gaiman is brilliant. But so many aspects of his universe have been explored/created by Barker that I wonder just how good he really is.

I plan to read more Sandman to figure that out.

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

I have said before that my favorite author is the Japanese surrealist Haruki Murakami, but until recently, I had not ready any of his shorts, just his novels.

I didn’t even realize that Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman was a collection of his short stories when I bought it and I don’t mind telling you, I was just a little disappointed.

I had set my mind on losing myself inside the peculiar, nightmarish world of a so-ordinary-it’s-abnormal protagonist. Each of Murakami’s novels, most notably Dance Dance Dance, Kafka on the Shore and, my favorite book of all time, The Wind Up Bird Chronicles has a way of enveloping you in a world that you don’t think you could possibly recognize, but feels somehow familiar, even comforting just the same.

My disappointment melted quickly after I started.

In fact, this collection reads very much like one of his novels, structured very similarly to Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (a novel striking in its episodic nature) in that it weaves carefully in and out of realism, changing protagonists without ever breaking the story’s thread.

In Murakami’s work, the protagonists are often interchangeable because the focus of his work is not how a character reacts to the events taking place around and to him but rather on how minor characters and even the world these strange creatures inhabit react to the protagonist.

How Murakami can take traditional narrative structure and completely invert it the way he does and still manage to create a universe as beautiful as it is mystifying and often even cruel is a testament to how, after all these centuries and millennia, art still has the capacity to surprise us.

It’s been said that there is nothing new under the sun.

Bullshit and fuck you.

In this collection, we encounter men who may or may not be made of ice, crabmeat with worms, staircases in which you can disappear and be spit out across the country for no apparent reason, crows tearing each other apart, ripping out the intestines of their fellow birds in the quest for tasty snack cakes, an absolutely goddamn terrifying mirror, nausea that strikes as if it were a villain with its own mind, a one-legged surfer ghost and my favorite, an employee of the Public Works Department who just can’t wait for an excuse to beat up, kill and/or torture a talking monkey.

The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

I can’t believe I hadn’t gotten around to reading The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie until now.

People are trying to kill a guy for writing this and I haven’t read it yet? What the hell is wrong with me?

Plus, once again, big fan of Satan. Satan in the title.

How could I go wrong? I gotta tell you, this book is easily one of the ten best novels I have ever read.

There is so much in here that I really need to digest it and maybe even reread it in the coming months before I can get a handle on it. I think that if most authors were to attempt something on this scale, it would end up being a mess, but Rushdie is up for the task.

Verses is congested with all kinds of crazy ideas and jumps from theme to theme, from story to story, from protagonist to protagonist.

We start with two fellows falling out of a plane that has just blown up. It doesn’t sound like it should be a funny chapter, but it really is. We follow them all the way down to earth as they miraculously land, unharmed.

We travel alongside them as they learn that maybe survival isn’t in and of itself the prize.

There is something more.

Then, Rushdie takes us back to the brothel where twelve prostitutes pretend to be the twelve wives of Mahound, the prophet.

Such sacrilege.

Then, it’s on to a disastrous pilgrimage with a delusional, leader who claims to be taking orders from the Archangel Gibreel. Is the prophet sadistic or foolish? Not only am I not sure, I’m convinced that Rushdie himself doesn’t know..

Rushdie juggles so many characters, so many stories, so many story arcs yet he weaves them together with such credibility that it really doesn’t feel as experimental as it really is.

It’s a rare novel that really experiments with theme, character, and story and is simple and accessible at the same time.

When it comes down to it, while Verses deals chiefly with religion, transformation, (one of our protagonists changes from a man to a faun to Satan himself and back again only to find that he really hadn’t changed much at all.) deception and death, on a broader level, it’s really about how we react to the unknown.

Rushdie studies both the insanity of belief and the stubborn arrogance of disbelief.

Goddamn, this book was good.

Rushdie’s style is so simple and lovely.

When he states that, “Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy,” it just really impacts the entire book with a very short, simple sentence.

I really need more time to digest and then I may post more thoughts on it in the coming weeks/months/years.

Diary by Chuck Palahniuk

“Your blood is our gold.”

It seems that most writers (at least the ones I read) try their hand at channeling Shirley Jackson at some point and Diary by Chuck Palahniuk is certainly right up there with The Long Walk by Stephen King as one of the best. But Palahniuk is inventive enough to inject a copious amount of ideas of his own so it doesn’t feel borrowed at all.

Where The Lottery is a commentary on conformity, Diary is an indictment, not merely on greed, but the nature of wealth itself. Apart from the thematic elements, which I could go on and on about, this is a very funny book.

Highly recommended.

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

American Gods by Neil Gaiman, sat in my ‘to-read’ pile for like a year. First, before Evil Darien starts calling for my head, let me say that I loved this book.

It’s now on the very short list of book I’m likely to read more than three times before I die.

I had the thought when I read Coraline, with its many elements of The Thief of Always that Clive Barker had to be a huge influence on Gaiman, which is odd since they’re contemporaries, give or take a decade or so.

Reading American Gods, with so many ideas lifted straight out of The Great and Secret Show, (easily one of my ten favorite novels of all time) cemented the notion.

Ever since I first read Imajica, I’ve insisted that Barker is much more than a genre writer and I’m confident that I’ll be proven correct when he’s still being read after most of his peers are forgotten.

So, here’s the deal. Gaiman is brilliant. But so many aspects of his universe have been explored/created by Barker that I wonder just how good he really is.

I plan to read more Sandman to figure that out.

1984 by George Orwell

A few months ago, I listened to 1984 by George Orwell on one of those books on CD thingies. And by ‘books on CD thingies,’ of course, I mean audiobook. I just listened to an audiobook for the first time ever last year. It’s staggering to think just how much influence this novel has had on our collective consciousness. Apart from the art that it’s inspired, from V for Vendetta to American Psycho to I haven’t read this since the ‘90s and while I found it unsettling then, it’s just bone-chilling ball-fuck terrifying now. I’m sorry, but if they ever make another film out of this, Bill O’Reilly has to play O’Brien.

It’s just too perfect. I also think Fox News needs to change their slogan from ‘Fair and Balanced’ to ‘Your source for your two-minute hate.'

Exterminator! by William H. Burroughs

If Naked Lunch is 1984 on acid, then Exterminator! is Animal Farm on PCP & crack. Seriously, Burroughs & Dr. Seuss were the premiere existentialists of the 20th century. And yes, it’s an apt comparison.

I know Burroughs is usually associated with the whole junkie culture, but that is a simple assessment at best. Yes, drugs are prevalent in all his works, but they are incidental. Junk is purely the means by which Burroughs distorts the reality of his different characters/narrators.

It’s not that dissimilar from how Dostoyevsky used religion and conscience to present the different points of view in The Brothers Karamazov. And yes, that comparison is also apt.

But aside from the snooty, philosophical, boring, pretentious, etc. reasons I could give for reasons why you should read something by Burroughs before you die, seemingly random, flung together cusses like MOTHER-LOVING STUPID-ASS BIBLE-BELT CUNTSUCKERS are just goddamn poetic

Mistress of the Art of Death by Ariana Franklin

Reading the description, I was expecting kind of a gothic horror novel, maybe with a little mystery thrown in. And I did get some of that. It’s a story of a forensic scientist tracking down a child killer. Now, I have to say that this book was involving, if not entirely engrossing and there were a couple of chilling moments. However, it seemed to suffer from schizophrenia. At times, it was a mystery, at other times, historical fiction, at times, chick-lit. And I’m sorry, but the romance that Franklin tacks on is unnecessary, not believable and just downright annoying. It was a bit chicky for my taste but again, when it was concentrating on the basic plot of our protagonist trying to catch the killer, it was a very good read. Since most of you are women, I’m sure any of you would enjoy it even more than I did. So, to sum up, no, this was not a good book.

Mildred Pierce by James M. Cain

I’ve only seen the movie once, but I don’t remember it standing out quite this much. Maybe I just wasn’t in the right mood, or maybe it loses something in its translation to film. (Still, since Michael Curtiz is who he is, I should give him the benefit of the doubt and give this film another chance.) Veda drips with an uncommon venom, Mildred is a sap, Bert is a tool and Monty is just aching to be killed in his sleep by Veda (you know it’s gonna happen.) What’s so fun about this book is the language and the tone. Words like ‘swell’ and ‘flop‘ in exchange for fuck, ‘stinking’ in place of drunk and of course, referencing tits as ‘the dairy’ punctuate the narrative and it’s just so goddamn (another word used effectively, and as frequent as a comma) fun. You can actually see the black and white photography and the dames driving taxis, wanting to fuck Humphrey Bogart in the background. The atmosphere is that thick.

After Dark by Haruki Murakami

If you’ve never read anything of his, the best way I can describe his work is to tell you that I can’t imagine anyone but David Lynch translating one of his novels into film. (Okay, maybe Jodorowsky or Bunuel.) Murakami, like Lynch has a way of creating a universe that is completely contrary to everything we know, but entirely believable. This is a universe that we are drawn to on the one hand but on the other hand, wouldn’t want to come within a thousand miles of. His characters’ most mesmerizing trait is that they are just so goddamn ordinary. Like Hitchcock, Murakami paints an everyman and then throws him into the unexplainable just to see how an ordinary person would react to it. Murakami gets this pitch perfect. Their reactions are believable and the secrets about them that are slowly revealed are blasé and beguiling at the same time. I’m not sure that he’s ever going to top Noboru Wataya from The Wind Up Bird Chronicles as far as excellent villains go, but here, he comes damn close. Again, our primary villain, Shirakawa, is just so common and his motivation so simple, (he had to do it) that we’re left scratching our heads which may not sound like a compliment, but it is. So, for the uninitiated, please read something, anything of Murakami’s. For those of you who love chick stuff, Sputnik Sweetheart or Norwegian Wood may be a good introduction of his world. For those who are more bold, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles is one of those books that just might change the way you look at literature forever.

Grimm's Grimmest

Grimm’s Grimmest is a collection of some of the Brothers’ Grimm’s stories with an introduction by Maria Tatar and illustrated by Tracy Arah Dockray. Evidently, these fairy tales, as originally told were hardly suitable for children. I have to say, it’s been quite a while since I’ve laughed out loud this hard at a book. The scenarios are horrifying, grotesque and simply hilarious. It’s awesome how casually they are with the brutality. You’ll just be reading a nice little fairy tale and then, all of a sudden, you’re reading something like, “After this, he caught a cat and gouged his eyes out.” How can you not like that? My favorites were The Juniper Tree and The Goose Maid. Fucking hysterical.

The Books of the Abarat

Books #1 & #2 of the Abarat by Clive Barker are a kind of odd mixture in tone between The Thief of Always and Imajica. Much like Thief, it has a very innocent and childlike quality, making it three books total that I can have Ethan read (Ethan is my 14 year old son, for those of you who don't know me.) but Barker also develops a rich, fascinating world like he did with Imajica.. Also, the Books of the Abarat feature some of his greatest villains and monsters to date. Christopher Carrion, who wears his nightmares, translucent eel-like creatures, around his face in a tank, breathing them in and out is both frightening and pitiful. He's kind of a mix between The Jaff & Kissoon from The Great and Secret Show, only without the shit & cum worms. (If you've read Show, you know what I'm talking about, if you haven't, don't ask.)

And then there's Mater Mosley, Carrion's grandmother with her army of stitchlings, creatures sewn together, filled with mud and brought to life. When Carrion was a child, she sewed his mouth shut because he said the word 'love.' Now that's a fucking grandma.

Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut

After reading The Time Traveller's Wife, which is essentially Slaughterhouse 5 for chicks, I thought that next, I should reread the actual Slaughterhouse 5. I've read it four or five times, but you really can't read this book too much. There really isn't much I can say about this book that hasn't already been said except that it's one of those rare acclaimed books that really as good as you've always heard it was. One of the things that makes Vonnegut so unique is that he may be the only fatalist I can think of who is just so damn cheerful.

The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

Joia made me read The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. When she described it to me, it sounded like Slaughterhouse 5 for chicks. And that's pretty much what it was, but I'm not just going to discount this book so easily. I have to admit, I was totally drawn in by Henry and Clare. It's not very common for an author to get me to care this deeply for their characters, but I was very moved by this book.