Another book

The latest book I finished was Palimpsest, by Catherynne Valente. It is the story of four people who are transported to a dream-city after an impulsive one night stand with a mysterious stranger, and how they each become obsessed with the city and finding their way back to it--permanently. My reaction was mixed. Valente's language is beautiful, and her writing has that half-intriguing, half grotesque quality of fairy tales. She is never a quick read. Her characters are only symbols and the plot never seemed to quite mesh. It was a bit more explicit and graphic than I expected, and the story was too disjointed to read smoothly or draw me in completely. It seemed to both go too far, and not far enough--too far to make the reader comfortable, but not far enough for clear resolution and closure in each of the tales. I wasn't sure I'd finish it and probably won't read it again. I liked her Orphan's Tales books (In the Night Garden and In the Cities of Coin and Spice) better. The stories were also disjointed, but it suited the structure of the books better.

Good book

Just finished reading The Stolen Child, by Keith Donohue. Someone in my book club loaned it to me. The story of a child kidnapped by faeries and the changeling left in his place. It's a strangely compelling book about identity and change, love and loss, remembering and forgetting. Fascinating.

What I've been reading. . .

Just finished reading Off the Books, by Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh. It's an exploration of a ghetto economy in southside Chicago. When segregation became less strict, a lot of the upper and middle-class African Americans left the ghetto, leaving the poor and the destitute. With few cash infusions from outside the community, poor social services and meager political power, residents turned inward and developed an unregulated, off the books economy. People are hired part-time with no paperwork, job security, or benefits, services are paid for in cash or with barter, favors are traded, and deals are brokered. Gang leaders, clergymen, neighborhood leaders, and local shopowners get together to mediate disputes. Part of America, but another world.

The book was fairly readable, but not well-organized; it felt like the author travelled the same ground over and over, emphasizing one aspect here and another there. An interesting read, but sometimes tedious and sort of depressing.

Book Club Book July

A few months ago my friends and neighbors talked me into joining the local book club, Nene Reads. I love to read, but I hesitated because, well, I want to read what I want to read, and I already have a stack of unread books. It's been fun meeting, though, and sometimes books that few people liked have generated a lot of discussion.

I just finished the July book, West With the Night, a memoir by Beryl Markham. I do a one-sentence synopsis of every book we read and read it aloud at the meetings, so here is the sentence for West with the Night:

"Memories of a bush pilot in Africa in the early 20th century: lions and airplanes and barons, oh my!"

I am very ambiguous about the book; parts of it were good, but I really do enjoy books that have a plot, which it did not. This one was a series of scenes that weren't very connected. I guess life is like that. The language was beautiful, the pace was slow, the story meandered at the writers whim. I enjoyed most the descriptions of flying.