Nobody Remembers Shakespeare's Daughter

A memoir by the daughter of the novelist James Jones about her alcoholic mother and all their drinky friends. In the interest of full disclosure: I had to read this book for work. Ok. Hm. There's an alright bit where she takes a class at Columbia taught by a young Richard Price. For some reason, in my head, Richard Price was never young but arose fully formed out of the East River. Also, at one point the author grows out of her conviction that "to be a great writer, one must also be an exceptional person," which is something I always believed without really thinking about. I guess this might be a good book to buy for an older female relative who likes books if it is already her birthday and you forgot about it and now it is too late to think of anything else to get her.

And Now I Want a Canoe.

If Dave Eggers isn't yet an entry in Stuff White People Like, he should be. Loving Dave Eggers goes hand in hand with being an upper middle class white kid in your early 20s searching for your one true self. It's right up there with pad thai and ugly sweater parties. So obviously, I've always been a fan. Admittedly, my fandom has more stemmed from stuff Dave Eggers has done that doesn't have to do with his actual writing. I volunteer at 826's Los Angeles branch and I'm incredibly fond of all things McSweeney's, but I found A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius a smidge too navel-gazing for even me and I never felt like What Is the What gelled. Eggers does best using his own voice and I don't think he ever captured his narrator.

All that said, Zeitoun completely won me. If loving Dave Eggers this hard makes me a hipster, dress me in skinny jeans and a fedora and hand me a clove cigarette. I'm in. The sparse prose makes me think of a modern-day Hemingway and the fact that this story is true only makes it more painful and more difficult to put down. He tells the story of Zeitoun, a Syrian immigrant living in New Orleans with his wife, Kathy, and their four children, and how Katrina affected them. Not that we weren't aware of how severely the US government botched the response to Katrina, but to see it so clearly through one man's eyes makes it come home more than any vague news footage ever did. This compounded with the way the National Guard responded to a Muslim makes for a fairly heartbreaking read. Eggers' writing - and Zeitoun and Kathy - never ask for pity. That's not this book's style, nor is it theirs. You will put this book down with both an overwhelming disgust at what can happen when those we put our trust in fail us, but also with an overwhelming faith in humanity - that people can be as mistreated as Kathy and Zeitoun and rise from the ashes and continue with their lives.

Hue and Cry

This is one of those books where, when you've finished, you'll flip back to page one without meaning to, trying to catch whatever it is you must have missed at the start, a hint in the opening lines at the fastball to the face to come. It is a 442 page howl of rage, but Thomas writes like de Chirico paints, his brush strokes invisible, his poetry effortless. He also appears to have read the entire Western canon, then distilled it into an angry screed against most everything. The results would be unendurable if they weren't so unexpected.

It's a story about New York, about loneliness and loss and identity, about race and sex and the trouble with potential, about losing your voice or never having one, about taking what was never anyone's to give. It is also about construction work and playing golf with people you hate. It will make you feel a lot of feelings, almost none of them good.  After it ends, if you are me, you will have to lie upside-down with your head hanging off the sofa for a little while before your mind goes back to normal. If you are a writer, or black, or male, or a person, it will make you question most of what you thought you knew.

Commencement. In more ways than one.

Can a book still be referred to as chick lit if it doesn't suck? Just because its cover happens to be the color of a Tiffany's box and the four main characters happen to be women in their 20s, one of whom may or may not live in Manhattan and drink cosmopolitans? Is it really fair to group Commencement, by J. Courtney Sullivan, into the same category as The Devil Wears Prada and Confessions of a Shopaholic for these reasons?

The answer? No. No freakin' way. I literally could not put down this novel. Usually, finishing a book is an exciting moment for me. I place it triumphantly on my bookshelf like a hunter with a stuffed deer head or I decide to swap it out with Paperback Swap (the secret to loving books and not being in the poorhouse) and then I get to spend another twenty minutes combing through the website to pick out the next book. Either way, life is good. But finishing Commencement depressed me because I had to put down my new four best friends and I already knew what I was going to get Sally as a baby gift. Also finishing Commencement depressed me because admittedly, if there was any flaw to this book, it was its sort of pat ending. For a book so in tune with all the random and horrible and beautiful messiness of life, I was surprised by how easily it all tied together at the end. Or maybe I was just really upset it was over. I don't want to describe these people, I want you to discover them for yourself. Just know, if you pick up Commencement, for the next few days, you're going to have four new amazing friends and you're going to be sad to say goodbye to them at the end.

I'd be hard pressed to think of a more perfect book for me to have just finished at the start of this blog, Sarah and my experiment in Los Angeles literacy. Well. Maybe The Beautiful and the Damned. But only for the title.