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Did you ever pick up a book with blurbs from authors you love raving about the writer, only to finish the book and wonder, What the hell were they thinking?! and realize, they were talking about that author, but not that book? That might be this one. Or I might just be feeling ignorant and out of sorts. I just finished a new offering from Haven Kimmel, a novel called Iodine. Kimmel wrote A Girl Named Zippy (never got to it, but heard good things) and The Solace of Leaving Early (cover looks familiar, so..?), among others. This book, Iodine is about a college senior, Trace, who ran away from an abusive home and survived on her own, primarily by recreating herself. Much of her world is built on “carefully constructed delusion.” So, fine. I love a good mental illness. In the beginning, it’s a little difficult sifting the reality from the non-reality and the memories in the narrator’s journal and dream journal entries. Add to that, Trace is a psychology major who apparently has a remarkable memory for everything other than her own life, and the allusions begin to fly. Allusions to Jung, Hillman–Hillman is her favorite–and Freud. References to the allusions. Opinions about the references to the allusions. Some of the allusions were probably part of her delusions, but who knew? Waaaayyy too much to follow for me. Too many layers. Too many shrinks spoil the psychosis. I finished the book because I was curious to see how much of her past life would eventually be revealed, and because the writing was good, but I tap-danced through quite a bit. Something else that haunted me…Back when I first started this blog, I wrote about a book called Switching Time, a true account of a woman who had Multiple Personality Disorder, chronicled by her doctor. Some of the abuse described in Iodine sounds very similar to activities written about in Switching Time, although I had to finish the book and go back and compare notes to confirm it (I did learn that the book is being released in paperback shortly, FYI). It wouldn’t matter if Kimmel had read the same book, as I’m not aware of any rule that says when you borrow from real life it has to be your real life; it’s just one of those weird coincidences.

If you are a serious student of psychology, this could be a great time for your next book group. The rest of you: be warned! 

In the beginning, there was the Oprah Book Club, and it was good. Depressing, mostly. But good. Then a pattern emerged. If you followed the book selections faithfully, you know what I mean. For a while there, it was Oprah therapy. All the books were about lost and abused children. Maybe not all, but a lot. After awhile, I had to bail out. Quality writing or not, the stories all began to run together after a time. I tried reading other books in between, but the heavy sadness never seemed to have time to dissipate. I’m sure I missed out on some great authors, although I did revisit the Book Club for titles I knew to be more diverse in subject matter. This all came back to me this week when I was given a book to read, an Oprah selection, as it turned out, that took me right back down that road, a rural Kentucky road this time, and into the sad, lonely, and difficult life of a young girl named Icy Sparks.

Icy, for whom the novel by Gwyn Hyman Rubio is named, has what we now recognize as Tourette Syndrome. I don’t know much about it, but hers lies dormant for much of the time, seemingly triggered by extreme stress or emotion. In her tiny mountain community, she is labeled a freak, isolated even by the people who care about her, and misunderstood to the extent of being locked up in a mental institution. She is eventually sent home again, but without any evidence of having been treated. Icy perseveres with her studies and her relationships, and eventually finds some spiritual comfort as well, but it seems as though she continues to exist regardless, not necessarily buoyed by anything that happens along the way. Sometimes people survive, the story seems to say, even when they don’t seem to have a reason.

Parts of the story seem vague and underdeveloped, and the epilogue is jarring: apparently Icy went to college, found out she had Tourette’s and went on to “embrace her difference.” But the story is moving and atmospheric, the characters well-drawn. I still have a hard time with cruelty to children, and was glad when it was over, so there is definitely a personal bias at work here where subject matter is concerned. Even so, it isn’t a stand-out among the Oprah favorites, good though it may be.

And one more word on the Oprah Book Club. I don’t miss the psychoanalytic selections of the early days, it’s true, and I know there were a couple of dust-ups over books like The Corrections and the Frey book, but her decision to use her Book Club to promote best sellers of the past is a real disappointment to me. Those books, those authors, have had their day, their money, their tour. There are so many amazing voices clamoring to be heard. Maybe she could send her best friend out looking for the country’s best writers, rather than the country’s best burgers…

Another heat wave, temperatures over 100, and if I had the time, my inclination would be to stay at home and watch movies over nachos and ice cream, preferably in a cool dark room on a big, fluffy couch. In this fantasy construct, what would complete this world better than to be watching movies about booklovers that take place in bookstores? (It’s a blog about books, remember—books, books, and more books?) –of which, I daresay, there are not many, but, of which, yes, I happen to have a few handy favorites to share.

 The first is my favorite, Crossing Delancey. It’s one of a handful of movies I’ve watched more than once. I fell in love with it because I wanted to be Amy Irving’s character, Izzy, and because I had the hots for Peter Reigert. Izzy is the quintessential NYC single working girl—who happens to work in a fabulous bookstore—meeting authors and artists, hanging out with friends, dating the wrong men. Peter Reigert is Sam. Sam is as far from Izzy’s idea of Mr. Right—or Mr. Right Now–as he could possibly be, but fate has other ideas.

 84 Charing Cross is a booklover’s classic, starring Anthony Hopkins, Anne Bancroft, and Judi Dench. Hopkins is the owner of a bookstore, and receives a request for a book from Anne Bancroft overseas. A correspondence, and eventually a deep friendship develops, sustained by their mutual love of books and literature. It’s based on the true story of New Yorker Helene Hanff and British bookseller Frank Doel.

 Last, and most commercial, is You’ve Got Mail. It’s actually an updated version of a classic film that has nothing to do with books, but that I love just the same, The Shop Around the Corner, with Jimmy Stewart. You’ve Got Mail ever-so-mildly addresses the then-recent concern that large bookstore chains would put smaller independent stores out of business—a concern that turned out to be well-founded. Mostly, it’s a romantic comedy about people who sell books.

 If you know of more movies that feature bookstores, I’d love it if you’d leave me a comment.

A redhead, backed up against a wall, eyes wide, cleavage, hands gripping a necktie looming in the foreground– ”Was he an innocent man…or a depraved killer?”

If you love crime stories, how do you not love a cover like that?!

This is one in a new series of Hard Case Crime, complete with cheesy covers, jacket blurbs, and inserts hawking the Hard Case Crime Book Club–”Get 2 Books Every Month…For the Price of ONE!”–and”the best in hard-boiled crime fiction, from lost pulp classics to new work by today’s most powerful writers, all in affordable paperback editions.”  Names like Lawrence Block, Erle Stanley Gardner, and beyond. The only part that gave me pause was the word “affordable.” I paid $6.99 for this affordable paperback. That sent me on a long and winding road of affordable paperback memories, though I don’t think I really remember when they were as cheap as I think I do.

On to the story itself: The Confession, by Domenic Stansberry (2004). Not bad. True to the “pulp” genre, you can see it all coming a mile away, and it’s probably wearing a blue suit and tie or a sexy blouse, skirt just above the knee. There’s a smelly PI, a vindictive prosecutor, but–here’s a 21st century twist–our narrator is a shrink. He’s testifying in a case where a woman was strangled, but there are those who think he may be a little closer to the case than meets the eye. The setting is Marin, CA, a lush area outside San Francisco, and home to Mount Tamalpais (tam-el-PI-es). Not a landmark that rolls trippingly off the tongue, but he works it in there. To distraction. At one point I wondered if he had a bet with someone. ANYWAY…Not worth $6.99, but maybe at 2 For the Price of ONE! Maybe…

What happens in Vegas, sucks. Seriously. The sequins, the sand, the dead bodies (I watch a lot of CSI), the cigarette smoke. Carrot Top. My overpriced timeshare. And, predictably, out of the muck and mire has come great inspiration, and not just CSI and Ocean’s Eleven. There’s other stuff that totally escapes me now that I started this riff, but it’ll come to you…Brand new on that list is a debut novel by Joe McGinniss, Jr., The Delivery Man. Think of Joe, Jr. as, maybe, the Bret Easton Ellis of Las Vegas–but don’t think about it too long, since he’s almost 40 and lives in D.C. with his wife and kids. Planned obsolescence in literary allusion: how cool is that?So they say, when copyright infringement isn’t an issue, that things that happen in Vegas stay in Vegas. For Chase, the protagonist of The Delivery Man, this concept resonates on a variety of levels. First of all, a lot has happened. Despite growing older, graduating college, and moving to New York City, Chase somehow finds himself back in Vegas, enmeshed with high school friends and high school habits, relationships like crime scene photos that rattle around in his head, that draw him in, that he can’t quite decide his part in. What used to be kids on the edge cutting classes to have some twisted idea of fun has evolved into a profession during his time away. Chase didn’t like it then, he doesn’t want it now, but he’s addicted. Not to the simple stuff that everyone else around him is jonesing for–drugs, sex–some complicated mix, or maybe it’s just where he comes from. But whatever happens in Vegas–and a lot seems to happen–will Chase stay in Vegas? There are moments when this book will make your skin crawl, but it’s a great read and an impressive debut.   

Today’s offering is a quick read, Now You See It, by Allison Lynn, courtesy of a worn reader’s proof from 2004, probably a donation from my holiday spent working at Barnes & Noble. Again I wonder: If I started today, how long could I read books from my home before running out of material? And while I was away, would Amazon stock dip, even slightly?

Missing persons seem (seems?) to be a frequent theme in my reading selections of late, and Now You See It slides comfortably into that trend. David and Jessica are a hip-but-not-too-hip Manhattan couple with a new apartment and an impending adoption. When David returns home from a business trip to find Jessica gone, everyone, including the police are confounded. No signs of struggle, no missing keys or wallet or money. Nothing amiss. What is interesting abou this novel, however, is that this event, seemingly pivotal, is ultimately just a piece of David’s life, a life that comes under self-scrutiny as he ponders how well he has ever known anyone: the parallel missing people–Jessica and an American businessman who disappeared in Peru, a story that helped David make a journalistic name for himself–his family, his so-called friends, and, most disturbingly, himself. The novel begins as a bit of a murder mystery, but shifts subtley into an examination of life by a guy in early mid-life crisis before you know it. It’s a quick, but slightly different read, with a little Peruvian travelogue thrown in for good measure. 

So, I just realized that countless posts ago I said I was going to write about Eric Maisel’s The van Gogh Blues: The Creative Person’s Path Through Depression. Near as I can tell, I never did. Which is a shame, because the book had an impact on me at the time, and I’m not a big fan of “self-help” books. This one I actually took a yellow highlighter to. So unlike me. Maisel also started “creativity coaching,” and after finishing the book, I went online and looked up coaches in my area. Blogging will have to pay a whole lot better before it gets beyond window shopping, but the book was pretty motivating.

The basic premise is that creative people need life to have meaning, and therefore need always to make meaning. When life is not meaningful, they become depressed. The key to avoiding depression is to find new and constant ways to make meaning.

“To heal your depression, you must force life to mean. You force life to mean by sitting down and deciding what you want your life to mean. When you are satisfied with your answer, and if you have been truthful with yourself, you will have stripped away false meanings and motives and arrived at your best understanding of how you intend to shape your life. By providing yourself with personal reasons for taking your own life seriously, you begin to build a shield against meaninglessness. These reasons must be personal. The hunt for ultimate reasons will prove a waste of time, even for believers, since we are built to dispute anything, putative pronouncements from gods. No ultimate reason takes precedence over a righteous human reason for taking action and making meaning.”

In my job, I often work and talk with people in recovery, and found Maisel’s take on addiction interesting as well. He writes about it as “happy bondages.”

“When you abandon your meaning-making activities for whatever reason–because it is too hard to make meaning, because you don’t know what meaning to make, because you’ve made some meaning and want respite from meaning-making–you court an addiction. Agitated, bored, you throw up your hands and cry, ‘Give me sex, give me a high, give me something!’ …Once having taken root, an addiction reduces your freedom to make personal meaning while increasing your psychological and physical dependence on the thing craved. The addiction begins to take care of meaning crises in its own way, producing an oddly satisfactory state of affairs: a happy bondage. The great irony about addiction is that, despit its terrible consequences, despite the guilt and despair that come from being out of control and from knowing you are out of control, the addiction is still less of a problem than freedom.”

Compelling stuff. I recommend this book for writers and other artists who struggle with depression or even severe lack of motivation or writer’s block. Eric Maisel, PhD, is a psychotherapist, as well as pioneer of creativity coaching in the San Francisco area. He has a Web site at ericmaisel.com. 

When 15-year-old Hugh went disappeared, his two younger siblings not only felt the loss of their brother and their family as they had known it, but in many ways, became lost themselves. Five years later, Lena, now fifteen, and Owen, 10, have slipped further from each other, and further from reality. Their parents live in a state of avoidance, having traveled through panic, grief, and denial, and barely register their remaining children’s presence, never speaking of the one that went away. They claim to have moved on with their lives–Dad to a new, if less desirable job and Mom to, of all things, medical school–but may only be looking desperately away from the remaining children, willing nothing to happen to them. Tragedy occurs on a number of levels in this story, the smaller ones being no less compelling or devasting than the ones requiring a call to 911. Every Visible Thing is Lisa Carey’s fourth novel, sensitive, lyrical, and compelling. Also gritty, heart-wrenching, and disturbing, with just a touch of the ethereal. 

“When Owen wants something, he prays directly to Hugh for it. When he feels shame, or the urge to confess things he does not imagine kneeling in penance before a priest or God or a Jesus with an exposed, thorny heart. He imagines a painting that once hung in his father’s office, an angel with six wings folded in toward his body like the petals of a flower. Wings that look strong enough, even in repose, to lift someone from mortal danger. In the middle of these wings Owen imagines the face of a ninth-grade boy, set against the photographer’s background of blue sky.”

Carey is a writer new to me, but I enjoyed this slightly skewed coming-of-age story very much. Her previous novels are The Mermaids Singing, In the Country of the Young, and Love in the Asylum. I’m anxious to check them out and see how they compare to this one. I think Every Visible Thing would also be appropriate for older teens who are not uncomfortable with topics such as suicide, drug use and mild sexuality.

I was asked by Amazon to review an advance copy of Our Lady of Pain by Elena Forbes, or I would probably not have chosen to read the second book of a series without reading the first. What’s weird is how tricky reading that first book–Die With Me–might be. Apparently it came out in hardback in July of 2007, now available through alternate sellers for around twelve bucks. It became available as an imported paperback in January 2008, also available though other sellers for around eight dollars. In September this second book, which Amazon is apparently trying to support becomes available. Also in September, a new paperback edition of Die For Me for–get this–$27.99! Hunh?

But I digress…

Our Lady of Pain was a slow start for me. Not poor enough to quit, but not engaging enough to make me look forward to picking it up again (the great irony of an avid reader’s life: great books go quickly, mediocre ones drag on). Some of the “clues,” were pretty rudimentary, and often barely relevant red herrings. The characters, mostly members of the Barnes Murder Squad were two-dimensional, despite attempts to give them back stories.  Where it became more interesting for me was when they consulted with an English professor regarding a poem that seemed to figure prominently in both a present and past, possibly linked, case. I was impressed with the inclusion of this gothic poet, Charles Algernon Swinburne, and the meaning behind his work. Here is a bit of the poem, called Dolores, Notre-Dame des Sept Douleurs:

“By the ravenous teeth that have smitten/Through the kisses that blossom and bud,/By the lips intertwisted and bitten/Till the foam has a savour of blood,/By the pulse as it rises and falters,/By the hands as they slacken and strain,/I adjure thee, respond from thine altars,/Our Lady of Pain.”

So, I am always really impressed by writers who create poems, bits of novels, stories, news stories for use inside other novels. In this case, Gothic poets are certainly outside my frame of reference, beyond a little Poe, perhaps, so it wasn’t until I finished the novel that I Googled Swinburne and learned that he was, indeed, a poet of the 19th century. Still a nice bit of work for Forbes, putting it all together.It picked up a little from page 195 on through the end on 401. A fairly straight-ahead British crime case. More depth of character, fewer pages, –and cheaper domestic paperbacks, for heaven’s sake–that’s my sage advice.  

As a child, I wasn’t much interested in dolls. I loved kids–real ones–and babysat from an early age (I also loved money, my motivation was not entirely maternal), but dolls just seemed silly. I played a little house, but I preferred store. I preferred store with all of the containers lovingly washed and saved by Nana: cottage cheese, milk, Saltines, and whatnot. I dreamed of having a wonderful treehouse, but settled for sitting in the branches of the backyard Fruitless Mulberry or throwing an old bedspread over the faded metal jungle gym and hiding underneath. I’m sure there were many, but one of my standout favorite books was one kept at my grandma’s about Miss Suzy the Squirrel. As I recall, she fought off soldiers of some sort. I can picture them with little bayonets, in little soldier uniforms. But what I loved about Miss Suzy was her house. It was cozy down to the last detail. I wanted to live in that house. Over the years, I think a lot of what has drawn me to books and films (and hotels and houses and churches restaurants and…) is atmosphere. Nothing posh or perfect; I’m just a nester, still in search of a really great treehouse. I also seem, despite a total lack of green thumb, to be drawn to gardens. This also began in childhood and I became a little obsessed with one of the books. I discovered The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett, in third grade when the teacher chose it as a book to read out loud after lunch. I’m not sure why I took to it so completely. Perhaps because I was the new girl in school, a new city, new neighborhood, a class of kids who already knew their multiplication tables (I did not), and I related to Mary’s isolation. Or maybe I just know a classic when I hear it, but I was enchanted. “When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It was true, too. She had a little thin face and a little thin body, thin light hair and a sour expression. Her hair was yellow, and her face was yellow because she had been born in India and had always been ill in one way or another. Her father had held a position under the English Government and had always been busy and ill himself, and her mother had been a great beauty who cared only to go to parties and amuse herself with gay people. She had not wanted a little girl at all, and when Mary was born she handed her over to the care of an Ayah, who was made to understand that if she wished toplease the Mem Sahib she must keep the child out of sight as much as possible.” When Mary is nine, her parents die suddenly, and she is hustled out of India and over to the English moor to live in the home of her uncle, one Mr. Archibald Craven, a man with issues of his own where family is concerned. The Secret Garden was first published in 1911 and new editions come out all the time. I have a bit of a collection: a 1912 edition, a board game, a few movies, a few modern versions, and a gardening book, some paper dolls, I think. If you decide to rent the DVD, the BBC version is the best, but I naturally prefer the book. Another children’s classic that I discovered only a few years ago, is The Court of the Stone Children, by Eleanor Cameron. I’m afraid it’s out of print, though. It’s a brilliant gothic tale with ghosts and history in the mix, and, of course, a garden. Also quotes from Faulkner, Camus, and de Nerval at the front, not typical of a young person’s read.