I wasn’t completely swept off my feet by this much-loved Irish autobiography, but I had an enjoyable engagement with it. McCourt’s grim take on his childhood poverty in Depression- and WWII-era Limerick is simultaneously depressing and bemusing.

Characters are fairly allegorical, though not without surprising complexity. Priests are inflexible, laughable and contradictory–though not all of them. Extended family members are condescending, bigoted and hypocritical–but not all of them, and not all of the time.

A few gems stand out: the janitor at the hospital where McCourt endures typhoid; a shut-in who has been shattered by his experiences in the English army in India; a forgiving and patient Franciscan priest.

The constant hard knocks. Repetitive, rhythmic sorrows of death and poverty and alcoholism. You see them coming up on the story’s horizon and you’re powerless to defuse them. It’s hard at times, to read. His father’s drinking is especially hard to tolerate because it’s such a helpless situation.

Everything is painted so grey: the lane, the dingy, flooded house, the River Shannon. So when something happens driven from love, the color it shoots into the story is blinding. Guilt and perseverance bind families and neighborhoods together. It is a nice frame of reference through which to grasp a basic understanding of the era.

I went in prepared for something that was aimed at the heartstrings. Perhaps as a result of this steely preparation, my tears were not jerked. But I was touched, if not moved. ( )

Book #21 of 2008 for me!

I received another Early Reviewer book this month from LibraryThing. The paperback edition of Sarah’s Key will come out this fall. It is currently available in hardback from Amazon and other sources.

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Some folks have been digging through LibraryThing books, looking at books that most often get tagged “unread,” indicating, duh, that they haven’t been read. Sadly, my system of tagging uses “TBR” (to be read) instead of “unread”, so my tags aren’t included in this collection. The top 106 most unread books are the meme. Why 106? Don’t ask me.

It is much in the spirit of other Internet memes in that it lets you talk about yourself a lot.

Here’s the premise: you take the list and then indicate:

1. Books you’ve read
2. Books you started but didn’t finish
3. Books that are on your to-read list
4. Books that you downright hated!

I’m going to do it this way:

1. Books I’ve read
2. Books I started but failed at
3. Books that are on my to-read list. If I own it already, it won’t be italicized. If I intend to read it Real Soon Now, it’s bold.
4. Books that I have no particular intention of reading, at this time
5. Books that I didn’t like!

Here we Go!

1. Jonathan Strange & M. Norrell
2. Anna Karenina
3. Crime and Punishment
4. Catch-22
5. One hundred years of solitude
6. Wuthering Heights
7. The Silmarillion
8. Life of Pi: a novel
9. The Name of the Rose
10. Don Quixote
11. Moby Dick
12. Ulysses
13. Madame Bovary
14. The Odyssey
15. Pride and Prejudice
16. Jane Eyre
17. A Tale of Two Cities
18. The Brothers Karamazov
19. Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
20. War and Peace
21. Vanity Fair
22. The Time Traveller’s Wife
23. The Iliad
24. Emma
25. The Blind Assassin
26. The Kite Runner
27. Mrs. Dalloway
28. Great Expectations
29. American Gods
30. A heartbreaking work of staggering genius (This is my least favorite book ever)
31. Atlas shrugged
32. Reading Lolita in Tehran
33. Memoirs of a Geisha
34. Middlesex
35. Quicksilver
36. Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
37. The Canterbury tales
38. The Historian
39. A portrait of the artist as a young man
40. Love in the time of cholera
41. Brave new world
42. The Fountainhead
43. Foucault’s Pendulum
44. Middlemarch
45. Frankenstein
46. The Count of Monte Cristo
47. Dracula
48. A clockwork orange
49. Anansi Boys
50. The Once and Future King
51. The Grapes of Wrath
52. The Poisonwood Bible
53. 1984
54. Angels & Demons
55. The Inferno
56. The Satanic Verses
57. Sense and sensibility
58. The Picture of Dorian Gray
59. Mansfield Park
60. One flew over the cuckoo’s nest
61. To the Lighthouse
62. Tess of the D’Urbervilles
63. Oliver Twist
64. Gulliver’s Travels
65. Les misérables
66. The Corrections
67. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
68. The curious incident of the dog in the night-time
69. Dune
70. The Prince
71. The Sound and the Fury
72. Angela’s Ashes (I am reading this RIGHT NOW!)
73. The God of Small Things
74. A people’s history of the United States : 1492-present
75. Cryptonomicon
76. Neverwhere
77. A confederacy of dunces
78. A Short History of Nearly Everything
79. Dubliners
80. The unbearable lightness of being
81. Beloved
82. Slaughterhouse-five
83. The Scarlet Letter
84. Eats, Shoots & Leaves
85. The mists of Avalon
86. Oryx and Crake : a novel
87. Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
88. Cloud Atlas
89. The Confusion
90. Lolita
91. Persuasion
92. Northanger Abbey
93. The Catcher in the Rye
94. On the Road
95. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
96. Freakonomics
97. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
98. The Aeneid
99. Watership Down
100. Gravity’s Rainbow
101. The Hobbit
102. In Cold Blood
103. White teeth (This is the only book on the list I’m not familiar with)
104. Treasure Island
105. David Copperfield
106. The Three Musketeers

Thanks for putting up with me! I’ve read nearly half of them. Whew!

Enger’s second novel gracefully tells a very American tale of identify and redemption, uncoiling with an almost Homeric, profound cadence, but in the end telling us less than I’d like. Sometimes what you look for in a book are the slight edges of imperfection. Sometimes when reading something classic, something fully planed flat and careful, we lose our way and are unable to feel enough. Perhaps that’s what happened to me here. No little burrs of emotion snagged into my soul.

It’s 1915. Monte Becket, a flailing, possibly dilettante writer with a rather too-lovely, whipsmart little family up in Minnesota (and obvious latent wanderlust), decides to tail along with Glendon, a fugitive felon whose crimes include…well, pretty much everything. But Glendon is good at making boats. And drinking.

What follows is an adventure tale that has that heavy, attractive feel of that underpinning of adventure stories that has been with us since prehistory. And it echoes the masters who have wielded the brush of this kind of adventure. Sections of river travel smack of Mark Twain. High plains and western happenings have shadows of (softer) Cormac McCarthy, Kent Haruf, Ivan Doig. Even the occasional burp of Steinbeck, especially towards the end of the novel.

Parts are downright appealing. The river-floating and turtle-catching center of the country now lost to modernity. Cowboys with depravities. Floods and shooting. It is a fun read, full of crisp and hearty language.

Characters speak in off-the-cuff, just-then-coined, beautiful proverbs. The countryside is dashed off in a few words or sentences that leave no doubt, and leave the reader room to roam the textures of the characters and the plots.

But some things–the bigger pieces–don’t deliver fully. There’s a pattering, heavily thumping sub-current of redemption. Glendon’s nearsightedness and other characters’ various types of blindness are emphasized. Without giving away plot points, I can say that the way these themes are handled and wrapped up left me cold. I found it hard to reconcile the motives of Becket in a few places, about two-thirds through the book–he left me exasperated. Additionally, the excitement and clarity of the structure and language in the book leave one expecting a swelling, memorable resolution and instead I feel blank.

But! I think someone of different temperament, at a different emotional point than I am right at the moment, might find this book deeply moving. I can imagine it filling a particular shape of personal void. And, for Enger’s admitted firm grasp on the language, and the enjoyability of the story, it still gets high marks. (