Death and the Penguin

A writer, organized crime, and a penguin: these are the wild mix from which Andrey Kurkov forms his bleakly comic novel Death and the Penguin (translation by George Bird).

In the post-Soviet Ukraine, Viktor, a writer who has found no success in novels or short stories, obtains a job preparing obituaries for a newspaper’s files. When the subjects of his pieces begin dying off in suspicious circumstances, Viktor finds himself the entangled pawn of a shady power struggle that spans the celebrities, the mob, and the government. Lost in a maze of unclear alliances and loyalties, he attempts to discover the part he must play.

Pushcart Prize XXXV: Best of the Small Presses

I'm always on the lookout for good nonfiction. Some of the best I find are in The Pushcart Prize. Editor Bill Henderson publishes it once a year, and includes short stories and poetry, as well.

My daughter gave me the 2011 edition in September, but immediately borrowed it. When I visited last week, I got to read a bunch of good stuff, but especially liked "Freaky Beasts: Revelations of a One-Time Bodybuilder." Here are some excerpts:

In the ... documentary Pumping Iron (1977), Arnold Schwarzenegger... likened a good workout pump to an orgasm... I cared more for what was permanent, for what I could carry through the day with me: the body armor that announced the arrival of a formidable opponent, a disciplined warrior... a man. Because, after all, being a man is the chief concern of any adoleswcent male, whether he recognizes it or not...

I needed another fifty pounds of lean mass, and it looked like anabolic drugs were the only route. If someone had told me then that in just over a year I would waltz across a stage in a frenzied bodybuilding competition, wearing only a blue bikini bottom, tanned an unnatural bronze, and mushroomed on three different anabolic drugs, I would have doubted it. My only focus at this juncture was to look like a genetically enhanced Atlas, to be the strongest eighteen-year-old guy in town.

Heathers by John Ross Bowie

The difference between a classic movie and a cult classic is a degree of slavish devotion. Classic movies, generally, are acknowledged by critics as great examples within the history of film, often elevating the medium to an art. Cult movies rarely aspire to the greatness or attention the receive and usually have a devoted following despite and not because of their critical attention. It falls to their fans – on blogs and message boards and at conventions and on Internet fan sites – to convince the rest of the world of their true worth.

Enter the Deep Focus series of film guides from Soft Skull Press.

Calling itself "A Novel Approach to Cinema" the series (six books so far) give authors permission to delve deep into their love of a specific film, elevating them from cult fanatics to cultural archaeologists. And while Jonathen Letham's interrogation of John Carpenter's They Live initially drew me to the series it's actor and author John Ross Bowie's take on Heathers that sold me. Somewhere between film criticism and fanboy obsession, this is where budding teen cineastes are going to find meaningful film theory. They'll also perhaps discover an otherwise overlooked cult classic like Heathers which, Bowie makes the case, is the ur-Mean Girls movie and an eerie foreshadowing of the Columbine massacre.

Filthy Shakespeare by Pauline Kiernan

Ever wonder what the Bard was on about? I mean, really on about? If you've read Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet for English class (and if you haven't, you probably will), you've probably figured out that there are some double meanings in the text. And if you've ever been to a live production of one of his plays, the snickers from at least some of the members of the audience have probably cued you in to the fact that just because it's Shakespeare doesn't mean it's high-brow. In fact, Shakespeare's plays were well-loved by the (unwashed - literally) masses during his lifetime, and with good reason: even the tragedies have really bawdy bits in them.

Hence today's book: Filthy Shakespeare: Shakespeare's Most Outrageous Sexual Puns by Pauline Kiernan. The book has a somewhat titillating title, and it certainly is chockablock full of blunt - nay, crude - sexual terms. But it does a good - if overenthusiastic - job of identifying representative scenes in many of the plays that involve decidedly bawdy terms.

The Psychopath Test--Jon Ronson

‘I heard a story about her once,’ said James. ‘She was interviewing a psychopath. She showed him a picture of a frightened face and asked him the emotion. He said he didn’t know what the emotion was but it was the face people pulled just before he killed them.’ (10)

The Edumacation of Jay Baker -- Jay Clark

Jay Baker, high school freshman and Ohio native, is in love with his best friend, Cameo Appearance Parnell. (Rather from shrinking from her unusual name, she embraces it with every fiber of her cheerleader self.) Unfortunately, she's always dating some jock or another. As far as Jay's concerned, they're all pretty much interchangeable.

All except for his arch-enemy, Mike Hibbard. A long time ago, they used to be friends, but then Mike turned into a complete meathead jerk, and spends much of his free time at school harassing Jay.

Stuff on the homefront isn't so hot, either: Jay's mother is moving to the local trailer park for the next three months because she and his father have decided to take a trial separation from each other. And then Jay's sister informs him the separation probably has something to do with the fact that their mom has been boffing Some Dude Named Keith. 

Along with the expected emotional distress, all of this drama is wreaking havoc on Jay's Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

Don't Let Me Go by J.H. Trumble

Don't Let Me Go by J.H. Trumble
"Some people spend their whole lives looking for the right partner. Nate Schaper found his in high school. In the eight months since their cautious flirting became a real, heart-pounding, tell-the-parents relationship, Nate and Adam have been inseparable. Even when local kids take their homophobia to brutal levels, Nate is undaunted. He and Adam are rock solid. Two parts of a whole. Yin and yang.

But when Adam graduates and takes an off-Broadway job in New York--at Nate's insistence--that certainty begins to flicker. Nate's friends can't keep his insecurities at bay, especially when he catches Skyped glimpses of Adam's shirtless roommate. Nate starts a blog to vent his frustrations and becomes the center of a school controversy, drawing ire and support in equal amounts. But it's the attention of a new boy who is looking for more than guidance that forces him to confront who and what he really wants."- summary from Amazon

Trumble has written a really emotional, funny, realistic debut. It's one of the best books I've read all year, if not THE best. I was a bit wary in the beginning because I didn't like Nate at all. I thought he was being really pissy for no reason and had no idea what an amazing boyfriend he had. Seriously, I was REALLY frustrated so it took me a bit of time to get 100 pages in. But once I got there, and Nate's past got revealed as well as good times between Nate and Adam were shown, it came together. What Trumble did here is a huge accomplishment- she made a really realistic character who felt like a real person. Nate is an extremely flawed character and there will be times that you like him and times you don't, but in the end, you still root for him. For the whole book, I was like "JUST TALK THINGS OUT!!" and "WHY ARE YOU BEING SO STUPID?!" It doesn't happen often that I get that invested in characters and a story. I felt like I was reading about people I knew and they were telling me everything that was going on.

I loved the friendship between Nate and Danial (btw, not a fan of his name at all- I'm one of those people who reads the words in their head- like an internal audio book- so everytime I came to his name, I was like "It should be Daniel!"); it's how all relationships should be between gay and straight people, especially men. Sexuality shouldn't be an issue and your friends should be loyal and willing to stand up for you.

I really liked the way Trumble unfolded the story, telling it a bit out of order. It starts out in the present day with Nate driving Adam to the airport for his off-Broadway job and from there, it goes back to when they first met and started dating back to present day then back to a memory. It's like every other chapter was written about an event in the past. Trumble also does not shy away from sex and sex talk- there's nothing graphic but it's also not sanitized in any way. Adam and Nate have a true relationship. There's also a nice epilogue that takes place 10 years in the future, which I loved.

Overall, this is a book I could go on and on about. I loved it that much. It's a stellar debut and I absolutely cannot wait to see what Trumble has in store for us next!!

One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy by Stephen Tunney

Hieronymus Rexaphin is a teenager like lots of other teenagers. He fights with his parents. He falls for girls way out of his league. He sneaks out at night to hang with his friends. He’s really good at history and English but terrible at math.

Also, he lives on the moon two thousand years from now and he’s legally prohibited from removing his glasses and showing anyone his eyes. Hieronymus suffers from a condition called Lunarcroptic Ocular Symbolanosis, which is to say that he was born with eyes tinted the fourth primary color. It’s not a mixture of the three primary colors we know, but a genuine fourth one, and people who don’t have the condition are unable to process it, which means that seeing the eyes of a hundred percent lunar person, as those with LOS are called, can cause seizures—although if the authorities are to be believed, it can cause madness. (Should a pair of hundred percenters look in each other’s eyes—WHICH HAS NEVER EVER HAPPENED—they will instantly die. Or so it’s said.) It also means that Hieronymus can see the future.

Where to Start

You've seen Terry Pratchett's Discworld books recommended on this blog before. I mentioned two in this post, and recently Debra reviewed his latest (the 39th in the series), Snuff. If you read those posts you know already that you don't have to start reading the series with book #1. In fact, you can start pretty much anywhere. Everything you need to know is contained in each book. And even when information is repeated, Pratchett is clever enough to keep it interesting and funny every time.

That said, there's also no reason NOT to begin at the beginning. The first book in the series, The Colour of Magic, introduces readers at a somewhat greater length than the others to the cosmology of Discworld: Discworld is not a globe like Earth. Instead, it is a disc, this disc is help up on the backs of for enormous elephants. In turn, the elephants are standing on the back of a giant turtle, known as the Great A'Tuin. The Great A'Tuin, thus loaded, swims through space.

Everybody Sees the Ants by A. S. King

When I sat down to start reading A.S. King's Everybody Sees the Ants, I thought I was just going to read a little bit to get started, and then put it down to go do something else. I should have learned from my similar experience with Please Ignore Vera Dietz, because three hours later I had finished the book and was screaming "Where was this book a decade ago, when it would have been infinitely more helpful?"

I'm pretty sure that particular feeling is just the occupational hazard of reading young adult books when one is not a young adult. In this case, it was brought on by the fact that Everybody Sees the Ants is less of a book about bullying—it feels like a disservice to try to sum it up that way—as it is a book about being young and male, and trying to figure out what that whole business of "being a man" is about in a society with strictly enforced gender norms. Especially when your particular experience of "being male" lies outside those gender norms.

It's also a book that's not afraid to raise these kinds of complex questions in the midst of reality-bending dream trips to Vietnam and snarky, culture-deconstructing talking ants.