I am the Cheese by Robert Cormier

I worked at Blockbuster for over five years. I know. It’s kind of depressing to think about. But during that time, I contemplated renting I am the Cheese a number of times. It must have been the title that drew me to it – that and the cover, which was a drawing of a young boy on a bike. I never read the back, so I had no clue what it was about. At some point we purged the store of VHS and I am the Cheese was not on the list of movies to order on DVD. It was by no means frequently rented. The other day I found out that it was a book, and decided that I should take a break from Lolita and read it.

I am the Cheese is written almost exclusively in the present tense, much of it first-person. This always takes some getting used to for me. Robert Cormier’s novel begins with a boy, of undetermined age, biking to see his dad. This is no short trip, but one that will cross state lines and no doubt place the boy in some degree of peril. This is where the first-person, present tense really adds to the book. It creates a sense of immediacy, putting the reader in the moment right along with the character.

The second chapter begins with what appears to be a transcript from a recorded interview. After a page or two, it is obvious that the person being interviewed is the boy on the bike, and that the interviews are taking place after the bike trip. The chapters alternate this way throughout the book, allowing the reader to slowly piece together the story and fill in the gaps that Cormier intentionally left blank.

I am the Cheese is relatively short, well-written, and an easy read. It was published back in 1977, winning many prizes and awards. I liked Cormier’s style and am planning on reading other works of his.

Now to track down that VHS.

The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

When the final Harry Potter book came out a couple of weeks ago, I found a lot of the comments left by people on articles discussing the book went something like, "Harry Potter is a children's book and I am an adult. As an adult, I don't read children's books." The obvious question about whether or not the Harry Potter series is really meant for children notwithstanding, I think this is a pretty forced piece of logic. Adults are certainly not precluded from reading children's books; in fact I like to read many books that I feel have been written for some demographic other than myself. Secondly, books that were once considered or written as juvenile literature have since become widely read by adults, like Tom Sawyer or The Hobbit. Furthermore, to write a good children's book requires a certain kind of talent for distilling information, and the kind of children's book that can tackle topics of great importance while simultaneously employing the kind of adventure and clarity to which children respond is a pretty impressive feat.

The Phantom Tollbooth isn't just one of those books; in many ways it's a book about writing that kind of book. It is an allegorical romp through the world of knowledge, and part of what its protagonist Milo learns in the land of Dictionopolis is to value clarity, brevity, and simplicity.

But more than that, The Phantom Tollbooth is a primer for young kids about the nature of knowledge itself. In it, the smart but bored-of-school Milo comes home one day to find a tollbooth (some assembly required) left for him at his door, and in his wind-up car he passes through it, ending up in a strange land. This land is split into two parts, the Kingdom of Dictionopolis, ruled over by King Azaz the Unabridged, and the Kingdom of Digitopolis, ruled over by the Mathemagician, King Azaz' brother. The kingdom has fallen into shambles since the exile of princesses Rhyme and Reason and the disagreement between the two kings about whether words or numbers are more important. Milo, with his friends the Watchdog and the Humbug, sets off through the Mountains of Ignorance to free the princesses.

The writing is so clever, and the topics so complex: One of my favorite parts is when, while traveling through the Mountains of Ignorance, the three heroes meet a character called the Terrible Trivium, who sets them to tasks like moving water from one well to another with a dropper or digging a hole through a cliff with a needle. This sort of lesson--that to live life fully, one must ignore trivial tasks and focus on important ones--is something that many adults live their entire lives without learning. That's what impresses me about this book: the whole thing tackles concepts of knowledge and learning that border on the philosophical, while being written simply enough for kids to understand.

Naked Lunch by William Burroughs

Aztec priests strip blue feather robe from the Naked Youth. They bend him back over a limestone altar, fit a crystal skull over his head, securing the two hemispheres back and front with crystal screws. A water-fall pour over the skull snapping the boy's neck. He ejaculate in a rainbow against the rising sun.

What. The. Fuck. I don't even know how to describe this book to you--at some level, it seems to be about a drug addict who undergoes recovery and then is cured, but along the way it takes on the form of an extended fever dream of drug use, sexual perversion, and graphic obscenity. Much of the book takes place in Interzone, a city of unspecified location (and perhaps meant to represent the state of a junky's head) where the inhabitants perform a lot of fellatio and other sexual acts on each other, as well as the strange creatures that live there. Youths hang each other, excited by their death spasms. Some people are addicted to the semen of strange translucent creatures called Mugwumps. A man teaches his asshole to talk, and eventually it takes over his body and eliminates his other parts.

If that sounds less than appealing, you're not the first to think so--this book set off a firestorm of media frenzy and obscenity charges in the early Sixties. It's not hard to see how that happened; lacking any semblance of a narrative (some episodes are arranged at random, using a Dada-like system of "cut-up"), and often being nigh incomprehensible, it is hard to piece what artistic value, if any, Naked Lunch has. I think that on a deeper level, Naked Lunch probably makes many interesting satiricial points--commenting on commercialism in society, the idea of normality, the relationship between sex and destruction--but who wants to read this revolting book closely enough to better understand them? Plus, for some reason, Burroughs has a knack for using verbs without any sort of augmentation--the phrase "he ejaculate" in the quote above is not a typo.

I've decided to officially call bullshit on the Beat movement. Having read its two flagship novels, On the Road and Naked Lunch, I can't imagine any genre in which its seminal works are of such mediocre quality.

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka

Nadia is a Ukrainian woman raised in Britain with her older sister. The story begins just after her mother's death, as her father falls in love with a bombacious 30-something Ukrainian woman. Nadia and her sister Vera try to team up together (after a long history of fighting) to convince her father not to marry this woman, attempting to make him see that all she wants is British citizenship. When he marries her, the two begin to tackle the question of divorce and deportation. Along the way here and there, Nadia adds in excerpts from her father's memoir (A Short History of Tractors) and stories of what she knows to be her family's past.

This book was okay, I guess. There were some funny parts, mostly her father's ludicrious behavior. His eccentricity is amusing. There were some sad parts, like when she finds out about her family's history in Soviet labor camps, or when she realizes her father's new wife is beating him. But mostly, it was just kinda ho-hum. Not bad, but not that good either. Easy and short to read, I guess I recommend it if you're at the beach and forgot any other books.

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

This is the first book I read this year that I didn't enjoy. The blurb on the back sounded like a good enough set up, but Conrad failed to deliver. It's a frame story, but the frame doesn't enhance the book at all. More than that, the so called "heart of darkness" isn't really that terrifying.

The main character takes a steam boat into then unexplored Africa in search of an ivory trader named Kurtz. Turns out Kurtz doesn't live up to his reputation as the ass-kicking, elephant-hunting, all-around frontiersman that Marlow, the protagonist, builds him up to be.

The book just kind of peters out and ends without a discernible climax. Thankfully it was only a shade over a hundred pages long.

Also, Conrad comes off as a bit of racist in his depiction of the Africans in this book. He doesn't seem to have a problem with poaching elephant tusks either.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling

Oh my goodness, oh my goodness... wow... I mean, just... amazing... just go read it... read the whole thing, read all of them... wow...

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling

Once again, Harry deals with being the so-called "Chosen One" during his sixth year at Hogwarts. Dumbledore is finally giving him personal lessons, so as to prepare him for fulfilling his prophecy with You-Know-Who, but per usual, Dumbledore is keeping more secrets than revealing truths. Meanwhile, Harry has found an old potions book that is helping to earn him top marks in his NEWT-level Potions class, but at what price? Although the plot certainly is eventful, in true Harry Potter fashion, it is probably the least so of the series. It includes a lot more history of Voldemort/Riddle and theory on how to defeat him -- the basis of Dumbledore's lessons with Harry. Tensions in the school rise as reports of Voldemort's evildoing across the country turn up, ultimately ending in a DeathEater-Order battle on school grounds.

Let us step into the night and pursue that flighty temptress, adventure...

This installment is pretty good -- emotional, adventurous, exciting, etc, etc. This one is also crucial to understanding the plot of the seventh book, as it's really kind of a set-up for the end. If you want to know who is good/bad/dead/alive this time, you'll have to read it yourself, which I highly recommend. I'm glad I decided to read this one before setting on the seventh... they're really closely connected and I didn't remember much of the sixth.

The Iron Dream by Norman Spinrad

Let Adolf Hitler transport you to a far-future Earth, where only FERIC JAGGAR and his mighty weapon, the Steel Commander, stand between the remnants of true humanity and annihilation at the hands of the totally evil Dominators and the mindless mutant hordes they completely control.

I decided to read this book based on the description, which is the kind of self-referential stuff I enjoy: Instead of becoming dictator of Germany in the 1930's, Hitler immigrates to the United States and becomes a science fiction author. His last work is called The Lord of the Swastika--which is actually what you're reading; the rest is all setup to introduce the false author. The story itself is of Feric Jaggar, a genetically pure "Trueman" intent on freeing his native country of Heldon from the scourge of hideous unpure mutants and especially the evil, mind-manipulating Dominators who are based in the faroff country of Zind.

The point is that the book Hitler would write--a narcissistic, sexually aggressive and racist fasco-fantasy where genetically pure people destroy thinly veiled mutants--resembles much of the science fiction literature that characterized the middle part of the century. By substituting Hitler as the author of the book, Spinrad means not for us to think about Hitler per se, but what we appreciate in fiction and what it says about us.

That's all well and good, but the fact is that Hitler is a terrible writer. Now, I realize, that is somewhat of the point, but that doesn't make Lord of the Swastika, or The Iron Dream, as it's published in real life, any better. It's still full of clodded, awkward writing and nauseating battle fantasies. What concept, no matter how clever, necessitates a full-length book that is necessarily awful? It's enjoyable in a superficial way, I suppose, but not in the way literature ought to be.

I did enjoy, however, the afterword by the fictional Harold Whipple of NYU, which points out the phallic symbolism of the book and relates it to the circumstances of the times, in which the Greater Soviet Union controls all of Eurasia and the United States yearns for a brave leader like Feric Jaggar, which Whipple says accounts for the book's popularity. The best part: "Of wider significance is the book's popularity and the adoption of the swastika motif and colors created in it among as diverse a spectrum of social groups and organizations as the Christian Anti-Communist League, various 'outlaw motorcycle gangs,' and the American Knights of the Bushido."

How Soccer Explains the World by Franklin Foer

I borrowed this book from Nathan and read it a few months ago (I'm still behind on writing reviews for all the books I've read this year). Read his review. He summed up my feelings about the book. His argument about why the US is so antagonistic towards soccer made a lot of sense. It explains why David Beckham's tenure at the L.A. Galaxy may attract the People Magazine crowd, but not the die hard, flag bearing, NASCAR watching American sports fan to the world's sport. The story about the Iranian women's struggle for equality was insightful, too. My favorite however, was Foer's explanation as to why Barcelona is, hands-down, the best soccer team in the world.

This "unlikely theory of globalization" is a quick, entertaining read even if you don't much like soccer. Go Barca!

Superstud by Paul Fieg

I read Superstud during the same car trip in which I read Notes From the Underground. That was a huge mistake. Paul Fieg's experiences with the fairer sex had so much in common with Notes' existential angst that I occasionally forgot which book I was reading. Superstud was funnier though.

Humor books are difficult to review, so I'll just say that Superstud is quite funny and sometimes quite poignant, not unlike Paul Fieg's crowning accomplishment, Freaks and Geeks. It's a collection of essays connected only by the fact that they a) happened to the same person and b) are told her in chronological order. From the world's worst not-a-date to an REO Speedwagon concert to Michigan's mostly blatantly racist girlfriend, all the stories are funny and strangely relatable. I didn't enjoy it quite as much as Fieg's other book, Kick Me, but it's still worth the read if you're into that sort of thing.