In a small town in 1930's Georgia, a handful of characters - searching, all of them, for something that will complete them - are drawn to deaf-mute John Singer. For a while, it seems that Singer can do this for them, that he can complete them. Then, the one thing that completes Singer is taken from him, and this is more than Singer can endure. By the time Singer is gone, it's clear that he was merely a blank canvas, that the others saw in him what they wanted, what they were looking for.

This book broke my heart, with all of its quiet darkness and blinding light, and its rawness and its truth. That said, it's the kind of book I'd have read in high school and gotten through, but not appreciated in the least. In fact, I recall reading a book by McCullers in high school, called *Member of the Wedding* (which just happens to be included in this edition of *The Heart is a Lonely Hunter*). My 11th grade self did not, in fact, dig *Member of the Wedding*. 11th grade Sheila didn't like whatever Steinbeck was assigned either, so what did she know?

Anyway. Five stars to *The Heart is a Lonely Hunter*, with a star for Mick, to have for just herself.
 

The blurb on the back of the jacket says it best: Factotum "is a beer-soaked, deliciously degenerate novel [that] follows the wanderings of aspiring writer Henry Chinaski across WWII-era America."

Factotum is gritty, uncomfortably realistic, and pointless. Henry is an alcoholic vagrant who likes to call himself a writer - and sometimes, he actually does write, and what he writes gets published in important magazines. Aside from that, he supports himself by taking menial jobs and staying at them just long enough to get fired from them. And sometimes, he spends more effort trying to get fired than it would take to just do the job.

I gotta say, though, I did enjoy my time with Henry. He's not likeable at first, but he grows on you by the end of the book - ignorance, laziness, and all. The book ended abruptly; I would've gladly hung out with Henry for a while longer. 3 1/2 stars + a bonus 1/2 star for cleansing my palate of 50 Shades of Grey.

Meaningless Trivial Fact: Bukowski died in San Pedro, CA, a year before I moved there. True story.
 

Fate throws together Jewish cousins Josef Kavalier and Sammy Clayman at the start of WWII, and, as a result, the superhero comic flourishes.

That's the gist, but oh - there's so much more in here. It's about WWII, and the hatred it spread. It's about the boom of the comic book industry. It's about love and truth, and how far some will go to earn each, and to avoid each. The story meanders a bit, but I didn't care. The characters more than made up for it. Four and a half stars. And kisses to Joe.

 

It went a little something like this:

Karen: Hi honey, I'm home from the women's conference my shrink sent me to. Guess what? I want a divorce.

Dillon: Aw, man! Is it my leather fetish?

Karen: Ew! Get out.

Dillon: Man, living in this motel sucks. At least I'm a hotshot stockbroker so I can use my 2 hour lunch to do my favorite thing: shop at Nordstrom's!

Hot Chick: You like what you see?

Dillon: Wow! It's a girl dressed in black leather! Shaaa-WING!

Dillon's Boss: Hey, honeybuns. C'mere.

Dillon: Yessum? By the way - I love how you're all bossy and stuff. If only you wore black leather, and weren't hideous...

Dillon's Boss: Knock it off, hotshot. Hey, here's a primo career opportunity. Invest this union group's retirement fund. And don't screw it up. See ya later, sweetheart.

Ring-ring-ring

Dillon: Hello?

Hot Chick: It's exactly midnight. Isn't that significant and erotic? Just wanted to mesmerise you with the sound of my voice. From here on out, you'll be ridiculously obsessed with me and my black leather outfit.

Dillon: Umkay.

Hot Chick: Meet me at x bar. Tomorrow. I'll bring my cigarettes.

Dillon: Hot dawg!

Hot Chick: Jeez, is this 1986 or 2001? Why am I dressed like Tawny Kittaen in a Whitesnake video?

Dillon: I'm sorry. Did you say something? I can't stop watching you smoke cigarettes and drink alcohol. Shaa-

Hot Chick: Yeahyeahyeah, I know - shaa-WING. Here. Let's make out in the parking lot, and then I'll make sporadic midnight phone calls to you over the next few weeks.

Karen: Dillon, what are you doing here? I'm going out to see my new friend. Who is suspiciously similar to YOUR new friend. I don't have time to talk to you.

Dillon: Er. Alright. I don't really know why I'm here anyway.

Karen: Wait! I think I still love you!

Dillon: Squee! Really!

Karen: No. Nevermind. Just kidding.

Dillon: Aw.

Karen: I might love you again if you didn't have that that icky leather fetish. It's just so...so...fetish-y. Blah.

Dillon: That's ok. Cuz I have a girlfriend who calls me at midnight, sometimes. And she let me kiss her once. And she gave me some really tasty inside stock information that I completely trust, because she's always wearing black leather, and I made the most important client investment of my whole career based on her tip. All of our money is tied up in it, too. Oh - and, um, she dresses in black leather all. The. Time.

Karen: God, I hate you.

Hot Chick: Well, Dillon, now that we've slept together, I feel, like, so, connected to you.

Dillon: Gulp - I can't believe you actually have a tattoo. Your edginess knows no bounds. I love you. Black leather. Gaaaaaaaahhhhh...

Hot Chick: Meet me on Monday at blahblah hotel in Canada. I made your flight reservations. When you arrive, sit at the bar till x o'clock. Flirt with the male bartender. At x o'clock, not one minute sooner, go up to the room. I'll be watching - if you don't follow instructions - no dice.

Dillon: Sha-WINNNGGGG!!!!!

Benjamin: You missed your last appointment, Dillon. What, do you think I'm JUST a psychiatrist? How am I supposed to be established as a minor character with potential if you never keep your appointments?

Dillon: Yeah. Sorry about that. Should I tell you some more about my mother?

Benjamin: Absolutely.

Dillon: Wow. That bartender wasn't the least bit interested in me. He must not be gay. He should've been all OVER this. And - oh, holy crap! There's a hog-tied, naked, fat dead guy in this hotel room! Eep! It's Mr. High Society! OMG! I think...I think...OMG, I think Hot Chick set me up! Wait. I know. I can fold up that fat man, stow him on the bottom shelf of this room service cart, and hide him with the table cloth. Then, I'll put him in the trunk of his car, and drive him to his house and ditch the car. That'll put Hot Chick in hot water. Heh. See what I did there?

Hot Chick: Wow, men sure are stupid. Here, want some more wine?

Karen: Yeah. Wine always makes me tell you even more secrets about Dillon. I'm so glad I met you at that women's conference that my shrink, Benjamin, sent me to. Between the two of you, you managed to convince me to kick Dillon out of the house. You can knock it off with the backrub, though. That's kind of weird.

Dillon: Thank goodness this multi-million dollar estate doesn't have a security system, or any staff on site. Otherwise, I'd never have been able to get into the house after I left Hot Chick's husband's car in the garage.

Hot Chick: Dillon! What are you doing here?

Dillon: Setting you up.

Hot Chick: Nuh-uh. [executes plot twist] I'm setting YOU up. Now you're a suspect in my husband's disappearance, AND your career is in the toilet because of that fake stock tip.

Dillon: No. [reverses Hot Chick's plot twist] I'm setting YOU up. Now you think I'm in love with you, and you think we got rid of hubby's body, but it's really in my freezer.

Hot Chick: Dude. [tries another plot twist] I'm totally setting YOU up. Now you think I'm buying your stupid plan and I'm gonna give you a million bucks.

Dillon: Whatever. [undoes Hot Chick's plot twist and tries one of his own] Now YOU think I'M buying YOUR stupid plan, AND I figured out that you and Benjamin have been in cahoots since the beginning, AND I've got the detective who investigated your last murder on my side. We've got a plan.

Hot Chick: Wait. I lost track. I have no idea what's going on anymore.

Karen: It doesn't matter. Because even though I'm in the process of divorcing Dillon, and I kind of thought I hated him, when he asked me to help him plant a 3 day old corpse in the engine room of his lover's yacht, and then spend a couple hours in there with it while the rest of the plan played out, how could I say no? After that, though, I'm going to throw a wrench in everyone's plans, because I came up with a plan that doesn't suck.

Hot Chick: Oh. I thought it'd be over sooner. Like, 30 pages sooner.

Karen: Nope. Because after I lose the catfight, I end up hog-tied and almost suffocate while Dillon tries to kill you. He doesn't quite do it, but then Benjamin busts in and surprise! He finishes you off and cuts my ropes, then sails away with your corpse on the yacht. Or...something. Dillon and I get back together, though. And sometimes, I smoke cigarettes and wear leather gloves.

Hot Chick: Sigh.

The End.

Three stars - two for the book itself, and one because I had so much fun snarking it while I read.
 

by Vyvyane Loh

I actually finished this one a few days ago, but had to give myself a few days to sift through everything, try to figure out how I could possibly explain this book in a way that would do it justice.

The Lims - father Humphrey, mother Cynthia, Grandma Soik, teenaged Claude, and little sister Lucy - are an English-speaking Chinese family living in British-ruled Singapore during WWII. None of them, save Grandma Soik, speaks or understands Chinese. They all enjoy the upper-class life Humphrey's bank job buys and seem to be a perfect family, but only till you get to know them. Humphrey's unquestioning adoration of all things British drives Cynthia into a clandestine cycle of self-destructive behavior. Grandma Soik reads all the time from *The Art of War* and tries (with no great success - one session ended with the children covered in fire ants) to teach the children life strategy lessons. Lucy - well, it's hard to say what Lucy's struggle was, as she was a mostly peripheral character til the very end of the book.

Our main focus, though, is Claude. Claude never knew where or how he fit in. He was Chinese, raised in British-ruled Thailand, by an Anglophile father. He found the "natives" distasteful, but at the same time, the British considered him an English-speaking, well-mannered "native", and treated him accordingly. Claude deals by withdrawing and detaching, acting out passive-aggressively when he's forced to entertain Jack, a British family aquaintance. Shortly after, Japan invades, and Britan loses her nerve. The Lims' cushy ride is over. This crisis throws Claude in closer than he ever wanted to be with Jack, but it also crosses his path with Ling-Li, who is a spy. As Singapore falls, the triangle of Claude, Ling-Li, and Jack is formed.

*Breaking the Tongue* burrows through layer upon layer of uncomfortable racial ickyness till it gets to the core of Claude's identity. He's dual-natured, his upbringing conflicting with his heritage to the very end of the book. It's a gorgeous, visceral, heartbreaking story. The only downfall was the format - it was so segmented, it was like a toddler's attention span. Seriously. Page-breaks all over the place, characters dropping in and out, plot threads running everywhere. The best word I can think of to describe it is kalidescopic. Or maybe fragmented. Anyway. Four stars.
 

I read *I, Claudius* a few years ago and fell in love. Couldn't turn the pages fast enough: incest, betrayl, murder, scandal - you want it, baby you got it. I was at the library a few weeks ago and when I saw there was more Claudius, I nearly wet myself. Not really, but kind of. Sadly, though, I had to say "Buh-bye!" to *Claudius The God [and in really tiny print] and His Wife Messalina*.

*Claudius the God* picks up right after Caligula's assasination, and just...stalls. There's 150+ pages of backstory about King Herod Aggrippa and when the backstory is done, there's another fifty pages or so of wheel spinning and Herod smarming his way out of what's coming to him. There is the barest foreshadowing of Messalina's motives and I'm guessing she'll hold all the cards by the end of the book - Claudius seems to be making the mistake of giving her busywork that she'll be clever enough to turn into leverage. Unfortunately, I'll never know - or care - if my predictions come true. Back to the library with you, Claudius.
 

Oskar Matzerath is born in 1924 Danzig (Poland? Or Germany? I was never 100% sure which, the names and borders changed too often for me to keep track of). Oskar is completely cognizant from the moment he's born, so when his father leans over his crib and promises Oskar he will one day run the family grocery store, Oskar decides to avoid this horrifying fate by simply never growing up. So he does. Not grow up, I mean. He stops growing on his third birthday, which is also when his mother gives him his first drum. Having never spoken, Oskar uses the drum to communicate, and soon discovers his drumming is a powerful talent/weapon. *The Tin Drum* is Oskars memoir, written while he's in a mental institution at the age of 30. Because yeah - Oskar's crazy.

*Tin Drum* is heavily political, but it's all twisted up with Oskar's warped internal world. I never tried to separate the two, because I loved the way they blended together. The thing about crazy narrators, though, is that they're unreliable. And 736 pages of unreliable narrator = sheer exhaustion. But the translation (it's a German novel) is one of the easiest to read I've ever encountered. Never awkward, gorgeous all the way through.

Four stars. Worth the time and effort, for me. Initially I disliked the narrator's tone, but then I gave Oskar the voice of Stewie from "Family Guy" and man - everything fell into place. Stewie just nailed it.
 

The writing was pretty vanilla, there was little distinction between characters, and the storyline had a few wobbles, logicwise. That said, one of the subplots - a chronicle of the women in the Sparrow family who have, for generations, been born with unique abilities/powers - was interesting enough to keep me reading. 2.5 stars. Cuz it almost fell into "I kinda liked it"-dom. Almost.
 

First page: "Ignatius Parrish spent the night drunk and doing terrible things." When he wakes the next morning, he's got a massive hangover and a set of horns growing out of his head.

Yeah. Put that back on the library shelf? As if.

Horns has absolutely no subtext, no metaphor, no subtlety. Joe Hill takes complex moral and theological themes and makes them all Day-Glo and campy, with a gritty undercurrent that made me kind of queasy. Usually I go for something a bit more substantial, but Horns was a lot of wicked, sick fun. Four stars.


 

by Irvine Welsh

Ah, Mr. Welsh, what happened to the genuine badass I fell in love with via *Trainspotting* and *Porno* and *Filth*? I saw glimpses of you in *School*, but they surfaced so rarely, and I was so tired of slogging through the mundane, I didn't even read the final installment. Thought *Crime* was just a blip, but I guess the bar has been reset. I reckon there are worse things a writer could be guilty of than being mundane, but it sure was a letdown for this reader. Two stars and I'm also breaking up with you.