Author Notes

Happy New Year!

I was perusing Amazon.com the other day and checking up on a few books I'll be making the purchase of in coming months. One is by Marlon James and is titled A Brief History of Seven Killings, and takes place in Jamaica. It's about the corruption and craziness involved in social upheaval and what-not. I heard it was very good.

I was also looking up some info on Up Up and Away [Expos Book] by Jonah Keri. The subtitle is far too long to put here, so I paraphrased it. It's a book about the Montreal Expos, and it looks pretty cool.

Another baseball book that caught my attention came out in 2014 was titled 1954, and like the Expos book, had a long subtitle. Written by Bill Madden, a baseball writer from New York that I remember fondly, it's about, namely, 1954 and how that was the first year both world series teams had black players and the the social changes that happened the same year (Brown vs. Board of Ed.). It looks good.

Baseball books aside, it was on Amazon's page for A Brief History... that I saw, down on the bottom where they have suggestions about "Customers who bought this also bought...", a familiar name: Bone Clocks by David Mitchell.

Mitchell, Dan if you don't know, wrote the nested egg "novel" Cloud Atlas, which I'm guessing was better than the movie (which I missed). Dad turned me onto it a decade or more ago. Bone Clocks follows a similar structure it sounds like, but with more connection between the sections.

Next to Bone Clocks was The Laughing Monsters, about shady business folks and shady African deals and shady weddings and nationalities---but was written by Denis Johnson, he of Tree of Smoke and Jesus' Son fame. Denis Johnson and David Mitchell both had books published in 2014. What the hell was I doing that I missed these?

THEN I saw another familiar name: The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a novel about POWs during WWII carving a road out of the Indonesian jungle written by Richard Flanagan and published in 2014.

So, along with Murakami's Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki..., Richard Flanagan and Denis Johnson and David Mitchell all published books last year, 2014.

Narrow Road... is being highly touted by the reviews on Amazon... Have you gotten to it yet, dad? I'll ask when I call sometime soon, seeing as how blog posts make for strange communiques. So far, besides Gould's... I've read Wanting and The Unknown Terrorist. Both aren't bad, but I would never had read them had I found them at a non-dollar bookstore AND hadn't read Gould's Book of Fish. Those two I don't really even recommend to people, whereas I've bought multiple copies of Gould's... as gifts for people.

Another book listed on that bottom scroll was Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel. It was familiar to me because of a list put together by the fine folks at Powell's Bookstore. Powell's is the Portland institution that we visited on our Oregonian sojourn, and I was reading up on their website about good books in 2014 and Station Eleven was listed. It tales place in some weird post-apocalyptic world where acting troupes roam wild...or something.

It kinda reminds me of something I'm reading now, Brittle Star by Rod Val Moore. It's published by a small press of LA writers, and Moore's been described on some websites as a "writer's writer". I guess that means his general audience is writers? It sure sounds like that's the case as I read.

Brittle Star is about prisoners that have been exiled on a distant planet where they are to remain for one year. These aren't hardened criminals, mind you, they are all former humanities professors. They are instructed to choose between two different colored uniforms upon arrival: one color is celery, the other, something called "celedon", which Corrie assures me is an actual thing. It's rare that I come across an English word that I've never seen while people like Corrie and other folks in the design industry use with regularity.

Anyway, celery and celedon are basically the exact same shit, and in the first 40 pages, picking the uniforms is about as exciting as it gets. I joke, and dad, you'd probably like it, but you'd also get what I'm saying. It's moody and well written, and, for better or for worse, is like the back says (incidentally the tidbit that convinced me to go with this book over another unknown quantity): Sartre meets television's "The Prisoner"; and A Brave New World as reinvented by Italo Calvino.

Now, I don't even know what the hell that last part is talking about, but I know I like Aldous, and my interest was piqued. Now I just need to look up Italo Calvino...