The Booksluts Discuss: Zazen by Vanessa Veselka

Book: Zazen

Author: Vanessa Veselka

Published: May 31, 2011 by Red Lemonade; 256 pages

Date Read: February 6, 2012

First Lines: ”I went to work and a guy I wait on said he was leaving. He said everyone he knew was pulling out.”

Genre: Literary fiction

Amy’s rating: 5/5  Buzz Lightyears lashed to miniature graveside crosses

Susie’s rating: 5/5 candy-colored rat phones

Warning: Extreme gushing about how much we loved this book ahead. Amy and I were both fairly bowled over by Ms. Veselka’s debut novel. Also, I was having a sad because I had to trim down our conversation about Zazen, because we had many things to say about it and it’s super fun talking to Amy about books. So, I’ve decided to post an extended version(!) of our conversation here, just in case some of you would like to see more about what we had to say. Everything that is down below is also on the extended post, so you don’t have to read both if you don’t want to!

Vanessa Veselka describes herself as having been, at various times, a teenage runaway, a sex-worker, a union organizer, a student of paleontology, an expatriate, an independent record label owner, a train-hopper, a waitress, and a mother–is it any wonder that she is also a writer? She fills Zazen to the brim with life and it bubbles over in streams of achingly beautiful language. Zazen tells the story of Della, a geologist/waitress who wants to get away from everything. She hears bombs in her head and can’t escape the monuments to shiny plastic capitalism that keep going up where she lives. When she hooks up with a girl named Jimmy who is leaving the country, Della buys a ticket, too. But she doesn’t go–instead, she starts calling in bomb threats, mentally attacking the places that threaten her neighborhood. She finds herself in deeper than she ever imagined when the real bombs start going off in places she’s called.

Amy: We both loved, loved, loved it! Best book I’ve read so far this year, by far.
Susie: I’m also so glad that we read it. I was enchanted (as much as you can be enchanted by a book that is about terrorism and war and hippies).
Amy: Almost every line was a poem in itself. I’m going to try to find the one, early on, that hooked me.
Susie: I loved her use of imagery. During the “anniversary” scene she talked about Della’s mother in terms of a tsunami–ocean imagery is dicey because it can be so overdone, but hers was perfect.

“Grace rose from the table like a tsunami. With her breath she washed away the debris of the past until we were all floating in her massive sorrow and buoyed by her absolute conviction in life, vibrant and wild on the shores, she carried us forward and that’s how we landed, all of us on this strange beach.” –Zazen

Amy: Bah, I can’t find the specific line, annoying. One I did find: “I had been kissing the hems of ghosts.” *swoon* Gorgeous.
Amy: Her use of language and imagery is masterful. The recurring themes of the self-immolators, the pregnant rat, her sister, the ocean… so many common (and often ugly) things, but made beautiful with her language around them.
Susie: I identified a lot with this book because it is about how ugly things have gotten–and it is frustrating. It’s compelling to follow someone who is acting on her frustration. Veselka said in an interview that she was trying to capture a culture, I think in this case the revolutionary/neo-hippie culture, but also contrasted against our mainstream consumerism.

 ”… what is this book? Hmm … another Buddhist geological thriller? A secular spiritual epic? You know, just the other day in a radio interview I actually failed to describe my own book. It was a low point. … One day I was listening to an English professor talk about encyclopedic fiction. He defined it as a work that attempts to encapsulate an entire culture. I immediately realized that’s what I was trying to do.” — Vanessa Veselka in an interview with Literary Kicks

Amy: That’s interesting. It did make me think of that – what the 60s protesters would be, were they around now. How they would use modern technology to their advantage, what they would protest against, how they would go about getting their point across.
Amy: It’s a frightening book, because it’s just vague enough that it could very much happen, and any day now, you know? No details for us to grab onto to say, “Oh, well, that couldn’t happen because THAT person wasn’t president,” etc. She purposely left everything vague so it could be us, in an indeterminate future. Chilling.

Susie: I loved the subtlety of her writing. Her humor was subtle–and she treated sex subtly, which I appreciated. She also doesn’t beat you over the head with anything; she doesn’t tell you what she’s getting at.
Amy:  The book didn’t hand you anything – it let you make up your own mind. I liked that. It treated me like an adult reader.
Susie: Something else I love–you can tell that she’s actually lived what she’s writing about. It’s not just some airy construct in her brain.
Amy: YES! I was so happy to see her list of jobs, and that she was writing from a place of knowledge with them.
Amy: Did I miss the story behind the title? Or was there not one?
Susie: Sitting zazen is a Buddhist thing. It’s basically sitting meditation.
Amy: Oh! I didn’t know that, I’d never heard the word before! I thought of it more as a nonsense word – in my mind, it was the sound of bombs flying overhead. Which almost works too, even if it isn’t what she was going for.
Susie: It does kind of sound like that, I hadn’t thought about it. I used to have a Buddhist roomie so I know a smattering of things about Buddhism. (Well, he was supposedly Buddhist–I think he told himself that to make him feel better about being a dick, but that’s another story.)
Amy: This is probably a bad book for a lengthy discussion because I have all the love for it.
Susie: I hope she writes more books and that they’re just as good as Zazen was. Totally would recommend it to anybody, and in fact I’m going to try to make my husband read it, ha.

Veselka and Zazen get two thumbs up from us. Each. So I guess that’s a total of four thumbs. So, you should probably read it, because that’s a lot of thumbs. As an added bonus, it’s available to read, for free, in its entirety, on the publisher’s website. Of course, this means reading on a screen, which kind of sucks, but it is free. (I have no doubt that the book will be winging its way to people soon, even if they start off reading it for free on the site. It’s just that good.)

Review: Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

Book: Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

Author: Ransom Riggs

Published: June 2011 by Quirk Books, 348 pages

Date Read: January 2012

First Line: ”I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen.”

Genre/Rating: Fantasy/mystery; 3/5 blue balls of flame floating over a broken-hearted girl’s hand

Review: This book was being discussed everywhere I turned, so it was high on my to-be-read list. I like quirk! I like photography! I like fantasy/mystery!

I wasn’t in love with this book.

Don’t get me wrong–I didn’t hate it, and wouldn’t tell anyone not to read it–but it didn’t blow me away.

The plot: sixteen-year-old Jacob travels to Wales with his father to fulfill his recently-departed grandfather’s dying wish: to investigate his claim that he lived in a magical orphanage as a child. Jacob was the sole witness to his grandfather Abe’s demise, and has since been haunted by what he thinks he saw that night; he thinks that he will receive some closure by making the trip. What he finds there–and what he discovers about both himself and his grandfather–is not what he imagined he would.

The book is illustrated with a number of “found” photos–one of which is on the cover, above, the “levitating” girl–which the author purports are all truly found photographs. The photos are the best part of the book. They’re serious and creepy and perfect eye-candy, very old-timey sideshow. I highly approve of the photos and the overall art direction of the book.

The story itself–it’s slight. I finished the book in a day. You don’t have to think about it too seriously. It doesn’t give you much to ponder. It’s not bad–I didn’t leave disgusted–just unfulfilled. Still hungry. It could have been more, and I was sad it wasn’t.

The characters seem two-dimensional; you don’t know much about their motivation. The book did set itself up for a sequel (or possibly a series), and I’m not sure if the unfinished air of the whole thing is because the author is keeping it all for the next book(s), or he just relied too heavily on the photographs and didn’t have enough story to carry him through.

I loved the character of Emma, and wanted to know more about her. Again, I’m not sure if the author’s saving that for subsequent book(s), or just didn’t think her character through thoroughly enough. Her correspondence with Abe was, to me, the pinnacle of the book. Unfortunately, it was not meant to be the pinnacle of the book, and there was a lot of book left to go.

The other children in the orphanage needed more backstory and more story-story, altogether. They were cardboard cutouts with a lot of unfulfilled potential.

I have to wonder at all the excellent reviews of the book I’m reading online, the reviews that led me to seek out the book so avidly, to be on a waiting list to read it for the past five months or so at the library. Am I the only one who thought the story took a backseat to the photos (which were, and I happily admit, awesome?) Or were people just so blown away by the art direction of the book they overlooked the story? And, if so, what does that say about the state of literature in the world today? Or is it that we’re just so eager for the next big thing–the next Harry Potter or Hunger Games–that we’re willing to overlook that this book was just–meh?

Tim Burton, purportedly, is interested in the movie version of the book. This I can get behind. Burton would work wonders with the magic in this story. It does have a very Big Fish feel about it, which Burton just made gorgeous, didn’t he? Because there’s magic there in the book, dying to get out, and Riggs just wasn’t skilled enough to extricate it. Burton, however, has the touch needed to make the children’s home a truly magic place. I can’t wait to see, if this deal comes to fruition, what his imagination would bring to the table.

Review: Reamde by Neal Stephenson

Book: Reamde

Author: Neal Stephenson

Published: September 2011 by Harper Collins, 1,056 pages

Date Read: December-January 2012

First Lines: ”Richard kept his head down. Not all those cow pies were frozen, and the ones that were could turn an ankle.”

Genre/Rating: Techno-thriller; 3.5/5 fierce Chinese girls wearing big blue boots

Review: This is the book that almost stopped my reading at a standstill.

Yes, you’re reading that timeline above correctly – it took me a month and a half to read this book.

It wasn’t an unbroken month and a half – I read a few other books over that period, mostly because the book was due back at the library before I could finish it, so I had to return it, re-reserve it, and wait to get it back to continue reading – but I don’t think I’ve ever taken this long to read anything in my life.

The plot: Millionaire Richard “Dodge” Forthrast, co-founder of T’Rain, an MMORPG (which I know little about, but it seemed similar to World of Warcraft), hires his niece, Zula, to work for his company. Through her boyfriend, who has gotten mixed up with the Russian mafia, Zula finds herself a pawn in an international plot to find and eliminate a computer hacker who is accidentally holding some important information hostage. (The name of the computer virus is “Reamde” – a misspelling of the common file “Readme,” as the hacker is Chinese and has poor command of the English language.) Throw in some Muslim terrorists, a Chinese woman with big blue boots, a taciturn Russian “security consultant” (ok, he was really more of a hitman, but I’m being nice), British and American spies, a heavily-armed anti-government Christian compound, and a Hungarian security consultant (actual security consultant this time) who falls in love, and you have a LOT of characters to keep track of, a LOT of plot, and a LOT of reading to do.

I liked the book. There were two major problems I had, but I would recommend it. (I also think that possibly someone who was a little more interested in MMORPGs and online gaming and computer culture, and/or fans of Stephenson’s earlier work – I haven’t read any of his other books – might get more out of it than I did.)

The good: Since it was so long, you had time to get to know the characters. You found yourself rooting for certain characters, and when they’d pop up again after being missing for hundreds of pages (yes, that happened, a number of times) it was like greeting an old friend. My favorites: Csongor (the Hungarian security consultant), Yuxia (the Chinese woman with the boots – she was absolutely adorable, I just fell in love with her and her spunkiness) and – SIGH and SWOON – Sokolov, the Russian “security consultant,” who I just adored. There needed to be more Sokolov. Give me a quiet man who gets the job done, knows how to protect himself and the people he cares about, and lives by a strict moral code, and I’m a puddle on the floor.

There was some romance and humor – not a lot, but enough to keep things interesting.

The bad: Editing. (And listen, I know about not being able to edit, I’m horrible at it, as anyone who reads my blog can attest, but this was insane.) Stephenson could have gotten across everything he did and had it be 3/4 again as long as it was. The writing style also took some getting used to – Stephenson is a dense-chunk-of-writing style of writer, and you really, really can’t skim this book. That’s why it took me so long. I’m a speed reader, and I couldn’t speed-read this. You had to pay attention. To everything. It was an information dump of text.

Second: without giving away too much, a good 7/8 of the book is Zula being held captive by various groups of people, and other various groups of people attempting to rescue her. She never played the victim and she never got annoying, and I thank Stephenson for that. But she also never showed any traits that, in my mind, would engender such passionate loyalty toward her from the characters. I understand, obviously, the lengths to which her family members were willing to go to obtain her safe return. But there were six other people, not related to her, who she’d barely had interactions with, all risking their lives to save her, and I found it very head-scratching, especially considering everything else was spelled out, in EXCRUCIATING detail, in the book. I also didn’t understand why, other than the book would obviously end if she did, all these various factions continued to cart her around places and didn’t just kill her. She didn’t seem to serve them any purpose. At some point, Zula became a plot point rather than a character.

I’m very stubborn. There are plenty of times I wanted to say, “You know what, Mr. Stephenson? There are a ton of other books I could be reading right now, good sir. This is TOO MUCH FOR ME.” But once I start a book, and invest a lot of time and energy into it, I don’t like to put it down. I like to finish things to the bitter, bitter end. I’m a bit of a rat terrier in my single-mindedness about seeing what happens. And I’m glad I did. I did enjoy it. It just sucked all of my reading energy out of me for a very… very… long… time.

The Booksluts Discuss: The Cry of the Sloth by Sam Savage

Book: The Cry of the Sloth

Author: Sam Savage

Published: September 1, 2009 by Coffee House Press; 224 pages

First Lines: ”Dear Mr. Fontini,

This is for the record. The sheetrocker has submitted his bill for replacing the ceiling in the kitchen. This was, as you are surely aware, a rather large piece of ceiling, more ceiling, in fact, than many people are unfortunate enough to have in their living rooms.”

Genre: Literary fiction

Susie’s rating: 4.5/5 cold cuts chucked at a poetry reading

Rob’s rating: I have no idea, she didn’t send it. Best guess is between 2-3/5.

The Cry of the Sloth is a book that we chose to read because we were intrigued by Coffee House Press, one of the indie publishers that we’ve featured in our Know Your Publisher series. The book, told in a series of missives by the protagonist interspersed with a narrative that he writes when not writing letters, follows the story of Andrew Whittaker, editor-in-chief (and founder, and sole employee) of Soap, a literary magazine based in Rapid Falls. To make ends meet during the tough economic climate of the Nixon era, Andrew struggles to write his own creative fiction (poorly), manage several rental properties in which he has invested (even more poorly), and bolster his magazine with a grand literary Event, which will include, he promises, elephants and a remarkable keynote speaker (except that his old friends, who went on to become real writers, turned him down flat–presumably, Norman Mailer never replied).

Andrew’s life has begun to fall completely apart. In one of the first letters of the book, Andrew explains to his estranged wife that he doesn’t have money to send to her because the rental properties are falling to pieces–why, he says, just last week, Mrs. Crumb tried to open a window and it fell out of the house and onto the street. The personal letters are engorged with Andrew’s haughty, rambling, seemingly unfiltered thoughts, which become more frantic, more desperate, and more unhinged as you read the book. Included also are a number of rejection letters he sends to writers who submit to Soap, letters written to local publications by “concerned citizens” defending his increasingly erratic behavior about town, rental ads for his various properties, and shopping lists, in addition to the text of his novel. All of these bits and pieces provide a fascinating dual view of his perception of his life and the unexpressed, yet clearly completely different, perception of the recipients of the letters.

Rob and I had differing opinions about this book–hardly surprising, given her dislike of, and my love for, the book Catcher in the Rye, of which we were both reminded while reading. We had a discussion about the book to share with you, much like the one we did about The English Patient–but shorter, much shorter, I promise.

Susie: well… (grins) I could tell exactly why you didn’t like it, but I thought I’d let you put it in your own words.
Rob: I didn’t marginalia it much. I wonder why? Probably it was just too boring and irritating to bother.
Rob: Oh, I know exactly why I didn’t like it.
Rob: Andrew Whittaker sounds like Holden Caulfield–all grown up, but still whining, and pissing, and moaning about his life. It was Catcher in the Rye Part 2 for me.
Susie: I thought it was hilarious. I laughed out loud when he wrote in a letter about how that guy wrote like Hemingway would have written, had Hemingway never gone to high school.
Rob: it made me laugh a few times, early on, but midway through that stopped. I just wanted to get it done.
Susie: Andrew’s writing is dreadful.. which made me appreciate Sam Savage, it must be damn difficult to be a purposely bad writer in a way that isn’t actually making the book terrible.
Rob: lol–yeah, he pulled that off pretty well. And while I can appreciate it, and while some of it was funny, the overall book gave me bad flashbacks. Heh.
Rob: There was one very good line though, on pg 55. He’s talking to Miss Moss, and he says, “As for God, I am not simply agnostic–I am indifferent…” I think that’s Savage peeking through there, it was too poetic and subtle for Andrew.
Rob: His letters to anyone official were funny. It reminded me of that blog you showed me, the guy who posts his emails…
Susie: ha, yeah–you mean the guy who tried to trade a spider for his utility bill? [This is David Thorne, I had forgotten his name. His site is hilarious.]
Susie: I thought Savage unwound Andy rather skillfully–and I liked the fact that we only saw it through his letters, because we had to reconstruct mentally what had really happened, like at the picnic when he was throwing cold cuts. He presented himself as being quite reasonable–even noble–when describing how he was chucking lunch meat at people at a picnic.
Susie: Then it suddenly strikes you how it looked to other people and it’s hilarious.
Rob: it’s an old 19th century writing device. It’s how Withering Hell [our book club's affectionate name for Wuthering Heights] is written–except everyone in that book is nuts so you felt like you were reading letters from the inmates of an insane asylum.
Rob: The Woman in White is written that way too, and Dracula. It’s not an easy way to write, and Savage did do a good job with it. For me, it wasn’t the writing itself that I had a problem with, it was the fact that I didn’t like Whittaker. I’m not one who must love all the characters, but when you’re getting it only from that one character, and you don’t like him at all… well, it starts to die on you.
Susie: Yeah. He wasn’t a very likable character at all. I thought of him more as an Ignatius J. Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces.
Rob: Ah. I never read that.
Susie: I’m taking a stab in the dark that you wouldn’t like it very much.

So, friends, we are of two minds. I would venture to say that fans of Catcher in the Rye and/or A Confederacy of Dunces would dig this book, a lot; people who found the main characters of those books so obnoxiously clueless that they wanted to stab themselves in the eyes to make it stop, like Rob did, might not like this book as well. Accept or reject this recommendation accordingly! Overall, though, we did agree that the book was well-written. His first novel, Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife, also got excellent reviews, and might be worth checking out. I plan to read it, for sure.

Review, IB Favorites Edition: Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood

Book: Cat’s Eye

Author: Margaret Atwood

Published: 1988 by McClelland and Stewart, 420 pages

Date Read: Originally, 1993 (with repeated readings afterward)

First Lines: ”Time is not a line, but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space, you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light, you could travel backward in time and exist in two places at once.”

Genre/Rating: Literary fiction; 5/5 little lost girls sinking under the ice

Bookslut who hearts this book: Amy

Review: There are very few books that completely understand what little girls can do to one another’s psyches. There are plenty of books that try, and there are plenty of books that come close. Cat’s Eye not only nails it, it brings you back there; it throws you right into the action. You live among the girls. You become one of the girls. You bleed and cry and scream with the girls. You long to escape, and yet you long to stay, with each page you turn.

I learned about Atwood my freshman year of college, not as a novelist, but a poet. I fell in love with her after reading this poem, which remains, even after almost a lifetime of studying poetry, one of the most beautiful and unexpected and true poems I’ve ever encountered (and one of the first poems that taught me brevity can be perfection):

You Fit Into Me

You fit into me
like a hook into an eye

a fish hook
an open eye

The summer after my freshman year, bored, constricted after a year of freedom to be back under my parents’ rule, I raided the library and brought home everything I could think of. Although most people know Atwood more for The Handmaid’s Tale – and yes, I love that book as well, as I do everything she writes, I actually did a graduate finale project on The Handmaid’s Tale, so I of course don’t mean to slight it – one of the books I brought home that summer was Cat’s Eye. I spent two solid days glued to the book. I remember audibly saying “YES.” I remember saying “NO.” I remember a wordless, pained exclamation near the end. It was a book about my childhood. It was like Atwood had been watching me, and knew what I’d lived, and understood, and wrote it for me.

Cat’s Eye centers around Elaine, who we see mature from a young girl in World War II-era Canada to a middle-aged woman in the 80s. Elaine’s life has been colored – in some places, scribbled upon, obliterated, wrecked – by her friend Cordelia. When this book was written, we didn’t have the terms “mean girls ” or “frenemies.” Not yet. Atwood pre-dated these terms, and understood them more innately. Cordelia is these things, and yet she’s more. She molds young Elaine into what she wants her to be, then systematically breaks her down, just to build her back up. The book is structured in flashbacks, with adult Elaine, a well-respected artist, one whose life has been forever tinted (pun most definitely intended) by her formative years spent under Cordelia’s cruel wing, remembering Cordelia, from youth to college-age, and how their lives become almost fatally and co-dependently intertwined.

You also get to know the other figures in Elaine’s life: her scientist father; her mother, stronger than she seems at first glance; her brilliant, scattered brother; the other girls in Cordelia’s orbit; and the adults who attempt to save Elaine from Cordelia’s iron grip, all of whom play a larger role in Elaine’s life than she realizes at the time.

Cat’s Eye is a painful read, but a joyous, triumphant one, as well. You bleed for Elaine, especially if you’ve either been through the torture of the million small bloody cruelties girls are capable of, or love someone who has. But there are small triumphs, along the way, that give you hope. And there is beauty. And so much poetry. One of the things that I love about Atwood’s work is that each of her novels reads, to me, like a book-length poem. She can’t keep poetry out of her work. I like to imagine if you met her in person, poetry would float around her in an aura.

It’s a beautiful book, and a painful one, and, most importantly, a true one. It will fit into you like Atwood’s hook into an eye.