When Lonesome Doves Cry

My personal soundtrack to "Lonesome Dove"

Last Wednesday I finished "Lonesome Dove," which I haven't been able to write about because all of my free time has been devoted to lessening the nine-book lead Kerry suddenly holds. But after she left several voice messages and texts that I can only describe as "abusive," I decided to finally put finger to keyboard and sum up the experience.

First of all, Larry McMurtry pretty much pulls off a master class in storytelling. The first 400 pages* he causally envelops you into the tale, introducing you to a disparate group of characters he draws with broad but precise strokes. Then he spends the next 500** pages walloping you with emotional suckerpunch after suckerpunch. It's a cliché, but you do fall in love with the characters.*** I found myself bartering with a higher power over the fates of my favorites, promising to clean my apartment/volunteer/donate to the Gulf if only they survived the Indian attack/found true love/admitted their paternity. I was worn out by the end, and can now understand the need for forgettable fiction where you aren't invested in the character's lives.

For me, one of the great joys in reading a book set before 1900 is trying to figure out when I would have died in that time period. I have a delicate immune system and no discernible manual skills, so I'd be pretty easy pickin' for all predators, human and viral. And McMurtry proves time and time again that I don't have the mettle to last long in the open West. Would I have gotten crushed in a cattle stampede? Besieged by water snakes during a river crossing? Casually shot down by horse thieves? The answer is probably a combination of all three. I found myself emphasizing with Roscoe Brown, the hapless deputy who sets out to find his sheriff only to be continually told by everyone he meets that he should turn around and find work as a clerk. I don't want to ruin anything by telling what happens to him, but I am grateful to live in a time with Mapquest and GPS.

*400? I know what you're saying, but trust me, you get lulled into the gentle rhythm and they go by fast.

**500?!? But it's a fast 500.

***Except for Ellie.

Every Last One, Anna Quindlen

Yup. I read a sad book. A terribly, horribly, intensely sad book. So far, the world continues to turn on its axis, but my eyes may forever be tinged red.

It's Anna Quindlen, so of course I knew she'd have some nice woman go through torturous grief, something that was both unbelievably unrealistic yet utterly possible at the same time. Quindlen's writing always brings the reader right in, so far in that you're shouting, "No! Stay away from him!" or "Slow down! Slow down! The roads are terrible!", even though it's the middle of the night and the kids and your husband are sound asleep and your screams (or sobs) will scare them. My mother warned me when I borrowed this book from her. "Are you sure about this?" she said, and I assured her that I could handle it.

By the third page, I began to have my doubts. Happy family (like me). Three kids (like me). Daughter the oldest (check). Twin boys (ditto). I started my internal chant, "Please, don't do anything to the kids."

Reading "Every Last One" is like opening a Jack-in-the-Box. Duh nah duh nah duh na-na-na-nah. OK, that chapter done, no one hurt yet. Duh nah duh nah duh na-nah. Potential dark things lurking, but everyone still fine. Duh nah duh nah duh na-na-na-nah. POP! Page 154 jumps out at you.

154 pages of waiting...for the monster under the bed, the creaking door, the shower curtain being pulled abruptly away. Oh Anna, you didn't. Oh Anna, you did.

Quindlen, as always, is a masterful storyteller with such strong writing that I was pulled along into the plot, feeling pain and relief for the characters as they struggled with their tragedy. I just hope that her next novel doesn't strike so close to home (hers, yours, or mine).

Chick-lit Gets Serious: Infidelity

I should have campaigned more strongly for a separate category for typical chick-lit authors who occasionally tread in more somber waters. Our official rules require me to balance a light and fluffy book with something more serious, but what about when a Cool Whip book suddenly turns serious? When I'm shuddering, not laughing? When bad things happen to children? What is this genre coming to?

I love to loathe Jennifer Weiner. I didn't mind her first books so much, but at some point she just plain began to bother me. I can't be the first person to think it just wrong that Weiner is shelved right next to Elie Wiesel. But, anyway, she just published "Fly Away Home" and I, lemming that I am, bought it. (In Target. I apologize to all the small, independent booksellers in my area). For some reason, Weiner decided the world had not yet tired of real political sex scandals and thought we'd might like to read a fictional account of one. Yet, she drops names like Eliot Spitzer and Mark Sanford into the plot (are we really going to remember these details of hookers and hikes in 2020?). For me, Weiner committed an unpardonable sin by killing off a child 2/3 of the way into the chick-lit story. Granted, said child was not a main character and was just a blip in the storyline-- but then why did you need it, Jennifer, why??? You let little Joy survive and thrive in those Cannie Shapiro books. As my son would say, "I'm mad at you."

Emily Giffin appears to be trying to leap from chick-lit fame to (slightly) more serious fiction with "Heart of the Matter". The arrogance of some of the central characters kept me from settling into the book. I wanted repercussions, consequences, and punishment for the blatant infidelity (come on, isn't someone going to report this to the Board of Ethics??). I wanted to support the single mom, but she kept insisting on making ridiculous decisions (hey, how about being there for your son instead of texting away to his doctor?). I simply wanted everyone to be on better behavior. If Valerie had just followed her gut and not allowed her six-year-old son to go to a sleepover birthday party at the house of adults she didn't know, none of this would have happened. Cowboy up, Val; it's time to start pointing the finger of blame at yourself.

Sigh. Why can't authors write the plots I want them to follow? I want my chick-lit to be light, sweet and airy, a nice literary dessert.

(I wonder how much longer I can avoid "The French Lieutenant's Woman"? Didn't I read it in college or something?)

Then We Came to the End, Joshua Ferris

Sometimes it's good to live under a rock.

"Then We Came to the End" was published when my twin sons were eight weeks only. I didn't read much of anything in 2007. I missed any buzz about Joshua Ferris, which allowed me to see this book at my parents' house this summer and think, "Ooh, cool yellow book with bubble writing on the cover". The National Book Award emblem legitimized it as a worthy balance to my summer reading to date.

Every once in a while, one of my reading quirks pay off. Take my need to finish any book that I start. Sure, there are plenty of books that I plugged through, sighing happily when I finished the final page. But then there are books that start to pick up for me 100, 200, even 300 pages in, and those final pages make up for the laborious first.

So it is for "Then We Came to the End". Based on the cover blurbs alone hyping the humor, I expected this to be a funny, you're-going-to-laugh-out-loud book. I had read one review likening it to "The Office", so I had Michael, Dwight, Jim and Pam in mind. I had expectations of greatness, given the literary accolades. After a few pages, I got into the quirky rhythm of the narrator. 50 pages later, I was wondering when the action would happen. I'll admit, I read while I also reminisced about life before the dot.com bubble burst, my fun work friends from then, my work colleagues who provided the material for our banter, and that whole life-before-kids time. Suddenly, I was on page 197.

I must need a traditional story at some point to reel me in, and Lynn is the character that brought me back (even after the narrator regained control). Her struggle of maintaining her professional standing in the office, keeping her company afloat, and dealing with personal battles all injected a dose of reality. While it took several nights to plod through the first half, I flew through the final half (pausing only once to google the whereabouts of a former colleague who is most likely to play the role of Tom in this book).

PS to Brendan: Ferris' follow up book, "The Unnamed", looks to be one that should go on my books-that-Kerry-can-never-read shelf on Goodreads.

Kerry's Cringe-worthy Summer Reading Program Confession

Confession time has come, as per official rule #9.

No, it's not the time when I crawled under booths at the Hanover Mall's Friendly's Restaurant to greet my favorite librarian. I was four or five, and it was not summer, and that was probably more endearing than crippling (not counting the waitstaff and other customers that I bumped into).

It's also not the fact that, as an elementary school student, I regularly participated in two summer reading programs, at the local Duxbury Free Library and our other family favorite, the Tufts Library in Weymouth. That I did not allow myself to "double dip" books (marking them as read on both library's logs) is more obsessive than embarrassing.

It's not even that time four years ago when my then 4 1/2 year old daughter refused point blank to sign up for the summer reading program and I signed her up and did all the recording for the summer simply because it's what I wanted to do.

No, to truly experience my monumental summer reading program fail you have to go back to the Summer of 1982 when I was 9 1/2 years old and entering fifth grade. The theme had to do with pirates and seeking treasure. Each participant wrote his/her name on a brown paper ship that hung all summer long in the children's library. Every time you brought your reading log to the librarian, she would count the number of books you had read since the last visit and staple the corresponding number of gold paper coins to your ship.

As luck (!) would have it, my ship hung smack dab in the middle above an aisle of books. As the summer continued, I realized that adults had to duck under my cascade of coins to enter the stacks. My luck continued, as there were several mustard yellow foam cushions at the end of each aisle, including "mine". By the end of July, my favorite thing to do in the library was to sit on those foam loungers and "read" (aka, wait for adults) and listen in to what adults said when they'd pass under the S.S. Kerry. "Wow, look at all the coins", "That kid must love reading", "What a lot of books!". By early August, I had visions of having such a long trail of coins that even kids would have to duck. I was in gold coin ecstasy. I was ridiculous.

Fortunately, no one (parent or child) took me behind the library to give me the trimming down that I deserved. I never witnessed anyone grabbing streamers of coins off my ship, but I am certain (and even, in retrospect, hope) that it happened. While I have the utmost respect for children's librarians, and especially those who worked then at the DFL, I suspect (and, again, hope) that when they realized my sinister plot, they failed to credit my ship with the correct number of coins.

Instead of being forced to walk the literary plank, the 1982 reading program ended, peacefully, with the customary ice cream party. By the start of school, the children's room was stripped of pirate ships and coins...and I returned to being a regular reader at the library once again.

With "Franny and Zooey," Brendan achieves a pitiful Two

The song that played on my life soundtrack as I finished my second book

As my sister continued her Herculean effort to read every hastily written book about a zany-gal-who-just-can't-figure-it-out-but-nonetheless-wears-expensive-shoes, I strategized and selected a bunch of slim books to burn through while “Lonesome Dove” lumbered on. Various works by Sandra Cisneros, Woody Allen, and Daniel Woodrell begged to help staunch Kerry's onslaught. But Larry McMurtry pulled a fast one on me and all of the sudden “Lonesome Dove” became unputdownable. Gunfights, grueling journeys, abductions, revenge, finding inner reservoirs of strength – what more could I ask from a summertime read? At the same time the supposedly “fast” read I had chosen, “Franny and Zooey,” seemed plodding and dense. Why would I want to untangle Zooey’s theories on theology when I HAD to find out whether July Johnson was ever going to realize Ellie* was just no good for him?

But I chipped away at “F&Z” and finally finished it last night. At times it seemed like I was reading a play - all of the characters speak in long soliloquies where they espouse their different points of view and not an awful lot “happens.” Maybe I felt this way because Zooey, with his world-weary misanthropy at age twenty-five, wouldn’t seem out of place in a Neil LaBute or David Mamet production. And I also had the disconcerting experience of playing “spot the reference” where books and movies I had enjoyed in the past were overshadowed by the debt they owed to Salinger (“The Royal Tenenbaums” took a severe hit on this front, what with its family of geniuses, suicidal brother, and significant use of bathroom smoking). But in the end, I was glad I read it, and it only strengthened my hope that J.D. Salinger (as well as Harper Lee) has a vault full of completed manuscripts that will all be published as soon as the legal paperwork has been completed by his estate.

*Oh, man, I know she’s had a tough life and not a lot of opportunities, but I really hate Ellie.

The Lure of the Bargain Book: Maneater, Gigi Levangie Grazer

I am a sucker for the bargain bookstore (as is my credit card). My first job in Boston was located across the street from a Buck-a-Book store, and I hauled many a heavy bag laden with books all the way to my apartment behind the last stop on the B Line. I was a charter member of the PaperBackSwap, until I wearied of receiving smoke infused paperbacks that had taken a spill in the tub. Building 19 is great for children's picture books. I've browsed through most of the bargain bins in my area, but had never looked in the book aisle at Ocean State Job Lot...until now.


Since most of my pop culture references are pre-1990, when I read the title, "Maneater", my brain immediately backtracked to Daryl Hall and John Oates. (I recorded it off the radio onto a mixed tape. It probably took me a whole afternoon of circling the dial to finally hear it. Now, I could find and download the song in about 3.2 seconds). The author, Gigi Levangie Grazer, rang no bells. I almost kept walking, but then spied the $1.99 price tag. The cashier exclaimed that it was "freakin' funny", all her friends liked it, and "like the only book she, like, ever read that, like, the teacher didn't make her"...and asked if I had seen the movie?


So then I learn that this book, known (apparently) to all 18-year-old girls in the greater Kingston, MA area, was made recently into a Lifetime movie starring Roseanne's Second Becky (ok, Sarah Chalke from Scrubs, but she'll always be the replacement to me). A bargain book that was made into a straight-to-DVD movie, loved by teen girls? Aren't these all signs telling me that this will be the worst chick-lit book ever??

Never one to run from a challenge, I bought the book and read it. Guess what? I smirked a few times and laughed out loud once. The hours that I was awake that night waiting for my kids to settle down and fall asleep just flew by (or perhaps the absence of a working clock kept me ignorant). I am neither a better nor a worse person for having read "Maneater". I am, however, up a book in the log. As an apology for such an easy read, I ordered the movie from Netflix and will lose at least two nights of reading time in order to watch all 172 minutes (falling asleep while viewing it and waking up hours later will also suffice).

(Is anyone else wondering if Brendan's latest strategy involves stockpiling read books in an attempt to race ahead in the final day of our countdown?)