Divisidero. I read this for my new book club, and I had very mixed feelings. On the one hand I think his writing is beautiful, and I liked the two stories fine. I think I understood what he was doing with the divided stories, but I was less certain that he’d pulled it off — in the end I just didn’t feel that they’d meshed very well.

I also had a lot of nitpicky complaints about the first half of the novel, which is set in a time and place with which I am pretty familiar. The ice storm in Petaluma felt wrong to me; I know it was supposed to be a “freak” storm, but seriously, he might as well have thrown in a rain of frogs. Claire was far too young to have had polio as a child. Nobody would stop for lunch in Carmichael. And I really wish there had been no mention of a California public defender’s office, or defense investigators, because the total unreality of those elements really took me out of the story.

Those little nitpicks made it hard for me to be fair to the novel as a whole. I found myself distrusting the part of the novel that is set in France, and feeling that it was overly romanticized and possibly anachronistic, when really I just wanted to let go and enjoy the damn book. I’m not sure how much of that was Ondaatje’s fault and how much was mine, but either way I was a bit disappointed.

I do want to read The English Patient now; the only Ondaatje I’ve read before this was a book of poetry and that short novella about the jazz musician.

So I took a break from this site, and then I went and had a baby, and in very short order I became very tired of board books and old women whispering “hush.” So I’m going to try this again, but with no attempt to keep track of every single thing I read. We’ll see what happens.

And comments are unbroken, for whatever that’s worth.

Jeremy intentionally broke the comments on this site because the comment spam was killing the server. We have a couple of different spam catchers installed, but that doesn’t lessen the load on the server from the spammers trying to get through. I don’t know how long this will last but for now, no comments. Sorry.

(It’s not like I was saying anything fascinating, anyway!)

Sorrow Floats. Although I am only halfway through the third installment in this trilogy, I can already say that the second installment, Sorrow Floats, is by far the best. I would not call any of these great literature, but Sandlin’s voice is engaging and although his characters seem awfully familiar, they are familiar in a likeable way.

Skipped Parts, the first novel, is narrated by a teenage boy, and Social Blunders, the third novel, is narrated by that same boy as a disenchanted thirty-something. I don’t really care for him as an adult, so the third book isn’t doing much for me, but Sorrow Floats — the book that first drew me to the series — is much more affecting. The narrator here is Maurey, a young mother who slips into alcoholism after her father’s death, and winds up losing custody of her baby as she slides down towards rock bottom. Sounds like a real upper, doesn’t it?

Oddly, it sort of is. As seen through the eyes of the male narrator in the other two books, Maurey is sort of an impossible fantasy girl, but once she is given her own voice, you find yourself wanting to listen. Although this book was written in the nineties, it feels like a seventies road novel (probably because it is set in 1972 and involves a road trip). The characters, like all of Sandlin’s characters, are a little hokey, a little unbelievable, a little straight out of central casting … but I like them anyway. This trilogy has been a nice diversion, and Sorrow Floats is by far the best of the lot.

Skipped Parts. I finally managed to finish this book, which has been on my to-read list longer than just about anything. When I looked for reviews of Sandlin’s work, I saw lots of comparisons to Tom Robbins and John Irving, neither of which I really understand. I guess he’s raunchy like those two authors used to be raunchy, and he has a wacky cast of characters, but his writing is rougher around the edges than either of those two at their best, and his characters are not as wacky as all that.

I liked the book. There is a Salinger vibe here, and from me that is kind of a criticism, but I liked it anyway. Raunchy coming-of-age novels seem to be a thing of the past, and this book was published fifteen years ago so I wouldn’t count on any kind of comeback for the teenage boy sex novel. I got caught up in the stock characters and the way Sandlin shakes up expectations. The novel is good-humored and funny as hell, so I forgave it a lot.

And there were some things that needed forgiving. In particular, I think Sandlin could do a better job avoiding anachronisms. Over and over, I got pulled out of the moment — 1963 Wyoming, specifically. And in either this or the sequel, Sorrow Floats, which is set in 1972 and which I am reading now, a character refers to a woman as thin “but not anorexic,” and I just don’t think that term entered the popular lexicon until the eighties.

And let us not discuss the appearance of the phrase “present company accepted.”

Those nitpicky issues aside, I liked the book quite a bit, enough to move straight on to the sequel and to order the third book in the trilogy so that I won’t have to wait. I want to know what happens to these characters, and I enjoy the way that Sandlin balances tragedy and humor. And I swear I will deny this if the word gets out, but I kind of miss the days when novelists wrote about fucking.

(Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth blurbed this novel. Drew Barrymore blurbed the sequel. Just some trivia.)

Harm Done. This is not a review of the novel, because I didn’t read the novel. This is a review of the audio version available at Audible, and the review could stop right here after these two words: it sucks.

I bought this about a year ago without realizing it was an abridged version. Once I realized that, I set it aside and didn’t listen to it. Then last week I found it in my library, wondered why I hadn’t listened to it, and put it on my iPod. And it was terrible. The reader is Christopher Ravenscroft, and unlike the other readers who have tackled her Inspector Wexford novels, Ravenscroft gives Wexford a hokey, fake-sounding accent that made me wonder if the reader was actually an American.

The abridgement is also just plain terrible. I half wonder if this was originally an unabridged recording, because at times the reading is awkwardly cut off with some phantom sounds remaining, like the reader got cut off mid-sentence with an old-fashioned tape recorder. No attempt is made to smooth out the abridged transitions; nights turn to days, scenes change, new characters show up but aren’t explained or introduced. I suspect that, in its entirety, this book would have been at least twelve hours long, but the abridged version is barely three.

It’s terrible, so bad that I am not going to blame Rendell for what felt like a heavy-handed, unsatisfying mystery involving spousal abuse and cancer patients. (Well, I blame her a little. But as someone recently pointed out, I obviously don’t know what great literature is or what makes a great writer.)

The Magician’s Assistant. The general consensus seems to be that this novel compares unfavorably to Bel Canto, but I disagree. I liked Bel Canto well enough, but I got tired of defending the ending to people who hated it. I thought The Magician’s Assistant was a lovely little novel, oddly hopeful and written with a light touch. I liked it very much, and although it felt sort of slight while I was reading it, I find myself thinking about it now and then, days after I finished it.

And it has a happy ending, Bel Canto haters.

The Black Tower. Another one I have read before, although I thought I remembered a different ending. I must be getting her books mixed up in my head in my old age. I like this one quite a lot; it’s not one of her very best, but it’s much better than more recent offerings.

The End. This entry will contain spoilers, although if you are looking for an actual plot summary you’ll have to go somewhere else.

I finished it this morning, after rereading the entire series, including two rereadings each of The Unauthorized Biography, The Beatrice Letters, and The Penultimate Peril. I was spoiled before I started reading it, and I kind of intended to hate it, but I did not. I liked it very much. I usually don’t like heavy-handed political messages, but this is a book for kids, really, and as young adult books go, this one is subtle enough. You’ve got your anti-sectarianism message, your warning against abistinence-only education, and your warning against stupidity in the name of dogma. (If there was ever any doubt that the message of this series is something along the lines of “knowledge is power,” that doubt was pretty much obliterated when the kids were saved by a snake handing them an apple.)

And a lot less is left unresolved than I was led to believe by the spoilers, but you might only get that if you have recently reread everything. By the time I finished The Slippery Slope, I was pretty sure both Baudelaire parents were dead. Quigley points out to Violet that he is probably the survivor of the fire mentioned on page 13 of the Snicket file, and when you figure that Quigley has probably seen parts of the Snicket file since he was working with Jacques, you can probably trust his information. And I don’t think we were intended to think that one of the parents would be alive after that, because the kids really stop looking for them after that the end of that book. They are still looking for answers, and they still have a dim hope that maybe one of their parents survived via the underground tunnel, but a search for their parents is no longer a focus of the story.

I also read that we never find out who J.S. is, but after rereading The Penultimate Peril, I think we were all making that too complicated. It was Jerome Squalor and Justice Strauss. No further mystery.

I also figured out on a second reading that the letters to Beatrice were not the same as the letters from Beatrice, although first I thought it was just a time difference — that the letters from her were written earlier, when she was a little girl. But that doesn’t work because she mentions Violet, Klaus, and Sunny. So I guessed that there was a second Beatrice, and I figured she had to be a sibling, but I wasn’t sure if she was younger or older. Obviously I was wrong about who she was, but I was right that there were two of them (not counting the boat).

Obviously he left a lot of questions, but a lot was answered, too, even though some of the spoilers I read said that these questions were left hanging. We do know what happened to the Quagmires — they got swallowed up by the great unknowable, whatever that is. We do know that there is another hotel under the one that burned; that was answered in The Penultimate Peril, so it did not really need to be answered in The End. (And Snicket confirms that it is still there, and someone is still cataloguing, and it hasn’t been found.) We know what was in the sugar bowl (and I think it’s clear that Lemony Snicket has it, that he retrieved it from the pond and had it with him in the taxi when he tried to get the Baudelaires to leave the hotel with him). We know why Count Olaf felt entitled to the Baudelaires’ fortune, since their parents killed his parents and all.

We don’t know some other stuff, or at least I don’t, although I suspect I just didn’t figure it out. Who was the woman who retrieved the sugar bowl from the grotto and took it to Captain Widdershins? I think it was probably Kit Snicket, but I’m not sure. What was the message that Captain Widdershins and Phil left in the refrigerator for the orphans when they abandoned the submarine? I didn’t understand the code, but there was definitely a message. (Six lemon-lime sodas, a bit of soft cheese wrapped in wax paper, and a cake that said “Violet’s Fifteenth Date.”) What was up with the Poes?

And who was Bruce? I think Bruce was Lemony Snicket, but maybe that’s too easy, or too much thinking. Maybe he’s just another volunteer, albeit one who is sort of mysterious and who always seems to turn up at crucial moments.

And, of course, we don’t know what happens next. In the Beatrice letters, the poster and the coded message make it clear that the boat “Beatrice” sinks. The whisk, the hair ribbon, and Klaus’s glasses all float up into a cave somewhere, and the boat is in pieces. We know that little Beatrice somehow makes it to civilization, but are the Baudelaires dead? Did the great unknowable thingie get them? How could Beatrice have heard Sunny’s voice on the radio unless Sunny survived? Are they just separated, or are the older orphans dead?

Maybe that all comes in the next book.

No, this post will not contain spoilers for The End, because I don’t have my copy yet. But I did read The Beatrice Letters, which convinced me that I needed to go back and read the entire series again. I last read the first four books right after they came out, and I listened to the others on audio, which means I probably missed a lot. So after first rereading The Penultimate Peril, I went back to the beginning and started over with The Bad Beginning, and I’m currently in the middle of The Slippery Slope.

I’m not really trying to figure anything out, though, because I think I will be disappointed if I do. The Beatrice Letters reinforced my suspicion that there is not going to be a satisfying resolution. My main reason for feeling that way is the time frame: Beatrice (if there even is such a person; some people think she is a boat, I think she may just be Lemony Snicket’s alter-ego, and who knows, maybe she’s the Baudelaire’s mother, although I think an older sister is far more likely) mentions hearing Sunny on the radio, suggesting that everything between her and Snicket happens in some future time. But Snicket’s hidden message to his sister in The Slippery Slope says that he will meet her at the Hotel Denouement on Beatrice’s birthday … but the hotel has already burned down as of the end of The Penultimate Peril. Maybe he means the hotel under the lake?

In any case, if there is this whole mystery with Lemony Snicket and Beatrice that happens in the future, and if Beatrice is left wondering where her family is, I just don’t see how we are going to get a resolution to both that mystery and the mystery of the Baudelaires all in one book, unless Lemony Snicket turns out to have been a completely unreliable narrator all along. Which I think may be how it works out, but if so, there is not really any point in trying to guess what is going to happen. Either we are going to get another thirteen books, or we are going to be left without any answers. I think that is a given.

My only remaining guess: I still think that the Baudelaire parents are the man with a beard but no hair, and the woman with hair but no beard, although I think the “man” is Mrs. Baudelaire and the “woman” is Mr. Baudelaire, since they are obviously in disguise. And I think they killed Count Olaf’s parents with poison darts at the opera, although that is not so much a guess as something that is pretty much given away in the text.

And as for Beatrice, if she is not just Lemony Snicket’s alter-ego (or if Snicket isn’t HER alter-ego), I think she is probably the Baudelaire’s oldest sister, one who was taken away by V.F.D. as a child (before the schism?). In The Slippery Slope, Violet recalls someone having heard the words “the world is quiet here” sung to her when she was a child; maybe it was her sister who sang the words. Or the people who stole her sister.

But who are Count Olaf’s siblings? He must have some. For that matter, who are Esmé’s siblings? Beatrice’s, if she’s not a Baudelaire? Everyone seems to have siblings. And who is “R,” the Duchess of Winnepeg? I assume we’ll find all of that out in The End, even if we don’t learn much else.

If you have read The End and want to post about it in the comments, please provide plenty of spoiler space for anyone who doesn’t want to have it all ruined.

The Inimitable Jeeves. I should probably be embarrassed to admit that this is my first Wodehouse. I’m not even sure that’s accurate, because the stories seemed so familiar that I am not sure whether I actually read this in high school, or whether Wodehouse has just been imitated and adopted into popular culture to such an extent that his work seems familiar even if you’ve never actually read any of his stories.

In any case, I loved it, of course. But by the time the collection was over, I was ready for it to be over. I have a half dozen more collections downloaded, but I haven’t been in the mood to listen to any more. I’m sure I will be eventually, but I think I like Wodehouse in small doses.

Have any of you ever read anything by Tim Sandlin? Years ago I picked up two of his books at a used book store — Skipped Parts and Sorrow Floats — because I liked the covers. (I hope it goes without saying that my copy of Skipped Parts has the same style cover as the one on Sorrow Floats; it was not that awful movie tie-in cover that drew me in.) And they have sat on my shelf ever since, except I once took Sorrow Floats on vacation and lost it in a suitcase for a while.

This morning I read four chapters of Sorrow Floats, and I love it. It’s quirky and funny and sad, already in just five chapters, and I want to read more. Only I just realized that Sorrow Floats is the second in a trilogy, so I have to read Skipped Parts first.

It looks like these two books got made into bad movies, and that Tim Sandlin was briefly buzz-worthy during the time when I was being a lawyer and not reading any fiction, and that his recent stuff has not been very well received. Anyone read any of these books? The descriptions are all saying Tom Robbins, but I did not get any Robbins vibe from the four chapters I’ve read so far. (That is a good thing, I think.)

Shroud for a Nightingale. The nice thing about listening to mystery novels on audio is that you can’t skip ahead and read the ending. The bad thing about listening to P.D. James on audio is that it is very difficult to keep the characters straight.

I don’t know if I guessed the ending this time or if I vaguely remembered it from reading this book twenty years ago.

I have a friend who is going to be on bed rest for the next several months, and she has asked to borrow some books. I have a whole lot of books, in a whole lot of genres, and I have already picked out a few. But I have never been incapicated for any length of time so I don’t really know what would appeal to me under those circumstances.

I don’t know her reading tastes in any detail, but I know that she likes Faulkner, she loves Walker Percy, she liked The Kite Runner, and she likes The Lord of the Rings. Those are pretty broad English-majory tastes so I am thinking that any literary fiction with a good story has a reasonable chance of working for her.

If I were on bed rest I think I’d enjoy Robertson Davies, so I am throwing in The Deptford Trilogy. She likes southern lit and I figure she might need some filler between novels, so I was going to throw in short stories by Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, and Eudora Welty. She’s probably read a lot of those but sometimes short stories are good for re-reading.

What do you think? Name some titles or authors and I will see if I have them.

So I have a draft, and possibly one eighth of it does not suck. I am going to spend some time this week reading short stories, because I have not done that in a long time, and I think I forgot how they are supposed to work.

I am almost positive that a 5,000-word short story should have fewer characters than a 19th-century Russian novel, however. I have some revising to do.