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The Cats of Roxville Station
by Jean Craighead George

It's almost impossible for me to resist anything that has to do with cats. So when I spotted this book at the local Friends of the Library book store, I decided to fork over a couple of bucks and see if I could enjoy a little feline entertainment, in literary form.

Turns out I probably should have stuck to LOL cats on the web.

The Cats of Roxville Station is ostensibly a children's book. It was published by a well-known publisher of children's books (Dutton). It has illustrations like a kid's book. It is short and tells a fictional story. All the earmarks of kid lit are there.

But here's the thing: the author is not really interested in telling a story so much as teaching a lesson about what life is like for feral cats.

Uh-oh. Whenever a kid's book is out to teach you lessons, you should probably run the other way.

It's been a truism throughout my many years of reading children's lit: books that are written to be educational--presumably as well as entertaining--are invariably only marginally educational, and hardly entertaining at all.

So it is with Roxville. The story follows the growth and travails of Rachet, a cat who is abandoned by her family and has to make her way among the hierarchy of feral cats who hang around a village train station and its surrounding neighborhood. In parallel, the text also follows a young boy (also an orphan--see what the author did there?) named Mike as he observes the cats of Roxville, roots for Rachet, and generally conspires in various ways to get his guardian to allow him to adopt his hoped-for cat.

Sounds interesting, right? Well, maybe. In reality, the story reads slow, has little that's particularly compelling to hold the interest, and ultimately just lacks a certain amount of literary punch.

The cats are characters in this story, but not as literary creatures. These are not anthropomorphic, talking animals. The cats are just cats, which means they only contribute to the story through actions, not thoughts, feelings, or any abstract expression thereof. That may be a big reason why this reader, at least, found it very hard to connect to these felines, despite being possessed of a passion for these favorite animals. Feline inscrutability may be fascinating in real life, in your living room--but it comes across as static and uninteresting on the written page.

It's possible that this negative vibe about The Cats of Roxville Station may be the product of expectations, but the author is not off the hook for not meeting the reader's anticipation. Things happen to Mike, and the cats--Rachet in particular, of course--but they rarely rise above the level of ordinary stuff. It is perhaps telling that I am writing this review several months after I finished reading the book. Nothing about the experience was all that compelling. I'm mostly producing this write-up just to get the book off my desk.

Overall, it's not a bad book--it's just not a particularly interesting book. And that's a hard idea to wrap one's mind around if you're as crazy about cats as I am. (And no, this feeling is not the product of my being an adult reading a child's book; even a kid's book, if well-written, should produce a certain amount of fascination and delight in an older reader.) I wouldn't necessarily recommend throwing The Cats of Roxville Station out with the litter, but I don't recommend rushing out to the library to pick up a copy of it, either.

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And Another Thing...
by Eoin Colfer

There are many reasons to approach this book with great skepticism. It's a "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" book that was not written by Douglas Adams; strike one. It was written by Eoin Colfer, who achieved success with the Artemis Fowl books, of which I read the first installment and was not particularly impressed; strike two. And it was produced after Adams had shuffled off his coil, and apparently without his participation; a Wikipedia entry claims that some of the story elements came from Adams's plans for a sixth installment, though it remains vague about just how much of the work comes from his efforts. That should be strike three and it's out.

Except that it's not. Somehow, Colfer made it safely to first base, or whatever is the equivalent in cricket. This came as a big surprise...but then, surprises are part of the raison d'etre of the Hitchhiker's series.

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Puss in Boots
by Philip Pullman / Ian Beck, illus.

I'm not impressed.

It's been a long time since Philip Pullman made a splash with His Dark Materials and its associated works. It has been nearly as long as Pullman gave his readers other great pieces of work, such as Clockwork and The Scarecrow and His Servant. Given the span of time that has passed since the author last wowed us, maybe it's time to reclassify Pullman, not as a star but as a comet--a body that shone brightly for a while, but eventually disappeared from the literary sky, perhaps never to return again.

It's not that this version of Puss in Boots is bad; Pullman does a serviceable job of presenting the traditional story; there are no passages in his tale that make the reader want to throw the book across the room or anything like that. But Pullman expands upon Charles Perrault's tale, including scenes with a hermit and some ghouls which, frankly, don't particularly add anything special to the story.

Accomplishment

Chicken Soup for the Soul: The Cat Did What?

Well, the day has finally arrived. August 19 marked the publication of the new book, Chicken Soup for the Soul: The Cat Did What? Normally, that would not particularly pique my interest, but this ain't normal. This new book includes my story, "The Marks of a Lasting Love" (pg. 172), and it represents my first paid writing effort. Hopefully the first of many to come. The check should arrive sometime in the next month or so; $200 big ones. I could get used to this whole writing thing.

The story tells the tale of the one and only time we tried to give our first cat, WT, a bath, and how that led to me winding up in the emergency room at the local hospital. A good story, if I may say so myself, and it is a sincere tribute to my dearly departed kitty and the legacy that she left in my life.

I had to wait a whole year from submission to today, when the book finally hit the stores. I did get 10 author's copies (all gone now, save one I kept for myself) for free, so that's another good thing about it. I haven't read any of the stories other than my own (so far I've been too busy) but I'm guessing that they're probably all quite entertaining and worth a read.

Better yet, this won't be the only thing I get published this year. Another story, "Giving Thanks for the Big Birds," is scheduled to appear in the November issue of the magazine Watching Backyard Birds. I get a year's subscription to that periodical, no money for publication, but it is another credit, and hopefully will help grease the skids towards more writings of mine gaining acceptance with paying publications. (I currently have drafts of two pieces written right now, with the concepts for two others worked out in my head and partially written up in notes.)

So things be movin'. Let's hope I can sustain the momentum for a while longer. Like, say, the rest of my life. Excelsior.

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Holy Toledo
Lessons From Bill King, Renaissance Man of the Mic
by Ken Korach

There is a dilemma that lives somewhere behind this book, one that I have experienced many a time with regards to various things in my own life: when you find something great, do you want to share it with everyone else in the world, or do you prefer to keep this great joy all to yourself?

Holy Toledo by Ken Korach

The answer depends, of course, upon the nature of the great thing. If it’s the music of some hugely talented performer, you’re bound to want to share, since there’s no real way in which your own enjoyment of a song or a musician can be diminished by others enjoying the same work. The same applies, to an extent, with a restaurant that serves great food; certainly, you want others to patronize the place, lest it should otherwise go out of business; yet, you also don’t want the joint to be too crowded during those times when you want a meal for yourself.

And then again, there are those great things that you want to keep all to yourself--or, at least, you don’t particularly care if others get to experience their share of that greatness. You’ll be perfectly happy to keep that personal favorite truly personal, to let that secret joy be your own little oasis in an otherwise desert landscape.

For many sports fans in the Bay Area, that latter sentiment surely holds true for their appreciation of the late Bill King.

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Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
by Susanna Clarke

This book surely must hold the record for longest time it took me to complete reading any work.

Does that mean it’s an awful book? Hardly. In fact, Clarke’s premiere novel delivers an excellent story told with plenty of sharp, witty writing. While the novel has a handful of inherent weaknesses that make for slow going, the bulk of my lengthy fulfillment time derived from my own extenuating circumstances. Had I not chosen to start reading this book just as I was in the midst of working full time (for the first time in ages), and at the same time trying to follow the baseball playoffs, surely this tale of two Georgian gentlemen and their efforts to revive English magic would have held my interest much more deeply than it did.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
by Susanna Clarke

The basics of the tale--how the owlish Mr Norrell achieves prominence as the wizard who brings magic back to the forefront of English life (in the midst of the Napoleonic wars, no less); all that comes of the thaumaturgical efforts of both Norrell and his brilliant student, Jonathan Strange; and the consequences of the magicians’ spells, for both themselves and others within their orbit--provide more than enough grist for an imaginative, enchanting literary mill.

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Life of Pi
By Yann Martel

How odd that I would read this book before seeing the movie. I guess my film viewing habits really have fallen off the table.

A more germane topic, however, concerns all this book wishes to tell us about life, and faith, and maybe truth--though that last one is highly debatable.

Author Yann Martel covers a lot of philosophical ground in Life of Pi, his somewhat spectacular story of, succinctly, a boy and a tiger on a boat. I say “somewhat spectacular,” because Martel’s ultimate storytelling gambit--which story is the “real” story?--actually winds up undercutting the impact of the trick he’s trying to play. If there had been one twist at the end of the book--some ambiguity in one aspect of Pi’s amazing journey, some distinct item that would provide a sharper, clearer “Aha!” moment for the reader--that might have served everyone’s needs rather well. But laying the entirety of the adventure on the line? I call that a bit of overreach, an act of authorial hubris that has too much potential to leave readers feeling excessively manipulated and to undo whatever good work Martel hoped to achieve. (I also happen to think he bungled the ambiguity; there are elements of the supposedly metaphorical story which, within the narrative’s reality, should have been easily verifiable one way or another.)

For me personally, “Life of Pi” shows another problem arises that highlights why, at this stage of my life, I find it so difficult to read fiction. Martel liberally sprinkles an encyclopedia’s worth of obscure knowledge--mostly, in this case, zoological knowledge--throughout Pi’s first-person narrative. It is exactly the kind of brazen authorial showboating that ruins fiction for me. Nonfiction works must be well-researched and extensively referenced, or else the author’s authority withers and perishes; but fiction has different demands. Showy displays of the author’s research may be good for attracting critical attention and awards--”Oooh, such extensive research you did--here, have a shiny object...”--but a writer who flamboyantly exhibits his research inevitably takes this reader out of the story. Here I am, reading a story, and then the esoterica drops: suddenly, I’m not reading a book--I’m staring at a Everest-sized pile of index cards (or the digital equivalent thereof). It’s a lot like watching a movie and seeing a boom mike that was accidentally left within the upper corner of the camera’s view; instantly, the illusion is broken, and I start to wonder about the competence of the person who put this thing together.

On the other hand, Martel deserves high praise for his skill as a prose stylist. Thanks to my own writing and editing work, I’ve developed a constant need to assess the quality of any text I read--especially when I’m reading fiction. But with “Life of Pi” my stylistic alarm bells almost never rang out loud. Martel crafts excellent--almost lyrical--prose. Without question, his literary skill is consummate and expert. In that sense, “Life of Pi” is a breath of fresh air versus other recent works, so many of which have been published seemingly without benefit of compositional skill or professional editing. From a ‘words on the page’ point of view, “Life of Pi” is a joy to read.

So we find a very mixed bag when we consider “Life of Pi.” The book has so many devoted fans that I doubt any critique by me would have much impact on how others feel about it. I should probably recommend this book for reasons of cultural literacy alone. But I do wish the author had not been guilty of literary overreach. A gesture made presumably to teach was, in the end, too grandiose to effectively instill its lesson. Martel may have felt that he needed something epic to get through to modern readers, but a smaller, subtler effort was all we really needed. Perhaps it would have been better if, as a guy trying to make a statement about faith, Martel had had a little more faith in us.

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A twofer for one of my favorite authors!

Once Upon a Time in the North
by Philip Pullman

It's been such a long time since I've had the chance to dig into anything by Philip Pullman. Part of the blame falls with me, as I've been wandering further afield, and part must fall on Pullman, who has been lax lately when it comes to producing works that just scream "Read me!" (More on this matter below.)

Once Upon A Time In The North
by Phillip Pullman

Here's a case in point: the novella Once Upon a Time in the North, the second short story entry into the His Dark Materials canon (the first being Lyra's Oxford). Since the HDM books were the magnet that drew me to Pullman in the first place, and still retain their place in my pantheon of favorite books, I felt true delight when I discovered (thanks to a library catalog search) that there was another addition to the series. Add in the fact that it's a story focused on the early career of Lee Scoresby and his soul-mate hare Hester--two of the best characters in the original trilogy--and I was ticked a ruddy shade of pink.

And Once Upon a Time in the North delivers the goods: the witty Texan Scoresby and his snap-tounged Hester are in fine form this quick moving adventure tale of a couple of hairy (harey?) days in an Arctic town. It is a delight to spend a few more minutes with Lee and Hester, who are characters a reader wants to follow anywhere: brave, smart, able, and only lightly touched by a non-incapacitating cynicism.

Unfortunately, minutes are all we get here. While brevity may be the soul of wit, and 96 small pages do serve to tell the story of the pair's involvement in a bit of local politics--with a touch of mayhem and potential murder thrown in to keep things exciting--the ultimate outcome is to leave the reader wanting so much more. It seems unlikely that we're going to get more; Pullman produced Once Upon a Time... back in 2008, and the HDM trail seems, in the intervening years, to have grown colder than Iorek Byrnison's Arctic homeland. The failure of the film version of The Golden Compass may have made that inevitable; perhaps Pullman has pulled up creative stakes and headed for greener literary pastures.

Still, Once Upon a Time... demonstrates how robust and rich a source the HDM world could still be, if the author is so inclined. Other characters from the original work could have their own past/origin stories brought to fruition and presented to an eager reading public. And for those who are not already fans, Once Upon a Time...  (or similar series-based novellas) could serve as a terrific intro to the wider works: a brief, excellent, entertaining entryway for those not already familiar with just how good Pullman and his work can be.

At the very least, I am grateful I had the chance to get a little more joy from one of my most loved literary adventures. And I'll welcome any more chances to reenter that world, should they come down the line.

---

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ
by Philip Pullman

News flash: Philip Pullman is not a fan of Christianity, or organized religion, or "the Church," however you want to put it.

So why, then, did he decide to write a Gospel?

Whatever the motivation, Pullman's impulse led to the publication of The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, the author's attempt to reconcile what he perceives to be the admirable qualities of Jesus's message with his personal world view--and the anathema status that the Church has within that world view.

The Good Man Jesus
and the Scoundrel Christ
by Philip Pullman

Pullman tries to pull this split personality trick by cleaving the Savior himself into two separate characters: Jesus, who is more or less the traditional prophet most of us have come to know, and Christ, the other's younger, sicklier, shrewder, and somewhat more contemptible twin brother. Throughout the narrative, Jesus goes about living his life as described in the canonical Gospels, while the brother Christ shifts about on the periphery of the "greatest story," serving as both scribe and secret mover of the action, both by his own volition and through collaboration with "the Stranger"--a mysterious character who may or may not ultimately turn out to be the Apostle Paul. (Pullman hints, but never comes right out and identifies who the Stranger actually is supposed to be.)

Naturally, this manipulation of the story causes problems for the reader, especially those who are familiar with the standard story (which is to say, virtually everyone in two thirds of the world, at least). Jesus, in most respects, comes across as a character worth rooting for; but Christ is presented much more ambiguously. The character never seems like an organic creation; from the start we are highly conscious that we are reading the tale of a literary device. Despite his titular appellation, and a story thread that obviously implies plenty of envy, Christ has admirable qualities, too. Too bad, then, that the character ultimately comes across as a stooge who serves the narrative role of the slightly reluctant tool by whose deeds the Christian Church is to be founded.

It is for that sin--being the necessary component in the Stranger's machinations to found an organized religion--that Pullman ultimately damns his own creation. Conversations between Christ and the Stranger, concerning the philosophical underpinnings of the Church, and why it must be founded upon lies, read like wiretap transcripts of racketeers caught in the midst of their conspiracies. When at last Christ, long after the unfortunate events, voices his pain and regret, the reader has little clue about how he should feel for this made up man.

Not only does the plotting suffer at the hands of Pullman's ulterior cause, but the author's own writing comes across as damaged by his agenda. Some passages retain their power, despite Pullman's tinkering with story, character and meaning. The Sermon on the Mount can still inspire and move the reader, even when presented in the author's purposefully banal language. (Much of this work comes across as a new, revised version of The Book, that laughably lowbrow version of the Bible that came out back in the 1980s.) In a few places, the author's talent still shines through, as with the very subtle manipulations that cast more than a little doubt upon Mary's pre-motherhood purity. At other times, however, Pullman's text degenerates into little more than philosophical screed. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus has a one way conversation with God that neatly refutes every word of Christ's and the Stranger's conceptual architecture for building a Church. The reader knows with absolute certainty that these words are Pullman's, with no attempt made to portray them as anything that might have sprung from Jesus's own philosophy. If you were at a pub talking religion, or lack thereof, with the author over a pint, such direct personal opinion might be accepted and welcome. But when the author is trying to make his own ideas into those of a character many consider to be the Son of God, it's fair for the reader to accuse him of being a little full of himself--especially when the presentation of those ideas makes for less than riveting reading.

I am a fully confessed Pullman fan. I have delighted in any number of his works. So I expected to come to The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ and find an admirable work. Even as I read the book, I figured that the work would merit a "so-so" (~) review once I got around to posting it on this site. But in retrospect, I can not view this book as anything but a failure; perhaps a noble failure, but even that is questionable. And considering the successes that have come before this work, it would be the worst kind of "grade inflation" to give Pullman a pass for this effort. If you too are a Pullman fan, one with a completist bent, or someone whose interest in interpretations of the Christian story is limitless, then I suppose you will want to read The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. Otherwise, the not so good news is, you can skip it.

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Summer of '68
by Tim Wendel

It happens every year. The winter months come, the last baseball season is left far behind, and I get the itch for the game to come back. So I usually try to jump that gun and bring baseball back, a little earlier than scheduled, by picking up one of the many works of literature devoted to the game. It's not exactly a day at the ballpark, but reading a good book about baseball will do in a pinch.

Summer of '68 by Tim Wendel

So it came to pass that, on a recent trip to the local library, I picked up Summer of '68, an account of the legendary "Year of the Pitcher" by longtime sportswriter Tim Wendel.

Just based on the title alone, this book held enormous promise. It is an account of 1968, that most famous year both in baseball (the last year before division play, the year when true giants stood atop the mound, the year before everything changed) and beyond (a year of unprecedented upheaval, with assassinations, demonstrations, riots, Olympics, and elections...not to mention my own birth, during game 6 of that year's World Series). As with other such baseball books--accounts of one particular, stand-out year in the game's history (Halberstam's October 1964 and Summer of '49 immediately spring to mind)--Summer of '68 comes with the built in advantage of a narrative already created and neatly packed; all the author needs to do is dig into the details and tease out the hidden side of the already well-known story to bring the reader a fascinating and refreshing experience of days--and the game--gone by. Given that standard, Summer of '68 is a win--but it's not a blowout win by any means.

After all, it's hard to go wrong when your chief subjects are the 1968 St. Louis Cardinals and Detroit Tigers: two teams full of larger than life characters who matched up against each other in that year's World Series. The tale of Bob Gibson's dominance on the mound, fueled in part by his reaction to the King and Kennedy assassinations, makes for deeply interesting reading. So too with the carnival show that was Denny McLain, winning 31 games at the height of his career; Mickey Lolich, overcoming adversity, doubt, and envy to stand in the end as the Series hero; Curt Flood, the game's best centerfielder who still had his greatest challenges ahead of him; Tigers legend Al Kaline, capping a Hall of Fame career with an exhibition of true greatness on the game's biggest stage; and...well, the list goes on and on. Great stories abounded on those two teams, not to mention the fascinating tales that peppered the major leagues outside of those two cities (Don Drysdale, Catfish Hunter, Frank Howard, Milt Pappas, Luis Tiant, and more). Almost any writer could produce an interesting book with such characters and their deeds as his subject.

And yet, Summer of '68 never quite caught fire for me, despite its glorious subject matter. The blame for that lack of intensity must lay in author Wendel's shortcomings as a writer. Perhaps it is telling that Wendel, according to his bio, was a founding editor of USA Today; Wendel's writing in Summer of '68 mirrors the blandness of that 'least common denominator' publication. The author is just not much of a stylist; his prose is flat and uninspiring, and that deficiency bleeds some of the drama out of otherwise fascinating characters and scenes. Much of the narrative is choppy, and comes across as less a flowing, unified work and more a quilt of disparate texts cobbled together from unrelated articles. (The reader gets the impression that large parts of Summer of '68 were pieced together from previously published works, though there are no 'previously published' credits anywhere in the book's cataloging info.) The writing also contains many stylistic faults, such as needless identifications and explanations of things already identified and explained--small flubs that are individually forgivable, but pervasive enough to be distracting. All in all, Summer of '68 suffers greatly from burdens that are almost more than its grand subject matter can overcome.

That the book does overcome those burdens, just enough to make the reader want to keep going forward, is a testament to the work's core story. What the Tigers and Cardinals accomplished in 1968, and the maelstrom in which they achieved their greatness, makes for a story too intriguing to be sidetracked by the presentation's failings. In a perfect world, this story would have gotten a better treatment by a truly gifted writer; as it stands, baseball fans can make do with Summer of '68 and honor the memory of what were truly legendary days.

Driven Insane, Just By Looking At It

In my wanderings across the web, I came across this work of brilliance: The Call of Cthulhu for Beginning Readers, a work of art by a cat who calls himself DrFaustusAU. It's a brilliant parody/homage to not one but two of my favorite authors. Give it a look, especially if it's your lifelong dream to sink into the depths of eldritch madness through rhyming couplets. (Note: as of this post, the work is not finished yet--you'll have to check back frequently for updates until the tale is complete.

Bonus reading: the now legendary Tales of the Plush Cthulhu.