Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a masterful collection of articles and essays. This slim volume is essential reading for anyone that wants a better understanding of late-60s America.

The book starts with magazine articles ranging in topic from a murder case to Joan Baez's school forteaching nonviolence. The events and settings are all there, but so is a human element. Baez is not just a naive hippie, she is a victim of her ability to see the world like a child.

Personal essays follow the articles, and surpass them in quality. Didion explores the attitude of exclusion prevelant in the Sacremento Valley of the 1960s. She also writes beautifully about her eight years in New York.

My favorite essay is entitled "On Self-Respect." The piece is short, but powerful.

The book's centerpiece is the title article. "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" is easily the best article about the hippie movement I have ever read. The hippie lifestyle is not demonized, but it's not glorified, either. Through interviews, Didion shows that many hippies were just lost kids, and had no idea that they had started something that had political undertones.

Didion's attitude towards her subjects is one of respect, which ends up getting her more access. She says a little about this access in the preface: "My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests."

Christine Falls by Benjamin Black

Crime noir is a genre I'm not too familiar with. But when I heard that John Banville, an author whose work I admire, had written a noir novel under the name Benjamin Black, I knew I had to read it.

Cjristine Falls opens with Quirke, a pathologist, noticing that his brother-in-law, Mal, a doctor at the same hospital, has been altering the records of one of the dead. The corpse in question? Christine Falls, of course.

Quirke feels the need to investigate. This leads to murder, family drama, and a conspiracy far bigger than either doctor. So, it's your average detective story.

While I found the plot intriguing, I did have one major complaint about the novel: Either Banville was trying too hard to make the work "literary," or his habits from his "important" works seeped into Christine Falls. There is plenty of suspense in the novel, but when the reader has to stop and look up a word, it really slows things down. I had to do this on a few occasions, and I'd like to think I'm no slouch in the vocabulary department.

I didn't love this book, but I like it enough that I will probably read its sequel, which has already been released. Give it a shot if you enjoy reading crime stories.

Everything Matters! by Ron Currie, Jr.

Junior knows that the world is going to end. Not only that. He knows exactly when and how. The voices in his head told him before he was born.

This is the premise of Mr. Currie's novel. With the knowledge he has, how will Junior live his life?

Currie does a masterful job in making the voices in Junior's head a character in themselves. They want to see him do the right things, but they refuse to intervene when he makes poor decisions.

Junior is an Everyman character with knowledge that no one should have to bear. Currie's writing makes the novel a joy to read, through all his good(and not-so-good) decisions.

The Better of McSweeney's Volume One

McSweeney's began my interest in literary journals about five years ago. Even though I'd never read an issue, the fact that Dave Eggers' name was attached caught my attention.

And now, five years later, I still hadn't read an issue. Not for lack of interest, but because, as I've mentioned before, literary journals have a tendency to be expensive.

That's what makes The Better of McSweeney's great and horrible. I get to read some great stories from the first ten issues of McSweeney's, which is awesome. But I really want to subscribe now, and I can't afford to.

The stories were worth a little lamenting about being poor. From the opener, "The Ceiling," by Kevin Brockmeier, a Twilight Zone-like story love and the sky falling, to "Tedford and the Megalodon," by Jim Shepard, the story of a man seeking the unknown, these stories are consistently fantastic.

Other highlights include "The Bees" by Dan Chaon, one of the most frightening stories I've ever read, and "Three Meditations on Death" by William T. Vollmann.

Before the stories start, there are letters to the editor from the first ten issue. They are a fun read, even if I did find myself getting impatient for the stories to start.

Ideas of Heaven by Joan Silber

This book is dubbed a "ring of stories." On one level, characters and places link the stories to each other. But more importantly, the themes of love and faith run throughout the book.

All of the stories are told in the first person, and the narrators tell stories of love they have found and lost. Faith, religious and otherwise, go right along with these loves.

The stories range from one about a woman that wants to dance on Broadway to a family of missionaries in China being threatened by local politics.

This is a quick read. It's well-written. Don't find myself wanting to heap praise upon it, but Silber is a good writer.

The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard

If I could rate this book based solely on Hazzard's gift for description, it would be among my faborite books.

But there is a story, too. A really boring story.

Leith, travelling Asia after a stint in the Second World War, falls in love with Helen, a seventeen-year-old. They are separated when he has to go back to England and she is taken by her parents to New Zealand. They write letters to each other.

Hazzard does write beautiful descriptions of the world just after the war. Shell-shocked, licking its wounds. I often forgot about the story entirely and revelled in such beautiful sentences.

But the story is boring. We find out little about Helen except that she is "the girl." I didn't really care throughout whether or not they were reunited.

My last complaint: Everyone talks like an academic trying to show off. Not sure one piece of dialogue rang true.

I think Hazzard should take up travel writing, if she hasn't already.

Varieties of Disturbance by Lydia Davis

You know when a band releases an album of "b-sides and rarities?" And all but maybe one or two tracks feel like they just weren't good enough to make the cut? That's what this book felt like to me.

This is the first of Davis' work I've read. I don't know if these stories reflect her normal writing style or not. But to be honest, most of these stories felt like blog entries to me. A quick laugh with my morning coffee, sure, but nothing I want to read 40 of in a row.

The stories that didn't feel like blogs felt like writing exercises. Written by someone with talent, sure. But exercises all the same.

The one time Davis breaks through to something meaningful is when she writes about death. The death of both a mother and a father are written about very effectively.

Like a b-sides album, there are a couple of things in this book I'd put on a "mix tape." But for the most part, this book left me cold.