Staff Picks Reviewer: Faith

The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver [Audiobook]

view/request

Barbara Kingsolver reads her ambitious 2009 novel in a soft and expressive voice with deliberate pacing. The story unfolds over three decades in Mexico and the U.S., and each character has a particular voice within the author’s reading. It centers on the young man Harrison Shepherd whose parents (American father and Mexican mother) are marginal to the picture, and who keeps diaries in which he is a third-person narrator of his own life. Though he holds himself as a perpetual outsider, his life is in the middle of some serious action: as a teenager he gets a job as a plasterer and then a cook for Diego Rivera, living with the painter, his artist wife Frida Kahlo and the exiled Leon Trotsky for whom Shepherd does clerical work. Later, he moves to South Carolina on his own and becomes a successful novelist, until he is targeted by Joe McCarthy’s HUAC. The fictionalized descriptions of these larger-than-life figures and the historical events surrounding them are the focus of the novel, with the main character acting as quiet observer and chronicler, adding his own wry take on the proceedings. It’s an unusual device that creates an inside view of epic times through distant eyes that could be your own. Which is not to say there’s no emotion in it–there’s more than enough passion in the cast of characters, and plenty of historical context to arouse the reader’s.

The Magicians by Lev Grossman [Book]

view/request

What if Harry Potter and his friends were older and lived in New York instead of England? Despite its references to Narnia and other fantasy classics, The Magicians is not a children’s book. The protagonist is neither hero nor anti-hero — he’s more like an actual human being (granted, with magical gifts) looking for meaning in the world and generally failing to find it. He and his classmates graduate from a secret, elite college for wizards and don’t know what to do with the rest of their lives. (Here’s where the existential literary fiction comes in.) Everything is open to question — was that a quest we were given, or are we just projecting? — and the lines between good and evil are often unclear, or beside the point. The plot is twisty enough and the prose captivating and spiced with humor. There are occasional disappointments, but The Magicians is still an adventure that’s hard to put down. It’s going to make a great movie someday.

The Mighty Uke [DVD]

view/request

The Bedwetter by Sarah Silverman [Book]

view/request

The Bones of All Men by Philip Pickett and Richard Thompson [Music CD]

view/request

This album marries two of my favorite genres of music: specifically, 16th century Renaissance dances and British folk-rock of the 1960s and ’70s.
Richard Thompson and some ex-Fairport Convention comrades joined conductor and multi-instrumentalist Philip Pickett (who has Albion Band credentials as well as early music) in 1998 to rock out on a selection of tunes by William Byrd’s contemporaries. When I used to play electric harpsichord for English Country Dancing back in the early ’90s, this was the sort of sound I dreamed of achieving. Imagine a note-perfect recorder consort accompanied by Dave Mattacks on drums, or dueling krumhorn and electric guitar, or virginal with a very electrified bass continuo. The tunes are brilliantly arranged, irresistibly driving, reverently irreverent (or vice versa), passionately fun and absolutely classic in every sense of the word. Turn it up, way up.

One of our Thursdays is missing by Jasper Fforde [Book]

view/request

Jasper Fforde’s latest offering in the Thursday Next series is a metafictional tour de farce. The original Thursday — literary police Special Operations Agent (ret.) and the star of her own series of novels-with-novels — has disappeared, and it’s up to her fictional character to find her by impersonating the real Thursday. There’s a border dispute in BookWorld between the genres of Racy Novel and Women’s Fiction, and if Thursday doesn’t show up for the peace talks, war might ensue. Fforde sprinkles his story with characters and allusions from the classics and popular fiction, and makes liberal use of puns including setting up whole subplots just for a punch line. His style is uncategorizable and nearly indescribable, at least not in a way that makes any sense, but irresistibly entertaining and uniquely inventive. This sequel refers back to things that happened (or didn’t) in previous titles in the series, and it might help to start with the first installment, The Eyre Affair.

The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown [Book]

view/request

The first odd thing I noticed about this novel is that it’s told in the first person plural. It’s a clever and engaging device for sisters talking about themselves and each other, and kept me attentive to whose point of view I was reading as it shifted from the inside of a character’s head to one, two or three characters collectively observing another. The voice is opinionated, familiar, loyal, funny, and often jealous or spiteful as siblings are about each other. Not much happens (three adult sisters move home as their mother struggles with cancer; they find themselves to be more than they thought) but plot doesn’t much matter as the book is about personalities, family relationships, and how we evolve through involvement with others. A rich vein of Shakespeare runs through Weird Sisters in the naming of characters, the professor father’s constant quoting, and the cast of literary archetypes that inhabit these contemporary, believable women.

Anthem for Doomed Youth by Carola Dunn [Book]

view/request

The 19th Daisy Dalrymple mystery was my introduction to this cozy murder series. Daisy is an aristocratic young mother whose husband is a Detective Chief Inspector at Scotland Yard. Set in 1920s London, the mystery revolves around some veterans of the ‘Great War’ whose bodies were found secretly buried in Epping Forest. The heroine possesses curiosity, common sense, intuition and a sly sense of humor. The period setting is engaging and the unraveling of the plot complicated enough to keep turning the pages. With the lead character’s appeal and just the right amount of Anglophilia, this was fun enough for me to borrow another one.

The Triplets of Belleville [DVD]

view/request

Sylvain Chomet’s feature-length animated film is like nothing you’ve ever seen. It’s weird, funny, sad, serious, lighthearted, suspenseful, perverse, sweet, surreal, retro, postmodern, and fantastic (in both senses of the word). There is virtually no dialogue, but there is music, adventure and character aplenty. The animation is hand-drawn and loaded with sophisticated detail. There are homages to Fred Astaire, Josephine Baker, Jacques Tati, the Andrews Sisters, and Django Reinhardt. The plot is quite satisfying, yet the style is the overwhelming story here. Despite the near-total absence of language, it could only be French. I have seen it three times so far and haven’t begun to get tired of it.

Bossypants by Tina Fey [Book]

view/request

SNL and 30 Rock star, writer and producer Tina Fey is as smart and irreverent as she is funny. This memoir gives an inside look at the improv comedy incubator Second City, developing material for Saturday Night Live, and how Fey and her contemporaries broke through the glass ceiling of comedy.*
Here in a quick engaging read is an honest tongue-in-cheek and witty look at success, motherhood, TV, sexism, and lots of famous people you may have been wondering about. A few classic scripts are included, notably the Sarah Palin/Hillary Clinton sketch that Fey and Amy Poehler did in the 2008 campaign season.

* “Women just aren’t funny.”–every male producer/director from the beginning of time.

The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party by Alexander McCall Smith [Book]

view/request

In the latest installment of the popular No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, Mma Grace Makutsi gets married, Mma Precious Ramotswe deals with a complicated case of attacks on a farmer’s cattle, and the tiny white van takes on a metaphysical dimension. McCall Smith’s characters handle the large and small dilemmas of life with a realistic mix of (mostly) good intentions and human vulnerability. His prose is charming and the loving portrait of Botswana, always in the background, makes you want to go there.

The Humanist [Magazine]

view/request

The American Humanist Association, founded in 1941, publishes The Humanist six times a year. It covers social issues, current events, science, arts and literature from the point of view of humanism, “a rational philosophy informed by science, inspired by art, and motivated by compassion.” This month’s issue has articles about religion, health care, technology, war, sexuality, and peace activism, plus poetry and book reviews. The writers explore ethical and environmental questions “free of theism and other supernatural beliefs,” applying intellectual analysis and practical thinking to the goals of liberty, dignity, and responsibility.