Disgrace - J. M. Coetzee

He has long ceased to be surprised at the range of ignorance of his students. Post-Christian, posthistorical, postliterate, they might as well have been hatched from eggs yesterday. So he does not expect them to know about fallen angels or where Byron might have read of them. What he does expect is a round of goodnatured guesses which, with luck, he can guide toward the mark. But today he is met with silence, a dogged silence that organizes itself palpably around the stranger in their midst. They will not speak, they will not play his game, as long as a stranger is there to listen and judge and mock.

A very powerful book centering on disgrace in the lives of a father and grown daughter. The story takes place in South Africa and confronts an amazing array of issues and emotions. The central figure is a male professor who must face his disgrace following an affair at his university. The theme of disgrace continues in the post-apartheid era when he involves himself with his daughter and an abused animal shelter. This is a gut-wrenching read at times, but shines when it illuminates what remains of human humility after suffering severe disgrace.

The author won the Booker prize for this novel and later received the Nobel prize for literature. I concur that he is a fabulous writer. His writing is both sparse and powerful. In simple, direct sentences he creates a complex illustration of humans suffering disgrace and coping with life as it moves forward. The book left me thinking about life at its bare essentials.

Tomorrow - Graham Swift

You're asleep, my angels, I assume. So, to my amazement and relief, is your father, like a man finding it in him ot sleep on the eve of his execution. He'll need all he can muster tomorrow. I'm the only one awake in this house on this night before the day that will change all our lives. Though it's already that day: the little luminous hands on my alarm clock (which I haven't set) show just gone one in the morning. And the nights are short. It's almost midsummer 1995. It's a week past your sixteenth birthday.

What a disappointing read from an author who has won many literary awards! This book all takes place during one woman's sleepless night in bed. She is worried about a discussion with her 16 year-old twin the next morning. The entire book is a first person imaginary dialogue with the children. While that premise might work as she looks back at life, it doesn't work in this book. The reader is kept waiting until halfway through the book to discover the big secret. Getting there is tedious reading and it gets worse after the secret is disclosed. The woman is an unlikable mother with little compassion or understanding. Her first person dialogue is completely unbelievable when it covers frequent and in-details of her sex life both within and outsider her marriage to their father. Can anyone imagine telling their teenage son and daughter, whom she describes as virgins, about her experiences in different sexual positions, the volume and type of her screaming orgasms, or how fluids seep out.

And it isn't just unrealistic sexual discussions, there are boring pages about a cat and a one-night affair. I was actually shocked by the woman's (or the author's?) comments about a non-genetic father's ability to be a father. Cold and Callous? Yes. Worth reading? Definitely not!

A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain - Robert Olen Butler

I have no hatred in me. I'm almost certain of that. I fought for my country long enough to lose my wife to another man, a cripple. This was because even though I was alive, I was dead to her, being far away. Perhaps it bothers me a little that his deformity was something he was born with and not earned in the war. But even that doesn't matter. In the end, my country itself was lost and I am no longer there and the two of them are surely suffering, from what I read in the papers about life in a unified Vietnam. They mean nothing to me, really. It seems strange even to mention them like this, and it is stranger still to speak of them before I speak of the man who suffered the most complicated feeling I could imagine. It is he who makes me feel sometimes that I am sitting with my legs crossed in an attitude of peace and with an acceptance of all that I've been taught about the suffering that comes from desire.

This book is probably the best collection of short stories I have ever read. Not surprising that it won the Pulitzer Prize. Butler has crafted a book that tells the human side of the Vietnam war. Each story, which read like chapters in a novel, is a tale told in first person. Most of the stories are told by Vietnamese immigrants living in Louisiana. They all have a unique relationship to the war ranging from military officer to prostitute. The last tale is told from the perspective of a US soldier who is not missing in action, but voluntarily chose to spend the rest of his life with a woman in Vietnam. The author is amazing in his ability to realistically capture differing and believable voices for a wide variety of personalities. He captures huges emotions and politics in simple situations.

There has been so much attention given to Vietnam. This book is the most human and the most touching I have read. The author has made the storytellers incredibly real with intriguing tales filled with a cornucopia of emotions, including humor. I finished each short story saying "Wow!" to myself. This is a great book in everyway.

Pieces of a Song - Diane Di Prima

Influence (Wooing)
I am no
good at pleading, too proud and
awkward, my hands
know better how to ask, but how
w/you so distant, look the leaves
are gold, remember August they were
green and we lay under them on earth

now we dwell
under roofs, we lie
side by side w/out touching
when I am
alone, my tears drop
thinking of winter

This book is an anthology selected by the author primarily with poems from the 1960s and 1970s. De Prima is a former beat poet who was an early voice for woman. These poems focus on freeing both the body and spirituality of women. Her language can be both blunt and mystical simultaneously. The poems are often reflective of the times, especially those from the 1960s. The later poems are largely based on mystical spiritual experiences. Di Prima has an original style and language that evokes new ways of imagining. Her poems are able to describe in lyrical fashion emotions and ideas which are difficult to put into words--but she does so effortlessly.

Bone Fire - Mark Spragg

The night after Claire gave him the iPod he fell asleep listening to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, waking in the middle of the night with a headache, the buzzing in his chest so acute that he lifted his T-shirt to see what was going on. After that, he let it charge while he slept.
He wore the earbuds during the day when they couldn't find enough for him to do or he got bored shooting baskets, and when he'd heard all the songs three times and they started cycling through again, he pushed the double dash to make it stop. On the evening of his fourteenth day in Laramie, he wrapped the earbud wires in a neat coil around the body of the iPod, laid it out in plain sight beside the computer, then waited.

Don't ask me why I finished this book; nothing in it justifies taking the time to do so. I am curious what grade this professor of creative writing would give a student who turned in this book. It is a poor writing with a disjointed storyline and unsympathetic, cliched characters. There is endless dialogue that is largely pointless. This modern western tale is certainly not one to read after Wallace Stegner, then again, it is not to read following any author.