Recent Reading goodness

A few books I've read this year:

1) Fur, Fortune, and Empire by Eric Jay Donlan was a fair overview of the fur trade and, more importantly, the habits of various mammals slaughtered the last few hundred years in North America.

2) American Green by Ted Steinberg was a very enjoyable read. It is one of those non-fiction books where the topic (in this case the perfect lawn) becomes a sort of metaphor for America and, in this case, a criticism of American indulgence (among other famously American traits).

3) Dolly City by Orly Castel-Bloom is the only novel I've finished this year and the best novel I've read in some time, although I'm sure much of the satire is lost on me. Yet any reader from any culture or country will understand the anxieties, the fears, the horrors of this novel as witnessed by its insane narrator: The baby was still lying on his stomach. I put him to sleep, even though I still didn't know where I was going to cut. I tried desperately to suppress this drive of mine to mess with the child, I tried pacifying it with a simple enema, but to no avail.

What Dolly City has going for it other than the invention and horror and humor shown on every page is that the madness of the narrator is given little perspective. What I mean is, the text then becomes an insanity, a surreal series of bloody "operations" performed with no more thought or preparation than opening a pack of gum, and the relationship between events are given with a crazed person's logic. Late in the book there is an amount of distancing that allows the reader to understand what it needs to understand, but for most of the book this is not a book illustrating the madness of a mother, but is the madness of a mother. The politics of the book aside, I found it the truest story of the mother/son relationship I'd ever read.


Also, as I mentioned a few weeks back, I am now a book reviewer at Red Fez. My first review, of Andrew Borgstrom's rather excellent Explanations, is now up for consumption.

I should note, now, how glad I was that my first book as a reviewer was a book that, from the first page, was, as you'd expect from a writer of Borgstrom's caliber, a very strong bit of prose. I encourage everyone to check out Explanations (and, of course, check out the reviews, comics, poetry and other doings at Red Fez).