Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

Honesty. Pure, unrivaled honesty. Even Augusten Burroughs' tales of family crazies cannot touch the honesty of David Sedaris's written word, and Me Talk Pretty One Day is no exception. He is brutally honest when describing his father's obsession with saving and eating food long past its expiration date. He is painfully honest when he discloses his drug abuse while feigning artistic inclinations. I think it is this honesty that makes me love Sedaris. I am truly jealous of the candor with which he can tell any story, no matter how embarrassing or slandering it might be. It amazes me that his honesty can literally make me sob but a few pages later can make me laugh until I cry.

The dramatic, emotional swings are paralleled in the bi-continental setting of the short stories in Me Talk Pretty One Day. Sedaris explores the entire spectrum of his life from the time he is his South Carolina grade school taking speech lessons to lessen his lisp to his forays into learning French while living in France, the short story providing the title line. The book is full of binaries: self-conscious pre-teen to self-accepting fifty-something, despising his family to accepting the quirks of his parents and five siblings, and drug addicted to stone sober. These binaries are not special to Me Talk Pretty One Day, however. Naked, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Blue Jeans all exemplify Sedaris's honest look at the changes one takes in life. He is able to poignantly address crazy neighbors and Christmas whores but also look at the funny side of death and addiction. Perhaps the thing that makes Me Talk Pretty One Day special is that Sedaris deftly balances the bittersweet with absurd in a way that, at the end of the book, makes you feel like you've just walked away from one really great therapy session where you realized that a) you can deal with your problems and b) at least you don't have it as bad as this Sedaris guy.

And it is so funny. I laughed until I snorted. This is not to say that Sedaris's other books are not funny because they are very much so, but Me Talk Pretty One Day just has something special about it that makes it unique. Again, Sedaris's honest look at himself is what makes it so personal and like a close best friend. He is able to find the humor in the fact that he is not as smart as his partner and his partner makes him feel better about this fact by stating that he is good at things like "vacuuming and naming stuffed animals." My favorite part of the book occurs in the short story with the same title as the book, in which Sedaris takes us through his evolution from speaking one French word at a time ("ashtray" and "bottleneck") to speaking French phrases: "'Is them the thoughts of cows?' I'd ask the butcher, pointing to the calves displayed in the front window. `I want me some lamb chop with handles on `em.'" I can open to the page this quote appears on and laugh out loud like I had never read it before.

This book is so worth the money and time. If you've not read Sedaris before, this is a great place to start. If you are a longtime fan of Sedaris, you will appreciate his ability to make you think deeply about hilarious instances and to make you laugh at things you probably shouldn't laugh at.

The Ghost King by R.A. Salvatore

There are some things I take into account when I go into a book from R. A. Salvatore. One, that I am highly appreciated of his work getting me interested in both reading and the genre. Two, that it will not be a shining example of genre literature. I expect to find plenty of action -- so much so that it may prove a detriment to the novel; Promise of the Witch King being a prominent example. I also expect to find dwarves with horrible names and various characters philosophizing despite their walks of life. These expectations are based on expectations are based on experience and they are rarely off the track. They were not this time around either.

I have a love and hate relationship with Salvatore's dwarves. I love them because they are often hilarious and some of the more outrageous characters tend to stem from this lot. I hate them because they are often used as little more than comic relief and they turn up so often throughout all of Salvatore's work that it gets old. In The Ghost King, the use of dwarves has been romped up to the point of sniggering glee, which is a contrast to the usual limited use -- after all, who needs that much comic relief? I actually liked this about the book because it provides a contrast to the downward spiral of depression that the novel entails. Instead of brief moments of comic relief, we are instead presented with a line of comedy running along the entirety of a novel. In this it feels less tacked than it would otherwise.

Over the past year or so, I have discovered that I do not gain much enjoyment from reading about fights and battles anymore. It stems from branching out in my reading and encountering a wealth of novels that are more focused on drama than action. However, I did enjoy a few of the battles found in The Ghost King. These few, which I cannot and will not mention thanks to their spoiler nature, managed to impart a feeling of...epicness. The sort of feeling that makes you want to thrust your fist into the air and scream something unintelligible. These scenes were well written and impressive and definitely recieved a nod of approval from me, along with a fist pump and declaration of "Huzzah!" Make no mistake though, not all of the fights or battles in the novel were like this. There were many that left me unintrested and skimming through the barrage of thrusts, slashes, kicks, and punches.

When I read The Pirate King two weeks before, I had quite a bit of respect for it. I enjoyed it more than most of Salvatore's other recent novels because the spotlight was finally removed from Drizzt Do'urden and dropped on some of the minor characters we have met along the way. The Ghost King tries to take this route as well and in a way, it succeeds, but in another it fails. The Pirate King managed to focus the spotlight on a couple of characters, switching over to Drizzt every once in a while to fufill the notiion that it is a novel in the Drizzt series. This novel cannot focus. It tries, it really does, but in the end there are too many characters and too few pages to follow any single one or group of them for any significant length of time.

And that leads me into my major issue with the novel. I am not sure whether there is an enforced word limit -- though I am inclined to believe there is -- but it seemed to me that there was a lot of story either left untold or edited out. Everything seemed rushed, from small things like traveling, to big things, like the conclusion. More time spent traveling, though an idea that strikes me as profoundly distasteful by my own inclinations, would have provided much-needed interaction amongst our desperate group of adventurers. On that same note, a lot of possible tension was siphoned off by skimming over scenes or leaving them to act out in the background. The resolution to the major arc of the novel was glazed over in a fashion that could only br described as lazy, but even then it only stands as the penultimate tragedy, the end of the storyline that ran from the beginning of the novel until the bitter end, was done in such an abrupt manner that the only description I can coin for it is: complete and utter failure.

The Ghost King is a novel written by R. A. Salvatore. That alone is enough to pique the interest of some and to make others scrunch up their faces cand turn away in search of something else to read. The prose here is simple and unadorned -- and therefore inherently readable -- and the liklihood of finding innovation amongst the books pages is slim, but that is the norm. What can be found here is an adventure story filled with more than enough action to keep even the most distracted individuals interested and a wild mixture of characters that promises, at the very least, humor and hints at the possibility of awe and emotion. The Ghost King was a novel that had the potential to be more than good, better than decent, but the issues dragged it down to merely average. I would recommend the book, but only buy it if you are a fan, everyone else should make use of their local library.

The Hours by Michael Cunningham

In 1925, Virginia Woolf published her masterful novel, Mrs. Dalloway. Set during a single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, Woolf brilliantly used techniques which became hallmarks of the modern novel--interior monologue, first person narrative and a stunning, albeit unrelentingly difficult, stream-of-consciousness rendering--to produce one of the masterpieces of twentieth century English literature. Nearly seventy-five years later, Michael Cunningham has used many of these same techniques to write The Hours, a fitting homage to Woolf and a novel which deservedly won both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

The Hours tells the story of a bright June day in the lives of three different women living in three different times and places. The first story is that of Virginia Woolf during a day in 1923, when she is writing Mrs. Dalloway. The second is the story of Laura Brown, a thirtyish, bookish married woman living in the suburbs of Los Angeles. Laura has a four-year-old son and is pregnant with another child as she plans a birthday dinner for her husband on a day in 1949. The third story is that of Clarissa Vaughn, a fifty-two year old, slightly bohemian, literary agent who is planning a party for Richard, her long-time friend and one-time lover, a prominent writer dying of AIDS.

The Hours is, among other things, a nuanced and sensitive picture of middle age in the lives of its characters. Like the novel to which it pays tribute, The Hours relies heavily on interior monologue-on thoughts, memories and perceptions-to drive the narrative and to establish a powerful bond between the reader and each of the female protagonists. The reader feels the psychic pain of the aging Virginia Woolf as she contemplates suicide in the Prologue. The reader has an almost tactile sense of Laura Brown's claustrophobia, of her feeling that life is closing in around her, as she flees to a hotel for two hours in the middle of the day simply to spend time reading (Mrs. Dalloway, of course). And the reader can identify with the yearning, the melancholy, that is suggested when Clarissa Vaughn thinks back to the time when she was young, when her life's choices had not yet been made.

The Hours is written, in short, like all great fiction--with deep feeling and love for its characters-and it stands as one of the outstanding American novels of the past decade. While resonating with the themes, techniques and characters of Woolf's difficult modern masterpiece, The Hours is masterful and original in its own right, an accessible and engaging work that is worth all the time you spend with it.

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

Alice Walker was one of the ones who helped put Zora Neale Hurston's works back on the map, and although the recent film version of Their Eyes Were Watching God probably doesn't match up to the novel's standards, it also was evident in giving more exposure to Hurston's novel. Perhaps one of the knocks against Their Eyes Were Watching God is the lack of plot--which basically consists of Janie experiencing three separate marriages and one tragedy before returning to her home--but it is evident that this journey is deeper than the surface value allows. In many ways, Janie Crawford's experiences are a sort of buildingsroman, or coming of age, in which she gets stronger with each life episode and comes back to a better understanding of who she is and what life is about.

Janie experiences two failed marriages before finally meeting someone who allows her to live, Tea Cake. Although Tea Cake doesn't have the status that either of Janie's first two husbands had, he has a personal quality that helps her express herself more. Starks, the second husband, was a man with great ambition, and although he goes on to be mayor, he keeps Janie secluded from the community. Janie's first marriage was loveless in a way that arranged marriages might have been, and the romantic ideal of "marriage bringing love" Janie realizes, is a fraud. However, with Tea Cake, she is able to live a little, and he has a real aspect to him that the others didn't have.

Certainly another aspect of Janie's character is her self-realization after her spiritual journey. She comes to understand what makes her a complete person, and has a more complete voice in life. It's ironic because Tea Cake, perhaps more than the others, brings on the most scrutiny and judgment from the "others", those who are from her community. But Janie, at this point in her life, can hold her own, and comes to a realization of what is critical in the life experience.

One of the more challenging aspects of the novel is getting used to the dialect. If you have read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, then you know that certain passages are hard to get through, and this novel is similar. As one reviewer commented, listening to this novel on tape or CD would be a great way to experience this dialect for how it should sound. Therefore, it takes a bit of time, but eventually one gets accustomed to it, and can proceed at a quicker pace.

Another interesting facet of Hurston's book is the deeply symbolic nature. Janie's hair seems to be synonymous with self-expression and having a voice; she only is able to free this voice later in the novel when married with Tea Cake. In her second marriage, Janie's hair is kept hidden from all society, and seems to equate with the restrained relationship she has with Starks. The storm that Janie experiences toward the end of the novel seems to be evident of life's struggles and overcoming them. The novel itself is very circular, as it end and begins in the same spot, with Janie having "been to the horizon" and back.

Over all, this is a novel that merits much praise, and it is great to see the revival of this great author.