2010 Reading #10: Six Easy Pieces

1. Young Adult Novel by Daniel Pinkwater
2. Avilion by Robert Holdstock.
3. Passing by Nella Larsen.
4. A Little Yellow Dog by Walter Mosley.
5. Gone Fishin' by Walter Mosley.
6. Lavondyss by Robert Holdstock.
7. Bad Boy Brawly Brown by Walter Mosley.
8. The Devil's Alphabet by Daryl Gregory.
9. Eisenhower: A Soldier's Life by Carlo D'Este.

10. Six Easy Pieces: Easy Rawlins Stories by Walter Mosley. More Easy; I just can't stop with these. A book of short stories--and really there are seven, so the title is odd--written as bonus material for trade paperback editions of the early Rawlins mysteries; really, though, the stories add up to a novel. Easy's supporting cast shifts, grows, shrinks, changes, and continues to lead him into trouble. As more than one of them points out, though, Easy is a trouble magnet, and despite his oft-stated reluctance, a part of him only seems to come alive when danger is about. Just a few books are left in Easy's story; I'll be sorry for it to end.

2010 Reading #11: The Dream Years

Books 1-10.

11. The Dream Years by Lisa Goldstein. For some time I've entertained the idea of writing a murder mystery starring some of the original Surrealists--Breton, Artaud, Aragon--as the detectives; this is not quite that novel, but it scratches that same itch, to the point where I probably don't need to write mine. Goldstein ties the story of Robert St. Onge, a fictional founding Surrealist, together with that of the general strike of Paris in May 1968; St. Onge slips through time and falls in love with Solange, one of the student leaders who cite the Surrealists as their political and artistic inspiration. Robert's relationship with Breton and his iron-fist control of Surrealism as a movement is complex; Goldstein has a good handle on Breton's dual nature and the rigidly enforced anarchy that he espoused. Goldstein's conceit has it that Robert, André and the other Surrealists are magi, able to fight the armies of conformity with their unchained imaginations. I won't say too much about where that conceit takes the novel, but I confess I found the final showdown to be a bit of an anticlimax. This is, in the end, a very idealistic novel, with a lot of faith in the power of art. I hope that doesn't sound condescending, because I don't mean it that way; on my better days I have that sort of faith. Just not every day.

2010 Reading #12: Ragtime

Books 1-10.
11. The Dream Years by Lisa Goldstein.

12. Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow. This is one of those novels that is excellent in ways that are difficult to articulate. It has odd rhythms. The sentences are straightforward, declarative, staccato, and yet as they pile together they begin to feel like dream images. Ragtime has elements of alternate history--figures like Booker T. Washington, Harry Houdini, and Emma Goldman appear in situations that never really happened--but it feels more like a dream of the United States before The Change. The Change could be more than one thing--World War I, the rise of the Labor Movement, the rise of Hollywood; it's all those things and none of them. Doctorow isn't as interested in the historical mechanics of the change as he is in its repercussions. He's writing, I think quite consciously, about a world that is lost to us, and it's not that he regrets its passing so much as that he wants to comprehend it, to encompass it somehow in his narrative sprawl. It is an extraordinarily good book.