This month was excellent for books. I found three new novels by some of my favorite authors, plus another couple really excellent titles. I also happened to run across a web page called Stump the Bookseller at Loganberry Books (http://loganberrybooks.com/stump.html). For $2, you can send them a short synopsis of the plot. They will then post it and help you find the title and the actual book. I posted 2, one of which they found within a day. Turns out the bizarre sci-fi book I read in middle school was actually a Quebecois title, translated to English in the 70s and finally ending up in our dinky library. Already more half-remembered plots are bubbling up in my mind. Anyway, on to the books.

The Ice Queen - Alice Hoffman

Hoffman is herself a queen - of magical realism. While spinning her story, she dabbles a toe her in there in pools of the fantastic. You barely notice the ripples here and there, until suddenly the most fantastic things seem totally believable. Sure, I can believe the woodman cut off his leg and had it replaced with tin. Sure, I can believe he cut off his other limbs and had them replaced with tin too. So why not his head also? And suddenly a tin woodman seems rational.

The Ice Queen is by far one of Hoffman’s best in recent years (though I did really like The River King). Her story is of a woman who made a horrible wish as a child and had it come true. She become frozen in her own little world until a cataclysmic event shocks her out of her static life. The book is beautiful and strange with the slight haze of the fantastic throughout.

Check out Practical Magic while you are at it. 100% better (and darker) than the movie, I guarantee.

Eleanor Rigby - Douglas Coupland

Though I’ve never heard him described as such, I also consider Coupland a magical-realist. Mostly he is known as the darling writer of Gen-X, whatever that may be. Coupland does have a knack for creating wholly believable modern characters. Parents and elders are not omnipotent. They are as lost, confused, poor and as uncertain as their children. His characters have lousy jobs, mediocre relationships, unpleasant but common maladies and dull, trivial lives. However, like a good magical-realist writer, the out-of-the-ordinary intrudes with events and people that don’t fit any category. They change the outlook and lives, not only of the main characters, but of everyone surrounding them. In Eleanor Rigby, Liz Dunn, a dull and lonely accountant, suddenly finds she has another parallel life waiting for her after a man she has never met lists her as his emergency contact. She returns from the hospital, no longer a mundane and trustworthy employee and sibling, but a woman with a past. Lots of strange plot twists, short bursts of Coupland’s own modernist brand of philosophy and his own special brand of happy ending.

Also check out Microserfs and All Families are Psychotic.

The Mermaid Chair - Sue Monk Kidd

The third of the "Books by Authors I Really Dig" is Sue Monk Kidd’s new book The Mermaid Chair. Kidd made quite the splash a few years ago with The Secret Life of Bees (so much so that one of my friend’s left the tech sector to start an apiary). The Mermaid Chair is a bit slower and sadder than Secret Life, but beautiful and tense. Her main character, Jessie, goes home to take care of her mother on a small island off of South Carolina. While trying to take care of her cantankerous and possibly mentally ill mother, Jessie falls in love with a monk at the nearby monastery. She swings from guilt to happiness, inspired to paint for the first time in years and at the same time fearful that she will destroy everything she has built with her husband and daughter. While the story is relatively straight-forward, Kidd has such a wonderful alive way of writing that even standing is rotting swamp muck sounds fabulous.

Leaving the Saints - Martha Beck

I’m not sure really what to classify this book as. After deciding to have a Downs Syndrome baby, Beck describes her decision to leave grad school and Harvard to return to her hometown of Provo Utah and her Mormon family. Through a winding path she describes the friendliness and welcoming attitude of Mormon neighbors, her own bizarre family and childhood, Mormon customs and beliefs, working at Brigham Young University and her own supposedly repressed memories of abuse by her father. While her beliefs about the abuse can be left to the reader, her total lifestyle description of life in a Mormon town is fascinating. Life is both welcoming and open and yet completely repressive. Rules are set for members for every aspect of their lives and everyone is watching everyone else to make sure they toe the line. Beck recounts various anecdotes of repression at the college, competition among mothers to be the very best homemakers, strange Mormon customs and rituals and other aspects of life in Utah. While her story is often grim and even scary, Beck’s upbeat personality shines through. She tells stories of making her pre-kindergarten teacher cry after she decorated her gingerbread house to look like King Hrothgar’s Hall, replete with black licorice Grendel on the roof and food coloring entrails decorating the frosted snow. In other places, she points out some of the ludicrous interpretations of the Prophet Smith’s writings and desperate attempts to make them seem vaguely lucid. All in all a fascinating read, no matter where you come down on Beck’s memories. I guess only time and Oprah will tell.

Here Speeching American - Kathryn Petras and Ross Petras

So enough with the serious literature already.

The Petras siblings came up with a hilarious little collection of horribly, painfully mangled attempts at English from around the world. Fans of engrish.com will recognize some of the old favorites ("No smorking!" )but there is a world of doozies here:

Travel - "Lhasa Reception Centre for the Unorganized Tourist" sign in Tibet
Rules - "Foot Wearing Prohibited" Buddhist template, Burma
Road Signs - "The Slippers are Very Crafty" - China (wet roads)
Wonderful Products - "Super Soft Computerized Socks" Madras India
Food "Crap Rolls, Crap Cream Spaghetti and Crap Cream Risotto" menu items in Italy
English Guidebooks - " To craunch a marmoset. Exculpate me by your brother’s. She make the prude" English phrases from The New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English
Advertising - " Before going to work, have a few lapses in the pool." Ad for a Bangkok condo

Very Bad Poetry - The Petras Siblings

I did so enjoy Here Speeching American that I grabbed another one of the Petras’ books. Through what must have been painfully arduous research, the duo managed to out together a collection of the worst poetry ever. No really, it is that bad. Godawful, in fact. Poems include:

The Dentologia- A Poem on the Diseases of the Teeth

Whene’er along the ivory disks, are seen.
The filthy footsteps of gangrene;
How Strange Are Dreams
How Strange are dreams! I dreamed the other night
A dream that made me tremble
Not with feat, but with a strange reality;
My supper, though late, consisted of no cheese.

Other fantastic poems include odes to: cheese, really really big cheese, carion crows, a girl with one eye, the happy cripple, the potato, Kansas, earwigs, my last tooth and other horrors. The book culminates on the poem that Petras decide is truly the worst ever. You decide. Vogons, eat your heart out.