GOD SAYS NO by James Hannaham

I wound up liking this so much more than I expected to. I mean, look at that cover. It's brutal. It was weird to receive it from McSweeney's, a company whose aesthetics I'm usually in love with. They've never put out anything ugly. Everytime I recieve a package in the mail from them it's exciting, and not always because of the writing contained within. I openly judge these books by their covers. Just not enough to avoid reading them. They are paid for, after all.

I kind of hated it for the first two hundred or so pages. Then I realized that my response to the book shouldn't necessarily be based on my reaction the the main character, Gary Gray, a Christian who struggles with "SSAs" (same sex attractions). He's an innocent dude in denial about his sexuality, and sometimes the mix of that and his religion make him into kind of an asshole. It's a tough read sometimes, especially when his wife is trying to get him into bed with her and he responds agressively, as if he were in an argument.

Hannaham, who doesn't strike me as the most compassionate author (he thinks his book is a lot funnier than it actually is), really gets into this guy's head. The book is written in the first person and a lot of it is what runs through the guy's mind. Struggles, hopes, faith, and all. He really did an impressive job.

Cat's Cradle is the best book my little book club has read so far, and I chose it.
So I rule.

I wrote a brief review of this book for another website, but it has bugs that won't allow me to access it anymore. So I'll do it here.

This is my second Vonnegut novel-length experience. The first one was Breakfast of Champions. Cat's Cradle is some high concept stuff about the end of the world and all the ridiculous circumstances that bring it about.

I've said this before, I know. I don't read the backs of books so I'm not gonna talk about the book too much here. I hate spoilage and I'll have no part in it! I'll just say that it really, really was a solid read full of satire and dark humor. It is equal parts terrifying and hilarious, and I wish everyone would read it. I feel as though everything Vonnegut was trying to do here was accomplished. All the funny, all the dark, etc.

Dictators are frightening. Religion, terrifying. And a good time was had by all.

The Setting: Victoria, BC Fairway Grocery Store
A CREEPY OLD MAN approaches me and asks me the following:
"Why do women live longer than men?"
"Why?" I ask.
"Because they don't have wives."
I fake laugh and he starts to walk away. Then he turns around and faces me again.
"Why can't Barbie and Ken do it?"
I knew the answer to this one. "Because they don't have genitals."
He corrects me. "Because Ken comes in another box."

With regard to August 13th's entry,
Yeah, Not so Much Anymore.

Zoe’s Tale was a totally dissatisfying read. It was a means to an end and that end was to fill the holes in the previous book in John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War universe, The Last Colony. I ate up The Last Colony. I fell in love with the characters and their situation, lost in space, not being able to communicate with their own people because they were, in a way, exiled. I enjoyed their wit and audaciousness.

I remember picking it up on a whim before a trip and beginning to read it at the airport. I remember Jesu was what was playing on my headphones, while my ex-girlfriend read whatever it was she was reading and listened to whatever it was she was listening to. We had probably missed our flight and were killing time until the next one. That’s how we travelled. We ran late, missed flights.

Once I finished The Last Colony, I ordered the two previous books in the story, Old Man's War and Ghost Brigades. I ate them up too. I read them in record time, and I was ready to follow John Scalzi through this or any series of books. I hadn't read sci-fi this fun since Ender's Game.

Anyway, The Last Colony had massive plot holes and untied loose ends, and Zoe's Tale, the story of The Last Colony told from the point of view of the protagonists' teenage daughter, was Scalzi's attempts to fill those holes and tie those loose ends.

Zoe, the teenager telling the story, is all sassy and smart and her personality just bleeds through the pages. It's clunky and weird and there was a part at the very beginning where I worried she might try to fuck her female best friend.

I'm sure it's a hell an undertaking for an adult male author to write a book from within the head of a teenage girl, and I can appreciate the ambitiousness of the project, but in this case it didn't work. I'm not interested in spoiling anything about the book so I won't go into scenes that I disliked in particular, but I can say that I was a little relieved when it was over. I didn't want to see teenage Zoe ever again. I like John Scalzi, mostly, and I'll keep reading his books. Maybe even one where Zoe's an adult and it doesn't feel like Scalzi's so far out of his element.

Yeah.

I'm Feeling Pretty Good.
I'm working out a whole lot and eating pretty well.
I've pretty much eradicated cheese in my diet, and I've been going to the gym on my lunch breaks.

I. I. I. I. I.

The World Beneath is a book that I picked up at The Stranger's Slog Happy, a monthly happy hour event in which the Stranger staff invites their readers to come out and have a drink with them. There are food and drink specials, friendly people, and free books. Their literary critic brings out a whole mess of galleys and uncorrected proofs (same thing?) and people are invited to take books home with them, read them, and review them.

There's really only one thing about Aaron Gwyn's The World Beneath that bothers me, and I'll take a moment to get it out of the way-- it seems like a modern fiction cliche to have the story's hero be traumatized by something that happened to them when they were younger. The death of a child by being run over, the death of a wife by fire, the death a little brother by drowning, the discovery of an artifact-collecting grandfather in the middle of an old-people orgy sex ritual, etc. Each hero is haunted by what they've seen or whatever else life has dealt them, and it has a tendency to inform their decisions for the rest of the book. It also has a tendency for flashback-making.

Oh, well. The rest of The World Beneath is about a few different things, all of which revolve around holes in the ground and Native American myths. There are three characters whose stories are told-- each of them broken in a different way because of their traumas. JT, a half-Mexican half-Chickasaw boy, a loner, is obsessed with going underground to be with his dead father. Sheriff Martin blames himself for his little brother's death and spends his entire life trying to make good on that, and Hickson Creed fought in the first Gulf War and is suffering from PTSD. The story flashes back and forth between two different timelines and JT's own narration of some of the important events in his own life, and all three character's lives intersect.

The World Beneath is a relatively short, spare story that sadly, loses some of steam as it moves forward but still is a story very much worth your time. This is Aaron Gwyn's first novel, and I'm looking forward to the second.