Fallow.

Like many an amateur blogger before me, I keep procrastinating my posts until I look up and it's been weeks since I last wrote. In my case, it's not from lack of copy--I'm always reading--but the opposite: I've finished six books since April 9, and am halfway through a seventh. (And I started an eighth, an attempted YAP break, but the heroine was one of those "oh poor me I'm so pretty and it's so hard putting together designer outfits" character types the appeal of which mystify me entirely. Quit after 20ish pages.) I feel like I owe each and every title a thoughtful, well-worded review; considering I used to regularly write 500 words on a single book for the Watermark newsletter, I know I'm capable of it. But the backlog daunts me, continually. So I'm trying something different today, and letting Goodreads shoulder the cataloging-and-rating burden for the past month. And I'm just going to write about the three books I've really loved.

First: a short-story anthology called, generically enough, Stories, edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio. While most of these contain speculative-fiction elements, they're not really tied together by any more definite themes. Gaiman says in his introduction that the four words that drive storytelling for him are "and then what happened?"; the ensuing collection is a fine, fine narrative salmagundi of page-turners of many stripes, blurring the line between genre and lit-fic with aplomb. (As well they should. It's a stupid line--realism in Serious Literature may be the vogue of this and the last century, but it's only one way to tell a story, and not necessarily the truest. Hell, epic poetry used to be the go-to for culture-defining tales, and that shit rhymed: what's "faker" than that?) Ten days after finishing the book, the one that most sticks in my mind is by Jodi Picoult (which I learned recently is pronounced not Pih-COLT, but PEE-ko. Huh). I've been curious about her for a while; despite her being known for penning tearjerkers for middle-aged women, not my usual cup of tea, I'd come to respect her for tackling tragedy head-on, with startlingly bleak sensibility. She doesn't do happy endings. This story starts with the death of a child in the first sentence and follows the grieving parents as they grow apart. Except here, they grow apart literally: she finds herself able to reach the top shelf, he trips over his suddenly-too-long pajama bottoms. The space between them swells to the magnitude of their dead daughter. It's a breathtaking metaphor for loss.

Ingrid Law's middle-grade novel Savvy caught my fancy two Aprils ago in a big way. An X-Men-y coming-of-age tale about a family where each member acquires a superpower on their thirteenth birthday, it was warm and creative and chock-full of killer figurative language, and introduced me to a great vocabulary word, scumble, an oil-painting term that the characters use to describe mastering their often-destructive gifts. And Scumble's the title of the companion book coming out in August! Huzzah! It is, I would scientifically calculate, 92% as awesome as the original.

I'm currently flying through Robin Bloor's Words You Don't Know, based on his blog of the same name. This is one of those books that turns me insufferable--I'm this close to just announcing to the subway car, "Didja know jentacular means "relating to breakfast"? I'm going to use that all the time!!!" It's finally given me a word for my family's tradition/habit/vice of chattering away about all manner of highfalutin topics at mealtime: deipnosophy, which specifically means "intellectual conversation over dinner"! It's made extra-perfect by how often word origins is the subject of that very conversation.

What I read instead!

The Gone-Away World, Nick Harkaway: YES YES YES. Like a dystopic Catch-22, full of black humor and tongue-dazzling wordplay, a great end-of-world-and-after scenario, and wonderful characters. Destined to be a classic--and unlike back-of-book blurbers, I do not use that phrase lightly.

Hotel Iris, Yoko Ogawa: I've read three books by Ogawa now (I think that's every one translated into English so far) and they've all been wildly different, but all stark and beautiful. This one is very dark, about the BDSM relationship between a 17-year-old girl and a man fifty years her senior. Point your mom towards The Housekeeper & the Professor instead.

The Boneshaker, Kate Milford: Middle-grade steampunk FTW! Full of creepy automatons, snake oil salesmen, and deals with the Devil, with an appropriately plucky heroine. Loved it.

Books I couldn't finish.

The Golden Calf, Ilya Ilf & Evgeny Petrov: Billed as "the funniest novel of the Soviet era"! Which it very well may be, but I'm reminded of a saying I never heard until I left my hometown: "like the tallest building in Wichita."

In Hovering Flight, Joyce Hinnefeld: Yup, creeped out by birds.

The Passage, Justin Cronin: Oh man, I really really tried with this one. It's the book of the summer, apparently, and has indie booksellers all het up about it; my co-worker Stephanie read and liked it; it's a post-apocalyptic vampire book, which should be right up my alley, right? And yet. I just couldn't get past the writing, which seems overwrought and flat at the same time. I kept thinking of Michael Crichton--and while I enjoy a good potboiler, this book is 750+ pages. To keep on keepin' on that long, a book has got to be awesome. So no. This one defeated me.

Some woefully brief recaps.

Here's everything I've read this month:

All Other Nights, Dara Horn: I might have read this in hardcover had someone pointed out it was about the Jewish experience of the Civil War, as I'm all for slants-I've-never-thought-of on familiar events.

The Origin of Species, Nino Ricci: Set in mid-80s Canada, this novel about the suffocating life of a sad-sack graduate student who learns he has a son in Sweden was just pretty good until Ricci drops in a 100-page, self-contained novella about an ill-fated, life-changing trip to the Galapagos two-thirds of the way through the book. Then: amazing.

The Eyre Affair, Jasper Fforde: Sad to say, I didn't love this alternate-reality homage to the power of literature. The wordplay and rife allusions were great, but the love story was lackluster, and the writing shifted from first to third person in a distracting and not narratively coherent way.

The Cat in the Coffin, Mariko Koike: Speaking of Jane Eyre, this is a lovely, taut Japanese take on the governess-and-dark-secret genre.

Poisonville, Massimo Carlotto: A modern Italian noir, set in the dying industrial Northeast. Decent, if standard.

The Braindead Megaphone, George Saunders: I'll admit to skipping some of the political essays in this collection, as a skimming of proper names revealed the same old tiresome partisan myopia. But the satirical pieces were well-honed, and the literary essays were top-notch, especially his loving introduction to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Speak, Laurie Halse Anderson: I've been a huge fan of Anderson as a mother since I started working with her eldest almost six months ago. Having gotten around to reading her most famous novel--brutal, intense, somehow often funny--I can join the chorus for her as a writer.

The Chill, Romano Bilenchi: Another Italian novel, this one coming-of-age. Again, good without reinventing the wheel.

For Grace Received, Valeria Parrella: Ah, finally an above-average Italian entry! Four sad, stark slices of Naples.

Elegies for the Brokenhearted, Christie Hodgen: This was my favorite read of the month. It's a first-person novel told in second-person looks back at five significant people she's lost: a life told in deaths.Hodgen's writing spins out dependent clauses like carefully controlled ripples of language.

Right now I've started Joyce Hinnefeld's In Hovering Flight; I'm wondering if it'll manage to sustain my interest despite my being deeply unsettled by birds.

Steam.

Picked up a steampunk anthology of my roommates' (ed. Ann & Jeff Vandermeer)--surprisingly, not a lemon in the bunch. Favorites? "The Steam Man of the Prairie and the Dark Rider Get Down," Joe R. Lansdale; "The Selene Gardening Society," Molly Brown; and Neal Stephenson (duh).

And I'm catching up on new paperbacks: Robert Goolrick's A Reliable Wife is more or less an erotic Ethan Frome. (For me that's a compliment. Your mileage may vary.)

Two quick reads.

The Art of Eating In, Cathy Erway: I will confess that two-thirds of the way through, I just started flipping to the recipes at the end of the chapters. This is another entry in the gimmick-life-project-turned-blog-turned-book category, which is always hit-and-miss: Erway didn't eat in a restaurant in New York for two years, a pretty staggering achievement (though I would argue that hipster foodie underground supper clubs are restaurants, just illegal ones. Exchanging money for prepared food is what defines a restaurant meal, yes?). But the book is tiresomely full of predictable mid-twenties dating drama, which is only ever interesting to the people it directly involves, and maybe their friends, out of politeness--the general reading public? Not so much. And while it's admirable to cook at home, as well as much cheaper, better for the environment, good for the soul, etc., one doesn't have to then become a super-creative gourmet cook. Ain't nothing wrong with pasta and burritos.

Heart-Shaped Box, Joe Hill: Yeah, I like Horns enough that I sought out his first novel, which is even better, though more linear. And, in what I think really defines horror fiction as successful, IT IS SCARY AS HECK ZOMG.

A (mostly) good run.

Blackout, Connie Willis: NEW CONNIE WILLIS NOVEL HOLY CRAP. And it's set in the time-traveling Oxford world of Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog! Of the two, it's closer to Doomsday in ominous tone, though still filled with the greatest comic incidental characters this side of Jane Austen. Both marvelous and maddening, though, is the fact that this novel is essentially setup, as three historians studying WWII through experiencing the early child evacuations, the rescue of the British Army at Dunkirk, and the London Blitz gradually realize they're stranded in the past, and have no one to turn to but each other. The "sequel," All Clear (really, it's one story; I'm guessing Spectra didn't want to publish it as one 1000-page Neal-Stephenson-size tome), comes out in August; I'm looking forward to the excuse to read Blackout again.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer: I had this impressed on me by a friend as an excellent companion to Sasa Stanisic's How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, and there are definite similarities, especially in the narrators, children simultaneously precocious and innocent in their experience of adult tragedy (9/11 and the Serbian-Bosnian war of the early 90s, respectively). Both also err on the side of "too clever by half"--not a problem for me, as I can't stand prose that doesn't acknowledge the figurative possibilities of language--though Extremely at times veer into preciousness (I wasn't totally behind the non-text visual elements).

When You Reach Me, Rebecca Stead: This year's Newbery winner (I get a kick out of having met her at WORD's author open house in December--that's three, I think, with Madeline L'Engle and Paul Fleischman), paired with having read Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book last year, really makes me think I should go back and read some more winners of recent since-I've-"grown-up" vintage, because they KICKED ASS. When You Reach Me is a gradually unfolding time-travel mystery AND a coming-of-age story AND a snapshot of Manhattan in the late 70s AND a homage to A Wrinkle in Time--I was super excited when Miranda, the heroine, gets a copy for Christmas signed "Tesser well," JUST LIKE MINE!!! The plot is precisely machined and self-contained, more so than a lot of adult science fiction. Good stuff.

Lowboy, John Wray: What I loved most about this novel, which follows a runaway schizophrenic teenager and the detective searching for him with the boy's mother through the MTA system, was its evocation of the subway itself--relentlessly corporeal in its dirt and screeching brakes and massed humanity, but somehow mystical in its ability to connect the aboveground world through its burrows. It's the subconscious of the city.

The Patience Stone, Atiq Rahimi: This won the 2008 Prix Goncourt, but I found it slight and predictable. An Afghan woman whose husband is comatose from a gunshot wound pours out her frustrations and secrets to his unreacting figure, and it's meant to be a powerful portrait of oppression--I think it goes too far in giving her Shocking Revelations that make for interesting fiction but miss the mark of casting her as Everywoman. The myriad daily hurts and humiliations lose their force in the author's overplayed hand.

The Proof of the Honey, Salwa Al-Neimi: I didn't finish this one. It's unfortunate that I picked this, an erotic novel by an Arabic woman, right after the disappointment of The Patience Stone. I'd argue that the proof of an erotic novel is whether it gets the reader rarin' to go, and this just slapped an intellectual veneer over romance-novel goosh, without satisfying either. Boring.

Clumsy, Jeffrey Brown: Relationships, like war, are wholly individual and wholly universal at the same time. Brown's debut graphic novel gets this.

Horns, Joe Hill: The second novel by Stephen King's kid! A young man mourning his murdered girlfriend wakes up from a spectacular drunk with diabolical horns curving from his temples, and soon discovers they give him the unpleasant ability to draw out confessions of people's darkest desires. The flashback structure here is top-notch.