What Not to Read

Why not post a few bad books as I battle insomnia?

Enslaved by Ducks by Bob Tarte-- Book club hated it unanimously. We found his stories about one pet bird after another boring and his characterizations of humans non-existent.

Forever by Pete Hamill-- the title isn't kidding. This is a LONG book about an Irish immigrant who is cursed/blessed with immortality as long as he doesn't leave Manhattan. This book needs a serious edit and some less archaic ideas about women.

In the Shadow of No Towers- Art Speigelman -- This kills me as I loved Maus. There is some very compelling stuff here as he recounts his own 9/11 tale and makes some comparisons to the Holocaust experience of his parents (i.e. the smell of burning bodies) but the pages of vintage comic left me cold.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

It's been six years since the 9/11 attacks and many writers have attempted to use art to make sense of both 9/11 and its aftermath. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is the story of Oskar, a young boy whose father died in the World Trade Center and a parallel story about his grandfather surviving the bombing of Dresden. If I hadn't look at the Amazon review, the story about the grandfather would not have come back to me, because Oskar is far more memorable.
A highly intelligent but extremely weird kid, he travels all over New York trying to piece together the meaning behind the key his father left behind in and envelope marked "black" and to come to terms with the loss of his father. Brilliant and a little post-modern, this is a fine beginning toward an understand of the effects of 9/11 on our country and our culture.

Falling Man

It's been six years since 9/11 and I still have mixed feelings reading or watching fictional works that deal with the subject. I've never read DeLillo but have read enough effusive praise of him that I was willing to give a novel of his about 9/11 a try. The main character is Keith, who survives the attacks. He walks from the falling towers to the home of his estranged wife, Lianne, and son, Justin and then stays. Other characters include Lianne's mother and her lover, Martin; another survivor named Florence, a performance artist who recreates the falling man jumping from the towers, and one of the hijackers, Hammad. For me, the book had a lot of great moments that really felt like authentic responses to that day. Justin and his neighbors' obsession with the planes and ''Bill Lawton" (bin Laden) was especially poignant for me. But many of these threads have frustratingly little resolution. I also found the dialogue to be jarringly unnatural in a few places. Overall, I found it to be a compelling, if somewhat incomplete, read.

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11

I stayed up way too late last night to finish Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower. I picked it up after seeing it on practically every best of the year list, and it certainly deserves all those accolades. Wright has constructed a compulsively readable narrative about the history of Islamic radicalism and two of its chief architects, Ayman Al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden. There is also some focus on the U. S. fight to combat terrorism, particularly focusing on John O'Neill, and some of the bureaucratic lack of cooperation between the FBI and CIA. While the build-up and plan for 9/11 is touched upon, Looming Tower primarily describes the origins and shifting philosophies of Al-Qaeda and how they came to be focused upon the United States.