Confederacy of Dunces
Posted: 2021/09/11 Filed under: Book Reviews, BookLust I, Fiction | Tags: 2021, august, book lust i, book review, Fiction, John Toole, Louisiana, motherhood, new orleans Leave a commentToole, John. Kennedy. A Confederacy of Dunces. New York: Grove Press, 1980.
Reason read: Why was this book on my list? I completely forgot. Probably something having to do with Hurricane Katrina.
Confederacy of Dunces is like cilantro: either you love it and you want it on anything and everything, or you hate it and you think it tastes like soap; you can’t come within ten feet of it. Meet Ignatius J Reilly, the trumpet and lute playing, obese and unemployed, lazy and insolent video gamer still living with his mother at thirty years old. He truly is the master of the deadly sin of sloth.
Reading Confederacy of Dunces was like playing the Untangle Me Game. You know, the one you play with string. Take twenty extremely long pieces of string, tangle them all around a room and then have twenty people chose an end to each piece of string. They must try to crawl over and under one another in an effort to untangle the mess. There are usually prizes at the other end of each string. Trying to follow the plot of Confederacy of Dunces was like trying to crawl under someone with extremely bad body odor in the hopes your entanglement will wind its way far, far away from the offending smell. Except. There was no prize at the end. I didn’t get it. In addition, I have a low tolerance for repetition and Confederacy is redundant on multiple levels. I will say, the best part of Confederacy was the culture of New Orleans. It lived and breathed like an unintended character. The parts about New Orleans I laughed about.
Line I liked, “When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip” (p 6). Okay. Funny.
Author fact: John Kennedy Toole at thirty-one committed suicide in a remote field. Maybe he was too much like Ignatius and couldn’t find his way to success.
Book trivia: Many different people have tried to make A Confederacy of Dunces into a movie. I don’t think it has happened yet.
Nancy said: Pearl said that A Confederacy of Dunces is an example of “What Mothers Ought Not to Do” (p 160). She also called it a “raucous tragicomedy” (p 168).
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “Mothers and Sons” (p 160) and again in the chapter called “New Orleans” (p 168).
Babylon Rolling
Posted: 2018/09/19 Filed under: Book Reviews, Fiction, Lust To Go | Tags: 2018, Amanda Boyden, book lust iii, book review, Fiction, new orleans, september Leave a commentBoyden, Amanda. Babylon Rolling. New York: Pantheon Books, 2008.
Reason read: Hurricane Ivan roared through the eastern seaboard in September 2004. I should know because it disrupted my wedding.
Five very different New Orleans families on Orchid Street are under a microscope in Boyden’s second book, Babylon Rolling. A careless accident will initially bring these neighbors into focus, but it’s the threat of intolerance that tightens their connections to one another.
Ed and Ariel with their two children (impossibly named Miles and Ella), are newly transplanted from Minneapolis, Minnesota. He’s a stay at home dad while she is a GM for a hotel. There is trouble in the marriage. Sharon Harris has all she can handle with her two trouble-making boys, Daniel aka “Fearious” and Michael aka “Muzzy.” Both are druglord wannabes. Cerise and Roy Brown are trying to live in peace with their grown daughter Maria. Racist Philomenia Beargard de Bruges keeps an eye on the street while her husband, Joe battles colon cancer. Then there are the Guptas who have moved into the largest house on the block. Their presence is barely felt in the plot.
One of the least liked elements of Boyden’s writing is her character stereotypes. The voice of each community member vibrates with an exaggerated edge, especially the “thugs” and African Americans. Dialogues sound forced and even comical at times. Confessional: the only character I liked was Cerise. She was the only normal one of the bunch.
Quotes I liked enough to mention, “Ed needed to work on his acceptance of overweight humans” (p 14) and “Her duties at this point in the marriage are very clearly defined, such that she has to do next to nothing for him should she not want to” (p 187).
Author fact: Boyden’s first novel was Pretty Little Dirty which is not on my Challenge list but sounds like it was a success.
Nancy said: Babylon Rolling features “a large cast of exquisitely drawn characters” (Book Lust To Go p 155).
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “News From N’Orleans” (p 155).
Zeitoun
Posted: 2018/04/11 Filed under: Book Reviews, Lust To Go, NonFiction | Tags: 2018, april, biography, book lust iii, book review, Dave Eggers, hurricane, new orleans, NonFiction Leave a commentEggers, Dave. Zeitoun. New York: Vintage Books, 2009.
Reason read: Louisiana was founded in the month of April.
For the rest of the world, Hurricane Katrina and the aftermath of her horrible devastation are receding images in the rear view mirror; images replaced by other natural and man-made disasters of bigger and nastier proportions. To the rest of the world what happened in New Orleans is fast becoming a series of footnotes in history’s troubled narrative. But, for the people of New Orleans, the nightmare is far from over. Zeitoun is just one man’s story. A man who stayed to wait out the storm. A man who tried to help those in need wherever and however he could. A man caught up in racial profiling, prejudices, and fast-ignited bad judgements. There were hundred of stories just like his. Dave Eggers makes the story more interesting than run of the mill.
When it was all said and done, I had to wonder about Zeitoun’s character. Here was a man who stubbornly made his wife and child walk four hours one way on a beach to reach a rock formation he could see in the distance.
As an aside, I tried to not let the rest of Zeitoun’s public story change how I read Eggers’s book. Like everyone else, I Googled Zeitoun and found out about his violent behavior towards his wife and their legal battles. So sad.
Quotes to quote, “The winds were still many days from being relevant to his life” (p 24).
Author fact: Dave Eggers was born in Boston and is my age.
Book trivia: Oddly enough, even though there are photographs in Zeitoun they are of his family and not what everyone would expect, of the devastation in New Orleans.
Nancy said: Nancy outlines the basic plot of Zeitoun.
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “News From N’Orleans” (p 155).
A.D.
Posted: 2016/02/01 Filed under: Book Reviews, Graphic Novel, Lust To Go, NonFiction | Tags: 2016, book lust iii, book review, graphic novel, january, Josh Neufeld, new orleans, NonFiction 4 CommentsNeufeld, Josh. A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge. New York: Pantheon Books, 2010.
Reason read: Mardi Gras is held in New Orleans every February. Rather than read this in August (typical because of the date of Hurricane Katrina) I decided to twist it up a little. Just as Pearl did (see BookLust Twist at the end of this review).
Right from the very beginning you know you are in for something deeply moving and very special when reading the graphic novel A.D. (although technically it is not a novel. Novel implies fiction, right?). Neufeld starts the reader off looking at Earth from outer space. As we look down on North America we almost get a sense of the calm before the storm. On the next page the graphic orientates us to the tragedy to come as we get a bird’s eye view of the city of New Orleans. We are coming in closer. We see the city as one entity and the storm as another, as if they are two strangers being introduced at a party. As the days go by we follow the lives of seven New Orleans residents. This becomes a biography of each individual.
To me, what is incredibly sad is the emphasis on their naivete, their attitude of “this is no big deal” all because hurricanes in their corner of the world come and go. They have lived through them before. They are experts in the realm of weather. That may be true, but no one expected the levies to go…
Yes. You can read this in one day as posting this on the first implies. My recommendation? Read it several times. Read and share it. There is a message hidden in the comic.
My favorite StopYouInYourTracks quote: “At least then we wouldn’t have had to walk on top of the things I cared about the most” (Leo, on page 171).
As an aside: Neufeld wasn’t the only artist to be shocked by Hurricane Katrina. Many talented individuals expressed their grief through art. But, listen to Natalie Merchant. She wrote a song called “Go Down Moses” (on her self titled album) that addresses not only the city of New Orleans after the hurricane, but the Danziger Bridge tragedy as well. Danziger is what she was referring to when she says, “let your people cross over.” Sad.
Author fact: the author of A.D. is JOSH Neufeld. Josh, not Joshua as Nancy Pearl refers to him. He is Josh in twelve different places in the book: on the front cover, on the title page, four times on the copyright page, in the afterward, on the “about the author” page, on the back flap and three in separate instances on the back cover. Not once does the name “Joshua” appear anywhere. Call me crazy, but I think he wants to be called Josh. For more information on Josh and this project, check out this link.
Book trivia: this was a New York Times best seller. Of course it was.
BookLust Twist: in Book Lust To Go but not for the reasons you would think. You’re thinking this would be in the chapter “New Orleans” but it’s not. It’s in “Comics with a Sense of Place” (p 68).
Lives of the Saints
Posted: 2012/08/20 Filed under: Book Reviews, BookLust I, Fiction | Tags: 2012, august, book lust i, book review, Fiction, Nancy Lemann, new orleans Leave a commentLemann, Nancy. Lives of the Saints. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985.
Probably the only good thing to come out of missing a cat is the long sleepless nights I spend reading. I was able to read Lives of the Saints in almost two nights.
Louise is a young woman with a great sense of sarcastic and romance. She has returned to New Orleans after college to work in a law firm. She reconnects with her long time love Claude Collier (as well as his family). Through a series of events Louise and the Colliers are changed forever. While the entire story is short (less than 150 pages) Lemann packs in a lifetime of emotion. What makes the story unique is Lemann’s writing style. She has fun playing with capitalization and repetition. Many reviews I read seem to fixate on the capitalization. I was more distracted by the insane amount of repetition. I wish I could count how many times the color green is mentioned or how many white seersucker suits are being worn. Every big event hosts and green and white striped awning. It’s very distracting. Here’s a small sample, “Saint started talking about bridges. He was Very Interested in bridges lately. Bridges were what made his Life Worth Living. He was studying bridges. Sometimes Claude had to take Saint out for a whole day to look at different bridges in the city. The theme was definitely bridges” (p 43). The entire book is filled with this ‘Rain Man’ like writing.
Favorite lines, “Then to put it differently, he was a man who had, at some juncture, come to know himself, and therefore had come to despise himself, and therefore was deemed worthy of the name: wise” (p 26), “We only saw three races and it was so boring and decadent that I fell asleep form psychological pressure” (p 30), and “His kisses were like conducting conversations with heaven” (p 76).
Reason read: Lives of the Saints takes place in New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina ripped through Cajun country in the month of August. In remembrance of that disaster I am reading Lemann’s book.
Author fact: Lives of the Saints is Lemann’s first book.
Book trivia: Walker Percy called it “nutty” and I couldn’t agree more. This is definitely an odd little book.
BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter simply called “New Orleans” (p 168).
Moviegoer
Posted: 2009/08/14 Filed under: Book Reviews, BookLust I, Fiction | Tags: 2009, august, book lust i, book review, Fiction, lonely, new orleans Leave a commentPercy, Walker. The Moviegoer. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001.
I felt like I was doing this book a disservice by reading it. I was bored half the time and I really couldn’t tell you why. I guess I didn’t fall in love with the main character as quickly or as easily as I wanted to. What is there to say? Binx “Jack” Bolling is a 29 year old stock broker who dates his secretaries. He’s good at what he does so he earns everyone (including himself) a lot of money. He appears to be a shallow man who spends most of his free time going to the movies. The majority of the story takes place in New Orleans which was fun. I have always been fascinating by that area of the south.
For the most part The Moviegoer was a social commentary on a man who prefers to watch life from the sidelines. He doesn’t spend a great deal of effort actually getting out there and making things happen. He has no clue who he is. Probably the most telling moment of the story is when Binx is being questioned: “‘What do you love? What do you live by?’ [he is asked.] I am silent'” is his reply (p 226). He can’t even answer the question of what he holds sacred, of what makes him live.
Best funny lines, “Oh the crap that lies lurking in the English soul” (p 26). Anytime someone uses the word “lurking” in a sentence I’m a fan. “Whenever I feel bad, I go to the library and read controversial periodicals” (p 100). The librarian in me loves the fact he goes to the library and he used the word periodical!
BookLust Twist: From Book Lust and mentioned three times: first, in the chapter called “Companion Reads” (p 65). I was supposed to read The Moviegoer with The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner (which I already read), The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, and A Gesture Life by Chang-rae Lee. All four books represent being more of a spectator to life than a participant. The second time The Moviegoer is mentioned in Book Lust is in the chapter “New Orleans” (p 168), the reason why I read the book in August. The last place The Moviegoer is mentioned is in the chapter “Southern Fiction” (p 223).
August ’09 Is…
Posted: 2009/08/02 Filed under: BookLust I, BookLust II, Fiction, NonFiction | Tags: adventure, astronomy, Fiction, language, Music, new orleans, NonFiction Leave a commentAugust is a long awaited trip homehome. August is the trials and tribulations of hiring. August is a little Avett Brothers, drums and Sean for music. August is getting back to cooking. August is so many different things, including a goal of 84 miles. Don’t ask. Here’s what August is for books:
- The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester (the easiest way to celebrate National Language Month.)
- The Moviegoer by Walker Percy (Marking the anniversary of hurricane Katrina later this month – The Moviegoer takes place in New Orleans.)
- Mutual Friend by Frederick Busch (Celebrating Busch’s birth month.)
- Turbulent Souls by Stephen J. Dubner (Blame it on someone else month. I think I’ll have to wait for the review to explain this one.)
- These Tremendous Mountains by David Freeman Hawke (Celebrating the expedition of Lewis and Clark)
- Wind, Sand & Stars by Antoine Du Saint (August is National Aviation Month)
And for LibraryThing it is: Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey and I really, really should reread the one Early Review book I didn’t get around to reviewing, Honeymoon in Tehran by Azadeh Moaveni.
For fun it’s a bunch of running band vegetable books. Go figure.