#322 Night at the Fiestas- Kirsten Valdez Quade

#322 Night at the Fiestas- Kirsten Valdez Quade

Frances is sixteen, coming of age and like most teenagers, she is ashamed of her parents. She rides the bus, the one her father drives, on her way to the Fiestas U.nil she gets there, she is still just her father’s daughter.

“Frances had found herself looking away from his sad, obsequious displays of friendliness, embarrassed.”

Frances is smart, but shy. She wishes she could be like her cousin, open, flirtatious and free. She wishes she could be like Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

“If Frances’s life was to be a novel—as Frances fully intended—then finally, finally, something might happen at the Fiestas that could constitute the first page.”

She has an exciting but dangerous interaction with a painter on the bus. She is uneasy about him and the package he accidently left behind. As her and her cousin dance and drink at the Fiesta, Frances is uneasy and can’t seem to fit in.

“She danced and laughed, but her rhythm was off, her voice false and harsh. She gulped the beer until she felt the disembodies sensation of drunkenness, but the feeling only made her less a part of the crowd, untouchable and remote.”

Growing up is messy and complicated, and if you’re not careful you could sell off your own innocence before you even know what’s happening.

Rating: 8-8-9-9 Total= 34

#237 Where the Road Begins- Jack Kerouac

#237 Where the Road Begins- Jack Kerouac

Nobody writes discovery better than Kerouac; discovery, adventure, wonder, and the enlightenment of youth. This is not a true short story, but it’s worthy of a look. Like a lot of what Kerouac writes, this is part fiction, part memoir, part manifesto.

“You embark upon the Voyage, face eager, eyes aflame with the passion of traveling, spirits brimming with gaiety, levity, and a flamboyant carelessness that tries to conceal the wild delight with which this mad venture fills you. You sit in the train, and you begin to feel yourself eased away, away, away…and the gray home town is left behind, the prosaic existence of 18 years is now being discarded into the receptacle of time.”

What could be more romantic a notion than traveling away from home at eighteen? The excitement and kinetic mind of Kerouac makes you want to immediately drop your things and hit the road, anyway…just go, man, go. Reading Kerouac always reminds me how much I love reading, traveling, living. There will never be another like him.

Rating: 7-8-8-10 Total=33

#236 Under No Moon- Amy Hempel

#236 Under No Moon- Amy Hempel

The narrator and her parents are on a cruise to the mouth of the Amazon to see Halley’s comet. The mother believes upon seeing this sight, she will die.

“This was not superstition; it was sixth sense, or second sight. Clairvoyance. It was something she said she knew the way she said she knew the moment her children were conceived. It was how she said she knew which song would be played on the radio next, how she knew to circle one more time around the block before a parking space would open.”

She never got to see the comet due to sickness, but then, or because of that she didn’t die either. The viewing for the other passengers were said to be the worst visibility of the comet in 2,000 years. However, even after trekking into the jungle with tri-pods, and heavy gear, nobody left disappointed.

It’s funny. Sometimes you read something and can imagine it in another voice. Hempel always reads to me as genuine, and straight forward. Even when she’s writing something funny or ironic, it doesn’t have a biting edge. That’s hers style and it’s wonderful. However, reading this story about 45 taxis (out of the whole country’s 47) taking old people into the interior of a tropical island to barely see a comet--one whole taxi used to carry a portable toilet—I imagine the buffoonery that would spew out of the pen of someone like T.C Boyle or better yet, Hunter S. Thompson.

Rating: 7-7-7-7 Total=28

#213 Another Pioneer- David Foster Wallace

By now you should all know how much I love and admire the writing of David Foster Wallace. You’ve heard my gushing diatribes about the genius of these stories, so I will try not to over-hype this—any more than I already have, that is.

What begins as an off-hand description of a passenger’s surroundings aboard a commercial airline, turns into a 26-page running tangent. 26 pages—one paragraph! How very DFW. You either like this type of literary challenge or you don’t. I can picture DFW siting in the airplane himself letting his mind wander where it will, and him just writing down what goes through his mind. This is what came out. One flight, 26-pages, one paragraph, pure brilliance.

Word of the Day: Heuristic-enabling a person to learn or discover something for themselves (google dictionary)

Rating: Once again…Not Rate-able…it is unfair to compare DFW to anyone else. To do so I’d have to develop a whole new system.  He ruins the curve…so lets just say he gets a perfect score and move on. Do I sound biased here? Who cares, it’ds my blog and my rating system.

#197 The Shivering- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#197 The Shivering- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

It is a horrible day in Nigeria. The first lady has died and a plane has crashed killing everyone aboard. In Princeton two Nigerian strangers living in the same building are drawn together to pray.

They develop the type of relationship that only disaster can create, together tentative and deeply meaningful. Ukamaka’s ex-boyfriend was supposed to be on the plane but missed his flight. She talks about him a lot.

“How can you love somebody and yet want to manage the amount of happiness that person is allowed?”

Chinedu is a very religious person who is open about his faith but protective and closed-off about everything else.

“Everybody has a crisis of faith. It’s normal.”

Their relationship gets strained over the weeks they know each other. Despite there obvious connection as foreigners living in a strange country, they have little else in common. She is academic, he’s a construction worker, he’s Pentecostal, she’s catholic. How deep do national connections go? Time will tell.

Rating: 8-7-8-8 Total=31