#250 Will the Circle Be Unbroken- Henry Dumas

#250 Will the Circle Be Unbroken- Henry Dumas

This is a story about the power of music. Probe is a musician playing in a closed off all-black club in Harlem. No outsiders allowed, the power of this music was known to do some serious damage to those outside the circle.

Probe is prepared to play the Afro-horn, one of only three in the world; It is his birthright. “Probe, since his return from exile had chosen only special times to reveal the new sound. There were more rumors about it than there were ears and souls that had heard the horn speak.”

Beyond the social commentary here of protecting culture, keeping the richness of your artistic identity locked in a circle, are truly amazing descriptions of live musical performances:

“The blanket of the bass rippled and the fierce wind in all their minds blew the blanket back, and there sat the city if Samson.”

“Inside the center of the gyrations is an atom stripped of time, black. The gathering of the hunters, deeper. Coming, laced in the energy of the sun. He is blowing. Magwa’s hands. Reverence of skin. Under the single voices is the child of a woman, black. They are building back the wall, crumbling under the disturbance.”

Rating: 8-8-10-8 Total=34

#249 Mountains Without Number- Luis Alberto Urrea

#249 Mountains Without Number- Luis Alberto Urrea

Urrea is a new author for me. Mountains Without Number is the first story in his Pulitzer Prize finalist collection The Water Museum. This is such a great start. Great style, nice slow pace, meaningful and full of soul.

It’s the breakfast club at Frankie’s diner in New Junction, Idaho.  “Everything at Frankie’s is like it ought to be, like it used to be.” New Junction is an old boom-town long past it’s hay day. The oil fields and uranium mines have all dried up, and the big roads have taken all the traffic miles from what’s left of this dying town.

“Is a town dead when the old men die, or when the children leave?”

If you live in a city, with new buildings, new cars, new people, everything is fast, exciting and about the future. But if you live in a small town surrounded by times buttes and open sky, everything is slow, old, and about the past.

“The Cliffs don’t count years—years are seconds to them. Flecks of gypsum pushed off the edge by hot wind. They are the original inhabitants of this valley. And they weren’t always cliffs. They were entire mountains once, until the inevitable carving wind and scouring dust and convulsive earthquakes and cracking ice trimmed them, thinned them, made their famous face appear to oversee the scurrying of those below.”

Notable Passages: “Atop the butte, the spirits of the old ones are indistinguishable from the wind.”

“She can never find Bon Jovi on the radio, only Jesus and Trace Adkins.”

Rating: 10-8-9-9 Total=37

#248 Knock Knock- Chuck Palahniuk

#248 Knock Knock- Chuck Palahniuk

We start 2016 with some excitement. For avid readers, there is nothing quite like beginning a new book. So, you can imagine my excitement in knowing that over the next 3 weeks I will start no less than 15 new short story collections! Add to that a few leftover from last year and a couple of The Best American series, and the first half of this year is going to be some fun around here.

None of the authors I plan on reading during this span is quite like this one. Chuck Palahniuk is such a singular voice in fiction, writing some of my favorite books like Rant, Survivor, and Fight Club, but this is his first collection of short stories. I have the feeling that Make Something Up: Stories You Can’t Unread is going to be quite a ride.

We get the story Knock Knock right out of the gate. It’s a story about a young kid being raised by a father ill equipped to raise a child. All he knows how to do is tell jokes. The kid is way too young to get most of these off-colored, dirty, racist jokes, but he’s not to young to understand that laughing is good, and laughing at Dad’s jokes is all that’s required of him.

“How I learned to say I Love You was by laughing for my old man—even if I had to fake it.”

The Dad gets cancer and will die. All the kid knows how to do is tell jokes and try to heal his father through laughter like he’s seen in the movies. But of course that doesn’t work. Now the kid is all alone having learned nothing but dirty jokes that he doesn’t even understand.

At times touching, at times heartbreaking, Knock Knock, like you would expect from Palahniuk has a dark uncomfortable strain that is like a truthful coat of paint laced with lead poisoning.

Rating: 8-8-9-8 Total= 33

#247 Chance Traveler- Haruki Murakami

#247 Chance Traveler- Haruki Murakami

This is Murakami telling us a story, as Murakami the narrator. Like many of his stories, it breathes better as the story progresses. You’re not sure how or when it happens, but somewhere along the way, you’re caught in a trance, like a day dream or a brief moment of hypnosis.

The story itself, isn’t my favorite of his. It’s about acceptance, fate and coincidence. Things that are around us all the time, but we may not acknowledge or see them until we must.

This is the last Murakami story I will write about for a while. This collection Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is worth the read, although I much prefer his novels. For his stories to truly develop, he needs space and pacing that just cant be given in the short form.

Rating: 9-7-7-8 Total= 31

#246 God- Jack Kerouac

#246 God- Jack Kerouac

For this New Year I begin with some Jack Kerouac. Who better? It’s filled with hope, adventure, and expectation. We start with a blank page: “This page is long blank and full of truth. When I am through with it, it shall probably be long, full, and empty with words.”

A young writer talks with God, it’s not a prayer as much as a conversation.  He ruminates on life, survival, and his will to write original words. Not unlike many who have tried, he struggles with his voice, and sometimes must sell his talents for the mundane needs of life.

“Tonight, I wrote a short story for a fellow on this floor. I toiled with it for an hour and a half. I had to make it exciting, fill it with colorful and authentic descriptions, and pound it out into the conventional whole. That is, wholeness of what is called the common short story. Beginning, middle, end. It has to introduce, enlarge, burst, and die down. So I plunged into it and finished it. It would net me one dollar.”

This was fun to read and think about the art of short story telling, and very house of mirrors. I’m now writing about a writer writing about short story writing.

Notable Passage: “You can’ be an artist unless you’re a member of humanity. Hermits make awful poets, I think. You can’t ruminate peacefully by a little stream in the woods unless you’ve been liberated from the turmoil of civilization. Peace is a relative thing. And it always turns out to be short lived."

Rating: 9-8-9-9 Total=35