Bliss by O.Z. Livaneli

(Ed.-- That number thing on the left side is broken. This is book #35.)

Not that long ago, I purchased a box full of $1.99 books from the internet, several of which I’ve already written entries about. All told, that shipment was lackluster, filled with books that were worth little more than a shrug and a Frisbee toss back into the box. I wasn’t expecting a trove of Penguin Classics or anything, so I’m not offended by a little light reading. I did get lucky, however, to receive the novel Bliss, by Turkish novelist O.Z. Livaneli. A scant 276 pages, Bliss captures the struggles of a country and populace trying to decide their roles in the world.

Turkey is an odd country, geography-wise. While most of it is considered Asia, bits can theoretically be classified as Europe. Stuck between the secular West and religious East, Turkey is still striving to create a solid identity. The nonreligious government dreams of membership within the European Union, which is hindered by the increasing Islamist factions within the country. It’s a strange world where cultures clash in great waves. Livaneli demonstrates these divisions with his characters: Meryem, a teenage villager who is raped by her uncle; Cemal, her cousin sent to take her to Istanbul for a ritual killing; and Irfan, a professor in a mid-life crisis. The three lives collide on a boat in the middle of the Aegean.

Turkey is at a crossroads in its development. Will it continue to throw itself against the wall of Europe, trying to achieve acceptance in its fairly anti-Muslim clique? Or will it roll over to the continuous tide of Islamist factions and institute a religious-based government, an Asia Minor Iran? Turkey has been in the news lately, but the world should keep an eye on this region. Their choices in the near future may affect us all.

The Case Book of Victor Frankenstein by Peter Ackroyd

Have you ever read a book and have just been entirely unsure as to why the author decided to take the time to write it? That’s pretty much how I feel about The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein by Peter Ackroyd. A slightly adjusted retelling of the Frankenstein story by Mary Shelley, the novel does little to improve or grow upon the original story. Essentially, Victor Frankenstein, a young scholar from Switzerland, enrolls in Oxford, where he meets the revolutionary poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Consumed with a drive to test the boundaries of life and the Divine, Frankenstein obtains a series of bodies through London’s resurrection men and creates the famous monster that we all know and love.

While Ackroyd makes use of the different setting to introduce Frankenstein to the likes of the Shelleys and Lord Byron, I still can’t see the point of this book. The original works in so many ways—why even bother to create what is essentially a remake? Granted, it takes a historian like Ackroyd to make London come alive as it does in this novel. The city has so many sides, so many mysteries, that it is a perfect character for any and all period novels. Still, it is a pale imitation of something that has already been perfect for years. I don’t like to say that any work of art is a waste of time, but do yourself a favor and pick up the original Frankenstein. You’ll never get those hours back if you waste them on this one.

A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick

Robert Goolrick’s novel, A Reliable Wife, introduced to me a Wisconsin I never knew existed. Up to this point, my only insight into the great state was that it was cold, residents hate the Minnesota Vikings, and there is always a brisk sale of cheesehead hats. Goolrick portrayal bitch-slaps my theory, showing me a 1900’s Wisconsin that was so desolate and hopeless that it drove people mad.

Not exactly a Midwestern paradise.

A Reliable Wife isn’t really about Wisconsin. Instead, we follow a mail-order bride, who doubles as a con-artist, who struggles with her past and her intention to murder her new husband for his money. The actual story itself is okay, though it is held together by a string of plot holes that makes it difficult to take it seriously. However, whatever Goolrick lacks in storytelling, he makes up for with phrases that I find beautiful and haunting. Every phrase crafts a bleak, blindingly white world, a world more Fargo than jolly Cheesehead. A place where “every day there was some new tragedy, some new and inexplicable failure of the ordinary.” It’s stunning. If you do pick up this book, savor the beauty of the words, even if you have to suffer through a lackluster story to do it.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson

When I used to travel more often, I would bring my own books to the airport. While I made it seem that the thought was to save money on reading material, it was mostly the paranoia that I would finish every book before the end of my trip, stranding me in a foreign airport with nothing to do. Yet, even while I was humping around a small library through the terminal, I would be inescapably drawn to the bookstores. It’s a disease.

Anyway, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by the late author Steig Larsson, would be exactly the kind of book that I would find in an airport bookseller. The bestsellers in such a shop are the kinds that you don’t have to put much thought into, yet exciting enough to get you through a flight with screaming children. This novel is a lot like that. Disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist is invited to a lonely island to solve the disappearance of an industry tycoon’s niece and encounters much more than he had originally bargained for. Assisting him is the hard-as-nails hacker Salander, a girl with a black and white view of right and wrong.

Saying that it’s an airport novel does not mean that I think it’s trash. As soon as Larsson introduced the possibility of a serial killer that uses Bible verses, I was hooked and flipped through my Kindle version with blinding speed. Unfortunately, I really can’t get too excited over corporate naughtiness, which was pretty much the last fourth of the book. It’s just not my thing. I also found the Apple fanboyness distracting—I frankly don’t care that all of the good guys are apparently dedicated to Macs. Just get to the story.

Despite my qualms, the story was definitely good enough for me to snag Larsson’s sequels to this one, if only to find out how it all ends.

The Book of Loss by Julith Jedamus

The Book of Loss is one of those rare novels in which you can absolutely hate the protagonist and everything she stands for, but still like the story. That’s usually a pretty difficult thing—after all, if you’re too busy wanting to slap the shit out of some whiney character, then the tale itself usually falls by the wayside. Yet, author Julith Jedamus has formed a world where every character has some pretty glaring flaws; it’s just a matter of shades of gray.

Jedamus’s novel takes place in Heian Japan, in the muffled halls of the Imperial Court. While the world outside steadily goes to hell by way of plague and mismanagement, the interior of the female quarter is going through a war of its own. The unnamed narrator leaves us a diary that chronicles her rage as her exiled lover, Tachibana no Kanesuke, transfers his affections to her younger, prettier rival, Izumi no Jiju. Our narrator’s jealousy and paranoia grows until it shakes the very heart of the Empire.

Like I mentioned before, the narrator is pitiful and rather unlikeable, not only through her actions, but through her very unreliability as a narrator. We only see within her warped little world and rarely catch a glimpse of the reactions of others in a society where emotions of the sort are taboo. Granted, she was thoroughly wronged by Kanesuke and Izumi, but we never get a firm feeling as to whether they truly deserves the amount of rage the narrator invests in them. Jedamus has used Imperial Japan’s veiled society to create a situation where the reader feels eternally off balanced and, as a result, always on her toes.

Beauty by Sherri S. Tepper

I’ve always liked deconstructed fairy tales, whether it’s through the works of Gregory Maguire or Robin McKinley. Fairy tales are always so distant—you’re not reading a story, you’re reading a lesson. When Cinderella, Snow White, or Sleeping Beauty gets a face and a voice, the tale is personalized. You’re invested. So, Beauty, a novel by Sherri S. Tepper didn’t have to work that hard to snag me. Unfortunately, things then turned weird.

Beauty, the daughter of a duke and a mysterious missing woman, is a loquacious, vain teenager in the 15th century. When she discovers that a curse is to be laid on her when she turns 16, Beauty escapes into the world, leaving her half-sister behind to take the brunt of a sleeping curse that spans a century. Fine, this I can handle. Suddenly, she stumbles upon a film crew from the deep end of twenty-first century sent to film a documentary about the end of magic. Stolen away with the film makers, she explores the terrors of the 21st century, the calm before the storm of the 20th century, and then a world created and abandoned by an ancient writer.

Say what now? This is where I’ll stop because you have to read it for yourself.

Tepper, though an incredibly imaginative author, suffers from something that I think all writers battle: too many ideas. Beauty has so many swirling ideas that it’s difficult to pin them down and analyze. There’s environmentalism, a criticism of organized religion, a rant against those who create ugly works (mostly horror writers, for some reason), and the exploration of the worlds that writers create. Even just picking one of these themes would make for a thoughtful book, one that would allow readers to meditate on the message. Instead, Tepper’s novel doesn’t allow the reader to stop and think before throwing them into a swirling stew of ideas and opinions. If you love books that take you places that you have never been before, then this book is for you; if you want something straight forward, better leave this one in the bowels of Amazon.com.