Category: reading

Back when I was in high school, one of my aunts left a bag filled with books at our house. I don’t know where that bag is now; it is possible that I had spread its contents all over my room and in my brothers’ room before going to college. Maybe, on the day I’ll finally feel compelled to look under the beds and into the deepest recesses of my closet, I’ll find those books.

One’s irrevocably lost, however. This one book that I read and liked – liked so much that I lent it to one of the student editors at my high school’s newspaper (I was still just a staff writer, I believe). He didn’t return it, of course. Bastard. And now I can’t find the book anywhere because I can’t remember the book’s title/author.

Anyway, yesterday I felt the urge to post the book’s details – what little I remember of the darn thing – on a couple of LiveJournal communities. Just to finally find out what the book’s called. I shared:

– the first chapter of the novel tells something about a group of boys in a school. one of the boys has just swiped some coins, and the school’s trying to find out who it is
– there’s a scene involving the boy and the mother of his best friend talking in a church
– fast-forward to several years later. the boy and his friend are now young men.
– there’s something about brothels, and syphilis
– there’s something about a family of bankers, or a family with a bank. they are Methodists. the boy’s best friend belongs to this family
– there’s a hint at a relationship between the boy and his best friend
– there’s a scene on a ship where someone gets killed.
– i remember the book as being very graphic

Oh, the things that stay with me.

This morning, I received two replies, and some more details about the novel that finally gave me the answer. It’s Ken Follett’s A Dangerous Fortune!

(I don’t remember this cover, though. I may have had the UK version.)

And now I believe it’s out of print. I’ve been searching online through our local bookstores and can’t seem to find it. Ngarr.

So. If ever you find a copy, message me? :) Thanks a bunch. It’d be fun to revisit the novel that I admired so much back in high school, now that I’m older.

Just finished it this morning. Bought a copy along with this book, after what felt like months of hunting down this novel in several bookstores. (I remember standing in a Fully Booked branch somewhere, sometime before Christmas, spelling out the author’s last name. No luck then.) Finally found it in Bibliarch near where I work.

I loved it. How else to review the damn novel? Mostlyfiction.com posted an excerpt, and so did NPR.

Consider the first two paragraphs:

You Don’t Know
What’s in My Heart

WE WERE FRACTIOUS AND overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise. At least those of us who smoked had something to look forward to at ten-fifteen. Most of us liked most everyone, a few of us hated specific individuals, one or two people loved everyone and everything. Those who loved everyone were unanimously reviled. We loved free bagels in the morning. They happened all too infrequently. Our benefits were astonishing in comprehensiveness and quality of care. Sometimes we questioned whether they were worth it. We thought moving to India might be better, or going back to nursing school. Doing something with the handicapped or working with our hands. No one ever acted on these impulses, despite their daily, sometimes hourly contractions. Instead we met in conference rooms to discuss the issues of the day.

Ordinarily jobs came in and we completed them in a timely and professional manner. Sometimes fuckups did occur. Printing errors, transposed numbers.Our business was advertising and details were important. If the third number after the second hyphen in a client’s toll-free number was a six instead of an eight, and if it went to print like that, and showed up in Time magazine, no one reading the ad could call now and order today. No matter they could go to the website, we still had to eat the price of the ad. Is this boring you yet? It bored us every day.Our boredom was ongoing, a collective boredom, and it would never die because we would never die.

Will you look at that.

I have no choice but to forever wonder how I would have reacted to this story if I had read it when I was still in college, when all I knew of office life I got from episodes of The Office.

Joshua Ferris writes so beautifully, and so damn accurately that he breaks my heart.

Read this book.

I’m suspicious of any book/film with a song title for a title, so this Joe Hill novel I’ve been seeing on the shelves for a long time but I don’t pick it up or buy it because the title’s – *cringe*. And I love that Nirvana song.

Not to mention that the tag line used an ellipsis instead of a period. What is with horror/suspense novels and their damn ellipses?

Anyway, I haven’t read a good horror novel in a while (I’ve bought Joe Hill’s dad’s It, and a Clive Barker novel, but I’ll get to them later, they’re enormous), and I’m so glad I’ve read this one. Neil Gaiman, according to one of the blurbs, loved it “unreservedly”. Well, I wouldn’t go that far, but Hill’s narrative has this restraint and touches of humor (not hysterical like his father’s; sometimes Stephen King practically screams the joke at you) that I fell for. It’s good. Still got the usual horror fare, like Ouija boards and ghosts talking through radios, and heroic animals, but it’s smart enough to know when it’s being faced by something silly. It’s good.

In the same bookstore where I got my copy of this, I also found an Owen King short story collection. Owen veered away from the supernatural, unlike his brother who embraced it and his dad who, well, practically lived in it. Wonder if he’s good. Maybe I’ll check it out when I have money again.

This book was published late 2005; I was able to read it only this year. People always talk about brutal honesty – this book is brutal, searing, frightening, almost painful to read. In one article I read, Sylvia Plath’s daughter, Frieda, said she’s ashamed of her “very, very strong” need for a mother, evident in her poetry. It does open a weakness, Frieda said. In The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion does not only admit to this “weakness” (her very, very strong need for her husband, her daughter, normalcy) – she dissects it, connects it to existing literature, questions it, rejects it, accepts it.

Read an excerpt here.