One Hundred Years of Solitude

My review of...

One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez 
Harper, 2003 (first published 1967)
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I imagine attempting to spend one hundred years in solitude would leave you a bit loopy, even hallucinatory. Wading through Márquez’s novel simulates this somewhat: you lose your sense of what’s real and what isn’t and which sort of motives make sense in a person. Really, it was all I could do to keep track of the sprawling Buendía family’s sprawling story lines. 

Márquez is clearly a creative genius and his prose is beautiful. It’s no wonder he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. If you’d like to lose yourself in hours of artful description, an enchanting/enchanted version of the Colombian rainforest awaits you. 

But personally I wasn’t up for all seven generations of this saga. The paragraphs ramble to disorienting lengths and the characters lose themselves in delusions as thick as the jungle in which they live. I guess my reality is a bit less magical than Macondo’s: the library’s due date cut my hundred years short.

Love Illuminated

My review of...

Love Illuminated: Exploring Life’s Most Mystifying Subject
Daniel Jones
William Morrow, 2014
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Reading this book felt a bit like sipping a cappuccino with a heart design in the milk-foam: by the time you get to the bottom, you’ll have consumed some coffee, but the drinking experience mostly consists of progressing through layers of froth. Depending on your tastes, this might be exactly what you enjoy. I was left a bit unsatisfied, myself.

Jones explores some of the common relationship issues people face in the 21st century by weaving together a couple dozen different love stories. Lest we doubt his qualifications to comment on love this way, he repeatedly reminds us that he’s read 50,000 essay submissions to the Modern Love column in his time as its editor. Fair enough—he certainly knows the trends. 

But what he offers in breadth he somewhat lacks in depth. None of the summarized anecdotes can match the power and poignancy that make the Modern Love column so successful. At various points I was tempted to put down the book and spend my time immersed in the column’s archives instead, where these stories are told by their actual participants in a variety of authentic voices. 

Having said that, Jones does have a charming voice. The book is written with wit and style. All around, this was a pleasant weekend read, one you could easily consume curled up in a café with that frothy cappuccino.

The First Five Pages

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The First Five Pages: A Writer’s Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile
Noah Lukeman
Touchstone, 2000
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This is a quick, easy read that’s worth a writer’s time if he or she is looking to attract a literary agent’s interest. The opening section in particular focuses on making a good first impression when querying, in which someone must judge your work based on the titular “first five pages” (or less). 

The rest of the book is essentially generic advice on writing, some of which seems obvious to me but all of which is legitimate. I hope that every writer is aware of these principles long before they start looking for an agent, but we all know that’s not necessarily the case. At any rate, it never hurts to be reminded of some basic elements of wordsmithing and storytelling, right? 

As Lukeman notes in the introduction, “There are no rules to assure great writing, but there are ways to avoid bad writing.” I’d say this book won’t assure you an agent’s interest, but it does offer ways to avoid getting immediately tossed from the slush pile. Again, being such a quick read, it’s at least worth skimming. 

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

My review of...

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory
Caitlin Doughty
W. W. Norton & Company, 2014
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I admit that at first I was rather afraid to pick up this book—would the doom and gloom of a memoir about mortality bring me to despair? But once I started reading it I couldn’t stop till I’d read through to the last page. Now that I’ve set it back down, I feel like I’m not even afraid of death anymore, let alone of books on the subject. Doughty takes on the topic with great humor and grace, ultimately reminding us how natural our mortality is and encouraging us to face it rather than flee from it.

She does this in part by taking us on a tour of the modern funeral industry. As a licensed mortician who’s worked in cremation, embalming, and funeral direction, she’s certainly qualified to wax poetic on the subject. But this memoir is more than a collection of anecdotes from the crematory: it’s also an account of her evolving relationship to her own mortality. Doughty writes about her painful personal encounters with death as openly as she does about her professional encounters. She also weaves in the expertise of anthropologists and the wisdom of cultures across history. 

The resulting book is, at the very least, poignant and entertaining for the individual reader. On a larger scale, I hope her efforts will help change the way our current secular culture confronts death.