The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson: Impressions

I meant to post this earlier today but work and travel have thwarted my efforts!

THE ORPHAN MASTER'S SON by Adam Johnson tells the sweeping tale of Jun Do, an unlikely orphan turned unlikelier heroic figure in North Korea. Jun Do believes his father is the cold, cruel orphan master, hardened from losing his beautiful mother, a singer whisked away to the capital before Jun Do can remember. He endures the pains of the orphanage only to be trained in fighting in pitch darkness, (after suffering through extensive pain endurance training) so that might lead his team in exploration of the tunnels under the DMZ. Fighting through the darkness and enduring pain are exactly the skills one would need to survive life, if you can call it life, in Johnson's rendering of North Korea (i.e. the Democratic People's Republic of Korea).

The key to fighting in the dark was no different: you had to perceive your opponent, sense him, and never use your imagination. The darkness inside your head is something your imagination fills with stories that have nothing to do with the real darkness around you.

Jun Do is requisitioned to kidnap opera singers in Japan, taught English so that he might listen and translate radio transmissions while aboard a fishing boat, fatefully tattooed with the face of a North Korean movie star, made to endure shark bites to make a concocted story believable, and sent to America to aid on a strange diplomatic mission involving a Texan Senator. In America he learns from Dr. Song:

"Where we are from," he said, "stories are factual. If a farmer is declared a music virtuoso by the state, everyone had better start calling him maestro. And secretly, he'd be wise to start practicing the piano. For us, the story is more important than the person. If a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change...But in America, people's stories change all the time. In America, it is the man who matters. Perhaps they will believe your story and perhaps not, but you, Jun Do, they will believe you."

Jun Do is mistaken for an important North Korean figure, which later he uses to his advantage. Just as stories matter more than people, Jun Do falls in love with the story of the actress tattooed on his chest, and becomes a much better version of the man he was mistaken to be.

THE ORPHAN MASTER'S SON is a highly engrossing read, though the horrors of life in that mysterious country are hard to stomach. The patriotic messages on the loudspeakers are humorous in their complete juxtaposition of reality, spouting lies to keep their citizens obedient. ("Jun Do understood that in communism, you'd threaten a dog into compliance, while in capitalism, obedience is obtained through bribes.") Johnson's North Korea is vividly imagined, making one wonder how he came to construct such a convincingly awful reality. The story culminates in a satisfying, bittersweetly triumphant conclusion, and is well worth reading sooner rather than later.

*I read this book courtesy of TLC Book Tours, Random House, and my local public library.

#readerswithlives

After a long hiatus this summer, I'm hoping the scarcity of posts will be replaced with a wee bit more regularity. The triple digit heat that plagued the midwest, sapping the energy out of me with sumo wrestler insistance, seems to have broken, finally, and I can stay awake to read again, and occasionally even write about what I've read.

We've spent a fair amount of time at the botanical gardens (pictured above) including the Chinese lantern festival.

It was lovely to participate in Rachel's 24 in 48 readathon - though I didn't quite make the 24 hours mark, I did read a book and a half, which is much more than I normally manage to read in a weekend. It's the perfect readathon for readers with lives that just can't be put on hold, as well as readers that cherish their sleep. Hopefully this becomes a regular occurrence.

Coming up in the next weeks, I'll have a couple reviews for TLC Book Tours (The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson and The Forgetting Tree by Tatjana Soli), hopefully some reviews of things I've read this year and never got around to discussing (Banana Yoshimoto's Kitchen, Barbara Kinsglover's The Poisonwood Bible, and Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake) and a giveaway of one of my favorite reads this year, A Partial History of Lost Causes by Jennifer duBois.

PS: Oh dear. Just returned from the in-laws with a crazy amount of discarded ARCs from the radio station. What! Danger!

How is everyone else's summer going?

A Partial History of Lost Causes by Jennifer duBois: Impressions

Let's just start with: I adored this book. It's going on my list of all-time favorites. It was beautifully written, with hilarity and sarcasm etched in to take the sting out of the overall sadness of the characters' situations and the painful, ridiculous decisions made along the way. To be honest, I decided to read A Partial History of Lost Causes by Jennifer duBois because I loved the title and I loved the cover, and the description sounded unique and interesting. I'm obviously glad I did. 

The story is told in chapters which alternate between the perspectives of two main characters: Aleksandr Bezetov, a world champion chess player turned political activist (who must be based in part on Garry Kasparov), and Irina Ellison, a 30-year-old English lecturer with Huntington's disease and a passive interest in chess. I know, I know: sounds fairly dreary, but it's not! More, poignant and sagacious, with artful yet casual wordsmithery and humor tinged with sadness. 

The novel begins with a description of Aleksandr's move to St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) back in 1978 to hone his chess skills, and admittedly, it takes a chapter or so to get pulled into the story, though we get a glimpse of the main theme - and Aleksandr's latent political leanings - right away: 

He didn't care for the billboards and didn't believe in the slogans, but nobody else did, either. He regarded Communism as a kind of collective benign lie, like the universal agreement among human beings to rarely discuss the fact that everybody would one day die.

Here we have the basic themes - Russia's stifled political landscape, the harsher realities of life we pretend to ignore in polite company. And once we meet Irina, with her fatalistic "practicality" dripping with sarcasm and her oh-cut-out-your-whining Harvard Square chess opponent Lars, the story picks right up. Irina admits her faults openly: 

I liked the bitter cold the best; it narrowed the meandering, self-indulgent courses of my mind into a focused dissatisfaction with what was right in front of me. This, I'll be the first to admit, was an improvement. 

Irina's chapters are told in the first person; she is the messier, more relatable character in the book. We get Aleksandr's story in the third person, and he remains somewhat cold, calculating and distant (which makes sense, since he's surrounded and defined by chess, cold Russian winters, and political conspiracies), though eventually shows more humanity by the end of the novel. They are both dealing with their own fallibility, meeting after Irina determines that her father's letter to the chess player, asking him how to fail with dignity, has not been adequately addressed or answered. 

I'm not doing this book justice, but suffice it to say, you should read it, unless dealing with issues of mortality and consequence makes you squeamish. I can't wait to see what duBois comes up with next - it's hard to believe this is her first novel. Also: it's out in paperback next Tuesday, if that puts you over the edge! 

*I read this book courtesy of NetGalley - and my local public library, after my digital ARC expired!

The Forrests by Emily Perkins: Impressions

The Forrests by Emily Perkins is a novel told in a series of gymnastically articulated snapshots, each chapter vividly reflecting a different point in the lives of two sisters, Dorothy and Eve Forrest, who move from New York City to Auckland, New Zealand when they are around 7-8 years old. Though their parents come from money, they have wasted their trust funds, forcing the family to lead stressful and haphazard lives. Dorothy and Eve have two other siblings, Michael and Ruth, that reside on their periphery, but never quite fully engage with the other two.

Admittedly, I had a hard time getting into this book, the first chapter seeming to jump all over in time within a paragraph or two. (I have an obsession with fitting events into a sequentially accurate timeline - I'm fine with jumping around in time, as long as I can place where in time I am.) But by the second chapter or so, the novel began to hit its stride: Perkins' colorful descriptions bringing to life each vignette in a different way. She could precisely capture those moments between childhood and adulthood where everyone else's lives seem shinier than yours:

Eve refused to be the one to bring it up. To ask the question would only make real the ice field between them, the blank that she was left standing in, alone. This was the worst of it - this plunging sense that everyone had got something she had not.

She also manages to capture those bits in which we learn to put on those shiny, everything's-totally-fine appearances (or at least, we believe we're fooling those to whom we're talking):

Flickered with adrenalin, caught out as always at the mention of his name, she told Mike that the last she heard he'd gotten married. Adulthood was like this - your voice calm, your face normal, while inside, turmoil, your heart still seven, or twelve, or fifteen.

Perkins' prose is enchanting, her descriptions uniquely acute. But what the novel gives us in pointed clarity it lacks in depth of field. It's as if in each snapshot, we're given one point of hyperfocus with everything else blurred in the background, darkening at the edges. I never felt I really got a sense of either Dorothy or Eve's separate characters, and their lives seem to be missing a certain fullness that they beg to portray.

Despite a few of its shortcomings, The Forrests pulled me into its glimpses of these women's ordinary but not-so-ordinary lives. Dorothy (and Eve, to an extent) survive but never escape their strange family and upbringing, but manage to find small bits of happiness along the way despite themselves. I'm happy I was given the chance to read the novel, courtesy of Bloomsbury USA, NetGalley, and TLC Book Tours. Check out what other reviewers had to say about the novel here.

24 in 48 Readathon!

24 in 48 is hosted by Rachel at A Home Between the Pages. Rachel had a lovely idea for what I randomly hashtagged as #readerswithlives: a 24 hour readathon over an entire weekend! (Hence #24in48!) Basically, it's the perfect readathon for those of us who like sleep and also have lives that refuse to be ignored for 24 hours straight no matter how great the book is.

Rachel is starting with Ender's Game, which is a fantastic readathon book, though I haven't read it in years. I have to finish The Forrests by Emily Perkins for a review set to go up on Monday for TLC Book Tours, so this is the perfect weekend for such a readathon. I'm not sure what's on the docket straightaway after that, if/when I finish in time to start another book, but I have 100s of options!

Fortunately for me and my reading time, the coconspirator is working all day long, so he won't be sad that I'm ignoring him in favor of a book.  Unfortunately, I'm on call for 2 long shifts for my volunteer life as well this weekend, so I'm hoping everyone behaves themselves & no trips to ERs are necessary. Also, that will allow for more reading time. But: If I disappear, that's likely where I've disappeared to, unless I've gotten lost in a book.

Either way, check back here (or better yet on twitter) for updates on progress! (I'll most likely just update this particular post.)

Update: finish

Total pages read: 425ish
Total books read: 1.5
Total book reviews written: 1

Though I didn't manage to read for 24 hours (it was just way too nice out), I did manage to read a lot more than I normally do! All in all, great readathon!

Wife 22 by Melanie Gideon: Impressions

Wife 22 by Melanie Gideon has been compared to Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones Diary and it's easy to see why. Of my own small reading repertoire, I'd say it's a cross between Bridget Jones and Domestic Violets, a story about a middle-aged copywriter wannabe writer going through an early mid-life crisis.

Wife 22 is a modern-day story of middle-age, fraught with family and marital tensions, told in humorous and insightful anecdotes varying in structure from traditional prose and dialogue to mini-plays to google searches to email correspondence to facebook status updates and chats. Alice is 44 with a cranky, self-righteous teenage daughter and near-teen son she suspects is gay, married for 20 years to distant William. She teaches drama part-time at a local elementary school; William is a creative director at an ad agency. There worlds no longer seem to overlap much at all, and unhappy Alice signs up for a study of 21st century marriage that she finds in her spam folder, which assigns her the code name wife22. Researcher 101 is her contact, and he feeds her a few questions a week from the survey. 

Alice finds that the anonymity of the survey lends itself to greater honesty, and she relates intimate details of her life with a humor, frankness, and attention to detail that has been missing in her present. She feels guilty for keeping her marriage survey participation from her husband, and, after her communications with Researcher 101 start to go beyond harmless flirtation, eventually confesses to 2 of her closest friends, who both tell her to cut if off before she does something rash. 

The novel is full of exchanges like: 

"Can we tell people?" asks Peter.

"What people?" I say.

"Zoe."

"Zoe's not people. She's family," I say.

"No, she's people. We lost her to the people some time ago," says William.

as well as witty advice such as: 

"Humiliation is a choice. Don't choose it."

Though I found the format a little trying and gimmicky at first, it ultimately worked for me as Alice grew on me. Is Alice imperfect? Of course. Selfish? Definitely - but aren't we all? Trying to figure out how to navigate life with all the gadgetry and online-connectedness we're supposed to be experiencing? Absolutely. But Alice is a very relatable character, even if she makes much different choices than I might make (or think I might make - she has higher meanness tolerance levels than I do). She's goofy and funny and frazzled but not to the point of ridiculousness (like the Bridget Jones in the movie version). She survives her crisis and manages to circle back to herself - the end is satisfying in it's slightly unpredictable obviousness (even if one could see it coming halfway through the book... it's the how that's fun). 

One thing to note, as I was reading the ebook version: The questions to the survey are in the appendix at the end. While reading, it just seemed that the reader was supposed to guess the question, which often was possible, but sometimes annoying. I'm not sure if knowing about the questions would have enhanced or detracted from my reading experience, but there is.

Either way, reading Wife 22 was a pure delight and I'd recommend it to anyone looking for a light summer read with a little bit of depth to it.

*I received this book compliments of Ballantine Books via NetGalley.

The Earthquake Machine by Mary Pauline Lowry: Impressions

I had high hopes for The Earthquake Machine. The author has led what seemed an unconventionally interesting life, and the premise of a young girl adventure, a girl learning independence and resourcefulness - in a book for young adults not shying away from topics of violence, sexuality, and spirituality - sounded incredibly promising. 

Unfortunately, this novel fell dreadfully short of such expectations. The story was disjointed, confusing, and contrived to the point of unbelievability - and wholly inappropriate for the young adult age category of 12 and up. Well, I will say that with a grain of salt. It's slightly more explicit than what I remember of VC Andrews novels, and I may have read those when I was 13 or 14. But you don't find those on YA shelves at the bookstores. (For the record, Flowers in the Attic is a very deceptive title. I think I thought I was reading Flowers for Algernon or something classic. I was not.)

I am obligated to warn that this review will be replete with spoilers, as it is the only way I can offer the problems I had with story and the subject matter's presentation. Since I definitely do not recommend reading this book, I do recommend reading this synopsis, if you would like to know exactly why you shouldn't read it. This is going to be long. But I must share my pain.

• To start, the book treats bipolarism as if it should not be treated with drugs. The first chapter sets us up: Rhonda's home life is boring and torturous - her pharmacist dad is drugging up her "crazy" mother - who it is implied is bipolar - without a proper doctor's prescription, which, yes, is bad, but we are offered no explanation as to why she wouldn't just see an actual psychiatrist. The drugs "flatten" her mother; Rhonda is convinced her mother would be much better without them, in her natural crazy state, it is assumed. This theme of not treating bipolarism is alluded to throughout the book. 
• Within the first 5 pages, Rhonda is masturbating in the bath, with her head underwater, assumedly having discovered autoerotic asphyxiation at the ripe old age of 14 ("the dizziness from not breathing made the colors brighter"). This is Rhonda who still maintains a boyish figure, and has not developed at all yet, nor started her period. But apparently she has been compelled to figure out the complicated female orgasm before her hormones have even kicked in, along with breath play. Oh, and her mother walks in on her and thinks she's drowning and flips out. Enter: shame, and self-blame for what follows. Really? 
• Rhonda has one real friend named Jesús, the family's gardener, who is an undocumented worker from Mexico. She has learned fluent Spanish - so fluent that she sounds "just like a Mexican" - simply by listening to him. After Rhonda's mom goes off the deep end, spurred by Rhonda's sexually precocious autoerotic asphyxiation episode, Jesús paints the bottoms of all the trees white. (These events are unrelated.) The neighbors get upset and retaliate by having him deported. And he is sent back to Mexico. Immediately. Because it's that fast and easy. He goes back to living with his mom. Being deported is that inconsequential. 
• Rhonda overhears her quietly evil father get a gun out of the closet, load it, and lay it on the desk, telling her mother to "do the right thing." Her mother then blows her head off. Rhonda gives us a lovely (read: unnecessarily graphic) description of the inside of her mother's head, as well as the brain matter on the wall. (We are still in the first chapter.) Neither she nor her father have much of an emotional reaction to this incident. 
• Next Rhonda is set to go on a father/daughter float trip in Big Bend National Park with two of her girlfriends from school. Her father predictably bails at the last second to hang out with his pharmacist mistress. Rhonda goes along anyway. While everyone is asleep, Rhonda approaches the guide with silver in his hair, motions for him to open his knees, and cuddles in between his legs with her back to him. Because that's completely natural. (No, seriously. This is presented as totally normal, acceptable behavior on 14-year-old Rhonda's part, Rhonda who has been described as quiet, thoughtful and bookish.) Then, of course, the dude can't help but feel her... down her pants, and she immediately has "the Feeling." She runs back to her tent. There is much inner talk of her wanting to stab him in the eye with her knife, or hoping he will have sex with her. 
• Now, I was lucky enough to have not been molested as a child, so I cannot speak to the normalcy of these feelings and do not pretend that I can. However, the book seems completely uncommitted to whether this was molestation or just a normal, totally okay sexual encounter for a 14-year-old to have with some dude that's three times her age. Maybe mid 30s and prematurely greying. But still. Wholly inappropriate, though not made to be so in the book. 
• The next day she decides she is suicidal and so falls off the raft to try to drown herself in the Rio Grande. (In Texas. In Big Bend. Is it ever deep enough for that to happen there? I didn't think so, but I'm no expert.) Mansk the molester morphs into savior, jumps in the water and rescues her. That night at camp Rhonda waits for everyone to go to sleep, and approaches the molester to solicit him for sex (" 'I want you to do it to me.' "). He laughs at her and says no way, that she's nuts. Rhonda is crushed and violently enraged by this rejection. More talk of stabbing him in the eye and other violence. Instead, she decides to run away to Mexico in the middle of the night to find Jesús, her only friend, who lives in Oaxaca (that's way south in Mexico, btw - and pronounced Wahackah - just fyi). 
• So she steals some money from one of the dads, who is also less than a stellar human being, surprise surprise, packs some food and clothes in her bag, walks down the river a little way, decides she should strip naked and pack her clothes in her bag too, to prevent them from getting wet, the Rio Grande being so very deep, floats down the deep river with a current, (is my dubiousness coming through loud and clear?) (in)conveniently has to let go of her pack with the clothes because she doesn't have enough energy to swim to the other side after floating for so long downstream (don't worry; she's conveniently tucked the money into her hair) and has to emerge from the river stark naked (REBIRTH!!), with just her sandals (those she left on, it being so easy to swim with shoes) , IN THE MEXICAN DESERT. She then... survives! She doesn't even get thirsty, she survives so fast. Conveniently, she finds some guy sleeping with a pack of burrows, hops on one, and within half an hour she's found a border town! How lucky! And no one molests or kills or even looks with unsavory eyes at the naked gringa. Totally believable, right? 

So I think I'm just through chapter 2 by now. You can read the rest, after all, if you stop here! But I wouldn't recommend it. It doesn't get any better, and just gets more contrived and farfetched after that. Since you're probably not going to read, the highlights: After dressing as a boy, renaming herself Angel, tripping on peyote, taking a bus in the wrong direction than getting out in the middle of the night in the middle of a jungle, starving herself to keep her boyish figure, escaping a bandit-boy circle jerk in the jungle, tricking a smarmy artist dude and his carpenter wife (how offensive, the Mexicans think, a woman wants to be a carpenter?) into driving her to Mexico city, getting abducted by female banditas dressed as men (they weren't taken seriously as bandits dressed as women), having the smarmy  dude's pin word come to her from the Virgin Mary (SLIT), bailing one of the banditas out of jail, and taking a taxi to the town where Jesús lives, she finds Jesús and starts living with him and his mom. 

But he won't teach her how to carve alibrijes, as he'd promised, on the other side (of the river/border): men carve; women paint. That's only, it turns out, because his mom is old and not so good with the painting anymore. So Rhonda learns to cook and paint, befriends an elderly American woman in the neighborhood, reads a book about an old fashioned vibrator - great for curing hysteria, finds an old-fashioned vibrator ("the earthquake machine" - yup, this young adult novel is named after a vibrator), has "the Feeling" and feels less hysterical  (because, you know, nothing cures an overly depressed or emotional woman/girl like a good lay... or orgasm... and this is definitely a message we want to give to young, impressionable girls), shares it with the neighbor elderly lady and watches her use it (um, what?), then travels with Jesús and his mama to Mexico City to sell their alibrijes. There, Jesús and the mom are crushed in the hotel after a massive earthquake, forcing Rhonda to return to Texas. Rhonda is devastated and angry and wants to grind away  her pain. No really. With her hips. Because she's still totally and completely obsessed with sex and The Feeling. 

On the way back home, she easily finds Mansk the molester, determined to stab him, or something vicious, but instead they have some violent, bloody but totally consensual sex (she's 15 now, so, very mature and in control), and then part ways. She bribes her dad into supporting her and her education while going to live with her fun-loving godmother. The end. 

I've spent way too much time summarizing, but I didn't know how to explain my criticism otherwise, and I haven't even begun to explain how put off I was by this book. The feminist message is so weird and skewed and misguided and unabashedly in your face that it's completely lost in the preposterous ridiculousness of the story. I can see what the author was trying to accomplish; but the novel utterly fails on that point, especially with the violence with which sex is presented. I strongly believe girls can have non-harlequin, non-crazy-violent adventures that actually explore maturing and independence in a healthy way. This is just not that story. 

I am not the last word - most reviews I found out there were gushing and raving about how fantastic this book is, or at worst lukewarm on the subject. Goodreads, normally a good  like-ability barometer for me, averages the ratings at a 3.8. I am the sole 1 star, and I rarely rate books 1 star. Lowry herself seems like a really interesting and lovely lady; I just did not enjoy her book, nor do I think it's remotely appropriate for younger audiences. She kindly provided the book to me in exchange for my honest review. I hope I wasn't too harsh. 

Some disclaimers about myself to help you decide whether or not my opinion or where I'm coming from might jive with your own tastes: 

1. I was raised Catholic, and attended Catholic school from kindergarden to 8th grade.
2. I am no longer Catholic; have not been since I was a teenager. 
3. I do volunteer work with victims of sexual violence on a regular basis. 

These factors may come into play more for myself than others when judging the violent nature of sexuality's portrayal in the book.

Q & A with Slant of Light Author Steve Wiegenstein + Giveaway!

I recently read Slant of Light by Steve Wiegenstein (review here - it was a great read) as a part of TLC Book Tours (see what others had to say about the novel here), and the author was gracious enough to answer a few questions about the book and his own reading habits and influences! Be sure to enter below for a chance to win a copy of the book (US & Canadian residents only).

1. How did you originally become interested in the utopian communities that were attempted back in the 1800s? It looks like there's quite a history there. Is Daybreak based on any community in particular?

Years ago, I was teaching "The Communist Manifesto" as part of a Great Books sequence in a class, and I noticed a disparaging reference in it to "Icaria." Curious about that reference, I looked up the term and discovered that a colony of pre-Marxian communists had existed in the American Midwest from 1848 to 1898. I was fascinated! And that's how historical research goes....you pull one little thread, and the next thing you know you've spent thirty years reading original documents and tracking down obscure sources. I based Daybreak on the Icarians in a general sense--a charismatic leader, a lot of internal dissent, a Midwestern setting. The original Icarians were mostly French, though, so I recast them as Americans to heighten my specifically American themes of Transcendentalism vs. realism, optimism vs. fatalism, and opposing views of nature. Emile and Marie Mercadier are disillusioned former members of the Icarian settlement, though. 

2. I understand that you grew up in the general area where the story is set. How did you choose that particular stretch of land for the Daybreak settlement?

When I was very small, my dad, who was a tractor mechanic, took me along on a repair trip to a farm on the St. Francis River in southwestern Madison County, Missouri. While he worked on the machinery, I fooled around in the fields, and the farmer showed us through some old saltpeter caves that had been worked there since the early 1800s. That combination--a rich valley, a steep mountain behind it, and some deep mysteries in the landscape--stuck with me, and for some reason it has stuck with me ever since.

3. In which of the characters do you see the most of yourself?

Oh my! I think I'm in all of them, a little bit. I'm optimistic to the point of foolishness, a little like Turner; I have a rather grinding sense of moral obligation, something like Adam; and I'd have to say, I have Charlotte's dogged persistence. But maybe John Wesley Wickman is my nearest stand-in.

4. Do you think self-sustaining, egalitarian communities such as Daybreak could ever have worked back then? In today's society? Why/why not?

Interestingly enough, they did, and still do. There's a commune north of where I live now that's been there for 25 years or more, and there are others across the country that have been in existence for just as long or more. I think the trick is to keep the size manageable and the principles simple. When you read the history of the utopias of the 19th Century, a lot of them had such eccentric ideas for daily life that it isn't hard to predict their demise in hindsight. The ones that have lasted tend to have a religious basis, like the Amish and the Hutterites. 

5. What was the inspiration for making Charlotte such a strong character? Did you always intend to portray her as a feminist and a leader?

Charlotte just kept growing and growing on me. The more I wrote, the more I loved writing about her, and she gradually took over the narrative. I have been fortunate to have had powerful, positive women in my life, and I guess Charlotte grew out of that experience. I always intended for her to be a strong counterbalance to Turner's impulsive charm, but her character developed way beyond that. 

6. If you could travel through time, where and when would you go?

Oh, the future! Like I said, I'm an optimist. Not too far ahead, because I'd like to be able to recognize things--say, ten or fifteen years. And I'd be right here.

7. Who are your favorite authors? Which do you think has most influenced your writing?

The great American Romantics are the ones I return to read again and again--Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Melville. But in terms of influence, I think later American writers have a stronger pull on my style. Fitzgerald is one, John Williams (author of Butcher's Crossing, Augustus, and Stoner) is another. Both classical stylists who avoided too much ornamentation but could pull out a beautiful figure of speech when the moment was right.

8. What are you reading right now?

One of the joys of being published by Blank Slate Press is that I get to be on the reader's panel for the next batch of books they are considering. So I've been looking over manuscripts that the Blank Slate people have identified as finalists. That's great fun! I'm also working on the sequel to Slant of Light, so have been upgrading my knowledge of Missouri after the Civil War--David Benac's Conflict in the Ozarks is an academic history of the logging boom that occurred in the late 19th Century, so it will come into play in the third book. There's also Missouri's War: The Civil War in Documents, which is a great resource for language and insights of the time.