Eugene weekly., December 12, 2013, Page 13, Image 13

Winter
Reading I
fi ction
The Goldfi nch By Donna Tartt. Little, Brown and
Company, $30.
It’s fi tting that Donna Tartt’s
third novel, The Goldfi nch, is
centered around a painting.
Tartt’s rich writing forms
brushstrokes clear enough to
see, carrying the reader from
New York to Las Vegas and
Amsterdam. Theo, a young
teenager, takes a painting from
the Metropolitan Museum of Art
in the aftermath of a bombing
that kills his mother. He tastes
privilege while staying with
a classmate until his deadbeat
father resurfaces and takes Theo
to Vegas, where they live. Theo eventually escapes back to
New York.
In each of Tartt’s three novels, the detail feeds the plot.
Tartt’s ability to paint vivid scenes and build characters’
dread and anxiety thumps the reader’s heart. The Goldfi nch is
a page-turner, even as throughout its 784 pages, it’s diffi cult
not to stop and reread passages simply because the writing is
brilliant. — Shannon Finnell
The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope
By Rhonda Riley. HarperCollins, $15.99.
Inexplicable is how
Evelyn describes the
being who was fi rst her
lover, almost her twin and
later became her husband.
The Enchanted Life of
Adam Hope is a Southern
tale of love that comes
in unexpected forms. It
is magical realism meets
romance
novel;
you
suspend your disbelief
and dip into a love story
that is as strange as it is
lovely. The tale of love
and family is set to a
backdrop of detailed descriptions of nature, the land and the
horses Addie/Adam loves and trains.
From the red clay of North Carolina to the clear springs of
Florida, Evelyn and the stranger that becomes the love of her life,
Addie/Adam, and their family love, survive loss and transition
from the post-World War II era to the changes of the ’60s. In
a recent interview author Rhonda Riley described her book as
“The Time Traveler’s Wife meets Cold Mountain with a dusting
of LSD,” and that is quite apt. — Camilla Mortensen
The Son: A Novel By Philipp Meyer.
HarperCollins, $17.99.
Epic. That’s the word that comes up again and again when
reviewers extoll the virtues of Philipp Meyer’s The Son. The
novel follows the coming of age of Eli McCullough, the fi rst
male child born in the Republic of Texas, and leaps about
t’s International Book Week! Read one of these books in our Winter Reading issue
and post the fi fth sentence on page 52 …
Whoops. Spoiler alert: There is no International Book Week, though there is a
United Nations World Book and Copyright Day, which was April 23, as well as a
Banned Book Week back in September. But really, do you need a Facebook status
update to remind you to share the joys of reading? Whether you are a solo peruser,
a book club member or you only read when you are stuck on an airplane for three
hours, we present to you our annual roundup of some of the books we enjoyed
reading this year.
k = OREGON AUTHOR
through the intertwined stories of his descendants, many of
whom share his ruthless pragmatism. When Eli is 13, his
family is murdered by Comanche who kidnap him, and then
raise and adopt him.
Eli’s children and their children bear the scars of a family
that will sacrifi ce anything for land and power. His adopted
Comanche father Tosehway tells him, “I will tell you something
my father once told me. The difference between a brave man
and a coward is very simple. It is a problem of love. A coward
loves only himself … The brave man loves other men fi rst and
himself last.” Eli is willing to kill, willing to die and more than
willing for others to die, but he fails at the sense of bravery
Tosheway attempted to instill. — Camilla Mortensen
with a cute pit bull and a bit of magic thrown in — the heroine
happens to have a supernatural ability to sense when couples
are destined to be together.
Author Jennifer Probst also writes erotic fi ction, so sometimes
this tale of a single matchmaker Kate Seymour looking for love
is a little heavy on descriptions of hero Slade Montgomery’s
hot body and throbbing need for Kate. Don’t pick up Searching
for Someday if you are looking for anything brainy. Read it if
you liked 50 Shades of Gray and like to read a little romance
here and there. I’m a dog person, so the descriptions of Kate’s
beloved disabled rescued pittie Robert make up for the more
mindless moments. — Camilla Mortensen
Taipei By Tao Lin. Vintage, $14.95.
nonfi ction
Taipei is a minutely
described, internally dis-
connected but intimate
portrait of a relatively
brief span of time in a
young author’s life among
his peers in New York. It
opens with the dispassion-
ate ending of a yearlong
relationship and wavers
through the desultory, out-
of-focus following events,
including two trips to Tai-
pei to visit his parents and
a handful of parties and
authors’ readings.
Great attention is
paid to the imperviously detached thought processes of the
protagonist, Paul, and his time spent on his MacBook, tweeting,
checking Facebook and refreshing his Gmail. The text messages
he sends his disconnected acquaintances play a central role in
providing dialogue, while a running list of the drugs he takes
with his friends and eventual girlfriend, Erin, shape the tone and
trajectory of the plot.
The read became immediately more compelling with the
aid of biographical information and when I discovered it to
be semi-autobiographical. Searching online for info about Tao
Lin catapulted me into discussions around the value of such
lucidly personal and uneventful writing. Some decry the novel
a plotless bore, while others praise Lin profusely as the voice
of his generation.
Paul is a paragon of the drug-addled, modern, fi nancially
secure young writer, disconnected from nature, reeling in the
artifi cial light and heartless fabric of metropolitan existence.
Is the novel merely a glimpse into the life of a privileged
and successful author, running in a tight bubble of likewise
disaffected, apathetic artists? More so, I think it captures a
very particular modern malaise and rubs at the raw nerve of
a culture subsumed and disintegrated by the noxious effect
of marketing and consumerism. For this reason it is a vital,
timely vision of how a certain subset of our culture sculpt
out their existence, isolated, self-involved and burdened by
privilege. — Paul Quillen
Searching for Someday By Jennifer Probst.
Simon and Schuster, $7.19.
Sometimes you just need an airport read. Whether or
not you are actually fl ying, there are days where you need
something mindless. Searching for Someday is a romance
k This Is Between Us By Kevin Sampsell. Tin
House, $15.95.
This Is Between Us is written in the same fl ash fi ction, micro-
chapter style as Kevin Sampsell’s debut memoir A Common
Pornography. The Portland author is a master of the form,
building rhythm and stitching together narrative using memory
like a photo album. For this reason, the two books feel related,
a hyper-confessional tone running throughout. Pornography
is a memoir of growing up in rural central Washington, with
all the messy, TMI, icky moments of teenagers; Between Us
is the fi ve-year life cycle of an adult love relationship, with
all the messy, TMI, icky moments of a post-divorce, blended
family. Infi nitely readable, I challenge anyone to not fi nd
something of himself or herself — often uncomfortably so —
in Sampsell’s writing.
The
two
main
characters are “Me” and
“She” or “You.” The
narrative voice is male:
He’s preoccupied with sex,
self-centered, questionably
straight and marginally
faithful. But he’s also
sensitive and perceptive,
doing his best to be a good
dad and partner while
facing real obstacles to
the intimacy he seeks.
“Everyone is a museum,”
Sampsell writes. And it’s
with this scientifi c eye he
describes his partner. He
worships her physically (again, relatable) but is challenged to
overcome his past, escape insecurities and heal from heartbreak
— dooming his relationship to nasty cycles of hot and cold,
sexual dalliances and frustrating monotony, devastatingly real
for anyone who’s attempted to maintain commitment over time.
Sampsell doesn’t always hit on all cylinders: Planes fl ying
into the Twin Towers as sexual metaphor doesn’t work — not
in a too soon way, but in a that’s just bad writing way. And
“She” is a bit of a troubled Portland hipster stereotype: Pill
popping, she puts on a mask and smashes dishes just “to see
what it would be like to shatter something.” But other times he
gets the spell a woman can cast on a straight man dead right, if
somewhat overwrought: “I like the gaps in you … the smooth
skin space between the bottom of your shirt and the buttons of
your Levis … the thin delicate bridge between your toughness
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