L.K. Rawles

There’s nothing more delightful than a book that makes me feel smart while I’m reading it.

I don’t mean in a “Oh my God, this is such simplistic writing” kind of way. More like “Hey, I totally recognize that obscure cultural/literary reference!” It’s why I like reading Jasper Fforde. It’s a reward for the vast amounts of usually useless trivia that’s taking up shelf room in my brain.

The premise of American Gods is that all the immigrants who came to America brought their gods with them. The people who crossed the Bering Strait brought their animal deities, the Vikings brought Odin, the Irish brought the Morrighan and leprechauns - and here the gods languish, as the people who once worshiped them die out or stop believing.

But here in the New World, we created our own gods to worship: Highways, Cell Phone, Internet and Credit Cards. And the new gods are ready to make war on the old gods.

Into this steps Shadow, a recently released ex-con whose wife has just been killed in car with another man. A mysterious stranger named Wednesday offers him a job as a bodyguard, and suddenly he is caught up in the schemes of a god.

As a kid, I was very into mythologies. Greek, Norse, Egyptian, you name it. Neil Gaiman drops hints and references to hundreds of different mythologies, and figuring out all the clues awoke the 8-year-old nerd in me. (To be honest, that little girl is just cat-napping.)

That’s not to say that I would let an 8-year-old read this book. It is adult and it is dark.

Verdict: 8.5 out of 10. As a bonus, I got to break out my rusty Russian skills! Such as they are.

My family is crazy - just like everyone else’s family. But there are books that remind me why I’m so grateful to have them. And this is one of them.

“Seeing Me Naked” is undoubtedly chick lit, but hey, I’m not a snob. I like chick lit, and this is a good example of when it works.

Elisabeth Page is the daughter of a W.A.S.P. socialite and a celebrated Kerouac-like writer. (Let that combo roll around in your mind for a little while. In the words of Ralph Wiggum, it tastes like burning.)

She and her brother, Raskolnikov or “Rascal,” have always lived under their father’s shadow. Rascal responded by setting out on a literary path of his own. Elisabeth responded by becoming a pastry chef. Neither of these choices is respected by their father.

One of the things that really works in this book is the way Elisabeth’s job completely consumes her life. I have a friend who is a chef in a Chicago restaurant, and I only get to talk to him every 10 months or so. He is always working. Elisabeth’s social life is pretty much restricted to semi-annual hookups with her childhood sweetheart Will, a foreign correspondent to war-torn countries. And that particular relationship is far from healthy.

Now, the inevitable love interest: Elisabeth donates a cooking lesson for one of her mother’s charity auctions, and regular-guy Daniel is the top bidder. He’s a basketball coach at UCLA. They hit it off, and slowly and painstakingly try to build a normal relationship. You know, the hard kind, with compromises, disappointments and insecurities.

So, you know, heartwarming. But my favorite part of the book was the Page family dynamics - and again, they make me super happy to be a member of the Rawles family.

Verdict: 7 out of 10. Light and fluffy, but with a bite.

Being a fast reader definitely has its advantages. But a big disadvantage is that I run through books like crazy, and to be honest, I can’t afford the bookstore tab.

I’m on vacation right now, and since Monday night I’ve read the following books, in order:

• “Big Boned,” by Meg Cabot
• “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency,” by Alexander McCall Smith
• “The Book of Lost Things,” by John Connelly
• “Pearls of Lutra,” by Brian Jacques
• “Tears of the Giraffe,” by Alexander McCall Smith
• “Make Him Look Good,” by Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez
• “The Gun Seller,” by Hugh Laurie (Okay, this one is only partially finished; I’m trying to stretch it out for the plane ride home.)

Denise Mina’s “Garnethill” isn’t just dark. It’s a black hole that sucks you in and consumes you.

I’ve gone on record saying that I don’t like movies and books that deal extensively with mental illness. For the most part, I think that this is still true; I have no intention of running off to buy “The Bell Jar.” But even though a hefty percentage of this book takes place in a psychiatric hospital and the heroine is forever teetering on the brink of a complete breakdown, I found it really enthralling.

“Garnethill” is the first of a trilogy of books (”Garnethill,” “Exile” and “Resolution”) set in Glasgow. The heroine, Maureen O’Donnell, is a young alcoholic who is mere months out of a psychiatric hospital and is dealing with the aftermath of childhood abuse at the hands of her father. One morning after another bender, she awakes to find her married psychologist boyfriend slaughtered in her apartment. In her efforts to clear herself, she uncovers a series of abuses against mentally ill women in the same hospital in which she herself was confined. More murder and mayhem ensues.

I know, right? The very description makes you want to slit your wrists to get it over with, doesn’t it?

Well, I can’t really explain it, but even though it’s an incredibly dark series, it never gets bogged down beneath the giant weight of its own pathos. I mean, the most sympathetic member of her family is her drug-dealing brother Liam - that should be almost cartoonishly pathetic. Maureen is barely able to cling to the remnants of her own sanity, and her actions consistently made me say, “Oh Maureen, what in God’s name are you doing?” But she does cling on, and her actions are believable given her circumstances.

If you do read “Garnethill,” I’d highly suggest reading the entire trilogy. Even though it seems kind of impossible, “Resolution” does resolve all the plot threads in a satisfying and really unexpected way.

Verdict: 8 out of 10 for the whole trilogy. It won a bunch of literary prizes, and it’s not hard to see why.

Okay, I didn’t like this one. But I think that part of the failing is mine, not the book’s.

“The Oxford Murders” was originally written in Spanish, and I’m ashamed to say that I could not get past that. The entire time I was reading it I kept thinking, “That’s kind of a strange way to phrase that. Was that Martinez or the translator Sonia Soto?”

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve read translated books before - I can’t exactly read “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” in its original Czech. (Side note on T.U.L.O.B.: What was with the bowler hat?) I don’t know why I couldn’t let it drop this time.

But even aside from that, “The Oxford Murders” won’t get a permanent place on my over-stressed bookcase. At 197 pages, it’s a short mystery. The unnamed narrator (pretentious!) is an Argentinian graduate student in mathematics studying for a year at Oxford University. His landlady ends up dead in the first of what appears to be a string of murders based on the beliefs of an ancient mathematical society. Unnamed Narrator works with one of his personal heroes, a famous Oxford logician, to try to anticipate the next murder in the series.

Okay, it sounds a little bit DaVinci-Code. What can I say, there was a 2-for-3 book sale at Barnes & Noble. However, instead of being brain candy, it kept whipping out passages like this:

My hypothesis is that it is profoundly linked to the aesthetic that has been promulgated down the ages and has been, essentially, unchanging. There is no Kantian forcing, but an aesthetic of simplicity and elegance which also guides the formulation of conjectures; mathematicians believe that the beauty of a theorem requires certain divine proportions between the simplicity of the axioms at the starting point, and the simplicity of the thesis at the point of arrival. The awkward, tricky part has always been the path between the two - the proof. And as long as that aesthetic is maintained there is no reason for undecidable propositions to appear “naturally.”

The eventual solution to this mystery was not cool enough to justify making me read 197 pages of this.

Verdict: 4 out of 10. Much like with Dan Brown, I enjoyed a few of the researched tidbits about ancient math brotherhoods, but that was about it.

I’m a newcomer to graphic novels. Before three months ago, the closest I had come to reading a graphic novel was reading “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” while on vacation at my aunt’s house when I was 9. Sad, huh?

I associated graphic novels with my goth friends who had fixations on Trent Reznor and painted their fingernails black. I know. It was really snotty of me. It wasn’t Neil Gaiman’s fault that they wore too much eyeliner; they made those fashion choices on their own.

The watershed moment for me came after reading a free PDF of Bill Willingham’s series “Fables,” which I now love and adore and recommend highly. Amazon.com’s Recommended for You feature - with which I have a tempestuous relationship - then pointed me to Joe Sacco’s work.

Sacco is a journalist whose medium is comics. He has covered the Palestinian conflict and the Bosnian War, in drawings reminiscent of R. Crumb. ”Safe Area Gorazde” chronicles the time he spent in a beseiged Bosnian village, Gorazde (gor-AHJZ-duh).

There’s something very poignant about Sacco’s combination of story and artwork. I loved details like the clothing they were wearing, the ugly patterned sweaters native to the Eastern Bloc (and appropriated by Bill Cosby). Most importantly, he was able to coherently explain the major events that tore Yugoslavia apart - in a comic, no less.

The Serbians suffered horribly during WWII, and you’ll never hear me say different. But they committed terrible atrocities against the Bosnian Muslims in the 1990s. Sacco’s book reminds me why I found it so trying to copy-edit stories from the Balkans. The more you learn, the more you detest everything about the situation and everyone involved in it. The human misery is bottomless.

I still think that I could offer a pretty solid solution to the Balkan Problem, but I’ll need some nuclear weapons, the Ebola virus and a lot of salt. Carthago delenda est!

Verdict: 8 out of 10. It’s an important work of journalism and pretty heart-rending stuff. I recommend it, but it’s not a light read.

I just finished re-reading one of my favorites, “Cold Comfort Farm.” Written in 1932, it’s a parody of the rural genre of Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence.

Yeah, sounds fun, right? Stick with me, it’s worth it. I’ve never read Thomas Hardy or D. H. Lawrence, and I loved it.

Flora Poste, an orphan at 19 with an expensive and unmarketable education, is faced with the decision of moving in with relatives. The ones she selects are the Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm in Howling, Sussex.

Determined to tidy up the personal lives of her passionately dysfunctional relatives, Flora embarkes on a campaign worthy of Hannibal, encountering fierce resistance. Flora is the enemy of melodrama.

Here’s Flora meeting her cousin Reuben:

The man’s big body, etched menacingly against the bleak light stabbed in from the low windows, did not move. His thoughts swirled like a beck in spate behind the sodden grey furrows of his face. A woman…Blast! Blast! Come to wrest away from him the land whose love fermented in his veins like slow yeast. She-woman. Young, soft-colored, insolent. His gaze was suddenly edged by a fleshly taint. Break her. Break. Keep and hold fast the land. The land, the iron furrows of frosted earth under the rain-lust, the fecund spears of rain, the swelling, slow burst of seed-sheaths, the slow smell of cows and cry of cows, the trampling bride-pride of the bull in his hour. All his, all his –
“Will you have some bread and butter?” asked Flora, handing him a cup of tea. “Oh, never mind your boots. Adam can sweep the mud up afterwards. Do come in.”

Faced with the Starkadder’s monumental strangeness, Flora decides to send her cousin Amos off on a preaching tour, marry her flower-child cousin Elphine to the son of the local gentry and deal with the matriarch Aunt Ada Doom once and for all. (Aunt Ada once “saw something nasty in the woodshed” and has never been quite the same - though her madness conveniently doesn’t stop her from keeping track of the farm’s poultry earnings.)

Something about the book reminds me of my adolescence, but in a good way. In high school I had a bunch of friends whose lives needed managing (back when I was still young enough to think that I should be the one managing them.) That was also the time period that I decided that tragic, artistic souls took themselves too seriously. Also that hemp clothes do nothing for a girl’s figure and that patchouli oil cannot perform the same function as anti-perspirant. Smells Like Teen Spirit indeed.

Verdict: 9 out of 10. It’s lighthearted and bracing at the same time, and even though I don’t catch some of the 1930s British references, I love reading this book.

I worry that I’m not being fair to Augusten Burroughs. The special place in my heart for gay men with dysfunctional families, obsessive-compulsive tendencies and strong ties to New York City who write semi-autobiographical memoirs – well, that place is already pretty filled by David Rakoff and David Sedaris.

The comparison is particularly strong with David Sedaris: both in committed long-term relationships, Northerners with Southern roots, compulsive smokers (although Burroughs has now transferred his addiction to nicotine gum), larger-than-life mothers, adolescent friendships with tough ballsy girls, a series of humiliating jobs and childhoods dominated by intricate self-imposed rituals.

And okay, maybe that could describe a lot of people. But their styles of writing are so similar - and Sedaris got to me first. So it’s hard for me to objectively appreciate Burroughs.

Anyway, “Possible Side Effects.” It’s a collection of essays, in no chronological order. He writes about his love for his dogs, the curse of chapped hands, alcoholism, getting hooked on nicotine gum and some very disturbing episodes from his childhood.

It’s those sections about his childhood that reminded me too much of “A Beautiful Mind.” Remember when that movie was winning sackfuls of awards? It was about a schizophrenic math prodigy. I couldn’t bear that movie (or “Shine” with Geoffrey Rush) because whatever uplifting message it may have had was drowned for me beneath the horror of not being in control of your own mind.

So debilitating mental illness will never be something I look for in my recreational entertainment, and Burroughs delivers plenty of it through the character of his mother. She suffered from a glittering, manic and magnetic psychosis. (You’ve probably encountered someone like that in your own life, especially if you got a liberal arts degree in college.) It was difficult for me to read while experiencing what was essentially a protracted wince.

Verdict: 5 out of 10. That probably says more about me than about Burroughs, but hey, it’s my review.

In the blink of an eye, Charlie Asher’s world fell apart - not that he hadn’t been expecting it. He was a worrier. After his wife died suddenly, Charlie was left with an infant daughter, a thrift store to run, and an eerie magnatism for the soon-to-be-dead. Oh, and a part-time job as a reaper, whose job duties are outlined in the manual “The Great Big Book of Death.”

I’d read Moore’s book “Fluke” before, and he has a knack for creating bizzare characters. There’s Charlie’s daughter, Sophie, who can kill with the word “kitty” and is guarded by hellhounds; his lesbian sister, Jane, who keeps stealing his suits; a goth-girl disciple and retail clerk; a 7-foot-tall fellow “Death Merchant” named Minty Fresh; a Buddhist with a talent for reanimating squirrel parts; and the Morrigan, a hostile trio of Celtic death-goddess harpies.

From Moore’s acknowledgments, it’s clear that he wrote this book while his mother was dying, and he dedicates “A Dirty Job” to hospice workers and volunteers. Hospice workers appear in several cameos, and his descriptions of families in mourning feel very authentic.

Another theme Moore is enchanted with is the idea of “Beta Males”:

While Alpha Males are often gifted with superior physical attributes - size, strength, speed, good looks - selected by evolution over the eons by the strongest surviving and, essentially, getting all the girls, the Beta Male gene has survived not by meeting and overcoming adversity, but by anticipating and avoiding it. That is, when the Alpha Males were out charging after mastadons, the Beta Males could imagine in advance that attacking what was essentially an an angry, wooly bulldozer with a pointy stick might be a losing proposition, so they hung back at camp to console the grieving widows.

Our hero Charlie Asher is most decidedly a Beta male.

So, what about this book got on my nerves? Continued and egregious use of a term I’d never heard used before (and would be hesitant about entering into a Google search engine): f*ck-puppets. The asterisk is mine, because my dead grandmas may be reading this from heaven. The more grandmother-appropriate equivalent would be “mistresses” or “kept women.” It made me all uncomfortable, and I don’t enjoy feeling like a prude, Christopher Moore!

But don’t get me wrong, I really liked this book. In fact, it won my heart the second I realized that the cover was glow-in-the-dark. I am all about the meaningless externals.

Verdict: 8 out of 10. I read it in one sitting, and laughed until my seat neighbor on the airplane started looking at me funny.

For an even better book with a similar sense of macabre whimsy, read “Good Omens” by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. “Good Omens” would score a 9.5 on my scale. Armageddon has never been this funny.

Some books have appeared in my life at exactly the moment I needed or could appreciate them. This is one of those books.

It was the autumn of 2003, and I was spending two weeks in Paris as a prologue to a three-month internship in Prague. (Grad school rocked.) It was the first time I’d been in a country whose language I didn’t speak. My French is abominable, and my Czech was non-existent (I did later learn some Czech; sadly, all that remains in my memory banks is “Can I buy a metro ticket?”)

I had seminars through the mid-afternoon, but after that I was free to wander around (my very favorite pastime.) I was spending an awful lot of time in the Gilbert & Jeune bookstores, which had a respectable number of new and used books in English. I reached down and plucked this book from the bottom shelf, then sat down on the floor to flip through it. Fifteen minutes later I had to buy the book and leave the store, because I was making a public spectacle of myself by laughing so hard.

P. J. O’Rourke was a foreign correspondent for Rolling Stone magazine from the 1980s through 2001, and Holidays in Hell is a collection of his travel stories, published in 1988. These weren’t the most sought-after travel locales. O’Rourke went to places like Lebanon, Nicaragua, Poland, El Salvador, Jim Bakker’s Heritage U.S.A., Northern Ireland and Panama, and got as drunk as he could on whatever local liquor was available.

But the article that was making me burst forth with those embarrassing snorting laughs was “Among the Euro-Weenies,” written from Paris in a fit of pique as O’Rourke tried desperately to get a visa for Libya in time for the coolest of the 1986 bombings.

I’ve been over here for one grey, dank spring month now, and I think I can tell you why everyone with an IQ bigger than his hat size hits the beach at Ellis Island. Say what you want about ‘land of opportunity’ and ‘purple mountain majesty above the fruited plain’, our forbearers moved to the United States because they were sick to death of lukewarm beer - and lukewarm coffee and lukewarm bath water and lukewarm mystery cutlets with mucky-colored mushroom cheese junk on them. Everything in Europe is lukewarm except the radiators. You could use the radiators to make party ice. But nobody does.

I loved this entire book, especially “Seoul Brothers,” “What do they do for fun in Warsaw?” and “The Holy Land - God’s monkey house.” But there were two quotes in Holidays in Hell that I’ve carried with me, quotes that helped prepare me for the next three months of editing articles about the former Soviet republics and the Balkans.

The first wasn’t actually O’Rourke’s, but it was on his dedication page:

Often the more you understand, the less you forgive. - Jillian Becker, Director of Institute for the Study of Terrorism

The second is from his introduction:

Half the world’s suffering is caused by earnest messages contained in grand theories bearing no relation to reality - Marxism and No-Fault Auto Insurance, to name two. Earnestness is just stupidity sent to college.

And oh, it is true. As someone who can spell Srebrenica, I tell you it is true.