Sometimes a Great Notion (Ken Kesey) (10.0/10.0)

That this greatest work of iconic, if underappreciated, American author Ken Kesey is not more widely read is, we consider, one of the great tragedies of modern American literary culture. Kesey is generally best known for his groundbreaking 1962 novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and his role as the leader of the cross country- and LSD-tripping Merry Pranksters, whose exploits were famously chronicled by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Both are excellent works and well worth a read, especially if you have interest in either the Beat Generation (whose individualistic ideals and perspective Kesey largely inherited) or the drug-fueled love-fest of West Coast America in the 1960’s and 70’s. But any lover of great literature, particularly great American literature, and particularly particularly great male American literature, is doing himself a serious disservice by ignoring what is undoubtedly Kesey’s greatest work, Sometimes a Great Notion.

The novel chronicles the Stamper family of Oregon, whose fiercely-independent and hard-scrabble life is played out among the teeming, danger-filled forests that they log and on the banks of the Wakonda River, whose waters have eroded the land about the Stamper family home to the point that the live on a virtual island. Like the setting, the characters are well-drawn and endlessly interesting, from the half-crazed patriarch, Henry Stamper, to the physically brutal but dependable eldest son, Hank Stamper, to the patient loyalty and creeping desire of Hank’s wife, Vivian Stamper, to the softer intellectual person of Leland Stamper, the estranged half-brother of Hank who returns to the family logging business just as the Stampers stand off against powerful union interests, which demand that the family shut down operations to support an ongoing loggers strike.

But it is not just the compelling story of rugged individualism and fierce family loyalty that makes this perhaps the greatest novel ever written in American Literature (and we say perhaps only because we have not read them all). Kesey also innovates in style, using a technique of multiple first-person, stream of consciousness accounts of thought and action to bring the gritty characters to life. The points of view move from person to person furiously over the course of a single page and the reader can imagine the 72-hour amphetamine-fueled stints that Kesey admitted to in his writing of it. Whatever your criticisms of his technique, the effect is pure artistry—a symphony of action and emotion that builds to a crescendo that pits the Stamper family against all the arrayed forces of man and nature.

We have no problem placing this book at the top of our list of books for men and recommend it above all others for its incredible story and innovative style.

Doin' the Hop

It's time for the Book Blogger Hop once again.  This time, Jennifer over at Crazy for Books has asked all of us bloggers to give our names and explain a little about how we got started in the biz.  Ok, so I'm Patrick and I'm addicted to books (Hi, Patrick).  As for how we got started, I'm reposting from an interview that we did over at Australian book blog Page Turners not so long ago. 

"We’re new kids on the block, having started this past March, but we’re in it for the long haul. As for the reason why, a National Public Radio story some years back determined that only 20% of fiction readers (in the US, UK, and Canada) were men. I’d be shocked if the number were higher in Australia. Not only do I think that this is a tragedy for men on an individual level (as I said above, I think fiction allows us to understand ourselves and one another), but it is a tragedy for society at large where a little empathy and understanding can sometimes make all the difference between uninformed violence and informed compassion. There is a real debate over whether the fiction-reading gap is due to a genuine lack of interest in reading on the part of men or a result of the heavy marketing dollars that are poured into romance and young adult novels based around female characters (the so-called “chick lit”). I tend to think that it’s is a combination of the two, but I do think that the publishing industry bears some responsibility for the actual state of affairs. Hopefully, with the continued development of reading technologies (an area in which men are definitely interested), that will begin to change. In any case, we at 'The Literate Man' want to do our small part to get men reading again."

And that's us in a nutshell.  Come on in, take a look around, take off your coat (it's summer down here in Miami, after all), have a seat, put your feet up, and settle in for a good read.  Oh yeah--and leave a comment--we want to hear from you!

A Declaration of War on All Things Twilight

I tried to read Twilight by Stephenie Meyer. I really did. I am conscious of the many historical instances in which the seemingly unredeemable popular work of the day—championed by the great unwashed masses, but ridiculed by the literati—later became a pillar of English or American Literature. And so, I very consciously refrain from judging a work before I actually read it for myself and, in all likelihood, determine that it is not, in fact, so much trash, but just another in a long line of additions to English or American pop culture that is mildly entertaining and, perhaps, of latent artistic value to be recognized in some far off date when our children seek to define the age gone by. But fifty pages of Twilight revealed the issue to me in stark detail: we have finally become a nation of literary panderers. For every Cormac McCarthy, there are a dozen Stephenie Meyers who direct the focus of American literary endeavor to the very lowest common denominator. And I, for one, will not watch the ship of American literature founder and sink without at least trying to plug the leak and bail.


There are many arguments to be made against the story of Twilight itself, which anyone who has not been living in a cave for the past decade knows whether they’ve read the book or not. It’s decidedly unoriginal—both Anne Rice and Charlaine Harris did vampires better. It’s also decidedly creepy—the story of a man 109-year old man having an affair with a 17-year old high school girl. Not since Nabokov’s Lolita has a story so successfully cashed in on society’s prurient interest in young girls. And it unabashedly perpetuates the princess myth, wherein the helpless young girl is unable to defend herself against the terrible forces of this world and must seek the protection of the impossibly strong, handsome, and wealthy man that will, of course, dedicate his life to her safety and happiness. That literally millions of young girls around the world are being raised to think that this is an acceptable framework through which to see the world is more our failing as a society than Stephenie Meyers’ as a creative artist.

But none of this is surprising or even particularly bothersome to me. I am sufficiently jaded by popular American culture at this point that lousy, recycled stories roll off my back like so much water off a duck. What does bother me is the scale upon which Twilight has been adopted by and incorporated into American culture and the resulting shift of our collective focus toward those stories that present an airbrushed (if not wholly animated) depiction of American life in a series of clichéd cliffhangers and caricatures while eschewing (or at least relegating to a distant secondary status) any story that accurately depicts the joys and the hardships of this life and the emotional struggles that realistic characters endure in order to survive within it. I genuinely fear that the overriding popularity of Twilight has finally pushed us irrevocably into the category of slack-jawed cartoon watchers, with no interest in stories with organic meaning for our condition as human beings, stories that make us think, stories that make us consider other points of view or strive to be better, or at lease stories that involve an original thought.

And so, somewhat surprisingly, I feel that I owe Stephenie Meyers a personal debt of gratitude. Twilight was, to me, a boot to the head. I can now see the dark night about me, but I refuse to go quietly into it. I am awake, and I recognize that, in order to find those stories that I treasure—stories by which we collectively define and experience the many beautiful variations on the human condition—I must trade Twilight for The Long River Home, Penguin Books for Pushcart, the Oscars for the Independent Spirit Awards, Blockbuster for Netflix, and Amazon for the local library. I must refuse the dry pellets of food poured in my feed bowl and instead beg from the table, because that is where the nutrition lies.
And so, The Literate Man hereby declares war on all things Twilight. I would ask you to join us by making conscious decisions about where your entertainment dollars (and those of your children) are being spent. Rather than dripping amorphously into the jellied mass of the lowest common denominator, let us try to raise it up, slap it around, and help it to recognize that genuine meaning can still be found in literature, if only we are willing to look for it.

To Have and Have Not (Ernest Hemingway) (4.5/10.0)

To Have and Have Not is the kind of book that you can barely believe was penned by Ernest Hemingway. This literary giant wrote many a beautiful thing in his day and no matter what terrible things he may have written between his several masterpieces the triumph of his genius cannot be erased. But this book comes as close as any will.

To Have and Have Not was Hemingway’s most ambitious literary endeavor by a long-shot. And he fails spectacularly. It’s a story about a smuggler and his family in Key West, which attempts to dissect the socio-economic injustices of Depression-era United States. This is no easy subject for certain, and his legacy would have been the better for not having attempting the feat. And yet, there is something admirable in Hemingway’s attempt even if it does make for a miserable read.

The story is disjointed in terms of both time and structure. It’s more a sequence of vignettes that fail to add up to a whole with a string of dead-end tangents around every page. When Hemingway broaches the greater social issues of the ‘haves and have-nots’ as the title suggests, there’s little point or connection to the plot. The examination is superficial, boring, and in the end sheds very light on the real issues. On top of that, it might just be the most extensive collection of awful metaphors ever published. Hardly a paragraph goes by without a clunker of a metaphor jumping off the page to stab the reader in his or her brain.

The most interesting parts of the story are the colorful scenes at various Key West watering holes, which Hemingway paints to perfection. These are no doubt well-researched, first-hand accounts of the Key West bar scene and its many colorful characters, but they serve no real purpose in the story other than to offer a break from the tired language of the rest of the book.

Worst of all, it’s impossible to like any of the characters. It’s almost as if Hemingway went out of his way to make his characters unappealing. And his attempts to add dimension to these figures simply gives the reader more reasons not to like them.

When Hemingway is at his best, he is king. When he’s at his worst, his writing makes L. Ron Hubbard look like Shakespeare. And after reading To Have and Have Not, even a TV Guide will look like breathtaking literature. In short, To Have and Have Not read this book, I’d much rather have not.

If you do give it a read, try and forget about it quickly. Dwell instead on A Farewell to Arms or The Sun Also Rises. This is the Hemingway that we know and love.

The Literate Man does the Book Blogger Hop

Every weekend, Crazy for Books hosts the Book Blogger Hop, where bloggers and readers alike are encouraged to explore the book blogosphere in search of as yet undiscovered snarky reviewers talent.  It is a great place to find out exactly what you have been missing and explore all of the distinct and varying perspectives on both classics and pop lit from our fellow lovers of literature.  It is also an opportunity for bloggers, like The Literate Man, to engage in shameless self-promotion educate the reading public about the valuable perspectives that we offer.  So get on board--do the Hop--and tell them that The Literate Man sent you.

  

My Invented Country (Isabel Allende) (7.0/10.0)

It's about time we at The Literate Man expand our minds and broaden our horizons to include more talented female authors. One of our favorites is Isabel Allende. She has a gift for storytelling and is one of literature's living treasures.

If you've ever read any of her books you'll begin to notice that most of them cover very similar territory, and you might be forgiven for thinking that all of them sort of bleed into a single, larger narrative. My Invented Country (Mi País Inventado, if you're looking for the original) is no different in this regard. If you're looking for fresh ideas from Allende's cannon you won't find them here. But if you're looking for a light read that will put a smile on your face and fill your brain with snippets of knowledge about her birth country of Chile, this book will more than suffice.

Because The Literate Man's global headquarters are located in Miami--the capital of Latin America and fertile ground for Chilean expats (hola muchachos!)--we at The Literate Man have been to known run in certain Chilean circles. So I have to admit that my particular interest in My Invented Country wasn't of a purely literary bent, but rather a bit of personal research to see what makes our Chilean friends tick.

Promising to "evoke the magnificent landscape of her country," and "the enchanting idiosyncrasies of the Chilean people," I was hooked as soon as I read the back cover. Admittedly, my knowledge of this most southern of South American countries is limited to the information I gather from expat friends and a reporter friend in Santiago who writes about professional basketball there. So it was with great interest and great pleasure that I read this book.

Allende, in a way that perhaps only she can, weaves a personal, cultural, political, historical (and any other descriptive modifier ending in `-al' that you can think of), account of a little-known country rich in narrative. And with her gifted and quirky eye for the details that lay just under the surface this is a great Idiots Guide to Chile.

So whether you're looking to learn more about the rich and turbulent history of Chile from the Spanish colonial conquest to post-Pinochet democracy, the mouth watering cuisine of one the world's major fisheries, the craziness of Allende's mythic family, or you if you'd simply like to partake of her talent as a storyteller, you'll find all that and more in My Invented Country.

It's probably as close as you can get to visiting Chile without leaving the comfort of your favorite reading chair.

We're HUGE in Australia!

Ok ... maybe that's an exaggeration.  But Becky over at Page Turners is Australian and, what's more, she's definitely the coolest book-blogging Australian that we've ever met.  More importantly, she likes us enough to print the brief "interview" that we put together in a fit of shameless self-promotion for her Lights Camera Blog Action series.  Check it out here.  Truth be told, we've had a nice little back-and-forth with Becky about Australian literature, which we can't get enough of.  Thanks, Becky! And don't forget to check out Page Turners--it's definitely worth your time.