A Christmas Blizzard by Garrison Keillor

A Christmas Blizzard: A Novel

by Garrison Keillor

This Christmas fable is a typical Garrison Keillor story, rambling with details of the far North United States, filled with minutiae. The absurd, the ludicrous and the ironic take center stage. It's Dicken's Scrooge updated with a uniquely Keillor humor.

James Sparrow has a strange but sometimes crippling fear of sticking his tongue on a frozen pump handle. He's not exactly afraid of doing it, but rather afraid the compulsion will make him stick his tongue to freezing metal.

A rich man from sales of an energy drink he didn't even invent, he just bought and marketed it, he has bought a Hawaiin estate and prefers to spend his winters there, free from the fear of frozen metal, but his wife adores Christmas and everything it brings in Chicago. She's on the board of directors of the ballet, the symphony and the theater.

Desperate to escape Christmas in Chicago for Hawaii, instead James ends up leaving his sick wife behind as he boards his private jet to go say good-bye to an uncle in Looseleaf, North Dakota who made his childhood bearable.

Once there, a terrible blizzard descends and he finds he can't bear going to see his dying uncle. James spends the night in an ice shack on the lake and is visited by many visions

As with any short fable the characters are not drawn in depth but rather more as archetypes. He's not cast as an evil man though, just one living his life without really living, running scared of frozen metal.

In checking out the book on Amazon.com, I was horrified to read the description and a review. Did anyone actually read this short book? The description doesn't remotely capture the story, saying it's a comic novel and he's going to see an ailing aunt but the power goes out. Heh? The review says James and his wife go to North Dakota, but it's only James who actually goes. At least they mention a dying uncle instead of an ailing aunt.

Oh well, if you're looking for a Christmas story that's a little out of the ordinary or you enjoy Garrison Keillor's monologues, this short book is for you. 

The Rope by Nevada Barr

The Rope

By Nevada Barr

Nevada Barr is one of those authors that I look forward to a new book from and, when I get one, I know that I will be up late into the night until I have finished the story. 

The main character and detective in this series is Anna Pigeon, a Native American park ranger in the U.S. National Park Service.  Anna has been in some life threatening situations and has the mental scars to prove it.  She is tough and resourceful.  Each book has taken us to a new national park as Anna has moved around in her work.  Her sister, Molly, is a psychologist and has been one of the mainstays in the stories.

Of course, as with any long running series, 17 and counting, some of the books haven’t been as strong as others but one of my coworkers, another Anna Pigeon fan, agreed that this book is a return to the gritty story telling of the Anna Pigeon mysteries.

I found it an interesting and effective choice that the book does not begin from Anna’s frame of reference, but rather from the National Park Service personnel who she was working with so that our first glimpse of her is through their recollections.  When we switch to Anna’s perspective, the view darkens considerably.

In this book, we are taken back to Anna’s first foray into park service, before she was a ranger.  At this point, Anna has lost her husband, Zach, fairly recently and is looking for a change to help escape her pain.  She goes out west to be a seasonal employee in the Glen Canyon National Recreational Area.  Clearly in mourning, her fellow employees are not surprised that Anna doesn’t stick around.  Most of her personal property is gone so they assume she went back to New York City and the theater life.  No one suspects that she is still in the state, let alone still in the park. 

The character of Anna Pigeon has always been marked by her resilience in enduring pain. This is a dark tale of our heroine being tested and forged in fire.  At the end, she gives voice to her decision to go into law enforcement, saying, “Women need to come to think of themselves not as victims but as dangerous.”  

A strong female character in the making, I highly recommend this book and the others in the series.

Odd Thomas by Dean Koontz

Odd Thomas
By Dean Koontz

Just hearing the name Dean Koontz, you might assume this is a horror book, but Odd Thomas is one of those books that rather defies classification and instead falls into the simple category of  “a really good book.”

In describing himself, Odd Thomas says, “I am such a nonentity by the standards of our culture that People magazine not only will never feature a piece about me but might also reject my attempts to subscribe to their publication on the grounds that the black-hole gravity of my noncelebrity is powerful enough to suck their entire enterprise into oblivion.”

“Oddy” as his girlfriend Stormy Llewellyn calls him, is a humble and simple man.  He works as a short order cook at the Pico Mundo Grill and if he ever left there, he thinks he might go into tires.  Perhaps it’s because of the demands of the dead that he yearns for the simple life.  You see, Odd can’t talk with the dead, because they don’t talk for some reason, but they do communicate with him and he feels the compassionate need to help them, because he can. 

“I’m not the law.  I’m not vigilante justice.  I’m not vengeance personified.  I don’t really know what I am or why.  In moments like these, however, I can’t restrain myself from action.  A kind of madness comes over me, and I can no more turn away from what must be done than I can wish this fallen world back into a state of grace.”

Odd doesn’t take matters into his own hands, he has no intention to hurt anyone, he’s almost like some kind of avenging angel sent to bring the guilty party to justice. 

The writing style is beautifully simple but colorful, humorous and sympathetic.  For example, “Little Ozzie has a cat named Terrible Chester.  He loves that cat.  In fact, if Terrible Chester were to use up his ninth life under the wheels of a Peterbilt, I am afraid that Little Ozzie’s big heart would not survive the loss.” 

Instead of simply saying that if the cat got run over by a truck, it would kill Odd Thomas’s friend, Koontz’s choice of metaphor illustrates it and is slightly funny while also showing Odd’s concern for his friend - beautifully done.

You may wonder about the name Odd, or assume that it’s a nickname, but you would be mistaken.  “According to my mother, this is an uncorrected birth-certificate error.”  Sometimes she claims they meant to name him Todd or sometimes even Dobb, after a Czechoslovakian uncle, but his father points out that he doesn’t have a Czechoslovakian uncle.

Everything Odd is welcome here.  Even the fact that the ghost of Elvis hangs around is not disconcerting because it is offered in such an understated way.  Only three people in the world know of Odd Thomas’s ability to see and interact with the dead – his author friend Little Ozzie, his girlfriend Stormy Llewellyn and his friend, the chief of police Wyatt Porter.  To everyone else, Odd Thomas is just… odd.  Once you know what he’s dealing though, he doesn’t seem so odd.  In fact, he seems downright amazingly sane and even for what he’s dealing with.

This novel introduced the world to Odd Thomas and tells his adventure of thwarting “Fungus Man” from creating a day of devastation in his hometown of Pico Mundo.  Thankfully, there are several more novels featuring Odd Thomas, including Forever Odd, Brother Odd, Odd Hours and Odd Apocalypse plus two more in the works.  There’s also a three part novella titled Odd Interlude and several graphic novels, not to mention an Odd Thomas movie coming out in 2013. 

Oh, and the reading of the book on audio by David Aaron Baker is brilliant in its understated portrayal of Odd Thomas.  I have read each of these books by listening to them on audio because his Odd Thomas is so perfect that it actually adds to the book, as good readers can, instead of distracting you from the story.  Enjoy!

A Good Man: Rediscovering My Father, Sargent Shriver by Mark Shriver

A Good Man
Rediscovering My Father, Sargent Shriver
by Mark Shriver

I’ve heard the Shriver name, of course.  Who could miss it in this day and age?  But my knowledge of that time period is relegated to memorized facts and figures as a period I did not live through.  I’d never really paid very much attention to the various people in the Shriver and Kennedy families, but this book caught my attention.  The title immediately made me think of my godfather, who I felt truly embodied the term “a good man.”  I remember at my godfather’s funeral, talking with one of his daughters-in-law about what a kind man he was.  How do you get to be that kind?  I still don’t really know.  Is it something particular people are born with?  Is it something they learn?  I hope everyone has had the opportunity to known someone like that in their lifetime. 

Though I didn’t know much about the man, I had of course heard of the Peace Corps and many other of the organizations that he put in motion.  With this book, Mark Shriver takes on the journey to understand his father Robert Sargent Shriver, known as Sarge, and “what it takes to be not a great man but a good man.” 

“Most of all, I wanted to understand the riddle of his joy.  I knew that his uncanny, boundless joy had powered him every day of his life.  Where did it come from?  How did he sustain it, gracing so many of us along the way?”

Sarge’s life was not a charmed and easy one as part of a well-known family.  A couple truly formative events in Sarge’s life were the Great Depression and his service in World War II. 

Sarge’s father “was ruined financially and emotionally during the Great Depression.  In 1923, his father had moved the family from Westminster to Baltimore, where he went into banking, and then again, in 1929, to New York City to become a founding partner of a new investment bank.  The time could not have been worse.”  They lost everything and his father fell into a depression that he never recovered from.  Sarge lost his father in 1941. 

Like most men who lived through a war, it wasn’t something Sarge talked about often but Mark remembers hearing once about a battle on the South Dakota that must have haunted his father all his life, the memory of slipping on the blood of his friends and having to clean up pieces of them on the deck of the ship afterward. 

Sarge never shrank from duty, as when he was asked to plan President Kennedy’s funeral.  Perhaps the hardest part was telling his pregnant wife, who he loved deeply, that her brother had been shot and killed.

“We are all born into a web of relationships and circumstances, tragedies and opportunities.  As I was coming into this world, my family lived through parades in Ireland one day and a funeral procession soon after.”

Through all of this, Sarge’s faith sustained him.  “I had as my father a man who not only was faith-filled and disciplined but who also insisted, in large part because of his faith, on the grace and joy in life.” 

Even if you don’t believe in God, or the Christian God, I think it’s easy to respect a man who lived by the principles that he learned from his faith to serve and help others with kindness all his life.

After President Kennedy’s assassination, Sarge worked under the Johnson administration in true bipartisan fashion to head the war on poverty.  His New York Times obituary suggests the scope of his influence by the programs that came out of that office, including “Head Start, the Job Corps, Volunteers in Service to America, the Community Action Program and Legal Services for the Poor.”

“Yes, Dad had an ego – you have to have a strong ego to stand up and run for political office at any level in this county, let alone vice president or president… Dad really wasn’t a politician, at least not a modern-day version of an American politician, Republican or Democrat.  I don’t think he ever looked at his defeats and thought, I am not powerful anymore.  It didn’t take him thirty years or, really, any time to get over the losses, because that type of thinking never entered his mind.”

The author takes time to describe the scene and his own life, growing up part of the Kennedy clan, to put in context and show the effect his father had on his life.

“It took me until after his death to see it clearly: his faith demanded his hopefulness, and his hope underpinned his work.  He worked to give others the opportunity to hope – that was his abiding ambition.”

In the words of former President Clinton’s eulogy, “he really was as good as his family just told you, and maybe even a little better, and a whole generation of us understood what President Kennedy meant by looking at Sargent Shriver’s life.”

The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper

The Dark is Rising
By Susan Cooper

Every once in a while a book, maybe a book series, comes along that grips your imagination and fuels it.  A lot of times those series are written for young readers, in my experience.  I think of the The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis or Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling or Redwall by Brian Jacques… or The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper.  If you haven’t discovered it yet, you have some good reading in store.

The Dark is Rising sequence has long been one of my all time favorite series of books and in particular, The Dark is Rising was my favorite book, perhaps because it was the first one I read.  (I did read them out of order but it didn’t diminish my enjoyment of the series at all.)  I first picked them up as a teenager because a family I babysat for was reading them a chapter or two a night. It was something the whole family could enjoy. 

If you are going to read just one book, read The Dark is Rising.  It is an Arthurian legend and Welsh folk hero based story that holds something for anyone, no matter how old you are.  I think it’s a better book then the first and more interesting to older readers.

The story opens on Midwinter’s Eve, the longest night of the year and the evening before Will Stanton’s 11^th birthday.  The animals are acting strange around Will, there’s a tramp hanging around and an unexpected blizzard blows in, giving Will the heavy snow he’s always wanted to see.  It all serves to set the stage for the beginning of Will’s awakening as an Old One.

“In the midst of all the din and flurry, he had suddenly had a strange feeling stronger than any he had ever known; he had been aware that someone was trying to tell him something, something that had missed him because he could not understand the words.  Not words exactly; it had been like a kind of silent shout.”

When Will wakes in the morning, everyone else is asleep and he can’t rouse a single person in his large family. 

“There was a total silence as deep and blanketing as the timeless snow; the house and everyone in it lay in a sleep that would not be broken.”

But in his awakening as an Old One, Will realizes that this is not as alarming as it might be under normal circumstances.  He dresses and sets off in the deep snow, beginning his quest though he doesn’t even yet know that he will be seeking the six magical Signs that will one day be integral in driving back the Dark.

Every once in a while I pull out this book and re-read it, falling under the spell it weaves, of an epic quest and an innocent child who awakens to the terrible beauty and sadness of life. 

No matter your age, this book will take you on a journey that will inspire you.

Artist’s Journal Workshop by Cathy Johnson

Artist’s Journal Workshop

creating your life in words and pictures
with insights from 27 artists
By Cathy Johnson

Now this would make a great Christmas present.  Hey, and she’s even offering autographed copies, a favorite gift of mine.  Of course, I highly encourage you to take a look at it through your local library, before you buy it.

Don’t think of this as a journal that only someone who is a trained artist would make, but as a journal to express the artistic part of yourself.

“People sometimes tell me their lives are too boring or uneventful to journal.  I’m not buying it.  They say there’s nothing to draw that’s not mundane.  But seeing and capturing such things in the pages of a journal rescues them from the mundane.”

I’ve always said everyone has a story to tell.  I encourage people to journal.  I’ve often heard people say they can’t write or they can’t draw, even though I know they made it through school so they must be able to put words on paper, and most people have at least doodled in the margins of paper while they talked on the phone. 

If you don’t enjoy these things, that is certainly valid, but what people usually mean is that they can’t create with the level of sophistication that they see coming from professionals.  Maybe it will be more representational than a direct picture, but you can draw.  You did when you were in kindergarten, right?  You can learn techniques and improve but just drawing will help you improve too.  If you are interested in this, don't let your current level of skill and knowledge deter you.  You will find your own mode of expression.

“This book will show you how to keep your own artist’s journal.  As you celebrate the moments of your life, you’ll discover your own way of capturing them on paper, whether you choose to do simple gesture sketches in less than thirty seconds or to design a complex page with borders, textures, layers or text.”

The author explores such basic questions as “What do you want from your journal?” and “What will go into your journal?”  It might seem art was intended to be shared but she suggests that even whether or not you share the journal is totally up to you.  She explores materials and supplies, like the many different types of pens and pencils, watercolor pencils, simple ballpoint pens.

She does stress that you should put name and contact info inside.  She says many friends have lost a journal and they usually get it back because they did that.

Looking at her images might be intimidating for those of us who are not artistically trained.  Let them serve as an inspiration instead.  What she’s showing you is much later in your journey, perhaps, but it’s also her journey, not yours. 

She encourages you to simply try things - try color, try ink, try collage. 

“For the first ten years or so that I kept an artist’s journal, I worked almost exclusively in black or brown with a pencil or technical pen.  For nature observations, studies and research, the pens worked beautifully – nice crisp details!”    Then she added colored pencils and built up to exploring all sorts of mediums in her journal.

This book provides just the right amount of art instruction as well as the inspiration to create an artist’s journal.  She provides instructions on how to do quick gesture sketches and even how to elaborate on things later, as well as different topics to journal about – nature, travel, dreams and your flights of fancy, challenges that you face in life, and/or your spiritual journal.

Making time may be the hardest part of any journaling endeavor but it can be done, trust me.  Whether you have some creative energy that is burning to get out or a spark that needs to be carefully tended to bring it back to life, you can do this.  Make time for yourself.

Sh*t My Dad Says by Justin Halpern

Sh*t My Dad Says
By Justin Halpern

I was browsing the shelves one day in the humor section, looking for a pick me up, when I found Sh*t My Dad Says by Justin Halpern and took it to lunch.  I’m not sure that was a safe thing to do because laughing and eating often end in choking, but I did it and I enjoyed the book thoroughly. 

As the title suggests, the book is not for the easily offended.  His Dad absolutely uses language constantly that is bound to offend some people, but it’s also incredibly funny.

“For as long as I’ve known him, my father has been a blunt individual.  When I was little, I mostly felt terrified of him, so I couldn’t appreciate that I was dealing with the least passive-aggressive human being on the planet.”

Of course, the idea that his father is simply blunt is a gross understatement but the fact that he is remarkably non passive-aggressive is a good way to think of it.  His father says what is on his mind, good or bad.  He gets it out and then it’s over.

If you want to check out some of his Dad’s latest and greatest one liners, Tumblr makes them available at http://shitmydadsays.tumblr.com/ or they are on Twitter at http://twitter.com/shitmydadsays. 

“On My First Day of Kindergarten – You thought it was hard?  If Kindergarten is busting your ass, I got some bad news for you about the rest of life.”

While most of what you see online is in the form of one liners, his book, short though it is as 158 pages, takes the one liners into the short story length and has a bit more poignancy to it like the time his father helped teach another boy baseball, or the time he goes nuts because Justin doesn’t show up to help him with a project.  When Justin finally shows up, his Dad yells at him then hugs him and says, “I can’t wait till you have some kid and you got to worry about what happens to him.  You never stop worrying about your children.  It sucks.”

There are some truly hilarious stories too, like the time his father thought there was a burglar in the kitchen, got his gun and army crawled to the kitchen (naked) but it was only Justin’s aunt getting a midnight snack. 

Don’t worry, there are also some of his best one-liners at the end of each chapter.

“On Aging – Mom and I saw a great movie last night… No, I don’t remember the name.  It was about a guy or, no, wait, fuck.  Getting old sucks.”

It reminds me of Maxine from Hallmark Greetings or Walter from Jeff Dunham’s stand up comedy.  If you enjoy either of them, you’ll enjoy this book.  I sure did.