HOW TO KEEP YOUR VOLKSWAGEN ALIVE A NOVEL CHRISTOPHER BOUCHER

9781935554639
EBOOK: 9781612190068

It's hard being a single dad—especially when your son is a 1971 Volkswagen Beetle. 

There’s nothing more troubling than having your child break down on the side of the road, leaking oil, overheating, and asking tough questions like, “What is death?” and “Why did Mom leave?”

But stay calm!

Because How To Keep Your Volkswagen Alive is not only a dizzyingly beautiful novel, it’s also a handy manual with useful chapters on “Tools and Spare Parts,” “Valve Adjustment,” “How To Read This Novel,” and, most important of all, “How Works a Heart.”

Welcome to Christopher Boucher’s zany literary universe, a place where metaphors shift beneath your feet, familiar words assume new meanings, objects talk, trees attack, and time actually is money. Modeled on the cult classic 1969 hippie handbook of the same name, How To Keep Your Volkswagen Alive is an astonishing tour-de-force that tackles some of life’s biggest questions: How do you cope with losing a parent? What’s the secret to raising a child? How do you keep love alive? How do you get your car to start?

***

This is a tale about a man, his father and the man's son.  That is almost all I can say.  Boucher is a wordsmith extraordinaire.  He uses symbolism and metaphor like most people use their cell phones.  I'm equally torn between absolutely loving this book and being totally frustrated by it.  While I find creative use of language fascinating and engaging, in this instance it made me feel like I didn't totally "get" everything that was happening. I played along for most of the book because it is a very well written novel with an unusual take on storytelling and I love when authors push the limits of their craft.  I particularly love when authors take the craft of writing into the realm of creative art. However, I felt abandoned as a reader by Boucher as he seemed more concerned with obscuring reality than letting the reader actually understand what was going on.  Instead of breathing life into the emotional aspects of the story the author chose to hide that emotion amidst symbology, representation and shifting words in odd ways. Boucher nearly had me singing his praises ardently, he nearly had me swooning with adoration.  As it stands now Boucher will be an author to keep a keen eye on. 

"Yes, I think it was, because it was the same day that I bought the corpse of an old accordian who'd gotten in a bar fight and been stabbed and killed. I bought it from a moustached truck who was selling it for two and a half hours."

***

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

CHRISTOPHER BOUCHER received his MFA in Fiction from Syracuse University, where he studied with George Saunders and Junot Díaz. Before moving to Syracuse, he worked as the Arts and Entertainment Writer for The Daily Hampshire Gazette, and drove (when it started) a 1971 Volkswagen Beetle. He currently teaches writing and literature at Boston College, and is the managing editor of Post Road Magazine. In his free time, he plays banjo in a bluegrass band.

* I received an advance copy from the publisher for purposes of review. I was in no way obligated to write a review much less a favorable one. The opinions stated herein are all my own.

EVERYTHING BEAUTIFUL BEGAN AFTER by Simon Van Booy

 Young, beautiful, and lost, Rebecca has come to Athens to abandon herself to the city's strangeness and heat on a campaign to learn about love. Deserted by her mother and brought up by her grandfather in the south of France, she has never had an anchor to keep her from feeling constantly adrift.

George has come to Athens to translate. It's all he knows how to do. Dropped off at a New England boarding school when he was a child, his closest friends are Aristophanes and Jack Daniels, Euripides and Jim Beam.

Henry has come to Athens to dig. An archaeologist, he spends his days on-site in Athens, and roams the Agora on the weekends. Henry comes from a happy, humdrum Welsh family. Nothing has really ever happened to him.

After a chance meeting on a hot Athens day, however, George and Rebecca begin a conversation...that turns into drinks...then a few dinners...

Until Rebecca meets Henry.
And Henry meets George.
And Athens changes their lives forever.

***

I have been known to toss about flippant phrases to describe the books I read..."beautifully written", "imaginative and creative", "masterful", "eloquent".  Then I read something that sets itself apart and it's as if everything before it is cast in shadows, clouded in mists of fog.  From the first words 'Everything Beautiful' is lit from within by brilliant imagery and a lyrical quality.  Each sentence crafted lovingly, sounding like poetry, words that fairly beg to be whispered aloud in the deep of night just to hear their sounds.

On the walk back home through the dusk, she's going to ask her father for the story of how he met her mother.  All she knows is that someone fell and that everything beautiful began after.

Devouring this novel in a scant two days I feel almost spent, maybe a tad hungry for something just out of reach.  I don't know how to explain it but this novel has me dreaming and thinking and wondering in ways that I thought were long lost to me.  It's a dreamy read that feels soft...the action has a misty quality as if seen through haze or in fragments.  The main characters seem more like perfectly rendered sketches rather than fully realized portraits.  Yet it is this quality, this disconnectedness, where Van Booy writes from that lends this novel it's beauty, it's far reaching tenderness and emotion.  There are deep thoughts found laying among the pages of 'Everything Beautiful' like the relics found laying about the islands of Greece.  Scattered here and there gems of a literary quality glisten and beg to be kept.

There was a time before he met her mother.  It was before she began.  It was a shadow world with no significance.  A world that was breathing but without form.  She hadn't even been thought of.  She was dead without having died.

Fate is for the broken, the selfish, the simple, the lost, and the forever lonely, a distant light that comes no closer, nor ever completely disappears.

...a world intact, but abandoned.  You scramble down the words like ropes...you dangle from sentences.  You drop from letters into pools of what happened.  Language is like drinking from one's own reflection in still water.  We only take from it what we are at the time.

Each page leads you on, like a stream that gently gurgles into a larger stream, then into a river and on into the sea.  You continue the journey to see where it leads you, what magnificent wonder will emerge on the banks of the waterway.  Maybe an ancient ruin looms up unexpectedly, a modern disaster my await just around the bend...you can't imagine any of this but you want to know anyway.  You simply must know how it all turns out in the end.  And in the end you realize that "Everything Beautiful Began After".

***

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Simon Van Booy grew up in rural Wales. He is the author of The Secret Lives of People in Love and Love Begins in Winter, which won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. He is the editor of three philosophy books, titled Why We Fight, Why We Need Love, and Why Our Decisions Don’t Matter, and his essays have appeared in the New York Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, and on NPR. He lives in New York City, where he teaches at the School of Visual Arts and is involved in the Rutgers Early College Humanities program for young adults living in underserved communities. He was a finalist for the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise, and his work has been translated into thirteen languages.

His debut novel, Everything Beautiful Began After is out now.

* I received an advance copy from the publisher for purposes of review. I was in no way obligated to write a review much less a favorable one. The opinions stated herein are all my own.

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

This is easily one of the funniest books I have ever read. And to think it almost wasn't even published.  

***

A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs. In the shadow under the green visor of the cap Ignatius J. Reilly's supercilious blue and yellow eyes looked down upon the other people waiting under the clock at the D.H. Holmes department store, studying the crowd of people for signs of bad taste in dress. Several of the outfits, Ignatius noticed, were new enough and expensive enough to be properly considered offenses against taste and decency. Possession of anything new or expensive only reflected a person's lack of theology and geometry; it could even cast doubts upon one's soul.
--from A Confederacy of Dunces

***

Walker Percy's Foreword to A Confederacy of Dunces

Perhaps the best way to introduce this novel -- which on my third reading of it astounds me even more than the first -- is to tell of my first encounter with it. While I was teaching at Loyola in 1976 I began to get telephone calls from a lady unknown from me. What she proposed was preposterous. It was not that she had written a couple of chapters of a novel and wanted to get into my class. It was that her son, who was dead, had written an entire novel during the early sixties, a big novel, and she wanted me to read it. Why would I want to do that? I asked her. Because it is a great novel, she said.
Over the years I have become very good at getting out of things I don't want to do. And if ever there was something I didn't want to do, this was surely it: to deal with the mother of a dead novelist and, worst of all, to have to read a manuscript that she said was great, and that, as it turned out, was a badly smeared, scarcely readable carbon.
But the lady was persistent, and it somehow came to pass that she stood in my office handing me the hefty manuscript. There was no getting out of it; only one hope remained -- that I could read a few pages and that they would be bad enough for me, in good conscience, to read no farther. Usually I can do just that. Indeed the first paragraph often suffices. My only fear was that this one might not be bad enough, or might be just good enough, so that I would have to keep reading.
In this case I read on. And on. First with the sinking feeling that it was not bad enough to quit, then with a prickle of interest, then a growing excitement, and finally an incredulity: surely it was not possible that it was so good. I shall resist the temptation to say what first made me gape, grin, laugh out loud, shake my head in wonderment...Read the rest here.

Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie

Set in an exotic Eastern landscape peopled by magicians and fantastic talking animals, Salman Rushdie’s classic children’s novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories inhabits the same imaginative space as Gulliver’s Travels, Alice in Wonderland, and The Wizard of Oz. In this captivating novel, Haroun, a 12-year-old boy sets out on an adventure to restore the poisoned source of the sea of stories. On the way, he encounters many foes, all intent on draining the sea of all its storytelling powers.

***

You may have heard about Salman Rushdie.  You might indeed know of his controversial flight for his safety and the famous million dollar price tag for his life.  Some of you may even have notions of his goodness or lack thereof.  It would, in my humble opinion, be doing yourself a favor of the highest order to reconsider.  Set aside those ideas you may have of the man himself, dip your toes into Rushdie's magical sea and just allow yourself to be transported nimbly into another place and time.  A mythical, magical, fanciful tale woven out of a brilliant imagination and crafted from the finest language.  It is simply a delight and coincidentally one of my most favored books.

***

So Iff the water genie told Haroun about the Ocean of the Stream of Stories, and even though he was full of a sense of hopelessness and failure the magic of the Ocean began to have an effect on Haroun. He looked into the water and saw that it was made up of a thousand thousand thousand and one different currents, each one a different colour, weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity; and Iff explained that these were the Streams of Story, that each coloured strand represented and contained a single tale. Different parts of the Ocean contained different sorts of stories, and as all the stories that had ever been told and many that were still in the process of being invented could be found here, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was in fact the biggest library in the universe. And because the stories were held here in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and so become yet other stories; so that unlike a library of books, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was much more than a storeroom of yarns. It was not dead, but alive.

"And if you are very, very careful, or very, very highly skilled, you can dip a cup into the Ocean," Iff told Haroun, "like so," and here he produced a little golden cup from another of his waistcoat pockets, "and you can fill it with water from a single, pure Stream of Story, like so," as he did precisely that.

Salman Rushdie is the author of ten novels: Grimus, Midnight’s Children (which was awarded the Booker Prize in 1981), Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury,Shalimar the Clown and The Enchantress of Florence.

He is also the author of a book of stories, East, West, and three works of non-fiction – Imaginary Homelands, The Jaguar Smile, and Step Across This Line. He is the co-editor of Mirrorwork, an anthology of contemporary Indian writing, and of the 2008 Best American Short Stories anthology.

He has adapted Midnight’s Children for the stage. It was performed in London and New York by the Royal Shakespeare Company. In 2004, an opera based upon Haroun and the Sea of Stories was premiered by the New York City Opera at Lincoln Center.

A Fellow of the British Royal Society of Literature, Salman Rushdie has received, among other honours, the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel (twice), the Writers’ Guild Award, the James Tait Black Prize, the European Union’s Aristeion Prize for Literature, Author of the Year Prizes in both Britain and Germany, the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, the Budapest Grand Prize for Literature, the Premio Grinzane Cavour in Italy, the Crossword Book Award in India, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature, the London International Writers’ Award, and the James Joyce award of University College Dublin.

He holds honorary doctorates and fellowships at six European and six American universities, is an Honorary Professor in the Humanities at M.I.T, and Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emory University. He has received the Freedom of the City in Mexico City, Strasbourg and El Paso, and the Edgerton Prize of the American Civil Liberties Union. He holds the rank of Commander in the Order of Arts and Letters – France’s highest artistic honour.

Between 2004 and 2006 he served as President of PEN American Center, and continues to work as President of the PEN World Voices International Literary Festival, which he helped to create. In June 2007 he received a Knighthood in the Queen’s Birthday Honours. In 2008 he became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was named a Library Lion of the New York Public Library. In addition, Midnight’s Children was named the Best of the Booker – the best winner in the award’s 40 year history – by a public vote.

His books have been translated into over forty languages. Films are currently in production of bothMidnight’s Children and Haroun and he Sea of Stories. 

The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane A novel by Kate DiCamillo

Candlewick Press, 2006
Ages 7 and up, ISBN 0-7636-2589-2

Once, in a house on Egypt Street, there lived a china rabbit named Edward Tulane. The rabbit was very pleased with himself, and for good reason: he was owned by a girl named Abilene, who treated him with the utmost care and adored him completely.

And then, one day, he was lost.

Kate DiCamillo and Bagram Ibatoulline take us on an extraordinary journey, from the depths of the ocean to the net of a fisherman, from the top of a garbage heap to the fireside of a hoboes' camp, from the bedside of an ailing child to the streets of Memphis. And along the way, we are shown a true miracle — that even a heart of the most breakable kind can learn to love, to lose, and to love again.

***

This is an absolutely beautiful tale.  It will break your heart, warm your soul and make you smile.  Words really can't express how much I love this book.  It will always hold a place of honor on our bookshelf.  If you have even the smallest glimmer of sentimentality in your heat, have a fondness for The Velveteen Rabbit, have a penchant for love stories (for this is truly a love story...), or just simply enjoy reading an amazingly well crafted story deftly told by an able artist then please consider gifting yourself with the joy that is Edward Tulane.

***

Chapter One
 
Once, in a house on Egypt Street, there lived a rabbit who was made almost entirely of china. He had china arms and china legs, china paws and a china head, a china torso and a china nose. His arms and legs were jointed and joined by wire so that his china elbows and china knees could be bent, giving him much freedom of movement.
    His ears were made of real rabbit fur, and beneath the fur, there were strong, bendable wires, which allowed the ears to be arranged into poses that reflected the rabbit’s mood — jaunty, tired, full of ennui. His tail, too, was made of real rabbit fur and was fluffy and soft and well shaped.
    The rabbit’s name was Edward Tulane, and he was tall. He measured almost three feet from the tip of his ears to the tip of his feet; his eyes were painted a penetrating and intelligent blue.
    In all, Edward Tulane felt himself to be an exceptional specimen. Only his whiskers gave him pause. They were long and elegant (as they should be), but they were of uncertain origin. Edward felt quite strongly that they were not the whiskers of a rabbit. Whom the whiskers had belonged to initially — what unsavory animal — was a question that Edward could not bear to consider for too long. And so he did not. He preferred, as a rule, not to think unpleasant thoughts.
    Edward’s mistress was a ten-year-old, dark-haired girl named Abilene Tulane, who thought almost as highly of Edward as Edward thought of himself. Each morning after she dressed herself for school, Abilene dressed Edward.
    The china rabbit was in possession of an extraordinary wardrobe composed of handmade silk suits, custom shoes fashioned from the finest leather and designed specifically for his rabbit feet, and a wide array of hats equipped with holes so that they could easily fit over Edward’s large and expressive ears. Each pair of well-cut pants had a small pocket for Edward’s gold pocket watch. Abilene wound this watch for him each morning.
    “Now, Edward,” she said to him after she was done winding the watch, “when the big hand is on the twelve and the little hand is on the three, I will come home to you.”
    She placed Edward on a chair in the dining room and positioned the chair so that Edward was looking out the window and could see the path that led up to the Tulane front door. Abilene balanced the watch on his left leg. She kissed the tips of his ears, and then she left and Edward spent the day staring out at Egypt Street, listening to the tick of his watch and waiting.
     Of all the seasons of the year, the rabbit most preferred winter, for the sun set early then and the dining-room windows became dark and Edward could see his own reflection in the glass. And what a reflection it was! What an elegant figure he cut! Edward never ceased to be amazed at his own fineness.
    In the evening, Edward sat at the dining-room table with the other members of the Tulane family: Abilene; her mother and father; and Abilene’s grandmother, who was called Pellegrina. True, Edward’s ears barely cleared the tabletop, and true also, he spent the duration of the meal staring straight ahead at nothing but the bright and blinding white of the tablecloth. But he was there, a rabbit at the table.
    Abilene’s parents found it charming that Abilene considered Edward real, and that she sometimes requested that a phrase or story be repeated because Edward had not heard it.
    “Papa,” Abilene would say, “I’m afraid that Edward didn’t catch that last bit.”
    Abilene’s father would then turn in the direction of Edward’s ears and speak slowly, repeating what he had just said for the benefit of the china rabbit. Edward pretended, out of courtesy to Abilene, to listen. But, in truth, he was not very interested in what people had to say. And also, he did not care for Abilene’s parents and their condescending manner toward him. All adults, in fact, condescended to him.
    Only Abilene’s grandmother spoke to him as Abilene did, as one equal to another. Pellegrina was very old. She had a large, sharp nose and bright, black eyes that shone like dark stars. It was Pellegrina who was responsible for Edward’s existence. It was she who had commissioned his making, she who had ordered his silk suits and his pocket watch, his jaunty hats and his bendable ears, his fine leather shoes and his jointed arms and legs, all from a master craftsman in her native France. It was Pellegrina who had given him as a gift to Abilene on her seventh birthday.
    And it was Pellegrina who came each night to tuck Abilene into her bed and Edward into his.
    “Will you tell us a story, Pellegrina?” Abilene asked her grandmother each night.
    “Not tonight, lady,” said Pellegrina.
    “When?” asked Abilene. “What night?”
    “Soon,” said Pellegrina. “Soon there will be a story.”
    And then she turned off the light, and Edward and Abilene lay in the dark of the bedroom.
    “I love you, Edward,” Abilene said each night after Pellegrina had left. She said those words and then she waited, almost as if she expected Edward to say something in return.
    Edward said nothing. He said nothing because, of course, he could not speak. He lay in his small bed next to Abilene’s large one. He stared up at the ceiling and listened to the sound of her breath entering and leaving her body, knowing that soon she would be asleep. Because Edward’s eyes were painted on and he could not close them, he was always awake.
    Sometimes, if Abilene put him into his bed on his side instead of on his back, he could see through the cracks in the curtains and out into the dark night. On clear nights, the stars shone, and their pinprick light comforted Edward in a way that he could not quite understand. Often, he stared at the stars all night until the dark finally gave way to dawn.



THE MIRACULOUS JOURNEY OF EDWARD TULANE by Kate DiCamillo. Text copyright © 2006 by Kate DiCamillo. Illustrations copyright © 2006 by Bagram Ibatoulline. Published by Candlewick Press, Inc., Cambridge, MA.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

I was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, raised in Clermont, Florida, and currently live in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I write for both children and adults and I like to think of myself as a storyteller. Here are a few more facts about me: I am short. And loud. I hate to cook and love to eat. I am single and childless, but I have lots of friends and I am an aunt to three lovely children (Luke, Roxanne, and Max) and one not so lovely dog (Henry). I think of myself as an enormously lucky person: I get to tell stories for a living.

Zorgamazoo - Robert Paul Weston

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Zorgamazoo tells the rhyming, rhythmical tale of Katrina, a girl with a big heart and an even bigger imagination.

Too bad Old Krabby will have none of it! She thinks Katrina is losing her marbles—and worse, she hires the quack neurosurgeon, Doctor LeFang, to make a midnight housecall! But there’s nothing wrong with Katrina’s noggin. In fact, she’s perfectly sane (Old Krabby’s the one who’s lame in the brain!)

The strange figure Katrina spotted, bumbling through the subway tunnels beneath the city, is Morty the zorgle. He’s been sent on a quest to find the lost zorgles of Zorgamazoo...

When Katrina and Morty join forces, however, they discover it’s not just the zorgles who have gone missing. Someone—or something—has kidnapped all of the Earth’s most magical creatures!

It isn’t long before Katrina and Morty uncover a bizarre, intergalactic conspiracy that threatens the existence of every last griffin, ogre, sphinx, dragon, mermaid, pixie and zorgle on the planet!

***

Amazing.  I read this book out loud to my darling daughter-8 and stepson-12.  They both loved this book and couldn't wait for story time:)  I highly recommend this book as it is a joy to read and it fairly begs to be read aloud.  Think Dr. Seuss meets Roald Dahl meets Tim Burton.  So go ahead, curl up with your absolute favorite person or people, grab a cup of tea and settle into the coziest spot in your home (or whereever) and read, read, read.  You'll be glad you did.

Read the first chapter here.

         

Robert Paul Weston

Robert Paul Weston is the author of Zorgamazoo (which ought to be read aloud to someone you love) and Dust City (a thriller inspired by fairy tales). Currently, he lives in Canada, where he lectures in creative writing at the University of Toronto. Zorgamazoo won the 2010 Silver Birch Award, and was shortlisted for the E.B. White Read Aloud Award, the California Young Reader Medal, and the Pacific Northwest Young Readers Choice Award. This biography was provided by the author or their representative.

Forbidden -Ted Dekker, Tosca Lee

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Category:  FICTION, SUSPENSE & THRILLERS

Publish Date:  13 Sept 2011

ISBN:  9781455509850

New York Times bestselling author Ted Dekker teams with Tosca Lee to create this gripping thriller set in a desolate future.

A terrible truth has been revealed to one man: the entire human race has been drained of every emotion except one-- fear. To bring life back to the world, Rom must embark on a journey that will end either in his own demise or a reawakening of humanity. But to bring love and passion back into existence will also threaten the powers of the world with the revolution and anarchy that had nearly destroyed them previously.

After happening upon a journal through strange circumstance, Rom's world is shattered. He learns that humanity long ago ceased to "live," that it exists today in a living death of emotions. In a terrible risk, Rom exposes himself to the vial of blood folded into the old leather of the journal. His change is fearful and fraught with mind-bending emotion. A once-pious observer of the Order's passionless statues, he is filled with uncontrollable impulses. He is filled with love.

He is undone, terrified, and alone in the desolate world.

***

This was a fairly entertaining read.  I enjoyed the plot, the story and the characters.  Having recently finished a most fabulous book I often feel that it isn't quite fair to the tale that follows.  It is something akin to Miss runner up.  'Tis hard to compare say...burger and fries to steak and lobster.  Each has it's charm and place.  Certainly I would not necessarily care to dine on Steak and lobster every meal.  Sometimes one simply feels like indulging in the perfectly plain and everyday. Nothing quite satisfies like a good old fashioned guilty pleasure.  "Forbidden" falls firmly into the category of light summer reading-I finished it within a couple of days.  A guilty pleasure to be sure.  Within the pages of "Forbidden" the reader will find, heroism, love, deceit, mystery, nefarious plots and a sword flight.  Oh, how I love a good nefarious plot or two. "Forbidden" is set in a far off dystopian future and it is up to the heroes to right some pretty devious, ancient wrongs.  Just be advised that the book ends with a bit of a cliff hangar so if you are adverse to open ends I would at least wait for book two to be released:)

About The Authors

TED DEKKER is a New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty novels with a total of more than 5 million books in print. He is known for thrillers that combine adrenaline-laced plots with incredible confrontations between good and evil.

TOSCA LEE is the critically-acclaimed author of Demon Memoir, a Christy Award finalist and a Publisher's Weekly Editor's Choice. Her novel, Havah received a starred review from Publishers Weekly and 4.5 stars from Romantic Times.