It’s no surprise I fell in love with A Kansas Bestiary.  This book of essays, written by Lawrencians Jake Vail and Doug Hitt, and illustrated by Lisa Grossman, delves into Kansas’ wild heart, presenting small mysteries, unfolding surprises, posing riddles, leaving the reader to weave along a path rich in imagery.  A beautiful poem, a love letter to the Kansas beasts.

In the title laid the first mystery: What exactly is a bestiary?  Each essay focuses on a specific animal, but they don’t attempt to paint a complete portrait.  Instead, I felt as if I was given pieces of a puzzle, little by little uncovering a bit of science, a bit of conjecture, a bit of poetry. I learned that bestiaries, made popular in the Middle Ages, are traditionally illustrated and may include a fantastic mix of natural history, folklore, myth, and religious allegory.

Vail’s and Hitt’s unique voices and the relationships they ask the reader to develop with each of the fifteen Kansas animals made for fun, engaging reading.  Winding from historical to biological, sometimes humorous and sometimes prophetic, they ask us to embrace these creatures in magical ways, to imbue them with supernatural powers: meadowlarks as deep time mapped messengers, “God’s dog” -the coyote- creating the world, feathered lizards patrolling crop circles.

If the book is a love letter to these animals, it also serves as a reminder of the fragile nature of life in twenty-first century Kansas, where wildlife stands “marooned on shrinking islands of crops and concrete” and boreal chorus frogs have to navigate “bipeds with a penchant for pavement.”  Lisa Grossman’s intricate pen and watercolor drawings illuminate each passage, both hearkening to the past and demonstrating our current interdependence.  A gopher snake is framed by fences, a car snaking down the road, wind turbines on the horizon.  Hawks survey a train bringing coal to the power plant.  Behind a box turtle, shadows of wooly mammoths lurch across the horizon.  At one point the authors, invoking Robert Bringhurst, ask, “Are there languages to think in other than the ones we talk?”  I would invite you to engage Grossman’s incredible art for the answer to that question.

Raised on John Muir, Willa Cather, Walt Whitman, the legends of many Native American tribes, I was delighted to discover their wisdom in A Kansas Bestiary.  Included are other favorites of mine such as the poet Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, and many local biologists and naturalists, including our amazing Nature Center director Marty Birrell.

In one of their many riddles, Vail and Hitt ask us, “That coyote, standing atop the great round hay bale-what is he looking for?  What does your heart say?”

In gratitude, my heart rejoices in these woven wilds of Kansas and sings praise for those who have spoken so eloquently for the beasts, for the trees.

In Hillary Jordan’s 2011 novel When She Woke, the author brilliantly conceives of a desperate set of circumstances that feel perfectly distant-yet-familiar.  Unfortunately, her execution of the story falls just shy of the setup’s promise.  The book begins in a prison cell in a near-future Texas.  Our protagonist, Hannah, has been convicted of having an abortion – a procedure that was criminalized by a religiously conservative government after a virulent disease left many women infertile.  As part of her punishment, she is infected with a virus that changes the color of her skin to red, signifying murder (and a nod to the Scarlet Letter).  This procedure, called Chroming, is used to relieve prison overcrowding after the bubble burst on the nation’s for-profit prison industry.  The severity of a crime dictates the color of a parolee’s skin, and justice is rendered in all shades of Skittle.

Without giving too much away, I’ll say that the first third of the book is a real page turner.  Hannah accepts her new pariah status with a steely resolve that readies the reader for an exceptionally strong protagonist.  Her pregnancy was the result of an affair with a very influential, and very married, man of the cloth.  Her own sartorial passion for cloth, as a seamstress, is a plot point built-up with a sensual intrigue greater than the actual affair.  But then nothing exceptional happens with either of those two loves.  What once felt like a desirous character bound for great insight, eventually is revealed to be naive young woman who is a tad boring.  Which is a shame, because the Margaret Atwood-esque world Hannah inhabits is beyond fascinating.

Axe Cop began as a webcomic in 2010, when 29-year old Ethan Nicolle seized on the idea of turning his 5-year old brother Malachai’s stories into comics.  The Nicolles’ protagonist, Axe Cop, was born of a small firefighter action figure who preferred, at Malachai’s direction, to attack bad guys wildly with his axe instead of fighting fires.  Axe Cop’s allies Uni-Baby (a baby with a unicorn’s horn whom Axe Cop hurls at enemies), Avocado Soldier (self-explanatory?), and Sock Ar Ang (a good guy with socks for arms that can be used as boomerang-like weapons) are depicted as superheroes conquering a host of even weirder villains in older brother Ethan’s polished style.  Between episodes, a Q & A with readers called “Ask Axe Cop” reveals even murkier corners of a little boy’s mind.  What kind of dinosaur might Axe Cop like to ride if such a thing were possible?   “I already have a T. Rex named Wexter.  He breathes fire and has a super-duper-fast bite.  I gave him cop glasses and machine gun arms.  He has a cop badge shaped like himself.  He lives in the parking lot.  I feed him bad guys.”

Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, regularly featured his own two young sons, Will and Abe, in the bunny-eared world of his long running Life in Hell comic strip, and these strips were compiled and released in 2007 as Will and Abe’s Guide to the Universe.  Will and Abe’s strips consist mainly of discussions documented by Groening, and bear such titles as Important Questions about Monsters (“Is Mothra a good moth or a bad moth?”), Will & Abe Discuss Leprechauns (“Why are leprechauns such dorks?”), and Hoogoo, The Nightmare Bird Who Has Spikes (“Once there was a little tiny bird, and he lived in a circus.  But then before they started the show, a bunch of mad scientists and karate robbers came to the circus to steal the bird . . . .”)

In hindsight, I’m a little perplexed as to just what exactly about Will (“I ate cat food”), Abe (“Jambooda!”), and Malachai (“Fire slicer became a vampire wizard ninja swordfish, and he had a whole bunch of swordfish throwing star bombs and a sword nose that he could take off and stab people with”) made me want to have children.  But I realize now that the magic of these books is their embrace of pure irrationality.  And maybe the surreal world-building fun of toddler life is the same as that to be found in the lives of their parents.  Chalk it up to sleep deprivation, but there is something almost intoxicating about the denial of rational thought and surrender to pure instinct required to survive as a parent.  As reflected in Axe Cop and the Will & Abe comic strips, the delirious state of young kids and their parents is at times almost indistinguishable from another great irrational human pursuit, that which comes after toddlers finally give up the bedtime fight, and our exhausted minds are free at last to dream.  At least for a few hours, in my own case, until a sudden and blood curdling request from my 2-year old son’s room for help wiping his nose shatters the night.  Oh wait . . . sorry.  There was room for a complaint right there, and I just couldn’t resist.

I still didn’t quite understand how she could get such joy from such an endeavor until I decided to read Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. Weighing in at 3.2 pounds and 1079 pages, it’s the reader’s equivalent of running a marathon. After successfully completing the novel and actually enjoying it, I thought I’d share some tips for reading this intimidating yet rewarding book.

1. Don’t go it alone. I never would have stuck with it to the end if I hadn’t been reading it along with several other friends. Checking in with each other on our progress and chatting about the various characters and intersecting plotlines helped keep me motivated.

2. Get three bookmarks. I thought I was so smart for purchasing a copy for my Kindle so I wouldn’t have to lug around a 25 cm thick book. It didn’t take me two weeks to search out a physical copy. Infinite Jest is full of foot notes, and flipping back and forth on the Kindle was tedious and time-consuming. You’re going to want a bookmark for your page in the novel, one to mark where you are in the endnotes, and one to mark p. 223 which contains important information to help make sense of the narrative (don’t skip ahead and read that page first, though).

3. Keep a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary handy. Again, I thought the Kindle version would be ideal because I would have instant access to the definitions of the infamously esoteric vocabulary words Wallace sprinkles so effortlessly in every sentence. Alas, even the Kindle dictionary didn’t recognize many of the medical terms. Learning new words was my favorite part of reading, and I would have been lost without the dictionary.

4. Take notes. If I hadn’t used an entire package of post-its and filled a good portion of a slim Moleskin notebook, I wouldn’t have been able to retain so many of the details or appreciate recurring themes.

5. Take a break and watch Hamlet. I prefer the Kenneth Braunaugh version, but there’s also the Mel Gibson version and  a BBC production with David Tennant. DFW took the title from a line in Hamlet: ”Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is!” There are other parallels and references worth noting. If you haven’t read it since high school, a good refresher is in order.

6. Don’t give up. I was often wistfully glancing at my stack of YA novels while I trudged through Infinite Jest, longing for linear plots. But now that I’m done, I’m really glad I stuck with it. When you’re finished, you’re going to understand jokes in Parks & Rec that baffle your friends. You’re bound to learn some new vocabulary words while reading. Don’t be surprised if you are soon inviting your friends out for drinks at The Bourgeois Pig to cure your dipsomania, noticing the guilloche on buildings as you stroll downtown, and commenting on the fulvous trees come fall. You might even find yourself nictitating anytime someone mentions Byzantine erotica or refers to a DVD as a cartridge, because you get the joke.

Ultimately, Infinite Jest is a fascinating novel and worth the effort to read it in the same way that marathons are worth it to some athletes. I enjoyed looking for order in the chaos. It’s a book about addiction, about how people fail to communicate with one another, about why we seek entertainment. If for no other reason than to maintain your hipster cred, I’d suggest it to anyone who has ever been curious about this novel.

While I found Stein’s imagery and metaphors to be challenging at times, it was a very fun and light read.  One of my favorite poems from the collection is Revisionism in which Stein writes, “I’m thinking of rewriting history so instead of jealousy/ my major themes are revenge and justice, and/ I’m going to the airport so we can miss each other more,/ because I want a future to look forward to,/ another new year already, noisemakers/ and dry champagne and songs I know/ the words to and the way you looked at me/ at the costume party: I want another chance/ for second chances.  I never make the same mistake/ more than four or twelve times, but enough/ about you, tell me more about you”.  Stein’s general commentary on life and what we deem as “important” really makes you think while slightly giggling at the same time.  Stein gently points out what a self-involved society we can be at times and really helps readers sort of laugh at themselves.  A review of the book by Genevieve Walker of Guernica perhaps describes it best, “Stein’s style…gives voice to an American post-collegiate, prolonged adolescent preoccupation with the defunct social structure that worships credentialed youths while condemning them to debt and precluding them from the workforce”.

Brown was a master of science fiction and detective pulps in the 40s and 50s. Many of his stories and novels became the inspiration for later writers like Philip K. Dick and basis of TV programs like The Outer Limits and Star Trek. (Wikipedia will tell you about that in further detail if you’re interested.) If you’re into science fiction, try his classic short story, “Arena,” for free here. (I remember reading that one in middle school.)

We’re thrilled to offer fans of pulp three of Fredric Brown’s early detective novels through Sunflower eLibrary, a new consortium of Kansas public libraries we’ve joined. I considered writing brief synopses, but you either like pulp or you don’t. I’ve found that I rarely care about plot when it comes to my consumption of pulp. So, give old Fredric Brown a try. And if there are other authors of detective pulp and noir not mentioned here, please include them in the comments for us all to discover!

Since I was in the mood to read something by my old hero Chuck D., I decided let LibriVox bring the noise and sample the vocal stylings of their volunteers.  “Volunteers” (emphasis on the plural) being the key word, because, although most of them were pretty good readers, about 20 different people contributed the 45 chapters (each packaged online as an individual MP3 file) of the book.  As I said, they were all decent, and it’s hard to criticize anyone who contributes free content like this as a labor of love and gift to the literary masses.  But there were just too many voices for my taste, some with accents even more American than my own, and I struggled to switch gears with each chapter.

On the other hand (warning: shameless plug for the Lawrence Public Library ahead), a quick search of the library catalog yielded a free recording of A Tale of Two Cities in a downloadable format on the library’s OneClick Digital platform, and on CD , the former read by Simon Vance, an actor who has collected nearly every award out there for audiobook performances, and the latter a BBC dramatization featuring the work of Emmy and Screen Actors Guild honoree Charles Dance (of Gosford Park and Bleak House fame).

Simon Vance and Charles Dance are pretty hard to beat.  “Their names even rhyme,” I smugly told my LibriVox-loving friend, who, over the years, has become quite weary of my constantly reminding her how much better the free stuff at the library is compared to a lot of other free stuff out there, or, even more satisfying and smugly proclaimed, stuff out there you have to pay for.  As usual, she was in a forgiving mood, and waited a few days to respond to my complaint about the many-voiced Tale of Two Cities.  Turns out that, as an experienced user of LibriVox, she was aware that there are often multiple versions of a work available on the site, and while some feature more than one reader, many do not.  In fact, she gently informed me, there is another recording of A Tale of Two Cities I would have found if I had spent a bit more time (i.e. a few more seconds) looking around.  And this version is performed by one person who has a British accent and shows some real acting chops in his characterizations, always the funnest part of listening to a Dickens novel.

So here I stand, corrected, and the better for it.  Check out LibriVox if you are looking for an audio recording of a book in the public domain, interested in recording one yourself, or just plain curious.  But don’t forget the professionals available at your local public library.  To bring it back to Dickens, there really isn’t a best or worst between them, and this noisy authority, at least, insists on no superlative degree of comparison.

But I’m not writing a book report here…as much as I LOVE that kind of blogging! And I could definitely write for hours on my feelings about Animal Farm and all of its political satire. But I think what struck a chord in me most was the way in which Orwell used his “Fairy Story” both as a critique of the Russian Revolution and a caveat for the risk of elected leaders taking control of societies founded on principles of equality.  Sure, on the surface Animal Farm is the satirical allegory of the Fall of Tsar Nicholas II and the Marxist Revolution that led not to government by the people as it was intended but to tyrannical Stalinism. Yet Orwell’s decision to use farm animals in place of humans lends a generic quality to the warnings. Warnings that, yes, this is about Russia…But what if it was an English countryside farm where all of this took place? Could this sort of thing happen anywhere? Could it happen in America? Are we blindly following our leaders? Could we even make them listen to us if we wanted to? Is our memory too short to see that while two pigs were responsible for the overthrow of farmer Jones, only one pig is now in control of the farm…and the other pig is the bogeyman that gets blamed for all things negative? Are we too unable to read the Seven Basic Principles painted on the side of the shed? Have a couple of those principles been changed slightly over time without our noticing? Sure we’re still electing our leaders on the farm, but why are pigs the only ones allowed to run for office? What about me, the hardworking cart-horse? Why can’t I run for office? Well, we’re told in Animal Farm that the pigs are better organizers of government and labor. That’s why pigs govern. Besides, if the hardworking cart-horse was elected to office, who would pull the cart? The pigs? Surely the intelligence of pigs would be wasted on THAT kind of work! And worse yet, the pigs have the dogs on their side so you’d better just pull the cart like you’re told!

Now it’s not that I completely distrust my State and Federal leaders…well, some more than others…but the point I get from Animal Farm is this: Whether you trust your leaders or not, it is always best to remain vigilant. Whether you are capitalist or communist, it is always best to keep your eyes open for freedoms being altered in the name of the State. And mostly, Tyranny doesn’t happen only to other countries. It happens to those countries that aren’t paying attention!

-Dan Winsky, Acquisitions

This is the story of Dawson, a boy from the other side of the tracks who was in love with a girl when he was younger but they had parted ways years ago. This is the story of Amanda, the girl who was in love with Dawson years ago but was forced to end the relationship when her mother and father got involved and thought she could do better. Several years later Dawson and Amanda reconnect when they come back to their hometown to deal with the death of a close personal friend, Tuck. Little did they know that Tuck had a plan all along to attempt to bring them back together if at all possible.

The problem is Dawson has feelings for Amanda that he has carried with him since the day they ended their relationship. Amanda has feelings for Dawson too, but there is another problem…Amanda is married with kids.

Do Dawson and Amanda find a way to be together? Are they able to forget the past and look to the future? Or do things end tragically for one or both of them? Is there anything good that can come from lost love and heartbreak?

For reasons never explained, Adam Strand has been unable to kill himself, and not for lack of trying. No matter what method he utilizes, he always wakes up hours later, alive and well. His friends, family, and the whole town know of his condition, and mostly just seem annoyed. But this book isn’t really about suicide: it’s about family and friendship and finding the will to live while recognizing the inevitability of death.

But even if you’re not slightly morbid (like me), there’s plenty to enjoy about this novel. Galloway has constructed a world within this Midwest town that is more than just a place. The banks of the river—with the the grimy angel statuary and rotting cow carcass, next to the murky water winding between factories that make wheels and corn syrup and pollution—was atmospheric, yet realistic.

Adam’s narration rambled, moving forwards and backwards in time with frequent asides. Incidents and stories were strung together. This isn’t a book full of action. There’s not a lot that happens. Instead, it’s best appreciated as a character study. Adam is so well-developed, and has such a unique voice, I wanted to keep reading about him, even if he doesn’t even want to tell me his story. Every now and then, he reveal something so wise, you wonder why he can’t see what a fool he is.

It isn’t just Adam that won me over, however. Each character is believable and well-developed. Maddy, the ten year old genius, was my favorite. She was absolutely endearing. Each member of Adam’s group of outcast friends was distinct and memorable. The 911 dispatcher who develops a habit of calling Adam each night, just to talk, will capture reader’s hearts.

Not only did I love the dark humor inherent in this story’s premise and structure, I loved the writing. It’s witty and touching, sarcastic and sensitive all at once. Though the novel is marketed as young adult fiction, Galloway hasn’t dumbed down the language.

I’d recommend this for fans of absurb novels, like one of my favorites, Death with Interruptions by José Saramago (I’ve discussed my love for Saramago here). It kind of reminds me of Tom Robbins, in that ridiculous-in-the-real-world kind of way. Try this novel if you’re a fan of Holden Caulfield. (Personally, I’d like to see some 39 Deaths/Catcher in the Rye crossover fanfic where Adam and Holden get drunk by the river.) Those who wanted to love Perks of Being a Wallflower but found all of Charlie’s crying annoying (I didn’t, but I know some readers did) then this is the book for them, though it unfortunately lacks a soundtrack and references to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. (I’d also read some fanfic in which Charlie takes Adam to Rocky Horror.)

I enjoyed 39 Deaths of Adam Strand so much, I can’t wait to check out Gregory Galloway’s debut novel for adults, As Simple as Snow.