Down By The Riverside

BRLP Update: Third Week, Third Book.

I heartily recommend Exiles to anyone interested in Jesuits, shipwrecks, nuns, or Gerard Manley Hopkins. It's a really interestingly composed short novel about alienation and lives devoted to God, with some very beautiful writing and the calamity of the shipwreck is rendered in a way that is simultaneously horrifying and graceful -- a quality I've admired in Ron Hansen's writing before.I'm now on to Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union, which is insanely fun. Word is that the Coen Brothers are putting up a movie version for 2010, which makes perfect sense -- there's a lot of Fargo in here. Aside from the conceit, in which the mid-century relocation of European Jews happens not in Israel but in the Alaskan islands, there's a noirish detective story with really crackling (not to say Coenic) dialogue. It's too bad Bogart can't star as the down-at-his-heels, existentially lost Detective Landsman.

I also snuck in Bryan K. Vaughn's Pride of Baghdad, a graphic novel based on a true story of lions that escaped from the Baghdad Zoo at the start of the current Iraq War. It's one of those rare talking animal comics for adults, and strong-hearted adults at that, since it doesn't end well. As an evening's read, it has a lot to recommend it, but its lessons were ones I feel I've learned already: war is savage, dehumanizing, monstrous, hell. I'm going to put on my long white robe, ain't going to study war no more. (Given the rules of the game, this book isn't counted as a book...)

Page-to-Date BRLP page count: 775
Days-to-Date BRLP calendar count: 15
Page-per-Date BRLP reading rate: 51.66