Kirstiecat | Blog

THREE TITLES: The Partly Cloudy Patriot, The Coma, and A Girl Named Zippy

THE PARTLY CLOUDY PATRIOT by Sarah Vowell

Oh I love Sarah. I really do. It started around the winter holidays when I saw her being interviewed in a TMBG doc. called Gigantic (A Tale of Two Johns) with Ira Glass (I’m a big This American Life fan as well, which Sarah has been a part of as well). Then, for my birthday in April, my dad bought me Take the Connoli, The Partly Cloudy Patriot, and her newest work, Assasination Vacation. (My dad gives the best gifts!)

Now, I have to admit something…it’s hard. It’s going to take me a couple of deep breaths here but….I’m not really such a fan of political novels. I love talking about politics but I feel like I’m so inundated with keeping up with news articles every day that I’m a bit overstimulated news-wise.

But with Sarah…it’s really not your typical political book. The first thing is that you always learn something and the way she intermixes past history with the present, you gain a weird sort of sense of how all of this is possible and why things are occurring. And sometimes, you even realize that it could be much worse.

Sarah makes you laugh at the same time that she really makes you feel something. In addition, her use of music and pop culture references really make the politics all the more enjoyable. I’m sure it helps the people trouncing around with her looking for plaques as well. (They should feel honored, really!) She has a keen sense of political awareness and how her views fit into the overall space and time of the current political environment. And in the same book where she talks about how she first saw Tom Cruise when she watched Magnolia, she’ll also tell you about how the media misquoted Al Gore and how maps have a tendency to be very wrong. She somehow explains how she’s very different from her twin sister at the same time that she talks about the sense of loss Teddy Roosevelt felt in North Dakota. She reminds us that in her own anecdotal stories, we see glimpses of ourselves.

I give Sarah Vowell alot of credit for being knowledgeable but humble at the same time…for being both politically aware and self aware. She’s become one of my favorite authors since April and the only reason why I haven’t read Take the Cannoli is that I know I’ll just break down into tears knowing that I have to wait for the next one of hers to come out. Right now, it sitting there on my bookcase is holding me together. If I really need it, I’ll break down and read it but right now I’m saving it because I don’t want to not have anything left. More importantly though, I need to know that there are rational and intelligent people like her out there that can add insight and perspective to this bizarre spinning political world.

I didn’t like the ending to The Partly Cloudy Patriot as much as Assassination Vacation but overall I found it to be just as fulfilling. May she never stop writing.

Interview with Sarah Vowell
Second Interview with Sarah

THE COMA by Alex Garland

This is a real easy read and has a nice sense of flow. The tone is very much like Waking Life (the film), Written by the person who wrote 28 Days Later, the entire premise is basically a stream of consciousness of a person who is trying to get out of his coma. After the very beginning initial incident in which he defends a woman who is being mugged on the tube and is knocked unconscious, the remaining passage is filled with a journey through his mind as a setting. In some ways, it was also reminiscent of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as the protagonist in some ways is really examining his own memories and trying to wake himself up. My favorite part is when he goes into a record store and puts on Little Richard and then the Beach Boys album Pet Sounds. He travels to childhood places and goes to bookstores. After the initial realization that he can’t remember anything and furthermore is not really conscious, the rest of the book is a curious struggle.

So it’s complicated but it again flows well and can be read in a relatively short amount of time. I’d recommend this book to anyone interested in a fictional story that deals with thought processes or to anyone who sits around wondering what it’s like to be in a coma or is obsessed with comas and has already read Douglas Coupland’s Girlfriend in a Coma. To be honest, I’m not obsessed with comas in the least but I do like thinking about thoughts and dreams and memories so this book was a rather engaging one.

A GIRL NAMED ZIPPY by Haven Kimmel

I’m going to be upfront and honest about this book…it has the worst cover. It looks like the kind of cover for a really awful shmaltzy book. You look at the cover and you read the description about how it’s an autobiographical piece of her experiences growing up in small town Indiana and you think…”Do I really want to read this or do I have something better to do…like water my dying cactus or eat pennies.” But it’s a very engaging read nonetheless and the real reason why I picked it up is simply because I had read Kimmel’s The Solace of Leaving Early previously and really loved the way she delved into philosophy and religion. She has a very strong and active writing style that makes you want to read more.

You do get a feel for small town Indiana and what it must have been like to live there growing up, as Haven did, a Quaker. The conservative nature of the town and even the racism and close mindedness within it aren’t completely hid either. But the majority of the text delves on the nature of growing up and you inevitably tend to remember all of your early life experiences and stories just as she recalls hers. Her first word was Magazine. Mine was Moon. She hid her pink Bible everywhere so that she wouldn’t have to go to workship. I dreaded getting up for Sunday School as well….and so on. At the heart of her story is the realization that you need to remember your own and compare…and that remembering can sometimes be a very thoughtful experience. There’s also betwixt all of these memories, an early life struggle in terms of her faith and what faith means along with an observance of how life ends amongst both animals in her small town and the elderly. It’s really very affecting but some of the stories don’t even hit you at first. It’s like you have to absorb them and let them sink into your skin a bit.

Interview with Haven Kimmel

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 7th, 2005 at 8:57 pm and is filed under books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.