Reckless Eyeballing by Ishmael Reed

I have been reading many short stories for my multicultural literature class, so it was nice to delve into a full-length novel. Reckless Eyeballing is a 148 page sort-of fiction about a playwright and his troubles with racism, anti-semitism, feminism, misogyny, and much, much more. It only took me two sittings to finish, and was a relatively easy read on the surface.

Reckless Eyeballing is told primarily through Ian Ball’s perspective — a Creole playwright who is trying to get his play, also entitled “Reckless Eyeballing,” into a popular theatre. The story is about his encounters with racists and feminists who want to hinder or change his play to suit their needs. Other, more minor characters include Tremonisha Smarts — a feminist playwright, Jim Minsk — a Jewish director, and Lawrence O’Reedy — a racist detective.

While Reed seems to poke equal amounts of fun at everyone and their faults, it seems to me that feminists get the short end of the stick. While there is one redeemable feminist, she is only really that way in the very end of the novel, and basically turns out not to be a feminist at all. In one of the most humorous parts of the novel, the “Flower Phantom,” a man in a beret, trench coat, and mask goes around New York City shaving off prominent feminists hair and leaving them with a Chrysanthemum. The black men of NYC secretly rejoice and praise this man, as the feminists seem to run everything in the city, and have been putting men on the “sex-list” for many years, affecting who is published, praised, paraded around town for their woman-friendly attitudes. Ian Ball hopes to get taken off the sex-list with his play, “Reckless Eyeballing,” which is about a black man who was lynched for looking at a white woman for too long. 20 years after the fact, the woman in question wishes to take the dead man’s skeleton to court in order to sentence him to death. Outrage and hilarity ensue.

This story is definitely easy to read if you take it at face value; it’s short, seems pretty straight forward, and for the most part has simple characters that are easy to identify and label. However, if you treat this as a true Ishmael Reed book, you could read it dozens of times and still come out with something new each time. While I did not love the book, I did enjoy the amazing amounts of layering that Reed accomplishes. By subtly hinting at being a pseudo-fictional tale, there are many popular references to jazz musicians, Disney characters, and an allusion that one of the main characters is basically a stand-in for Alice Walker, and the character’s script-turned-play mirrors Walker’s book-turned-film, The Color Purple.

To truly understand the multilayered intertextual themes, the reader will have to have a basic understanding of a lot of prominent black literature and culture both in and out of the USA. However, before taking the multicultural literature class, I can say that I did not know much about that scene, and I could still enjoy the basic premise and humor of the extremely satirical novel from Ishmael Reed. If you think of the novel as light reading with dark undertones, it makes for a satisfying, humorous, quick read. If you prefer to look deeper into the text, you will also be satisfied — there is layer upon layer of cultural and literary references to feast upon.

Farsighted by Emlyn Chand

Farsighted is the first novel in Emlyn Chand’s series, also entitled Farsighted. It is relatively short — it is a 260 page fantasy novel focusing on the psychic, paranormal, and just plain weird aspects of high school.

Alex Kosmitoras is blind. When he starts his sophomore year, he ends up in a fight with his personal jock-bully, Brady. Life gets even more difficult for him when he starts having visions, truly strange moments where his other senses pick up scents and sounds that don’t belong in his current real life.

Alex finally meets some friends at school who are no less weird than him. Simmi, a girl who smells of an almond bar, is a psychic by touch. Shapri, the daughter of the local mystic — who incidentally has a shop right next door to his mom’s flower shop — doesn’t believe in any of that “psychic mumbo-jumbo.” Unfortunately for her, she can speak to the dead, even though she denies that the people she speaks to are deceased. While Alex tries to live as normal a life as possible, his strange visions cause him to act out in school and be further ostracized by his other classmates.

Things get even more difficult when he starts seeing visions of a man, Dax, hurting or potentially killing Simmi. In order to save her in some distant possible future, Alex starts taking psychic lessons with Miss Teak, Shapri’s mother, who owns the psychic shop next door. The three friends embark on a journey to save Simmi’s life from the mysterious Dax.

I’ve never read a book with a blind narrator before, and the way Chand goes about it is brilliant. Although I was of the thought that it would be a huge negative to lose my eyesight, because Alex has lived with it his whole life, it doesn’t seem different or noticeable to him, and therefore also does not to the reader. The descriptions of the other senses are just as enticing as descriptions of sight can be, especially when it comes to Alex’s love interest.

The interactions between Alex, Simmi, and Shapri feel slightly awkward at some points. This early on in the series, I’m not sure if that’s because they’re awkward teens in high school, haven’t fully come to grips with their powers and what it means to each other, or if the dialogue is just awkward. Fortunately this wasn’t a big issue, because the book had a lot of action, which was written wonderfully. Seeing each character flesh out and start to master their abilities was fun and rewarding. However, some of Alex’s actions actually instilled fear in me for what he might do with his abilities. He ends up beating the hell out of a guy that he thinks deserves it, and it was a startling scene that made me realize he has a long way to go with learning control and responsibility for his power.

Although Farsighted felt brief, I believe it serves as a great introduction to the world of psychics that Emlyn Chand created. It has suspense, romance, and a little bit of high school drama. It is also worth noting that this is Chand’s first published novel — and a great breakout book it is. I can’t wait to see where she takes these characters and their powers. The adventure will continue in books two and three of the Farsighted series, Open Heart and Pitch.

The Desert Spear by Peter V. Brett

The Desert Spear is a 583 page fantasy novel. It is the second book in The Demon Cycle. After reading The Warded Man (first of the series), I immediately picked up the Desert Spear and continued the journey of Arlen, Leesha, and Rojer. Along with the familiar characters, Peter V. Brett added in a few new perspectives, like that of Jardir (Ahmann asu Hoshkamin am’Jardir am’Kaji) from Krasia.

The first 200 pages detail Jardir’s life from childhood to the approximate present that The Warded Man brought us to. Jardir, being a male, was basically taken from his family at age 9 and put into intense training called Hannu Pash. Through this training, almost all the boys of Krasia are trained in order to fight alagai’sharak every night. During this, they use spears, nets, and teamwork to trap and kill corelings, the demons that rise from the core of the Earth every evening as the sun sets. It was fun to get a deep back story and understanding of Krasian culture and history as a precursor to the events in the rest of the novel. We also get a new view of Arlen here, as he manages to travel to Krasia and befriend Jardir.

Although I really enjoyed Jardir’s point of view, I think I would have liked it more if it was spread throughout the book rather than condensed into the first 200 pages. It felt as if his story was just playing catch-up to the other characters, and didn’t really fit into any major plot other than back story for a main character.

Along with Jardir, the second primary point of view comes from Renna Tanner, a young woman on a farm just outside of Tibbet’s Brook. When she was young, she and Arlen were promised (basically an arranged marriage agreement). Renna has it rough living with her family and rather disturbing and backwards father. Her viewpoint was an exciting way to get back into the hamlets without reliving the stories from the first novel. She eventually travels with Arlen, and it was nice to see him return to his human side after thinking absorbing Core magic was turning him into a demon.

Arlen, Leesha, and Rojer are returning POVs in The Desert Spear. In this book, I think Leesha’s view was my favorite. It was really fun to see her going on adventures. Other than that, I feel not too much changed from the first book that wasn’t natural progression. Aside from the regular human perspectives, this book actually brings in one of the more intelligent demon breeds — a mind demon — and gives a little hint into their thought process. In the face of this demon and the other corelings, humanity is desperate for the return of the Deliverer, a prophet foretold by both the Ejevah (Krasian holy text) and the Canon of the northern cities, to save them from the darkness. Krasia claims the deliverer is Jardir, and the northern cities and hamlets claim Arlen for role. It is this that sparks such tension between characters in this novel.

The book moved quickly, as it felt like something completely different from The Warded Man. The additional POVs really brought some spice to what could have been a simple continuation of The Warded Man. It was fascinating to see Krasia, a civilization that actively fights the corelings every night, rather than just hiding behind wards. Arlen’s explorations into various worldly places was one of the best things Brett could have done for the series to expand the world in a believable and understandable way. The exploration of previous POVs was interesting, and the new ones really brought a fresh feel to this book. If you liked The Warded Man, you should not miss The Desert Spear.

Found: Book Sale Bookmark

I found this bookmark from a book that a friend gave me. I actually don’t recall if they placed it in the book, or if it was already there (I believe they got the book from a garage sale or something similar). It’s an advertisement for a Planned Parenthood of the Heartland Book sale that took place almost a year ago on the Iowa State Fairgrounds.

The book that my friend gave me is Smoke and Mirrors, which is a collection of “short fictions and illusions” by Neil Gaiman. I intend to read the book at some point, because I’ve had pretty good experiences with his works in the past. The bookmark was just sitting in between the cover and first page.

Mercury Falls by Robert Kroese

Mercury Falls was one of the first books I started reading when I got my Kindle — over a year ago! It is a 370 page humor/fantasy/magical-realism piece. It’s actually a little hard to pinpoint the genre, because the book does so many things.  There are a few other books in the series, which has no true intended order. I believe I got this book for free, which is why I read it first.

Mercury Falls centers around the coming Armageddon and certain PAIs (Persons of Apocalyptic Interest). The two big main characters are Mercury, a wayward angel who does pretty much what he wants when he wants for reasons only he knows about; and Christine, a journalist working for a reputable newspaper, traveling the USA and writing about end-of-the-world cults and their doomsday predictions. Her boss and owner of The Banner, Harry, has had the lifelong ambition to be the first newspaper to correctly document the pending apocalypse. This is why Christine has been sent to interview most anyone who claims they know the date of Armageddon.

The novel follows Christine’s travels around the US, and eventually to the Middle East, and all the attempts to either support or negate Armageddon made by humans, angels, and demons alike. Her plans go astray when Karl Grissom, a 37-year-old who still lives with his mom, is named the Antichrist by a competition based on a popular young adult series. Hilarity and fast-paced calamity ensue.

Though it took me an insane amount of time to read this book (I started it in early 2012), it was actually pretty enjoyable. Kroese portrays Heaven as a huge bureaucracy that in order to get anything done has to step on so many toes in its other departments that nothing ever gets done. None of the angels really know who “the big guy upstairs” is, where humans go when they die, or what the plan after Armageddon is. Half the fun of the story comes from the fact that disgruntled angels act pretty much like humans.

My favorite character is Mercury himself, the best–and really only–anti-establishment angel out there. I could never really guess his motives or which side he was on, whether it was pro- or anti-Armageddon, as the book calls it. He really throws everyone for a loop when he starts building snowmen instead of ushering in Armageddon like he’s supposed to be doing. Although the plot did move along quickly in this book, it was really the unique characters and creative Heaven that Kroese created (portals, a planeport limbo) that made the book so much fun to read.

Once I got over the initial push, about the first 100 pages, it got interesting and amusing and hard to put down. The contrasts of Christine’s apathy towards religion, Harry’s fanaticism, and Mercury’s mischief of minor miracles make this semi-religious book extremely lighthearted. Once I got into it, Mercury Falls was an easy, quick read. I’d recommend it if you want a humorous look on Armageddon.