The SunBreak » novel

Summer Reads for the Seattleite (Khaled Hosseini, Ben Winters)

Michael van Baker — Fri, 02 Aug 2013 23:18:04 +0000

The best two of the six novels I've read lately are right up Seattle's alley when it comes to "beach reads": Khaled Hosseini's And the Mountains Echoed and Countdown City by Ben Winters.

Meyer’s Texas Epic “The Son” Sweeps from Comanches to Oil Barons

Michael van Baker — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 22:12:54 +0000

Soon enough, Eli's vocabulary expands: "paa, water; tuhuya, horse; tehcaró, eat. Tunetsuka -- keep going." The Comanches enter him into a remedial program where he learns how to prepare a buffalo hide, and make necessary tools from animal sinew. "By comparison," thinks Eli, "we were dumb as steers. They could not understand why they had not defeated us."

Doig Spins a Wholly Original “Bartender’s Tale”

Michael van Baker — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 21:48:36 +0000

Following on his much-praised Work Song, set in Butte in 1919, Seattle novelist Ivan Doig returns readers to Montana, but this time it's the '60s, and the tiny town of Gros Ventre, which, if it's anywhere, would be up in Glacier National Park.

Family Ties in Both a Marine’s Memoir & Comedy-of-Art-Manners Novel

Michael van Baker — Wed, 02 May 2012 22:35:58 +0000

Dust to Dust is startlingly good. Though it's bound up in Busch's experiences in wartime Iraq, as an officer in the Marines, it's the opposite of what you might expect. Let's begin with the chapter titles: "Arms, Water, Metal, Soil, Bone Wood, Stone, Blood, Ash." That's not rhetorical stylishness; Busch has a grim fascination for what he perceives as elemental that might remind you of the poet Ted Hughes.

In Stewart O’Nan’s The Odds, the Drink is Marriage on Niagara’s Rocks

Michael van Baker — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 23:47:06 +0000

I don't want to quote too much from The Odds, by Stewart O'Nan, because it's a small book, about 180 pages, and his style isn't the pyrotechnic kind that, in a paragraph, leaves you wide-eyed. I'd just end up giving things away. The Los Angeles Times called him "the spokesperson of the regular person," and you can see what they were getting at, but O'Nan's gift is to somehow, through building up the stream of life's matters of fact, surmount them.

Horse Bite, Seattle’s Latest Love Letter, by Dave O’Leary

Michael van Baker — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 00:00:14 +0000

This willingness to bare all has its payoffs. I am pretty sure I didn't need that money shot on page 30, but there's an affecting portrait of a largely unspoken kind of straight manhood here: unspoken because other men simply grunt or chuckle in recognition, and women are chancy when it comes to how numbingly often the male mind turns to sex.