THREE TENSES: A Transmission from the Nineties, do a vibe check...should it be 1998 outside? here's you a book

THREE TENSES: A Transmission from the Nineties
ED PARK
Random House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An elegant, iridescent mosaic of autobiographical fragments, both real and invented, forming a portrait of a creative life, from the life of the Pulitzer Prize finalist for Same Bed Different Dreams

In 1998, Ed Park wrote a memoir and saved it to the vanishing technology of the floppy disk, losing it for more than twenty years. Until one day, emptying out an old, unmarked box in his family’s cramped New York City home, he came across a hefty manila folder. Out slid the only remaining copy of Three Tenses.

The piece of writing that Park found—“a voice lesson, a language experiment, an autobiography with lies, a document of sustained artistic bliss of a sort that I have never found again”—was an assemblage of beguiling anecdotes, sly observations, and collected esoterica, produced within the confines of the shoebox apartment of his twenties and only now allowed to see the light of day. Two Ed Parks emerge on the within the prose of the young, struggling writer arises the voice of the artist he would become.

Profound, wily, and beautifully wrought, Three Tenses is a meeting of memory and myth, confession and obfuscation, coalescing to offer a singular picture of creativity in action.

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My Review: I've always felt oddly indifferent to memoirs, assuming they're pretty much always a load of fantasies piled up in a kind of rough shape sort of evoking a person's past. Trust them? Trust them to what? No one's memory is perfect, often it's at complete cross purposes with others who were (probably, allegedly) there, and in any case is the purpose of a memoir to be a record, settle scores—or to tell people how the writer sees the past that made them, from the ground they stand on in the present?

Ed Park takes bits and fragments of observations, memories, dreams, flat-out stuff he wishes was true, shakes 'em out of a shoebox, makes a beautiful mosaic of prose that thinks it's poetry, and says "here, read this," with a bashful smile.

I believe that woman on the subway wished people a terrible day, but not that she had black teeth. Or she had black teeth and wouldn't speak, only how then would he know she had the black teeth? Why did his parents emigrate from Korea to the US? What the hell brought them to, of all places...Buffalo?!

All the stops on the tour of his life led to his present. That's enough to tell me-the-reader that these fragments, too small to be more than thoughts that don't have deep enough edges to interconnect, exist for themselves. We already know Ed Park's work. His life is in it already, his world-view is in it already, his memoir has no heavy lifting to do that an autobiography, or later a biography, couldn't, won't, do better.

Except tell you how he felt. That's what kicked my indifference aside as I sat in the middle of the piles of thoughts and ideas wondering how I should piece them together. I shouldn't. I should respect that he didn't do it for me, so maybe the point was not to follow a narrative on its arc. That surprised me because this was Ed Park's life.

Comes the dawn....

What's more important to know about someone you care about, care for...what happened, or how they're feeling...feeling about what happened/didn't happen/could happen/might have happened? Why do so many of us have therapists if not to have someone to tell the truth about how we're feeling and maybe why we think we're feeling that way?

It's probably as coherent in this book as it is in Ed Park's mind. I don't think the framing device, discovering the floppy disk (!!) in a box during the pandemic, is really anything to get humg up on but many Goodreaders seem to have beef with it. Beats me why. Gotta start somewhere and the mass-death event only a couple years ago seems like a pretty significant road sign.

At all events I'm glad I got to know Ed Park a little, curated bit. I think I'll read his next published fiction with some added fellow-feeling.

A YEAR OF GARDEN-INSPIRED LIVING: Season by Season, inspirational as well as aspirational

A YEAR OF GARDEN-INSPIRED LIVING: Season by Season
LINDA VATER
Cool Springs Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$30.00 all editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A Year of Garden-Inspired Living is a giftable homage to living seasonally and is filled with inspiration for creating a garden-inspired life of grace and abundance. Bring simplicity and grace into your life, garden, home, and community with this treasured collection of ideas and daily inspiration from garden lifestyle guru Linda Vater.

Whether it’s connecting with a neighbor over a bowl of homemade soup, displaying a much-adored collection of books, creating personalized seed packets, setting a beautiful seasonal tablescape, or compiling a basket of comforts for someone in need, author Linda Vater (@potagerblog) has gathered a wealth of reflections on how to make the ordinary extraordinary and bring the joy of the garden’s seasons back into your life.

Each page features a narrative story about a special life moment, followed by an idea for bringing that moment to fruition in your own life, all organized by the season. Beautiful watercolor illustrations add further inspiration and a spark of creativity to the notion on each page.

A small sampling of the guidance found inside includes:

Giving a house blessing to a brand-new homeowner

Picking a seasonal wardrobe “piece” and letting it shine

Spreading seeds in an old spice jar

Being intentionally inefficient

Wearing your garden boots with a flouncy dress

Welcoming friends and neighbors to cut bouquets from your garden

Having a “ladybug party” for the children in your life

Creating herbal bouquets for cooking

Making and displaying decorative fall leaf bouquets

And so much more!

A Year of Garden-Inspired Living offers an elegant yet easy way to bring the joys and textures of seasonal living into your daily life, welcoming peace and connection to your days and restoring the balance of nature’s seasons in your home and life.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Charming, gentle anecdotes centered on a woman's garden as she moves through her very aspirationally bourgeois year.

Interesting reading for a resolute urbanite who quails inwardly at the notion of suburbia. I was fascinated by this Junior-League vision of a leisurely life I'd thought was dead. No one I know who isn't retired has this kind of time to putter and potter and coddiwomple hither, thither, and yon to be a willing slave to a bunch of botanical divas.

Absorbing, in a very retro way. Belong to a gardening club? The girls'll love this!

we're going hard on seasonality

This is, I'd guess, a gift item for your older female friends who do the relaxed lifestyle and would enjoy learning how to put some intentionality into the day. Rhythms of the seasons always make life feel purposeful, add that sense of being in a world larger and more...complete...than one's private world.

These samples of the design style might tell you what my review can't:

You get the picture...all very focused, true to an aesthetic, and sharply defined by softness and gentle colors.

IMPOSTURES by AL-HARIRI, as Englished by Michael Cooperson, is a loopy, looping funhouse ride of a read

IMPOSTURES
AL-HARIRI (tr. Michael Cooperson
NYU Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$18.00 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Winner, 2020 Sheikh Zayed Book Award, Translation Category

Shortlist, 2021 National Translation Award
Finalist, 2021 PROSE Award, Literature Category

Fifty rogue's tales translated fifty ways

An itinerant con man. A gullible eyewitness narrator. Voices spanning continents and centuries. These elements come together in Impostures, a groundbreaking new translation of a celebrated work of Arabic literature.

Impostures follows the roguish Abū Zayd al-Sarūjī in his adventures around the medieval Middle East—we encounter him impersonating a preacher, pretending to be blind, and lying to a judge. In every escapade he shows himself to be a brilliant and persuasive wordsmith, composing poetry, palindromes, and riddles on the spot. Award-winning translator Michael Cooperson transforms Arabic wordplay into English wordplay of his own, using fifty different registers of English, from the distinctive literary styles of authors such as Geoffrey Chaucer, Mark Twain, and Virginia Woolf, to global varieties of English including Cockney rhyming slang, Nigerian English, and Singaporean English.

Featuring picaresque adventures and linguistic acrobatics, Impostures brings the spirit of this masterpiece of Arabic literature into English in a dazzling display of translation.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'm dazzled, and a bit frazzled, by this high-intensity read. Unlike most times I read vignettes, I was compelled to read the book in two sittings, instead of a more normal-for-me five or six. It is fun, often enough funny, and always about a fun-loving merry prankster and bon vivant living for the next encounter.

It's also a sarcastic snook-cocking at the pious liars who talk a godly game while fleecing or planning to fleece you. The Englishing of these cultural treasures of the Arabic language...wonderful word, better concept, "Englishing" for something like this that can not possibly be a translation...is the source of most of the fun. Many's the time I used the glossary, and thank goodness it was there.

What makes the read so much more than it sounds like it is from my maunderings is that indefinable *something* that clicks a switch in the reader, that makes words into stories, stories into memories.

That's what happened to me. I can only hope that is what will happen to you.

UNCLE OF THE YEAR & Other Debatable Triumphs, famous gay actor writes vignettes a la Sedaris...and succeeds at it!

UNCLE OF THE YEAR & Other Debatable Triumphs
ANDREW RANNELLS
Crown Books
$28.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the star of The Book of Mormon and Girls, candid, hilarious essays on anxiety, ambition, and the uncertain path to adulthood that ask: How will we know when we get there?

In Uncle of the Year, Andrew Rannells wonders: If he, now in his forties, has everything he’s supposed to need to be an adult—a career, property, a well-tailored suit—why does he still feel like an anxious twenty-year-old climbing his way toward solid ground? Is it because he hasn’t won a Tony, or found a husband, or had a child? And what if he doesn’t want those things? (A husband and a child, that is. He wants a Tony.) In deeply personal essays drawn from his life as well as his career on Broadway and in Hollywood, Rannells argues that we all pretend—for friends, partners, parents, and others—that we are constantly succeeding in the process known as “adulting.” But if this acting is leaving us unfulfilled, then we need new markers of time, new milestones, new expectations of what adulthood is and can be.

Along the way, Rannells navigates dating, aging, mental health, bad jobs, and much more. In his essay “Uncle of the Year,” he explores the role that children play in his life, as a man who never thought having kids was necessary or even possible—until his siblings have kids and he falls in love with a man with two of his own. In “Always Sit Next to Mark Ruffalo,” he reveals the thrills and absurdities of the awards circuit, and the desire to be recognized for one’s work. And in “Horses, Not Zebras,” he shares the piece of wisdom that helped him finally come to terms with his anxiety and perfectionism.

Filled with honest insights and a sharp wit, Uncle of the Year challenges us to take a long look at who we’re pretending to be, who we know we are, and who we want to become.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Impostor Syndrome played for laffs. And it got them from me! What I don't always understand is how the idea of this common mental illness is so undertreated in the world of psychology, except of course among women in whom it was first identified forty-five years ago. That makes sense because it's a subtle way of (in)validating women's power.

Actor Rannells is a gay man of a certain age writing about himself and his multivalent struggles to achieve success, find love, gain self-esteem and confidence, and then Own It. If Impostor Syndrome does nothing else, it weaponzes the "virtue" of modesty to create eternal insecurity and "unworthiness" in those not inoculated against those insidious underminers of personal satisfaction and empowerment by virtue of gendered, class- and race-specific messaging. Just look around at those whose self-esteem is most on public display to get the import of this effective means of social control.

Those reflections being delivered, the story itself is a laugh-out-loud collection of short essays, the precise proper length to be read while in down-time from tasks of ordinary living...waiting in waiting rooms, between required or assigned busy-work bursts...and they deliver not simply respite from these but quietly effective food for thought. Rannells has lived an active public-facing life. His reflections on how that's worked for him, what it's cost him, where it's led him, are both completely personal and universally applicable in their outlines. (Funny how often those things go hand-in-hand, isn't it?)

What I enjoyed most about the read was how much honesty Actor Rannells brings to his gayness. He denies, hides, celebrates, and ultimately integrates his sexual and romantic focus on his own gender in a social milieu, the theatre, where it's not exactly uncommon. The process isn't direct, and is never over...gay men never stop coming out...but it's a lot less time-consuming as he ascends the career ladder with candor and humor. Aging has its good points. He's in charge of his own life and future in ways he never thought he could be as a young gay man. But the eternal struggle to believe himself actually possessed of that power, and the deservedness of that success, that is the ongoing "gift" of Impostor Syndrome, is the quiet but inescapable burden of his humorously delivered anecdotes.

I'm older than Rannells, older even than his decade-plus older partner, and I still recognize and relate to all the struggles he underagoes. I found comfort, fellowship, and fun in this read. I hope you'll take it with you to the next doctor's office or bureaucratic waiting room you go into.