Four Books for the Holidays

The original idea for this month's post was a humorous reflection on my family's Xmas traditions. Then last night I learned that a good friend, someone from my critique group, was in a very bad motorcycle accident. When I started to write about him, it read too much like a eulogy and we're not there. Hopefully, on next month's post, I'll have good news. Needless to say, my Holiday spirits have dimmed a bit.

Instead I'll give a recap of the most memorable books that I read this year.

When Breath Becomes Air, a remarkable and poignant memoir by Paul Kalanithi. He started his university studies with the intention of being a writer, then switched to becoming a neurosurgeon, only to have terminal lung cancer interrupt his promising career. Kalanithi's literary talent shines though his prose and his 1st POV narrative reminded me of Flowers For Algernon, where we the readers are helpless bystanders as the author describes his descent toward the tragic end. 

Atomic Habits by James Clear, came to my attention via one of my ghostwriter clients. As we struggle to get a handle on life and find ways to improve our station, we often turn to self-help books. While the advice is usually sound, finding ways to exercise it can be frustrating. One of Clear's habits is the idea of getting one percent better in a specific area of your life. In applying this concept to himself, my client determined that getting one percent better meant devoting one percent of his day (which calculates to 14 minutes 24 seconds) to a particular effort. Not even fifteen minutes. How many increments of fifteen minutes a day do we waste? Sitting in traffic. Scrolling through social media. I embraced this idea and used it to improve a skill I'd been slogging after for years, improving my Spanish. 

Now my daily routine is to study Spanish for at least fifteen minutes a day, usually by reading a book in Spanish. Which brings me to Corrido de Amor y Gloria by Reyna Grande. While Corrido is fiction, the story is based on the Mexican-American War of 1847, during which Mexico lost more half of its territory (New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Utah, California, and parts of Wyoming, Oklahoma, and Kansas) to the US. The narrative is told through John Riley, one of the Irish-American soldiers who defected to fight for the Mexicans in the St. Patrick's Battalion, and Ximena, a Mexican curandera (healer), who served as a battlefield nurse. Besides laying out the historical foundations for the war and sharing the cruel deprivations suffered by the ordinary Mexicans, Reyna also relates the internal treachery and political machinations that undermined their nation's resistance. 

I continued my "One Percent Better" practice in Spanish as I explored one of my favorite periods in history, the years between WW1 and WW2, in El Hombre Que Amaba a los Perros by the Cuban mystery writer, Leonardo Padura. We follow Lev Davidovich, aka Leon Trotsky, in exile and his assassin, Ramón Mercader, the Spanish communist who wielded the murder weapon, the infamous ice ax. The tome sprawls over 700 pages, and Padura does a masterful job giving us context and tension as the characters maneuver to their fateful encounter in Mexico City on August 20, 1940. Trotski died the next day.

On that cheery note, Merry Christmas, and I'll see you Next Year!

Stories from Cuba and Mexico

If you want to be a good writer, you'd better be good reader. To that end, I've got a bunch of books in my reading stack and at the moment, the titles are limited to a pair of writers, Leonardo Padura and Silvia Moreno-Garcia. You may recognize Padura as the acclaimed author of the Mario Conde series, the exploits of a Cuban police detective. The novels spin through the tropes of the big-city gumshoe: a deep cynicism about society, a distrust in authority, hangovers, stale cigarettes, failed romances, and an overbearing boss. What keeps the stories fresh is the location, contemporary Havana, which seems exotic in the details and setting, and Padura's incisive scrutiny of Cuba's political structure. Who knew so many sketchy characters thrived in the cracks of Marxist society? I tend to be a fast reader, which means I end up skimming more than I should, but in Padura's books, because I'm reading them in Spanish, that causes me to sift through the prose and better appreciate its rich texture.

I recently interviewed Moreno-Garcia for StokerCon 2021, scheduled for Denver...God willing. She's a Mexican writer (now living in Vancouver, BC). Besides extending congratulations for having her novel, Mexican Gothic, being adapted by Hulu TV, we discussed the writing process and her career. All of her novels are set during a definitive time period in Mexico. Every narrative carves a swarth through Mexican society, experienced through a woman's perspective, and what emerges is a Mexico quite different from the cliché that we're used to seeing from this side of the border. Mexico does not perceive itself as a Third-World country but a nation with modern sensibilities. Her novel Signal to Noise is framed by the mixed-tape pop culture of the 80s. Gods of Jade and Shadow is a supernatural tale blending Mayan legends with the 20s jazz age as it unfolded in Mexico. For sure, class privilege and historical antecedents create the stage upon which the characters appear, but that is true in any good story. In the interview we shared this quizzical take on what constitutes Latino literature in the US. Seems that the only accepted works as American "Latino" literature must focus on the immigrant experience (recent and impoverished) or on occasion, relate the tribulations involving the sisterhood of sassy Latinas. Even though my books feature a Chicano detective-vampire and draw from Mexican and Southwestern mythology, they are branded as supernatural stories, front to back. Then too, just one drop of science fiction or the paranormal keeps even a good detective yarn off the shelves of mystery fiction.

En español, con ganas

Today I'll be giving a talk at the Denver Public Library, Escribiendo parte de nuestra historia con el autor Mario Acevedo. What makes this presentation especially noteworthy is that I was asked to give it in Spanish, no duh, given the title. While I am more or less conversant in Spanish, preparing for this talk filled me with trepidation. Like many other immigrants, the language skills my family brought to this country have deteriorated over the generations. The first generation is fully literate, the second generation (me) much less so, and by the third generation we speak English only. As a young child my first language was Spanish, which we spoke at home. But then you go to public school, are immersed in English, and at that point the vocabulary in the other language stops growing. As you are assimilated in American culture the relevance of the mother culture gets pushed aside. (Up to a point. No one mistakes me for being anything other than Mexican.) Of course, people can blame the school system for this but there was nothing that prevented me from taking the initiative at keeping my Spanish language skills sharp. So I used this recent opportunity to brush up on my español. I just finished reading--in Spanish--Cuban mystery writer Leonardo Padura's intriguing Paisaje de Otoño. As a writer, I choose my words carefully--a challenge enough for me in English--and now I have to do it in Spanish. It's more than simply using Google to translate my address, their software is useful, but it's far from perfect. I also used another website, Front Door, which is more comprehensive and accurate though not as convenient. My ace-in-the-hole is a childhood friend who is a retired ESL teacher and he tutored me through the process. Those of you who are fluent in another language are aware of the subtle shifts in meaning as you translate from English and back again. And then there are phrases that if translated directly lose their meaning or there might not be a literal translation. For example, "soft porn" translates into "porno blando," as in "bland porn," not a bad twist on words. I wondered if there was direct translation of "navel-gazing" and there was! Ombliguismo. "Unwholesome" (we're talking about my books) translates into a rather cool-sounding "moralmente malsano." In Spanish, you don't trip over your words, you "swallow" them (tragar).

So I was going to play on that by asking the audience to "swallow" shots of tequila every time I "swallowed" a word. My friend said, do that and your audience will be drunk before you get a minute into your talk. Salud!