Diminishing the Backlog On my attempt to read 1 unloved book per week for an entire year

It took me all of three weeks to finally finish Lovely Bones by Ms. Alice Sebold. No, the book wasn’t a disappointment; in fact, it’s one of the most exquisitely wrought stories I have read for the longest time. Just like in the book, life happened, swept me into tidy and messy corners of nights and days where I’d find myself reaching out towards the blue book (I got a first edition copy, at 70 pesos, from Booksale SM Batangas City), savoring a paragraph here and there.

The first line which I quoted in the book is telling. Susie Salmon is dead—a foregone conclusion. What happens in the book is the life of her family as its members try to wrestle with and away from the memory of that tragic event. This is not a novel about poetic justice where we see the murderer of Susie suffering or serving a lifetime sentence. It’s about how, in their day to day lives, the characters insist on living the only life they know. Susie’s mother Abigail walks away from a marriage and savors her independence by working in a winery; her father Jack tries to fix the delicate fabric of his household the way he meticulously works on a ship inside a bottle; her Lindsey sister gets married; and her brother Buck transitions to adolescence.

“These were the lovely bones,” Ms. Sebold writes, “that had grown around my absence: the connections—sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent—that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events the way my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.”

I like the way Alice Sebold narrates the story, with telescopic attention and utmost care for the language that you buy into the conceit on which this entire book pivots: that it is told from the point of view of a dead girl. With Susie removed from the mundane concerns of the world, it is easy to see that what she is after is not vengeance or closure (her mortal body is never found) but an understanding on how life on Earth transpires because and in spite of her; it is wisdom, it seems, that will finally heal her and not revenge.

Though the language of book is its greatest strength, it may also be its liability. The sonorous melody of the book is hypnotic; the reader can’t help to feel occasionally that he is a sleepwalker barging in in the Salmon family. But somewhere near the middle, the reader gets jolted by bursts of suspense, especially when Mr. Harvey targets Lindsey (who trespassed into his house and tore off a sketch of what could be evidence) with an insatiable lust for pretty young things. The erotic charge is palpable (it seems that Susie, even after death, is hormonal) and culminates into sparks when Susie inhabits the body of her friend Ruth to make love to the boy of her dreams, Ray.

Overall, the book feels like a literary achievement—the story-telling is impeccable, the progression is as natural as breathing and the plot succeeds in fleshing out characters (even the minor ones) which could have ended as mere sketches in the hands of a lesser novelist. There’s nothing not to love about this book which I enjoin everyone to read for its compelling beauty and immense heart. Anna Quindlen agrees that it will become a classic, “in the vein of To Kill a Mockingbird.” The last line, especially, is a killer.

Part of me wished swift vengeance, wanted my father to turn into a man he could never have been—a man violent in rage. That’s what you see in movies, that’s what happens in the books people read. An everyman takes a gun and a knife and stalks the murderer of his family; he does a Bronson on them and everyone cheers.

What it was like:

Every day he got up. Before sleep wore off, he was who he used to be. Then, as his consciousness woke, it was as if poison seeped in. At first he couldn’t even get up. He lay there under a heavy weight. But then only movement could save him, and he moved and he moved and he moved, no movement being enough to make up for it. The guilt on him, the hand of God pressing down on him, saying, You were not there when your daughter needed you.

“My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973.”

Unloved Book No. 2 will be revealed on January 7.

I finished reading the memoir, The Sound of No Hand Clapping, at around 3 o’clock this morning (which says a lot how such a page-turner the book was) and felt compelled to rush a letter to the author, thanking him what a great read it was. Waking up, I saw a reply in my inbox from Mr. Toby Young himself, which further endeared the British bloke to me, considering that he is famous than ever (Top Chef judge, anyone?).

Before reading No Hands Clapping, I suggest that one should read first How to Lose Friends and Alienate People for the following reasons:

1. the second book is a sequel to the first, thus offering a narrative continuity to the life of Mr. Young post-New York (his foray to the Big Apple is the subject of How to Lose Friends).

2. other personalities recur (such as Gordon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair) and it will be great to be familiar with them and put them into context (such as how they made the life of Mr. Young not exactly easy).

3. that the reason for the second book is the first, since No Hands Clapping takes off from a deal from a Hollywood kingpin to write a screenplay after he read Mr. Young’s first book.

More than anything, I think that the best parts of the book are when Mr. Young deals with issues of fatherhood, with straight-forward and sometimes eviscerating honesty. They make you think that Mr. Young is not entirely the fame-seeking careerist which he so lavishly portrays himself to be in the first book. He has what Graham Greene calls “a splinter of ice” in his heart (something which he quotes in No Hands Clapping).

This is not to say that the book lacks comic heights: riding a paparazzo SUV to “accidentally” bump into the Hollywood kingpin who has been avoiding him is classic. Ditto his fumbling speech as a best man to his friend’s wedding.

All in all, I find No Hands Clapping infinitely more tender than How to Lose Friends and shows Mr. Young’s immense gifts of weaving different anecdotes to create a portrait of a man as he struggles with “heroic failure” (again, a term from him). I can’t think of anyone who considers the act of failing as an adventure sports. Lucky for us, he comes back from ordeal, wanting to tell us everything.

Now, if I have convinced you enough, you can buy the book here.

I ordered this book from Amazon less than a year ago, titillated by the prospect of encountering again the author of “How to Lose Friends and Alienate People”—a book which sorely worried my sister regarding my mental health the first time she read its title. Toby Young is nothing but fun—his writing style brims with candor and wit, shot through with the right amount of sarcasm and self-deprecating humor. He doesn’t mind being a butt of jokes—especially in his own books.

“The Sound of No Hands Clapping” is the sequel to the runaway bestseller, “How to Lose Friends.” In the new memoir, the British author tries his hand on show business, convincing his wife to move in with him and start a family in Los Angeles. How does he navigate between a heap of diapers and crumpled script sheets? How does he balance fatherhood and almost-there fame? I am interested to find out.