PECKERWOOD BOOK CLUB: How Do You Read A Book? Plus a Very Unsettling "Hurricane!"

Welcome, reading floozies, to another edition of "The Peckerwood Book Club," a place to discuss what your currently reading, what you recommend, along with other book-loving minutia. 

Speaking of minutia, how do you read a book? When I was in college a mere two or three years ago - ride with me on that, won't you? - I always had a yellow highlighter in my paws, and found that highlighting key phrases or sentences helped me better remember the book's contents, even though I'd seldom go back and re-read any of it. Just the act of highlighting, I think, help burn important portions in my brain. 

I can't seem to break the habit. Though I always have a highlighter handy for material I read for work, I sometimes find myself highlighting books I read for pleasure, things like character names or other story elements I think I might forget. This is helpful when I have to stop reading a book for whatever reason - life intervenes! Elder Cat demands attention! - enabling me to scan the highlighted bits when I pick it up again as a quick refresher. Helpful hint: as much fun as it might seem to use colors other than yellow, colors like orange, blue, red just aren't as good. I stand by this! Another helpful hint: you can't donate a highlighted book, so I rarely do this with trashy-fun best-sellers I know I won't keep forever. Yet another helpful hint: the hubs does not like reading a highlighted book ("It feels like you're reading over my shoulder," he says), so if you know someone else in your household wants to read something, or you're going to pass it on to a friend, don't do it. 

How do you read a book? Do you just plow in? Do you look up words as you go along? Or Google parts for more information, like I do with non-fiction books? Or scribble little notes in the margins? Meanwhile, if you're in the mood for a brisk, chilling, darkly humorous literary novel, have I got a fine one for you. 

Unfolding lightening-fast, "Hurricane Girl" by Marcy Dermansky charts the plight of Allison, a writer who’s reeling from sexual harassment and physical abuse in Hollywood. Yet she soon faces a more dire threat with Keith, a TV cameraman who first comes to her rescue when her North Carolina vacation home is destroyed by a hurricane. 

With its references to Harvey Weinstein and other Hollywood figures, the novel has “Me Too” on its mind, though its focus is both deliberately narrowed and abstracted. We’re inside Allison’s fast-shifting state of mind - brought on by a cataclysmic head injury - where she examines and parses the many abuses from men, both major and minor, that she’s endured throughout her life, and how she might, or might not, act on them in the present. Allison is memorably blinkered, her dazedness and caustic humor giving "Hurricane Girl" a restless, disturbing power. You never know where her thoughts will take her - and neither does she. Her injury also opens up new avenues in her mind, illuminating anew a long-subjugated life, from her dismissive brother Adam; to her best friend, Lori, who’s revealed as spectacularly selfish; and onward to present-day interactions with a series of abusive and near-abusive men. 

That she questions the seemingly genuine affections of Danny, her brain surgeon and a former college classmate, only adds to a story which constantly throws Allison off balance. The novel isn't quite stream-of-consciousness, but it is a bracing, roller-coaster ride inside a fractured psyche desperate to heal itself, and a speedball-fast read I won't soon forget, though be forewarned, it's not, as they say, for the easily triggered. 

Your happy-go-lucky, neighborhood Bibliophile Boy™ has been in the book store for ages, just bursting all over with good cheer and big tiddys, and, yes, eager to find a good read. Won't you do him a solid and recommend something?

Photo Credit: Vintage