Tinkers

Okay, I’m going to make this a short review since I told myself I’d finish writing a review of a book before moving onto the next one and technically I’ve started another book. And by technically I mean I’m about 40 pages in. (Okay, I finished and read three more books after it).

I got this book thinking that I was buying a book that I’d read in the 5th grade and thought it’d be interesting to see if there was a difference in my opinion of the book. It turns out though that the book I was thinking of was Twink, not Tinkers. Though if a book titled Twinkers ever comes out, I’ll be all over it.

That being said…Tinkers was a book that will give aspiring writers who have trouble with dialogue, plot and tense, hope. Which is not to say that it is a bad book – just the opposite of what you will find in any discussion these days about what a book needs to get published. And not only did this book get published, it got a Pulitzer…which is a bit baffling. The book does have beautiful moments, such as – well if I weren’t such a lazy curr and wasn't already several books ahead, I might quote here, but well,…

I felt if the plot strings were tightened a bit, that the book would have been much stronger. It was a nice change of pace though, to read a book that doesn’t move along at breakneck speed for fear of losing its reader. Which just goes to show that the entire US (or at least the Pulitzer committee) has not lost its collective attention span.

Inch

The size of Inch, a tiny lit mag (larger than an inch, 4 ¼ by 5 1/2, but I suppose 4 1/2 inches might have been a little less snappy of a title) is nice in that it allows you to easily carry it wherever you go. You can even slip it between the pages of another book. And the brevity of the pieces inside (that would be one thick War and Peace at this size) mean that you can easily read and re-read the pieces and turn them over in your head. In the particular issue that I read recently (Summer 2010) the short short story “Two Kinds of People” by Clare Marie Myers is an understated story about searching for meaning and what happens when it’s not to be found. There's also a lovely and unsettling little poem from Colleen S. Harris.

The Post-Script she doesn't Write:

Send me the spent shells of your enemies.
I will string the brass of the bullets

that missed into a necklace of luck.
I will wear it until the greenblack stain

creeps around my throat like a bruise,
a death-echo. A reminder of my promise.

Where you go, I follow, Always.