Bookish

This is dumb

2012-02-14T04:30:00.000-08:00

Why?

Why We Broke Up

2012-02-12T12:38:00.000-08:00

My interview with Daniel Handler and Maira Kalman is on Newcity! I really loved this book - it was so enjoyable and I fell in love with the characters.

One regret I have is using the word "morality" in my question about sex - I should have just said "message". I have this occasional dumb habit of referring to out-of-wedlock-sex as an issue of "morality" even though I don't even BELIEVE that people who have unmarried sex are in any way immoral. But, I was raised in a very religious household/community where especially teen-sex was inextricably seen as a question of morals. It's dumb, but, for some reason it's stuck in my head that way. It's funny how, when you learn something as a child, it is very difficult to un-learn it. For example, my mom told us that if the car door opened while the car was in motion, the force of change in pressure would suck everyone out of the car where they would be smashed on the side of the road. To this day I COMPLETELY freak out if a car door cracks open when the car's moving. Anyway, it's just a lesson to me to think more carefully about my word choice and I wanted to put it out there that I do regret using that particular word.

They were fun to interview - it was nice talking about a book I really enjoyed with the author and illustrator, right after I finished reading it. I'm a big Daniel Handler fan - if you haven't read him, check out Adverbs or, better yet, Watch Your Mouth.

BTW, the book has an accompanying tumblr which is kind of amusing - you can read about breakups by people of all ages or add your own. I wish I had a good break-up story, but most of them were just like, I don't like you anymore. Oh, except for that one guy I dated in college who I found out was married. Then, I broke up with him.

A new pile

2012-01-17T19:16:00.000-08:00

Picked up a nice little pile of books at my local thrift store - look at these treasures!

Three Carol Shields books that I hadn't even HEARD of - OMG, I'm so excited to read those. That Guernsey Literary and Potato thing, two of those Clan of the Cave Bear books that I've been wanting to read ever since we saw those caves in France. And The Awakening, by Kate Chopin - apparently a Must Read in the history of feminist literature.

Right now I'm reading Great House by Nicole Krauss right now which is mildly challenging following the brain vacation I've been on recently.

Before I Fall

2012-01-14T13:23:00.000-08:00

I got a nice handful of YA books from my Secret Santa (bro-in-law) at Xmas - Before I Fall (2010) by Lauren Oliver was the first one I read. It's about a mean girl, Sam and her mean friends who are in a car accident after a party and Sam gets killed. But, she wakes up and relives that day all over again. And again. And again.

The premise is compelling, and even though I really didn't like Oliver's writing style very much, I could barely put Before I Fall down. I just wanted to find out what happened and what changed every time. What I also found interesting was how Oliver humanizes the bully. She doesn't pull any punches with Sam and her friends, who do some truly rotten things to the other students at their school. As Sam relives the day over and over, she becomes more cognizant of how her actions are effecting those around her, but she doesn't turn her back on the Queen Bee and her best pal, Lindsay.

Lindsay, with her angel's face and messy, dirty blond hair and chipped black nail polish and battered leather Dooney & Bourke bag that always has a film of tobacco and half-unwrapped Trident Original at the bottom. Lindsay, who hates being bored, always moving, always running. Lindsay, who once said -"it's the world against us, babes" - drunk and looping her arms around our shoulders when we were out in the arboretum and really meaning it. Lindsay, mean and funny and ferocious and loyal and mine. p.346

Oliver explores elementary theory from a combination of Butterfly Effect, Schrodinger's Cat, and a wee bit of Quantum Physics, as any decent time-travel story naturally would. I'm obsessed with Quantum Mechanics so I enjoyed those bits:

It amazes me how easy it is for things to change, how easy it is to start off down the same road you always take and wind up somewhere new. Just one false step, one pause, one detour, and you end up with new friends or a bad reputation or a boyfriend or a breakup. It's never occurred to me before; I've never been able to see it. And it makes me field, weirdly, like maybe all of these different possibilities exist at the same time, like each moment we live has a thousand other moments layered underneath it that look different. (p. 285)

I saw Young Adult recently - a movie about another Mean Girl played by Charlize Theron who happens to write YA fiction (unironically) about Mean Girls. That stood as an interesting comparison to this book, for me, largely because Theron's character doesn't really learn any Life Lessons and also because it brought full circle for me this rather new (am I right?) concept of the Mean, Popular Girl as fictional heroine. It's like, this girl is popular, smart, beautiful, witty, has a ton of fun, learns some Life Lessons (unusally) and comes out on top. In any event, I'm sure Before I Fall would be quite interesting to teen readers and any adult like me that likes reading YA fiction.

The Goats

2012-01-07T12:46:00.000-08:00

The Goats (1987) by Brock Cole had been popping up on my radar. It seems to be one of those YA books that has an effect on people who read it as children, like The Chocolate War. Like The Chocolate War, I somehow missed it when I was but a wee, moody, bookworm adolescent. I suspect they hid books like these to keep us from getting ideas. But it's just a suspicion.

In The Goats, two children are tricked by their summer-camp-mates into going to a small island, where they are briefly physically assaulted and then robbed of their clothing and left. (An aside: my sister and I were talking about someone being assaulted within earshot of her 4 year old. I thought he wasn't listening, but later on he spilled salt on the table, flicked it at us and said it was a' salted.) The general idea, by the camp bullies, is that the two clumsy, unlovable outcasts would find humiliating solace in each others arms in animalistic, goat-like behavior. The two children are, naturally, humiliated and escape the island by swimming away and hiding out, with the intention of never returning to camp. The girl calls her mother, who initially doesn't understand the urgency of the matter and refuses to come to the woods to pick her up.

What I found interesting as an adult reader was how Cole positions their youth and sexuality. The children are pretty specifically pre-adolescent - the girl is described as having "[...] no breasts, just two shriveled nipples. At the bottom of her belly was a little patch of hair, like a Hitler mustache. That meant she was more mature than he was. He didn't have hair yet." They spend about 3-4 days together hiding out and testing their capacity to live in the woods together.   They don't have anything approaching a sexual relationship, but their relationship is certainly sexualized. "Covering" themselves, like Adam and Eve after The Fall, is first priority. Of course, it could be that it's merely my interpretation of the book as focusing on their pre-sexual interactions. The (adult?) reader is perhaps (more) aware of the children's ever-present consciousness of their sexual fragility.

The Goats really manages to tap into the no-one-understands-me element of being an adolescent, and I can easily image how it could be so impressionable on young readers. The fantasy of hiding out/running away that's fairly appealing to young people is lived out. For me, that book was From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (1967), in which two children run away and hide in the Met.   In parts The Goats reminded me of Margaret Atwood's Surfacing (I need to re-read that!) in which the main character runs into the woods and tears off her clothes - if I remember correctly, she fantasizes that "fur" will grow, allowing to live in the woods without concern for frippery modern amenities like clothes.

Unlike The Hunger Games and Divergent, which I think are really engaging reads for older readers, this book is less likely to appeal to mature readers, aside from satisfying literary curiosity, like mine. But, I should think it would be a very fine book to read and discuss with a young person. Some parts are a bit dated... In one section, the children fall in with some kids from the city. These African American and Latino characters are caring and wise, and fall precariously near (or in) the "Magical Negro" stereotype. Also, I have a real pet peeve of white authors writing in the voice of exaggerated black voices.   It's not really offensive, but it felt forced.

Top Fives

2012-01-06T05:00:00.000-08:00

Some of my Top Fives on Newcity Lit...

I was particularly proud of "Top 5 Book Titles We Have in Mind to Capitalize on the Success of “Go the F*ck To Sleep”

2011 Stats!

2012-01-04T18:46:00.000-08:00

It's that time of year again, for tallying and list-making... Here's what I read (generally) in 2011:

35 fiction and 8 non-fiction books, a conscience effort to read more books by women than men. 2011 was the year I read Freedom (and did NOT fall in love with it) - I also read Super Sad True Love Story and A Visit from the Goon Squad - although those were published in 2010, they were my absolute favorites of 2011. Oh, I also quite enjoyed March by Geraldine Brooks. And did I mention Divergent? That was definitely my fave YA pick of the year! Plastic and Moonwalking with Einstein were by far the most influential non-fiction books I read in 2011, both of which had a pretty profound effect on my thoughts and actions (I've been trying to use a lot less plastic and I've put Foer's palaces to work).

I published about 20 reviews in NewCity Lit, which I'm fairly proud of - looking forward to doing some more reading for that in 2012!

I'd love to hear your favorite books of the past year - please leave a note in comments!

Woolgathering (2011)

2012-01-04T16:57:00.000-08:00

My review of Woolgathering on Newcity!

The Skull Beneath the Skin

2012-01-04T16:54:00.001-08:00

I lucked upon a PD James mystery at my local coffee shop - The Skull Beneath the Skin - and it was a a fabulous diversion. I'm becoming a real mystery-lover. I mean, like, I want to move to England, live in a cottage decorated only with tartans, and read mystery novels while sipping tea all. Day. Long.

But, who wouldn't? Amirite?

This is a classic mystery novel, in the footsteps of Agatha Cristie (if I'm not mistaken, there was even a quote from And Then There Were None although I'm too lazy to verify.) On a private island off the coast of Dorset, a man invites some folks to his castle and, well... I hate to ruin anything. James had me guessing until the very end (I'm talking like, last 30 out of 416 pages).

The Skull Beneath the Skin was published in 1982 and I think also takes place in the early 80s - it was a bit difficult to tell and frankly might have mentioned the year somewhere and I didn't pick it up. It really could have taken place in just about any time period as the location and the characters avoid most modern conveniences. To me, that's a telling quality in a mystery novel, because it's very boring to read them and think the whole time, "If they only had a cell phone!"

The protagonist is Cordelia Grey, the owner of a detective agency that seems to specialize in finding lost pets. She's very thoughtful and thorough. The pet-thing is very funny. Apparently she's also in An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, for which I'll be on the look-out. Her hero, Adam Dalgliesh, makes not so much an appearance but a quick reference or two, which will cause heart of the PD James' fans to trill a bit.

James uses the phrase "poison pen" (must be an British saying?) to describe a nasty letter writer - Dorothy Sayers also centers her Gaudy Night around this conceit, so I couldn't help but think of that great mystery novel frequently (also English, also with a lady detective).

By the way, I generally try to find the cover matching the one I read for my blog, out of some sense of continuity, but I couldn't find my exact one - and I thought these were both quite amusing.

If you're looking for a great mystery, I really don't think you can go wrong with this one - it's an engaging read!

The Forgotten Waltz

2011-12-05T16:13:00.001-08:00

My review of The Forgotten Waltz on Newcity Lit!

I'm a big fan of Enright - here are my reviews of some of her other books:
What Are You Like?
The Wig My Father Wore
and
The Gathering (best place to start if you haven't read her before)

When She Woke

2011-12-04T20:31:00.001-08:00

My review of When She Woke on Newcity Lit.

Rin Tin Tin

2011-11-30T05:00:00.000-08:00

My review of Susan Orlean's Rin Tin Tin on Newcity. Goddamnit, can she write.

Literature Map?

2011-11-27T20:17:00.001-08:00

I found this website (via Flavorwire), called Literature Map in which you type in an author, then it shows you a bunch of other authors who people who like your author also like? Or something. I'm not really sure but it's mildly amusing. I typed in my all-time favorite, Margaret Atwood, naturally, and here's what I got:

Then I clicked on Zadie Smith and got this:

I'm not crazy about Wally Lamb but otherwise seems reasonable.

Twilight belt

2011-11-20T15:55:00.001-08:00

Found this awesome infograph on Goodreads re: who loves Twilight and who doesn't. Interesting, no? I'm in Illinois, which, as a light blue, I can only assume doesn't totally hate it. No surprise that it's read by 12x more women than men. I don't really understand why Utah is singled out - 6th most readers? Who cares?

via

Oh, the Humanities!

2011-11-13T19:34:00.001-08:00

Last weekend, my friend MZ and I went to a couple of events in the Chicago Humanities Festival - we saw Jonathan Franzen (and Isabel Wilkerson) and Joshua Foer.

Franzen and Wilkerson were winning some kind of award - there was a HUGE crowd with what I figure must have been Chicago's most ardent readers. Also some of Chicago's most ardent queue-ers. These lunatics were trying to make this crazy-long line, and then when they opened the door, it all went to shit, and lots of people got very, very upset. I never saw so many old people get so distressed about line management. You'd have thought we were in a war-time bread line.

I really thought seeing Franzen was going to be the highlight of the day, but I most enjoyed Joshua Foer's chat - that probably shouldn't come as a surprise - I was completely obsessed with his book, Moonwalking with Einstein, ever since I read it earlier this year for Newcity. He was very charming, smart and funny - it's such an interesting topic (memory)... As in the book, the real challenge is actually supporting why it's even worth trying to develop the memory when there are some many external memory storage areas available (ie, smart phones, computers, etc. Remember when you were a kid and you knew all your best friends' phone numbers? Now I barely know my own husband's because it's stored in my phone.) He took another crack at answering that and came up with a pretty good answer - he think that as external memory devises become more and more prevalent, we may discover the impact on creation - he thinks that memories are the "raw data" that lead to creativity and innovation. Makes sense.

I also enjoyed listening to Wilkerson - I was only vaguely aware of her book, The Warmth of Other Suns, about the great migration - but, I bought a copy and look forward to reading it.

the Kid

2011-10-20T05:53:00.000-07:00

My review of Sapphire's new book, The Kid on Newcity Lit!

The Things We Cherished

2011-10-16T17:51:00.000-07:00

My review of “The Things We Cherished” by Pam Jenoff on Newcity Lit!

19th Wife

2011-10-09T10:53:00.000-07:00

My husband's been amusing himself with the repeated phrase, "One's enough!" while I've been reading The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff. Very funny. However, nineteen is an intolerable number of wives, and the repetition of this number throughout this novel about polygamy is a continual reminder of an incomprehensible number of marriages.

Ebershoff tells parallel stories of two women who were (approximately) the 19th wives. One is based on the real-life figure of Ann Eliza Young, who was married to early Later Day Saints prophet Brigham Young; the other is (the fictitious) BeckyLyn, jailed and accused of murdering her polygamous husband in rural, present-day Utah.

Ann Eliza

The Ann Eliza narrative provides an eye-opening history of the formation of what is now the Mormon religion, and, not inconsequentially, the expansion of America into the west. Ann Eliza was married, against her will, to Young (age 67), and then, as one might imagine, largely neglected and abandoned, being, more likely, the the 26th or possibly 52nd of 55ish wives. After a court battle to divorce Young, she wrote a book (also called the 19th Wife) and had a popular lecturing tour to talk about life in her former community.

Although the Ann Eliza chapters are historically interesting, they're also a little boring, and I ended up skimming a lot of the ho-hum bits re: tilling the unforgiving soil of Utah etc. of which I could not give two shits.

The modern tale is more interesting, told from the perspective of Jordan, a young man who was excommunicated, or forcibly expelled from his LDS household, as boys often are (to eliminate possible rivals from the marriage pool.) After years of struggle, Jordan has managed to get his footing, but gets pulled back into his former life when his mother is accused of murdering his father, and he begins investigating to find out what really happened. Jordan is a charming, loveable character with enough distance to guide the reader through what may be a first-time view into this very particular slice of Americana.


Brigham Young

The book is frequently cited as raising many "questions" about faith and religious practice. At least for me, as I have fairly established views on polygamy, Ebershoff's book did not cause me to raise any questions but rather helped solidify my opinions about polygamy, at least as practiced for religious purposes.

Ebershoff does some interesting things with switching narratives and including bits as if from Wikipedia, 19th c. newpapers, interviews, letters, a BYU thesis, ect. Typeface and even the odd illustration made the reading experience a bit richer. Personally I thought the book sort of walked a tight balance between the sort of salacious schlocky-ness of best-sellers to more thoughtful literature, but, at the end of the day, the truth is that I found it pretty hard to put down, and, aside from the skimming I might have done, an engrossing story.

A favorite part:

I can't tell you what Kelly was thinking, but I was thinking, Look at this girl. LDS through and through. BYU rah rah rah. Rise, all loyal Cougars and hur your challenge to the foe. No coffee, no tea, no Diet Coke, never a drink or a smoke or a hit, temple garments as white as Wasatch snow, Relief Society chick, missionary missy [...] Here she was, Kelly Dee, of hearty Pioneer stock, always well loved, always loving, three years from marriage, four from motherhood, Sister Kelly, who probably plans for week in advance when it's her turn to stand up in church and bear witness, Sister Kelly, Who probably keeps a to-do list clipped to her fridge, who probably spends Sunday nights shampooing those waves of blond hair, so clean, so hardworking, a human honeybee, she of the Chosen people, of the desert kingdom, of the Saints. Yes, here she was, sitting in a crappy office chair helping kids like me. And not just helping, because there are people who are like, Oh, you poor thing, and cluck their tongues, and maybe give you a dollar, but they don't understand and don't want to understand. And then there are people who are like, Oh, you poor thing, now come and meet my God, He is the only way. But not Kelly - she wasn't just helping, assisting, offering a hand. No, she was researching, reading, learning, talking, understanding. Working hard to understand, wanting to understand, telling herself that's the most important thing she can do.

Bookin'

2011-09-13T20:13:00.000-07:00

When M & I go on vacation, we really like going to bookstores. On our recent trip to the Northwest, we must have gone to at LEAST 10 bookstores, and I got a nice little pile of books. Lately I've been thinking about writing when and where I get my books, because I usually find them at interesting places, not just Amazon or the local big box store.

Our favorite bookstore in Seattle was probably the Elliott Bay Book Co, which is a gorgeous bookstore with a fabulous cafe and really nice places to sit and read and nice folks that bring in their dogs and let you pet them. This bookstore was really elegantly organized and I really liked how they arranged their recommended books. We also went to a small bookstore in Pike's Place that had mostly used mysteries and sci-fi and this totally bizarre owner who sang opera at us and, yes... scared us a little. He was partly mad-bookstore-genius and partly just wacky. Anyway, I do like a good mystery and found a PD James and he recommended this Donna Leon person, who I've never read before. God help me if I don't mind reading Patricia Cornwell every now and then...

Octavia Butler I haven't read before but she has some Seattle connection (maybe she's from there?) Anywho, I picked up Fledgling at another shop and look forward to reading that soon.

I think I got that What French Women Know at Elliott Bay. I'm hoping it's better than What French People Like and Why French Ladies Don't Get Fat or whatever it's called...

Zadie Smith I just love. I can't believe I haven't read that book of essays yet. I also got Blood Red Road out there but I finished it and gave it to my friend before we left. These all look like great books to read on vacation but unfortunately I didn't get to them all, only about half-way through the Cornwell and now I have other reading obligations that I must finish first. Ah, there's never enough time! Or, vacation time!

Famous authors on zip lines

2011-09-12T19:44:00.000-07:00

Ha! This is really funny. I Heart Conan O'Brien, but I do not Heart zip lines! I rode some once when I was on vacation in Costa Rica. It's really terrifying!

Sister

2011-09-05T16:30:00.000-07:00

I read a compelling review for Sister in the
NY Times book review section. It's written by British author Rosamund Lupton and was apparently quite popular in England last year.

It's a story of a woman who's sister is killed (not a spoiler, happens right away) so she goes to London to find out what happened. Told mostly in 2nd person, Sister is like a letter to the dead sister, a chronology of the events told by the living.

It's a good mystery novel and really wrapped me in - Lupton does some interesting things with the narrative and the POV and writes skillfully.

The Postmistress and The Report

2011-08-11T09:24:00.000-07:00

Moi's sister gave moi The Postmistress for moi's birthday. It is a lovely book about how to, basically, live your life when terrible things are happening in the world. Most of the characters in this book live in Cape Cod during WWII, and one character is an American journalist who works with Edward R. Murrow in London. To various extremes, the characters address this theme of what-to-do? Writer Sarah Blake's thesis is to be aware, which, generally, yes, is a good idea.

I found the actual postmistress, who is ostensibly the main character, at least judging by the title, an extremely strange protagonist, with whom I did not identify at all even though we are clearly meant to identify with her. Early on she discloses that there was a piece of mail which she did not deliver, a shocking revelation to people who believe in the US Postal Service but perhaps not to anyone who's ever dealt with the US Postal Service. She also has an oockie doctor's visit to prove she's a virgin and provide "proof" to her mister-friend, who will presumably be impressed by the information.

Descriptions of the London tube station shelters were of particular interest to me, mainly because I think that's ingenious and I also love LOVE LOVE Henry Miller's drawings of the same.

By coincidence, after I read The Postmistress I read a new book called The Report, a fiction book by Jessica Francis Kane based on the actual event of 173 dying in a London tube station during the blitz - not the result of bombing, but of a crush of human bodies. I only ended up reading about half of it because the middle part was a bit dull, with all the excitement of journalism performed 40 years after the event. And then, by another coincidence, I found a 2001 article in the New Yorker about this phenomenon of people getting crushed, which I never really could/can wrap my head around. I also find it difficult to finish this article because it's making me feel all claustrophobic.

Animal Dreams

2011-08-08T16:25:00.000-07:00

The title of Animal Dreams refers to (and I don't think I'm ruining it for you by telling) one character's theory that animals dreams are not that complicated - that they most likely dreams about what they do all day. One of the themes of this book is that humans are like animals, we're motivated by sex and basic needs and mostly sex. I don't agree with that, but Barbara Kingsolver makes a good case for it.

The baby signed and stirred in his crib. At seven months, he was just the size of a big jackrabbit - the same amount of meat. The back of my scalp and neck prickled. It's an involuntary muscle contraction that causes that, setting the hair follicles on edge; if we had manes they would bristle exactly like a growling dog's. We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts. There's no sense pretending. Tomorrow, I thought, or the next day, or the day after that, I would have sex with Loyd Peregrina.

In Animal Dreams, Codi returns to her hometown after a long absence to watch over her inattentive father. Kingsolver tells Codi's story really beautifully, letting details spill out over time, and even including an environmental twist without lecturing the reader (I thought this book had a lot in common with the great My Year of Meats and Annie Proulx's That Old Ace in the Hole). Codi starts dating her old high school boyfriend, an Apache, who takes her to see old ruins of American Indian sites - Kingsolver describes these marvelous places so vividly I wanted to take an immediate road trip to Arizona. (see: Kinishba!) I have a vague memory of reading something by Flannery O'Connor that made me feel the same way but I can't for the life of me remember the name.

While Animals Dreams is unbelievably beautifully written, it's depressing as hell. Among the hands-off parenting atrocities practiced by her widowed father was listening to his teen-aged daughter have a miscarriage in the bathroom and then bury the fetus in the yard without interfering. For example.

But then there's this:

I'd finished my shopping in a few minutes, and while I waited for Emelina to revision her troops for the week I stood looking helplessly at the cans of vegetables and soup that all carried some secret mission. The grocery shelves seemed to have been stocked for the people of Grace with the care of a family fallout shelter. I was an outsider to this nurturing. When the cashier asked, "Do you need anything else?" I almost cried. I wanted to say, "I need everything you have."

Stuff Parisians Like

2011-08-02T17:25:00.000-07:00

Stuff White People Like started as a blog and then quickly made a book deal. Then, white people like me became less enamored with it when people started pointing out that it's kinda racist. (What, people of color don't like recycling?)

Stuff Parisians Like is obviously capitalizing on the 'Stuff fame and also started as a blog. Parisians, as you might imagine, are described as dull moderates that "like" feeling a sense of superiority in all things. I love cultural insider-info - so bits about how the last two digits on the license plate indicate the owner's home town (Paris is 75), that a three-day-"scruff" of unshaved beard is considered the height of sexiness, and that San Pelegrino is ordered as "San Pé" are the details I love.

But, like Stuff White People Like, it's problematic. Stuff Parisians Like is riddled with a rather off-putting masculinity that ridicules relationships, "Testosterone-Deprived Males", and claims all Parisian women are uptight prudes. The author writes, "...Parisian men get sick of begging their women for oral gratification" and "foreign girls are different. They can dance. They drink. They have fun." Ick.

The biggest offense Olivier Magney gave was not claiming that Parisians no longer drink enough wine (surprise: he's a sommelier) but that he used the word "retarded" to indicate that something was uncool.

Grow up, putain.

March by G. Brooks

2011-07-26T19:31:00.000-07:00

I have a long history with March, but just read it myself a few weeks ago. After it came out I read some reviews and knew my sister would love it, so I gave it to her and she did, but I wasn't too jazzed to read it myself. Then I saw a free copy over at the community center and thought that was a sign. I love found books. Also, it DID win the Pulitzer in 2006.

It's told (mostly) from the POV of Mr. March, the father of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. If you don't recall, in Little Women, the young women and their mother are alone while their dear father is serving as a chaplain during the American Civil War. It is a fine book that I loved very much as a child and have not read since then, but now I recall it being sort of treacly.

March is really quite brilliant because what Brooks does is sort of merge the character of Mr. March and Louisa May Alcott's father, Amos Bronson Alcott (surely something LM Alcott did herself, at least to some extent). Amos was a rather fascinating person - a Transcendentalist who was pals with Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, a vegan, a starter of vegan communes, an abolitionist and an educator. Mr. March is all of these things as well. He's a kind and thoughtful man who quickly decides that he must spin the truth to his Penelopean wife and daughters, shielding them from the horrors he sees (and sometimes commits) and instead painting a picture of bon amie with his comrades at arms.

Something Brooks is extremely skillful at is weaving back and forth in time - she easily moves between Mr. March's experiences in the war to his interpretations to his family, to the time before the war as he traveled through the south to a later time, but still before the war when he met his wife and back and forth again. To change the timeframe so much without loosing or annoying the reader is pretty remarkable.

Just about when I was starting to question this white, male authority figure of Mr. March, Brooks swiftly (I don't think I ruin it for you by telling you) turns the book on it's end and switches the POV to Mrs. March, who is also hiding her true emotions. She is full of anger and resentment with her husband for the rather selfish act of volunteering for the war and leaving her with the hardships of raising her daughters in near poverty. He describes, for example, his wife's announcement of joining the troops with tearful adulation. She says:

He looked me full in the face, he saw my tears, and he ignored them and did as he pleased. And then I in my turn had to pretend to be pleased by my hero of a husband. When he stepped down, and came to me, I could not speak. I took his hand and dug my nails into the flesh of it, wanting to hurt him for the hurt he was inflicting on me.

I am not alone in this. I only let him do to me what men have ever done to women: march off to empty glory and hollow acclaim and leave us behind to pick up the pieces. The broken cities, the burned barns, the innocent injured beasts, the ruined bodies of the boys we bore and the men we lay with.

Brooks also allows another woman, a slave, autonomy as well (in this case I will not ruin it for you!) In the end she turns the telling of the civil war, often a story about the brave, anti-slavery, white men from the north and retells it from the perspective of women and people of color. This isn't too different, in fact, from what LM Alcott does - her's is not a story of men and wars, but capable women in a society nearly lacking men. Brooks shows such a generosity to LM Alcott's story, by framing the events of Little Women as merely the outward performance of a loving, perfect, happy family (know any of those?), while what is really felt remains unsaid. What she ultimately does is make Little Women a richer story as well. Not an easy feat for any beloved treasure.

And now I think it's my duty to set this one free again to find the lucky arms of someone else.

Foe, by Coetzee

2011-07-25T16:10:00.000-07:00

I read this great article on my new favorite website, Flavorwire, called "11 Great Literary Spinoffs" - you know, like Wide Sargasso Sea (a "spinoff" of Jane Eyre). Anyway, it mentioned Foe, which I had never heard of, by J.M. Coetzee - inspired by 1719's Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe - which I have no intention of reading. It was an intriguing enough post that I picked it up from the library right away.

Reading Foe might have been a slightly richer experience if I had read Robinson Crusoe, but, for me the wikipedia article seemed to suffice. What Coetzee does is write the book from the perspective of the female castaway in the story, Susan, as well as Crusoe's black companion, Friday. Told from this perspective, Coetzee reframes the story (generally acknowledged as a [white] man's triumphal conquering of strange lands and people's unknown) and exposes the colonialism of the story. When the castaways are rescued, Susan takes responsibility for the mute Friday and further questions the relationship between Friday and Crusoe.

To raise money, Susan tries to sell her story and confronts the inherent challenges of telling any history:

I am not a story, Mr. Foe. I may impress you as a story because I began my account of myself without preamble, slipping overboard into the water and striking out for the shore. But my life did not begin in the waves. There was a life before the water which stretched back to my desolate searchings in Brazil, then to the years when my daughter was still with me, and so on back to the day I was born. All of which makes up a story I do not choose to tell. I choose not to tell it because to no one, not even to you, do I owe proof that I am a substantial being with a substantial history in the world. ...I am a free woman who asserts her freedom by telling her story according to her own desire.

Coetzee's writing style reminded me a lot of Jeanette Winterson, who, in my small experience with her work tells a great story but also slips in a hefty dose of theory. I thought it was a really cleverly told story and I appreciated the thoughtful questioning about what it really means to attempt to tell or re-tell a story.

Luxe

2011-07-09T08:43:00.000-07:00

In Luxe, 19th century teenagers dress up and pout, try to get laid while maintaining an air of respectability. It's a YA book by Anna Godbersen (Nom de plume? I'm too lazy to find out...) billed as a 19th century Gossip Girl. I read Gossip Girl, or tried to. It is essentially unreadable. At first I thought Luxe was merely painfully readable, but I'm now ready to downgrade that to unfinishable.

I do have to give Godbersen (if that is her real name) props (or snaps) for utilizing a rich vocabulary - I wouldn't be surprised if the average teenager reader had to make frequent trips to the dictionary. It's the plot that killing me, and my own lack of interest in vapidness. But, to each his own!

I grew up on the Sweet Valley High series and find it interesting how influential those books continue to be. If the authors of these new "bad girl" books were not directly influenced by Francine Pascal, her work has just sunk that deep into today's consciousness. For example:

Now, observing her family's ballroom from the mezzanine, her torso cinched beneath her flamenco dancer's red flounces to a perfect eighteen inches, she felt supremely confident that he would come. It was the evening of the Richmond Hayeses' ball, the evening when they reached their apotheosis as a top-drawer family - there was simply no place else to be. She was certain he would arrive shortly. Well, almost certain.

This is a spoiler, probably. I'm not going to finish it but it's pretty obvious that the "good" sister, Elizabeth (He-Llo?!?) is going to fake her own death and move to California with her coachman boyfriend, thus allowing her younger, more daring sister Jessica, I mean, Diana, to marry her wealthy, roguish fiance and save the family from financial ruin because those two are in love anyway.

If I am incorrect, please let me know! Anyone ready any great YA books lately? I would love to know!

When God Was a Rabbit

2011-07-04T20:16:00.000-07:00

My review of When God Was a Rabbit, by Sarah Winman on NewCity Lit.

Divergent

2011-06-28T19:33:00.000-07:00

I read this great book called Divergent by Veronica Roth. Roth is a recent college graduate, which is infuriating, if you're like me and get infuriated by the success of youth. (grrr! Why aren't I successful? Plus, even if I do get successful, I won't be youthful anymore!)

Anyway, I won't say much because I don't want to spoil it, but it takes place in the futuristic burnt-out Chicago, where the Lake is actually a Marsh, and society is split into different factions. When you're 16, you choose your faction, and that's your faction For Life. And, if you get expelled from your faction or whatever you're "factionless" and that's like Worse Than DEATH. Because you have to clean up garbage and stuff.

The main character is born into Abnegation, which is a selfless faction that tries to be really empathetic and helpful, but she decides to go into this other faction called Dauntless, which is all about bravery and strength. If they ever go somewhere, they run. If they get on a train, they only jump on or off (I never quite figured out what they would do if the train happened to be stopped when they arrived, but, they'd probably just hang back and then jump on when it started moving.)

It's quite similar to the Hunger Games because once you choose a faction, you have to go through an initiation to prove yourself and, if you don't make it... FACTIONLESS. (Plus a strong female character, feats of strength, love interest in unlikely character...)

I think Chicagoans are going to straight up LOVE it - I really enjoyed the parts that had to do with The City. And, fans of the Hunger Games are likely to be on board too. The only bummer is, I discovered HG right at the end, when all the books were already published, but the next two in this 3 part series haven't been published yet. *frowny face*

Maybe Dauntless was formed with good intentions, with the right ideals and the right goals. But it has strayed far from them. And the same is true of Erudite, I realize. A long time ago, Erudite pursued knowledge and ingenuity for the sake of doing good. Now they pursue knowledge and ingenuity with greedy hearts. I wonder if the other factions suffer from the same problem. I have not thought about it before.

Despite the depravity I see in Dauntless, though, I could not leave it. It isn't only because the thought of living factionless, in complete isolation, sounds like a fate worse than death. It is because, in the brief moments that I have loved it here, I saw a faction worth saving. Maybe we can become brave and honorable again.

The Mutation of Fortune

2011-06-12T20:23:00.000-07:00

My review of The Mutation of Fortune by Erica Adams - up at Newcity Lit!

Learning to Read

2011-06-08T06:12:00.000-07:00

I loved this article in the New Yorker by Salvatore Scibona, How I Learned to Read. He writes about how he went to a unique college in New Mexico, St. John’s College where they focus on the classics. (Anybody heard of this place?)

Got me thinking about where I learned to read... I read a lot when I was a kid and just about anything I could get my hands on. I wasn't really a critical reader 'til about grad school, though (hence my love of Ayn Rand in high school*).

From How I Learned to Read:

By senior year at St. John’s, we were reading Einstein in math, Darwin in lab, Baudelaire in French tutorial, Hegel in seminar. Seminar met twice a week for four years: eight o’clock to ten at night or later, all students addressed by surname. On weekends, I hung out with my friends. The surprise, the wild luck: I had friends. One sat in my room with a beer and “The Phenomenology of Spirit,” reading out a sentence at a time and stopping to ask, “All right, what did that mean?” The gravity of the whole thing would have been laughable if it hadn’t been so much fun, and if it hadn’t been such a gift to find my tribe.

In retrospect, I was a sad little boy and a standard-issue, shiftless, egotistical, dejected teen-ager. Everything was going to hell, and then these strangers let me come to their school and showed me how to read. All things considered, every year since has been a more intense and enigmatic joy.

Lovely.

*BOOM!

Emerald City, Jennifer Egan

2011-06-04T15:58:00.000-07:00

I am, of course, I big Jennifer Egan fan and loved her collection of stories in Emerald City. All of the stories were terrific but there were definitely a few that stood out. This collection seemed to have a focus on far-flung travel, which was kind of interesting. The first story, Why China?, is about a family on vacation in China who run into a man the dad knew and distrusted in America. I also really loved a story called They Stylist, about a group of people shooting a young model (from Rockford, IL - shades of Look at Me) in some beach location.

Egan's made a bit of a kerfuffle recently, not just for winning the Pulitzer but making some perhaps ill-thought-out remarks about fellow writers, for which she has apologized. I find it interesting that there a quite a few celebrity apologizes floating around right now - like Lars von Trier and his ridiculous Nazi comments at Cannes. Seems like a lot of people are all, Let's forgive Lars von Trier already, but I rather respect France's (collective?) decision to say, Lars von Trier, you're out of our lives. Jennifer Egan, on the other hand, is very forgivable.

Flavorwire, my new favorite website, claims Egan and Jennifer Weiner had a "feud" - I wouldn't go that far, but Weiner did groan (appropriately) at Egan's comments. The same story recalled a(n actual) feud between Colson Whitehead and Richard Ford. Apparently Whitehead said amusing things about Ford and Ford actually SPIT on him at some event. Now I'm really paranoid when I write a critical review for my new gig at Newcity that someone's going to spit on me.

That wouldn't happen, right?

The Hunting of the Snark

2011-05-31T18:08:00.001-07:00

My review is on Newcity Lit! It's my first (and last?) review in rhyme!

Girl with Curious Hair

2011-05-25T16:57:00.000-07:00

It is time to admit some things. 1. I do not like David Foster Wallace's writing, I just don't. (There, I said it.) 2. I don't like reading about animal abuse. Which is why I stopped reading Girl with Curious Hair abruptly around page 60.

All this D.F.W. talk, re: the posthumous Pale King etc. made me think I should give his work another try, and I read an interesting review of Girl with Curious Hair (1989).

I've been having a hard time finding something great to read - if you can suggest something...?

Rereading Women, by Sandra Gilbert

2011-05-18T04:22:00.000-07:00

My review of Rereading Women, by Sandra Gilbert on Newcity!

The Uncoupling

2011-05-17T05:38:00.000-07:00

My review of The Uncoupling is up on Newcity Lit!

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

2011-05-15T06:01:00.000-07:00

Ugh, I wrote this review and then it got lost in some Blogger shenanigans and I don't feel like re-writing it. Anyway, I really liked it. Next up: Sexing the Cherry!

Ewwww

2011-05-15T01:18:00.000-07:00

Apparently not too long ago it was not considered ookee to send a lock of your hair to a lover or acquaintance. The New York Public Library has quite a collection of authors' hair! This, it will not surprise you to hear, is Walt Whitman's!

via Flavorwire

This Is A Book, Demitri Martin

2011-05-10T17:59:00.002-07:00

My review of This Is A Book is up on Newcity!

Plastic

2011-04-19T17:09:00.000-07:00

My review of Plastic: A Toxic Love Story, is on Newcity Lit!

Started Early, Took My Dog

2011-04-17T10:06:00.000-07:00

I've read everything Kate Atkinson's written ever since I fell in love with Behind the Scenes at the Museum about 10 years ago. With the exception of one book, everything is terrific.

Her last three books are serials, based around a private detective named Jackson Brodie. They all have a ridiculous number of characters and, if you're like me, you might find them hard to keep straight, although I have resisted, so far, creating complex trees and graphs on the back page, like I do with Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Salmon Rushdie.

What's really interesting about these three books is that they read sort of like (if you'll pardon my innate snobbery) middle-brow action novels along the lines of say, Clancey or Cornwell. Her earlier work, if you ask me, is much more academically literary. However, even though in terms of tone and pacing they have this more "pedestrian" (not that there's anything wrong with that) impression; thematically they are extremely sophisticated. I suspect that this is purposeful, and she's making a very specific choice to write in this way.

Atkinson leans heavily on her literary sources, this book has frequent references to Emily Dickenson and a traditional British poem that begins "For want of a nail the shoe was lost..." as well as the Latin phrase Et In Arcadia Ego (made popular in a 17th century painting by Nicolas Poussin). These themes (of death, the influence of the minuscule) repeat across the large cast of characters and what draws them together is not only their coincidental experiences but their sort of ... paradigmatic realities.

Atkinson refers again and again to violence toward women and allows this popular novel (heavily contrasted to Steig Larsson, who gets unjustly credited with exposing violence toward women in his work, if you ask me) to illustrate the extreme and subtle ways in which women face violence every day. For example, one character is a policewoman whose male colleagues over and over again refer to prostitutes as "working girls". Each time, she mutters how she is also a "working woman" -- a statement so lost on her coworkers they never respond to her.

Many characters are responding to current events out of regret for how they handled a similar event in their pasts. An elderly actress suffering from early dementia relives almost simultaneously an affair and pregnancy from her youth. Her chapters are poetic:

She had that funny feeling of darkness again, of the curtain of Northern Lights before her eyes. She was on a ship plowing through the dark waters. All about her was desperation. The spars breaking, the mainmast cracking, the sails hanging in rags. The figure-head of the ship was a naked baby howling in the wind. There were babies everywhere, hanging on to the rigging for dear life, clinging to the sides of the ship as it began to sink into the icy, oily sea. Tilly must save them, she must save them all, but she can't, she is going down with the ship. Mercy on us! We split, we split!

That last bit coming from The Tempest, naturally. You see what I mean?

Read an excerpt.

The Paperbark Shoe

2011-03-30T05:02:00.000-07:00

My review of The Paperbark Shoe is on Newcity. It's a gorgeous book!

Moonwalking with Einstein

2011-03-27T19:59:00.000-07:00

My review of Moonwalking with Einstein is up at New City!

It's a great book, I really recommend it. I became absolutely obsessed with this book - and, it does have some great tips for memorizing. I can memorize long lists of words now using the technique in the book.

Strong Poison

2011-03-01T19:24:00.001-08:00

I found Strong Poison in this fabulous bookstore in Milwaukee a few weeks ago - I'd probably put that bookstore on my list of top five bookstores, which, off the top of my head are:

1. The Strand, NYC
2. Powells, Portland Oregon
3. Women and Children First, Chicago
4. I can't remember the name, Mendocino, CA
5. City Lights, San Francisco

OK, well, it's definitely in my top ten.

I've been meaning to mark the provenance of all my books, but I always forget. But, I digress... Strong Poison is by Dorothy Sayers, and, by all rights, I should have read it before Gaudy Night (and so should you!)

In it, we're immediately thrown into the trail of one Harriet Vane, a mystery writer herself, who's been accused of murdering her ex. Our hero, Peter Whimsey, watching the trial, decides that Harriet is NOT guilty and also that he would like to marry her.

Despite the sexist overtones of er, our hero, Sayers's book has charming early feminist tones as well - she addresses sexism in the workplace, domestic service and the difficulty of detecting whilst female. A woman finds herself at a loss when, hot on the trail, she doesn't have a conceivable excuse, as a woman, to linger on the street, aside from gazing longingly in shop windows for a certain amount of time. She imagines all the ways a man or a boy could lurk indefinitely.

Vane and her ex-beau (fictional) were part of the (actual) Bloomsbury crowd. The Bloomsburies are a fascinating group of artists who, in this book come off as slightly wacky almost-hippies. In a way, I suppose they were - they were experimenting not just with different ways of creating art, but non-normative social structures and ways of living. These interactions with the aristocratic but easy-going Whimsey are awfully funny.

There's also a hilarious bit having to do with "Spiritualism" - another popular idea of the time, that you could communicate easily with departed souls and whatnot.

Sayers is a very witty writer and her language is just a pleasure to read - Strong Poison is a great example of her work, although, I do have one small complaint, and I'm about to drop a major spoiler, so stop reading if you intend to read it unless you have a really bad memory like I do. OK, seriously. Look away! I'm going to start a new paragraph and then I'm going to drop the spoiler.

...

...

Alright, you're with me? So, what happens is, her ex is poisoned, right? And, it turns out, his last meal was eaten entirely with someone else, and then he had tea with Harriet. But, the someone else didn't get sick, and, it turns out, that person had built up a fuckin' immunity to the poison. Come on! That's annoying. You could never figure that out. So, that was really lame, but, otherwise I couldn't put the book down, it was really great.

When the Killing's Done

2011-02-25T06:04:00.000-08:00

Oh boy, my review of When the Killing's Done is up on Newcity Lit. And both my reviews are in the print copy if you happen to see it on the street in Chicago!

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

2011-02-23T19:48:00.001-08:00

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is Aimee Bender's latest. It's really typical of her work - beautifully written, full of pathos, very girly (did you write this book just for me, A.B.?) and has an element of magic.

Magic isn't the right word but there's something about her work that's fantastical. It might even be unique. (Gasp!) Like, in Willful Creatures, she tells a story about a woman who has these little potato children, and it's not like it's a metaphor or anything, she just has. potatoes. for. children.

In this book, the young protagonist, Rose, can taste people's emotions in the food they prepare. Mainly she's eating food prepared by her mother (interestingly, she never eats food prepared by her father), whose sadness and other emotions nearly destroy her. She tastes rage, tiredness, guilt, etc., but not just from the cook, but from the farmer or the ground itself. She eventually can tell what state or which factory her food was processed in. She takes to pushing her food around and eating junk food. One of the perks (?) of the state of the food industry is that Rose can rather easily find food that no human has created - that machines mix, process, assemble and package. She saves her money for machine-made food like other children save money for toys.

The bread distributor, the bread factory, the wheat, the farmer. The butter, which had a dreary tang to it. When I checked the package, I read that it came from a big farm in Wisconsin. The cream held a thinness, a kind of metallic bumper aftertaste. The milk - weary. All of those parts distant, crowded, like the far-off sound of an airplane, or a car parking, all hovering in the background, foregrounded by the state of the maker of the food.

This book was almost painful to read because I, like just about every American woman, have my particular food issues (x 1000) and reading about this much emotionality wrapped up around food was a bit overwhelming.

Bender's book isn't a one-trick pony, however nifty that trick might be. The story about Rose's family would have been pretty interesting without her interpretive powers. The first (and only) taste of a sandwich made by her brother reveals a horrifying emptiness, the autistic-like sibling is a mystery. (Here's a hint: Quantum Physics are involved!)

Here's one of my favorite lines:

Several of the girls at the party had had sex, something which sounded appealing but only if it could happen with blindfolds in a time warp plus amnesia.

Brilliant! Just like the rest of the book!

A Visit from the Goon Squad

2011-02-22T15:29:00.000-08:00

I'm a big fan of Jennifer Egan and have read all of her novels. Look at Me is absolutely brilliant, The Keep is great, and The Invisible Circus... isn't bad either!

Welcome to the Good Squad is her latest, and it's at least as good as my favorite (Look at Me). The main thing I love about Egan is she's soooo theoretical. When I was studying Art History, Look at Me really hit the spot because it's about visual images and definitions. At this point in my life, it turns out, I'm vaguely into quantum physics (in a theoretical, non-mathematical kind of way...) and, you won't believe what theme slips in to A Visit... Ok, I'll tell you: Quantum physics!

I'm working on a theory that we're in a period of Quantum Mechanical Angst right now, like, as a society, so it's no small surprise (according to my working theory) that this idea is popping up lately in art, literature, and theater.*

Egan's quanta explorations have mainly to do with Time. A number of characters slip forward and backward in time as she chooses parts of their stories that create who they are. At one point, one of the characters comes out and nearly quotes this book on quantum physics that I read recently:

Here was the bottom line: if we human beings are information processing machines, reading X's and O's and translating that information into what people oh so breathlessly call "experience," and if I had access to that same information via cable TV and any number of magazines that I browsed through at Hudson news for four- and five-hour stretches on my free days (my record was eight hours, including the half hour I spent manning the register during the lunch break of one of the younger employees, who thought I worked there) -- If I had not only the information but the artistry to shape that information using the computer inside my brain (real computers scared me; if you can find Them, then They can find you, and I didn't want to be found), then, technically speaking, was I not having all the same experiences those other people were having?

Egan employees various story-telling techniques, like a chapter in the form of an article written by a slightly disturbed hipster about a movie star and (guess what?) Quantum Mechanics! Another chapter is famously in the form of a power point presentation - it's surprisingly moving. Like so many authors today, Egan includes some txting language. I think it's interesting how so many artists today are starting to explore this evolution (for better or worse) in language.

Another theme she tackles is music today - its inspiration, creation and distribution. One of the characters, a producer, laments how so much music today is so cleaned up you can't hear its soul any more. I whole-heartedly agree. Egan's fittingly created a playlist on 8Track that's meant to accompany the novel.

Welcome to the Goon Squad incorporates some short stories from over the years - I remember one very clearly from the New Yorker about a publicist who goes to a unnamed country to improve the image of an unnamed dictator. I just stumbled upon another one if you're interested...

There's truly so much to process that I would like to read it again soon. I hope you'll become a Jennifer Egan fan if you're not one already - she's such a terrific writer and she requires an engaged reader.

* And math, for all I know.

Quantum Physics for Poets

2011-02-21T14:57:00.000-08:00

My review of Quantum Physics for Poets is up at Newcity Lit!

I was inspired...

2011-02-06T17:37:00.000-08:00

I was inspired to DRAW (which I'm not very good at, as you can see!) by Super Sad True Love Story. One of the characters was described as wearing a green jumpsuit that read SUK DIK on the front. He's playing with his äppärät.

XVI - my review!

2011-02-02T04:12:00.000-08:00

My review of XVI, a YA novel by Julia Karr, is over on Newcity Lit. They have TONS of book reviews - check it out!

Super Sad True Love Story

2011-01-31T19:30:00.000-08:00

We read Super Sad True Love Story, by Gary Shteyngart, for book club. I really enjoyed it and encourage everyone to read it - it was really hilarious and such a novel of our times (even though it's futuristic!)

It's written fromt he perspective of Lenny Abramov's diary and the electronic correspondence of Eunice Park. They live in the (not-so-distant) future, when everyone wears an äppärät (a device worn around the neck that makes an iphones look like an Apple II) which most people live their lives through - shopping, communicating, and assessing the vital stats - credit and "fuckability" - of everyone else.

Lenny works for Post-Human services, which helps HNWI (high net worth individuals) extend their lives indefinitely. Terrified of death, he's drawn to the young, lithe, Eunice and practically worships her into being his girlfriend. I was a bit leary that this was going to be one of those old-man-resurrected-by-youthful-tail tales, almost always completely unbelievable and largely if not exclusively written by aging old men, but Eunice is such an unlikable character she hardly resurrects anyone.

Shteyngart's novel is less sci-fi and more of a dead-on satire of today's culture. Consumerism, corporations infecting politics, hyper-sexualized people (he writes about "Juicy-Pussy for Men" and Onionskin pants - clear pants!), youth obsession - all are examined to hilarious (and terrifying!) extremes:

At least your Lenny lvoes you so much he'll never ever cheat on you. I can't understand why you're feeling so insecure about him. So he's brain-smart. Who cares??? It's not like he's some superstar Media guy or VP and LandOLakes. So he REALLY, REALLY READS instead of scans. Big whoop. Maybe you guys can read to each other in bed or something. And then you can sew your own clothes. HA HA HA. Anyway, looking good is the new smart, and I don't think you should have kids with him because you'll have really ugly children.

This book reminded a lot of us in book club of Feed - in which "book smart" intelligence is not only undervalued but ridiculed. What's coming across is a real sense of anxiety from some writers about the future of, I think, not just reading (physical) books, but reading at all.

I loved the juxtiposition of Lenny's style with Eunice's, and their telling of the same events. Shteyngart's structure and plotting were really clever and I admired it so much. There's actually so much to discuss I can't really fit it into a blog post and I don't want to give away to much of the story except to say: You must read this!

One Amazing Thing

2011-01-29T07:44:00.000-08:00

I've been a fan on Chitra Divakaruni for quite awhile. She often writes about Indian diaspora and sets most of her stories in San Francisco (where I used to live). I had the pleasure of seeing her read in San Francisco once and it really stuck with me - sometimes when I read her books, it's like she's reading to me. (It's not as creepy as it sounds...)

While One Amazing Thing ostensibly doesn't take place in SF (apparently Divakaruni now lives in Houston, of all places), to me it did - the fact that it's about a group of people stuck in an Indian consulate after a massive earthquake cements it for me.

What I really like about this quick read is that Divakaruni creates nine distinct characters, each of whom tell a story - one amazing thing - about their lives to their fellow captives to pass the time, and distract focus from their own terror, while they're trapped in an increasingly dangerous place. With that type of story, I think a lot of characters have a tendency to merge together and I have a hard time keeping them straight, but I never had that problem with this book.

It reminded me quite a bit of Douglas Coupland's Generation A, which I read last year. Both books are about how the stories of our lives, when shared, lead to a greater sense of community and understanding. This is a common theme in Divakaruni's books, in which characters from a wide variety of cultural and social backgrounds are forced to interact.

Here's one of my favorite parts:

"When had it happened? Looking back, I could not point to one special time and say, There! That's what is amazing. We can change completely and not recognize it. We think terrible events have made us into stone. But love slips in like a chisel - and suddenly it is an ax, breaking us into pieces from the inside."

Beautiful!

Tiger Mother

2011-01-19T20:06:00.000-08:00

I haven't read this book, Tiger Mother, but it came on my radar when I was visiting my friend and her new baby. It's a book that's supposedly about Chinese parenting - or at least one Chinese-American's interpretation. The mother tells her children they're a big disappointment and not living up to her expectations of them. Huh, sounds a lot like Midwestern parenting!*

We practiced by telling the charming newborn what a failure and a disappointment she was and then laughing raucously (well, mostly just me and the dad, my friend could not even utter the words).

Judith Warner's review in NYT Magazine is worth reading, if only for the hilarious beginning paragraphs (even my baby wearing, co-sleeping friend agreed!):

There was bound to be some push back. All the years of nurturance overload simply got to be too much. The breast-feeding through toddlerhood, nonstop baby wearing, co-sleeping, “Baby Mozart” co-watching; the peer pressure for never-ending singsong-voiced Mommy niceness, the ever-maddening chant of “good job!”; compulsory school “involvement” (that is, teacher-delegated busywork packaged as a way to Show Your Child You Care), the rapt attendance at each and every school performance, presentation, sporting event — the whole mishmash of modern, attuned, connected, concerned, self-esteem-building parenting.

The reaction came in waves. There were expert warnings, with moralists claiming that all this loosey-goosey lovey-dovey-ness was destroying the hierarchical fiber of the American family, and psychologists writing that all that self-esteem building was leading to epidemic levels of pathological ninnyishness in kids. Then there was a sort of quasi-hedonist revolt, cries of rebellion like Christie Mellor’s “Three Martini Playdate,” mother-toddler happy hours (postpregnancy liberation from “What to Expect” sanctimony!) and take-the-kid-out-all-night hipster parenting. Then came “free range” parenting, an appellation with the added advantage of sounding both fresh and fancy, like a Whole Foods chicken; “simplicity parenting” (recession-era lack of cash dressed up as principled rejection of expensive lessons); and, eventually, a kind of edgy irritation with it all: a new stance of get-tough no-nonsense, frequently called — with no small amount of pride — being a “bad” mother.

read the article

*I kid, I kid. Sort of.

Freedom

2011-01-08T04:44:00.000-08:00

I spent most of 2010 hearing about how great Jonathan Franzen's Freedom was, while stubbornly refusing to purchase the hardcover. Then I finally did buy it out of desperation for something excellent to read over the Christmas holiday and it turns out I didn't find it that excellent.

It's a book about this midwestern family that has its fair share of problems and it follows them through their various foibles and silliness. It tackles a couple of pretty big themes like freedom and consumerism and conservation, but in the end, I never felt any connection to this family after spending 550 pages with them. I think that's because the entire book is written in the 3rd person and with a very dry and witty narration that makes the whole cast of characters look like a bunch of jackholes. It never moved me or touched me.

The third person really turned me off, particularly when the book was actually from the perspective of one of the characters who writes about herself in the third person. Ugh. I mean, honestly. This character, the mother (and I don't think I'm ruining it for you) writes about how she was raped as a teenager and that part read particularly untrue to me. Taking into account, naturally, that everyone's experiences are different and that a rape victim's reaction, whatever it might be, is not for anyone else to judge, not to mention that it's a work of fiction, but I just found it so untrue and it influenced the remainder of the book for me.

The indignity was that Ethan had considered her such a nothing that he could just rape her and then take her home. And she was not such a nothing. She was, among other things, already, as a junior, the all-time single-season record holder for assists at Horace Greeley High School. A record she would again demolish the following year! She was also first-team All State in a state that included Brooklyn and the Bronx. And yet a golfing boy she hardly even knew had thought it was OK to rape her.

I'm a big fan of The Corrections and would like to read it again. I find it curious that Franzen writes another book about a midwestern family that's sort of fucked up, in which the son goes to far-flung places for dubious business dealings, and everyone has sort of inappropriate sexual adventures. Meanwhile, Franzen gets credited with writing about EVERY family and continues to get such praise as the "masterpiece of American fiction", which I'm not sure it deserves. It's just such a classic that the man gets credited with capturing the human condition while a similar book, written by a woman, would be tucked in the "chick-lit" section. (Or, well ok, maybe it might win the Pulitzer.) There's a great article/story on NPR about feminist reaction to the praise that Franzen receives - check it out.

Freedom is quite funny, and there's a hilarious bit at the end about the father's dealings with his neighbors' cats. I also quite liked how he wrote about consumerism and over-population, but, I do regret buying the hardcover.

Huck Finn and the N word

2011-01-06T15:10:00.000-08:00

What's the use you learning to do right, when it's troublesome to do right and ain't no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same?

There's an interesting debate going on right now about a new version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn which is about to be published, with the numerous instances of the "n" word replaced with the word "slave."^*

An educator and Twain scholar is behind the new edition, supposedly because he wanted it to be more easily taught and less offensive. More

I really love that book, despite the repetition of that noxious word. I agree that it's difficult to teach, because I foolheartedly tried to do so myself back when I was younger and slightly stupider and didn't think too far ahead. But, I disagree with re-writing history, especially when it's done to gloss over an unhappy part of our history. Facing up to our shameful past is difficult, but it can lead to greater understanding and compassion. It's really disappointing to me when I hear that educators censor, because they're passing up on such a perfect opportunity to have a thoughtful dialogue about the material. Luckily, I don't think I'm alone, because I've seen a number of articles condemning the new book, but, it looks like it will be published and will be available in schools.

I presume that the reason this is even possible is because the book is older than 100 years old, but I don't understand the copyright issues. I would assume that the Twain estate might have some control over the rights. Can anyone republish an edition of a book older than 100 years and change whatever they like?

Word of the Day: Bowdlerize

Here's an article with a pro-new addition slant.

^* Apparently also "Injun Joe" is changed to "Indian Joe" and "half-breed" to "half-blood."

Oops

2011-01-02T09:09:00.000-08:00

Oops, I just realized my chart was wrong because I forgot to review a couple of books - Winter's Bone and the Satanic Verses.

Anyway, the numbers look like this, for posterity's sake:
43 Fiction books
7 Non-fiction books
25 books by women
25 books by men

For some reason, I'm having trouble processing the Satanic Verses, which is an amazing and challenging book to read. We read it for book club and everyone loved it although most agreed it totally kicked their ass.

Winter's Bone (by Daniel Woodrell) deserves a longer write-up too, which I'm not sure I'll be able to provide. It's a fine little book that can be quickly read but better off savored. It's about a young woman who is searching for her meth-cook father in order to save their family shack, which is, nevertheless, the only thing they have. It's language and imagery is brutal - she's described as someone who looks like she had been "smacked and smacked again." There was an amazing part where she sleeps in a cave during a snow storm. She builds a fire and takes off her wet clothes and survives the night like a wild animal (or a resourceful pre-historic woman, perhaps). That part reminded me very much of an early novel by Margaret Atwood book called Surfacing where the protagonist goes into the woods to live. From Winter's Bone:

She stood in sunlight and stretched, a great long body pale and twisting at the brink of a cave. She walked to water dripping from the rock above the cave mouth, cupped her hands to the trickle and drank and drank deeply of the falling new water.

Here's my updated graph:

2010: Books in Review

2011-01-01T19:18:00.000-08:00

I continue my analysis of yearly reading. In 2010, I read:
41 Fiction books
7 Non-fiction books
25 books by women
23 books by men

Favorites:
It was a great year for terrific YA Fiction, I greatly enjoyed the entire The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins and Feed by M.T. Anderson. I was also impacted and effected by a couple of non-fiction books, How To Suppress Women's Writing by Joanna Russ and Peace is Every Step by Thich Nhat Hanh. I re-read everything by J.D. Salinger this year - he'll always a favorite of mine.

I have a few Reading/Writing resolutions for 2011, which are to read new books in hard-cover even though I don't really like reading hardcover books (just because they're heavy and a pain in the ass, but I really want to read newer material) and to do some writing of my own.

Here's a comparison chart to previous years:

2008 in review
2009 in review

The Passage

2010-12-27T09:15:00.000-08:00

I read something vaguely promising about The Passage somewhere so when I saw it in a used book store, I snatched it up. Perhaps not the wisest purchase because I got it in one of those books-by- the- pound places and it's 750 pages. Also it blows and I'm not going to finish it. It's this dumb book by Justin Cronin about a secret virus thing they give to convicts that turns them into vampires. And then the vampires break out of this secret bunker place and start destroying the whole world. And meanwhile, this one guy is watching a little girl who also has the virus but she doesn't try to kill anyone, she's just really sensitive to light, see? But the guy is really dimwitted and he's like, huh, I wonder what this weird virus is that turns people into raving blood thirsty super-strength lunatics? Oh well, I'm just going to keep taking care of this light-sensitive kid.

There is just nothing in the world more boring than a book about kids, amirite?

I thought it would be a sort of perfect vampire- related brainless novel, perfect for laying around my parents house during the holidays, but it's way too brainless. It reads kind of like a cross between Dan Brown and Michael Creighton. So, I popped out to the bookstore and got another 550 page book - Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen. This is making a lot of Best of 2010 book lists (I'll write mine soon) so perhaps I'll finish it before the new year and add it to mine too. So far, it's about 10,000 x's better than The Passage.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

2010-12-07T16:07:00.000-08:00

My first review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was more of a rant about English and American versions of the books and avoided all spoilers. After the movie came out, I read it again, and, assuming you've read the book by now if you're going to, this will be rife with spoilers.

This book dives right into the Harry universe without so much as a gentle recap of the storyline, which I appreciate. I thought the bit with Harry finally saying goodbye to the Dursleys, and the Dursley's complete inability to look him in the eye, with the exception of a changed Duddly, was some fine foreshadowing that this book was not going to have a fairy tale ending, and that it's not exactly a children's book anymore. I sped through the first half, where Harry, Hermione and Ron are wandering around the countryside looking for horcruxes. I loved what Rowling did with Hermione's beaded bag and all the things she packed in there. I enjoyed reading the back-story of Kreacher, the Black's house elf. (BTW, I though the movie was excellent!)

The second part, the break into and out of Gringotts, the war at Hogwarts, was really exciting. I could barely put the book down when I got to the end. When they jump on that dragon in Gringotts and break out of there... oooo! And, when they get to Hogwarts and the other students are in the Room of Requirement, just waiting for such an opportunity to fight, I thought their bravery, such an, honestly, rather unusual quality these days, read as true. My favorite bits were McGonnagal chasing Snape and fighting.

"My word," puffed, pale and sweaty, his walrus moustache aquiver. "What a to-do! I'm not at all sure whether this is wise, Minerva. he is bound to find a way in, you know, and anyone who has tried to delay him will be in more grievous peril -"

"I shall expect you and the Slytherins in the Great Hall in twenty minutes, also," said Professor McGonagall. "If you wish to leave with your students, we shall not stop you. But if any of you attempt to sabotage our resistance, or take up arms against us within this castle, then, Horace, we duel to kill."

"Minerva!" he said, aghast.

And, I thought Rowling pulled an interesting little literary conceit at the end when we're not quite sure what's going to happen to Harry where he goes through a long series of Snape's memories (although it borders slightly on the Matrix construct), and finally found out that Snape actually WAS a good guy and working for Dumbledore this WHOLE time! Good grief!

I've heard some folks say they didn't exactly love the wrap up 16 years later with Harry and Ginny, Ron and Hermione taking their kids to the train station, but I thought it was excellent. I did want to know that all those parties got together and that Neville became a professor and that even Draco make it out ok. These are characters I was invested in, and it pleased me to read that Harry continues to honor his heroes - Dumbledore, his parents, and Snape, "the bravest man [he] ever knew."

Zeitoun

2010-12-06T16:02:00.000-08:00

Zeitoun is written by Dave Eggers about a man named Abdulrahman Zeitoun and his wife, Kathy. It's sort of the same idea as Eggers brilliant and beautiful What is the What. Zeitoun and Kathy lived in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and chronicles what happened to their family. Zeitoun wouldn't evacuate the city with his wife and children because he owned a construction company and several rental properties and wanted to make sure they were in order, and, like many others, he had no idea how bad the storm would be.

The first part is how they learned about the storm and deciding whether or not to leave town, the second is how Zeitoun lived in the flooded city and some of the things he did to help people and animals, while his wife tried to find a place for her and the kids to stay. This part is really fascinating because Zeitoun had a canoe, which he used to help a handful of people, and he slept on the roof of his garage in a tent (because it was too hot in the house) quite happily. He fed neighborhood dogs that were trapped in their houses.

The story of his wife's adventures are less action-packed, but the story of her life is really interesting - she's a southern woman who converted to Islam and married the Syrian immigrant, Zeitoun. Her own family is unsupportive of her choices and her former Christian mega-church mocked her honest exploration of the Muslim faith. Her experience as a Muslim woman in the south could have made a great book in its own right.

The third part of the book came as rather a shock to me because I had no idea it was coming - Zeitoun was unlawfully imprisoned by FEMA agents and kept in jail without sentencing or a phone call for over a month. He was abused, served pork products that he couldn't eat, isolated and kept like an animal in an outdoor cage without so much as a blanket or a bed. He was arrested with one of his tenants and two companions on his own property. His companions had it even worse than him - they spent 5, 6 and 8 months in jail and lost all their possessions and savings. The book is a really horrifying tale of human rights abuses, not merely those related to how Zeitoun was treated but also how the swarms of military sent to New Orleans after the hurricane were not only ineffectual but caused more damage. Zeitoun, for example, paddling in his canoe was able to locate people who needed help because he could hear them. The military response rode giant boats that were loud and created dangerous waves. A "rescue" helicopter nearly killed him.

In summary, the Zeitouns seemed to be suffering from some fairly severe post-traumatic stress disorder - I hope they're doing better now. The betrayal of a government they trusted and the hatefulness of those in power destroyed some of their faith in humanity. It was very disturbing to read. Like many Eggers book, this one ends with pages of organizations to combat human rights violations and rebuild New Orleans, so if you finish with the desire to do more, you can.

Evermore

2010-11-18T06:38:00.000-08:00

I don't recall where I happened across a review of Evermore, but, anywho, it got compared to Twilight, only slightly more racy. And I was like, Alright. I'm in.

There are some quite amusing reviews on Amazon arguing about whether it's better or worse than Twilight, but what's clear is this book is obviously heavily influenced by our friend Stephanie Meyer. It was as if the author, Alyson Noel, read Twilight and said, "I can do better than that." And then did mildly better than that.

Ever, the 16/17 year old protagonist, moves to California to live with her Aunt after her family is killed in a car accident. She quickly locks eyes with Damen and finds herself inextricably drawn to him. Turns out, Damen has a secret - seems like he's hundreds (or perhaps thousands) of years old, and to prove it, he does some creepy old-man tricks like pulling flowers from behind girl's ears. Sound familiar?

(One of) the weird things about Twilight is that Edward and Bella are really crazy about each other even though neither one has anything to be crazy about. They're both boring, unlikable characters with little personality outside chuckling and clumsiness. In Evermore, the main characters are only slightly more interesting, but at least Ever has some talents of her own - she can read minds and see auras, and, she also sees her sister - a ghost who died in that car crash.

Yes, but how racy is it, you ask? Well, not very. Anyone looking for the broken beds and bruises (ick) of Breaking Dawn will be disappointed. Ever and Damen kisss and she dribbles off those bobby brooks, but panics when he goes for her undies. Then this happens:

And when it's clear he has no plans to continue I say, "You know, it would really be nice if you'd stop talking in code, finish a sentence, and tell me what the heck is going on. Because all I know is that Evangeline is dead, Haven's wrist is a red oozing mess, you ditched me at the beach because I wouldn't go all the way, and now you're breaking up with me."

That was the first of two passages that made me laugh, although I'm pretty sure it wasn't intentional.

Here's the other one... Eventually Damen explains that he's an "immortal" and so is Ever, sort of. Also, she's been reincarnated a bunch of times and they always fall in love. He even explains how he pulls all those flowers out of mid-air:

He smiles. "Manifesting. Same way you made the elephant, and this beach. It's simple quantum physics."

Ah, yes! Quantum physics!

I picked up the second book in the series, Blue Moon, but I don't think I'll read it. Well. Skim it. Maybe.

Curse of the Wolf Girl

2010-11-07T15:16:00.000-08:00

When we were on vacation in France, I read Curse of the Wolf Girl while husband read the first two Hunger Games books. Not surprisingly, we both finished pretty quickly, then were tortured by all those fabulous French book stores and book stalls along the river full of French books we can't read.

Curse of the Wolf Girl is the anxiously awaited follow-up to Lonely Werewolf Girl by Martin Millar. A bit too long awaited, for me and my bad memory, because I had no recollection of how that book ended.

This second novel continues the story of Kalix and her family, as well as her rag-tag group of well-meaning, goofy, goth roommates (including the nearly-adopted niece of Malveria the Fire Queen, my favorite character.) It was really funny and caused me to laugh out loud frequently and entertain an ungrateful husband to whom I like to read against his will. It's also packed-full of adventure and fights which I don't ever recall enjoying reading before. Is this a new dawn, I thought, of enjoying "action" books? I asked husband. "What do you mean, action? You never read action books before?"

"Not like this," I said, as I read aloud the following:

Malveria smiled. She took a step forward to address the Fire Elementals who remained at her side. All around were the bodies of fallen comrades. "Gentlemen." She raised her voice over the sound of the thunderous fire. "We are fortunate. It is rare that the opportunity presents itself to perform great deeds of valor that will be talked about in ages to come. We will advance, dispatch the enemy, and return in triumph to let the bards sing songs about us. If any of you would rather not participate in this glorious victory, please feel free to withdraw."

God help me if I didn't pick up the first to Evermore books from the library that I heard are like the new Twilight. Well, sort of - there are some rather hilarious reviews on Amazon that greatly debate whether it's better or worse. Ie. "This series is just as good as Twilight saga!!!!!" and "Evermore is basically Twilight, only much more poorly written, with a dash of "quantum physics", a pinch of a glossed-over theory of reincarnation, and a dollop of The Secret for good measure." Oooo - burrrrrnnn. Well, I'll let you know soon. Right now I'm deep in the throes of the Satanic Verses so I think it will be just the thing to cleanse my palate when I'm done.

The Diary of a Disappointed Book

2010-10-14T06:57:00.000-07:00

The Diary of a Disappointed Book from Studiocanoe on Vimeo.

Peace is Every Step

2010-10-12T12:53:00.000-07:00

I have been experiencing a teensy bit of stress lately and asked a friend that seems to have it together to recommend a good source for chilling out. She recommended two books - Peace is Every Step, by Thich Nhat Hanh and Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living by Pema Chodron.

Thich Nhat Hanh is a Vietnamese Buddhist monk and apparently very well respected in the Buddhist community, as far as I could tell from the approving comments of my few Buddhist friends. Peace is Every Step was very helpful in reducing my stress level. Nhat Hanh's all about breathing deeply and repeating meditative phrases to stay in the moment, like:

Breathing in, I know that I am breathing in. Breathing out, I know that I am breathing out.

and, if you're more stressed out or angry, you might say:

Breathing in, I know that anger is here.
Breathing out, I know that the anger is me.
Breathing in, I know that anger is unpleasant.
Breathing out, I know this feeling will pass.
Breathing in, I am calm.
Breathing out, I am strong enough to take care of this anger.

That became frequently helpful, alas to say, many times recently. Repeatedly.

There are some Buddhist practices that I really identify with, and others I wish I could identify with more (but it doesn't seem to be in my nature!) Nhat Hanh, for example, encourages readers to try to understand why "people that cause suffering" might be suffering themselves. I think that's all well and good to a certain point, but I think I'm not a big enough person to do that consistently. He compares anger to a compost pile out of which beautiful things might grow: "When anger is born in us, we can be aware that anger is an energy in us, and we can accept that energy in order to transform it into another kind of energy." OK, but how about cursing and crying and slamming doors and watching tv until all our troubles seem to disappear?

I kid. Sort of. Actually, this book really inspired me (to be a better person!) and I think I should read it a few times more. Although, the jerk in me thinks it's very nice for a monk to propose these things because he's surrounded by a bunch of other monks who are super nice and always practicing mindfulness and whatnot, while the rest of us are mostly surrounded by complete A-holes. Amirite?

I most mention, however, when this book helped me deal with something that was really upsetting me - I had just gone to a funeral of a beloved family friend, and someone in that family had also just had a baby. Grieving and celebrating, welcoming life and saying goodbye all at once was causing me some overload. I couldn't process my emotions. Then, on the way home, I was reading this book and he ends with a poem called Call Me by My True Names, which goes, in part:

My joy is like spring, so warm it makes flowers bloom in all
walks of life.
My pain is like a river of tears, so full it fills the four oceans.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and laughs at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up,
and so the door of my heart can be left open,
the door of compassion.

Innocent Blood

2010-10-11T10:09:00.000-07:00

Lately I've developed a affection for British crime novels written by the ladies (Sayers, James) and picked up Innocent Blood somewhere, probably for a quarter or free... I think I need to officially declare that Sayers shall heretofore be my go-to-lady-British-crime-novelist because James has done me wrong too many times.

Innocent Blood is kind of ridiculous. It's about a young woman, Philippa, who's adopted, and she finds out that her birth mother is in prison for murder. But, for various reasons, this doesn't really bother her, even though her birth mother and father were convicted of raping and murdering a child. So, when her mom gets out of prison, they rent a flat together and get to know each other, vaguely. Meanwhile, the father of the murdered child is trying to find the birth mother and kill her.

I found the whole thing unbelievable and the characters really under-developed. In the end (here come some spoilers...), it turns out the birth mother was greatly abused as a child herself (not surprisingly) and what James seems to be half-heartedly pursuing was the idea that violence and disregard for others is a result of nature. In the end, I mean, like the last two pages, Philippa ends up having sex with her adopted dad, which I just thought was a punch in the face after reading the damn thing and I was quite furious:

What, she wondered, had it meant exactly, that gentle, tender, surprisingly uncomplicated coupling; an affirmation, a curiosity satisfied, a test successfully passed, an obstacle ceremoniously moved out of the way so that they could again take up their roles of father and daughter, the excitement of incest without its legal prohibition.

See? That's exactly what I mean about unbelievable characters - nobody has sex with their adopted dad and calls it uncomplicated.

Mockingjay - Spoilers!

2010-10-09T09:48:00.000-07:00

I almost walked over to my friend's house and broke in to steal something in the middle of the night. That item? Her copy of Mockingjay. I'd just finished Catching Fire, and I needed that book. I couldn't think about anything else.

Like the other two books in the trilogy, I read the final installment in less than 2 days and really couldn't be distracted to do anything else until I was done. It's a really phenomenal series and absolutely gripping! I'm actually relieved I didn't discover them until they were all out, or I would have been in agony waiting for them to be released!

I'm going to get into specifics, so stop now if you intend to read this in the future...

As you may recall, at the end of Catching Fire, Kitness has just been snatched out of the arena and discovered that Peeta is in the hands of the Capital. At the beginning of Mockingjay, we learn that the revolution is in full swing and Katniss, her mom and sister, Gale and many others are living in District 13, underground. The rebels want Katniss to be the symbol of the revolution, The Mockingjay. She finally consents, after making some conditions. She does inspire the districts with her bravado and hatred for the Capital's practices. I think that bit of the books is interesting because (although I often forget) these are YA books with a largely un-confident female protagonist, who has to prove to herself, or have others point out, that she really is a remarkable and inspiring person. While she may otherwise have little in common with teenage girl readers of the books, it's quite likely that they'll have lack-of-confidence in common.

I enjoyed reading about the underground caverns that make up district 13. How they got their daily schedule temporarily tattooed on their arms, what they ate, what they wore, what their rooms were like. The rebels understood as well as the Capital how important the message of the revolution is - Katniss is instructed to make propos (propoganda messages) to be aired across the districts, while President Snow creates his own propos, using an ever-beaten down Peeta as his tool.

Because Katniss is so overwhelmed by the thought that Peeta is being tortured to effect her, the Rebels free him and others from the Capital, but Peeta's been "hijacked" to believe that she's the enemy and tries to kill her. I thought that was a really clever plot devise even though I found it kind of devastating because I was so wrapped up in the story.

This inspires Katniss and others to topple the Capital, so she, Gale, Finnick and some others (followed by a camera crew) go off to fight. They discover that the Capital has been rigged, much like the Games, with all kinds of crazy traps, and lots of folks on their team get killed. Isn't it interesting when you love someone in a book and when they get killed or die, you've got to recover a little? This book reminded me a lot of the last Harry Potter book (also about a war, also were beloved characters are killed) but Suzanne Collins' book struck a more universal note with me. Ultimately Katniss becomes the sort of moral barometer of the war. She feels the weight of each person she's killed, has caused to be killed, or even sees die. Her friend Gale is the opposite - he looks at the war strategically and logistically and it ultimately drives a wedge between them.

I love how the book ends with Katniss and Peeta creating a book together of everyone who died in their lives, the games, and the revolution:

The page begins with the person's picture. A photo if we can find it. If not, a sketch or painting by Peeta. Then in my most careful handwriting, come all the details it would be a crime to forget. Lady licking Prim's cheek. My father's laugh. Peeta's father with the cookies. The color of Finnick's eyes. What Cinna could do with a length of silk. Boggs reprogramming the Holo. Rue poised on her toes, arms slightly extended, like a bird about to take flight. On and on. We seal the pages with salt water and promises to live well to make their deaths count.

In Mockingjay, Collins illustrates the futility of war, while complicating the fact with the need for revolution. I think it's a really thought-provoking series that leads the reader to contemplate the complicity and responsibility of citizens relationships to their governments. I'm going to enjoy rereading these books many times.

Catching Fire - Spoilers!

2010-10-05T19:11:00.000-07:00

I do not like buying hardcover books, but I was drawn to the bookstore mere moments after finishing The Hunger Games where I stood holding and cursing an obnoxiously priced Catching Fire. $18.95? Really?

But, I had to have it. I was addicted, but good. And, for the next 48 hrs or so, I did little else but read it.

In this book, Katniss and Peeta are forced to go on a victory tour through the districts, where they uphold the appearance of their faux romance. Which is sort of real. And Katniss is so confused! And Peeta sleeps in her train compartment! But I don't think they have sex or anything! Anyway, they refuse to play into the Capital's hand and are gracious to the families of the dead tributes in District 2 and get themselves into trouble. They cause so many problems that another Hunger Games is declared and former winners have to play in it! OMG! That was very upsetting. For me and for Katniss.

I got so wrapped up in these books and characters that it was really pretty sad for me when people died or got hurt. I haven't felt real sadness for a dead fictional character since Charlotte's Web. When Cinna got beat up in front of Katniss just before she went into the arena... oh! That was brutal! And some of the new characters are just so fun - the saucy Finnick with a heart of gold, the abrasive Johanna who says, "They can't hurt me. I'm not like the rest of you. There's no one left I love."

My only complain about the plot contrivances is that a lot of Katniss's confusion (how does Peeta really feel about her, why are all the other tributes sacrificing themselves in the arena) could easily be solved by a little chat, but... she's a teenager, I get it. But, these books are so addictive, and not in a bad Twilight-way, a great Harry-Potter-kind-of-way. I think you know what happened after I finished this one...

The Catcher in the Rye

2010-09-23T05:58:00.000-07:00

I first read The Catcher in the Rye in high school and must have read it at least a dozen times since. I've owned multiple copies, but I frequently give it away if I meet someone who hasn't read it yet. It's on my Top Five for sure.

I suggested it for our last book club, trepidation, because I actually hadn't read it for quite a few years and I wasn't sure if I would still love it as much as I have before, also I was afraid someone else's possible negative reaction would spoil my own. But, it turns out I loved it as much as I ever did (and I think everyone else in book club enjoyed it quite a bit too!)

Re-reading it again, I realized how much the language of the book influenced me as a kid. I used to say that I got a "bang" out of things all the time, a reference only appreciated by my sister and perhaps my friend L. This time around, Holden's criticism of corny music effected me. Now when I'm listening to the radio, I'm like, "Jesus Christ, that IS pretty corny."

There are many things I love, but, just to name a few, I just go crazy over Salinger's narrative structure. It really shines in his short stories, which I've been re-reading this year, but in this novel, what's remarkable is you go on this long journey with the main character, it feels epic. And then, when you think about it, it's a matter of days. I was thinking about tracking the whole thing, kind of like in a day planner, to see how it laid out.

I also love how Holden is a untrustworthy narrator, and the reader needs to decide who to trust - for example, in one scene, his friend tells him to stop shouting and he says he's not shouting, just excited.

What I'm excited about is the possibility of more stories coming from the Salinger estate. He reported hated working with publishers, so we'll see if anything is published now that he's passed away.

The Knife of Never Letting Go

2010-09-22T04:13:00.000-07:00

The Knife of Never Letting Go is book one of the "Chaos Walking" series by Patrick Ness. It's a YA book and the first Space Western genre I've ever read! It's about a young man who lives on some distant planet in some distant time but they don't have any advanced technologies (you find out later they're kind of like pilgrims and they wanted to live more "simply"). All the people were settlers, and shortly after they settled in this new place, all the men's thoughts were audible as well as visual to everyone else.

Todd, the kid, lives in this town which doesn't have any women. Everywhere he goes, he's surrounded by the horrible thoughts of the men of the town - and, they're a bitter, awful, violent group of people, barring Todd's adoptive parents, two guys (possibly a gay couple but it's a bit unclear). Without ruining it for you, Todd needs to run away from the town and that's mainly what the book is about.

There's a LOT of repetition in this book and it got really old - and I'm a person who likes repetition. But, ultimately I thought I would tear out my hair if I had to read one more

...I could finish falling down that pit, down down down til there's only blackness, down into the nowhere where there's no more Todd to blame or screw things up or fail Ben or fail Viola...

Or, God forbid:

And I can't hold it back--
And the hate --
And I look over --
At the knife --
Just a few feet away --
On the ledge --

etc. I mean, honestly. Come on.

So, that drove me insane, and I'm quite sure this rather long (almost 500 pages) book could easily have been a decent 300 if they'd cut out some of that nonsense.

But, what I really LIKED was how this misogynous world and its consequences was created. Essentially, I believe Ness was writing a book about the culture of hatred toward women and, unlike, for example, those horrid Stieg Larsson books which are also ostensibly about a culture of violence toward women, but, as I've previously said, end up contributing to that very culture in the form of extremely graphic portrayals of that very violence. Ness manages to describe that world without reveling in the gory details.

He also does very interesting things with text to illustrate how the thoughts of so many men can get jumbled together:

Unlike The Hunger Games, which I really loved, I don't think The Knife Of Letting Go transcends that YA category. I haven't decided if I'm going to read the other books in the Chaos Walking series, but I can definitely see the appeal they have. At it's best, it reminded me of the TV series Firefly and I really enjoyed reading about the universe that was created.

Bad Marie

2010-09-20T15:53:00.001-07:00

I heard about Bad Marie on The Rejectionist, a blog I really admire. Her review is excellent and I encourage you to read it.

It's about a woman, Marie, recently released from prison. She's one of those people who have a pretty loose system of morality and she doesn't really feel guilt. This is very interesting to me because I am almost constantly wracked by guilt. Marie (and I'm not ruining it for you) kidnaps her best friend's kid and husband and goes to Paris with them. What's really interesting is how the author, Marcy Dermansky, writes Marie in such a way that you really hope the best for her. To make a villain likeable is such a triumph... I have a theory that Marie is such an empathetic character because it would be such a relief to be even partly like her - to say what you think, to act in the moment, to live without (major) consequences.

Marie was certain this relationship would not last another day. The strain had been too much: death, infidelity, cat abuse, plagiarism, and now this added worry about money. Also, they were drunk, still, from dinner.

But she's not a one-dimensional, soul-less character, in the briefest ways (and those I won't spoil), you find out a little about how Marie became the person she is.

It's a quick, fun read and I'd highly recommend it.

From Dead to Worse

2010-09-02T07:32:00.000-07:00

When I first read a Sookie Stackhouse book, by Charlaine Harris, I was ashamed, yet titilated. The second time: more ashamed, but I had a lot of fun. Now I want to shamelessly read anything I can get my filthy hands on. Her books are fun, interesting, fast-paced, and they fill in the lonely blanks between seasons of True Blood.

Oddly, From Dead to Worse doesn't have ANY of Harris's trademark bloody vampire sex (but that's ok har har har), but this (I think) eighth book in the series was fresh and amusing. And still a little oowkie:

From his tension I realized that some major event was coming at me fast, and I began to be afraid. Eric took my hand as we walked across to the restaurant, and he ran his thumb absently across my palm. I was surprised to find out there was a direct line from my palm to my, my, hootchie.

Hunger Games

2010-08-31T15:50:00.001-07:00

My colorist and I share a love of YA fiction. I slipped her a copy of Lonely Werewolf Girl, and she tipped me off about The Hunger Games (and that the follow-up to LWG is finally out!). Naturally, I picked up The Hunger Games immediately.

It. Was. Awesome. and I could barely put it down for the two days that it took to read it. It takes place in the dystopian future, where the former America is split into 12 districts and ruled by a central Capital (really central, like, former-Denver). Each year, "the Hunger Games" are held, in which one boy and one girl from each district have to Fight To The Death while the whole thing is televised. The district of the winner gets a fair amount of food while the other districts starve.

The book naturally has a lot of predecessors, most notably Shirley Jackson's 1948 alarming short story The Lottery, which you really must read if you haven't already, and the 1999 Battle Royale by Koushun Takami, which I have not read (but have one friend who said it's her favorite book of all time).

Anywho, as you might imagine, the young female protagonist, Katniss, becomes a contestant in the Hunger Games and struggles to survive and still hold true to her idea of herself (ie not "a murderer".) Interestingly, Katniss is a hunter, and every once in a while examines her own easy attitude toward killing and eating animals as relates to her predicament of needing to kill humans.

Another theme I liked very much about the book is how Katniss and her fellow district contestant accept or give gifts. Katniss keeps a running tally of goods and ills done her - she sees every "gift" she receives as something to be repaid. Her more generous companion does not keep score.

There are three books in the series and I intend to pick up the second one very soon! Anyone else reading these great books? Like any good fiction, I think it really defies labels, particularly that of "YA."

The Girl Who Played with Fire

2010-08-24T18:39:00.000-07:00

I went to a party where a lot of folks were reading the second Larsson book, The Girl Who Played with Fire. All of them were really wrapped up in it and, even though I'd previously told myself, "NO MORE!" I thought... "Maybe one more."

I thought the first book was very readable and certainly captivating, but I was really turned off by the violence and I thought the characters were flat. The second book (Plays with Fire) does expand on the Lisbeth character more (she is most compelling to me) but to sort of re-dick extremes. I'm talking a Luke-I'm-your-father sort of extreme. Without ruining it for you. Or, perhaps I already have.

Larsson heaps abuse on the ladies in this book, just like he did in the first, ostensibly to show, if you haven't been paying attention, that women suffer unconscionable violence at the hands of men. What I believe, gentle reader, is that Larsson contributes to the very culture of violence toward women that he portended to abhor. I was thrilled to see my very thoughts laid out in handsome prose on ye old Tiger Beatdown - I encourage you to read the post if you're at all interested in these books, it's really brilliant.

Anyway, seriously, NO MORE! I am done with you, Stieg Larsson, and I won't read the third book or the forth one either!

The Unnamed

2010-08-20T16:29:00.001-07:00

The Unnamed is Joshua Ferris's new book. I really admired his first novel, Then We Came to the End, so I had high hopes. I think Ferris's storytelling is modern and fresh. The Unnamed didn't rock my world, but it is certainly a well-constructed book and I admire the risks he takes.

In the story, an NY lawyer named Tim Farnsworth has some kind of affliction that causes him to walk. The urge to walk is the unnamed thing - no doctor or psychiatrist can diagnose it or even categorize it as a mental or a physical disorder. The not-knowing of his illness is the worst for Farnsworth, in fact, he comes close to suicide several times.

This book is being described by some as the existential contemporary dilemma of suburban America, that we wish to throw off the binds of society and family and abandon our bodies and souls to a sort of undefined naturalism. To me, instead, the story rang like a tale of addiction - Farnsworth, despite all rationality, and at the risk of everything comfortable and wonderful in his life, wife, child, career, home, friends, walks. The interactions between him and his wife becomes a story of just how far this couple will stay together in "sickness and in health".

Tonally, I like how Ferris writes:

He was tough and he was special and he had inner resources, he had many things going for him, and others had seen much worse, time was precious and things happened froa reason and there was always an upside, and it only took a good attitude to fight and win and nothing was going to stop him and tomorrow was another day.

Like other books about the existential zeitgeist of our time, those pesky bees popped up. My favorite bits were the ones with the lawyers. Ferris writes offices really well.

Gaudy Night

2010-08-11T19:39:00.000-07:00

So, I finally got that Dorothy Sayers recommendation I was waiting for and 'twas Gaudy Night. It was excellent, and I am very happy! Apparently it's the book that distinguished Sayers from a mere genre writer of detective fiction (the horror!) to an actual writer of literature-y fiction (huzzah!)

The main character is Harriet Vane a (wait for it...) writer of detective fiction and really terrific, strong, female character that's reticent to marry the handsome, charming, intelligent (filthy rich) Peter Whimsey because she fears he might not treat her as an equal (amongst other things).

Vane is asked to return to her alma mater, Oxford, where, in one of the women's colleges, a "poison pen" is wrecking havoc on the school. This "poison pen" writes vile things on the walls and sends people nasty and threatening notes. What's really interesting is how Sayers tells a rivoting mystery without that classic event of so many detective stories: a murder. In fact, she manages to tell the whole tale of the "poison pen" without ever actually writing any dirty words herself, leaving the reader is left to imagine what might have been written.

Written in 1936, the book displays a rather interesting pre-war sentiment. Here are two colloquial characters:

"When I was a lad," replied the foreman, "young ladies was young ladies. And young gentlement was young gentlemen. If you get my meaning."

"Wot this country wants, "said Padgett, "Is a 'Itler."

Like her other books, this one is very funny and awfully smart. I love the character of Harriet Vane, and look forward to reading the other books that are about her. She appears in Strong Poison and is also in Have his Carcase (?) and Busman's Honeymoon.

This song comes up in the book, btw. Lovely. Also, thank goodness (and I don't think I'm ruining it) despite the fact that Whimsey is the famous detective, it's Harriet who is respected for her detective abilities and gets herself out of her own scrapes. Ultimately, Gaudy Night examines the sort of clash of pre-war England as people choose a cultural allegiance - progressivism and intellectualism or political and social regressivism (in a 1930s kind of way).

I would highly recommend this book - at 501 pages (paperback), you can really sink your teeth into it, and you'll want to!

Oh, brush up on your latin! And, if you have already read it and are a Harry Potter fan (or not...) check this out! Hilarious.

The White Tiger

2010-08-10T19:36:00.000-07:00

The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga, won the Man Booker Prize in 2008. I'm a believer in the readability of Man Bookers, so that was enough for me. It is extremely readable although not exactly pleasant to read.

Centered around the issue of class conflict in India, it's about a young man named Balram Halwai (his last name implies that he should be a sweet maker) who is the son of a rickshaw driver. He becomes a driver for a wealthy person and eventually an entrepreneur. Balram is partly able to break the expectations of class and caste by the changing social environment in India and also partly because he kills his boss. I'm not, by the way, ruining it for you - that is all disclosed in the first chapter.

Balram spends his day driving his boss to newly erected malls and hotels that he's not allowed to enter. He and his fellow drives are caught in a "chicken coop" where:

A handful of men in this country have trained the remaining 99.9 percent - as strong, as talented, as intelligent in every way - to exist in perpetual servitude; a servitude so strong that you can put the key of his emancipation in a man's hands and he will throw it back at you with a curse.

Another major theme of the book is corruption in India. In the paperback copy of the book, there's a "Conversation" with the writer - he is asked "Your novel depicts an India that we don't often see. Was it important to you to present an alternative point of view? Why does a Western audience need this alternative portrayal?" Adiga's answer is that it's not an "alternative" view at all, for him it's a common view of India (re: the corruption). The White Tiger is an interesting departure from some of the popular (and beautiful) books about India that have been mainstream in the US recently - like Divakaruni or Lahiri's books or Kiran Desai's stunning The Inheritance of Loss. Me? I love reading books about India and there are just so many terrific contemporary Indian writers! The reason I found this book unpleasant was merely because the main character is, well, a murderer and has this really immoral behavior justification, and it's largely heart-breaking (although also rather humorous in sections.) Adiga will undoubtedly have more for us to read soon.

The Help

2010-08-01T12:33:00.001-07:00

My sister gave me a copy of The Help for my birthday and told me, "If you don't cry like, 4 times, you're a monster." Eek. I got a little anxious when I was 3/4 of the way through and hadn't shed a tear.

The Help, by Kathryn Stockett, is a compelling story about a group of American Southern women. I had a hard time putting it down, even though the book is highly problematic. Told from the perspective of two African-American maids and one white woman, the book is about how the three of them write a book about the maids' experiences working in the homes of white families in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960s.

The appropriation of the African-American women's stories and voices made me feel uncomfortable. Aibileen, a kind older woman who brings a very 21st century to bringing up children in the mid-20th century, ruminates:

Minny near bout the best cook in Hinds County, maybe even all a Mississippi. The Junior League Benefit come around ever fall and they be wanting her to make ten caramel cakes to auction off. She ought a be the most sought-after help in the state. Problem is, Minny got a mouth on her. She always be talking back. One day it be the white manager a the Jitney Jungle grocery, next day it be her husband, and ever day it's gone be the white lady she waiting on. The only reason she waiting on Miss Walter so long is Miss Walter be deaf as a doe-nob.

Even Stockett felt uncomfortable - in the after-word, she writes:

I was scared, a lot of the time, that I was crossing a terrible line, writing in the voice of a black person. I was afraid I would fail to describe a relationship that was so intensely influential in my life, so loving, so grossly stereotyped in American history and literature.

It is, of course, absolutely impossible to capture another person's experience (and nearly impossible to capture your own), but one makes allowances for artist license. I am very sensitive to racial prejudice, so, for me, parts of the book were inappropriate.

Most of the white people in the book are racists, some of whom actively work to harm the welfare of their African-Americans, most whom merely look the other way when they saw it happening. I feel quite positive that any white reader of the book would identify with the white character who has the idea to write the book and works with the maids to tell their stories. But what I found most disturbing is that it's quite unlikely that those same readers would have followed the rather exceptional actions of that character. It's more likely that they would have fallen firmly in the "look the other way" category, or, let's face it, the Civil Rights movement would have ended well before a mere handful of decades ago, and racial injustices would be a thing of the past, which they are not. The Help allows privileged white readers to pat themselves on the back for something we don't deserve.

I noticed the British cover and the American cover are quite different! I'm afraid the American version has fallen prey to that well-known publishing-world fear that images of black people on the cover will keep write readers from picking up the book. All of this is just proof that we still have a long way to go to heal the long, shameful history of racial injustice in this country. If people are reading The Help with a critical mind and asking themselves some hard questions, I think that is helpful.

I did, by the way, get a bit misty a few times near the end, so I guess I'm not a complete monster after all!

The Passion

2010-07-28T19:55:00.000-07:00

In my course of quickly rectifying my lack of experience reading Jeanette Winterson I picked up The Passion. It takes place in the early 19th century, during the Napoleonic wars. One character is a cook in Napoleon's kitchen. Another is a Venetian woman, the daughter of a gondolier, who works in a casino. I don't think I'll ruin it by saying their paths cross eventually.

Both of the Winterson books I read are slender books, but best read slowly and thoughtfully. They're crammed full of big ideas, and each led to a crescendo of language and thought at the end.

In The Passion, Winterson lambastes the heartlessness of war:

Home became the focus of joy and sense. We began to believe that we were fighting this war so that we could go home. To keep home safe, to keep home as we started to imagine it. Now that our hearts were gone there was no reliable organ to stem the steady tide of sentiment that stuck to our bayonets and fed our damp fires. There was nothing we wouldn't believe to get us through: God was on our side, the Russians were devils. our wives depended on this war. France depended on this war. There was no alternative to this war.

And the heaviest lie? That we could go home and pick up where we had left off. That our hears would be waiting behind the door with the dog. (p. 83)

and the importance of love, or passion:

I think now that being free is not being powerful or rich or well regarded or without obligations but being able to love. To love someone else enough to forget about yourself even for one moment is to be free. The mystics and the churchmen talk about throwing off this body and its desires, being no longer a slave to the flesh. The don't say that through the flesh we are set free. That our desire for another will lift us out of ourselves more cleanly than anything divine.

Some people go absolutely batshit over Venice, and I suppose they have every reason to. Her descriptions of Venice were exciting and mysterious and made me want to return there. Oddly, this book occasionally reminded me of this goofy Anne Rice book I read a long time ago called Cry to Heaven about a castrati opera singer, due to the lush descriptions and the decadent lifestyle of the Venetians. But it made me think about (I'm not done yet) the difference between "high" and "low" literature.

Not unlike an Anne Rice novel, some of Winterson's characters are not hetero-normative. Winterson's young woman often dresses as a man, for safety and for fun, and moves somewhat freely between the masculine world (particularly as a boater) and a more feminine one. I think one of the main differences, however, between Winterson and Rice is that Rice's characters exist in a hyper-fantasy while Winterson's are more grounded in reality. Winterson's treatment of the female character's sexuality is pointedly easy; she loves.

Often Winterson's writing takes my breathe away. I love her repetition, the acknowledgment of story-telling, the poetry, and the grand themes. I intend to read everything she's ever written.

Weight

2010-07-27T07:41:00.000-07:00

I recently read Jeanette Winterson described as "one of the most brilliant writers in the English language" on a blog I read and respect so I picked up a few of her books from the library. I actually had quite a few of her books on my "wishlist" so it's about time I read her.

The first I read was Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles, which is part of that "The Myths" series. (I love Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad from the series.) In The Myths, authors are invited to tell or re-tell ancient myths, and Winterson tells the tale of Atlas, who was punished with holding the world on his shoulders.

In an introduction, Winterson writes about telling stories and the issue of autobiography:

Weight has a personal story broken against the bigger story of the myth we know and the myth I have re-told. I have written this personal story in the First Person, indeed almost all of my work is written in the First Person, and this leads to questions of autobiography.

Autobiography is not important. Authenticity is important. The writer must fire herself through the text, be the molten stuff that welds together disparate elements. I believe there is always exposure, vulnerability, in the writing process, which is not to say it is either confessional or memoir. Simply, it is real.

Later she leaves the story of Atlas and Heracles and writes:

I know nothing of my biological parents. The live on a lost contenent of DNA. Like Atlantis, all record of them is sunk... Spin the globe. What landmasses are these, unmapped, unnamed? The world evolves, first liquid and alive, then forming burning plates that must cool and set. The experiment is haphazard, toxic at times. Earth is a brinkmanship of breathtaking beauty and a mutant inferno. My own primitive life forms take a long time to web intelligence. When they are intelligent they are still angry.

Wow!

Ultimately, she brings the reader to the conclusion that the weight Atlas (and all of us) carry can simply be put down, if we choose. When she allows Atlas to unburden himself, the world doesn't come to an end, it hangs there without him. Winterson's re-telling of the story of Atlas undoes the story of an eternity of punishment and becomes a beautiful tale about letting go.

How to Suppress Women's Writing

2010-07-18T06:14:00.000-07:00

How to Suppress Women's Writing, by Joanna Russ is a marvelous book that examines the systematic ways that women artists have been suppressed by society and critics. Russ's book is a very readable, accessible polemic against the suppression of women artists (not just writers, but artists, actors, musicians, etc) and explains the various ways that women's work is undermined:

She didn't write it.
She wrote it, but she shouldn't have.
She wrote it, but look what she wrote about.
She wrote it, but "she" isn't really an artist and "it" isn't really serious, of the rigth genre - i.e., really art.
She wrote it, but she wrote only one of it.
She wrote it, but it's only interesting/included in the canon for one, limited reason.
She wrote it, but there are very few of her.

Aside from verbalizing some of the frustrating questions I've been asking myself lately, Russ presents example after example of brilliant women artists and the denial of their place in the canon. She counts representations of women in anthologies, cites old criticism of books, most amusingly when a book is first published under a male pen-name and later revealed to have been written by a woman - like Emily Brönte's Wuthering Heights. After the shocking revelation of the artist's sex, her writing was compared "...to a little bird fluttering its wings against the bars of its cage." When it was understood to be written by a man, it was described as "powerful and original", "bestial, brutal, indeed monstrous."

Women's experience (sometimes but not always the subject of women's writing) is often rejected out of hand. Writes Russ:

Many feminists argue that the automatic devaluation of women's experience and consequent attitudes, values, and judgments springs from an automatic devaluation of women per se, the belief that manhood is "normative" and womanhood somehow "deviant" or "special." ... Not only is female experience often considered less broad, less representative, less important, than male experience, but the actual content of works can be distorted according to whether the author is believed to be of one sex or the other.

Naturally, she addresses Linda Nochlin's extremely influential 1971 article "Why have there been no great women artists?" in which Nochlin writes, "There are no women equivalents for Michelangelo or Rembrandt, Delacroix or Cezanne, Picasso or Matisse..." Russ answers that with, "...there is the statement "no great women artists" in a century that has produced Georgia O'Keeffe, Käthe Kollwitz, and Emily Carr, to name only those I happen to like."

Russ ends the book with a challenge to the reader to consider their own prejudices and rejections, while freely admitting that her own book doesn't adequately address the suppression of other minority writers, particularly black women writers and other writers of color and non-Western artists.

I came away with a long list of writers I want to explore more, here are a few:
The Countess of Winchilsea, Anne Finch
Margaret Cavendish
Jane Marcus, Art and Anger
Eve Merriam, The Club
Anna Letitia Barbauld
Jane Elliott
Lady Anne Lindsay
Lady Carolina Nairne
Aphra Behn
Charlotte Brontë's Villette
And, thanks to Russ, I got that Dorothy Sayers recommendation I've been waiting for: Gaudy Night - review coming soon! Let me know if you're familiar with the writers above.

Feed

2010-07-14T06:00:00.000-07:00

Feed, by M.T. Anderson, is the next book for our book club. It's officially a Y.A. book, but I think very accessible at least to my age group as well. Feed takes place in the (not-so) distant future when everyone has a chip in their head that's kind of like the internet and facebook. People "chat" even when they're standing right next to each other, and, when the characters go to the mall and walk in a store, they instantly get a feed from the store with ads and prizes based on their previous purchases. Basically it's the dystopian future where the entire culture is consumer-based and corporate-owned and naturally, the environments a wreck. People have lesions on their skin, but even the lesions are consumerized and it becomes cool to have lesions of certain placement, size and shape.

You know in a teen movie where there's this group of good-looking rich kids that goof off and are kind of jerks? The main character is one of those. He falls for this girl, Violet, (on the moon!) and it turns out she's sort of anti-feed and anti-consumerism, but following her path is like, well, turning his back on everything he loves.

Some of the things I loved about this book was the creative language that Anderson employs. While some of the characters are so entrenched in the feed they can barely create a coherent sentence, he's created this goofy, idiotic, dumbed-down language and slang that even the President uses. Anderson's book is frighteningly close to reality, minus like, the flying cars. I think, like most good dystopian fiction, he merely expands upon reality to an absurd, but not impossible, conclusion.

One of my favorite parts, and I don't think I'll ruin it for you... is:

Violet was screaming, "Look at us! You don't have the feed! You are the feed! You're feed! You're being eaten! You're raised for food! Look at what you've made yourselves!" She pointed at Quendy, and went, "She's a monster! A monster! Covered with cuts! She's a creature!"

I think it's an important book, and I can see it being very productive to read it with a young(er) person. Or, any person - I read mine to husband on a car trip although he was a bit perplexed by the language. He kept stopping me to repeat and spell words. I'd say, "I don't know, youch, it says, y-o-u-c-h." It reminded me a lot of my favorite book of all time, The Handmaid's Tale - I will not be surprised if it claims a spot similar to Atwood's book, in the annals of, not just dystopian fiction or YA fiction, but simply excellent fiction.

Poppy Shakespeare

2010-07-13T09:00:00.000-07:00

I hate to write that Poppy Shakespeare is like a cross between Catch-22 and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, because that's what it says right on the book jacket, but, it's a very good way to describe the book.

It's about a group of people in a mental hospital in London. "N" is the narrator, and Poppy Shakespeare is a woman who is sent to the hospital against her will and attempts to get out, only to find herself in a "Catch-22" whereby she must admit that she's mentally unstable in order to get the support of a facilitator, at which point it's she cannot argue that she is not mentally ill. The whole thing is quite alarming to N and the other patients because they are very comfortable in the hospital and feel safe there and, of course, never WANT to leave.

What emerges is that the characters glide between the fluid space of what is considered "normal" and what might be considered "unstable", and that their environment only intensifies their behavior. The book begins with a quote by Chekhov that I was reminded of again and again:

Since prisons and madhouses exist, why, somebody is bound to sit in them.

The author, Clare Allan, created a whole set of language for the hospital, including, in a very English way, various Ministries of this or that. She gives N a rather marvelous way of speaking - I'm not enough of a linguist to categorize it, but it goes like this:

That frist day Poppy gone down alright. After she'd saved Brian the Butcher's life, people give her the benefit. So when she started slagging the doctors off, how she shat better crap than they come out with, I ain't saying there weren't a bristle gone round but people was prepared to overlook it. On top of which she got novelty value; no one met a dribbler like Poppy before, and when they finally got their heads round the fact that she meant what she said, she didn't want to be there, they was that fucking jiggered, that stunned to the core, it never occurred to them they should be offended.

I thought it was excellent. Very funny and poignant.

What my mother doesn't know

2010-07-05T10:24:00.000-07:00

What my Mother Doesn't Know is a sweet little book written in free-form verse. It's over 250 pages, but I read it in about an hour. It's about a young woman (12ish?) who's parents don't get along and watch too much television, and her boyfriend's a d-bag who doesn't want his parents to know she's Jewish.

Apparently it's a frequently banned book because this young woman (*gasp!*) acknowledges her own sexual feelings and says the word "breasts" a couple of times. After a school dance, she waits for her mother, who's late:

I never thought
it would happen this way --
with the guy standing closest to me
suddenly bursting out laughing
and grabbing my breasts
with his slimy paws
squeezing them for a split second
that seems to last forever.

I never once envisioned
the devirginization of my breasts
happening like this,
with the guy and his scumbag buddy
slapping five afterwards
...

(Then she punches him! Yea!)

Well, it's an utterly charming little book and I'd recommend it to just about anyone. One of the most lovely bits (for me) was when she goes to the museum to view her favorite painting, La Bal à Bougival and she later learns that the young woman in the painting is Suzanne Valadon - that's a nice shout-out for a little-known post-impressionist.

Here's some amusing negative criticism on Amazon:

Book Giveaway!

2010-07-05T08:21:00.000-07:00

Here are a couple of books I started but weren't for me. If you're in the Continental US and want to read them, leave your email in comments!

The Aqua Net Diaries: Big Hair, Big Dreams, Small Town, by Jennifer Niven. Written by a woman who grew up in a small town in Indiana during the 80s - just like meeee! But, I couldn't get into it.

Sabbath's Theatre, by Philip Roth. About an old dude trying to get more tail, as far as I can tell. Reminded me of hiliarious article I read on Tiger Beatdown called "Fond Memories of Vagina" about older, male authors who, well, I'll quote the article:

The plot is always the same: “I am a writer in the twilight of my years, bored with life and my sexual powers. Oh, wait: pussy. I shall attain some. I am reinvigorated! Thanks, pussy!” This bores me and makes my entire lower half numb.

That's two, Philip.

I know, I make them sound really enticing, but, one person's trash...

Adverbs

2010-06-15T18:49:00.003-07:00

Ever since I read Watch Your Mouth by Daniel Handler (aka: Lemony Snicket ) I've been dying to read more. Adverbs (2006) is something like short stories but not quite. Sometimes the characters come back but it's also not a novel. Each story/chapter's title is an adverb: Clearly, Naturally, Wrongly, Often, etc. Like most collections, some of them are so-so and some of them make you want to lie down and die (in a good way. Happy.)

Look, I'll go ahead and tell you why it's called that because I don't think it will ruin it for you, and if you're like me, you'll forget anyway... It's based on a party game called "Adverbs" where someone leaves the room and you choose an adverb and when they come back, everyone acts out the word and the person tries to guess.

It's a charade, although it's not much like Charades. You play until you get bored. Nobody keeps score, because there's no sense in keeping track of what everyone is doing.

The story that made me want to die was Soundly - it's about two girl friends, one of whom is dying. They leave the hospital for the day and get stuck in traffic on the way back:

There was a noise above us like an airplane zoom, but it was getting too dark to see. People started laying on the horn, braying like bad geese in a panic. "I am here," Lila said with a trembly smile. Our driver's ed teacher had told us that's what the horn should mean. Not Move along, buddy or I am displeased but I am here. I am here, I am here, I am here!

Beautiful!

Methland

2010-06-15T18:49:00.001-07:00

We read Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town, by Nick Reding, for book club. The book is quite interesting and I encourage you to read it if you are at all interested in Midwestern drug culture, or even Midwestern culture. Reding creates an argument for the proliferation of meth in the Midwest based on a number of factors - the abundance of chemicals (for corn production), people with few options for employment or wealth, and even that good-old-fashioned American work ethic.

To read his book, you'd think there wasn't a town in the Midwest that wasn't completely destroyed by meth. For me, one of the fallacies of his argument is that I'm from a small Midwestern town and, at least for now, it isn't running rampant with meth addicts roaming the streets like zombies. Of course, that's just my experience, I do know that some of my friends from the Midwest DO know people who's lives have been destroyed by the drug.

I think the book would have made a really terrific long article, perfect for Vanity Fair or the New Yorker, but I thought it was a bit long for a book. I GET IT! METH'S REALLY BAD AND STUFF.

Housekeeping

2010-06-15T06:37:00.000-07:00

Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson (1980) is a highly acclaimed book which won a bunch of awards and was nominated for the Pulitzer, but I really didn't enjoy it. It's a prose-alicious book that is written with utterly breathtaking sentences, I mean, sometimes I'd read a sentence and then sit back and say, "Well, why would anyone write anything else?" But, altogether I found the book really distant and well, boring. It was a quite odd mix of beautiful writing and a boring story, but that's heavy prose for ya.

I'm sure there are many who'll disagree with me - I encourage you to defend in comments!

The Nine Tailors

2010-06-05T16:05:00.000-07:00

Riding on the high of my first Dorothy Sayers experience, I went to the "Sayers Shelf" in the library and somewhat randomly chose The Nine Tailors, thinking, How could I go wrong? I love the sewing arts.

Turns out the nine tailors are like bells? And a certain style of ringing like, church bells? I'm not kidding you, beyond boring, but I hung in there 'til almost the end. Peter Wimsey continues to delight (despite his own predilection for bell ringing) but I wouldn't recommend this book, even to Quasimodo himself. (PS, the image I've included isn't the cover I had, in case my old friend Anonymous drops by and has something to say. As he always does.)

Now, I know there are some hard-core Sayers fans out there so I patiently await your recommendations before I return to that shelf. I'm not giving up on you, Dorothy!

The American Painter Emma Dial

2010-06-03T16:07:00.000-07:00

I picked up The American Painter Emma Dial on our trip to South Beach about a month ago. It caught my eye because I'd heard some buzz about it in Chicago and the author, Samantha Peale, went to The School of the Art Institute (Hey! So did *I*, and yet, I remain an unpublished author.)

It's not exactly a "beach" book - it requires a bit of high-functioning brain activity, exploring the idea of The Artist, creativity, and ownership. Emma Dial is an assistant to a famous (fictional) artist, Michael Freiburg. Freiburg describes his paintings to Dial who executes them flawlessly while he takes all the credit for the work. Some readers might be surprised to hear about this type of relationship in the contemporary artist's studio, as we live in an age that identifies with the art hero as, specifically a solo genius. Of course, it's not unusual for many of today's artists to work as a team. What's interesting is that Dial doesn't seem to resent the fact that her work is identified as her boss's, merely that she isn't given more credit, and also that, as she spends all her creative time creating his art, she has no time or energy left over for her own.

While the book reads like an insider's view of the art world, the themes easily appeal to anyone whose creative work suffers while working for the man.

Peale's writing style is straight-forward, sometimes startlingly so. She writes, "We lay close. He wiped his dick on the sheet, drew me to him, with his arm across my shoulders." Ewww. I appreciated what she didn't describe. Mainly: the art, which allowed me to imagine the paintings as I chose. (For me, something akin to Gerhard Richter.)

Peale herself worked in the studio of Jeff Koons and the "Reading Group Guide Interview", normally ignored but in this case interesting, contained some fascinating tidbits about her own experience as an artist's assistant. But those looking for a roman à clef are apparently misguided. "When I worked for Jeff Koons he encouraged me to do my own work." says Peale. "He always had the time and interest to find out what I was up to and serve up some uncanny insight."

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour

2010-05-27T19:15:00.000-07:00

Continuing my revisitation of J.D. Salinger, did I extract my Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour, an Introduction from the shelf.

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters unfolds in that brilliant way, revealing pieces bit by bit, including that marvelous title.

Seymour is exquisite and indulgent, a dream to read. For fans of the Glass family, and me reading these stories so close together, it, to borrow a phrase from The Dude, really ties the room together. Told from the perspective of Buddy, it's Buddy who tells us that he wrote many of the stories in Nine Stories, even those that don't have to do with the Glass family, like "Teddy". No less than a meditation on art and artist, "Buddy" writes some killer lines, like "When he was twenty-two, he had one special, not thin, sheaf of poems that looked very, very good to me, and I, who have never written a line longhand in my life without instantly visualizing it in eleven-point type, rather fractiously urged him to submit them for publication somewhere." and "You can't argue with someone who believes, or just passionately suspects, that the poet's function is not to write what he must write but rather, to write what he would write if his life depended on his taking responsibility for writing what he must in a style designed to shut out as few of his old librarians as humanly possible." Buddy bristles at the idea that Seymour's art is based on biography, that old saw that true art comes from the imagination - it's one I don't particularly believe in because I think it's generally used as a defense of art by men and a way to discard art by women, but I never get tired of the argument.

I'm waiting with baited breathe to hear if any more stories will be published. Rumor has it that he had piles of stories about the Glasses.

The Plot Against America

2010-05-16T17:05:00.000-07:00

In The Plot Against America, Philip Roth writes an alternate history to WWII in which, instead of going to war, America doesn't re-elect Franklin Roosevelt but instead Charles Lindberg, who becomes an ally of Hitler.

The story is told from the perspective of a young, Jewish boy in Newark whose parents view with immediate suspicion the change in leadership and the direction of the country. A family vacation to DC reveals the first public expressions of anti-semitism the family faces and soon after the oldest son is recruited to be part of a program to send young Jewish boys to the "heartland" to work on farms. He returns with less respect for his parents and deeply ingrained with the lessons he learned in "real America."

Mr. Mawhinney owned not just one farm but three--the lesser two rented to tenants - land that had been in his family going back nearly to the days of Daniel Boone, and my father owned nothing more impressive than a six-year-old car. Mr. Mawhinney could saddle a horse, drive a tractor, operate a thresher, ride a fertilizer drill, work a field as easily with a team of mules as with a team of oxen; he could rotate crops and manage hired men, both while and Negro; he could repair tools, sharpen plow points and mowers, put up fences, string barbed wire, raise chickens, dip sheep, de-horn cattle, slaughter pigs, smoke bacon, sugar-cure ham- and he had raised watermelons that were the sweetest and juiciest Sandy had ever eaten.

The anti-semitism grows stronger and stronger until eventually the US experiences something quite similar to Kristallnacht.

What Roth's book illustrates is how easily compliancy can lead to vast human rights violations. Published in 2004, it seems quite likely that the book was influenced by the liberties of the Bush administration, although I haven't read anything by Roth himself about that. For me, what really struck home, after some additional research, was the untold story of Charles Linderberg and other notable historical figures like Henry Ford, who are no less than national icons and symbols of all that is good about American ingenuity and capitalism, but were both anti-semites and used a fair amount of their political capital to promote that agenda. (There's a very helpful postscript in the paperback version that includes a "note to the Reader" and a "A True Chronology of the Major Figures" that provides more information.) Many of the hateful comments made by those characters in the book are taken directly from public speeches made by those men. (The postscripts reveals that history has literally been re-written in which re-publications of Lindberg's journals omit anti-semitical statements.)

Roth seems determined to expose Linderberg and Ford for the contributions of hate they added to the political and social atmosphere and I think that's a worthwhile endeavor. Ignoring their faults does a disservice to people who work for peace and, well, shows us that history is often a lie. And, of course, it is.

Aside from providing a lot of fodder for thought, the book is very entertaining and readable, as almost all of Roth's work is. I've never been disappointed by him with the exception of his 1971 Our Gang, which I think I just didn't have the historical perspective to appreciate. If you've never read Roth before, I'd suggest Goodbye, Columbus, which is one of my favorites - but, I certainly haven't read all of his stuff and would appreciate your suggestions if you have!

Nine Stories

2010-05-02T17:06:00.000-07:00

After re-reading J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zoe, I re-read Nine Stories as well. It begins with A Perfect Day for Bananafish, an at-first charming and mysterious and ultimately alarming little story about the eldest Glass child, Seymore, on a beach vacation with his wife. That story's shocking ending rather keeps the reader on their toes for the rest of the collection. I'm quite fond of The Laughing Man, about a young boy who idolizes this young man who's kind of like a boy scout leader that all the boys call the Chief.

I like how many of the stories have a little mystery that unravels, like Down at the Dinghy, in which the maid has said or done something she shouldn't have and doesn't become clear until the end. Or Teddy, the last story, about another young boy of preternatural intelligence or perhaps (no spoilers) something else? I think all the stories highlight Salinger's incredible skill in the realm of the short story, and how in a few short pages he creates such a rich landscape of history and language and suspense.

From Teddy:

"I have a very strong affinity for the them. They're my parents, I mean, and we're all part of each other's harmony and everything," Teddy said. "I want them to have a nice time while they're alive, because they like having a nice time... But they don't love me and Booper - that's my sister - that way. I mean they don't seem able to love us just the way we are. They don't seem able love us unless they can keep changing us a little bit. They love their reasons for loving us almost as much as they love us, and most of the time more. It's not so good, that way."

I mean, wow. You could just spend the next two weeks thinking about that handful of sentences, couldn't you?

Unnatural Death

2010-05-02T14:05:00.000-07:00

I picked up a Dorothy Sayers' book in South Beach at a fine little book store on Lincoln Road. I'd heard her mentioned reverently on some of the various book blogs I read and I was not! Disappointed! The book I somewhat randomly selected from her series was Unnatural Death, first published in 1927. It features a Lord Peter Wimsey, this wealthy dude who's really great at solving mysteries. He's kind of like Jeeves and Wooster rolled into one person, with a little Sherlock Holmes (He likes comparing himself to Holmes, as a matter of fact.)

The mystery in question is the death of an older woman for whom there is no sign of foul play and yet Peter Wimsey has a suspicion that she was murdered and sets out to solve it. Apparently the book was quite topical when it was published, relating to a change in inheritance laws which caused me to recall Austen and even consider looking up the definition of an "entail." (Just to consider, not to do, ultimately.)

Well, I thought it was absolutely marvelous and I intend to read many many more books by Sayers. It's very British, very funny, very smart and kind of scary! (I got spooked at the end!) Here's a passage that made me laugh:

"Your friend's going to be left behind," said Mrs. Cropper as the train moved out."

"That would be very unlike him," replied Mr. Murbles, calmly unfolding a couple of rugs and exchanging his old-fashioned top-hat for a curious kind of travelling cap with flaps to it. Mrs. Cropper, in the midst of her anxiety, could not help wondering where in the world he had contrived to purchase this Victorian relic. As a matter of fact, Mr. Murbles' caps were specifically made to his own design by an exceedingly expensive West End hatter, who help Mr. Murbles in deep respect as a real gentleman of the old school.

Night

2010-04-18T09:30:00.000-07:00

Recently I had a desire to read something really excellent, so I went to my bookshelves and pulled out Nobel Peace Prize winning author Elie Wiesel's Night, which has been getting a lot of press since the the 2006 re-translation by Wiesel's wife, Marion, and a new preface. It's a slim volume of 120 pages but the weight on the soul is quite heavy.

Wiesel's novel, which was originally written in Yiddish and translated to French in 1958, is about his experience as a young Jewish boy from Transylvania who was sent to concentration camps (Auschwitz then Buchenwald) in 1944. Weisel and his father were immediately separated from his mother and sister after a harrowing train ride to the camp (the mother and the sister were killed immediately).

The book is hopeless and heart-wrenching and the fact that he survived at all is rather astounding. What Wiesel makes clear is that those who did survive were robbed of their humanity - he describes how his body sort of went on autopilot, as, starved and abused, he nevertheless was able to run and work for long periods. He describes how men killed each other for a piece of bread, and how, ultimately, he turned his back on his father for fear that he would be beaten himself. Wiesel's honesty about his own most shameful moments are, simply, agonizing to read. He is a brave, brave man to expose himself. However painful to read, his book is a gift. He writes in his preface:

For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear; his duty is to bear witness for the dead and the for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.

The Harlot by the Side of the Road

2010-04-17T08:37:00.000-07:00

The Harlot by the Side of the Road: Forbidden Tales of the Bible, by Jonathan Kirsch is not so much about "forbidden tales". They're tales that are right there in the bible (I went and looked up a couple of them on my own). But they're the stories that priests and pastors and Sunday School teachers don't dwell on or even approach because they don't fit into the common narrative of the judeo-christian faith.

I would imagine that most folks from a Christian background would be unfamiliar with the stories in the book (according to the author, Rabbis also avoid these stories). I was familiar with a few, only because of my Art History background and a possible penchant for incestuous scenes in previous centuries. For example, one of the stories that Kirsch illustrates is that of Lot and his daughters. Lot and his family, as some of you might know, lived in Soddam, a city which God destroyed but allowed this one family to escape. As they were leaving, Lot's wife "looked back" and was immediately turned into a pillar of salt. Lot and his daughters eventually ended up in an isolated place and thought that the whole population of the world was destroyed. So, the daughters had sex with Lot to repopulate the earth. Look it up. Genesis 19:31-38. (Hendrick Goltzius, 1616)
Actually, from my own experience of growing up in a conservative Lutheran church, I remember very well the story of Lot and his wife, but I certainly don't remember being told the bit with the daughters. Our church was not the kind that entertained questions of any kind, so, "Why did his wife turn into SALT?" was the sort of thing that was answered with, "Why don't you sit there and be quiet?" And my family wonders why I don't want to go to church with them.

Kirsch copies various texts from the Bible, and then narrates it again for folks who have trouble parsing out the language. Then, he examines the history of the story and any cultural issues in the past or present that might apply. So, for the story of Lot and his daughters, he'll suggest that Lot, who was clearly not a righteous man, was more of a classic buffoon and the story would surely have "gripped the ancient reader." Oh, and I forgot the part where Lot offers his daughters to this angry mob of people to rape? That's because, Kirsch explains, the head of household must do absolutely anything he can to appease his "guests".

Kirsch's point, which he reiterates frequently, is that the bible is chock-full of these crazy stories which, in fact, do not carry a moral or didactic tale, but are simply entertaining and complex. "I hope to take back the Bible from the strict and censorious people who wave it in our faces and to restore it to the worldly man and woman who will appreciate the flesh-and-blood passions that are described in the Holy Scriptures." His approach is similar, but not as damning as Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus, which challenges the idea that the Bible is the directly translated Word of God but rather just a bunch of made-up stuff that's been deliberately or casually mistranslated for hundreds of years. Ehrman ultimately rejects the bible completely, which is not what happens to Kirsch at all.

I thought the book was really well-put together. I usually read a chapter, then was like, "No way." and then I'd go look it up in my own dusty Bible, then I'd tell my husband, then I'd read another chapter. Kirsch refers to a bunch of feminist Bible scholars (I didn't even know there was such a thing!) that I'd like to check out as well.

So we might conclude from an open-eyed reading of the forbidden texts of the Bible that the fundamental truth is that there is no fundamental truth. Instead, we are invited to join the rest of humanity in a restless, ceaseless search to discern some moral order in a chaotic universe. We are challenged by the Bible itself to figure out who God is and what God wants - and that is the most disturbing revelation of all.

Abundance

2010-04-17T08:00:00.001-07:00

Abundance: A Novel by Marie Antoinette, by Sena Jeter Nasland is historical fiction about (you guessed it) Marie Antoinette. It's extremely well-researched and includes, as far as this semi-M.A.-dabbler can tell, just about every real-life quote that's documented by the former queen of France, and major historical details from the Necklace Scandal to, natch, the French Revolution. It's also the book upon which Sophia Coppola based her 2006 movie, Marie Antoinette (my review).

Jeter Naslund is a poetic writer, given to long flourishes, which are really fun at first but get old after a while. I also read (most of) her Ahab's Wife about (you guessed it...) but didn't finish it. In fact, I didn't finish Abundance but ended up skipping large portions of it. I was interested in how she wrote The End, which, I think I do not have to avoid spoilers here - suffice to say that The End is rather startling and beautiful - what she creates is an image of a young woman who's been raised her entire life to appease and to charm, to make herself amenable and that's what she does right up until her head gets removed from her body.

Breathe, Eyes, Memory

2010-03-27T16:16:00.000-07:00

Breathe, Eyes, Memory is by Haitian author, Edwidge Danticat, 1998. I first learned about Danticat on the New Yorker Fiction podcast. Danticat read a story by Junot Diaz, and later, Diaz read one of her stories. Diaz spoke so highly of Danticat that his recommendation was enough for me.

Breathe, Eyes, Memory is a book about a young girl, Sophie, who lives with her aunt in Haiti. Her mother lives in New York and soon sends for her. She lives with her mother for a little while, and then there's a quick fast forward when Sophie returns to Haiti with her own daughter to deal with some family issues. (I don't think I'm ruining it for you.)

Danticat weaves in some big themes: diaspora, the abuse cycle, sexuality, family, matriarchy. Her description of life in Haiti is both beautiful and sometimes a bit shocking. Sophie's mother begins what she calls "testing" her in an attempt to verify her virginity. Sophie realizes this is a pervasive practice in her culture and comes up with a fairly drastic way to make it stop. She hates the practice and suffers psychological repercussions, as did her mother, and as did her mother.

Haitian men, they insist that their women are virgins and have their ten fingers.

According to Tante Antie, each finger had a purpose. It was the way she had been taught to prepare herself to become a woman. Mothering. Boiling. Loving. Baking. Nursing. Frying. Healing. Washing. Ironing. Scrubbing. It wasn't her fualth, she said. Her ten fingers had been anmed for her even before she was born. Sometimes, she even wished she had six fingers on each hand so she could have two left for herself.

Something that surprised me is that Danticat's writing is extremely simple. Aside from the somewhat frequent multilingual text, I was generally not wow-ed by her writing, although I appreciate how extremely accessible it was, and think this would be a really excellent book for young women. I remember Diaz saying that the way she writes is actually a rather complex accomplishment for a writer, I'm not sure I get that, but I really respect his opinion. The last two pages, I will say, were absolutely beautifully written, and I suspect the simplicity of the language for the majority of the book made those last few pages all the more spectacular.

Franny and Zooey

2010-03-16T19:07:00.000-07:00

After JD Salinger died, I got that old familiar craving to read The Catcher in the Rye (for the __ time?) and, horror, it was not on my shelf. But there was Franny and Zooey, which I haven't read for quite a while. Dave Eggers wrote a lovely bit in the New Yorker re: the influence of JD Salinger, which almost goes without saying for a person like Eggers, forgoodnesssakes. These parts struck me:

I read “The Catcher in the Rye” the average number of times for a young person my age—which is to say, every few years between when I was sixteen and twenty-six or so.

Hey, meeee tooooo!!!!

His is still my favorite dialogue, the dialogue that rings truest, that’s at once very naturalistic and musical; it’s really remarkable how difficult it is to do what he does between quotation marks.

I think what's really interesting about his dialogue is, take for example, our Holden Caulfield - his language is pretty dated, but it remains so immensely readable! But, that sentence really made me want to go back and read Salinger with a more critical eye.

After he died I read that Salinger became a Buddhist as well as a semi-reclusive, so it was with only a small amount of surprise to rediscover (me and my memory!) Franny (the first of two short stories in the slender 1961 book) is about a young woman practicing Buddhist-style mediation with a Christian prayer. What I found remarkable about the story, as I read it again, was what brilliant control Salinger had over the narrative structure (and yes, that delicious dialogue) and in no more than 44 pages we learn so much about the characters. Zooey continues the arch and further examines (I don't think I'm ruining it for you...) the act of the repetition of the Jesus Prayer and delves even further into the marvelous Glass family. I found the both stories near-transcendent, they were so beautifully crafted and told.

And what really struck me, as I re-read these stories, was how much Salinger and one of my other favorite childhood books, From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E. L. Konigsburg inspired me for a life of arts, literature, and, dare I say it? Sophistication and education (me and Wes Anderson, right?) And to live in NY, which A Certain Husband continues to resist...