Fun Home (A Family Tragicomic)

I read a chapter of Alison Bechdel's Fun Home in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007 (ed. Dave Eggers). Usually the Nonrequired books are filled with amazing things. The 2007 version was uneven, to say the least - but it had a couple of gems. The first is an essay by Conan O'Brien (a commencement address to a high school), which is worth the price of the book (or at least sitting down in your local bookstore for the 15 minutes it takes to read) and the second is that chapter that introduced me to Bechdel.

Fun Home is a memoir about Bechdel and her family. Her father was the director of a funeral home, and "fun home" was their nickname for the building. Bechdel's story-telling and artistry are really quite breathtaking. Fun Home chronicles her own awareness of her sexuality as a child and a young adult, and her growing understanding of her father's homosexuality, which was largely a shameful secret to him. Bechdel beautifully and honestly writes about her relationship with her father - a man who was not outwardly loving or affectionate, but intellectually challenging and in other ways, supportive.

Fun Home is one of those comic books that prove what a "high" art form they can be - Bechdel relates her story to James Joyce's Ulysses, and includes references to dozens of other books and influential works of literature. I found myself wanting to take notes to put together a hell of a reading list.

Bechdel also writes another strip - Dykes to Watch Out For - it looks like they're mostly online.

I'd recommend Fun Home to just about anyone - but especially comic book readers. It's a sensitive and amazing story, and I think she proves how useful the medium is for memoirs!

The Bean Trees

I was not very impressed by The Bean Trees, by Barbara Kingsolver (1988). I think her Poisonwood Bible is close to brilliant, and now I don't know whether or not to read Pigs in Heaven, which is sitting on my shelf (any opinions?)

The Bean Trees is about a young woman who, for no particular reason, decides to leave her hometown in Kentucky for parts unknown. On her journey, she congratulates herself for not getting pregnant in high school, changes her name, and is given a nameless child by strangers during a brief stop. She keeps her.

Her car breaks down in Arizona (where Kingsolver lives) and there she stays, getting by with the help of kindly locals who spill out homespun advice. I am not a fan of proffered hillbilly homilies given as if they were incredibly wise nuggets of truth. With about one per page, these statements made me gag again and again. "Everybody deserves her own piece of the pie", "If the truth was a snake, it would have bit me" and so on...


At times the book approaches a kind of Tales of the City sort of philosophy - in that what it's really "about" is people choosing less traditional lifestyles, raising their children in different ways, and creating a matriarchal society for themselves. But while Tales of the City is really interesting and compelling, I wasn't really interested in the characters of The Bean Trees.

Because there's essentially no plot, the book really drags through the middle, and I found myself turning more than one page at a time to make it through to the end. Quite disappointing.

Murder in the Dark

I just finished another book of short stories by Margaret Atwood called Murder in the Dark. These are short, short stories, and I finished the slim volume in a matter of hours all together, but it really took several days because after each story I had to close it and think about it for a while.

This 1983 book blew my mind kind of like her more recent Moral Disorder did. It's strongly feminist (natch), with a lot of rather virulent (but right on) reactions to patriarchy. "Simmering" is a story about men taking over the kitchens of the world (it begins, "It started in the backyards.") and then turning cooking into a masculine act and a type of supremacy. As if to say, it doesn't matter if we change the traditional gender roles, men will find a way to turn it into a power play.

Several stories, like "Women's Novels" and "Happy Endings" address books and the reading and writing of books. If the term chick lit had been invented then, it would have been in "Women's Novels", where Atwood brilliantly plays with simple language in a way that's both hilarious and insightful:

Men's novels are about men. Women's novels are about men too but from a different point of view. You can have a men's novel with no women in it except possibly the landlady or the horse, but you can't have a women's novel with no men in it. Sometimes men put women in men's novels but they leave out some of the parts: the heads, for instance, or the hands. Women's novels leave out parts of the men as well. Sometimes it's the stretch between the belly button and the knees, sometimes it's the sense of humour. It's hard to have a sense of humour in a cloak, in a high wind, on a moor.

When You are Engulfed in Flames

When You are Engulfed in Flames is the latest book of short stories/essays by David Sedaris. I'm a big Sedaris fan, so I broke down and bought the hardcover, which I usually don't do, but I couldn't wait. Possibly it is better to wait for the softcover, but it's a very enjoyable read. Not nearly as laugh-out-loud funny as Me Talk Pretty One Day, but not as mournful as ... oh, I forget which one... where he writes about his mother dying.

I'd already read several of the essays in various other publications - The New Yorker and GQ and so on. Because they were great stories, I was thrilled to read them again. The best is probably "Cry Baby" about his seatmate on a plane crying throughout his journey. And the last third or so of the book is about his three-month trip to Japan to quit smoking. It's beyond self-indulgent, but that's also partly the point.

My favorite essays were the ones that made me laugh and then surprised me at the end by turning the table toward seriousness, like "Cry Baby" or "All the Beauty You Will ever Need" which address a certain view of homosexuality:

It's astonishing the amount of time that certain straight people devote to gay sex - trying to determine what goes where and how often. They can't imagine any system outside their own, and seem obsessed with the idea of roles, both in bed and out of it. Who calls whom a bitch? Who cries harder when the cat dies? Which one spends more time in the bathroom? I guess they think that it's that cut-and-dried, though of course it's not. Hugh might do the cooking, and actually wear an apron while he's at it, but he also chops the firewood, repaires the hot-water heater, and could tear off my arm with not more effort than it takes to uproot a dandelion.

You know what I find most curious about this book? At the end there's an "About the Author" paragraph which reads:

David Sedaris's half-dozen books have been translated into twenty-five languages, including Estonian, Greek, and Bahasa. His essays appear frequently in The New Yorker and are heard on Public Radio International's This American Life.

I just find that so odd. Do you think he wrote that himself? Bahasa? What the hell is that?

BTW, the cover art is from a less-well known painting by van Gogh - so, you see, he did have a little sense of humor!

Infidel

Infidel is an autobiography by Ayaan Hirsi Ali - you may have heard of her. She was born in Somalia, and eventually moved to The Netherlands as a refugee where she met the director Theo van Gogh. They made a short film together and he was killed by a Muslim extremist. (I'm not ruining the book, by the way - aside from being all over the news, that's all spelled out in the first few pages.)

The first part of Hirsi Ali's book describes her life growing up in Africa. She had a pretty terrible childhood, and it's rather agonizing to read. I don't really like her writing style, which sort of goes like, and then this terrible thing happen, and then this terrible thing happened, and then this terrible thing happened...

I think she spent so much time describing her horrendous childhood for two reasons - she's trying to illustrate how difficult life is for young girls and women in the various Muslim countries and communities she lived in, and also because (she's very upfront about this) she lied in her process to get refugee status in The Netherlands, and was trying to justify her right to be there.

The second half of the book explains her experience in Holland, her intellectual awakening, her feminist awakening, and her entry into politics. Particularly after 9/11, she starts to question Islam. She writes:

I didn't want to do it, but I had to: I picked up the Quran and the hadith and started looking through them, to check. I hated to do it, because I knew that I would find Bin Ladin's quotations in there, and I didn't want to question God's word.

While so many in the west were concerned about a general backlash against Muslims and all basically all Middle Easterners, she holds that it's not a faith of peace, but a faith that's rooted in violence and, in practice, not only tolerates but encourages treating women badly and beating children. Again, she writes:

Most Muslims never delve into theology, and we rarely read the Quran; we are taught in in Arabic, which most Muslims can't speak. As a result, most people think that Islam is about peace. It is from these people, honest and kind, that the fallacy has arisen that Islam is peaceful and tolerant...True Islam, as a rigid belief system and a moral framework, leads to cruelty.

I'm all for questioning organized religion. Hirsi Ali rightly points out that the messages of religious texts we have today have been heavily influenced for centuries by the writings of men. Her message, that Islam is wrong, strikes me (who has a small amount of respect for the freedom of religion) as a simplistic response to outrageously complex reasons for violence in various societal groups. The fact that she now works for a right wing "think tank" in Washington DC (that also boasts Newt Gingrich as a "fellow") makes me wonder what her intentions really are. She certainly is for more integration of immigrants into the lands where they immigrate - but is she for the dissolution of Islam?

She's supposedly motivated by improving the lives of Islam women. How Feminism and ultra-conservativism got so mixed up, I'll never understand. But, no matter how frustrating I found her book, she made me think about these issues a little more. Even though I think she's a little bit of a crackpot, she did make me question a few of my own opinions about these issues.

Here's the short film she made with van Gogh. It's about 10 minutes long.

Small Ceremonies

Small Ceremonies (1976) is by Carol Shields, author of one of my favorite books, The Stone Diaries. If you haven't read The Stone Diaries, I implore you, get thee to a bookstore (especially if you're from Indiana). Although I like just about everything she's written, her other work hasn't wowed me like 'Diaries - until now!

Small Ceremonies is a short book, with chapters split by months (less than a year) of a woman's life. During this time, Judith, a wife, mother and author, grapples with a couple of life's mysteries (which I'll let you read for yourself). What I found so exciting about Small Ceremonies was how this woman, even though she's, you know, kind of old-ish, is still asking herself questions about her own art (writing biographies), discovering that deconstructionist truth that you can never really sum up a life in something so simple as words on a page (the same is true in Shield's book!)

With a strong feminist view, a lot of humor and a theoretical look at the art of writing, this intellectually stimulating book rivals that old favorite of mine (which won the Pulitzer Prize, if you need more convincing).

Running with Scissors

Read Running with Scissors: A Memoir by Augusten Burroughs for my new book club. A few days before I started reading it, I got my hair done, and the girl who dried my hair was nuts about A. Burroughs, and told me what a great writer he was and how he's like David Sedaris, only better. I'll tell ya, he ain't no David Sedaris. Where Sedaris is a great writer, hilarious, cultured, and sentimental without being cloying, Burroughs is ham-fisted, dull, and not at all funny. I dont' know why people are always going on about how hysterical it is - I never so much as cracked a smile.

Misquoting Jesus

I've been wanting to read Misquoting Jesus ever since I heard a great interview on NPR with the author, Bart Ehrman, on Fresh Air. Ehrman is a Biblical scholar, or textual critic, as he calls himself. He explains in the book (and the radio interview) how he used to be very religious - a "born-again" Christian, who, like many Christians, believed that the Bible was the inspired word of God, which was transmitted to the original writers of the New Testament and written down by them. Ehrman explains in the introduction his own sort of unravelling spiritual journey, where the more he learned about the Bible as a Christian scholar the less reliable a text he found it to be.

The main thesis of the Misquoting Jesus is that the Bible, as we know it, has gone through a fairly ridiculous number of changes since the original, which doesn't even exist any more. Ehrman figures the earliest copies available to us are something like copies of copies of copies of copies of copies, and even when comparing early copies, he and other textual critics have found vast discrepancies between copies. Whether purposefully or ignorantly, scribes of various books of the Bible have made mistakes as they copied, by hand. He illustrates the various reasons these mistakes might have been made, and their humorous or shocking results - for example - turns out that famous line and it's accompanying story, "He that's without sin should throw the first stone" is totally made up. Meaning, it's not in the early, reliable copies, and shows up out of nowhere in a later manuscript, and gets integrated into later versions.

I was quite interested to learn more about this early history of the Bible and how it was created, who read it, how people read, and how people wrote. I think for the most part Ehrman writes a clear history, although he doesn't really write about the history of the Old Testament at all, just the New, and, I should think anyone without a decent background in Christian theology might be sort of lost. In some areas, I wished he given a more thorough bibliography. A few of times I found myself wondering exactly which sources he was talking about, and where they were and who had access to them, for example. Another thing I found slightly annoying was that there were some really bad copies of images from early manuscripts. In my work at the Art Inst. I saw some amazing early manuscripts, and they're full of incredible colors and gilt - color illustrations would have been beautiful - the black and white was worthless.

It seems that Ehrman might have been trying to balance writing a widely appealing book and writing a scholarly book. Essentially he's writing a deconstructionist's analysis of the Bible with a fair amount of semiotics thrown in, without ever using the words "deconstruction" and "semiotics". Ultimately, Ehrman's point of view is that to read anything is to change it - because when you read something, you process it in your own mind, into your own understanding of language and your own world view, in a way that you can understand. Early scribes who changed the Bible for whatever reasons simply physically manifested this principle in their copy jobs. It's a principle that doesn't just apply to the Bible, but actually anything you read (or see or hear...)

Misquoting Jesus answered a lot of questions I had about the process the Bible went through in the early C.E.. I'm also from a background where the Bible is meant to be the unquestioned, inerrant word of God, and that was a frustrating, aggravating point of view for me, and it was somehow very satisfying to read a book that explained why there are so many inconsistencies and oddities in it.

To be clear, I don't think reading this book is going to turn you into an atheist, or necessarily radically alter your beliefs - but, it's sure to make all readers do some deep thinking, and what could be wrong with that?

Ophelia

I'm a big fan of Shakespeare. I've studied his work, I've taken multiple Shakespearean acting classes - I'll watch any play, I've been to Stratford. I've been to the Globe. I love it when people do interesting things with his plays, like set them in various time periods, play around with costumes, with gender roles - whatever - I love it all - because his work is so transcendent - his themes are timeless.

So, when I saw Ophelia, by Lisa Klein, I thought - why not? The back of the book told how it was a "reimagining" of Hamlet and read blah blah blah In desperation, Ophelia devises a treacherous plan to escape from Elsinore forever... with one very dangerous secret. That could only mean one thing - that somehow Ophelia does not drown, but rather skips town, pregnant with Hamlet's baby.

Spoiler alert: that's exactly what happens.

Hamlet, the play, is like the perfect story - it begins and ends at the perfect time. It begins: Hamlet's dad is dead, everything's in turmoil - it begins with a question: Who's there? It ends with one hell of curtain drop: everybody's dead. One of the big problems with Ophelia is that it starts way before the perfect beginning, and it ends way after the proper ending. It's unfortunate that Ophelia, like most of the women in Shakespeare's plays, has little character development. It's natural to want to tell more of her story, but I think where Klein goes wrong is trying to hard to match her novel to the play (there are some really lame bits, where, for example, Ophelia might wander by someone and overhear them saying something like, "The play's the thing!") whereby it's necessary for Hamlet and Ophelia to merely pretend that they are "mad." It felt as if she were fighting too hard against the play instead of just moving ahead with her own narrative.

In Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, he works with the play, not struggling to explain or work around the difficult sections, but embracing them for all their absurdity.

About half way through, it occurred to me that maybe Ophelia was meant to be a YA book, which, it turns out, it is. I don't necessarily think that a book that's meant for younger people is or should be inherently more simple or readable, and it irks me that this simple book is meant for teens. A dumbed-down version of Shakespeare benefits no one. I wouldn't recommend it to either young or older readers, simply because it's not intellectually satisfying. It doesn't elaborate on the themes of Hamlet, it doesn't offer new ideas, and the plot's beyond dumb.

Household Saints

Household Saints (1981) is a lovely little novel by Francine Prose. I've also read Prose's Blue Angel, which was supposed to have been titillating but I found completely forgettable. It turns out the most titillating bit was the cover.

Really good cover.

Household Saints is about a group of Italian-Americans, religion, superstition, food, and family. I love reading about other cultures, and this book neatly fit the bill. The characters are those imperfect yet lovable galoots - the main character is a cheating butcher who plays pinochle, you get the idea...

The book manages to transcend mere problems with the mother-in-law, and Prose's ... uh, prose is simple and elegant. What I found interesting was how religion and spirituality played out in the book. Within one family, the daughter is very religious, but the parents are not, causing some conflict. The extent of their religion (they are not a-religious) was never really in question until they had a saint-like daughter. Having a saint-like daughter makes them both more and less religious than they were before.

While religion is a major theme in Prose's book, it's not a morality tale (Thank God! - ha) and doesn't read like (heaven forbid [somebody stop me!]) Christian lit.

The Book of Other People

The Book of Other People is a book of short stories edited by Zadie Smith. Smith writes in her introduction that the only guideline was to "make somebody up" and that the writers donate the stories on behalf of 826 New York, to whom all the proceeds of sale go, apparently. If you're not familiar with the various 826 organizations, you really should check it out. It's an amazing program to help young people, and to stir the creative juices. It was started by Dave Eggers, and, not surprisingly, he and and a lot of other hot young writers (what I wouldn't give to be part of that social group) are featured in The Book of Other People.

Unlike Atwood's Moral Disorder, which, to me, called out to be read front to back, The Book of Other People is merely arranged by character's name, and can be read in any random order without fear upsetting any balance. Skip ahead to A. M. Homes's Cindy Stubenstock, a fabulous story about Ladies Who Buy Art - delicious sort of name-dropping stuff that really made me laugh:

   "We're going from day to night - swapping all the black paintings for white, we sold the Motherwells and the Stills and now she's bringing in Ryman, Richter and a Whiteread bookcase."
    "Sounds great - very relaxing - no color at all."
    "I heard you bought a Renoir in London."
    "We had a good year. I like it so much I want to fuck it."
    "When we got our Rothko - we had sex on the floor in front of it."

Skip the Nick Hornby, it doesn't make any sense. There are several tales told in graphic novel style - one by Daniel Clowes and the other by C. Ware - both terrific.

I'm crazy about Smith's Hanwell Snr, which I wrote about after it was published in the New Yorker. It's worth the price of the book, if you ask me.

Moral Disorder

Moral Disorder (2006) is a book of short stories by perhaps my favorite author, Margaret Atwood. I love her novels, but after reading The Tent and The Penelopiad, I've gained a greater appreciation for her shorter work.

Moral Disorder is a slightly unusual set of short stories because they share a through-line of one character. They are not in "order" of this woman's life, but jump around from various points, and, at times, even spring unexpectedly into the distant past. I thought it was interesting that she chose to write this woman's story in pieces (and how, anyway, can you really sum up a life in 250 pages?) Sometimes I like to skip around when I'm reading short stories, but these were kind of fun to read in order - it seemed that even though they were not chronological, that there was some reason they were in that order.

Hard Times

There's a great article in Bitch magazine, Hard Times by Sarah Seltzer, that addresses the disparity of books by women and reviews by women vs. books and reviews by men in the NYT Book Review. She also lists some misogynist comments by reviews to recent feminist books - the sort of knee-jerk reactions to everyday feminism that we'd like to think the Times would be above. She quotes Toni Bentley’s review of Katha Pollitt’s Learning to Drive:

“An enraged, educated woman (Vagina dentata intellectualis)…is a force to be reckoned with, a kind of intellectual Mike Tyson—though, apparently, she is still not as likely to be seduced into bed as the bombshell bimbo, one reason she’s so irate.”

Vagina dentata intellectualis! Excuse me while I change the name of my blog!

I read a lot of book reviews, and I listen to a fairly ridiculous amount of short stories and fiction on my 'pod, and let me tell you - the number one complaint, the perhaps single complaint I have is that there are not enough women writers being recognized. I don't know why people think "feminism" is such a dirty word - they love to be the first to act like a feminist is some crazy, hair-covered woman likely to fly off the handle. At its most basic, it's just about equality. Like most feminists, Seltzer is just asking for a level playing field.

Venus

It's not easy to read plays. For the most part, they're meant to be seen on stage, and reading them requires a lot of imagination, a different pace from novels, and a modicum of theatre know-how (I can't tell you how many times I've heard people read the character's name before the line).

But, I find reading plays very rewarding - particularly Shakespeare, which benefits from multiple readings, and plays that I want to see, plays that I saw once and want to recreate in my mind...

Venus, Suzan-Lori Parks' play about the so-called Venus Hottentot, is particularly challenging to read because so much is left to the stage directions, or what Parks calls "unconventional theatrical elements" in her note at the beginning. She differentiates between a rest and a spell, and there are frequent passages in the text that read just the characters names and no lines:

The Venus
The Chorus of the Spectators
The Venus
The Chorus of the Spectators
The Venus
The Chorus of the Spectators
The Venus
The Chorus of the Spectators

She also uses inventive spelling (it sometimes read like a text message) to indicate accents or perhaps pace - things that may or may not translate to the stage, but are interesting to read:

The Chorus of the Court
Outrage! Ssanoutrage!
Outrage! Ssanoutrage!
(Order order order order.)

I thought these choices were quite interesting because the play is essentially about looking (if you're unfamiliar with the sad and true story of Saartjie Baartman, she was an African woman who was essentially kidnapped and taken to Europe where she was the object of various vaudevillian/circus freak shows. People paid to look at her and extra to touch her. Even after she died, her pubic area was kept on display in a museum and only buried after repeated appeals from her own country and people.) From an academic point of view, the Venus is really a classic case of the objectified woman - and, beyond that, an African woman. Parks explores this low-point of history and its many aspects - the "other", the non-humanizing, the hyper-sexualizing of the African woman, the pseudo-science applied to non-European standards of beauty, the complicitness of the crowd... the list goes on. I would be interested to see this show on stage one day. Has anyone seen it?

Eyes Wide Open

My friend Sonya ran into someone reading Ursula Le Guin for her amazing blog, People Reading. I've been interested in reading some of her work because she's a pioneering woman in the otherwise pretty male-centric world of sci-fi. In February's Harper's, Le Guin published a response to the various reports on the decline of reading that have come out recently. (I blogged a little about that in January.)

Le Guin's article, Staying Awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading is really amazing, and I encourage you to read it at least once! Aside from challenging the idea that there's a decline in reading (she asserts that, historically, hardly anyone read), she blames the publishing industry for focusing on books with quick returns rather than long-term appeal. Le Guin's not trying to convert non-readers, she's harsh on those people who claim they fall asleep the minute they pick up a book - she's writing to us readers who make time for books - who read wide awake. She writes:

Once you've pressed the ON button, the TV goes on, and on, and on, and all you have to do is sit and stare. But reading is active, an act of attention, of absorbed alertness - not all that different from hunting, in fact, or from gathering. In its silence, a book is a challenge: it can't lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire gunshots in your living room; you have to listen to it in your head. A book won't move your eyes for you the way images on a screen do. It won't move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it. It won't do the work for you. To read a story well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it - everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is not "interactive" with a set of rules or options, as games are; reading is actual collaboration with the writer's mind. No wonder not everybody is up to it.

Like Michael Moore's solution to our national health care crisis, that health care should not be a for-profit business, Le Guin wishes publishing houses and chain bookstores would change their business models. I agree society would benefit from a lot of industries changing from for-profit models to socialist ones, but how do you convince entire, wealthy, capitalist industry leaders to give up their profit margins? Revolution, I guess... Until then we can relish them being healthily skewered in Harper's.

And I'm going to pick up a copy of Le Guin's 1969 Left Hand of Darkness from my local independent bookseller.

Skinny, by Ibi Kaslik

When I was but a teenager, I hate to tell you how many books I read about girls with eating disorders. A lot of these books followed the same formula - an ever so slightly chubby adolescent from an upstanding family has a few pressures and eventually almost dies from anorexia or bulimia. What's interesting is that a lot of these books literally work as How-To books for eating disorders, describing in detail how to get your own! I know I certainly picked up a few bad habits myself from those books.

Skinny is a new book by Canadian Ibi Kaslik, who, not surprisingly, had an eating disorder herself. The main characters in the book are Gizelle and her sister Holly. Gizelle's had to drop out of medical school due to her illness, and Holly, in contrast, is an athlete. Chapters switch the between the perspectives of each girl, with Gizelle's beginning with snippets from a medical text, giving an eerie, dry tone to the emotional story.

Skinny differs from those "anorexic books" of my youth in that, instead of focusing on the obsessive behaviors of the anorexic, Kaslik writes about the obsessive thoughts of her main character. In fact, there is only one scene in the book that describes (briefly) how Gizelle throws up her dinner. Seriously, if you've read any of these books (why can't I remember a single title?) I'm sure you'll agree that this is quite unusual. As I recall, so many of them go into absolutely pornographic detail in how to starve yourself and/or how to most efficiently become a bulimic - as well, of course, of how to hide it from your parents.

Skinny feels much less like a book from the Eating Disorder Genre and more like a really great book about a girl who has an eating disorder. Kaslik's writing is poetic and I think she really challenges the YA description. It's a book that would hold appeal for a wide range of readers. I couldn't put it down.

I am Legend

I was surprised to find out that the Will Smith movie, I am Legend, was based on a 1953 novel by Richard Matheson. According to Wikipedia, the book was highly influential to the now-popular "zombie genre" as well as Stephen King, who said, "without Richard Matheson I wouldn’t be around."

Just to get a few things out of the way, the movie and the book share little in common, besides leaving the world occupied by vampire/zombie-types while the only unaffected person is Robert Neville. Aside from that, it doesn't take place in New York, Neville is (specifically) white, and not a former military dude/brilliant scientist. The zombie-types are actually quite functional, retain their speech and come to taunt him by night and call out his name. The "infection" does not spread in the same way, and perhaps most shockingly, Neville does not have as his soul companion a wonderful dog named Sam.

What it does hold in common is what I found most interesting about the movie (and others like Cast Away): how a person operates day to day in absolute isolation, and, with everyone they loved dead and gone, why they should continue living.

There were a few racial identifiers in the book that I found quite strange (maybe because I had a clear view in my mind of Smith as the main character). The writing is not great (it's a little Stephen King-y, or vice verse) but it's a very interesting story and a quick, fun, read.

The title, by the way, is neatly explained in the book - I'll leave that for you to discover!

Twilight

Twilight (2005) is a YA book by Stephanie Meyer, about a young girl (16?) who moves to Fork, Washington, and before long meets a family of vampires at her high school. I don't think I'm ruining it by telling you that she falls in love with one of them. I found Twilight ridiculously addictive, and I read the approx. 500 pages in a matter of days and am fairly thrilled that there are 3 more for me to read.

Like the vampire tales that came before, Meyer borrows some vampire rules (blood drinking), explains away others, and invents her own (turns out they can go in the sun!). It's difficult not to compare this book to the Buffy the Vampire series, in which a human girl also falls in love with a vampire. A better metaphor for dating the ultimate bad-boy, I can't imagine. The beloved vampires in both Twilight and Buffy (Edward & Angel) are "good" vampires, meaning they don't kill humans for food, which doesn't mean that they don't LONG for blood. As a result, the table is turned on the classic teenage conflict to control their "urges" - rather than trying hard not to have sex, the vampire has to try really hard not to suck the blood of his human girlfriend. It leads to some highly confused snuggling.


I'm simultaneously reading this book called The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (don't laugh, it's really amazing!) by Carol J Adams (1999). Adams makes a compelling case that the patriarchy and meat eating are closely tied, and that women and animals that are eaten are both objectified and denied their humanity (or acknowledgment as sentient beings) and that's why our society is so violent (especially toward women). She calls this the "absent referent", because the being (woman or animal) is objectified to the point beyond which they're acknowledged as beings (ie., we refer to "meat", not say, "a cow", or even "a piece of ass" instead of "a woman".) Much more on this later after I finish it - anywho, Twilight is practically chapter two of Adams book, where the woman is someone who is treated "like a piece of meat" and the vampire (insert teenage bad-boy) literally wants to eat her. Huh.

One frustrating thing about Twilight is that, as it reads as a very old fashioned romance novel (think du Maurier or Brontë), the characters also fit into these very old-fashioned gender roles. I found this mildly disturbing for a contemporary YA book obviously targeted toward young women, and I hope that as the story progresses, the lead character breaks out of her victimized state and becomes more powerful. I think it's a lot more fun to see the classic tales subverted, and instead of waiting for her knight to come and save her, the young woman takes care of business herself.

The Brief History of the Dead

I read The Brief History of the Dead to participate in the first meeting of my sister's book club while I'm visiting her. The book appears to have begun as a short story which was published in the New Yorker in 2003.

The Book Club met last night and largely everyone disliked the book, finding many parts quite tedious and waiting for explanations that never came. The whole thing uses as a jumping off point and a set of rules, an African proverb. It reads that there are three kind of people: living people, living-dead people, who are dead but remembered by the living, and then a third type of person who is dead and not remembered by anyone living.

The book is of the post-apocolyptic variety, and everyone is dying quickly of an air-born virus. It's told from the perspective of the living-dead, as it were, who are in an after-life world. One character survives the virus only because she is living in isolation in Antarctica. Those sections were really weak, as if the author had simply watched March of the Penguins and felt himself expert enough to write about that part of the world. I think he made some disastrous POV choices which caused me to feel completely uninterested in nearly every character. Also his writing style is so uninspired. I'm more interested in great writing than anything else.

But, it was fun having a conversation about a book and I'm going to start my own club when I get home. I never would have chosen this book on my own, and even though I didn't enjoy it, it's good to try something new every once in a while, right? I think these gals are going to have fun with their next book - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, which is excellent, and, because I'm really bossy, I talked them into reading The World to Come, by Dara Horn, as their third book.

The Wig My Father Wore

I picked up The Wig My Father Wore because I was so moved by Anne Enright's The Gathering about a month ago. The Wig surprised me because it's a kind of absurd novel - it's about a woman who's experiencing some emotional problems, and an angel moves in with her. A real angel. He does odd things like paint her entire house, inside the walls and out, and touches her body and removes her nipple and she's very attracted to him.

I wasn't really into the story, which is, as I said, literally absurd, but Enright's writing is so amazing, she could be writing about cleaning up dog shit and I'd be in. In fact, a description of her mother cutting an avocado brought me to my knees. Not only does she make me stop and read some pages over and over again, but I frequently had to put the book down and do a little literary analysis about whether she's more of a post modernist or a deconstructionist (Derrida was never my area). She creates a tempo that carries the whole book, and it rises like a crescendo at the end. I'm going to carry on and read everything she's ever written!