Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters

At our book club meeting for this book, someone had a great idea to go around and say what we hated the most about the book. The funniest answer was - the subtitle: From Dating, Shopping, and Praying to Going to War and Becoming a Billionaire - Two Evolutionary Psychologists Explain Why We Do What We Do.

I actually hated this book so much I can't bare to write much about it, aside from saying Evolutionary Psychology seems to be a new and suspect field in which "scientists" claim that basically, everything we do is motivated by the urge to spread our seed, as it were. Of course, it's a ridiculous argument and there are like, four THOUSAND reasons it's ridiculous.

I'd go so far as to say that this book is dangerous and could easily inspire racism and sexism while excusing inexcusable behavior by claiming that the offender is merely following his natural, biological impulses. One of my friends said, "That book makes me angry beyond words. I would like to hunt down the author and punch him in the face." Me too! Not only that, but a room-full of librarians, book lovers and liberals agreed we'd all like to go out in the street and burn every copy we could get our hands on.

I would never suggest you read this book unless you enjoy being outraged.

Enormous Changes at the Last Minute

I learned about Grace Paley from Selected Shorts, a podcast I listen to and admire. It's nice to hear her stories read, and read well. I probably should have tried reading some of the stories in this collection out-loud.

Paley's short stories are beautifully written - modern, witty, very American (American immigrant), feminist. Here's an example of a killer opening:

I saw my ex-husband in the street. I was sitting on the steps of the new library.

Hello, my life, I said. We had once been married for twenty-seven years, so I felt justified.

He said, What? What life? No life of mine.

I said, O.K. I don't argue when there's real disagreement. I got up and went into the library to see how much I owed them.

The librarian said $32 even and you've owed it for eighteen years. I didn't deny anything.

Although I found myself emotionally distant from most of her characters, sometimes they crashed right into my world:

Alexandra, in the first summer dress of spring, stood still and watched. She breathed deeply because of having been alone for a year or two. She put her two hands over her ribs to hold her heart in place and also out of modesty to quiet its immodest thud. Then they went to bed in the bedroom and made love until that noisy disturbance ended. She couldn't hear one interior sound. Therefore they slept.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Somewhat ambitiously, I took four books on our nine day Christmas vacation. Long days in a wintery cabin were spent not reading, however, but snuggling on couch with sister and staring adoringly at beloved nephew with husband. Therefore I only read one book, which I started on the airplane out and finished on the airplane in: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson. It's a mystery story that takes place in Sweden. It's a translation, so that may account for what frequently comes off as stilted language.

It's a "page turner", as they say, in the grand tradition of the Dan Browns and Michael Connellys of this world, and of about the same literary merit. It's about a journalist, Mikael Blomkvist, who gets hired by a wealthy business owner to unravel a decades-old family secret. Along the way, a young woman, Lisbeth Salander, becomes involved. She's something of a private investigator and has some unexplained mental condition and social conditioning that leaves her with a different set of moral and ethical values than most of world generally agrees on.

Each section of the book begins with a quote like, "Forty-six percent of the women in Sweden have been subjected to violence by a man." Lending an ostensibly pro-woman, anti-violence theme to the book. The fact that the book glorifies violence toward women in its graphic exploration of the same theme is a bit problematic, to say the least.

I love reading books about different cultures, but this book reads as if the story were in any generic place, only all the places have Swedish names. So, it's not unusual to read a sentence like, "She took the tunnelbana from Zinkensdamm to Östermalmstorg and walked down towards Strandvägen." Also, apparently in Sweden there is a statute of limitations on murder.

I wouldn't recommend this book unless you happen to really love murder mysteries. The author was obviously a huge fan of the genre himself and frequently his characters pick up a book by Sue Grafton or the like for some casual reading. I'm vaguely interested in learning more about Lisbeth, but not enough to read the other books in the series. I'm sure there will be a movie soon enough.

Year in Review: 2009

Last year I started keeping some stats of the books I've read so now I've got charts and everything! Here's how 2009 looked!

Books I read in 2009
Fiction: 34
Non-Fiction: 10
Books by Women: 29
Books by Men: 15

Comparison to 2008Good, my numbers have gone up, and up is always good, right? (That's what they tell me at work, anyway.)

Can you imagine what my chart would look like if I take my own challenge one year and only read one book, over and over? (Middlemarch.)

My favorites of 2009
A Gate at the Stairs
Push
Olive Kitteridge
Pride and Prejudice
Payback
Watch Your Mouth
The Year of the Flood

Happy Reading in 2010!

Points of View

Points of View (1956) is an anthology of short stories I've had at my bedside for about a year now. The stories are arranged by point of view - Interior Monologue, Dramatic Monologue, Diary Narration, Subjective Narration, etc, which will prove uninteresting for those of us who have been reading for a while but might be interesting for young readers. There are, nevertheless, a few great short stories in it - A And P, by John Updike, which improves with every reading - really fantastic story about a young man working at the A And P in a tourist town. The eery The Lottery, by Shirley Jackson, which I just heard for the first time myself on one of my podcasts (I forget, either New Yorker: Fiction or Selected Shorts, both are terrific and you should subscribe if you haven't already. I like to listen to them at night if I'm too tired to read with my eyes.) Jackson's story sticks with you long after you wish you had forgotten it!

I'd been reminded of Flowers for Algernon recently when I read Push. Rereading Daniel Keyes's story confirmed for me that there are some similarities in the two stories, although, of course, Precious is responsible for her own growing knowledge, not some artificial means.

I wouldn't necessarily recommend this particular anthology, but I do love some of these classic short stories.

What Are You Like?

I discovered Anne Enright about a year ago. The Gathering really moved me, and The Wig My Father Wore was a fun literary experience for me.

On a recent trip to NY, we hit our favorite book store - The Strand - for which I had specifically left space in my suitcase. I spied a copy of The Gathering for my friend and What Are You Like? for myself. Like her other books, Enright's incredible prose is relentlessly invigorating. It's easy to get lost in the way she combines words - I think she benefits from multiple readings.

What are you like begins with a fairy-tale-like story of a pregnant woman who tries to undo things - "She pulled him to her every night, as though to make children where there was already a child, as though to unmake the child and let it swim away."

There was a kind of pleasure to it that he had not seen in her before, never mind the crockery in the hot press, the cutlery in bed. The house filled up with unread books, and she sang to the radio as she cleaned.

After that thrilling beginning (Enright has incredible pacing), the book focuses on two seemingly unrelated young women on somewhat similar paths. As the title suggests, she explores why people do the things they do. Themes of identity and nationality emerge:

She took a baby clam on the end of her fork and look at it. So this was who she was. She was a person who picked at her food. She picked at her food because she was a woman. She picked at her food because she was English, because she was Irish. She picked at her food because she was a Capricorn, because when she was a baby she had choked on a on a spoonful of puréed parsnip, because she was a famine gene, or a food-picking gene, or because when she was young her mother told her to sit up straight and not wolf her food. She picked at her food because she was middle class.

It's a lovely book. I suggest reading it. Twice.

Check it out! There's a preview on Google Books:

The Year of the Flood

Margaret Atwood's latest book is The Year of the Flood, a follow-up, in a way, to her 2003 Oryx and Crake.

I did not enjoy Oryx and Crake (you should not consider it a prerequisite), but I did enjoy The Year of the Flood very much. It tells the story, going back and forth in time, of the "waterless flood" - an apocalyptic moment in time that lead to a massive devastation in population. The main character are "God's Gardeners" - a group of people who anticipate the approaching deluge and live off the land, as much as that is possible in a barren landscape. Motivated by a quasi-religion, the doctrine of which is modified along the way to reinforce their teachings (much like, hey, lots of religions!) and make up songs to remind them which weeds and mushrooms are edible.

One of the major themes of the book is food - how over-processed and dubious it is before the flood, how people either eat it or avoid it, like the Gardeners, and how after the flood, there's nothing available but dwindling supplies of pre-packaged food and animal meat, if you've got what it takes to kill the animal. Not surprisingly, a fair number of Gardeners survive, but find it necessary to overcome their strict vegetarianism.

Atwood seems to ascend to no less than visionary status with The Year of the Flood. I read her descriptions of a popular food chain called "Secret Burger" at the same time I was discovering that some yogurt and orange juice brands are not vegetarian (come ON!). I found myself thinking, IS milkweed edible? I'd better pay attention to that rhyme!

Ultimately I found Atwood's book thought-provoking and positive. Lucky for me, my whole reading experience was enhancing by having recently seen her read from the book. What an inspiration she is (not to mention she's 70 years old and writes with such freshness of language!) Here's one of my favorite passages:

Surely I was an optimistic person back then, she thinks. Back there. I woke up whistling. I knew there were things wrong in the world, they were referred to, I'd seen them in the onscreen news. But the wrong things were wrong somewhere else.

By the time she'd reached college, the wrongness had moved closer. She remembers the oppressive sensation, like waiting all the time for a heavy stone footfall, then the knock at the door. Everybody knew. Nobody admitted to knowing. If other people began to discuss it, you tuned them out, because what they were saying was both so obvious and so unthinkable.

We're using up the Earth. It's almost gone. You can't live with such fears and keep on whistling. The waiting builds up in you like a tide. You start wanting it to be done with. You find yourself saying to the sky, Just do it. Do your worst. Get it over with. She could feel the coming tremor of it running through her spine, asleep or awake.

Pictorial Webster's

Pictorial Webster's is getting a lot of press as a charming book. The book itself is beautiful, and the idea is good, but I'm not sure I was utterly charmed by it.

The book features illustrations from early versions of Webster's - copies of engravings and some etchings. It's organized alphabetically, with 20 or so pages devoted to each letter. I LOVE that type of illustration, with repeated lines for shading. But, I thought they chose odd images. It's full of pictures of fish and birds and insects. Listen, you need one fish, under F, one bird, B. Seriously. There were also oddly a handful of images regarding medieval torture devises, like pillories and stocks and a disturbing "ducking stool" which features a woman waving jauntily as if she's on a Ferris wheel.

The back features some rudimentary information re: printing processes, which will probably be somewhat interesting to general audiences (but not me, harrumph). In any event, I'm glad I just borrowed it from the library instead of purchasing it.

The Gate at the Stairs

Lorrie Moore's new book, A Gate at the Stairs, is her much anticipated novel and is getting great reviews for good reason. I started reading it and 20 pages in thought: This can't go on! She writes so beautifully, with so much wit and pleasure in language - and it does go on - she maintains this absolutely brilliant tone and language throughout the whole book.

A Gate at the Stairs is about a young college student who gets a job as a nanny, ostensibly. But what it's really about, and I don't think I'm ruining it for you, is what it's like to be a young college student. And more specifically, a mid-western college student - a subject rather dear to my heart, as I myself was but a lithe, young, art history major a mere mumblemumble years ago. Moore captures Midwestern Culture (you may laugh, but, it's does exist) with all it's feigning humbleness and linguistic creativity:

Prepositions mystified. Almost everyone said "on" accident instead of "by." They said "I'm bored of that" or "Wanna come with?" They pronounced "milk" to rhyme with "elk" and "milieu" as "miloo," as in skip to my loo - when they said it at all. And they used tenses like "I'd been gonna." As in, "I'd been gonna to do that but then I never got around toot." It was the hypothetical conditional past, time and intention carved so obliquely and fine that I could only almost comprehend it, until, like Einstein's theory of relativity, which also sometimes flashed cometlike into my view, it whooshed away again, beyond my grasp... Who else on earth spoke like this? They would look at the tattoo on my ankle, a peace sign, and, withholding judgment but also intelligence, say, "Well, that's different." They'd say the same thing about my electric bass. Or even the acoustic one - That's different! - and in saying it made the same glottal stop that they made pronouncing "mitten" and "kitten."

Moore skewers the misdirected good intentions of a group of well-meaning but ridiculous adopted parents of multi-ethnic children in a series of interactions only overheard by the nanny, upstairs, watching a brood of interracial children. Those parts were exhilarating - Moore really sets an incredible pace in this story.

"'I Been Working on the Railroad.' I've heard her sing that. There's just two things I'm worried about with that: the grammar and the use of slave labor."

I wasn't sure I was hearing things correctly. Her sense of humor was still not always explicit or transparent of of a finely honed rhythm, and it sometimes left me not in the same room with it but standing in the hall. The words "You're serious?" flew out of my mouth.

"Kind of." She looked rigth through me. "I'm not sure." And then she went upstairs, as if to go figure it out. When she came back down she added, "Correct subject-verb agreement is best when children are learning language, so be careful what you sing. It's an issue when raising kids of color. A simple grammatical matter can hold them back in life. Down the road."

While Moore's book reads like a structured story, it's really not - what you think is the main plot is not, themes emerge and then gently fade back, following not that pleasing arch of the classic story, but the one we're all more familiar with: the unpredictable twists of everyday life. I think Moore's a real deconstructionist at heart - and just as I was forming that theory, she verified it for me:

What had I learned thus far in college? You can exclude the excluded middle, but when you ride through, on your way to a lonely and more certain place, out the window you'll see everyone you've ever known living there.

I had also learned that in literature - perhaps as in life - one had to speak not of what the author intended but of what a story intended for itself. The creator was inconvenient - God was dead. But the creation itself had a personality and hopes and its own desires and plans and little winks and dance steps and collaged intent. In this way Jacques Derrida overlapped with Walt Disney. The story itself had feet and a mouth, could walk and talk and speak of its own yearnings!

I learned that there had been many ice ages. That they came and went. I learned there were no mammals original to New Zealand. I learned that space was not just adrift with cold, flammable rocks. Here and there a creature was riding one, despite the Sufic spinning of the rock. The spores of lightless life were everywhere. I think I learned that.

It's one of the finest books I've read this year and I'd recommend it to ALL my Midwestern friends and anyone who's looking for a really incredible read. You won't be disappointed.

People of the Book

People of the Book is Geraldine Brooks' latest novel, recently released in paperback. Brooks won the Pulitzer a few years ago for March (pov: the dad of the Little Women). I didn't read it but I gave it to my sister and she was totally ga-ga over it.

People of the Book's premise was very appealing to me - rare book expert examines ancient Jewish text - neatly combining my love of things Paper and things Jewish History.

Brookses' story is loosely based on the real-life story of the 14th c. Sarajevo Haggadah - an illustrated Jewish prayer book (the fact that it's illustrated in "Christian" style is quite unique) that was only somewhat recently in human history re-discovered. In the book, the paper conservator examines the book, finding a few anomalies (a hair, several fluid residues, a bit of insect wing) which she unravels as far as she can. Interspersed with these histories are the stories of the people who handled/protected/guarded the book. If I'm remembering correctly, each story is first-person pov narrative.

Brooks tells the story in a backward narrative, from finding the person to the previous owner and so on until (no surprise) its creator. That particular structuring didn't work for me, I thought it was ambitious and I appreciate that. What Brooks seems to excel at, beside wonderful storytelling and a few great ideas, is capturing the voice of a variety of characters, not afraid to find the simplicity in some characters' language, and the poetry of intellectual thought in another. Explores Jewish mystisicm and kabala (a similar theme is found in another great book about language: Bee Season come to play. She writes:

It was in the still of the early hours, when the stars blazed in the black sky, that it happened. His fasting, the chill, the brilliant flare of the lamp; suddenly the letters lifted and swirled into a glorious wheel. His hand flew across the parchment. Every letter was afire. East character raised itself and danced spinning in the void. And then the letters merged into one great fire, out of which emerged just four, blazing with the glory of the Almighty's holy name. The power and the sweetness of it were too much for Ben Shoushan, and he fainted.

A reoccurring theme throughout the book is how how the book, the Haggadah, was created under the influence of multiple cultures and religions, and how both the past and future are guided and protected by the cooperation of seemingly incompatible relationships. Brooks illustrates the power of books to connect us and provide common ground in an engaging and challenging way.

Margaret Atwood

This weekend we saw Margaret Atwood read from her new novel, The Year of the Flood at DePaul’s Merle Reskin Theatre. It was so exciting to see her - she's one of my favorite authors and I think she's an absolute genius. The reading was very unusual - there was a choir and a small band and a group of three actors. Atwood and the three actors took turns reading from the text and the choir sang the songs that are part of the book.

The songs were of that rather horrible Sunday-morning-on-tv evangelical crap that's really cheesy and not what I'd call "good". I'm quite sure that the music was meant to be ironic because a certain faction of the characters are called God's Gardeners and I believe they're meant to have a sort-of extremist attitude which I'm sure Atwood doesn't let off the hook easily. She looked like an indulgent granny watching this rather rag-tag group of (I believe) DePaul students singing along to her verses. I really appreciated hearing the songs, even though I didn't enjoy the music, because it will be nice, when I read the book, to know what kind of sound they were meant to have.

I think it was a very clever idea to share the reading with the actors, giving the almost 70-year-old Atwood's voice a break. And, let's face it, not all great writers are great readers (although Atwood was very good - very funny, very dry, just like you'd expect.) The tour is going around the world, and actors and singers are found in each host city, making each performance unique. According to my playbill, all proceeds were donated to environmental groups.

Afterward she signed books - I'd taken my old Handmaid's Tale - my favorite book of all-time! and she signed it for me while I swooned.

I can't wait to get my copy through inter-library loan (I'm more and more opposed to buying books in hardback.) The idea of a waterless flood has been intriguing me.

How to Help your Child Grow Up

So, we've been helping M's gran clean out her house, and she gave us a number of books. A couple of them, I hate to tell you, I took for the sole intention of mocking them for their outdated information, such as How to Help Your Child Grow Up (Angelo Patri, 1948).

Aside from the ridiculous title (whether you "help" them or not, child are going to "grow up" - how about helping them "grow up to be emotionally intelligent"... or somethin'?), I found the book disturbing from the moment I opened the cover. Inside the flap is a montage of photos of shiny, happy, white people with little boys doing woodworking and little girls washing dishes. Turn a few more pages: To the Mothers of America's Children. To me, that says:

A. You fathers can go fuck off
B. Mother's of other countries, fuck off
C. Children from other counties, fuck off

Well, you don't need ME to do a critical analysis for you of the bizarre-o world of the American mid-century, where the acknowledged audience was white, middle-class, Christian, heterosexual and healthy. I found it rather alarming that, at over 300 pages, the book failed to address any real and quite common issues like illnesses, sexuality, or mental or physical challenges.

The author's advice varies from hilarious to downright dangerous. A bit that, by all rights, should have been titled "Dealing with Bullies" was instead called "Cowardice Can Be Cured" and speaks of the "shame" of a young Freddy who "couldn't not seem to hold his own." Parents are told to contact a physician because "cowardice" is most likely a glandular problem. (!!!)

I got a real kick out of the section on kids who have trouble sleeping at night because my sister's 2 year old has been having trouble with that lately. The mother (specifically) is encouraged to "put courage in it's [fear's] place. Teach such a child to say his prayers to himself when he wakes." There you go, C! Just teach that 2 year old to say his prayers!

It's only relatively recently in human history that mankind has acknowledged childhood as we do today. This book, with it bottom-of-the-barrel advice, reminds me that our grandparents and great-grandparents had few resources for raising their kids - perhaps this book was a major step forward in that it didn't advise people to beat the hell out of their kids when they misbehaved and send them out to work in the fields as soon as they were able. Thank god the bar's a little higher now.

The Murder Room

After I posted a "meh" review to P.D. James's Children of Men, a gentle reader left a comment setting me straight P.D.'s sex and encouraged me to read one of her Adam Dalgliesh novels. When I saw The Murder Room, I snapped it up.

Alas, I didn't, uh, even finish The Murder Room, but I love that my guest commenter suggested it (check out her blog, Entre Deux Solitudes) and just because it's not my cup of tea, if you're into mysteries, you'd probably love it.

What I liked: It's really English. One of the characters was always talking about taking a walk on the "heath." It made me absolutely LONG for a walk on the heath, whatever heath is. Reminded me of, after reading The Mill on the Floss, wondering, what the hell is floss?

James's writing is sophisticated, and she never insults the reader. Her writing style (obviously not her topics) reminds me of Barbara Pym, who I've been enjoying lately. I think she's decidedly old-fashioned - I was actually surprised when one of the characters pulled out a cell phone, because I thought it took place much earlier than that.

What I didn't like: The pacing. It's a murder mystery, but the first hundred pages basically just introduces the characters with little action. It moves r.e.a.l.l.y. slow. Sometimes, I like a book with a slow pace, but, in this case I didn't. I ended up skimming and then skipping to the end.

It used to be almost impossible for me to put down a book - I felt like I was giving up on it, and myself. Lately it's merely difficult, but I can do it. When I don't enjoy a book, it gives me a thrill to pass it on to someone I think will enjoy it, or to leave it on a bench in a public place to let fate help it find a home. That's what I'll do with this one, tomorrow.

Going Nowhere

Ha!

Anybody going to read it? Personally, I think if she didn't have the decency to write it, I'm certainly not going to read it. I suppose I could hire someone to ghost-read it for me...

Push

Push is a novel I heard about some time ago and tried to sell my book club on. Most people were largely turned off by the description of the main character: 16, obese, illiterate, pregnant with the child of her father and sexual abused by her mother. I can respect that.

The funny thing is, I just read it a few days ago, and I read the whole damn book almost in one sitting and in less than 24 hours, and even though all those things (and more, I hate to tell you) are true about the main character, Precious (there's a movie by that name coming out soon), it was somehow uplifting and invigorating.

The author's (Sapphire) voice, and the voice she gives Precious is so strong and purposeful. Precious has slipped through the school system until grade 9 but is completely unable to read - when she finally finds a program that invests in her, her pleasure in reading, and the power she finds in reading and writing is awe-inspiring and thrilling. Sapphire writes the book largely from Precious's point of view, complete with colloquialisms and misspellings, and as Precious learns, the language becomes more and more refined. It reminded me, in a way, of the text of Flowers for Algernon, a manipulative story, but with a hell of a trajectory.

Precious is truly an ignorant person with some misplaced allegiances and horrifying impressions of what it is to be good, or lucky. For example, she categorizes everyone she meets by the shade of their skin. But through language and literature, she finds new heroes and even finds empowerment in her own language - what "push", as a verb, becomes is the necessity to find the power within herself to to break out of the horrible situation she lives in, and create a new world for herself and her children.

She say, "Write." I tell her, "I am tired. Fuck you!" I scream, "You don't know nuffin' what I been through!" I scream at Ms Rain. I never do that before. Class look shock. I feel embarrass, stupid, sit down, I'm made a fool of myself on top of everything else. "Open your notebook Precious." "I'm tired," I says. She says, "I know you are but you can't stop now Precious, you gotta push." And I do.

The Wild Things

I picked up a (signed!) copy of The Wild Things by Dave Eggers at the movie, Where the Wild Things Are, last week. Mostly I bought the book because it was signed and I was excited. I honestly think Eggers is a literary hero, but I didn't really love this book. It's quite similar to the movie, and, perhaps more importantly, true to Maruice Sendak's book. (Eggers book is dedicated to Sendak, whom he calls "an unspeakably brave and beautiful man.")

Eggers fills in the blanks for us for Max - where he lives, his family situation, where the costume came from, what happens in the land of the Wild Things, the names of the Wild Things and their various insecurities.

What Eggers explores in the book is how Max is bridging that awkward period between being a child, with really no barometer for what's socially appropriate, to an adolescent that's becoming self-aware. Max's decision to return to his home (I don't think I'm ruining it for you) becomes a rejection of those things wild and a commitment to well, society. Whether it's a choice that any child makes, or a role that all children are simply forced to accept, I'm not sure - for Max, it's more like a choice between certain death and ... dinner.

I'm not sure if I'd necessarily recommend this book to anyone but die-hard Where the Wild Things Are and Eggers' fans, or perhaps pre-teens. Eggers' YA book was less appealing to this adult reader and I started skimming about half-way through. At 281 pages, I found it rather long, but it's certainly charming. Eggers is a poetic writer and therefore this is more than your average book-after-the-movie.

The Little White Car

I picked up a copy of The Little White Car (2004) by Danuta de Rhodes at a library book sale. It was an advance copy, so maybe I was swayed by the effusive praise. It's a fine enough book but the storyline (I don't think I'm ruining it by writing) in which the main characters believes herself to have inadvertently killed Princess Diana with her little white car, is ridiculous, and it completely lacks poetry.

It's a pretty good book if you're looking for some kind-of mindless, fun weekend or vacation reading. The character is a young french woman, not unlike Bridget Jones in that she's fairly irresponsible and devil-may-care - she gets drunk a lot and is largely unconcerned about causing the death of Princess Diana.

There is one mildly-amusing post-coital scene:

'So...,' he said, looking away from her. 'It is over. Finished.'

'Yes,' she said. 'Goodbye.'

'We will never see each other again.'

'No. Probably not.'

'There must be no kiss goodbye, no final embrace.'

'Fine.'

'I mean, we have just been like ships in the night.'

'Yes. Off you go now.'

A High Wind in Jamaica

A High Wind in Jamaica was our book club selection for this month. It's by Richard Hughes and was first published in 1929. It's a fascinating and troubling book because it explores the capacity for survival of a group of small children.

A British family are living in Jamaica, but the parents decide to send the children back to England after a hurricane because they think it will be a safer, less "savage" place for their children. On the journey, their ship is taken over by pirates, and through some Home Alone shenanigans, the children end up on the pirate ship, rather to the dismay of the pirates.

By today's standards, both the parents and the pirates possess abysmal child-caring skills, leaving the children to self-regulate and self-rule. In a nearly supervisor-less world, the children create their own set of rules and morality that most people would find quite different than the a priori mores of society.

Children's inherent lack of morality is something that really fascinates me and it was quite interesting, however disturbing, to read Hughes tale of these little kids. Throughout the book, he brings in a variety of animals, both domesticated and wild, as if to compare them to the children - but I think what becomes clear is that the children are (obviously) like neither animal nor (adult) person.

One of the cool things about book club is that everyone shows up not only with their own opinions about the book, but also, literally, their own versions of the book. I had the most recent printing with an intro by Francine Prose and cover with Henry Darger image, but friends had a copy from (I think) the 40s with color lithographs published under the original US title, "An Innocent Voyage" and another from the early 30s with absolutely fabulous one-color lithographs. If you read it, and I encourage you to, head to your local library and find the oldest copy you can get.

Club Dead

Despite plenty of grousing about the low-quality of Charlaine Harris's Dead Until Dark, I couldn't resist snagging another in the series when I saw it on the freebie pile at my fave coffee shop.

I think that Club Dead is the third in the Sookie Stackhouse series - it's kind of like the New Moon of the series because boyfriend vampire Bill is mostly absent. The plot's kind of too silly to go into, and parts definitely insulted my intelligence, but I will admit that it was quite a page-turner! Damn you, Charlaine Harris! Damn you!

The Daughter of Time

The Daughter of Time was written by Josephine Tey, the pen name of Elizabeth MacKintosh, a Scottish woman. She also wrote plays under the name Gordon Daviot, apparently.

The book begins with a lovely little quote: Truth is the daughter of Time. It is apt, because the story is about a detective who, during a hospital stay, takes it upon himself to solve the mystery of the "Princes in the Tower" - the tale of the two children of Edward the IV, long-rumored to have been murdered by Richard III.

The main character is lying bored out of his mind in a hospital bed with a broken leg when a friend brings by a pile of historical pictures to amuse him. Because he doesn't think Richard III has the face of a murderer, he begins delving into the story to find out what really happened. Daughter of Time is practically a theoretical treatise on the necessity of primary sources for all research and study. Tey makes a strong and damning argument that the history books most of us grew up with - one page per century/civilization are worthless nonsense.

Tey illustrates how our perception, regardless of validity or truth, is what really becomes history - she seems to have a very post-modern viewpoint of what we call history - particularly re: her rejection of the very linear way we organize the past:

...One was the kind of history book known as a Historical Reader. It bore the same relation to history as Stories from the Bible bears to Holy Writ. Canute rebuked his courtiers on the shore, Alfred burned the cakes, Raleigh spread his cloak for Elizabeth, Nelson took leave of Hardy in his cabin on the Victory, all in nice clear large print and in one-sentence paragraphs. To each episode went one full-page illustration.

The second-half of the book was a little boring for me - with the challenge of being restricted to the hospital room, out of necessity, her characters move into a sort of Socratic exchange, like, "So Richard the III couldn't possibly be responsible for the death of the two boys, could he?" "No, he couldn't have, because..." and so on.

Finally, what Tey focuses on is the persistence of false histories to masquerade as fact through incompetence (on the part of the chroniclers) and indifference (on the part of the audience). All in all, I thought it was a really amazing book, especially for anyone interested in history in general and British monarchs in particular.