Bookin'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Divergent

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

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

Learning to Read

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

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

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

Girl with Curious Hair

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

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

The Uncoupling

My review of The Uncoupling is up on Newcity Lit!

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

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

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