Envy

...by Kathryn Harrison. That's the title of the mystery novel. Envy. This is a freaky book; I can't think of any other succinct description. Harrison goes inside the head of Will Moreland, a forty-something psychoanalyst who is himself dealing with: the death of his young son, sexual unease between him and his wife, an absentee twin, a sex-crazed patient, his twenty-fifth college reunion, his father's new art career and new mistress, and surprising news from an old lover. And boy, it all fits together with quite a bang.

It's a bit much really, but she ties Will's life together so neatly that it's hard to begrudge Harrison her fun.

A couple quotes:

Will pondering: "I worry that my tendency to insist upon connections leads me to find significance where there isn't any. Create meanings that don't exist outside of my consciousness."

On his father: "Every once in a while his father makes an observation meant to prove he's not out of touch, leaving Will feeling less impressed than protective of whatever inspires this earnestness, because this is the quality that's most palpable when his father produces what he believes to be evidence of his being hip ... and it's the same quality that insures he'll never be hip."

In my last post, I spoke about how the novel was both cerebral and sexy. The sexiness also has a very creepy edge to it. So it's a dark book, but then again, envy is a dark emotion. And the envy that turns out to be the driving force behind this plot is as dark as it gets.

Teaser

I'm about halfway through a quite fascinating novel. I'm really intrigued by it, and not quite sure where it's going to take me. I like that. And because the book itself is a bit of a tease, I'm not going to tell you the title yet.

It's a very cerebral book, with a lot of discussions. This makes sense, seeing as how the main character is a psychologist. On the other hand, another overarching theme of the book is sex. Will (that's his name, a hint) is utterly consumed with thoughts of sex, but attempts to intellectualize the obsession. Analysis is in its own way pretty sexy. And everyone around him is as thought-provoking as he is.

I've been reading with a raised eyebrow. I like that.

The Curious Incident

This month's book club selection was Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, an autistic teen's tale of solving mysteries both big and small. The title refers to the event that kicks off the action, Christopher's discovery of his neighbor's stabbed dog. After being wrongly suspected of the killing, he vows to solve the mystery. He finds himself dealing with the more mysterious doings of the human heart.

Haddon, who worked with autistic children, shows what I have read called an acute understanding of the autistic mind. And Christopher is a compelling and fascinating character. Sympathetic to be sure, but even reading events through his eyes, you can see how he must be a handful for the adults around him. Achieving mutual understanding is a painstaking and ongoing process.

I haven't fully fleshed out another observation, and so it may sound ridiculous, but I also felt this novel evoked magical realism. Seen through Christopher's eyes, the whole world is a little fantastical.

That's it for commentary now, but if anything comes out of the book club, I'll report it as well. And there are plenty of new library books awaiting me, so posting may pick up in the next few weeks, despite the holiday madness.

I skipped a book

Despite composing an entry in my head while walking to the office, I completely forgot to post on a book that I read last week. I blame tryptophan blues.

The book was Susan Vreeland's Girl in Hyacinth Blue, another of the guilty-pleasure-art-historical-fiction novels that I keep coming across and reading as soothing and romantic intervals. This one chronicles the history of a Vermeer, beginning in the present day and journeying backwards to its germination. What you end up with is a very different conception of Vermeer - and "the artist" in general - than in the more famous Girl with a Pearl Earring. (For example, this has what I see as a more realistic view of how Vermeer must have felt about his wife, considering the passel of children they had. On the other hand, the relationship between Vermeer and Griet was far more delicious to read.)

The main story was the impact of the painting on people's lives, specifically why an array of owners felt that they couldn't live without it. Each found what it was they were searching for in the girl. It reminded me that art is a dialogue between the product and the viewer.

So while not the most important or memorable of novels, a sweet way to spend a little bit of time during a busy holiday season...

Boldtype

Other people do book reviews too! (In fact, I hear there are even other book blogs, such as Bookslut, but I am lame and haven't searched out proof.)

Anyway, Boldtype is a monthly newsletter by Flavorpill, and mainly distinguishes itself with a hipster vibe and independent, non-commercial streak. Also, each month has a theme - and like most themes, some work better than others.

November's newsletter is about kinship and the complexity of family ties. Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking received a nod from them as well:

Through her grieving, Didion comes to understand that death is not just about losing someone else; it's also about the loss of oneself. Time had stopped for her the day she married Dunne; then she abruptly awoke to her 71-year-old self, bewildered and alone. Now she has to navigate life without her lifelong partner's advice; now she has to make medical decisions for their terminally ill daughter. It becomes painfully obvious just how much she is a part of the people she loved.

When I wax philosophical, I occasionally wonder to what extent we exist outside of our relationships with others and how we are perceived by them. And by that measure, losing a loved one is clearly losing a part of ourselves. Also, loss is always a love story. Definitely will make it on my list.

Nothing else *particularly* caught my eye, but isn't that how much collections of book reviews go? As I remember, and dig through my inbox, I will be trying to share with you some other people's book reviews.

Which reminds me, feel free to comment/e-mail me if you want to recommend books or put something up here.

Erin reads the LA Times: pre-Thanksgiving edition

Thus far in my Times reading:

"[A] very surprised William T. Vollmann received a National Book Award for fiction for his widely praised novel Europe Central," a book on my "to read" list; another likely future read, Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, also won honors. In the same article Anne-Marie O'Connor considers whether book awards have become too commercialized to be meaningful anymore.

Norman Mailer nevertheless made an impassioned defense of recognizing literature:

Mailer said it is important to celebrate the kind of serious literature that has imbued societies with powerful but intangible rewards, but is endangered today.

"Would England be a great nation without William Shakespeare?" Mailer asked. "Would Ireland be entering a period of prosperity today without James Joyce?"

But before boys get to be Mailers (hopefully without the bad attitude about women), they have to grow up readers. And shockingly enough, they have their own book clubs. A Virginia middle school has launched Club BILI (Boys in Literacy Initiative), with boy-friendly selections. The goal?

to help close the literacy achievement gap between boys and girls. The club focuses on books that appeal specifically to boys and includes read-aloud sessions, visits to elementary schools to promote reading, and trips to see movies based on the books they read.

On average, boys score seven to 11 points lower than girls on standardized reading comprehension tests. The discrepancy isn't limited to the United States — a study by the University of York in Britain found it exists in 22 countries. Scientists say boys are born with biological differences that make them read later than girls, though they eventually catch up. Boys also have a harder time sitting still for long periods, studies show.

Prevailing attitudes toward reading don't help.

"Society has created an aura about reading that it's a girl thing and it doesn't fit into adolescents' persona," said Jodie Peters, a reading peer coach at the school who co-founded Club BILI after coming upon a book about the gap called "Reading Don't Fix No Chevys." "We want to fight that."

It also turns out that the available reading in schools doesn't appeal to boys: Teacher and co-founder Rob Murphy noted that "the boys really hated the books that we were making them read in classrooms. There were a lot of female protagonists, and it was hard for them to make the connection with some of the plot lines."

It's too bad to think that youth reading ends up gender segregated, but it's better than the kids not reading at all. And fortunately, there's always Harry Potter...

Fabulous Fabulist LA

In this past Sunday's LA Times Magazine, Alan Rifkin muses about the fantastical Los Angeles brand of literature that is "the only American fiction that's really worth reading." (Sorry, after this Saturday, the link probably won't work anymore)

I don't subscribe to that notion, and I'm not even completely sure that I would like most of what he mentions, but I think there is a Hollywood/LA/desert sensibility to the city's writing (and the city itself) that is a little like a shimmering mirage, one that can be beautiful or grotesque - or more often, both at once. According to Rifkin, it was more like this in the 30s through the 60s, but it's still there, and still inspiring authors.

Two thought-provoking quotes:
Rifkin on the difference between the coasts: "They get that we're closer than they are to the vortex."
Rafael Luevano, an area religion professor: "The Anglo mind might be giving way to the Latino influence of magic, myth and symbol."

And a brief selection of titles that come up as Rifkin's examples: Evelyn Waugh, "The Loved One;" Carolyn See (Carolline's favorite), "Golden Days" and "Slipstream;" Francesca Lia Block's Weetzie Bat novels; Joy Nicholson, "The Road to Esmeralda"

A SoCal girl at heart, maybe I should give these books a try. I have read a Carolyn See novel - The Handyman - and can now see how the magical realism truly reflected this crazy city I call home.

Stop Hurting America

When Jon Stewart said that on Crossfire, I wanted to stand up and cheer. I can get so tired of punditry and fighting.

What I wish, however, was that more talking heads were actually coming up with concrete suggestions and ideas. Sort of like what Bill Maher did in his 2002 When You Ride Alone, You Ride with Bin Laden, a collection of posters (updated versions of WWII ones) and essays about what the government would be saying if it chose to be straight with the American people. His suggestions run the gamut from obvious (we need to wean ourselves from our oil dependence) to politically incorrect (racial profiling in airports makes sense) to unexpected (ladies, give up your blood-soaked diamonds). It's dated in many ways - a lot has happened in 3 years, even if we haven't had another terrorist attack in the United States - but still carries relevance today.

In a twisted way, something I admire about Bill Maher is how frequently I disagree with him. Because he doesn't fit neatly into any ideological box that I can think of, I usually believe that he's sincere about what he says. And I believe that he is sincerely angry at our government for not asking - not demanding - more of us. This nation is at its greatest when it pulls together, standing as one even as it respects individuality; even as this is a little too let-the-mighty-eagle-soar for me, I agree with the main point. We can and should do more; and our leaders can and should tell us that. So kudos to Maher for being willing to anger all sides because he's fighting for what he truly believes in: America.

(Also, he's convinced me: I don't need diamonds.)

All Alone in the New South Africa

My first Nadine Gordimer novel - a book club selection - was None to Accompany Me, a transitional novel. It came just a few years after she won the Nobel Prize, and in the midst of the stupendous upheaval that accompanied the end of apartheid and white hegemony. The novel is set in this tumultuous time and details several lives, but concentrates on Vera Stark, a strong and practical lawyer who has worked for black land rights.

Hers isn't an uplifting tale, although it is a sensual one. A woman deeply in touch with her sexuality, she left her soldier husband for a sexy artist who takes his place, and continues to find sex with her husband and a new lover powerful and fulfilling. (Though much of this is told in flashback) She's not so good at the emotional level though, and the intensity of her lover/husband's need for her repels her, as do the intimacies of her children and other family friends. She is passionately independent: having none to accompany her is her choice, not that of those around her.

But beyond Vera, this is a novel - written in the immediacy of the moment, coming out the year of the election that brought Nelson Mandela's ANC to power - about lives in flux, about how victory up-ends expected roles, and brings both expected and unexpected change.

The book got a fairly sour review during our club's discussion, and I think that is both fair and unfair. This is a difficult book to like; however, I think that it gains power when thought of in the context of when it was written and pubished. And I think that its very difficulties, the challenges, matter as well. That said, I hear July's People is a more auspicious pick.

The Apple's Bruise

This collection of stories by Lisa Glatt is not for your lighthearted moods. It's not quite dark (unlike Mary Gaitskill's "Secretary," which has none of the whimsy injected into the film version) but it doesn't sugarcoat.

The men and (mostly) women in the stories are involved in an array of unbalanced relationships - between friends, lovers, and others who come in and out of one's life. The first, "Dirty Hannah Gets Hit by a Car," is about a little girl and the bullying older girl who torments her. Another story is about a couple attempting to recover from the husband's injuries from lightning strike; two others feature the internal struggle between maintaining one's integrity and giving into what will make a loved one happy, whatever happiness really means. It is not surprising that most of these relationships are also troubled, and while it's not clear precisely what the future holds for these various characters, it's difficult to imagine a series of happy endings. Satisfactory ones perhaps, but not happy.

Glatt's is an intriguing voice. And the stories easy to read. She has also written a novel, A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That, and I'll be reading that to see how she holds up over a longer length.

War is bad for children and other living things

I delved back into history by exploring one of my favorite twentieth-century topics - the less popular history of WWII. In 1997, Iris Chang released The Rape of Nanking, creating a stir among my roommate and several other Chinese-Americans in my freshman dorm. The massacre, rape, pillaging, and destruction of a city and hundreds of thousands of civilian inhabitants in 1937, years before WWII would come to Europe (and even longer before it would reach American shores) is a story that needed to be told, to resurrect memories of the past and learn from them.

Chang writes:

Whatever the course of postwar history, the Rape of Nanking will stand as a blemish upon the honor of human beings. But what makes the blemish particularly repugnant is that history has never written a proper end for the story.

And despite the attention that Chang and others brought to the topic, it is still, as she calls it, "the forgotten Holocaust of World War II."

As far as the writing goes, Chang does not spare the reader a full share in the horrors of what occurred. It's gruesome, and turned my stomach a few times. (What is frustrating is how familiar to other atrocities it sounds. How often in the course of human history have we treated our fellow man and woman so brutally. Why do we do this? Why do we continue to?) More prosaicallly, perhaps, she constructs her narrative in a clever and effective manner, retelling the events from the perspectives of the Japanese invaders, the Chinese victims, and the expatriate Westerners who risked their lives to help save the people of Nanking. Each section illluminates a different aspect of the invasion, massacre, and occupation.

I wholeheartedly recommend this book, and I admire Chang's determination to tell a wrongly overlooked piece of history as well as her decision to use her voice to demand that the world avert their eyes no longer. If I have any qualms (and how difficult it is to voice them about a book so harrowing), they would regard the insertion of authorial emotion. Chang's insistence that the reader acknowledge the horrors of the Rape of Nanking is so strong that the Rape becomes almost an event unique in human history. She is careful in the epilogue to state that the Japanese are no more prone to evil than others, that "human being can [easily] be encouraged to allow their teenagers to be molded into efficient killing machines able to suppress their better natures." Yet that consciousness, that the Rape of Nanking took place in a war of atrocities, in a century of atrocities, in a history of atrocities, is sometimes missing, and could have strengthened the moral authority of the book.

I sound harsher than I mean to. It is a truly stunning work.

More Erin reads the LA Times...

This week the Business section: the Times reports that

Major book publishers have quietly begun selling directly to customers over the Internet, a move that could transform the trade by putting them in competition with online retailers such as Amazon.com.

It's not clear to me exactly what this will mean, but it could create a new amount of cooperation, rather than competition, between publishers and retailers. Either way, the losers in the transaction will probably continue to be independent bookstores. I can't say that I'm a big help to their business model, as I tend to browse rather than buy, and am cheap and check books out from the library instead of plunking down my cash. But on those rare occasions when I'm willing to purchase, I go small and local (unless I have a gift certificate to Borders).

Erin reads the LA Times so you don't have to

Today's Book Review section raves about Jane Smiley's new offering, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel. Referring to Smiley's "unmediated voice - blunt, uncompromising and witty," the review details the path that led the author to a year of reading that spanned the history of the novel, and what she learned about what has changed, and more importantly what has stayed the same. It's a defense of the novel:

if there's one thing she believes, it's that reading fiction broadens our sympathies and stretches our imagination so we understand that even bad guys have their reasons.

I heartily enjoyed listening to Smiley speak back in April and so plan to gather even more of her thoughts by reading this book.

Also, Adam Gopnik, of New Yorker fame, has branched out into the world of young adult literature with The King in the Window, about an American boy's adventures in Paris. I loved (and heartily recommend - and may even lend) his collection of Parisian esays Paris to the Moon, and thus agree with the reviewer: "The only question ... is an obvious one: How long must readers wait before Gopnik writes a Parisian novel aimed at his legions of adult fans?"

The pen is mightier than the machine gun

The LA Times Magazine takes a look at the recent spate of memoirs written by soldiers returning from the action in Iraq. After hemming and hawing a little bit about the quality of an immediate response, without the years of gestation and rumination that apparently make for a good war memoir, Michael Slenske decides that these books are good for the American people, who need to have the real war brought into their homes. For confirmation, he turns to none other than John McCain, who opines:

Most historians would agree that definitive histories are written at a minimum of 20 to 30 years after a conflict is over. But that doesn't detract from a personal account of an individual's involvement. ... Firsthand experiences are always helpful in contributing to the knowledge of people who haven't been there.

Plus, speaking as a historian, I know that these memoirs will be a treasure trove for the historians of the future when they write about the Iraq war. (Of course, they will have to take into account people's biases and motivations, the pressures of publishing, etc. but good historians will do that. Good readers now should attempt to do so as well.)

My favorite description of any of the memoirs comes courtesy of Kirkus Reviews, which said of Colby Buzzell's My War: Killing Time in Iraq: "If military recruitment is down now, wait till the kids read this book." The Times article also includes a great excerpt.

I don't know that I'll be reading any of these any time soon, but I definitely agree that we should be listening to the soldiers as an important voice in the conversation on the war.

Nostalgia

One thing that I don't recommend when you're reading a fictional memoir about high school is to receive several boxes of childhood stuff from your parents who are moving. This past Monday, somewhere in the middle of Lee's (from Prep, see last entry) sophomore year, my dad appeared with a box of dance trophies, a pile of random school papers, certificates, and diplomas, assorted other stuff, and all four of my high school yearbooks. I spent part of the evening with the book from my senior year, finding all the pictures of me, marvelling again at my classmates who were votes "most popular," "best hair," etc. (I didn't even remember quite a few of them), and wondering about all of the ways my high school experience was both wonderful and terrible. How much I could identify with Lee (and could identify the popular perfect people at TOHS who had their counterparts in Prep). How much I have grown since then, and how much I cherish that growth, but yet can still miss how much I felt part of that community.

In the end, I felt that it allowed me to finish reading Prep in a different way; it complicated the novel a lot. You can both love and hate high school, and I think that Sittenfeld should have emphasized that more. She should have teased out more of how some people only belong to a community when they are physically removed from it. Above all, though, I wish she hadn't ended with a little "where are they now?" about some of her main characters, although thankfully she spared us her protagonist's future.

Don't get me wrong. I enjoyed the book. It was a fun read, replete with all the secondhand discomfort and recognition of the embarrassing things that you did when you were a teenager. It'll be interesting to see what Sittenfeld - currently teaching at a private school in DC, just up the street from my old apartment - takes on next, and how she grows (or doesn't) as a writer.

Prep

Catty alert: reading Curtis Sittenfeld's fictionalized boarding school expose (damn html: how do I make accents?) has kindled in me my inner teenage queen bee bitch. Sure, I can identify with her alter ego, the awkward scholarship recipient Lee Fiora, but it's really more fun to be one of the members of the "in" crowd.

But really Curtis, just because you have an unusual name for a female, and just because the rich do occasionally have some crazy names (Apple? Paris and her former fiance Paris? Blanket?!?) doesn't mean that all rich people have crazy names. I'm only through Lee's freshman year, and have already met Aspeth, Little, Gates (female), and Cross. Really?!

On a serious note, I think Sittenfeld has interesting things to say about the high school experience and particularly about class matters. And as another Stanford alum, I think we both saw how wealth bubbled under the surface. She has a great line about how

"there were different kinds of rich... There was normal rich, dignified rich, which you didn't talk about, and then there was extreme, comical, unsubtle rich - like having your dorm room professionally decorated, or riding a limousine into Boston to meet your mother - and that was permissible to discuss."

It was like an observation that I always knew but had never quite gotten around to making. This, rather than the satirical commentaries on boarding school life, are what have made this book strong thus far. I hope that as the novel continues I get more of the good stuff and less of the ridiculous...

(Also, regarding heroines named Lee: I have a hard time disassociating this Lee with Maggie Gyllenhaal's wonderful Lee in Secretary. I loved the movie - the short story it was based on proved to be a big disappointment.)

"Reading Homer in Kabul"

The above is the after-the-jump title for an excerpt of Nelofer Pazira's memoir A Bed of Red Flowers: In Search of My Afghanistan printed in the LA Times over the weekend. It's not fair, really, but her love letter to her father's library does recall Azar Nafisi's blockbuster of a few years back. Anyway, it's a beautiful elegy.

The smuggler insists we cannot take even a piece of paper with us, let alone books. Even if we could take a couple, which ones would I choose? I think of Mohammad Hajozee's essay that describes a young woman in a flower shop sorting and separating flowers for two bouquets, one for a wedding, the other for a funeral, having to decide which will end up in the hands of a bride and which will lie over the dark soil of a grave. I understand this. Perhaps it will be easier not to take any at all.

A far cry from the ordinary...

Finally, a book to review! I just finished Muriel Spark's A Far Cry from Kensington, a 75 cent find at a library book sale. If I've read Spark before, it was in a high school English textbook, which is barely reading at all, often enough, so it was a joy to discover her.

The narrator reminisces from several decades remove on her time in 1950s London as a young war widow living in a boardinghouse and working in a series of odd publishing jobs. She's a fascinatingly strong character, but not overt about her strength. No nonsense without being stern. And she relates her history and her community of coworkers and fellow boarders warmly, matter-of-factly, and sympathetically all at once. I almost felt as though I, the reader, were like a granddaughter, or rather a young researcher seeking an oral history.

None of what I've written really explains why I (punning on the title) decided to stress how unique this novel struck me as being. Maybe it's Spark's voice - that oral history quality. Even more so, she doesn't force feelings or reactions on you, allowing you to take it in however you so choose. It's cerebral, a bit, but not demanding. In that way perhaps a bit like the main character herself. If the rest of Spark's work is of the same vein, I will have found myself a new author.

In case you've been wondering...

... life events have gotten away from me, and taking away from both reading and blogging time. But I hope to have more time for both as we transition from late summer into fall. But I have been reading a little.

Earlier this month, our book club discussed Tobias Wolff's Old School, a fictionalized memoir of life at a tony boarding school in the 60s. The whims of teenage star crushes are illuminated in loving detail, and Wolff notes the class tensions simmering below the surface for a scholarship boy. Plus great sendups of Robert Frost, Ayn Rand, and Ernest Hemingway. A read that manages to be fun and light as well as thoughtful.

Right now, I'm working slowly through another short read, this one by Muriel Spark. More on that as I move closer to finishing...

Google is the new Microsoft

Maybe not that new, actually, but I've been out of it. My recent absence attests to that. But the Google backlash has maybe begun? This week, the lamely titled "Current" section of the LA Times takes on the latest class action suit against Google... by a group of authors no less.

Xeni Jardin, BoingBoing editor and apparent gadfly is "Current's" blog correspondent, reporting in about online trends for the sad folks still reading the dead medium of newsprint. So clearly, you'd expect her to have a technophilic perspective. And she does skewer the Authors Guild and other writers for claiming that Google's attempt to create"the world's most ginormous digital card catalog" will irrevocably damage the meaning of the copyright. Google is copying with commercial intent (as it will sell ads on its search pages) and authors who do not want to be included have the burden of opting out.

But as Jardin notes, Google makes things (websites, and eventually books) easier to find, and "any product that is more easily found online can be more easily sold." Another great quote, from an anonymous author who spoke to Jardin, "fear of obscurity, not digital indexing, is what keeps most authors awake at night."

I for one think it's awesome that Google is compiling this amazing source of knowledge. It's like the Alexandria library or something. And I admit to a little bit of school pride in knowing my alma mater is among the chosen sites (of course, it's also the alma mater of the Google founders too, so not that surprising). I have benefitted from the openness of libraries - both the LA Public Library's exchange program that sends the equivalent of a branch library through its system every day, matching book with reader across the city; and from the DC college consortium, which allowed me to check out books not available at Georgetown, but in plentiful supply at Catholic University or George Mason. Continuing the trend of making books more accessible to readers should be every author's goal.

New books for fall

The LA Times provided its seasonal preview of upcoming books, noting the return of some favorite authors. Since the link won't last forever, here are some of the books I am looking forward to:

• Joan Didion's memoir of losing her husband and almost losing her daughter, The Year of Magical Thinking
• Salman Rushdie' s Shalimar the Clown (I need to read more of his work in general)
• Barbara Ehrenreich has another undercover expose of working America, this time as a white-collar worker
• Simon Winchester (he of The Professor and the Madman on the making of the OED, an awesome nerd book) has a "geologic and cultural history of the quake that changed the face of California, giving rise to many of the myths by which we define ourselves."
• And Margaret Cho and Zadie Smith also have new books, taking on culture in America in different ways

Should be yet another busy season for reading. As it should be...

Madras on Rainy Days

Samina Ali's first novel, and I'm curious to know how autobiographical it is. Like her protagonist, Layla, Ali grew up in both India and the US - and she has a lot to say about how living in two worlds can mean you belong in neither.

This is in many ways a crushing novel. Ali is harsh on her characters, and particuarly unforgiving of the way that they allow tradition and religion to dictate their actions even at the cost of hurting loved ones. Layla suffered a lonely childhood, dedicated to easing her mother's troubles; at age 20, all she wants is to belong, to have a home - badly enough to acquiesce to an arranged marriage. Everyone has secrets that threaten societal rules - particularly both Layla and her husband-to-be - and efforts to keep these secrets cause a great deal of (unnecessary, to my areligious and Western mind) pain.

And yet Ali is lush in her description of India, despite the misogyny and terrible religious strife (Layla's family is Muslim, but tensions with Hindus play a significant role). Layla strongly considers staying, making her home and becoming fully Indian.

In the end, Madras on Rainy Days is an indictment of the clash of old and new, tradition and modernity, East and West. Each threatens the other, and yet, with a couple days remove, I would like to sense that there is some hope of reconciling the two in a way that preserves the best aspects of both.

***Re: New Orleans. I know that many of the few of you who read this blog don't have much to spare, but I urge you to give whatever you can to the relief effort. Good thoughts, prayers, blood, cash, time, whatever. The Red Cross is a good place to start, but so is the Louisiana SPCA - trying to save abandoned pets and hopefully reunite them with their owners - and Planned Parenthood has lost all the clinics in the affected area and are raising money to provide services and rebuild. Habitat for Humanity hopes to begin building homes for those left homeless by the end of the month. I'm reminded of Rudy Guiliani in the aftermath of 9/11 saying that the devastation will be worse than anything "we can possibly imagine".... But we can make that so much better.

More Wisdom...

I guess I'm kind of over this book, because I can't think of anything else interesting to write about it. I think I waited too long after finishing it to get back online. Anyway, you should all read Rahul's comment to the previous post. He makes a lot of good comments about how crowds get hijacked - something I wish Surowiecki did a better job explaining how to avoid.

Nonetheless, here are a couple more comments/recaps that I missed last time around:
*The "four conditions that characterize wise crowds" are: diversity of opinion, independence, decentralization, and aggregation (p 10). When these are missing, you end up with stock bubbles, sheep-like crowds okaying a war in Iraq, etc.
*Football teams should practically always go for it on 4th down instead of punting. Coaches don't make that call b/c of both tradition and aversion to risk. (Also a factor, I think, Monday-morning quarterbacks)
*Surowiecki notes that the sciences are more collaborative than the humanities. It's an intriguing point, and I think would certainly disturb many of my former colleagues and professors. But his main evidence is the fact that many papers in the sciences have tons of co-authors and there's an emphasis on getting information out. I think the humanities collaborate in a different way - certainly I think that the concept of a "crowd" of scholars eventually reaching a wise conclusion isn't as prevalent.

I guess that's about it. I reiterate my earlier point about how much I like Surowiecki. He's a great writer. Two things I take away from the book: 1 - keep reading his columns in the New Yorker and anywhere I can find them; and 2 (the real one) - aim to pose the unpopular opinion from time to time instead of going along with the group. Value debate over consensus - at least sometimes - and get as diverse a group as possible to maximize the group's ability to make a wise decision. All obvious, but it's easy to forget them.

"the crowd is blind to its own wisdom"

James Surowiecki - The Wisdom of Crowds

or, as Michael likes to call it, The Opposite of Blink. (Though it should be said that Gladwell and Surowiecki are colleagues at the New Yorker, and the former provided a blurb while the latter praises The Tipping Point in his book.) I think the argument of the book is relatively self-evident: crowds as a whole end up making smarter decisions than individuals. When they don't, there are things they could have done differently to make smarter choices - if they know those strategies, they can make them work again.

It's a pretty upbeat book, if you think about it. Crowds tend to make the right choices in the end, particularly if you define a crowd as a market or some other virtual, not physical, entity. Just as Gladwell wants to help us harness the power of our unconscious, Surowiecki wants to help us recognize and appreciate the power of our collective (un?)conscious.

This is another in-progress review, so I'm mostly going to leave it at that. Surowiecki's "Financial Page" columns in the New Yorker have always made me happy. (I'm going to try to remember to come back and link to a couple of archives if I can find them.) He's such an elegant writer, good at interweaving story and theory. And I appreciate his ability to change my mind on Starbucks. While they may indeed be a corporate behemoth, they - by creating a market for fancy coffee drinks that didn't really exist before - actually grew the market for small independent coffee houses, of which there are more now than there were in pre-Starbucks days. So I can drink my frappuccino without feeling too guilty, as long as I patronize the indie places too. (Hurrah for justification.)

Anyway, Surowiecki is awesome.

A book that's going on my list

I waited too long, and now you have to pay for the LA Times link, but I am totally excited about reading this book. (Not as excited about what a big nerd that makes me.)

Before I wanted to be a historian, I was really into translation. Learning language made me realize what an artistic - and important! - task it is. Doomed to failure in some respects, open to all sorts of possibilities in others. But I'm getting ahead of myself. The book is If This Be Treason, a memoir by prolific translator Gregory Rabassa. Reviewer Michael Henry Heim, on Rabassa's "commitment to ... cultural mediation as represented by translation:"

Much as he argues against the notion of translation as a betrayal of the original - and he does so with great gusto - he is also perfectly willing to concede the point: In the end, what matters is not so much that a work comes through the translation process unscathed as that it enriches the culture it enters. Even if translation is treason to the original, he argues, we should make the most of it."

final word on A Changed Man

I liked it. It's nice to be nervous reading a book, and to be rooting for the characters, to be embarrassed for them. I almost hate that I can't ruin the ending for you, because it's a pretty exciting one. But I can be patient and wait for you to read the book yourself...

A Changed Man (?) - an in progress review

I'm currently reading A Changed Man, by Francine Prose. It got a lot of attention in newspaper reviews, as it's about a neo-Nazi who has a change of heart and flees to Brotherhood Watch, run by a renown Holocaust survivor. His stated goal: "to help keep guys like me from becoming guys like me" (fortunately, he knows how cheesy a line that is). For the head of the organization and his adoring development director, this is a miracle that can get them the publicity (and money) they've been needing. So our divorcee development director takes him in.

A little far-fetched, I admit.

We are treated to in depth looks at the minds of Vincent, the former racist; Meyer Maslow, world-famous but narcissistic survivor; Bonnie, his acolyte; and Danny, her teenage son. Prose is brilliant at showing the constant mental dialogue that runs through all of our doings and interactions with others. The characters are, like most of us, incredibly perceptive about some things, and utterly oblivious to others. They become intensely real.

I find myself rooting for these characters. But I'm suspicious. I'd like to have a happy ending, but I don't really see that happening. How can it? How cliche? And yet... wouldn't it be something for even "serious" fiction to be light-hearted about its endings from time to time?

Collapse

on Jared Diamond's tome... I have a lot of jumbled thoughts and reactions to this work. I've decided therefore just to list them, instead of forming a coherent narrative review. (Not like my posts are ever particularly coherent.)

Overall: thumbs up. His case histories are interesting, and his last chapter ties past and present together quite well. Despite the differences among each earlier society and between them and our own, it's clear that we have plenty to learn in order to avoid the same fate. Also, man he has a LOT of friends in places and companies all over the world. Similar to my graduate advisor. But onto the thoughts:

*What is it about Easter Island that people find so fascinating? I think it's haunting somehow, but I wonder if "ghosts" of other civilizations are ever jealous.

*I started to think about life cycles of cities, societies, and civilizations. We like to think of history as having "sped up" but I wonder if that's really accurate.

*How big is my footprint? I thought of this quiz while reading. When I think of how much of the world we are unsustainably mining... I sort of think we must be insane. On a happier note, sort of, the quiz says that we'd only need two planets if everyone lived like me (three times fewer than the average American). But then we don't have two planets, that I know of, which brings me to my next point...

*How do societies learn to think sustainably? Although everyone's favorite, Easter Island, has gotten a lot of attention in reviews (mainly I believe b/c it's at the beginning of the book and was all that some readers got to) Diamond provides examples of societies that did learn to think sustainably, by enacting religious laws to save land, or reconceptualizing their identities to line up with environmental realities. I guess one would have to find the "tipping point" for such a shift.

*As far as specific societies, I found the suggestion that the pressures from overpopulation helped precipitate the Rwandan genocide provocative and intriguing. And he has a few pages to devote to his hometown and mine, Los Angeles (pp 499-503). Surprisingly for those who love to bash the Southland, despite our bad environmental rep, Diamond says that our myriad problems still actually have us in pretty good shape comparatively. (So there.)

In closing, this is a big book. I think there is much to be gained from reading the whole thing, digesting all the different societies, applying them to the present. However, he can get a little long-winded, especially about industry stuff. So I would say it's okay to pick and choose chapters, or to skim over the boring stuff. Diamond's pretty good at putting flashing signs around his main points, so you won't miss much.

Sane by Comparison

While I'm finishing Collapse and sorting out my feelings on it, another article on books for amusement:

The LA Times reports on those poor "book people" who collect and collect and collect.

For the bibliophile, what to do with the books is life's central decorating issue, an ongoing discourse, a debate, and often an outright décor war, between aesthetics, the practicalities of storage and the consuming mindlessness of passion.

The roots of that passion are simple. To these readers, books aren't mere objects but possessions that carry intensely personal memories: where they were purchased, who the reader was while reading them, how they changed his or her life. They carry a weight of history.

Exactly. Except, unlike some of the people in this article, I am able to distinguish between the truly weighty and the peewee. The latter, I move on out. Even so, I face the same dilemma discussed in the article: where to put books when you have a lot of them. I'm always wondering "How come other people's homes look so spacious and clean? Oh, because they're missing all the books."

Non-reading post

Regardless of whether you consider the horrors in Darfur to constitute genocide, there is clearly no excuse for them, and the U.S. truly ought to be doing more to protect the lives of hundreds of thousands of Africans. If interested, you can sign Africa Action's petition to President Bush here.

Also, the situation in Niger looks really bad. Read LA Times coverage of it here and here. To (misguidedly, I'm sure) connect it to reading, this situation is precisely what Cause Celeb's Rosie is trying to prevent. I mention this in part to again argue how deft Helen Fielding can be at mixing the very serious and the absurd. But more to the point to point out how often famine in Africa has periodically caught the attention of the West, and yet how we ignore the moves that could prevent it in the first place.

In Darfur and in Niger... we say "never again" far too often. It would be nice if we really meant it.

Are we all going nuclear?

Jared Diamond has apparently endorsed exploration into nuclear energy as a potential alternative in the post-Peak Oil world we about about to enter.

"[T]o deal with our energy problems we need everything available to us, including nuclear power." Nuclear, he added, should simply be "done carefully, like they do in France, where there have been no accidents."

Hmm?

I'm reading Collapse right now - more on that later - and am somewhat surprised to hear this. One of the main stories of Collapse is the law of unintended consequences. Seems like nuclear power has plenty of those.

Admittedly, saying that we should use everything available isn't necessarily a ringing endorsement of nuclear energy per se, but is nonetheless a frightening one.

Contentment

I'm not sure just where I'd be without Helen Fielding. Sure, I think she's a big reason behind the explosion of "chick lit," which I'm not so crazy about. But she's brilliant. And despite the frumpiness of Renee Zellwiger as Bridget Jones - the film's fault, not the author's - she creates sassy (if neurotic) heroines who give voice to both women's insecurities and their kick-ass qualities. Even if Rosie (of Cause Celeb) and Bridget could be a bit daft sometimes, I still kind of wanted to be them.

So imagine my joy at coming across Olivia Joules (of Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination). Utterly ridiculous title - I don't really like it. But pretty clear about the premise of the book - a freelance writer who decides the hot producer she meets on assignment is actually al Qaeda. (My overactive imagination seems so mundane in comparison.) The al Qaeda stuff is a little too much - and man, they have a lot going on in this novel - but I recommend just overlooking that as much as you can, so you can concentrate on the good stuff.

Fielding is so brilliant with her characters' ascerbic observations about both themselves and others. She exaggerates, sure, but there's still a hell of a lot of truth behind most of it. Also, how fun is the British term "snogging," which I guess is equivalent to hooking up short of sex (which would be shagging, obviously). And the banter is sublime. And I like romance. I saved this for a weekend minibreak, and read it at the coffeehouse, the pool, and the beach. Utterly perfect.

Also, Bridget Jones is back in the Independent, but you have to pay for it. Boo.

On ironic titles

I've decided I don't want to skip books on this blog, but I've really had a time trying to figure out what to say about Geraldine Brooks' novel Year of Wonders. It's a very pretty book. Does that even make sense? calling a book pretty? Especially when the subject of the book is the plague, which wipes out the larger part of the heroine's village? And Brooks doesn't spare us much detail in the weeping buboes and the ugly actions of the terrified villagers. It is pretty though - I guess that's part of the wonder.

Anna, the protagonist, is a young pre-plague widow, working for the town's young rector and his wife. Were this book a little different - say, written by Lynne Cheney? - there'd be a love story between Anna and the wife. Instead, they're platonic "lovers" and tireless caregivers to the ravaged people of the town. Anna, already a strong character, matures throughout the novel, and emerges from the plague almost as a butterfly from a cocoon.

Okay, I feel like I sound ridiculous, so I'll skip to the interesting part. Brooks has worked as a Middle East correspondent based out of London. While traveling through England, she came across a plaque in a little village, naming it as "The Plague Town." Turns out that during the plague year of 1666, an unfortunate village over 100 miles away was stricken due to some imported goods. The villagers made a pact to prevent the spread of the disease by all staying within the village - instead of fleeing - and shunning contact with outsiders. Essentially condemning the greater part of them to death in an attempt to save the wider countryside. Year of Wonders is an imagining of what happened within that village during that fateful year. (You could almost see this as a movie, except it would have to be some sort of extraterrestrial disease, and probably more special effects. Definitely more sex.)

Like The Lady and the Unicorn, this book doesn't attempt to be great literature, but it does ground itself in historical fact, and tries to truly envision the past, give shape to it, to imagine the stories and dramas that made up forgotten lives. It's a different sort of "chick lit," one that asks a little more of the reader.

Nurturing the next generation of readers

Check out Barack Obama's speech to the American Library Association from earlier this summer. He's really a lovely and inspiring speaker, and to my mind appeals to the best and most hopeful parts of our nature. A couple examples:

And so the moment we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold into a library, we’ve changed their lives forever, and for the better. This is an enormous force for good.

I believe that if we want to give our children the best possible chance in life; if we want to open doors of opportunity while they’re young and teach them the skills they’ll need to succeed later on, then one of our greatest responsibilities as citizens, as educators, and as parents is to ensure that every American child can read and read well.

I was a library junkie from a young age, but too many children aren't, and that has to change - in order to ensure that we raise a generation of Americans that love reading and learning, that can draw on a wide range of knowledge, and make the connections that our increasingly interconnected world demands.

Us YFBers...

I was truly shocked at my desire to read Suze Orman's book of financial advice for twenty-somethings. I usually don't buy this shit, and I find it ironic that she wants to take $25 from the very people she acknowledges are "young, fabulous, and broke" (or YFB, as we were termed for the rest of the book). (Also, the leather jacket she's wearing on the cover was a poor attempt at connecting with her target audience.) But I'm fascinated by money, and freaked out by my enormous school loan debt, and thought there might be something in it for me.

Another reason I love the library. I had to wait over 2 months to get my hands on a copy, but once I did, I had the full benefit of Suze's words of wisdom - both on the page, and on her website - without dropping money I don't really have. There's a lot in here about building good credit, and even more about how to best dig your way out of credit card debt. (Discovery: I don't have credit card debt - apparently I'm less broke than I thought, but also I think a little less fabulous in my spending habits.) It's all pretty sensible, and provides a good set of step-by-step instructions for those who need a very straightforward path to financial responsibility.

For people more like me, she quelled my fears of my looming loan payments by announcing that I've got a great deal, especiallly at my interest rate, so I don't need to freak out or subsist on ramen noodles while pumping my entire income into loan payments. She also provides smart advice on maximizing investments and how to start saving money when you're not a saver. By the end of the book, I was starting to think that maybe it was worth the $24.95 cover price after all...

Serendipity

I've found that there are certain books and stories that touch you incredibly deeply, not just because of what they say, but because of what place you are in life when you read them. For me, the best example is Robert Hellenga's The Fall of a Sparrow, a novel that might have meant less had I read it at any other time, in any other place. Another is this short story by T.C. Boyle, which I read last year, as winter slowly gave way to spring, on a bench just outside the Library of Congress.

On not thinking

Chances are, you've heard about Blink, Malcolm Gladwell's recent book on "the power of thinking without thinking." The man's become famous lately. I feel like I see or hear about him everywhere. And this is in spite of (or more likely because of) the fact that his argument about split-second thinking is pretty controversial. (Check out here, here and here for some of these mixed reviews.)

The book is an intensely fast read, well in keeping with the idea of taking in information quickly. And Gladwell's argument is best put when he explains that certain people are able to make snap judgments accurately b/c they know which pieces to keep and which to ignore among the flood of information and perceptions we are constantly receiving. To do this, though, you have to have a LOT of experience - intuition is built on expertise. So in effect he is saying that "blinking" is great, and you can trust your gut, as long as you have that basis of unconscious information to tap into. Or something. At any rate, he meanders around his argument, providing lots of fascinating anecdotes, but not really convincing me of anything except that he's a good storyteller.

The End of Poverty

Mixing it up a little bit, I decided to raid Michael's bookshelf (well, pile really) and grabbed The End of Poverty, by economist Jeffrey Sachs. I'm just reading excerpts, but it's enough to grasp the core of the book. He explains the root causes of poverty in the third world, exonerating many of the reasons given by liberals - making me a little uncomfortable with his analysis, but willing to buy in, since he isn't justifying the things we did wrong in the past, just arguing that there's more to the problem. Namely lack of access to technological change, and how both growth and stagnation spiral until you have a stratified world.

Then, and this is the part I'm reading now, he does a little tour of the world, with short chapters on his role in saving (or trying to save) the economies of various countries. Unsurprisingly, this reads like a memoir replete with name-dropping and transitions between false humility and utter pride. That's okay though - I want to know about how Poland's economy transitioned from Iron Curtain to free market.

Next, he's going to do something with the millenium and 9/11 - I'm curious to see what - and make the radical argument that not only do we have to solve poverty, but we actually can do it. And in twenty years. It's "our" (meaning his, not my) generation's challenge.

I am heartened by the fact that Sachs sees the impoverished as people, not just numbers. And that he believes in the free market, but sees a role for governments and institutions in breaking the cycle of poverty. And I hope that he is going to do what he says, provide a step-by-step plan to ending poverty. (It will be interesting to see how "liberal" and humanitarian this is, and also how well it meshes with last week's G8 discussions. I know he believes in debt relief.)

Oh, I forgot. Foreword by Bono. He's kind of a funny writer. But he is lavish in his praise for Sachs, and credits him for providing the kinds of insight and knowledge that have made the rock star a credible speaker for third world debt reduction.

The Five Obstructions

Not a book, but going in here nonetheless. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this movie by Lars von Trier (and Jorgen Leth). It's a little bit documentary, a little bit film theory, a little bit sadism, and a healthy dose of creativity under pressure. von Trier has Leth remake the latter's 1967 film The Perfect Human (which is a fun film in and of itself, and available in its entirety as a special feature on the dvd) four times, each time adding an "obstruction," one or more rules that Leth must follow. The resulting efforts are recognizable as children of the first film, but depart from it in extraordinary ways. Watching von Trier try to trip up Leth is its own drama. von Trier is a leading voice in the
Dogme 95 movement which aims to reestablish the purity of filmmaking through its own obstructions:

The essence of Dogme95 is to challenge the conventional film language – in order to make authentic films, in search of the truth. This implicates cutting out the usual aesthetic means of adding sound, light, make up, “ mise en scene”.

(One could argue that these are their own artificialities, but nevermind that here.) While Leth isn't beholden to these rules, the idea of getting at something true through imposed hardship is certainly a theme recurrent in von Trier's actions.

In short, fascinating to watch and really rather witty.

Guilty Pleasures

I spent a day reading Tracy Chevalier's The Lady and the Unicorn. Like Girl with a Pearl Earring, it's a fictional account of the creation of a great work of art - in this case, a series of tapestries. Also like the other book, it's about a time and place most Americans don't know much about, in this case late 15th century France and what would become Belgium. The women are surprisingly sassy and modern - is this anachronistic, or is it more true? Among the nobility, at least, the traditions of courtly love and all the extramarital play involved may have still had traction.

No one will accuse this novel of being great literature. But it's pretty, and I think it plays a useful role in bringing history to an audience that isn't used to digesting it. Chevalier is good at the details of the creation of art. She explains the weaving process and how many artists are behind such a complicated piece of artwork. Little details, like the need to sew together the slits that form when switching from one color to another. So mock me if you must, but there is room in everyone's reading life for something a little lighter, playful, romantic.

The Gate of Angels

I can't remember the name of this author - Penelope something (I am too lazy to look it up now but will do so and correct this later) - but it is our latest book club selection. I finished it yesterday for tonight's reading. Michael is hopefully going to read it during his lunch break. It is super short, but was hard to get into. It started to flow better after the first 50 pages of so and comes together in the end pretty well.

The setting is Cambridge (England), 1912. The main characters are a young physics fellow in one of the colleges, and a nurse-in-training. The author is big on description - especially of flowers, it seems - and creates vivid scenes. I feel like the pre-war years aren't that common in historical fiction, so it's nice to get a picture of that world, on the crux between old and new. However, the plot and characters are kind of sketchy. I felt bemused.

Also, I am coming to the conclusion that the librarian in our book club and I have different tastes in literature. Which is okay, but it does mean that perhaps I should be making more recommendations. Take it over.

David Sedaris ... Naked

I wasn't really into the idea of David Sedaris when I first heard about him. I think it was around the publication of Me Talk Pretty One Day, and apparently the faux bad grammar got to me. I enjoyed his articles in the New Yorker but even so wasn't interested in reading the books. Then I "joined" the Stanford Sunday Salon, and the book for this month was Naked. I definitely can't complain. He is witty, bizarre, self-depricating; his family is crazy but in a sassy way. He's had a lot of wacky adventures, which I found a little unbelievable, but then I'm young and sheltered. All in all a fun read.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Jonathan Safran Foer makes me mad. Or jealous, rather. I want to be a wunderkind author. On the other hand, I wouldn't have wanted to face the expectations he must have been staring at following Everything is Illuminated. ELIC is a good sophomore effort, and he didn't shy away from taking on something big, in September 11th, although he did protect himself a little by couching himself in the guise of an odd and grieving little boy.

I liked this book. I liked and wanted to protect Oskar, just as I felt for his namesake in The Tin Drum. JSF is talented at exploring the ways that people who love one another deceive and/or misunderstand each other. The members of the Schell family reach out to each other in funny ways and reciprocate another's plea within the overwhelming paradigm of his or her own individual pain.

Life is hard. But it is also incredibly touching.

The Plot Against America

To begin, I'd like to offer one piece of advice: be thoughtful about bringing hardbound books to the beach. Expect (especially if it's windy) that sand will get between pages and everywhere else.

Anyway, I read the new(ish) Philip Roth on a camping trip. It was so idyllic - and in some ways very middle-America too - that it made for an interesting backdrop while reading a dystopia of the 1940s. Overall I was extremely impressed by the novel, and enjoyed it much much more than the other book of his that I've read, Sabbath's Theater. Roth is convincing as a 7 year old version of himself, and touching too. The grand arc of the plot is a little weak though. Provided, yes it seems fantastical (but no more so than some of what's happened in recent American history), but I was able to suspend my disbelief until the last two chapters. Then everything lost coherence. I think this was Roth's intention, but still, it left me confused and unsettled. (Again, pretty sure this is intentional, but I still would have liked a little more closure. Oh well.)

Politics & Plays

Not a book review, but sufficiently similar that I think it belongs here...

I've been collecting programs in the last week. Friday was Chloe's culmination event for pre-school, and last night was the annual spring fundraising dinner at work. Saturday, we went to the Tamarind Theatre to see The Eyes of Babylon, a one-man autobiographical show about a gay Marine's experience in Iraq. Jeff Key, the writer-performer, fulfilled a life-long ambition when he joined the Marines in 2000, at the age of 34, going back in the closet to do so. His naked (sometimes literally) performance challenges whole sets of assumptions about what it means to be: gay, in the military, Southern. It problematizes simplistic views on either side of the political spectrum of what's happening in Iraq - sure, he's in Shiite southern Iraq, and sure, he's a gay actor in Los Angeles so he's probably pretty liberal, and sure, he came out last year to leave the military. But it's complicated, as all things are. In addition, he evoked how foreign things were here in the aftermath of September 11th, in my mind the most serious indictment of how far we've swerved off course in the past 3 1/2 years. And there's a love scene that's so unexpected, so touching, that it still makes me warm inside. Babylon is disarming, challenging, and entirely human.

Sunday took us up to Topanga, to the Theatricum Botanicum, for a series called Botanicum Seedlings, which consists of readings and workshops for plays in progress. It's a way of cultivating playwrights. The reading we saw was of Matt Pelfrey's An Impending Rupture of the Belly, a satirical reverie about a modern-day Willy Loman. In a world consumed with threat, danger, and consumption, can the wussy man survive? Or will he snap? I liked the reading format. Stage directions read, instead of witnessed, props half-assed, or missing. Actors carrying their scripts. Very minimalist. I personally think they should keep the show under-produced like this. As for the play itself, it was very biting and amusing, and certainly topical. But I don't know that it ever really connected with me. It'll find an audience though.

Plays are great fun. And plays, much more than novels, place great premium on being witty. I appreciate that.

Dangling Man

This month's book club selection, courtesy in part of Michael's suggestion to honor the late Saul Bellow. I was a little nervous as I really didn't much like Henderson the Rain King (in fact, it made me like the Counting Crows song a little less for quite some time). And after last month's meeting which was largely (and sadly) a bashing session of Barbara Kingsolver, I was wanting something I could really get behind. The first twenty pages of the book confirmed a lot of my fears. It was meandering and boring, and I couldn't really tell what was going on. I put Michael to sleep twice reading it. Luckily, he acknowledged first that this was not a book for reading aloud and took matters into his own hands. Leaving me to catch up. Which I am now doing. Actually, I should be finishing it right now, but am blogging it instead. At any rate, it's gotten much better, although I don't at all see how it's going to wrap up in 50 pages.

The "dangling man," by the way, is our hero and journal-writer, a Chicago resident in the midst of WWII who is essentially sitting around waiting to be drafted. This has been going on for some time now, due to Army confusion and bureaucracy (and a Canadian birth certificate) and in the meantime he has left his job and become alienated from those around him. He dangles, waiting...

We truly are bowling alone

The book has me partially inspired, and feeling pretty good about where I stand in relation to civic participation. In fact, I marched on a picket line for the first time the other day, and while definitely feeling out of place, was truly warmed by the power of solidarity. On the other hand, I'm also acutely aware now of any and all areas in which my social capital is deficient. Michael and I have had several talks about this in the past week. (Also a little sad: Putnam reverses some on his evangelicals argument, which I had found really fascinating.)

Upshot: the book might be a little dated at this point, and I'd be curious to see a new foreword or any "five years later" analysis of where we are. But still a good read, especially for those of you who don't mind repetition (or are good skimmers) and even more so for people who like graphs and statistics.

Have I been reading lately?

I think I have.

In fact, I remember finishing Fontanka 16, another entry on my age-old books to read list. It's a history - pretty readable for an academic work - about the secret police in tsarist Russia. There are lots of biographies and sideplots to keep the thing moving. But I think I expected it to provide more insight into the Cheka, NKVD, OGPU, KGB (etc) than it did.

Right now I am trying to read Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone, another long-time curiosity. It seemed especially relevant to read about the decline in civic participation since my job is all about improving civic education. But it is sloooow. It just started to pick up a little bit though. Fun fact: there is a high correlation of religious participation and civic participation. If you are active in a church, synagogue, mosque, etc., you are more likely to volunteer and join committees, vote, and what not. Even if you take out the church-specific involvement, you're still more likely to be civically engaged. I had had my suspicions about this growing up, when I envied my religiously active friends the community and social capital they were developing. However, and this is the part I find fascinating, it doesn't hold true for evangelical congregations. Members of these groups are likely to be highly active within their religious community, but there isn't crossover into other outlets of civic participation.

Anyway, I think I need to take a break from non-fiction sometime soon and switch to some fun books. (On the other hand, current fiction reading, book club selection Dangling Man by Saul Bellow, is no more engaging than the above selections.)

Periodicals

Newspapers and magazines get in the way of reading books. I spent my weekend primarily reading. But only managed about 20 pages of an actual book. The rest was the LA Times and the New Yorker. I'm not really complaining, but have noticed that this trend is going to get seriously in the way of regular blogging. (Work is also a problem, since there's 30 hours of non-reading time too, but that's unavoidable.)

The Winter Zoo (and more on The Bean Trees)

The Winter Zoo, by John Beckman: do not bother reading this book. Back in the day (i.e. second half 2002) there was a minor spate of books on Eastern Europe right after the fall of communism. The best of these books were Everything is Illuminated, Prague, and The Russian Debutante's Handbook. In some or another review of this trend, Beckman's book came up, and it was the one I never managed to get around to. And I kind of wish I hadn't.

There's a pretty serious amount of deviant sex in the book: cousinly love, statutory rape, pornographic photography, lots of girl-on-girl action, and a free for all orgy. And it seems at first like the sex belongs - that there's a reason for it. But there's not, most of it is just for titillation, as far as I can tell.

I feel mean being this negative, so I'll stop here. The other books I mention are all great and I highly recommend them. But stop before you get to Poland and The Winter Zoo.

[UPDATE: Rahul makes a good point in his comment below. My problem with the sex is not that it was "deviant", or that it crossed lines, but that Beckman seemed to just be looking for ways to try to shock the reader. It didn't work, it just got old. Also, hi Rahul!!! It's nice - and a little scary - to think that someone is actually reading this...]

As for The Bean Trees, we finished just in time for tonight's book club. I have no idea what I'm going to say. I liked the rendering of the toddler's baby talk? If the aforementioned novel had too much sex, maybe this one had too much sexless romance? The book is nice, and sweet, but didn't really provoke much of a reaction from me.

The Bean Trees

We've been reading Barbara Kingsolver's The Bean Trees before our book club meeting next week. Like the great big nerds we are, Michael and I have decided to read our club books together - aloud. And since I can do a pretty ridiculous Southern accent on accident (and also b/c this book is so a chick book) I have been doing the reading.

Anyway, I want to save most of my witty thoughts for the meeting, but I'll offer this: even though Barbara Kingsolver was huge on BART a few years ago (Poisonwood Bible mostly), I never really considered reading her. I'm not overwhelmed, but not disappointed either. It's genial, you might say.

Favorite character: Turtle, the toddler
Biggest disappointment: I think I'm wrong on the lesbian prediction I had around page 35. I could still be right though... but I doubt it.

more Moooooo

There's something comfortingly witty about the kind of satire that announces deus ex machina by titling a chapter "Deus ex Machina" - and then proceeds to provide it in spades. Moo is an enjoyable book; my only quarrel is that with the huge cast of characters, Smiley can't possibly provide enough attention to each one, and sometimes I'd rather know more about the ones that she glides over. But really, when your biggest complaint is that you want to know more, that's pretty good.

Does writing matter?

After reading Midnight's Children, I couldn't talk normally for a week, as Salman Rushdie's style had utterly supplanted my own. In this article, he explains why that's important.

And because the LA Times is stingy about how long it leaves links up, here's an excerpt:

One may read and like or admire or respect a book and yet remain entirely unchanged by its contents, but love gets under one's guard and shakes things up, for such is its sneaky nature. When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced. We love relatively few books in our lives, and those books become parts of the way we see our lives; we read our lives through them, and their descriptions of the inner and outer worlds become mixed up with ours — they become ours.

LAT Festival of Books, and Jane Smiley's Moo

Michael and I spent the weekend at the LA Times Festival of Books - gathering free stuff, checking out books we want but are too cheap to buy, sharing info on where to get the good free stuff with friends, and also going to several panels. We had underestimated the popularity of swarming Ticketmaster for the (free) tickets to panels, so by the time we made it there last Monday, many of our top choices were sold out. We still did pretty well, with 4 panels.

Three were political: Interrogation or Torture: Human Rights After 9/11, Brave New World: Monopoly, Media, & the Right to Know, and Are We Making the World Safe for Democracy? Each had one token conservative, and perhaps one moderate. Facing an audience that was overwhelmingly liberal, this may have been a good percentage, but it was also kind of sad. Facing a hostile crowd, conservatives were faced with the option of insulting the audience by saying they were unpatriotic and "reviled" the troops (Max Boot), announcing that the LA Times was a far-left newspaper that many people in California were rejecting (Hugh Hewitt), or reading your piece as unpassionately as possible and hoping the crowd didn't really notice you (Charles Kesler).

Next year, however, I want to see and hear more about actually writing a book. Our fourth panel was Jane Smiley in conversation with some historian named Zachary Karabell (who was kind of this odd combination of Josh and Toby from The West Wing with a little of The Actor's Studio guy thrown in. here's a picture on a page that suggests he's also a big-shot econ guy). This was great, a very entertaining hour that combined politics and fiction writing and reading.

In honor of our Jane Smiley panel, I began reading Moo on Saturday morning. I gave myself twenty-four hours to get a feel for the author before I saw her speak. Now that the panel's over, I could put the book down, but I'm enjoying it. She is apparently quite catholic in her tastes, so perhaps it's too bad that the only novel of hers that we own is one that satirizes university life, as so many have done before. But what I like about Moo so far is that she's cast her net wide, and takes us into the minds of a wide array of professors, administrators, students, and even a very fat hog.

Claire Marvel (cont.)

Well, I finished the book. In an attempt to not be a spoiler, I will just say that I wasn't dissatisfied with the ending, so that was reassuring. It's a pretty book, and made me pensive for at least a day. There's a blurb on the back from Frank McCourt that, paraphrased, says that you'll be tempted to read this book in one sitting - but you shouldn't, b/c you should give the characters the chance to worm their way into you. I am horrible at taking such advice no matter how much I want to, but the characters got to me nonetheless.

Claire Marvel (part 1)

Today's book is Claire Marvel, by John Burnham Schwartz. It came out sometime in 2002 or 2003. Now that I am not tied into reading history book after history book, I revisited a list of "books to read" that I had started before moving to DC and am, courtesy of the LA Public Library, slowly working my way through it. I don't remember what review I must have read that prompted its inclusion on the list. (Some days I am more exclusive than others about what I might want to read.)

This is one of those books, written by a man, that serve for certain female readers like me as a reassurance that men fall in love as hard, and manage to mess it up through their own uncertainties just as women do. In short, it's a love story with a man as protagonist. And with our narrator Julian a grad student, this book is in some ways strikingly like this novel. (Use this link if the other one doesn't work.)

I feel for this couple; they've touched me. And yet, on page 178 of 316 or so, I am wary. Books that trick me into caring about the characters' plight run the risk of having a dissatisfying ending. Too often the author promises me that I should care about his or her creations, but then allows the ending to trickle away into something lesser. Leaving me feel betrayed. (High on this list is Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy.) You could just say I'm a sucker for a happy ending, and that's probably most of it, but there's more at stake when you deny characters the ending they deserve.