It's all madness

While I talk about the New Yorker incessantly in this blog, I've actually become much better over the years about not prefacing every remark with "I was reading in the New Yorker that..." But this somehow resonated so I had to share.

Adam Gopnik, on abridged books and director commentaries (abstract only): "Masterpieces are inherently a little loony."

Yes, exactly! Funny how I've heard (and repeated) time and again that line about no genius without a touch of madness (Seneca?), and yet never extrapolated to the work of the genius. So thanks New Yorker. And thanks Adam. Can I call you Adam?

My new job...

Well, probably not. But um, who knew you could make a career out of picking out Indiana Jones' books?

We all know I am several issues behind on the New Yorker, so I am just now discovering things more timely readers would have known back at the end of September. (Someday, I believe, I will catch up again.) Anyway, an October 1st "Talk of the Town" - linked above - is about Strand Bookstore and its books-by-the-foot service.

Since the program’s inception, in 1986, the Strand has built scores of imaginary reading rooms, from the prison library in “Oz” to the Barnes & Noble clone in “You’ve Got Mail.” Clients also include window dressers, commercial architects (the Strand furnished each floor in the Library Hotel with a different Dewey decimal category), and people with more shelf space than leisure time. Kelsey Grammer requested all hardback fiction in two of his homes, while Steven Spielberg, who, incidentally, is the director of the new Indiana Jones movie, allowed a wider range (cookbooks, children’s books, volumes on art and film) to penetrate his Hamptons estate. “There have been a lot of biographies on him, so I put those in there, too,” Nancy Bass Wyden, a co-owner of the store, said.

I wonder if Strand needs a West Coast affiliate...

About a Girl

Someone, if so inclined, could write a very interesting essay bringing together my last two reads: Ann Fessler's The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade (a mouthful) and Rajaa Alsanea's Girls of Riyadh, a novel of modern Saudi girls written as a series of mildly salacious e-mails to a listserv. Sadly, this someone is not going to be me. Not this week at any rate.

First Fessler. An adoptee herself, she began compiling an oral history of women who had given up children for adoption in the 50s and 60s, when good girls "didn't have sex" and single women were not mothers. Through the voices of these women, Fessler explores the cultural constructs that virtually mandated adoption - and the resulting trauma for girls who became mothers for an instant - except forever, really - and then surrendered their babies and were supposed to go back to just girls again. The book - and the deep, deep current of emotion it exposes - is a lot more than I can give justice to in a paragraph.

And the quartet of young women in Alsanea's novel represent a generation of women who live almost schizophrenic lives, navigating Arab Muslim and Western values. They aren't hypocrites though - they really are attempting to forge a place for themselves even among competing cultural messages and demands. One thing that I took away, even as the girls were falling in love and breaking taboos, is that they adamantly felt themselves good Muslims, and accepted or even embraced some of the practices we in the West would expect them to either struggle against or accept blindly. My only quibble with the book is that the conversational tone was probably more effective in the original Arabic. Alsanea co-translated the book, and discusses this in an author's note, but I still suspect that the "aha! I know these people!" familiarity readers should feel got lost in translation.

DC, Revisited

While staying on Capitol Hill (and on the plane back to LA) I chose to get a little political reading in with Kristin Gore's Sammy's Hill, chick lit for the wonkish set. (More stereotypical but also more enjoyable that Dog Days.)

Sammy is an idealistic aide to an eminently decent senator, and also a klutz and neurotic who puts herself in one ridiculous situation after another. While her personality quirks are a bit over the top (Gore was a television writer for Futurama, which may explain part of it) she is for sure likeable. You want her to get the guy and the bill signed and all of that.

So the plot is what you would expect. (See Bridget Jones and/or every other chick lit ever.) I'll spare you the details. But that doesn't mean that you aren't cheering for her.

(Also, I still really want a Blackberry every time I read one of these DC books.)