2009 Recap, and Goals for 2010

First of all, looking back, I see I have read about 32 books in 2009. This number isn't entirely accurate, as there are books that don't merit blogging, but close enough. This is a lower number than I would have liked, but decent enough considering the combination of school and work, and the big project that was Infinite Jest. And depending on how I spend the rest of today, I might get through Wolf Hall as well, another big book. Also worth noting, I actually made it through all my magazines for the year, New Yorkers included. (In 2007, when I finished those, I left a huge pile of other crap. No piles left this year.) I also set the goal of reading 10 books I already owned. Considering how much I love getting library books instead of reading what I already have, this is harder than it sounds. And looking back at my posts, I didn't do it, and hit what looks like 8 instead, although if you count books that were lent to me before the start of 2009, maybe I could give myself credit.

So for the year to come... I'm going to stick to my usual. I'm going to keep up with magazines, and again go for reading 10 books that I already own. This time, I'm going to identify 6 in advance, and leave the other 4 up to fate. So here goes. In 2010, I will read:
2666, by Roberto Bolano
Dreams from My Father, by Barack Obama
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz (why have I been putting this off???)
The Black Book, by Orhan Pamuk
Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver
And in deciding this list (all random except for 2666, which I thought would be part of Infinite Summer, but that appears uncertain, to say the least) I am noticing how many other fantastic books I have that I am really eager to read. Perhaps I need to lose my library card for a little while...

Happy New Year to you and yours.

"Happinesses opted against" or, an iPod love affair

The Song is You - Arthur Phillips
New York: Random House, 2009

I was recently commenting that Phillips has written four very different novels, starting with the Eastern European ex-pat novel in Prague, and then an Egyptology mystery and a Victorian ghost story before this latest about the unlikely romance between a music fan and an up-and-coming singer-songwriter set in present-day New York City. Except that there are thematic similarities. I mentioned in one of those previous reviews that he likes to play with the subjectivities of reality as experienced by different people. That continues here, as Phillips layers actions and memories, such that you are constantly forced to re-conceive of what happened in the previous pages.

Plot brief: Julian is a somewhat-jaded tv commercial director who has lost his wife and son, his libido, and is struggling to hold onto memories of the power of song. Until he comes across Cait O'Dwyer, a young Irish musician who is about to make it big. Julian's estranged wife and Asperger-y brother are also lost and damaged, and so are the other men orbiting around Cait: her guitarist and collaborator, a policeman who much prefers Sinatra, and a washed-up rocker who grasps desperately at a chance to feel fame again. Phillips sets up a whole array of other storylines that could be, most of them freighted with a hint of impending menace. I read nervously, unsure when a misunderstanding - that subjective reality - would lead to disaster. Whatever disaster means.

The novel also contains some lovely musings on the power of music and the way certain songs elicit longing and evoke times and places. And how their power loses potency when called upon too often, or wrongly. It made me want to empty my iPod of all those podcasts and just trip down memory lane, one song at a time.

Sookie Stackhouse, take 3

Club Dead - Charlaine Harris
New York: Ace Books, 2003

And so here is Book 3. Damn, this girl gets around. Also, lots more supernatural creatures out there. It's a little overwhelming. Nothing particularly to add to my thoughts on this series, but figured I would have it here for the record.
(Also, since there are elements here that appeared in Season 2 of True Blood, albeit in different fashion, I'm wondering exactly how they will use this book for Season 3.)

Family Histories

Rain of Gold - Victor Villaseñor
Houston: Arte Publico, 1991

A friend, recommending this to me, describes it as the book that made him want to be a history major. (For me, that was pretty much a foregone conclusion - probably because of this book from my childhood that no one else has ever heard of - but I had a similar experience reading this.) Much as I love history, these kinds of books are few and far between, so I decided I would go find Rain of Gold after my semester ended.

And then I found out it was 550 pages long. And I questioned my resolve. There's a lot I want to read coming up; was I sure I wanted to devote so much time to this book about a Mexican family that eventually settles in California? But then I sped through the book. I could barely put it down. Victor Villaseñor's parents are the two protagonists in this unlikely love story, though the lifeblood of the story likely belongs to his grandmothers, two women who battle to keep their families alive and together through upheaval and violent change. The foreword, just over 2 pages long, is important, so don't skip it. Here he explains how these stories were part of the air he breathed growing up, and how he brushed them aside as he got older, as we all do, until he had a family of his own and realized "how empty I'd feel if I couldn't tell my own children about our ancestral roots." But even more importantly, he explains why the narrative is told in a melodramatic style that is sometimes reminiscent of magical realism. It makes sense then.

What works even as everything threatens Juan Salvador and Lupe and their families again and again is that you know the end - you know that eventually there will be Victor, and then this book. And as a result, history seems fated, preordained.

And finally, while the scenes is Mexico when Lupe is a little girl are perhaps the most vivid of the entire book, I was particularly interested in life after the two families make it to Southern California sometime in the early 1920s. My family first settled in Los Angeles around 1950, so learning more about what it was like - for Californians of all races - during the Prohibition era was fascinating.

Yet another vampire post

Living Dead in Dallas - Charlaine Harris
New York: Ace Books, 2002

I read the second book in the series that has become True Blood, which I miss. A classmate has noted that Harris seems to have better editors as the series goes on, and even if this second novel I feel like I might be starting to see a difference.

What's sort of more interesting to me is how drastically the books differ from the tv show. Reading this, which is essentially season 2, you can see where the writers found their inspiration, but then they went off in all sorts of directions. And most of them, I prefer. The television characters, Sookie and Bill excepted, are pretty much all more vibrant and funny and engaging. (Harris pours her all into Sookie, so she is lively on the page, and while book Bill is fine, I find him just sooooooooo boring on the show that it's not too hard to outdo him.)

Anyway, it was a good read for finals week. Vacation reading on the way...

I can see the appeal of small-town life

Empire Falls - Richard Russo
New York: Vintage, 2001

They made a miniseries out of this novel the year after I moved to LA. I was taking the bus at that point, and I remember there were ads on benches everywhere. It was a little over the top.

The book itself is a little over the top though too. Except that it's also understated. Does this make any sense? It's about the life of a fading town in Maine, centered around Miles Roby, who was supposed to leave but didn't, and his family. It's slooooowly paced, except when it isn't, and the main narrative is punctuated with regular flashbacks that explain how it all came to be. You find yourself wanting a positive outcome for (most of) the characters, but just don't know if that'll happen.

This is one of those books where I think I might remember reading it - and the atmosphere it created - better than I remember the plot itself. I started it on a gloriously warm and sunny Thanksgiving afternoon, then spent a lovely portion of an evening reading snuggled in a beautiful hotel lobby. (And then finished it in bed at some point later.) The overall effect was tremendously calming.

Russo is a thoughtful writer, and I appreciated his style. A few of the moments that caught my eye:

• he "especially admired that they were dreamers who felt no urgency about bringing their dreams to fruition."
• "What did you do when you were good at just one thing, after it turned out you weren't as good as you thought?"
• "And that's the thing, she concludes. Just becasue things happen slow doesn't mean you'll be ready for them. If they happened fast, you'd be alert for all kinds of suddenness, aware that speed was trump. 'Slow' works on an altogether different principle, on the deceptive impression that there's plenty of time to prepare, which conceals the central fact, that no matter how slow things go, you'll always be slower."

And this last observation, by Miles's teen daughter, occurs just as the things that had been happening slow start to happen very fast indeed.

Geographic Misadventures

London is the Best City in America - Laura Dave
New York: Viking, 2006

This is kinda the best book title ever. Well, perhaps not ever, but still. And eventually, you actually find out what the title refers to. Anyway, this isn't necessarily the book I expected.

What I especially didn't expect was how creepily it seemed to be written for me, in order to smack me around a little and say, um, hello Erin. What is going on? Which is not to say that I've spent three years since running out on my fiance working in a fishing shop in Rhode Island and working on a documentary of fishwives. Or that my brother is about to get married to a girl he's been dating since I was in high school, except that he might be in love with someone else. Or that my brother has a hot older friend who is a chef, which may or may not be important to me.

Some of Dave's pronouncements can be a little pedantic. Emmy is full of deep thoughts and meaningful realizations. But it worked, and, again, it slapped me around a little. Some examples:

• You don't always know what you'll remember. And, still, it was starting to seem to me that -- if you paid close enough attention -- you could sometimes predict moments that were going to turn out to be important, moments that would stay with you. [This is just the beginning of a reverie about the times "already existing closer to memory than reality"]
• You can't really feel anything entirely unless part of you doesn't know it's happening.
• There are moments when you can feel something fall down inside of you, and never rise up in exactly the same way again.
• I said a small, silent prayer of gratitude that tonight was going to end. Not gracefully, maybe, but eventually.
• I felt this incredible relief at hearing him say it -- and then, almost simultaneously, this incredible sadness. If things were eventually going to work out, did it matter how you go there? Didn't it ultimately just matter that you got the ending you wanted?
• Never. I will never be done with you. I will never be able to think about you and hear about you and not totally -- totally -- miss you. [and more thoughts about her former fiance and her intensely complicated relationship. Not with him, but with the version of him that she's held ever since she left him. And later...] I'd remember [him], and I'd remember him wrong. And that was probably when I'd miss him the most.
  
• I really wish that I could begin to describe what it was like seeing her being seen that way by him. It was like watching a memory.
• If this were all we'd have to remember this day by, wouldn't it end up looking like this was the only way it was ever supposed to be? So maybe I was wrong to be questioning it still. What did I know about the way things came together? Maybe they had to come this close to falling about first.

So you see? In fact, the whole thing almost made it hard for me to concentrate on the will he/won't he plotline that ostensibly drives the whole book. And perhaps it does. Perhaps it takes other people's dramas to force Emmy out of her holding pattern. And if that's the case, what are the implications for a girl like me?

Hey Lauren Lipton, please write another novel

It's About Your Husband - Lauren Lipton
New York: 5 Spot, 2006

With the exception of some weird Twilight madness that overtook me last fall, I really don't read multiple books by the same author all at once (and by "all at once" I mean within 6 months or so). I tend to spread them out. But occasionally I make exceptions. And since Mating Rituals... apparently got to me so much, I decided to inaugurate my new library card (hello Huntington Beach!) with Lipton's earlier novel.

Let's see. Iris is a newly-unemployed transplant from the San Fernando Valley to New York. (Why oh why does everyone knock the Valley so much, btw?) Because apparently the fact that she confuses twin sisters is a sign of her awesome detective skills, she somehow gets herself hired to track Sister #2's husband, who may or may not be having an affair. And, predictably. mayhem ensues. Oh, and puppies. Two of the main characters are a pug and a Jack Russell terrier (Awww).

One thing I will say about this novel that I really needed is that there really aren't any evil characters. (Is that a spoiler? It might be.) You go through thinking, oh, well this person is a cad/bitch/psycho/whatever, and then they aren't. They're just misguided, or a little selfish, and human, and forgivable. So that's nice. In the middle of stressful life changes and moves and end-of-semester workloads, it's nice to visit a world where good things happen.

Since Lipton's second novel just came out earlier this year, I'm not expecting anything new anytime soon, but when it does come, I will read it. Ooh, and hey! she's working on her next novel. And it's going to be "literary!" Yays all around.

I'm so glad I missed the 70s

The Ebony Towers - John Fowles
New York: Signet, 1974

I'm not sure how I ended up owning this book. But once upon a time I read The French Lieutenant's Woman and liked it. And more recently (well, 8 years ago, but still...) I read The Collector, which I found incredibly disturbing.

This collection of works is kind of sexy, in the way that I now imagine English sexiness to be, a little awkward, far more matter-of-fact than sex today, and awkward again for good measure. Too long to be short stories, but too short to be novellas, they are something in between. And they are meditations that take place at least as much in the characters' heads than in any action. What action occurs is mediated by thinking and overthinking. And each one turns on a mystery which is left unresolved, because Fowles is trying to tell us... what?

Anyway, for the first 100 pages, I had missed that this was a collection and not a novel. Which was a little disappointing, because I had already charted the path of the title story's "novel," and felt a little cheated when it ended abruptly. On the other hand, I was glad it ended, but I found the characters so annoying, so self-indulgent. There's a bit near the end where David, the married man who had decided he is IN LOVE, has an existential crisis because the girl wouldn't sleep with him. (Oops, spoiler.) Anyway, I was going to quote parts of it, but I just can't.

I'm dwelling on the negative. There was lots to like in the reading. Had I come across these stories in The New Yorker, one at a time, and in that NewYorkershortstorycontext that I don't know how to define but changes my readiness to accept certain conventions, I would have enjoyed myself a lot more. As it is though, I just found myself glad to have made it through another book that I can now remove from my shelf.

I heart Michael Ondaatje

Anil's Ghost - Michael Ondaatje
New York: Knopf, 2000

I went through a Canadian phast in my late high school years. While this was largely due to a certain hockey player, it also included a love affair with Ondaatje's The English Patient (both novel and film) and Joy Kogawa's Obasan. I had dreams of moving to Vancouver and having a big dog and taking him on walks to Stanley Park. All of which is introduction, of sorts, to the Canadian Ondaatje's 2000 novel about his native Sri Lanka.

I read it in Denver, and the cold weather and warm family atmosphere made for a gripping counterweight to the book's sultry temperatures and political chill. You understand why Anil left for England, America, etc., and work to understand why she returned to practice forensic anthropology, investigating the murders and atrocities committed by political factions within and against the government. You also work to understand the two brothers who accompany her, one an anthropologist, one a doctor, both destroyed both by their own pasts and the turmoil of their country.

It's hard to say that a lot happens, in the traditional sense of the word. I found myself thinking, well this is where I would go with this plot, and then remembering that Ondaatje is a lot less trite or more interesting than I can be. His prose is lyrical and haunting and quiet and disjointed and all sorts of other good things. Had I not been on vacation, I might have noted passages to share; instead you will have to take my word for it.

In short, he's gorgeous, and I was unsettled and unsatisfied in an entirely satisfying way.

What was sexy (and what wasn't) in medieval England

The Illuminator - by Brenda Rickman Vantrease
New York: St. Martin's Press, 2005

I kinda hate it when I wait awhile between finishing a book and blogging about it. I forget things. I stop caring. But I can't just skip it, not that whatever readers actually exist out there actually care. But I digress, as usual.

The Illuminator is probably much more about the a widowed noblewoman than the title character, a former noble who know creates the beautiful illuminated illustrations on religious texts but who also works with the heretic texts of proto-Protestant John Wycliffe. Life is all sorts of perilous for everyone in late 14th-century England. And the novel's plot feels the need to reinforce the point by letting bad things happen to good people. (That's not too much of a spoiler, right?) Anyway, in order to safeguard her home and lands with the protection of a nearby abbot, Lady Kathryn takes in the illuminator and his daughter. She's a single lady, he's a single dude, and she also has twin boys the same age as the girl. Oh, and there's an evil sheriff, an evil bishop, a female religious recluse, a dwarf, and a servant girl who can read auras. Mayhem, predictably, ensues. Also lots of pride.

But lest I make this sound like fluff, it's really not. It seems fairly well historically grounded, and I didn't feel like it was too anachronistic. I found the sympathetic characters sympathetic, and rooted for them. Vantrease's style is quite pretty, and during a stressful period, I found the quite different stresses of this world a comforting escape.

Vampires

Okay, I would like this vampire to be my boyfriend. But I digress. To the review...

Dead Until Dark - Charlaine Harris
New York: Ace Books, 2001

I would never have read this were it not for True Blood. And I don't know if I would have continued watching the show - which is entertaining enough although I'm still not sure about Anna Paquin - were it not for Eric.

But I did watch the show, and got pretty into it. So clearly that meant that I had to try reading the books. My mom gave me the copies of 2-4 that she got from a friend, but I don't like starting in the middle. So I ended up buying a copy really cheap. (And now I'm babbling. Have I mentioned that Eric is hot?)

Okay. So here is Dead Until Dark. It's difficult not to compare it to the tv show. Sookie is a strange character. She can hear people's thoughts, and that creates problems for her, even as she tries to keep out of their heads. People think she is definitely weird, and possibly a little retarded. She's hot enough, but a virgin in her mid-twenties. She handles with aplomb situations that would fell me, and then gets weirded out by other things. I don't get her. And then Bill is a vampire. That's about all there is to say there.

Wow, this is a bad review. (Have I mentioned though that Eric is hot? Although not so much in this first book. Will he get more hot later on? I guess it doesn't matter as long as he stays hot on tv.) The book is enjoyable enough, and it's got some suspense and a decent mystery. I'll keep reading the series.

I read newspapers & stuff...

A couple book-y articles that have caught my eye in the last couple days...

I didn't even notice the title of "Hero librarians save my babies" ("Librarians saved my babies" in the print edition) until I finished reading it. This says something about how little I notice headlines when I am charging my way through the paper. Anyway, it's a cute essay about how the characters in a novelist's work are like children that you send off into the world, and that reviews and fan mail and sightings of your book on store shelves are the ways in which you hear that your little ones are all right and making their way out there. And that when you hear your book has been remaindered... well, that's bad news for your characters. Except...

The horror of the "R" letter is mitigated by only one thought: Your babies are safe at the library! Were it not for libraries, there would be no safe harbor for characters and stories, nowhere for them to wait out disasters and economic storms. And were it not for librarians, there would be no one to introduce your characters to new children as the older ones grow up and move on.

And for this, I want to thank librarians, for the work they do and for the many, many lives they save.

So, there it is. Good job, libraries.

And then courtesy of John Dickerson's Twitter feed, I get to find out this morning about a woman who is reading a book a day for a year. (This was impressive enough back in 2007 when my friend Siel did so for a month.) So, Nina Sankovitch, I envy you. I want to do this. And then have a blog about it. Except I wouldn't want to give up the things that the NYT article says she has: The New Yorker, coffee with friends. And what I definitely would miss is getting to take time off after reading a book that really moves you. Or getting to stop and wait at least a day before you finish, because you want to prolong the experience of being inside the book's world.

Oh, and I imagine we'll see Sankovitch's book at some point in the next couple years? And finally, while I have read excerpts and stories from several more of the books, of the 349 books she has read thus far, I have read a whopping total of 7. Seems like I need to get busy...

Welcome to America, Comrade

K Blows Top: A Cold War Comic Interlude, Starring Nikita Khrushchev, America's Most Unlikely Tourist - Peter Carlson
New York: Public Affairs, 2009

Nikita Sergeyevich makes me strangely emotional. His embarrassing blustery buffoonery, his role in the Thaw and the Cuban Missile Crisis, his eventual downfall. (Soviet leaders in general bring out this reaction in me. Which is strange because most of them don't deserve my pity, and I am sure they wouldn't want it.) I don't know what it is, but for years I've found him utterly compelling. And tragic. And hilarious.

Anyway, so the point is that I was excited when I heard about Carlson's book. He's a former Washington Post reporter, and came across the story of Khrushchev's 1959 trip to America when he was working at People magazine in the 1980s. So while the book came out for the 50th anniversary of the trip, it was over 20 years in the making. And, Carlson relies on one of my favorite historical sources: press accounts. I was planning on building a career as a historian on the legs of the popular media, after all.

But I am digressing again. The book is fun. At least, it's fun for someone like me, who knows and likes Soviet history, and probably knows the 1950s USSR better than the USA of the same period. But I bet it'll be fun for you as well. It really is what the title suggests: a Cold War comic interlude. In a world that was likely far more dangerous than I am willing to imagine. As a historian at heart, I would have liked to have seen more rigorous scholarship, but then it wouldn't have been the same book, and the audience would have shrunk to essentially nil.

I've packed up all my Russia books in preparation for my move, but I am tempted to pull out the Khrushchev stuff now. Maybe when I'm unpacking... :)

My favorite line of the book was buried about 3/4 of the way through the book. Discussing Khrushchev's trip, and commentators' reactions to it as it finally came to a close, Carlson writes, "The trip was, if nothing else, a victory for nuance." Would that we have more of those.

DFW lives on

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men - David Foster Wallace
Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1999

First and foremost, I am still sad that Infinite Summer is over. Although happily it is living on in the reading of more and new books. (I already own 2666 and am ready for January! Skipping Dracula.) And secondly, I am so grateful that LA has Skylight Books, and even more grateful that Skylight hosted an Infinite Summer party so we could all celebrate. (Plus, John Krasinski! see above for blurry proof)

I will skip my musings on how sweet Krasinski was and how much I am looking forward to seeing his film adaptation of the book. I will get right to the book, which I read in a hurry so that I could go see the film.

Here's the thing. With Infinite Jest, I knew what I was getting myself into. I gave myself lots of time, expected it to be hard. Why didn't I expect this with Brief Interviews? I guess because I had already battled through his fiction once, and thought I had the process down. And besides, this was less than 300 pages. And there was a lot going on in my life. What I had forgotten is that DFW never made things easy. So I blame myself for not liking this book all that much. And that said, it had some moments that blew me away. Here they are...

An adolescent boy at a community pool:

And girl-women, women, curved like instruments or fruit, skin burnished brown-bright, suit tops held by delicate knots of fragile colored string against the pull of mysterious weights, suit bottoms riding low over the gentle juts of hips totally unlike your own, immoderate swells and swivels that melt inlight into a surrounding space that cups and accommodates the soft curves as things precious. You almost understand.

And it is, of course, that last sentence that makes that whole paragraph amazing.

B.I. #14 (pp. 14-15) - it's the ones that understand that are the worst, that bring out his contempt. Because his affliction, you see, Is. Not. Understandable.

All of Pop Quiz #9 (pp. 123-36) and its call back to the ambiguity of PQ #4. And the fucking sincerity of DFW, that breaks your heart and makes you want to be a better person.

At any rate it's not going to make you look wise or secure or accomplished or any of the things readers usually want to pretend they believe [you are]. Rather it's going to make you look fundamentally lost and confused and frightened and unsure [...]

With a different writer, that could just be meta and pretentious and everything else. But with Wallace, for whatever reason, you believe him. You believe that he's really had these feelings and these moments of self-doubt, and is sharing them with you because he really wants you to understand, not as some sort of cute exercise. And that's why he means so much to so many people.

"World enough, and time"

The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
San Francisco: MacAdam/Cage, 2003

I need to take a break from these books that put me through some kind of emotional washing machine. (Or dryer?) I'm tired, y'all. I'm not saying it's not worth it, but it's getting to be a little much.

There really isn't any way to discuss the things I'd want to discuss in this post without engaging in all sorts of spoilers. And even though the book has been around for years, and the movie was released this summer, and how many people read this anyway?, I like trying to avoid spoilers.

Clare's and Henry's is a love story unlike any I think I've ever seen. He eight years older than she, but she meets him when she is six, and he doesn't meet her until he's 28. It's kind of remarkable, the way it all works out. Because she's in love with him by the time she meets him in real time, but if she weren't in love with his older self, and if she didn't know that's how things would be, would she have loved him? Maybe we're not supposed to dwell on this, and it doesn't really matter because their love is really quite something. But it's evidence of how little control they have - in so many ways - over their destiny. You have to act as though you have free will, but the result is predetermined anyway, and you know this, because Henry's been there, or a future Henry has come back and told you, or given you enough hints. It's dizzying. And puts that metaphysical question in stark relief.

I found myself wondering about Niffenegger's writing process, and how she managed to keep everything straight, since the novel runs in roughly chronological time (but of course Clare's chronology doesn't quite match Henry's, to say the least) and things that happen before also happen after. The decisions about whether to share a moment as it appears in Clare's life or in Henry's... again: dizzying. Before I began reading, a coworker who had just seen the movie asked to borrow the book to check something. She then returned it saying that she was just going to need to read the whole thing over. And I understand - there are moments I'd like to return to, to re-experience or to check for hints - and I don't know really how I would find them. Some are easy, but others would be require essentially rereading large swaths. (This is a real problem with Infinite Jest as well. Even more of a problem there in fact.)

So I regret nothing. But I'm going to try to take a break from books that leave me bruised and battered. Suggestions?

Nothing lasts forever, not even an Infinite Summer

Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1996

I finished the book three weeks ago, but wasn't ready to write about it, to really be finished with it. But it seems like there's no better day that on the first anniversary of Wallace's death to take a stab at wrapping up my time with the novel. For now anyway. I won't try to memorialize DFW here, since Infinite Summer (and others, I am sure) have already done a far better job of that. But know he's been very much on my mind.

But the novel. My book is battered and bruised. It was a little roughed up before, since it was a borrowed used copy. But now I'm a little embarrassed to give it back. I also don't want to have to return it. This is the physical copy that I read. That means something. (I also feel this way about my copy of Fall of a Sparrow, which is why I spurned my mom's gift of a nice hardback edition.)

I have run my mind ragged trying to figure out what happened and what it all means. I'd come close to an epiphany, and then it would shimmer and disappear. And that's okay. I don't really mind anymore. I'll read it again someday, and maybe I'll see something new. I'm sure I will see something new. But it won't offer all the answers either.

I mainly just read and read. And didn't stop and note funny quotes or moments that I particularly wanted to go back to. So when I did write on my bookmark, you would figure those moments would be important. And they are, except now I look at them and I don't know what I wanted to say. What I do know is that they are all about Hal. Hal through the lens of Mario. Hal and sadness and irony and and Avril's awesome definition of existential ("vague and slightly flaky"). And Hal & Mario talking almost past each other.

'I feel like you always tell me the truth. You tell me when it's right to.'
'Marvelous.'
'I feel like you're the only one who knows when it's right to tell. I can't know for you, so why should I be hurt.'
'Be a fucking human being for once, Boo. I room with you and I hid it from you and let you worry and be hurt that I was trying to hide it.'
'I wasn't hurt. I don't want you to be sad.'
'You can get hurt and mad at people, Boo. News-flash at almost fucking nineteen, kid. It's called being a person. You can get mad at somebody and it doesn't mean they'll go away.'

It's so.... it's too big to talk about. I wish I could, and it makes me crazy a little that I can't. If I had specific questions to answer - if this were an essay exam where someone asked me something like "Compare and contrast the archetypal roles that mother- and father-figures play for the main characters" I would have something to say. But to just try to get over 1000 pages into a single post, or even several posts, it's too much.

I really hate the term WASP

...And in fact, that is probably my biggest gripe with this book.

Mating Rituals of the North American WASP - Lauren Lipton
New York: 5 Spot, 2009

I definitely did not expect to find myself so wrapped up in this book. I mean, it's a "oops, we accidentally got married in Vegas and now are going to pretend the marriage is legit for some ridiculous reason" chick lit plot. But I read a good review of it somewhere, and I was still adrift after finishing Infinite Jest (a post I still can't bring myself to write), so here it was.

And I have to say, I kind of loved it. I'm not sure why. I didn't love the characters, but then, I liked them much better when they were with one another. And maybe that's the hallmark of a good romance. And the whole poem thing is kinda awesome. Actually, the poetry may have been the key. I am a sucker for books that quote Yeats. And then the snippets of verse that lodge themselves inside Luke's head... I walked around with them too. "An aphrodisiac will disappear, delusional, like permanence or wealth" and especially "staid genes worked hot from your electric charms." In the cursed heat and smoke of late August, these lines hung in the air around me.

Or maybe it wasn't the poetry, or the love story, but rural Connecticut and old money. Snow is mighty appealing when you are starting to think that you may never not be too hot again. Or maybe I'm reliving a chapter of my youth; as my mom said to me last weekend, haven't I already done the Connecticut WASPy thing? Oh, but believe me, he was not Luke.

Whatever it was, the novel demanded my attention. And refused to let me go. And that was it.

Three: something important is about to happen. Pay attention. Yes, you.

How to Buy a Love of Reading - Tanya Egan Gibson
New York: Dutton, 2009

The gimmicky premise: Nouveau Riche Long Islanders decide to show up their neighbors and serve their chubby and anti-intellectual daughter by becoming patrons of the arts. That is, they hire an author to move into their home and write a novel to their daughter's specifications. Needless to say, things don't entirely go as planned.

The cast:

• Carley is the daughter, overweight and addicted to reality television. But she may be way more perceptive than she seems. She also is in love with...
• Hunter, her best friend. Also super hot and popular. Also an alcoholic who pops pills, worships Fitzgerald, and cries more than I ever knew any boy to. He's the only one who has actually read the first novel by...
• Bree, whose postmodern trickery (and footnotes! footnotes everywhere!) makes her the unlikeliest of candidates to write a Arthurian novel (the theme of Carley's upcoming Sweet 16, selected by her parents) for a teen girl. She's a former classmate of...
• Justin, a successful novelist and Hunter's idol and neighbor technically, although he's been gone since being shot by a deranged fan.

There are other characters too, obviously. I can leave them aside for now. And I will not even try to get into the web of relationships just among these four. Suffice it to say that love shows itself in strange ways. And sometimes we love someone not because of who they are, but who we are for loving them. And do those lies and misperceptions - the fault of love - matter, in the end?

I waited a week to write about this book because I had SO much to say. I still do, particularly about love and how desperately selfish it can be. How maybe we would be happier if we loved people for who they were instead of ghosts or mirages. How a "happy" ending can still be the wrong one. And how a father holding a bouquet of flowers can be the trigger that makes me cry. I honestly don't even know if I liked this book - it was ambitious, that's for sure, but that's doesn't necessarily make it successful. But like it or not, it made me think far more than I expected.

And a few miscellaneous thoughts: did I feel like the parody of pomo literature was at the expense of DFW? Not sure, but considering my other summer reading, it was on my mind. Also, the line that turned into the title of this post. It made me happy. Gibson's descriptions of Justin's panic attacks weren't entirely convincing, but perhaps close enough. And Aftermemory. When you go back and relive events the way you wished they could be. But none of this is as important as the rest of it. So go back and re-read the previous paragraph.

What I am seeking. What am I seeking?

From Tanya Egan Gibson:

...and then she and Justin are cracking up, slap-happy, teary-insane with that feeling that comes from getting exactly what you need when you don't know what to ask for.

From Robert Hellenga:

It seemed to him he'd come to the place he'd been looking for all evening, a place where prayers are answered in unexpected ways, which is just the way prayers are supposed to be answered. You might get what you want, but it won't be quite what you expected.

This is water

(aka an update on Erin's own Infinite Summer)

I'm a member of that generation that has a hard time with sincerity. Whenever feelings get a little too real, we need to say something caustic, ironic, to back away. Is this a generational thing, or a cultural thing, or just part of being young? I'm not sure. Anyway, I found it again yesterday while reading about Mario Incandenza:

The older Mario gets, the more confused he gets about the fact that everyone at E.T.A. over the age of about Kent Blott finds stuff that's really real uncomfortable and they get embarrassed. It's like there's some rule that real stuff can only get mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes or laughs in a way that isn't happy. (p. 592, btw)

And that's the thing about Madame Psychosis for him (and prob not just him) - she talks about "stuff that is real."

Because I suspect we all secretly crave that sincerity, even as we are embarrassed by it.

So this is the real thing I read 2 pages before, about Mario, that just pulled and pulled at me:

He can't tell if Hal is sad. He is having a harder and harder time reading Hal's states of mind or whether he's in good spirits. This worries him. He used to be able to sort of preverbally know in his stomach generally where Hal was and what he was doing, even if Hal was far away and playing or if Mario was away, and now he can't anymore. Feel it. This worries him and feels like when you've lost something important in a dream and you can't even remember what it was but it's important. Mario loves Hal so much it makes his heart beat hard. He doesn't have to wonder if the difference now is him or his brother because Mario never changes.

Oh, and the title for this post? That's from here.

I really cannot believe I read this.

The Hopeless Romantic's Handbook - Gemma Townley
New York: Ballantine, 2007

I am really enjoying Infinite Jest. A lot. But it is hard work. (Lots of testimonials to this fact over at the Infinite Summer site.) Instead of giving up, I am taking brain breaks. I have also been fighting off a cold.

All of which led to reading this. Believe me people, I KNOW. And I'm not even going to go into the story of how I came across it. What has been fun - and more fun than reading the book, which was fine, I guess - has been casting the actors in the film version. I've gotten as far as NOT Keira Knightley thankyouverymuch for Kate (maybe Natalie Dormer? or Jacinda Barrett?), Martin Freeman for Tom. I'm having more trouble with Joe, perhaps b/c I can totally picture him but can't think of the actor who is most "him." Leaning toward someone like Teddy Dunn. Anyway, I am back to the tome and on track to finish before my semester starts.

Characters I Love

Memories are slippery, so I can't be sure exactly how dramatic this moment actually was, but I remember sitting, at 17, in a waiting room at Kaiser. I was there with my grandmother for some appointment or other, and I was reading War and Peace. (Isn't this how everyone spends the summer after their high school graduation?) Anyway, I had a thing for Prince Andrei. In fact, I'm looking forward to re-reading the book just so I can see how he holds up over a dozen years. And so there came a moment where another character acts in a way that will hurt him, and I exclaimed, to the whole room, "You whore!" Um, that was embarrassing.

Anyway, he's not the only character I have gotten too close to. And if you add in tv shows and movies, I am over-empathizing with characters all the time. But he's still the one that matters the most.

And now, reading Infinite Summer, I find myself (like Avery Edison) liking Hal Incandenza just a little too much. And fearing for him. Avery says anxious, and since I have such a close personal relationship with anxiety, it goes without saying that that's the best word for it. I just... I want it to be okay. But I don't think it will be.

I've always liked to root for the bad guy and tried to create antiheroes where they didn't exist. And I was down with my ex who, we joked, only liked movies where people died at the end. And yet.... A co-worker was telling me something he heard about ways in which women conceive of fairness differently than men. And really, when it comes down to it, as much as I don't want to be like everyone else, man do I crave the happy ending. I want things to be the way they are supposed to be. Which isn't always happy per se. But is the way I feel like it should be. It's unoriginal perhaps, and quite possibly is pretty unhealthy, but it's me.

All that said, I can't imagine DFW giving me what I want. And probably I'd respect him less if he did.

A descent into...?

Atmospheric Disturbances - Rivka Galchen
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008

This book had been on my To Read list since sometime last year, but it got bumped to the library request list when it appeared as a Slate audio book club selection in May. (Then I had to wait to actually get and read the book, so finally just listened to the podcast last week.)

This is one of those books that's so clever that I sort of feel like I won't be able to say anything sufficiently clever about it. But not in an annoying way, just in a "it is what it is" sort of way. Leo is a psychiatrist, which somehow gives him enough mental credibility that you want to believe him when one day an impostor comes home instead of his wife. Despite being right to almost the slightest detail, he knows she's not his Rema. So he goes off looking for here, and gets caught up with the Royal Academy of Meteorologists, with which one of his clients (also missing, like Rema) claims to be a secret agent. Long story short, the line between what is real and what is in Leo's head is constantly shifting as the simulacrum tries to persuade Leo to come home to her.

I expected this to be mostly a meditation on the ways in which we fall out of love, or love changes, and the person you loved is suddenly gone and replaced by someone else. It's a great metaphor. But it's that, and more and less than that too. It's about perception and love and loss and the lies we tell ourselves and those around us, and the impossibility of ever perfectly knowing another person. And it's about the ache you feel for Leo (and his wife) when you see how he almost loves this replacement Rema, and wants to love her, and yet there is this block that prevents him from seeing her for who she is.

Some points:

• I noted some similarities - in title mostly, but also in style - with Special Topics in Calamity Physics, and was annoyed with the book club for pointing out the same thing and making me feel less original.
• Completion error: "with any incomplete perception - and needless to say all perceptions are incomplete - the observer 'fills in' by extrapolating from experience. Or from desire. Or from desire's other face, aversion. So basically, we focus fuzzy images by transforming them into what we expect to see, or what we wish we could see, or what we most dread to see." I love this quote in its own right, but I love it even more for Leo's further statement of being reassured that he knew right away that the impostress wasn't Rema instead of falling into completion error, without having considering that he is just committing the opposite completion error.
• Too lazy to check whether Leo's attribution to Freud is accurate, but he credits Freud with the belief that "there's always a thicket of past people between any two lovers." Leo then goes on to disagree, but really, isn't love about sorting one's way through the thicket in order to truly find each other?
• The book gets surprisingly and randomly funny toward the end, perhaps to mitigate how tragic everything is starting to feel, with a set of mistranslated drinks on a menu: Bloody Girl & Bloody Great. Also "I crash." (The first two seem to be sangria, the last maybe cocoa?)

And so that's it. Clever to be sure. But also quite touching. And disturbing too. But it was melancholy and yearning that stuck with me.

Did I mention I am doing this?

Infinite Summer

Which is not quite what it sounds like, the long lazy summers of my youth. Or at least, the ways we choose to remember the summers of our youth.

Anyway, I am reading DFW's Infinite Jest, alongside a cast of thousands. And as could be expected, I started late, then got ahead, and now have stopped to read another book. But it's fantastic. I don't think I know how to talk about it. I tried, a little, yesterday, and ended up mostly speechless. All I could really say was that his mind worked in a way that we, as mere mortals, can't really understand. Which is what made him a genius. And also what must have been such pure torture.

It's not really about cricket at all

Netherland - Joseph O'Neill
New York: Pantheon Books, 2008

Right before I started reading it, I found this Wonkette description of Netherland:

Recall last summer: it was the summer of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, the most important book liked by people wearing the most important-looking glasses. It seems O’Neill has journeyed from that wire-rimmed menagerie of the psyche to Politics & Prose, where all such odysseys of the soul must, and do, eventually terminate.

And I thought to myself, that sounds about how I remember the talk about this book. And while I generally don't wear glasses (current facebook profile pic aside), I figure that since I like the sort of books those people like, it's a good thing I've finally checked this out from the library. Oh, plus, it's a 9/11 book, and I'm kinda fascinated by those. (Like this one and this one.)

But just like it's not really about cricket, it's not really about 9/11. Except it's not not about them either. It's about love and loss and rediscovering oneself. And - and this is what makes it most about 9/11, for me - it is a love story about America, and NYC specifically. What is it about America that keeps pulling people toward it? Why are we a nation of immigrants?

I found Hans a lovely and thoughtful - albeit lost - narrator. It's as though he serves almost entirely as a mirror to hold up the world and the other characters he sees. But anyway, a few of the lovelier observations from Hans:

• Even my work, the largest of the pots and pans I'd placed under my life's leaking ceiling, had become too small to contain my misery.
  
• Who has the courage to set right those misperceptions that bring us love?
• I was possibly the only person contained by the apparent world who was unable to see through it.

And, finally, "my secret, almost shameful feeling is that I am out of New York - that New York interposed itself, once and for all, between me and all other places of origin." Which reminded me of nothing so much as E.M. Cioran:

All that is not Paris being equal in my eyes, I often regret that wars have spared it. [...] I shall never forgive Paris for having bound me to space, for making me from somewhere.

Which is a lot for a city to shoulder. But if any cities can, they are NYC and Paris. And what of my City of Angels? In what ways is it so much like and unlike the others? Could a different Netherland be set here?

Hyper radiance?

The Uses of Enchantment - Heidi Julavits
New York: Doubleday, 2006

So I actually went and looked up Bruno Bettelheim when I found out that Julavits borrowed the title from him. Fairy tales allow children a safe way to come to terms with fears and darkness. Do we ever really stop being children? In Julavits' novel, which I'm not totally certain I can discuss coherently, most of the characters are engaged in similar acts of attempting to empower themselves to be the masters of their story.

There are three narratives, set in 1985, 1986, and 1999. In the "present," Mary Veal is back in New England for her estranged mother's funeral. Her family has yet to forgive her for what happened over a decade ago, but she has held out hope that maybe her mother understood and forgave. This is juxtaposed with "What Might Have Happened" in 1985, when Mary disappeared, a willing participant in her abduction, and the notes taken by her therapist during a series of sessions early the next year, when he notices inconsistencies in her story, decides it is all a lie, and makes her the case study for his theory of hyper radiance. So it's difficult enough to tell what really happened, if a phrase like "what really happened" even makes sense. But then you realize that pretty much everyone is lying, or at least willfully ignoring what doesn't fit. And by the end you are kind of dizzy. And yet.... Julavits is smart and interesting and so are her characters. I was engaged start to finish. Frustrated as often as not, but engaged.

Pause. This isn't precisely what I want to say about this novel. I started writing in one place, and ended up somewhere entirely different. (Which is maybe not unlike what happens to some of these characters are they lose and regain control of their own narratives?) But rather than edit and re-think and try to get it right, I'll just end with the recommendation to read it for yourself.

Regency Vacation

Austenland - Shannon Hale
New York: Bloomsbury, 2007

I hadn't been to the library in ages. (Like since February probably.) So I was really excited a couple weeks ago to trek up to my local branch and see what from my "to read" list was in stock. And I was in the mood to find a book that I could read that afternoon. Hence, Austenland. (And how awesome was it when two hours later my friend e-mails and says, "My mom says hi. She wants to know what you're reading," and I had to respond, "um, Jane Austen fan lit.")

This was cute though, and a lovely weekend afternoon read. Jane (not the name I would have chosen, but whatevs) is about my age, and totally identifiable to a reader like me. She's single, relatively successful, and might be slightly obsessed with Mr. Darcy. Her great-aunt decides that Austen is keeping Jane from finding happiness in the real world, and bequeaths a vacation to an English resort where guests live in an Austen novel. With actors, and love affairs, and all sorts of ridiculousness. Jane goes, with the plan of getting Mr. Darcy out of her system forever, and being able to move on. And really? Do I have to say any more of the plot?

Another nice touch was that each chapter begins with the tale of one of Jane's loves, which run the gamut from the boy who kissed her in pre-school to her former fiance.

While nothing inspired by P&P can ever possibly be Bridget Jones, much less the real thing, this was a charming effort.

Like reading a dream

The Vine of Desire - Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
New York: Anchor Books, 2002

When I was in college, I went through a phase where it almost felt like I could get enough literature by South Asian female writers. Really this was pretty much just Divakaruni and Arundhati Roy, but in my head it was much more. Anyway, I heard both authors give readings on campus, which was lovely. And what I really liked about Divakaurni was that she was based in the East Bay, so everything had an extra tinge of familiarity. And there was a lyrical quality to both writers, where things seemed lush and rich beyond themselves. (This is also a trait I have ascribed to Canadian writers, thanks to Michael Ondaatje and Joy Kogawa.)

I digress. Vine of Desire is a follow-up to Sister of My Heart, which I read in college and do not remember AT ALL. Fortunately, the novel stands alone just fine. The main characters are friends, sisters essentially. At the opening, one has lost the baby she was carrying and is adrift. The other has lost her husband, so that she could keep her baby, and is likely drifting. Anju, the former, insists on bring Sudha and the baby out to California. This despite knowing that her husband has nurtured a desire for Sudha. So now you have three injured souls (and an adorable baby) in a single apartment. And no one is capable of communicating in any truthful fashion. And obviously things go badly.

The plot isn't much of a surprise. But the writing is simply lovely. Chapters come in different forms, different styles, and we see the perspectives of not only Anju and Sudha, but also Anju's husband Sunil, Sudha's suitor (if that's the right word) Lalit, and even the baby Dayita. Divakaruni is extremely compassionate toward her characters, and you ache for each of them, over the pain they feel and the pain they cause.

Welcome back Erin

This has been a strange spring. Not in a particularly interesting sort of way. But strange. And thanks to things like Twitter, I spend too much time on the internet as it is. Which makes blogging seem a lot less enticing.

Anyway, there have been books in the last 6 weeks. A couple. All by female authors. So posts to come right now...

hilarity, delayed

I am still chuckling to myself about what is probably the funniest thing I've seen in the paper in ages...

When sex isn't sexy

The Rachel Papers - Martin Amis
Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1984 (originally published 1973)

I went back and checked. It doesn't actually say "romp" on any of the cover blurbs. That was my imagination. But still, I feel like I was misled to expect a sort of screwball sexy comedy, British-style. Plus, I really liked Time's Arrow (spoiler alert on the link).

So. Charles is about to turn 20, about to go to Oxford, probably. He was sickly and effeminate growing up, and has decided to prove his virility by being almost monomaniacally focused on sex. Which I guess isn't that unusual for young men. But it's a scary look into their minds.

I guess I just found him troubling, and sad. His notebooks and careful over-thinking prevent him from really experiencing life as it happens. And really seeing himself and other people. He is a (very) little like Chuck Bass, although I am only making that comparison because I just finished watching Gossip Girl.

Anyway, romp it was not. Slightly painful journey into the mind of a neurotic young man? That's more like it.

Rahm Emanuel and I are not meant to be

Per Ryan Lizza:

Rahm Emanuel’s office, which is no more than a three-second walk from the Oval Office, is as neat as a Marine barracks. On his desk, the files and documents, including leatherbound folders from the National Security Council, are precisely arranged, each one parallel with the desk’s edge. During a visit hours before Congress passed President Barack Obama’s stimulus package, on Friday, February 13th, I absently jostled one of Emanuel’s heavy wooden letter trays a few degrees off kilter. He glared at me disapprovingly.

Sigh.

It's how you play the game

Friday Night Lights - H.G. Bissinger
Cambridge, Mass.: DaCapo Press, 2004 (originally published 1990)

I've gotten attached to the tv show. After roommates and friends and some growing up, I was finally ready to appreciate a little bit of Texas. So when I heard the book was good, I bought it. And when I was searching for something different to read a couple weeks ago, I turned to it.

And then, maybe 80 pages in, I found myself in a convention center hall in Riverside. And looking out at a room full of excited youth who spent their weekend competing, having developed surprisingly strong bonds with their teammates as well as their fellow competitors. And at their parents, and coaches, who give so much of themselves to help their kids succeed. Suddenly I was not-quite-eight again, at my first feis. Or 10, in San Diego, winning my first championship. Or 14, at Nationals, when I was supposed to make the final round as a soloist and failed and when my team paid more attention to our placement compared to other California schools and so was pleased with a 6th place finish. Or 17, at my last Nationals as a competitor. My teammates... we were a family. I didn't always like all of them, and I know they felt the same. But on stage, I trusted them implicitly. I knew exactly where they would be at any given moment, without looking. I don't think you realize how unique and rare that experience is until it's over.

But back to FNL. It's about a football team, and the town the team props up. Their heroes, their goats, the ways football fits into a broader social and historical context, and the importance of being part of something bigger than yourself.

Over my time as a dancer, I learned what it was like to be the newcomer, to be the small Cinderella school. And I experienced life on top, what it was to be part of the elite school on the West Coast, expected to win. And I also felt the confusion that comes when you are supposed to win, going to win, and somehow you don't. So maybe, in my own way, I know what it's like to be a Permian Panther.

And even more so, I know what Bissinger points out that these boys learn: it doesn't last.

They [the former players] might come back to the locker room after a big game [...] and paw around the edges of the joyful pandemonium and it would become clear that it wasn't theirs anymore - it belonged to others who had exactly the same swagger of invincibility that once upon a time had been their exclusive right.

It had been my right once too. And maybe that's why I enjoy watching these mock trial teams trying to guess their standings by analyzing the matchups. And why I cared so much whether the Permian Panthers made it to State. And why I do care about the games that end most episodes of the tv version of Friday Night Lights. And why I want them to win, and to lose. To experience it all. Before it's the next generation's turn.

Blank Slate

Man Walks Into a Room - Nicole Krauss
New York: Anchor Books, 2002

After the excitement of Stanford and Venice Blvd, I was able to get down to concentrating on the rest of Krauss' novel. It's haunting and minimalist and bizarre. It's not as deeply moving as The History of Love, but beautiful and interesting in its own right. The main character, Samson, a lit professor in his mid-30s, is found walking through the desert with no idea who he is. After a brain tumor is removed, his memory returns, but only through age 12. The last two dozen years: empty. But he embraces the emptiness, and his experiences as he puzzles through what it means and what it's worth to make connections with others make for a challenging and thought-provoking read. A couple moments that I highlighted:

• wanting to say to his estranged wife, with whom he cannot remember falling in love:

  "Tell me, was I the sort of person who took your elbow when cars passed on the street, touched your cheek while you talked, combed your wet hair, stopped by the side of the road in the country to point out certain constellations, standing behind you so that you had the advantage of leaning and looking up? and so on [...] But he didn't ask because he didn't know if he wanted the answers."

• on loneliness: "How can a mind know how alone it is until it brushes up against some other mind? [...] and now the magnitude of his own loss was impossible for Samson to ignore. It was breathtaking."
• and do I agree with this or not? How can you know for certain? "The mind cannot abide any presence but its own."
• Oh, and the epilogue. Which I wasn't expecting, but which completely fit.
  

Dislocation

I am currently reading Man Walks Into a Room, by Nicole Krauss. (I've written a little before about how I am terribly jealous of her.) Apparently sometimes I am bitchy. Case in point: when amnesiac Samson flies into LA, he tells the neuroscientist who picks him up, "I probably came [here] once or twice when I was a kid. I feel like I've been here." And the response: "You watch a lot of movies? Because it unsettles even people who live in L.A.: the nagging sense that they've seen a part of the city before, exactly like this." Um, I really don't feel that way. I recognize things, and am pleased or not, depending. It's certainly not unsettling. So minus points to Krauss.

Except then... 12 pages later another character tells Samson about sticking around at Stanford after finishing his degree, and hanging out with guys in Symbolic Systems. SymSys?? I didn't expect to see that in a book. And then, in another 4 pages: "They ate dinner at a plastic picinic table outside the India Sweets and Spices Mart on Venice Boulevard." Wait, where? The cheap Indian place down the street where they yell at you if you don't order quickly enough? The one I walked by this afternoon on my way back from Trader Joe's? And there, perhaps, is the feeling the neuroscientist mentioned. Unsettling, as though characters have been walking through my world.

So in the end, Krauss (if I attribute her character's observation to her) is right. Except for me, it happens in books, not in film.

"On beauty and being wrong"

On Beauty - Zadie Smith
New York: Penguin Press, 2005

I like Zadie Smith. I like her characters. They are rich and interesting and thoughtful and flawed and confusing. And not really all that much like me. At least, I don't find myself identifying with their foibles. Which is maybe why they interest me so much - they are entirely new people to learn about.

So On Beauty... is about a family. The middle-aged British professor, who is sympathetic despite being an intellectual prick, so far as I can tell, and engaging in a whole variety of stupid and hurtful actions. His wife, described by another character as being like an "African queen," big in body and spirit. Three children, all finding their own identities and wrestling with questions of being mixed-race and middle class. And another family, that of another professor, a bitter rival of the first. And the ways their families mix and interact.

In both this novel and White Teeth, I felt Smith was far stronger in developing her characters and setting a stage than in moving the plot along. The climaxes seemed strange and perhaps forced, as though they couldn't live up to everything that came before. But if you read more for character and less for plot, that becomes less of an issue. You have to leave the characters and hope for the best for them, rather than trust that Smith will bring them where you want them to be.

PS - a favorite moment: "When [the cab] arrived, the driver's door opened and a young Turk in the literal sense leaned out and asked Howard a rather metaphysical question: 'Is it you?' "
I don't know why, but I love that.

Human Nature, reduced

I had a few minutes to read yesterday sitting in front of the Central Library, waiting for my students to appear. And this moment, in a profile of movie marketing exec Tim Palen, made me laugh:

The collective wisdom is that young males like explosions, blood, cars flying through the air, pratfalls, poop jokes, “you’re so gay” banter, and sex—but not romance. Young women like friendship, pop music, fashion, sarcasm, sensitive boys who think with their hearts, and romance—but not sex (though they like to hear the naughty girl telling her friends about it).

Collective wisdom is awesome. And sad. Ooh, and it stays good even as we get older:

Older women like feel-good films and Nicholas Sparks-style weepies: they are the core audience for stories of doomed love and triumphs of the human spirit. They enjoy seeing an older woman having her pick of men; they hate seeing a child in danger. ... Older men like darker films, classic genres such as Westerns and war movies, men protecting their homes, and men behaving like idiots. Older men are easy to please, particularly if a film stars Clint Eastwood and is about guys just like them.

So if you've ever wondered how exactly the film industry saw you, now you know.

Tiny Tim, grown up

Mr. Timothy - Louis Bayard
New York: Perennial, 2004 (trade paperback)

I stopped reading books for about a month. I got distracted by things, such as:

• the inauguration
• work
• magazines (1, 2, 3)
• school
• a trip to the ER (albeit a largely unnecessary one)
• old tv shows about teen detectives

But this past week I was ready for an actual book again, so picked up one that has been on my bookshelf since my "Auntie Mame" (and yes, someday I will actually have to read the book and/or watch the movie) gave it to me for Christmas probably 5 years ago.

The book? Louis Bayard's Mr. Timothy, a thriller about the grown Tiny Tim and his efforts to save a young girl from a sexual predator. Interspersed among the action, and Timothy's quite touching relationship with two strong-willed and yet vulnerable urchins, is enough backstory to catch us up on what happened in the years after The Christmas Carol and Ebenezer Scrooge's change of heart. Tim is still trying to make sense of his relationships with his father and his benefactor, each of whom projected their own sense of whom Tim needed to be. Now, he's still trying to figure out his own identity. And finds it, unexpectedly, through his interaction with the two children.

The story moved quickly, and did not feel close to 400 pages. Yet it's not an easy read either, per se. It's an evocative, and disturbing, at times confusing, yet ultimately satisfying novel. And for a girl who hasn't particularly liked revisiting Dickensian London for probably 10 or more years, it was an unexpected pleasure.

Why my messy apartment is like Wikipedia

Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder - David Weinberger
New York: Holt, 2007

The semester starts later this week. I guess I don't mind, but it's not something I'm looking forward to in the way that I used to look forward to the new quarter and my new classes. Maybe because I'm only taking one class, and because I'm doing it during my busy time at work. Anyway, to prepare, my professor asked us to read the book above, in order to get a perspective about the possibilities for information in the digital age.

Weinberger's got a little Malcolm Gladwell in him; he likes to use interesting anecdotes to illuminate a broader theory. In this case, the theme is that instead of having an order of a single place and category for everything, we can now assign things multiple places and categories, sorting and resorting them according to our own individual needs and wants at that moment. (Note to self: should tag blog posts and photos better)

This argument necessarily embraces a seeming paradox about the desireability of having a glut of information. For example, "if [businesses] make their information messier, it'll be easier to find" and (italics Weinberger's) "the solution to the overabundance of information is more information."

While talking about some of the most popular Web 2.0 sites out there (and the way other sites have incorporated similar strategies), Weinberger has also reminded me about how exciting it will be to be a social historian of this era, sorting through this messy and miscellaneous pile of information about ourselves and what we deem important. Flickr alone could keep a researcher going for years. (Of course, what a historian leaves out is almost as interesting as what she includes, and with all this information, there will be an awful lot to leave out.)

What will be truly interesting will be to see how Weinberger's analysis stands up over time, as the trends towards miscellany continue and shift, and maybe reverse. What will the online world look like in the future?

Lost in Translation (going for the easy pun)

The Translator, by Leila Aboulela
New York: Black Cat, 1999

This book is seriously beautiful. And soothing. Even when Sammar, the main protagonist, is agonizing over circumstances and sad, it is oddly calming. Which reflects the role that Islam plays in Sammar's life, sustaining her through a tragic loss, her reawakening and love (which forms the actual substance of the novel), and the way her growth is challenged and reaffirmed.

Sammar's faith was actually the most difficult aspect of the book for me. I just could not relate. And the fact that a happy outcome depends on bringing another character into the faith... well, it was hard for me. But also an excellent reminder that my secular humanist view of the world isn't the only one.

A couple passages that I found worth noting:

Benches. White curved metal, each and every one bore a placard, In Loving Memory of this person or that. As if people must die so that others can sit in the Winter Garden.

An observation that just hit me as funny and poignant. And on the second page no less, setting the tone for this reader for the rest of the novel.

On the strange paradox of time passing:

The days were numbered. They dwindled and by their nature could not increase. But they were not normal days, they expanded as if by magic, they stretched out like trees, and the hours passed like the hours of a child, they did not flicker or melt deceptively away. She thought that it was not true what people said, that time passed quickly when you were happy and passed slowly when you were sad. For on her darkest days after Tarig died, grief had burned away time, devoured the hours effortlessly [...] Now each day stretched long and when Rae spoke to her a few words, when they only saw each other for a few minutes, these minutes expanded and these words multiplied and filled up time with what she wanted to take with her, what she did not want to leave behind.

(Also, back in the day, I read this other love story titled The Translator. Also recommended. Ooh, and you can read my review of it for the Daily Cal. I used to have a lot more to say, I guess.)