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.