2010 WrapUp & Best Of...

I read a lot at the beginning of this year. And then life got really hectic and I stopped reading. As much as I ever "stop" reading. Anyway, so my total count for the year is somewhere in the neighborhood of 42 books. (This does not include romance novels, which I should finally be brave and just admit that I read about 6 times/year.... Dude, they have hockey ones.... and it also counts all those Vampire Diaries titles as a single one.)

Going back and making a best of list was difficult, especially since there was a lot of light reading that I really enjoyed. And then there was a Pulitzer Prize-winner that didn't crack the list either. But whatever.... it is what it is, to bring back a phrase that was finally starting to fade out of my vocabulary.

But here it is, starting with some not-quite-official selections...

*Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel - technically I finished this last Dec. 31, but it never had a chance to count on my books of 2009, so here it is. Lovely.

*War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (trans. by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky) (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007) - well, obviously. This one also gets an asterisk because I had read the novel before. But not this translation!

And the rest, in reverse chronological order from when I read them:

The Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins

I hadn't realized that YA dystopias could be so moving

North and South - Elizabeth Gaskell

Won't knock Austen off her throne, but such a joy to discover.

One Day - David Nicholls

I have heard critiques that it is a little too manipulative, but screw that. I was enthralled.

Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller

This memoir was stunning. I kept finding myself dumbstruck.

The Possessed (etc.) - Elif Batuman

The title of my blog post was Russian! Books! Stanford! - 'Nuff said.

Bel Canto - Ann Patchett

So much more beautiful and moving than I had expected.

The Black Book - Orhan Pamuk

Challenging, but worth the effort.

A Fortunate Age - Joanna Smith Rakoff

I will always be a sucker for these novels about college graduates whose lives look just enough like mine.

Dreams From My Father - Barack Obama

Excellent food for thought, and a reminder of the complicated and thoughtful man who became president.

2666 - Roberto Bolaño

Soooooo good. So interesting. So confusing. Will eventually require additional reads.

2011 resolutions upcoming.... Stay tuned.

Face of a Revolution

Mockingjay - Suzanne Collins (Scholastic Press, 2010)

After waiting 3 months between The Hunger Games and Catching Fire, I waited about 10 hours before diving into Mockingjay. I mean, what is the point in being finished with the semester if you can't do things like that?

So.

A lot of this trilogy is about the indignity of being having no control over your life, of being a pawn manipulated for the entertainment of others. Of finding ways to live with integrity in this system, of being authentically yourself. (This does seem a little like being a teenager, doesn't it?) Katniss is particularly compelling because of what I have to call - although the term is so inexact - her naivete; she is capable of genuine independent and surprising action, but within a system of other actors that continue and continue to try to use her to meet their own ends. This does not change in the third installment. In fact, if anything it gets more brutal.

This book was the saddest of the three for me. I found it difficult even as I couldn't stop reading - and it was both good and bad that while I was reading the suspenseful trip through the Capitol, J was arranging (arranging?) a three-part harmony to "Zip-a-dee-doo-dah" - the juxtaposition was creepily appropriate. But it finally ends. And while I saw a few different ways in which Collins could satisfactorily conclude, I felt like this perhaps made the most sense. It was always what I wanted, more or less.

This was some of the most fun I had reading this year. I'll be recommending it for sure.

Back to Panem

Catching Fire - Suzanne Collins (Scholastic Press, 2009)

For some reason that I won't try to understand, my library has far fewer copies of Catching Fire than of either The Hunger Games or Mockingjay. So - and since I was supposed to be concentrating on school anyway - I waited to request a copy, figuring that if one was free it was meant to be. Otherwise I was supposed to wait until the end of the semester.

But then I got impatient, and got on the list so that I would get the book right around the end of the semester. So as soon as I turned everything in last week, I got down to the important business of returning to Panem and finding out what was up with Katniss. (er, spoiler: she survives the Games in the first book.)

Anyway, there is more love-triangle drama. Of a decidedly tame - and thus adorable - type. Plenty of unexpected twists. And life in general there just sort of sucks. But Katniss remains this interesting, thoughtful, extraordinary young woman. And the other characters gain additional dimension this time around too.

The plot moves quickly, and I was surprised when I came to the end. Fortunately though, I had already snagged my copy of Mockingjay, so instead of waiting and reading something else, I will be finishing the trilogy this week instead...

BACK! (Also, more cheesiness)

The Awakening, The Struggle, The Fury, Dark Reunion (Vampire Diaries 1-4) - L.J. Smith (Harper Teen, 2007 - originally published 1991-2)

Nightfall andShadow Souls (Vampire Diaries - The Return 1&2) - L.J. Smith (Harper Teen, 2009 & 2010)

While I was busy being on hiatus and "not reading", I also decided that it was very important that I read a vampire book for Halloween. And then I figured I might as well read the whole series. Which is loooooong. At least the new ones. Smith, like Meyer & Harris, has let her vampire world get totally out of control. Whatever I read in Shadow Souls about demons and weird underground dimensions I still don't understand. And like Meyer, she just starts writing longer and longer books.

But they are entertaining. If you can look past all the ridiculousness and the sloppy editing, they are kind of fun. It was certainly all I was capable of taking on during the month of November.

(I like the show better though. Mainly for Damon.)

Going home, moving on

Get Lucky - Katherine Center (Ballantine Books, 2010)

You may remember that it was just a couple weeks ago that I announced I was taking a break from reading. And I really have had barely any time to read recreationally (Twitter aside).

But on the other hand, a week into my hiatus, I found myself desperately craving narrative. And even though I have a nice DVR backlog as well, I needed a book. And a book with a story. But nothing too taxing. A beach read, probably. And so that's how an advance copy of Get Lucky fell into my hands.

It's cute. The premise is that this woman returns home to Houston in order to be a surrogate mom for her sister and brother-in-law. (I immediately thought of Phoebe Buffay.) And also she is trying to figure out what to do with her life. And also the high school ex who she treated terribly back in the day is back in town... and superhot. (Also he dated Mary Louise Parker? Because of course he did.) Oh, and there's a library subplot, which is adorable. And another about how the sisters have come to terms (or not) with their mother's death when they were teens. That could have spun off into a different literary novel had Center gone in that route.

Sarah isn't particularly likable though. I mean, she's fine. But I never felt like I really got to know her. Which was a little too bad.

I love the book cover though... Flip flops! With a little shamrock! Adorable.

I want this

Ad in a recent New Yorker:


This is a Russian magazine called Snob. Obviously I must find myself a copy.

Free books!!!

I am still not reading (sigh) but I did get my hands on a free copy of Nicole Krauss's Great House. Yay. Yay yay yay!

Hiatus...

Sigh. School is hard. And I have real hours at work. And some other things going on.

All of these are good things, but they are meaning that for now I am limited my reading to the New Yorker and bits and pieces online. I'm not sure how long this will last, but for now, this blog is likely to be quiet for the next few weeks.

Austen was REGENCY. This is VICTORIAN.

North and South - Elizabeth Gaskell (Penguin Books, 1995 - orig. serialized 1854-55)

A month or two ago, I found out that my friend Jason was going to be speaking at an upcoming service at the church I attend. His topic? Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell and her Unitarian background and the Unitarian themes in her work. My response? BOOKS. Yay!

But I had never actually heard of Gaskell, and wanted to read something by her. And then I forgot, but then his talk got postponed to today, so a couple weeks ago we had the following conversation (paraphrased):

Me: If I were to read just one Elizabeth Gaskell book before you do your thing, which should I read?
Jason: Actually, there's a really good BBC mini-series of North and South.
Me: (offended) What? You think I can't handle reading the book?!?
Jason: (in mild distress) No. It's just... well, the book is long and I don't know if you'll like it, etc.
Me: How about I actually read the book and decide for myself?
[Karen: I love this moment. The writer telling the librarian to watch the movie instead of reading the book.]

I actually understand Jason's reluctance. Recommending books is a slightly treacherous task. Especially when you find yourself recommending a book that is 150 years old and over 400 pages long. But I asked, so I took all the responsibility on myself. It would have been my own problem had I not liked it.

Except I didn't not like it. It was so good. (Today is italics day, btw.) Now that I've taken up all this space with prologue, I will be brief about the actual review. You can go read it yourself - or watch the mini-series, which I saw half of last night. (Book is more fully realized - shock! - but I will admit that Richard Armitage is totally hotter than my imaginary Mr. Thornton.)

So a few of the main things: the title refers to the collision of Northern (industrial) and Southern (more genteel and also pastoral) mores during the period. Margaret (South) and her family move to a mill town when her father gives up his vicarage as a result of his religious doubts. Margaret, as an outsider, finds much to dislike in the North (and vice versa) but grows more fond of the region and its principles through her relationships with a millworker and his dying daughter as well as a mill owner, who is also her father's pupil. There is a strike, and a violent riot, and a love story, and lots to think about philosophically. Or you can just think about the love story, which is quite a bit like Pride & Prejudice if we had actually gotten to know Mr. Darcy a little better. (Also had Elizabeth Bennet been a little less Lizzy-esque and more like the rest of Austen's heroes. But Jason has reminded me multiple times that this is more than a whole generation later, so I really ought to stop making the comparison.)

But I will say that if you like either Austen or Dickens, you will find something to like in North and South. Also, yay for the book, for Gaskell, for Jason, and for the BBC.

July 15

One Day - David Nicholls (Vintage Books, 2009)

One day a year.... on one day a year, starting in 1988, we check in on Dexter & Emma. That first time, they have just hooked up, right as they're graduating from college. It looks an awful lot like a one-night stand. But it's the beginning of a really powerful connection.

I'm a girl, and I've loved unrequitedly, so maybe I'm especially sensitive to how much work Emma puts into the relationship in its first years. (They actually reminded me a lot of Carley & Hunter in this book, which worried me.)

But I love the way it works. I love the development, how seeing them just once a year makes it so clear how much (and how little) they change - and how we never really end up where we think we are going.

I also starting thinking about the choice of dates. Mid-July... I can start in college, and realize that give-or-take a little, you would see a lot of me if you checked in on me then: getting on a plane for a solo trip to Italy, starting a long-term relationship that would shape me considerably, sitting on a beach wondering what on earth I was going to do now that I had a degree, feeling miserable in a job that didn't challenge me, signing the lease on my DC apartment (1999-2003). So my own life was in strange ways very close to the surface as I read, because it all felt so tangible.

You can't really talk about the plot without spoiling the whole thing. You just can't. Which is frustrating, because I really have a lot to say. I need to find someone else who has read it - hello anyone? this is a popular book based on circulation at my library, so I know you're out there - so I can vent and work through the difficult emotions. And the ways that I was prepared for a whole variety of plot twists, but unprepared perhaps precisely when I needed to be. I had troubled dreams last night because of you, David Nicholls. I just thought you should know.

May the odds be ever in your favor

The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins (Scholastic Press, 2008)

Unlike with many things that get overhyped, I was not "ugh, this is going to be overhyped," I was actually ready and eager to really enjoy it. (I actually felt this way about Twilight too, come to think of it, so many my natural skepticism falls away for YA materials. But talking about Twilight in a discussion of HG is unacceptable, so let me get back to the point.)

The hype is totally deserved. I was really blown away.

The prose is simple, and the plot arc is fairly predictable, but none of that really matters because Katniss has such a strong voice. The dystopic world is the right ratio of familiar and foreign, and just because you are pretty sure how the end will look doesn't mean that you won't be wrapped up in figuring out how to get there.

Oh yeah, plot. It's the future. An evil Capitol demonstrates its power over the outlying districts by forcing teens to compete against one another to the death. For the winner: glory, wealth, fame. For the 23 losers: well, duh. Katniss ends up there and the boy from her district is one with whom she has a past. And maybe a future? (By the way, if you can read this book without thinking about Bella, Edward, and Jacob, you are a stronger person than I am. But Katniss is about a zillion times more kickass than Bella, and there is no good correlation to be had among the men. At least not yet.)

Anyway, go. Read. Also, games. They are fun.

Finishing School 2.0

The Finishing Touches - Hester Browne (large print edition, Wheeler, 2009)

Remember how I said "No more chick lit for a while"??? Somehow this didn't stop me from leaving the library last Friday with yet another one. This one is British though, which I kind of think should be a separate category.

And I really enjoyed it. The storyline is sort of absurd: this baby is abandoned on the doorstep of a London finishing school (the morning of/before Princess Di's wedding) and raised by the lord and lady who run the place and two old maid employees. Flash forward to the present. Betsy's adoptive mother has died and Betsy returns from Scotland for the memorial service where she discovers that the school is in shambles. (Duh, b/c who goes to finishing school in 2008?) Betsy got a math degree instead of going to the school herself - she is bitter about this actually - and is recruited to save the place and her mother's legacy. High jinks ensue. [That is my standard ending for pretty much ever plot summary, if you haven't noticed.]

But here are the things that make it work: British heroines are almost always more self-aware and hilarious than their American counterparts, and the supporting cast is just better. The four students - crazy rich young women - are adorably written, and I got a kick out of how they and Betsy interacted. It was over-the-top, but it also seemed real. And the love story was well-crafted. Browne sets it up so you're like, oh, it's this cliche. And then immediately something else happens, and you're like, oh nevermind, it's this cliche. And then sends you tripping back and forth between them for quite a while. Well played.

(On a side note, I ended up with the large print edition, which made the book almost 600 pages long and more importantly often made me feel like I was reading a kids' book. I understand why a lot of people who don't need the large print refuse to read it. It probably took well over 100 pages to get used to it.)

And now, seriously, I'm going to try to take a break from the chick lit. I swear.

Wrapping Up: Peace, after War

War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (trans. by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky) (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007)

Volume Four & the Epilogue

How much do I love that Tolstoy writes a two-part epilogue almost 100 pages long? (Not a lot actually. It's so him, and that I love, but if I were his editor, part two of the epilogue would be long gone.)

Volume Four is mostly about what happens to the French (and Russian) armies after Napoleon occupies Moscow and then up and leaves, retreating all the way back to France, army in tatters. Tolstoy has a LOT to say about this, and about what caused the retreat, and how the Russians "won" by losing. This all can be mostly summed up here: "Only unconscious activity bears fruit, and a man who plays a role in a historical event never understands its significance. If he attempts to understand it, he is struck with fruitlessness."

This also gives him a chance to do what he seems to love best, which is to make fun of historians. He also shares his opinions on doctors, and on "intelligent" women - who are juxtaposed with "real women, endowed with the ability to select and absorb all the best of what a man has to show." (Yes, I almost threw my book across the room here.)

But you forgive Tolstoy. Because he is big and expansive, creating a whole world that is larger than life. Sometimes when I think of him, I think of Whitman.

Other things happen too. There are a few major deaths, a couple marriages. The epilogue takes us into the future and lays the groundwork for what I understand was the original plan for W&P: understanding how the Decembrists (not these guys) became the Decembrists.

I was dissatisfied with how it all worked out when I read it at 17. This time around, I get it more. It somehow seems more appropriate and right. I don't really begrudge the characters their actions anymore, although I wish I could have seen the alternate world where you'd get my happy ending. It probably wouldn't have been especially happy, after all.

And the last of the Twittering, where it's clear I lost a lot of steam:

• Turns out that if your sister is engaged to a dude, it's not okay for you to get involved with the same dude's sister.
• On the other hand, if then that guy were to die....
• "The war was being conducted against all the rules (as if there existed some sort of rules for killing people)."
• "But pure, perfect sorrow is as impossible as pure and perfect joy."

Filthy Rich Girls

The Dirty Girls Social Club - Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez (St. Martin's Press, 2003)

Perhaps I should take a break from the chick lit.

I ended up just finding this to be fairly mediocre. And then I felt bad about not enjoying it. Valdes-Rodriguez has a sunny, conversational style that was a kick, and really worked with the story. Plus I really loved the ways in which she complicates America's overly simplistic view of what it means to be Latina. What you look like, where your family comes from, what foods you eat, what languages you know. But I just felt unsatisfied. Why? you ask...

Las sucias. The girls themselves were fine, and I like how much they judge and often don't really like one another. It made their friendships and connections seem real. But seriously? There was so. much. money. They are rich, or their boyfriends/husbands/benefactors are. Or they're not, but then they become Shakira or something. Too much wealth. I know this is a problem with all chick lit, but it's somehow amplified when you have six main characters.

Speaking of six main characters... this meant I never really got to know any of them as well as I wanted to.

Plus. And this is probably actually where I lost my ability to suspend disbelief. Passage of time and chronology are all over the place. I think the novel takes place over 6 months, between sucia dinners. But maybe it's a year? And it just doesn't work that one character can be in the hospital for weeks, and then have so much happen post-release. Or that another can put together a whole record, have it produced and released and go on tour. Or that a woman signs the papers to buy a house and enters escrow one night, is supposed to go to Maine that weekend, and then has moved in by the time the Maine weekend comes along. ETC ETC ETC. Maybe I'm being purposely daft, but I just don't really get it. Sorry. :(

And I wanted to like this book. So now I feel kinda bad about it.

Things Fall Apart

Lima Nights - Marie Arana (Dial Press, 2009)

This slim novel is about one man - Carlos Bluhm - and two relationship crises, separated by twenty years. It's nicer to think of the first half as actually the coming together, the initiation of a relationship. But in light of the second part, Carlos and Maria twenty years later, the first starts to feel more like the dissolution of his marriage to Sophie.

Our cast: Carlos is of German descent, as is his wife and his group of friends, but he has fallen from the heights of wealth that his family once enjoyed. Maria is the young teen who beguiles him with her skin color, her dancing, her strange combination of innocence and knowingness. But there is also the wife, Sophie; the mother, Dorothea; the sons Fritz and Rudy; the men: Oscar, Willy, and Marco. And Maria's family. Arana keeps the book spare and focused, but the minor characters actually beg for more space - another author would have created a sprawling saga. (Yes, I still have Tolstoy on my mind.) And I might have preferred that book. This one - tight, sad - left me feeling as much hopeless as anything.

Paranormal Romance

Kiss & Hell - Dakota Cassidy (Berkeley Publishing, 2009)

The post title refers to the official genre designation that Penguin gives for this book, according to the back cover. I've been writing a paper on genre classification - and whether libraries should shelve books separately by genre - so this sort of thing is on my mind. For example, paranormal romance is quite possible the right classification for Ms. Sookie, although maybe paranormal suspence w/ lots o' sex is more accurate.

Anyway. Somehow this book made it into my book list. I hate this. Sometimes I remember exactly when I heard about a book and it stuck well enough to make me get out my little notebook and pencil. But sometimes I clearly am acting on whim and titles just seem to appear in there. K&H is chick lit with ghosts. Or demons. Well, both. Delaney is a medium, who has dedicated the last several years to helping the newly departed clear up whatever's going on so that they can go into the light (instead of getting swayed to hell by demons out to collect souls). Except her best friend is a demon. And she doesn't have much of a social life, unless you count her motley crew of dogs.

So when a sexy nerdy demon shows up and tells her he's been assigned to seduce her and take her back to hell, except he's not really going to do that because he ended up in hell by mistake, she proceeds to let him go right ahead with the first part of his plan. Because he's hot. Anyway, the plot twist holding this whole thing together is beyond ridiculous, but the set-up is kinda fantastic. Lots of adorable humor.

Cassidy has a couple stylistic tics that I both like and find utterly frustrating about chick lit. The one that leans more toward the like is her tendency to end sections/chapters with incomplete sentences, usually laced with sarcasm. Like "And that meant hard core" or "End of." This is part of a broader trend toward highly idiosyncratic, contemporary slang. It felt awkward and sloppy rather than natural, and I think that Cassidy fully capable of a more interesting writer. Maybe I'm not representative of her target readers, but I think they could handle some more sophisticated prose.

Totally fun, breezy, and often sexy. It was in my beach bag for a barbecue, and I found myself recommending it to the ladies. How could I resist?

Sense and Sensibility, updated

The Three Weissmanns of Westport - Cathleen Schine (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010)

I decided to read this modern retelling of S&S after hearing about it here and there, and then having it pop up on Slate's Double-X Book Club. I held off on listening to the podcast for 4 months until I could read the book, and finally it's all come to pass.

I found myself underwhelmed both by the book and the discussion (more on the latter later). It's clever, and I loved identifying the characters who pop up and remembering their Austenian counterparts. Marianne and Elinor as 5o y.o. women is an interesting twist, and Betty Weissmann is a far more fun Mrs. Dashwood. But then things get all wonky in the second half - and I can't even discuss it here without engaging in major spoilers.

And this is what I wanted to hear about on the book club podcast. How much can you change the template of Austen's original? Does it matter if the original seems utterly implausible in today's world? Or is Schine arguing that there might have been a better way to plot Austen all along? I don't know, and the Double-X ladies skirted around this, when for me it was the central point. Oh well. Also, they referred to the novel as chick-lit - or rather "hen lit" (clever) - which jagged me off on a tangent about genre fiction and the very specific potential definitions for women's genre fiction. For me, this is definitely a woman's novel, but it's not chick lit, which has very specific conventions about the female protagonists as well as the plot.

Oh well. The novel was still a fun read, even if occasionally infuriating, and it was often funny. A couple memorable moments:
Miranda the literary memoir agent has a client who writes about her (fake) childhood in Rhodesia. This was entirely too close to Alexandra Fuller for me and I was confused as to what Schine might have been trying to say (the Slate ladies noticed this too).

Annie the librarian through her sister's eyes: "Miranda sometimes thought of Annie as a kind of desiccated opium addict, stretched out in a smoky, sweet-smelling den with her fictional strangers, cut off from the noisy circus of life, uncaring, inaccessible, eyes closed in someone else's dream." Harsh.

There are young twins named Juliet and Ophelia. NO. No matter how pretentious you are, you do not name both of your girls after Shakespearean heroines that go a little (or a lot) crazy and off themselves.

But mainly I was caught up with trying to work out how I felt about the plot.

WTF Lion

Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller (Penguin Books, 2004)

I bought this book when I came across it cheap. I had heard good things about Fuller's earlier Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight and was taken with the excerpt from this work that had appeared in the New Yorker (natch). Then it sat around for years, waiting for me. And I don't know why the time was now, but it was. And let me tell you, this book blew me away.

Fuller grew up in what was Rhodesia, and then Zambia. But in this book she is in the US, married, with two small children. Except she's back at her parents' home in Zambia. And she meets this man, who she calls K, a veteran of the wars in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe and Mozambique. He has demons, and she ends up with what I can only describe as severe cognitive dissonance upon her return to Wyoming. So when she ends up back in Africa a year later, and sees him again, somehow she hatches a plan that they will travel back into Zimbabwe and Mozambique, that through this he may exorcise the past, and she will understand it, understand this war that was the backdrop for her childhood.

But there is so much more going on here. I can't even describe it. I felt like I fell down the rabbit hole as I was reading. But I also felt intensely present, thanks to the minute and vivid detail. And I kept trying to work my way through the silences to understand the relationship between this man and this woman. She uses him, in this way that writers use people, but I wonder if she is using him less - or differently - than she imagines. There's just too much there.

And since I can't manage to coherently explain my reaction to these larger themes, I'll just point out of few of the other places, where Fuller's careful and cutting description shines through.

• During a drought in the region, that somehow skirted the little area near her parents': "in the whole of central and southern Africa they [the news teams] couldn't find people more conveniently desperate--by which I mean desperate and close to both an international airport and a five-star hotel"
• "The engine of Dad's boat, in common with almost everything mechanical on the fish farm, had quirks of temperament that required an intimate knowledge of the psychology of machines to operate."
• A bullfrog, given to Fuller's mother as food but freed by her when she can't bring herself to actually cook him, "leaped under the firewood pile and glared at us with a mixture of alarm and disdain for the next several days."
• And the frog is nothing compared to the animal that prompted the title of this post, which is the actual note I made while reading: K knows a guy who knows a guy - another war veteran, and an important character in this story - who has a "pet" lion. Mambo launches himself at Fuller, only to be stymied time and again by K, who goes all Cesar Milan on him. Mambo's efforts to get at her, which seem like something out of a cartoon (like Lucifer and the mice in Cinderella) continue intermittently for the next 50 pages. And then there is a drunken fight between two men, after which "the lion trotted out of the shadows and started rubbing against their legs, purring resoundingly." To which, I continue to maintain, WTF. The lion is the 160 lb. feline representation of how utterly incomprehensible this world is to a person coming from my background.

At multiple occasions, and more frequently as the trip and the book hurry to a close, Fuller stops to ponder the futility of her mission to understand K, and the war, their own complicity, and how it scarred them all. The trip brought them no closer to anything like healing, and I am unsure of whether it brought acceptance.

What I do know is this: the blurb on the back cover describes K as "strangely charismatic" and I can think of no better term, for him and for the book. It was troubling, terrifying, beautiful, and utterly captivating.

Volume 3: The Big Battle

War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (trans. by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky) (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007)

Volume Three

This whole section is pretty much the lead up to the Battle of Borodino and the resulting (despite a result that has to be considered a draw) Russian retreat past Moscow, ceding the ancient capital to Napoleon. In the midst of long philosophical musings by Tolstoy about how war is outrageously crazy but wheels get set in motion and none of us can really do anything about it (no matter how the history books later spin it), our characters recover - or don't - from the upheaval that ended Volume Two, they seek revenge, they move around and seek places where they feel at home.

Pierre, a la Forrest Gump, ends up right in the middle of the Battle of Borodino. Because of course he does.

Some things that happen in these 300 pages...
Tolstoy waits until page 603 to call war "an event .... contrary to human reason and the whole of human nature." [By the way, based on the complexities with which he describes people and human nature, does he really believe this?]

Tolstoy explains that the Russians fleeing Moscow essentially led to Napoleon's retreat and humiliation. He counters this act of patriotism to "the killing of children to save the fatherland." ... I would love to know what Tolstoy would have to say about the Soviets in World War II (aka The Great Fatherland War).

And all this, according to my Twitter feed:
"Everyone wished more to listen than to speak." This seems unlikely. Also, for Tolstoy, unusual.

We *think* we have free will and all, but really we are just cogs in some big master plan of fate. Even Napoleon.

Also. it's really easy to pick out evidence after the fact to justify your interpretation. This is why historians are lame.

It's kind of amazing how much I like Tolstoy considering how annoyed I get by half of what he says.

Chaotic Battle of Borodino today in #WandP. Reminds me of this poem: http://www.poetry-archive.com/s/grass.html

Tolstoy takes two pages to say: Correlation does not equal causation. (This is why #WandP is 1215 pages long.)

At the end of Volume 3, Moscow is burning, Pierre is in jail(ish), but the love story might be back on. Yay?

All caught up with Sookie, for now

Dead in the Family - Charlaine Harris (Ace Books, 2010)

Hallelujah! I am all even with the Sookie Stackhouse books. Now I get to sit like everyone else and wait for the next one, presumably sometime next spring. (And yes, I know there are collections of stories out there. I am not that obsessed.)

So this time around: Sookie is bummed and hurt, Eric has a family - including famous Russians (!), Sookie disapproves of Sam's new love interest (just get them together already, please), Bill is going to commit incest or something, fairies get lonely, were chicks are fierce, Jason continues to be far less entertaining than his television counterpart. And the presumed major enemy really has nothing to do with this novel, so he's either a red herring or the focus of the next installment.

And the novel continues to show that True Blood will by necessity have less and less to do with the novels. No people, Godrick is not Eric's maker in the books. Lafayette gets killed off way early and is never as fabulous as he is on screen. Jessica doesn't even exist. I'm guessing that after this season - maybe next season? - there will be essentially no remaining connection between the two. And that's just fine with me.

More tweeting Tolstoy

What I had to say about Volume 2, in 140 character snippets...

I know you haven't been missing my #WandP tweets, but they are back anyway.

Love & death are capricious.

Also, "Vera's observation was correct, as were all her observations; but, like most ... this one made everyone feel awkward."

Russian nobles can be really depressing. And Masons have a bunch of wacky rituals.

"She was in that highest degree of happiness when a person ... does not believe in the possibility of evil, unhappiness, and grief."

Tolstoy, did you just call the military sanctioned idleness? OH SNAP.

I am trying to picture how fat Pierre Bezukhov is supposed to be. Having trouble.

The end of Volume 2 of #WandP is like reading a train wreck. Why is everybody so vain/proud/foolish/sexually-frustrated/etc?

And now I'm in a bad mood. Thank you Tolstoy.

The saga continued (and delayed)

War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (trans. by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky) (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007)

Volume Two

I don't have a lot to say about V2 right now. I waited a week before blogging, mainly because I've been busy, but also because this section has such a downer ending.

It's been years since the skirmish, and everyone has grown up more. The emperor and Napoleon are pals, mostly. Pierre's marriage is going about as well as you'd expect, Andrei has given up on everything, Natasha is hmm, mostly indescribable, Nikolai is kind of a hotshot. And there are of course a bazillion other characters.

And then there's this reversal of sorts, that opens up the possibility of some sort of happily-ever-after. As if Tolstoy would allow such things. And then you spend about 200 pages feeling the same sense of dread that Natasha's family seems to feel. And, since I'm doing a terrible job with this post, I'm just going to quote this description of Mama Rostov(a): "Her maternal intuition told her that there was too much of something in Natasha, and that because of it she would not be happy."

And by the way, this time reading, I have a lot more blame to spread around. Everyone's at fault. Everyone.

Russian! Books! Stanford!

The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them - Elif Batuman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010)

This book has a whole bunch of things I love:

• A regular New Yorker contributor as author
• Lots of talk about my alma mater and professors I knew
• Russian books and Russian history
• A good sense of humor

Once upon a time (sometime late 2000 through 2001), Roz Chast did a cartoon for the New Yorker that was a series of "thank you" cards to Ralph Nader for playing spoiler to Al Gore. I remember this well because my ex-boyfriend was apoplectic about this. As a result, I never see her work without thinking of that. And here she is, with the cover design, this of lots of wild-eyed readers and one manic, dancing book. But all of this is besides the point because...

Elif Batuman is delightful. Is it obnoxious and conceited to say she reminds me a little bit of myself? Her comical accounts of the "adventures" of the subtitle are interwoven with consider detail and exposition about lots of random facts about literature, history, geography, etc. She passes up few teachable moments.

I found myself laughing aloud several times while reading this book (which is a collection of essays about her adventures in undergrad & grad school as a student of Russian literature, many involving travel), and when I tried to explain what was so funny, it didn't translate. So I'm not sure it will here either, but here are a few of my favorite moments:

On Derrida: Elif is "someone who likes to keep to a minimum her visits to Planet Derrida--that land where all seemingly secondary phenomena are actually primary, and anything you can think of doing is an act of violence, practically by virtue of your having thought about it using some words that were also known to Aristotle..."

"Babel in California" is chock full of awesome, particularly picking up Babel's surviving partner and their daughter, working with Hoover, and other daughter Nathalie Babel's speech as rendered by Batuman.

Also this moment, which manages to contain a deeply-held belief and be hilarious at the same time:

...one nonetheless likes to think that literature has the power to render comprehensible different kinds of unhappiness. If it can't do that, what's it good for? On these grounds I once became impatient with a colleague at a conference, who was trying to convince me that the Red Cavalry cycle would never be totally accessible to me because of Lyutov's "specifically Jewish alienation."
"Right," I finally said. "A s a six-foot-tall first-generation Turkish woman growing up in New Jersey, I cannot possibly know as much about alienation as you, a short American Jew."
He nodded: "So you see the problem."

Older Russian women have a great perspective on the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

An Uzbek janitor giving Elif's boyfriend sex advice, because it's unthinkable that she would be childless at 24. The "husband" must be doing something wrong.

Utterly amazing quote by Tolstoy (too long to post in full) about that misty half-understanding of poetry in a foreign language... "once I deciphered its true meaning, there were many cases in which I missed the poem I had invented..." - this is a feeling I have about songs all the time.

A couple things I liked less: Batuman doesn't have much nice to say about Orhan Pamuk. This hurts my feelings a little bit, but okay. And at one point I found myself troubled by how often she recounted held truths, most often of foreigners, in ways that made them clearly and patently ridiculous. Then I realized the foolishness wasn't endemic to that culture itself, but rather to all cultures, or all held and unquestioned truths.

I'm really just scratching the surface. This book was tailor-made for me. But if you like Russian literature and/or have dealt with being in grad school in the humanities, you might also find it filled with fun.

File under: Things that don't happen in my life

Diary of a Working Girl - Daniella Brodsky (Berkley Books, 2004)

Sometimes, you just need some chick lit. (Well, maybe you don't, but I do.) And the lovely and talented Siel happened to have one, and was all-too-happy to get it out of her apartment.

This novel struck me as almost shockingly derivative of Confessions of a Shopaholic. Brodsky even has her main character namecheck the book and its author at some point. (She also mentions thinking of Bridget Jones as a real person, which is a bad habit I have had at various points in the past.) But I actually liked this way more than COAS. (In fact, I'm surprised I gave the book a good review on my blog, b/c in my memory I was kind of horrified by how mediocre it was.) I found Becky vapid and annoying. But Lane, even if she was doing the same ridiculous things - like going shopping when you're late to work on your first day?!? wtf - was somehow endearing. I felt like it lost a little steam toward the end, when the inevitable happy ending arrives, but these books are more about the buildup than the actual payoff, right?

It also doesn't hurt that I've always liked the name Lane (actually, preferably Laine) thanks to the Babysitters' Club books and also my girl Lelaina Pierce.

I Was Told There'd Be Cake - Sloane Crosley (Riverhead Books, 2008)

Sloane Crosley has a new book out. Thus it seemed like an appropriate time to actually get around to reading the first collection of essays, which has been on my To Do list for awhile. (It also helped that I was at the library, weeding books just 2 aisles away from this one.)

I'm not feeling very review-y right now, but in short: very funny, slightly neurotic essays from a highly educated young woman, covering terrible jobs, bridezillas, sex and love, moving, friends, oh and that Oregon Trail game that we played computer-free in our fifth-grade classroom while everyone else in the world my age apparently played at home on ancient Apples.

I was utterly enchanted with Crosley's search for a legitimate one-night stand, as documented in the essay "One-Night Bounce." While waiting at the vet, I actually read most of the first several pages aloud to my mother, who was amused, but not nearly as much as I was. I kind of want to block quote the first three pages. I won't. But here's a peek:

The second I was old enough to know what sex was, I knew I wanted to have a one-night stand. [...] I wanted to do it immediately. Largely because I had no idea what it entailed. I figured a one-night stand happened when two people, one of whom was a woman, went to a man's apartment for martinis and stood on the bed the whole time, trying not to spill them.

And it goes on from there.

People who are about my age who are more fabulous than me can be depressing, and I wasn't completely immune to this with Crosley, but she's awfully disarming. So thumbs up.

New Yorker Fiction!

So The New Yorker had a summer fiction issue again! And like one of the very first I remember reading, this one features Jonathan Safran Foer. This time, he's one of "20 Under 40" - a pretty eclectic group of young authors, most of whom will be familiar to NYer readers.

This issue had stories by eight of the 20, with the rest to come in the next several issues. I tend to stick with this magazine for the reporting, not the fiction, but it's nice to have a nice big set of stories from time to time.

You can see more about the authors, including individual Q&A and links to their stories (if already published), here. Frustratingly, a bunch of the stories aren't available online except to subscribers, but some are. In brief, I am curious to see if Foer's "Here We Aren't, So Quickly" is part of a larger project, and I heartily enjoyed (as usual) Gary Shteyngart in "Lenny Hearts Eunice." Everything else was good (in that New Yorker fiction way) but I will just leave it at that.

Tweeting Tolstoy

During my reading of Volume One, I also shared regular thoughts on my Twitter feed. Here they are... (hashtags removed except where integral to the tweet)

"If the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy" --Isaac Babel

Feeling far more sympathetic to Pierre Bezukhov than I remembered.

If Prince Andrei turns out to be like Ethan Hawke in Reality Bites, I'm going to be pissed.

I imagine it comes as no surprise that I think War < Peace.

Andrei Bolkonsky is maybe not as awesome as I remember. (I think this is going to be a major theme of my #WandP tweeting.)

chai at Panera and #WandP (Napoleon is winning.)

The aftermath of battle: "All this was so strange, so unlike what he had hoped for."

"He was sincerely beginning to believe in his extraordinary kindness and his extraordinary intelligence..."

"... the more so because, deep in his heart, it had always seemed to him that he really was very kind and very intelligent."

The thought of battle makes soldiers emo. Also? Apparently the emperor is like Jesus or something.

Battles make for all sorts of confusion. And overblown prose. Thus ends Volume One.

Peace > War

War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (trans. by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky) (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007)

Volume One

I was all aflutter when this translation came out, and it took me awhile (a year or so) to actually purchase it. And then it took me even longer to read it. I've mentioned before that I read W&P right after high school and fell dramatically in love with it. But how would I feel 13 years later?

So here I am this summer, reading this translation. Marveling at all the French. (Apparently P & V's decision to leave so much of the original French, which I think it probably justified, caused some amount of controversy.) When I committed to this big book (1215 pages before the appendix and endnotes) I decided I would serialize my reading. There are four volumes and a (two-part) epilogue. Attaching the epilogue to Volume 4, it makes for about 4 chunks of 300 pages each. I'll be interspersing this with lighter - or at least other - reading. (For example, on my plate right now: essays about being a 20-something female.)

I remembered that Tolstoy cut back and forth between "peace" in Moscow & Petersburg, and "war" out in Austria or wherever. I remembered finding war significantly less interesting. This has not changed. The homefront has women! and gossip! and romance and intrigue. The soldiers on the other hand are mostly just riding around being melodramatic and daydreaming about glory. Seriously, I found myself nodding off multiple times during battle scenes.

I did not remember that the novel starts back in 1805, years before much of the main action. I forgot that we meet Natalya Rostov(a) as a coltish tween. I forgot that before I had an irrational excuse to dislike Pierre, I might have actually found him charmingly inept and adorable, the way I do now.

But of course I remembered the epic scope of Tolstoy's world. And the ways in which he was so generous with detail. No one is an afterthought.

I'm looking forward to Volume 2.

Team Eric

Dead and Gone - Charlaine Harris (Ace Books, 2009)

Just one behind! (Of course it's the brand new one, so who knows when I'll get my hands on it.) It seems fairly clear to me that Harris has a plan for Sookie's love life, and with whom her happily-ever-after (if she ever gets one) lies. I don't think I approve of this plan. But whatever, I'm not in charge. If it's so important to me, I should just go write my own wildly successful series of vampire/werecreature/witch/fairy books. But if you had any doubts where my allegiance lay, check out the title of this post again.

And that's about all I have to say about this installment. It's gotten totally out of control - there are about a zillion different groups of supernatural beings either trying to kill or keep an eye on Sookie pretty much simultaneously. And everyone keeps dying. And really, dying in increasingly horrific ways. When do we get the book where no one dies?

Also, whenever she has a moment of regret, I applaud. Because things were obv kinda awful before, when everyone thought she was a freak for reading minds. And being desired for that very trait is pretty cool. But being desired has an awful lot of pitfalls. Sookie's a do-er more than a philosopher, but I wouldn't mind a DFW-esque cascade of footnotes that consider this somewhat existential dilemma. Just saying.

La sua cantante

Bel Canto - Ann Patchett (HarperCollins, 2001)

I feel like there was this period right around my college graduation where everyone on BART was reading The Poisonwood Bible and Bel Canto. I never got around to the former (though I've read other Barbara Kingsolver) but came across a copy of the latter, so after sitting on my shelf for awhile, it made it onto my list of books to read this year. And I'm glad - it made for a particularly nice antidote to the anxiety of White Noise.

While reading, I kept finding myself thinking of the Stanford Prison Experiment. This novel presented a scenario almost the opposite. A group of commandos, terrorists, guards, set against their hostages, or prisoners. And unlike the escalating cruelty that occurred in the basement of Jordan Hall, the story of the two groups stuck in the Vice Presidential mansion of an unnamed Latin American country is one of relationships built and humanity in ascendancy. Over the weeks and months of confinement, they create a new reality, to the point that several never really want it to end - and even fewer are willing to admit the only possible way that it can end.

This raises a few questions. Does the initial power imbalance account for the differences? At Stanford, you have a group of peers, randomly assigned positions of power or subjection. In Patchett's novel, the prisoners represent the powerful and privileged, and in a sense swing the pendulum back to an original state as the authority of the generals slowly (or rapidly?) erodes. Or is it a timing issue? Zimbardo called things off after 6 days, when they got out of control. In the novel, the situation drags on for months. After 5 days, the guards and generals are still very much in power. Had the Stanford Prison Experiment lasted longer, would relationships have been forged and equilibrium restored? And of course, it's useful to remember that I'm talking about a novel and not real life.

Anyway, at one point in the reading, the phrase "recklessly beautiful" came to mind. I don't know exactly what I mean, but it seems appropriate. The characters fall prey to beauty - to the beauty of music, of love. Their embrace of it leads them to live recklessly, carelessly. Not in their actions per se, but in their suspension of disbelief, that this world could continue, or that things could all come out all right in the end.

So you're left with this mesmerizing story, that invites you too to set aside the dark undertones, to ignore the threatening moment. And believe, for a few pages, in something magical. You can know in the end that the system always wins, and still believe that maybe this time it won't. Or that even when it does, the interlude made it worth it.

[Also, the characters! They are treated with a lot of love. I should have allotted them more time. It's the minor characters that made the book: the vice president turned cleaning crew, the French ambassador, the loud and romantic and ridiculous Russians, the singing terrorist, the chess-playing general. They sound so cheesy when reduced to these terms. They were not.]

Airborne Toxic Event

White Noise - Don DeLillo (1985, Viking Penguin)

At some point while reading, I started a mental list of "Things this book reminded me of," but because I didn't write it down, I now only remember Catch-22. This is disappointing, b/c I was planning to arrange this whole post around this list.

Instead, I'll have to talk about my vague sense of dis-ease while reading. I have to figure it was carefully cultivated. The talk of death and emergencies, the constant hum of non sequitur from background televisions or radio, the terribly sophisticated contentiousness of the children, and the regular interspersion of brand names... ugh, I feel a little uncomfortable again just thinking of it all.

[Sorry, just took a break to have dinner and also to randomly watch this video of my '07 Ducks]

Okay, in short. Dude invented the field of Hitler studies, which he teaches at a Midwest college. On his fifth marriage to a woman who has also had several. Many many children from all the various pairings - some live with them, others don't but make appearances. Then there's an "airborne toxic event" that forces the family to evacuate, and also prompts a couple of my favorite moments of the book. In one, Gladney tries to reassure his family that things'll be fine b/c this sort of thing happens to poor people of color, not to college professors. In another, an organization charged with planning simulations of emergency response is attempting to respond to the real thing, in order to practice for their real work of simulations. (The later simulation is also kind of awesome.) Gladney ends up exposed to the toxins, which spins off into how both he and his wife respond to the threat of death.

Among the points of interest were Gladney's assertion early in the novel that "all plots tend to move deathward," which he isn't even sure he believes but which he revisits again and again; the ridiculous discussions Gladney has with a fellow teacher, the last of which poses the question of "how does a person say good-bye to himself;" and the need of non-believers for believers to exist somewhere out there.

So in the end you end up with a satire, of a world that doesn't feel dangerous or meaningless per se, but which is deeply discomfiting. It's funny, but somehow not humorous. It's also strangely dated. None of DeLillo's themes have been rendered irrelevant by the trends of the last 25 years, and yet they feel so worn, as though we've already grown weary of them. Too many readers have followed in DeLillo's footsteps, perhaps, so what may be legitimately original is sadly no longer so for me.

The wisdom of young fools

The Two Lives of Miss Charlotte Merryweather - Alexandra Potter (Plume 2010)

I've mentioned enough times my complete adoration for parallel universes and the ability to be able to see the paths not taken, to measure out opportunity costs. I, for one, will probably always wonder about the Erin out there who went not to DC, but to Toronto, and where she is now. But Sliding Doors and The Post-Birthday World and now Potter's novel serve as a good reminder that it's the little moments, not the big decisions, that have the biggest impact.

And this isn't actually particularly Sliding Doors. This book came across my desk at the library, and I was charmed by the cover, so I kept an eye on it, and as soon as I finished my last final, snagged it the second it came back in the door of the library. It seemed light, refreshing, set in London, and fun - everything I needed at the end of the semester.

So Charlotte. Is on the verge of 32 and a total stressball. A successful stressball, but still. And then a traffic detour shoots her through a wormhole (I guess?) and back to 1997, where her 21-year-old expat self is a happy-go-lucky bundle of Id. Young Charlotte doesn't recognize the now-blond, thinner (stressball) Charlotte as herself, and so Older Charlotte decides to impart some life lessons. (Lessons that she has apparently learned over 10 years, but I guess she wants to speed up the process?) And quelle surprise, it turns out Charlotte has a lot to learn from her younger self, especially about love.

It's a consummate beach read, and really quite charming. (And Potter - who incidentally has an adorable website - has also written the obligatory Mr. Darcy novel, so I'm sure I'll have to check it out too.)

Locavores, or I feel bad about my diet

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle - Barbara Kingsolver (HarperCollins, 2007)

So it may or may not be the case that at one point the reader sat down with both this book on a year of local eating and a bag from McDonalds. I can promise you that if it were the case, this reader was aware of how incongruous and embarrassing it was.

In short, Kingsolver and her family (husband, two daughters) moved full-time to their property in Virginia, and after some time settling in, embarked on a year of knowing the provenance of their food. Most of it, they grew themselves (either in the plant or animal husbandry sense). While this was a big commitment (duh) this was a foodie family that had roots in the world of fresh, local, home-grown food. They had grown up with gardens; they cooked with fresh ingredients; the youngest had already been raising chickens. This contributed to the success of their project - imagine if they didn't already know how to cook - and helped communicate that the kinds of lifestyle changes involved are not (or at least don't need to be) great hardships. On the other hand, they started out from a point so far beyond where many American families currently reside... it's easy to get overwhelmed and think, this will never work for me.

I'm not a cook. I don't get excited about it. I wish I did. It seems so romantic in Kingsolver's description. It makes me want to try harder. At the very least, maybe I'll start going to farmer's markets again so that at least I know what's in season, even if I refuse to give up my bananas. (Hell, I live in Southern California - I have more access to fresh produce than almost anyone else in the country.)

As the book was winding down, I was planning this post around a frustration that I didn't real feel connected to what was happening in their lives. I didn't get a sense of adventure. I didn't see how it fit into the rest of the narrative of their lives (and apparently it was an eventful year). And then I got to the chapter about turkey mating and was utterly won over. And then I came to the final chapter, where Kingsolver confronts my troubles as a reader:

I am old enough to know I should never, ever, trust I've explained anything perfectly. Some part of the audience will always remain at large, confused or plain unconvinced. As I wind up this account, I'm weighing that. Is it possible to explain the year we had?

This question, more than anything, made me feel comfortable with the book. It acknowledged the distance that would always remain, and I appreciated that.

Plus, seriously, fresh and local food. I promise.

Enough already with the vampires

From Dead to Worse - Charlaine Harris (Ace Books, 2008)

I know, I know. And actually, I don't have much to say here. More supernatural beings. More wars. And more chances for me to read about Eric and picture Alexander Skarsgård. (Yay!)

But honestly, as far as vampires are concerned, I'm thinking a lot more about the season finale of The Vampire Diaries, which I just finished watching. It made me sad. Intrigued, but sad.

(And yes, I am aware that this is a really sad and pitiful book review. Sorry.)

History = yay; libraries = yay. History of libraries = zzzz

I am lazy. Therefore...

History of Libraries of the Western World by Michael H. Harris


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I like libraries. I like history. So there's really no reason this book should have put me to sleep so often. :(
It's not all boring though, and it particularly gets better in the second half when it moves onto modern library history.

View all my reviews >>

The Black Book - Part 2, where nothing gets clearer

The Black Book - Part 2
(Post on Part 1 here)

This book was hard work, people. I kept wondering why I struggled so much. But it really is hard to know whether the narrator's voice is Galip, Celâl, or someone else entirely. Plus, what is real, and what is imaginary? Plus are the cultural references -particularly the literary ones - accurate, and would they be familiar to Turkish readers? So much of the novel is an exploration of identity, of authenticity and masks and doubles. Therefore the confusion is intention, I think.

I felt much better when I got to the afterword by translator Maureen Freely, where she discusses the challenges of rendering Turkish prose in English. She paraphrases poet Murat Nemet-Nejat, who called Turkish "a language that can evoke a thought unfolding" and asks "How to do the same in English without the thought vanishing into thin air?" How, indeed.

But anyway, after slogging through so much of the novel, I found it picked up speed at the end. Galip is still searching for his wife, Rüya, and Celâl. Somehow, while pursuing "clues," he assumes Celâl's identity, and finds himself fending off a very impassioned reader. His actions don't make sense, but then, when do anyone's? And as the chapters with "Celâl's" columns continue, we end up seeing deeper into Galip and Rüya's marriage.

A few things, indicative of the broader themes:

• Celâl refers to Turkey as "a country where everything was a copy of something else" - to the point that a group unknowingly replicates the murder from a Dostoyevsky novel.
• Pamuk/Celâl opens a chapter with Coleridge: " 'Aye!' (quoth the delighted reader). 'This is sense, this is genius! This I understand and admire! I have thought the ver same a hundred times myself!' In other words, this man has reminded me of my own cleverness, and therefore I admire him."
• A prince spends 6 years just reading, the happiest time of his life. Except because his thoughts and dreams were the authors', not his own, he was never really himself.

I've loved Pamuk since My Name is Red, but haven't read nearly enough. Apparently, this is where it all started. Per Freely, "The Black Book is the cauldron from which [his later works, like Red] come."

Too many people: My experience at the 2010 Festival of Books

I had been telling everyone that there were about 30,000 too many people at the LA Times Festival of Books this past Saturday. (It turns out there were about 130,000 attendees total over the weekend, so my numbers sound about right.) Honestly, I was so cranky about being there that I almost just left. I'm not sure what happened to the fun, awesome festivals I remember from my first years back in Los Angeles.

And then I think I figured it out. I snagged a panel ticket - just to something, anything really - and ended up at "Memoir: All the Single Ladies." (Ahem, that is me near the left edge of the picture, bent over something.) This totally made the festival worthwhile for me. The panels are the reason to go. They don't need to be favorite authors, and they certainly shouldn't be the political panels - those are chaos. My hour listening to these four women was perfect. And I also just happen to fit right into their demographic. But I liked that they were funny and self-deprecating and thoughtful, etc.

I also loved this line from Julie Klausner: "I hate when women do things that are good for their career and shitty to other women." Yay for solidarity.

Someday, if I survive this semester, I will get to read for fun again, and I will pick up these books....

Fugue state in Istanbul

The Black Book - Orhan Pamuk (Vintage International, 2006)
(originally published in Turkey in 1990)

Part One
I might be using the word "fugue" wrong, but whatevs. One thing I've noticed is that for all I love Orhan Pamuk, I really haven't read all that much by him. I am slowly trying to remedy this shortfall.

So far this novel reminds me of nothing so much as Rivka Galchen's Atmospheric Disturbances, which I read last summer. In both, a wife has "disappeared," and in both the husband's search takes on fantastical qualities and I find myself utterly unable to determine what, if anything, is real. Instead of trying to puzzle it out, I am instead just letting Pamuk's prose wash over me. It's too difficult to be an entirely passive reading experience, but it's less active than one might expect.

There are moments when I found myself making connections to his other work. For example, how much did Galip's opinion of detective novels come into play when he later wrote My Name is Red:

the only detective book he'd ever want to read would be the one in which not even the author knew the murderer's identity. Instead of decorating the story with clues and red herrings, the author would be forced to come to grips with his characters and his subject, and his characters would have a chance to become people in a book instead of just figments of their author's imagination.

And then I found that I utterly understand what Pamuk meant when in this putative column by Celâl:

But as I watched this person from the outside, as if in a dream, I was, in fact, not at all surprised to see that this person was none other than myself. What surprised me was the strength, the implausible tenderness, of my affection for him. I could see at once how fragile and pitiful he was [...]. Only I knew this person was not as he seemed, and I longed to take this unfortunate creature - this mere mortal, this temperamental child - under my wing, be his father or prehaps his god.

Lastly, for now, how can you argue this: "It was stories that kept them going."

Regularly scheduled reading interrupted for Ramses

A River in the Sky - Elizabeth Peters (William Morrow, 2010)

One of my favorite things about my volunteer job is that I often see brand new books the day before they are officially released. And since I don't particularly follow such things, it's often particularly exciting. Such was the case last week, when a cart appeared with 9 or 10 copies of a brand new Elizabeth Peters book. And sure enough, it was an Amelia Peabody one. (Yay!)

I had previously mentioned that I thought the series was probably through. I couldn't figure out how she could move forward. And it turns out she moved forward by going backward. To 1910. To young Ramses. And I can't resist young Ramses.

So I had to drop everything (sorry Orhan Pamuk!) and read this before doing anything else. I'll spare you the plot and all. It's during the lead-up to World War I, and the Emersons aren't allowed to go to Egypt. So somehow they end up in Palestine instead, where Ramses is already working and allowing trouble to find him. It's short, and genial. And again has me ready to one day go back to the beginning.

Mysteries, books, and television

Heat Wave - Richard Castle (Hyperion, 2009)

All Together Dead - Charlaine Harris (Ace Books, 2007)

This is how I spent my spring break.

One's a book from a series that created one of my favorite television shows (returning in June!) and the other was inspired from another show in my regular rotation. I'll start with Castle.

Okay, so Richard Castle (Nathan Fillion) is a successful mystery author who somehow manages to get permission to shadow a NYC homicide detective, who is a beautiful, tough yet vulnerable, blah blah blah, romantic tension. Anyway, the show is funny. Heat Wave is the first in his new Nikki Heat series, based on Det. Kate Beckett. Since it's such a great plot point on the show, I was highly amused when I saw (via Twitter, natch) that they actually published the "real" Heat Wave. (It's worth noting that the physical version, at 198 pages, is significantly slimmer than the tome that appears on the show.)

Since certain family members were dying to read it, and I was amused, I picked it up from the library. (The staffer at circulation was also excited, and actually yelped when she saw the pic of "Richard Castle" on the back cover.)

Oh, but the story itself. It's cute. It's not great, but it's cute, and I was entertained, particularly by all the extra-plot flourishes, like the blurbs and the dedication. Definitely for fans of the show only, but those folks will be amused.

.... And back to Sookie Stackhouse, heroine of this blog, so it seems. This, the 7th, might be my favorite installment of the series so far. It pushes along the grand narrative, and I've come to just put up with many of the quirks which I initially found annoying. And since it's been so long since True Blood was on the air, I'm finding it easier not to compare the two. I've almost been able to separate them into totally separate entities (like Gossip Girl, although I haven't actually read the books to compare).

This one actually had a quote that I enjoyed enough to note down. Sookie's a telepath, which has mostly been a problem until she started meeting supernatural beings, but she can't read vampires. So when she's in a room just with them, she realizes she has no idea what everyone else is thinking, and that this is what most of us deal with every day. She marvels, "How did regular people stand the suspense of day-to-day living?" How, indeed.

The Post-College Years

A Fortunate Age - Joanna Smith Rakoff (Scribner, 2009)

No citations, but I heard lots of mixed reviews about this modern-day homage to Mary McCarthy's The Group (which I haven't read, but apparently if I had read it, I would have known pretty much the major plot points of this novel). Enough that I wasn't really interested in reading it for the longest time. I forget what made me decide to add it to my list.

Regardless, I'm glad I did. Because I found the characters often terrifyingly familiar. There's something about coming out of an elite college or university and then making your way in the real world that perhaps happens to us all. There's a weird juxtaposition between who we are able to be in college and who we must be outside, for better or worse. I'm just about the same age as the characters when the novel ends (well, a little younger, but not much) and I can't really say that my life looks like any of theirs. (The differences between 1994 and 2001 matter a lot too.) But there is something there that transcends that.

Anyway, the novel jumps around between the major characters, a group of friends from Oberlin who all congregate in New York (most of them being from the region anyway). Most of the really big life-changing events - except Lil's wedding, which opens the novel - take place off stage. You see the lead up to them, and then suddenly we've jumped and they've already occurred. It challenges the notion, to some extent, of what is truly important, what matters the most.

And what strikes me the most is how much of growing up is about letting go. And how difficult that can be.

Egypt & mystery

Tomb of the Golden Bird - Elizabeth Peters (Harper, 2006)

I've mentioned before how much I've loved this series, which I think may have come to a close with this book. I didn't blog this when I finished it (2 weeks ago, maybe?) because I had a nagging feeling the whole time that I had already read it. Maybe I have, I'm still not sure. If I haven't, that sense of it not being new is troubling (like the first chapter of The Babysitters Club, which I'm pretty sure I had memorized for at least a decade after I stopped reading those).

Anyhow. I love this series. I love the characters. Peters brings so much humor to play, and the characters are way more interesting than the action. But it does sort of feel like it's time to wrap things up. It's become too modern for one - this novel involves the opening of King Tut's tomb - and I don't think there's much more to be done with the characters. When Peabody and Emerson fell into a bit of a rut, Ramses and Nefret were old enough to take up much of the dramatic slack. But now, unless Peters wants to move forward another several years to focus on Sennia and the twins (which would consign P & E to undeniably old age) it's got to be over.

(I am not going to go look on message boards, because I imagine people who don't wait four years to read new books have probably already had this discussion, and Peters may have already addressed the question, and I'm just going to be solipsistic and ignore all those possibilities.)

This isn't the strongest book in the series. But. It made me want to go back to the beginning and re-read them all. So at some point, I'll be doing that. I read the first when I was probably 12 or so. I'm ready to go back.

Book club!

Slate's Audio Book Club tackled Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, which I read last December. (I like the book club better when I've actually read the book they're discussing.) This is a good one; give it a listen.

Brief? Yes. Wondrous? Uncertain

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Diaz (Riverhead Books, 2007)

First and foremost, I would like to say that this book, a Pulitzer Prize winner, deserves all the accolades it has received. It is lively and witty and intense and well-written and filled with pathos and history and I don't even know what else.

But I kind of blew it. How? you might ask. Well. I read too much of the hype. People gushed over it, and I think I might have expected too much. I also think that I might not have been the right audience. One of the brilliant aspects of Diaz's prose is the insertion of lots of sci-fi, fanboy references that make perfect sense considering Oscar and the novel's narrator. I recognize them, sort of, but I don't really live them. So while I can appreciate them, I don't get them all the way. My fault, not Diaz's.

Plus, Oscar was a difficult character for me. I felt simultaneously intensely protective of and embarrassed by and for him. This, again, is all to Diaz's credit, but made for a difficult reading experience. I could much better handle Lola and Beli, and the other side stories. And I was absolutely fascinated by the footnotes, the vast majority (all?) of which dealt with Dominican history.

Another thing: at least two excerpts were published as short stories in the New Yorker. (This one actually spans the entire plot.) I remember reading them. But I didn't recognize them reading the novel, as I usually do when this happens. I don't think that's good or bad, just unexpected.

This is a much more tepid review than the book deserves. Seriously, take this as an endorsement. It's good. Really good. You won't be sorry that you read it. But don't let your expectations run away with you.

A portrait of the president as a young man

Dreams from My Father - Barack Obama (Three Rivers Press, 1995, 2004)

I'm not the first to ask, but I still have to wonder if Obama thought he would run for president when he wrote this book. Not so much because of the cocaine and racial tension, but because he is so thoughtful and honest (at least, he comes off as honest) about his own personal struggles with his identity. I don't read a lot of political memoir, but I gather than overcoming one's demons is a popular trope in the field. But this seems like more than that. It's a different kind of journey.

Anyway, it's frustrating to now, a year after Obama's inauguration, be reading the memoir that everyone else read back in 2004 or at least by 2007. In part because there was a lot I already knew, but in part because you realize which parts didn't garner attention. I heard about Jeremiah Wright (obviously) but not about how what it was like to search for a spiritual home while working with - and seeing the flaws of - so many of Chicago's church leaders. Or about what family meant to his relatives in Africa, and the tensions of responsibilities. I also found myself wondering so much why I always thought of his mother's daughter as his sister, but his father's children as his half-siblings. What are my own biases?

He incorporates a lot of dialogue, which gives the book a feeling more sometimes of a novel, b/c you know much of the dialogue is reimagined in order to get at what Obama felt to be fundamentally true, even if it's not quite what happened. This is something I've always found fascinating about autobiography.

And Obama is often a beautiful writer, and as I said before, a thoughtful one. Such as in passages like this:

What is a family? Is it just a genetic chain, parents and offspring, people like me? Or is it a social construct, an economic unit, optimal for child rearing and divisions of labor? Or is it something else entirely: a store of shared memories, say? An ambit of love? A reach across the void?

It's been a challenging year for Obama, and I can't guess how the remainder of his term will play out. But reading this book reminded me why it was so important that we elect him.

Making books, old-school

Scribes, Script and Books: The Book Arts from Antiquity to the Renaissance - Leila Avrin (American Library Association, 1991)

Sometimes I read books for school. Mostly I read PDFs of journal articles, but there are books too. And I just read this one for my course on the history of the book. (Technically it's the history of books and libraries, but apparently with this instructor, just the book.)

This book is pretty cool. It's laid out like a textbook. Lots and lots of graphics -plates, figures, maps. It averaged over 1 per page. So you could see examples of the evolution of pictograms into letters, and of scrolls and writing tools. Plus, it makes the text (8 1/2 x 11 pages) seem a little less daunting.

Avrin starts with writing and the alphabet and then moves on to ancient books/scroll/manuscripts through various eras and geographic locations. We get the Greek book, the Hebrew book, the Islamic book, plus lots of handwritten codices, manuscript and papyrus making, illumination, and bookbinding. What I suppose I most enjoyed was thinking about how much the transmission of information has both changed and stayed the same over thousands of years. And how much information we've be able to glean from the objects that made it through history.

And again, lots of cool illustrations. I can't really see this book being of much use to someone who isn't, say, studying the topic, but if that happens to be you, then I'd recommend the book. :)