Erin's Library

Addressing the void

2012-01-25T19:45:00.000-08:00

Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death - Irvin D. Yalom (Jossey-Bass, 2008)

One nice thing about having a blog which few (if any!) read is that I can be fairly forthcoming when it comes to self-disclosure. So I can tell you that this book was recommended to me recently as I've been going through a struggle with anxiety that has taken the form - in part - of death panic.

It seems so banal somehow to state "I'm afraid of dying" and so I've perhaps had a difficult time doing that. And my reluctance to just say it gives the fear more power. In this fear, I must realize, I am far from alone. Which is one of the many helpful takeaways from Yalom's work.

Oddly, as I start to try to describe the book, I find it slipping away from me. I'm not sure why that is. But let me try to reel it back in. Yalom explores the prevalence of death anxiety, and ways in which he has found the words of past thinkers helpful. He uses copious examples from his own work as a therapist. He challenges us to consider what about death terrifies us, and in what ways we can find comfort in confrontation.

I was also struck by his emphasis on connection. It's a theme that I've come back to again and again in my life, particularly in challenging times, and in this book I almost felt as though my focus was being validated.

This is almost useless as a book review, so let me try to sum up my reading experience. I struggled at times with this book, finding myself alternately receptive to its message and entirely the opposite. I argued with it, and raged over the places where it seemed to be speaking to someone entirely other than myself. I even found myself wishing for more spirituality, although Yalom very eloquently explains his reasons for the omission. And yet, these experiences enriched the book, because they forced me to ask myself why I reacted so strongly. For an introspective reader, this book offers ample food for thought, and certainly a dose of comfort.

Hotshots

2012-01-24T10:23:00.000-08:00

Hot as Sin - Bella Andre (Dell Books, 2009)

Sometimes library books get misdirected. Like this one which showed up yesterday. So obviously I had to read it before sending it to its rightful destination. In brief:

car accidents cause a lot of miscarriages
all firefighters are hot
if you run away from love when you're 18, you'll eventually run into the guy 10 years later, and fall in love again
especially if he flies across states to see you after a second car accident
and then helps you trek through the woods to save your kidnapped sister

Aw, ain't love grand? Seriously though, this book was pretty cute.

A dish best served....

2012-01-17T17:14:00.000-08:00

The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas, translated and abridged by Lowell Bair (Bantam Classic, 1844, 1956, 2003)

My boyfriend and I had the following exchange after he encouraged me to read this book since it was a) one of his favorites, and b) both a movie and (especially) an anime series that he liked quite a bit:

Him: I don't know if you'll like [the anime]. I mean, it's pretty different from the book.
Me: [quizzical]
Him: Like for starters, it's set in the future.

Hmm, in typing this story, I suppose I can see how you the reader would not be quite as tickled by it as I was. I don't know if I'm very good at telling jokes. Anyway, I thought it was hilarious, and I definitely want to see a version of the Count where they travel around in spaceships and he is maybe a vampire. But that isn't the novel, so.....

I felt a little bad about getting the abridged version, but when I realized it weighed in at 531 pages I got over my shame. Fortunately, it is a quick-moving 531 pages. I felt like I got through big chunks of text and events every time I picked up the book. Seriously, so much happens.

Basic premise: poor guy spends years in prison, and when he gets out (and how!), he sets about taking the most intricate revenge on those who wronged him. Along the way, we get to see how often the bad guy finishes first. But we know that the race isn't truly over, because the Count has a different ending in store.

Except.... the Count kinda creeped me out. I think I already get why he is (maybe) a vampire in this anime adaptation. He knows all and does all and has everything and ... I don't know. It's creepy. You start to think that his younger self really did die in prison. He redeems himself for me, but I can't reveal much more than that. Suffice it to say that I appreciate it when passion overtakes a cool, hardened facade.

...and I'm babbling. Anyway, good book. Sad I waited so long to read it. And can't wait to watch it on screen.

Institutionalized Injustice

2012-01-11T11:54:00.000-08:00

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness - Michelle Alexander (The New Press, 2010)

Alexander provides an impassioned monograph arguing what we - if we're to be honest with ourselves - already know: the criminal justice system in this country has systemic problems that make it racially biased. And our criminal justice system legitimizes ongoing and permanent discrimination against those that fall into its hands. In effect, we have created a new set of structures that mimic many of the effects of Jim Crow.

What I found particularly compelling was Alexander's analysis of the impact of the War on Drugs, and how a "public consensus was constructed by political and media elites that drug crime is black and brown." Furthermore, court decisions have essentially given a green light to racial profiling. And what is especially fantastic about this is that African Americans engage in illegal drug behavior at no greater rate than Caucasians. And yet they are caught and punished so far disproportionately that it becomes a joke.

I might have been precisely the target audience for this book. And yet, in reading, I sometimes got caught up with things that took away from her argument. Like following footnotes to discover sources, and seeing how often the reference was another scholarly work, not the primary source itself. (And then in one case spending a whole bunch of time online trying to look up old Congressional Records in order to figure out whether the cited source attributed a quote to the correct person.) This made me cranky, which seems particularly unfair of me when you consider how few works of popular scholarship offer footnotes whatsoever. But this, I fear, is just who I am.

Give this book a shot. It broadened and deepened my understanding of the incarceration crisis in this country, and made me wonder how taking voting rights away from felons isn't a violation of the Fifteenth Amendment. And so on. Excellent food for thought.

The course of true love...

2011-12-19T08:44:00.001-08:00

I'm In No Mood For Love - Rachel Gibson (Avon Books, 2006)

Calling Romeo - Alexandra Potter (Downtown Press, 2002)

I needed a romantic reading fix, so took a trip to the library and ended up with these two, figuring I was safe with both authors. And now I don't have that much to say, except that here they are. Gibson ran more or less according to romance genre conventions, but I found both characters appealing. Potter offered a really interesting look at how a love story almost falls apart, and what's required to make a relationship work. Fairly or not, I found one character loads more sympathetic than the others, but a happy ending for one requires a happy ending for most, so....

And now the pink books go back to the library, and something else will take their place.

Elizabethan Sci-Fi, except not

2011-12-14T10:38:00.000-08:00

Shakespeare's Game - William Gibson (Atheneum, 1978)

I'd like to have someone to blame for this. Somewhere along the line, I came under the impression that cyberpunk doyen William Gibson started his publishing career with an early novel that somehow brought in Shakespeare and would be tame enough for someone like me to actually dip my toe in the genre. This is totally wrong (unless Neuromancer is somehow about the Bard). The Gibson above is an older Gibson, a playwright, who offered a structural and textual analysis of Shakespeare's plays based on years of teaching graduate students. So I guess I need to talk about him and that book, although I maintain that "Shakespeare's Game" would be a fantastic title for some sort of science fiction-esque work (or it sounds just like Da Vinci Code... one of those).

Anyway, this work. Look, 200 pages of analysis is not going to be exciting, no matter how much Shakespearean iambic pentameter you include.Well, not exciting to me at any rate. And so I may not have been the close reader that this book deserved. Even so, I found things to learn, having not studied Shakespeare since high school. I think - think - Gibson argued that the climax of the plays tends to occur at the end of Act III (of V); everything else from this point is essentially pre-ordained, and thus tidying up to get to the inevitable conclusion. He also talked quite a bit about how deftly Shakespeare presents false antagonists, who stand in or draw attention from the real conflict. (On this note, I wish he had spent some time with Julius Caesar.) And how sloppy and nonsensical Shakespeare can be in service of other goals (chiefly entertainment); for the life of me I couldn't tell whether Gibson considered this a failing or not.

Lots of Hamlet (which will forever be the Reduced Shakespeare version to me... below) and King Lear. And then Merchant of Venice and Othello. What I realized: I don't know Shakespeare as well as I'd like. Goal: watch more. :)

Le sigh

2011-12-05T15:58:00.001-08:00

I wish my blog got enough attention to qualify for free books. (And then to have said free flow of books threatened.) Thank goodness for libraries.

Sex and hockey in DeLillo's America

2011-12-05T13:26:00.001-08:00

Amazons: An Intimate Memoir by the First Woman Ever to Play in the National Hockey League - Cleo Birdwell (better known as Don DeLillo) (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1980)

Apparently DeLillo has pretty much disowned this book, omitting it from official bibliographies and blocking its republication. (As a result, this book was tough to track down in a library.) I'm not entirely sure why. I mean, it's not great literature, but it brings in much of the absurdity that I found in White Noise (and one of the same characters, for that matter).

But I didn't read it because of DeLillo. In fact, if I remember correctly, I heard about the book well before I found out Birdwell was a pseudonym. You know me, I'm a sucker for hockey books. And for complaining about how unrealistic they are. And this one offers ample opportunity.

Cleo is a rookie for the Rangers. And the first woman to play in the NHL. So she gets a lot of attention, naturally. But apparently she is like Taylor Hall or something, the rate at which she seems to score. And speaking of scoring, there is plenty of that off the ice. It seems like everyone circling the team eventually succumbs to the belief that sex with her will ... I don't know, do something. And despite assertions that make her seem sorta meh about most, if not all these men, she is usually a willing participant. In some of the weirdest sex scenes I've read in a while.

And then there is the former player who shares her apartment, a man suffering from some bizarre affliction and whose search (aided by Cleo) ends with him spending months asleep in a machine. The way in which this whole scenario is normalized is what I remember best about DeLillo from past forays into his work. And it hints at something deeper than "Cleo plays hockey and has lots of sex." But I just couldn't get my finger on it.

Irish Times

2011-11-30T10:27:00.001-08:00

No News at Throat Lake - Lawrence Donegan (Pocket Books, 2000)

So let's say you play bass guitar in a rock/pop band in the 1980s. But what you really dreamed of doing was writing for the Guardian. So when the band fizzles out, you do that. But then somehow you decide what you really want to do is live in a the boonies of County Donegal. If this is you, you'd be Donegan.

Despite leaving his old world behind him for a ramshackle home in an Irish cottage, he doesn't leave behind journalism, and ends up writing for the local Tirconaill Tribune. This memoir, then, is a combination of Donegan's attempts to adjust to a new pace of life, the stories that come his way thanks to this quirky newspaper, and his immersion in the world of Gaelic football.

It's light and amusing, and strangely dated feeling. The year he spent in Ireland is circa 1998, and I guess it's just hitting me now what a long time ago that really was. I wouldn't mind going back in time, and to a picturesque locale like Creeslough. Anyone with a time machine?

A different look at Egypt

2011-11-14T15:31:00.001-08:00

In the Eye of the Sun - Ahdaf Soueif (Anchor Books, 1992, 2000)

Several years ago, I received a notebook titled "Books to Check Out" and ever since, I've made a valiant effort to keep my list of books to read in one place. (With mixed results.) Anyway, from time to time, I go back to the early entries that are yet to be crossed off, and wonder why I haven't gotten to them yet. Usually, it's because I can't find them in a local library. But now I have access to oodles of libraries in California, so I'm going back through.

My friend Mariam recommended Soueif to me early early on. This must have been shortly after we graduated, or maybe soon after she arrived in Cairo. And now, years and years later, I have finally read it. This was a challenge, with my work and life schedule being what it is. 785 pages.... thank goodness for a one-day business trip that gave me uninterrupted hours and hours to read. (I probably read 1/3 of the book that day.) But this is in some ways actually quite a quick read; the pages generally turn in a hurry.

Asya is a young member of the Cairene middle-class, I guess you'd call it. The daughter of two professors, her future in academia was never in doubt. She is romantic and headstrong, and eagerly falls in love at 17, and less eagerly waits until graduation before marrying Saif.

Thanks to the structure of the novel, which starts with 39 pages at the end of the 1970s and then doubles back to the beginning... to 1967, we know that things go wrong. And in some ways, the novel is just the path of how they get there. Asya and Saif made me a little crazy -- it's one of those love stories open to all sorts of interpretation. They met too young, perhaps. They never really knew one another, not really, and they just grew apart. A skeptic could quickly point out all the warning signs before their marriage. And yet, in another light, their love shines more brightly, and their troubles stem more from their failure to communicate. They misread one another again and again. And I longed for them to bridge that gap.

It comes out early on that Asya has an affair, so I don't feel like I'm spoiling anything. But to say too much more may bring on spoilers. Suffice it to say that at one point I grew sufficiently frustrated that I told my boyfriend that I wanted to punch the book. Some characters...... argh.

Oh, and the first half of the book laces Asya's life with the historical events unfolding around her, these latter reported in terse, journalistic style. Once she leaves for England, though, her internal world grows larger and larger, and we learn less about not only outside events, but even the lives of those she loves.

And lastly, a quote: "This [poetry] has to be what matters. Or a large part of what matters. How can people read it and just go on as though they'd been reading the newspaper or some geography lesson[...]?"

Books for trade

2011-10-22T12:26:00.000-07:00

I had another book swap a few weeks back. This was my take. (I also made some lovely lovely bookmarks.) And when all was said and done, we donated about 40 books to the Huntington Beach Public Library. Thanks everyone for the fun evening!

How to be a writer

2011-10-22T12:23:00.000-07:00

Making a Literary Life: Advice for Writers and Other Dreamers - Carolyn See (Ballantine Books, 2002)

I've always loved writing without really having any real conception of how I could be a writer. Do I want to be? Do I not? Reading this book didn't really help answer that question, but See is just about all you could want in a mentor. She is honest and witty and eccentric and self-aware.

The book covers the preparatory period, and ways to psych yourself up for writing. (This includes writing "charming notes" to those you admire.) It then moves on to the writing process, and how to conceive of major aspects of writing, such as plot, space, characters, etc. Her assertion that the 10 "most important" people in your life are your characters led me make my list, and realize that there were some surprising names on there. And finally, the last section is about all the work YOU have to do to get your work out there, and published, and promoted, and everything else. It all sounds exhausting, to be honest.

But if nothing else, See reminded me how much I enjoy writing, and watching words flow from my fingers onto a page (or screen). And as I said above, she really makes quite a mentor.

Hope & Faith

2011-10-14T09:59:00.000-07:00

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian - Marina Lewycka (Penguin, 2005)

So the two sisters are Hope & Faith (except the family is Ukrainian, so they are Nadezhda and Vera) - this is important enough that it gets spelled out. Their elderly widower father decides to marry a voluptuous Ukrainian immigrant, to help her get her papers. And because he is in his mid-80s, and utterly infatuated with this woman who makes him feel like a man again. The sisters, unsurprisingly, are not excited about this plan.

So he marries, and then everything (predictably) goes to hell. And much of the book is a tale of how they are going to get rid of this monstrous woman, sprinkled with occasional questions of whether one should admire her tenacity and/or have sympathy for her striving. But what it reminded me of was - of all things - Catch-22. I felt that same profound discomfort and unease while reading, that same sense of being trapped in an illogical world, where life was profoundly unfair. Through the looking glass, I suppose. Or like life in the USSR, for that matter. I kept reading because I wanted to know how it played out, but I felt... well, icky.

Then, somehow, it picks up a lot of speed. Maybe because you start learning more about the trauma of the family's past. This is a family whose origins can be found in the Terror, and the terror famine, and then the War and the German camps. And somehow, being reminded of all that made me feel somehow safer. I grew to believe that Lewycka had too much sympathy for her characters to make them truly suffer again. Writing that, I can see how it doesn't make much sense, but it's how I felt all the same.

And, because in a way it both wraps up the novel and a broader project in my life to consider the importance of the narratives we create to make sense of our experiences:

I had thought there was a happy story to tell about my parents' life, a tale of triumph over tragedy, of love overcoming impossible odds, but now I see that there are only fleeting moments of happiness, to be seized and celebrated before they slip away.

Lizzie Bennet in high school

2011-10-05T10:40:00.000-07:00

Prom & Prejudice - Elizabeth Eulberg (Point, 2011)

I was reading some RA (readers' advisory) thing about new young adult fiction when I came across this title. And the description made me howl. At work. Lovely. My library didn't purchase it, but I finally came across one that did, and here we go.

I can't figure out if it's even possible to read this book without knowing the source material. Certainly it can't be as amusing. Longbourn is no longer the home of the Bennets, but instead a very posh New England boarding school, where prom is a BFD. Lizzie is a scholarship student. Jane & Lydia are sisters, but not Elizabeth's sisters. Bingley & Darcy attend the neighboring boys' school, named - naturally - Pemberley. Other references to the book pop up in unexpected places.

Eulberg has a difficult task adapting P&P for modern teens. The grand themes of the love story are as apt as ever: pride, an unwillingness to change initial impressions, misunderstanding, stubbornness about who we think we are and what we think we want.... all of these get in the way of true happiness. But actions and attitudes that make sense in the early 1800s seem bizarre in today's climate. Bingley & his sister, for example. Are brothers really that persuadable? And Lydia.... you can have a wild child today (easy enough) but how do you demonstrate how humiliating that wildness is? Can it really bring shame on a family?

Anyway, it's cute. But I'm afraid I would have hated it had I read it as a teen.

I'm re-reading again

2011-10-03T21:19:00.000-07:00

Reading a book on the computer is a strange experience still to me. Especially when it's a book set in the early nineteenth century. Anyway, yay Jane Austen. Yay Persuasion.

Sometimes I re-read books

2011-09-26T21:01:00.000-07:00

Mating Rituals of the North American WASP - Lauren Lipton

This book lodged itself so firmly in my head, I had to buy it used, and to spend stolen moments here and there reading it again, falling a little bit in love. Thanks Lauren Lipton :)

Hey A's

2011-09-22T14:04:00.000-07:00

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game - Michael Lewis (W.W. Norton & Co., 2003)

In 2002, I lived in Berkeley. And somewhere along the line, I became an A's fan. Probably because they had this unreal winning streak, setting MLB records. I was at 2 or 3 of the games in that streak. And baseball was fun.

I've been wanting to read this book for awhile. I've picked up enough here and there to know that by using statistics in a different way, Billy Beane had upended all the typical rules about what you needed for a successful team. And could do it on the cheap. Coooooooooool.

Somehow, it never occurred to me that the book covered the same season that I remembered so well. But then, suddenly it did. And it wasn't just names like Miguel Tejada, Eric Chavez, and Mark Mulder (yum!) that were popping up. All the people I forgot: Dye, Scott Hatteberg, Chad Bradford of the craaaaaazy pitch, etc etc etc. Oh, and Nick Swisher, who joined the A's after I left for the East Coast. Ah, sigh.

So honestly, the chapter about the game where they went for the MLB record.... that was my favorite part of the book. I was at that game. It was one of the most wild sports experiences I've ever had. It rivals the hockey stuff even. Just.... oh, it was amazing. And I bet it's fun to read about even if you aren't reliving it. :)

The book itself is fascinating too. Lewis explains Beane & DePodesta's strategy essentially like this: what's most important is ability to avoid making outs. Look for players who are good at that - focus on the stats that really matter. Find the ones who are good at that who are undervalued for some reason, and snap them up. Generally these people don't "look" like baseball players, so are discounted. And thus, your 2002 Oakland Athletics.

Of course, the A's haven't been much to look at in awhile, and I'm curious about how one would analyze Beane's tenure now. Lewis is an admirer, or was in 2002-03. I want to hear more about now (perhaps I should actually go look and see what he's written).

And yet, I say Lewis is an admirer, but he may not be entirely sold, and here was his comment to Beane that stood out, even amidst all the (lovely lovely) statistics: "Every player is different. Every player must be viewed as a special case. the sample size is always one" (p. 248).

How to become a bestselling novelist

2011-09-09T11:08:00.000-07:00

The Glamorous (Double) Life of Isabel Bookbinder - Holly McQueen (Washington Square Press, 2008)

I really shouldn't complain, b/c this book made me laugh a lot. (It's always fun when the baristas look over at you wondering what's so funny.) And it has a cute twist. And the requisite Daniel/Mark Darcy triangle. However, I don't feel like we get to know our romantic male lead nearly well enough, and we probably should.

More importantly, who are you, Isabel??? Her antics and total inability to understand almost anything led me from chuckling to wanting to bang my head on the table. I kept waiting for some sort of personal growth, or something... but if it existed, I missed it. I probably felt this especially keenly having just left Ellie from The Last Letter from your Lover.

Lots of intriguing characters though, and I think McQueen has a lot of space to play around with the eccentric mother secretly pursuing a bizarre dream, the disapproving father, the friend who has everything together except for a totally unreasonable crush (I wanted more of this storyline!). This is her first novel, and I'll be curious to see how her next ones develop.

A little bit of magic

2011-09-05T12:15:00.000-07:00

Howl's Moving Castle - Diana Wynne Jones (Greenwillow Books, 1986)

First of all, the book is pretty different from the Hayao Miyazaki film (which I want to go back and watch again). So you should probably make sure you come across both of them, else you'll be missing out.

This was a book club selection (I finally made it to a meeting!) and received positive-to-mixed reviews from the members. There was some frustration with the abruptness of the ending, and uncertainty about whether Howl was actually a romantic dude.

But first, plot. Sophie has resigned herself to a dull life taking over the family hat shop when a witch's curse turns her into a 90 year old crone and she leaves home to ... well, that's not very clear. But she soon finds herself in the walking castle of Wizard Howl, where she and his fire demon agree to a deal: he'll lift her spell if she can free him from the contract binding him to the castle hearth.

And then adventures go from there. Howl is a dandy rather than an evil eater-of-hearts, everyone seems to have more magical power than they think, and Wales circa 1986 makes an appearance even among the towns in this fantasy land.

I am slightly embarrassed to say that Sophie reminded me very much of Bella Swan (Wow, I barely blogged about Twilight at all. I must have been ashamed) and if Stephenie Meyer didn't use Sophie Hatter as inspiration, both authors were at least trying to do the same thing. Which is? Sophie & Bella don't see their own power. Sophie believes she is plain and destined for a plain life; Bella is plain and awkward and surrounded by creatures far more beautiful and powerful. And yet, the problem throughout is that they don't see themselves clearly; they don't recognize their own beauty and strength. It's a difficult task to carry off, and both books have problems, but the trope is one of the things I like most about YA fiction.

As Time Goes By

2011-09-05T11:45:00.000-07:00

The Last Letter from your Lover - Jojo Moyes (Viking, 2011)

One of the reasons I feel blessed to be a reader is for the feeling you get when you come across a book that makes you so pleased to be reading it. It may be romantic, or exciting, or heartwarming, or tear-jerking. But whatever it is, you are glad that the book exists, and that you exist and are able to read it.

All of which is a rather over-the-top way to say that I really loved this book. I am all about the British romances, apparently.

Story, in brief: in October 1960, Jennifer Stirling wakes up in a hospital, her memory essentially gone. She tries to return to upper-class life with a husband she feels is a stranger ... and then finds a letter. She had been having an affair, and now much begin a mad search to determine the identity of her lover, the trajectory of their love, and what her husband and friends may have known.

Interspersed are flashbacks just a few months, to when she met the man behind the letters, all from his point of view. How he found himself desperately in love with someone who should have been only a conquest. And then time moves forward.

And then time moves dramatically forward, to 2003. Ellie, a reporter whose own "all-consuming" love affair threatens to wreak havoc on her career, finds a cache of these letters. For reasons both professional and personal, she sets out to discover what became of Jennifer & B.

The earlier story is the more compelling, and I wouldn't blame any reader who wanted to take Ellie and shake her for being just like any other British chick lit heroine. But that is unkind, and not entirely true. (And also kind of okay, b/c this reader loves [most] British chick lit.) And Moyes does two things that I adore. The first is making a romantic hero of the librarian. (Thank you!) The second is entwining the two stories such that the resolutions of each are entirely bound up in one another.

If I only read novels like this, I'd be pretty darn close to perfectly content.

KGB-CIA Smackdown

2011-08-23T10:30:00.000-07:00

The Charm School - Nelson DeMille (Warner Books, 1988, 2006)

My mom tells me that she went through a phase when I was a baby where she believed it inevitable that Reagan would blow us all up. And really, am I too blasé in my conviction that the Cold War was never really going to go thermonuclear?

I grew up, for all intents and purposes, after the Cold War. Born weeks after the Miracle on Ice, I knew the USSR as a place my daddy had visited as a student. Heck, he worked for a Russian businessman who - I think? - was installing laundromats in Moscow or something. It was perestroika, glasnost, and then a Wall fell, but I was too little to understand. And then a putsch. And aftermath. Drunken Yeltsin dancing on a stage. So long Soviet Union, I hardly knew ye.

Even after I became a scholar of Soviet history, I was just that: a scholar. I never had known the USSR as an existential threat, the way my professors had. Well, many of them hadn't felt that way themselves, but they existed in a world that did. (And some did. Certainly.)

But I digress. There's a book here. A spy thriller! I don't think I've ever read one of these before. It's exciting! And during the Cold War - probably set roughly around when it was written, 1988. And it takes things so seriously. And gives the Soviets points for competence that, quite honestly, they probably didn't deserve. The allure of détente vies for primacy with the deeply rooted sentiment that the Soviets would do anything to win.

Lots more for me to think about as well. Often the action (and exciting action! KGB training "Americans" how to completely pass and infiltrate our society. Car chases! Plane crashes! Lots of doublespeak! Oh, and sex) felt like just a distraction from the questions I wanted to ponder about the importance of the Cold War as an origin myth in the construction of post-war identity in both the USA and USSR. So my point is: this was fun! Seriously. Spy novels are awesome. But it also made me want to run into the garage and dig through boxes until I found all my history books.

Just a fling? Ha!

2011-08-15T09:59:00.000-07:00

Only Mine - Susan Mallery (HQN Books, 2011)

Sometimes, when I'm reading a romance, and a woman gets involved with a guy in one of those "no strings attached, just for fun" affairs, I kinda want to take her and shake her. "Don't you ever read romance novels?!? Haven't you ever seen a romcom?!? You're totally going to fall for him." It's a similar urge to wanting to smack the characters in horror movies, who clearly have never seen a horror film before.

(Admittedly, on occasion, characters go meta and say shit to themselves like: Snap out of it [character's name]. This is real life, not a romance novel. Ha!)

But! This book has no fake marriages, although one faked relationship, which actually, for maybe the first time in romance history, makes sense. It also has both twins and triplets (two more books coming this fall, if you were wondering). And I took the book home mainly to figure out where in California the fictional town of Fool's Gold was located. I'm still going through this wistful phase where small-town life sounds really really good.

Not Alone

2011-08-12T21:53:00.000-07:00

Midlife Crisis at 30 - Lia Macko and Kerry Rubin (Plume 2004)

I really wish I had read this 3 years ago, when it first came into my life via a bookswap. Because despite all the differences and things that "make me unique" and whatnot, I often felt like I was reading my life story.

So Macko & Rubin explore what seems the feminist mystique for my generation: that the promise that "you can do anything" turns into the expectation that "you should be everything" ... and inevitably, guilt and panic when we're not. It's a little frustrating to travel back to 2003 and 2004. Man, I wish I were building my career then; I'd happily take that economy over this one.

Anyway, a couple moments of deep identification:

"a sense of bewilderment about why their lives felt so out of sync with their expectations, as well as a deep fear that the paths they had chosen were leading them in the wrong direction"
"Despite my best intentions, I ended up exactly where [I did not want to be] at 30."
"I feel like I just got divorced without ever being married." [This one. So. Much.]

and then the more helpful moments of hearing from women on the other side:

There's still plenty of time.
The difference between a B and an A often isn't worth the extra effort and struggle. Sometimes it's okay to settle for that B-plus.
and from Lt. General Claudia Kennedy: "There are times in your future when you will be more beautiful than you are today; you need to get old enough to be that beautiful."

Anyone who has spent five minutes talking to me in the past 3 months knows that I needed to hear all those things right now. But really, I think just about every young woman I know needs them too. We're a bit younger than Macko and Rubin. Our generational experience is a touch different. But the questions and fears and identity crises we're facing: they haven't changed much over the past decade.

Lost in a Painting

2011-08-05T18:31:00.000-07:00

The Museum Guard - Howard Norman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998)

This is one of those novels that creates a deep sense of unease from the start. Maybe it's because you find out right away that something is not right with DeFoe's romantic relationship, or because of the telling of his parents' horrific death when he was a child. Not only their death, but the way that adults tried - ineptly, as all efforts must surely be - to protect him from some of the worst of the blow. Or maybe it's just 1938, and a growing awareness of the tragedies already taking place in Hitler's Germany.

At any rate, nothing feels right in DeFoe's Halifax: neither in the residential hotels where most everyone seems to live, nor in the art museum where he guards an unpretentious collection.

Much of the first half of the novel was taken up by my wondering why his girlfriend was so cruel to him. I think I used the term "jerking him around" quite a bit. I was not impressed. But as she falls further and further under the spell of one particular painting, everything gets so convoluted, that you just want the train wreck to actually occur, the crash to happen. It's like watching a disaster in slow motion.

Despite my saying slow motion, the pacing is both fast and slow. Just when I began to feel I understand Norman's rhythms, it would switch up again. Considering how consistently I've reached for cheerier books over several months, this was a departure for me. And a difficult one. I need some sunshine.

One exchange, though, between DeFoe and Miss Delbo, the museum's tour guide, stopped me in my tracks. Somehow, it seemed the truest and most familiar moment in the whole book.

Miss Delbo: Imogen is lost to you, DeFoe. I may as well state it now as later. You aren't -- forgive my bluntness -- you aren't a man who recognizes his own nature.

DeFoe: I recognize a lot of it. I just don't know what to do with what I recognize.

Stay. Or let me go.

2011-07-27T14:36:00.000-07:00

The Playboy - Carly Phillips (Warner Books, 2003)

This is the second in the trilogy (first here) about a trio of brothers who are sworn bachelors, until mom gets in the way. And the right woman blows into town. And....

Anyway, it's cute. It's sweet. And like far too many romances, it makes me want a change. A new town. (It makes me think of the lyrics to "Boston" for that matter.)

I'll get out of California, I'm tired of the weather,
I think I'll get a lover and fly him out to Spain...
Oh yeah and I think I'll go to Boston,
I think that I'm just tired
I think I need a new town, to leave this all behind...
I think I need a sunrise, I'm tired of the sunset...

Maybe change is in the air. Certainly feels like it must be.

Do you speak my tongue?

2011-07-27T14:18:00.000-07:00

The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts - Gary Chapman (Northfield, 1992, 2010)

I've been curious about this book since a friend gushed over it about a year ago. It seemed a little self-helpy to me, and my library catalog attaches it to Christianity. Also, I'm not sure what marriage I'm working on. But.

It seemed pretty self-evident to me that there are different ways to express love, and that some expressions of love mean more to different people. So I picked it up, and spent an afternoon with it and a glass of iced tea.

Here are the five love languages:

Words of Affirmation
Quality Time
Gifts
Acts of Service
Physical Touch

Dr. Chapman devotes a chapter to each one, and has lots and lots of examples of marriages falling apart that were saved by the decision to really try to speak one another's language. Cute.

Okay, fine. I get that. What I found most interesting was the relative ease and difficulty of figuring out the dominant love languages of those around me. My mom was immediately obvious, and it threw a lot of areas of our family dynamic into sharp relief. My dad was harder. Some friends became clear just as they popped into my head over the past few days, as I'd be thinking about other things. What frightens me is that I look at my past romantic relationships, and I can't say for sure what my partners' languages have been. Even more so, I can't figure out my own. He offers lots of tips for figuring it out, but all I really got to was that one of the five is definitely not mine. (This one, by the way, happens to be my mom's, which I find amusing.) So I'm still puzzling that out. (Chapman has an edition for singles, which might be worth digging up.)

What I have thought about is that I can show love and appreciation in my relationship through all these ways, and that I should, in order to really ensure the people around me know that I appreciate them. It has also been a good reminder that they show their appreciation and love in different ways too. Sometimes, when you're convinced love looks a certain way, you miss the love that's right in front of you.

Hell-o Starling

2011-07-21T11:10:00.000-07:00

Bright's Passage - Josh Ritter (Dial Press, 2011)

I am a sucker for "Snow is Gone." I could just listen to it over and over again. I'm still discovering Ritter's other songs, but it alone was enough to get me excited when I saw he was coming out with a debut novel this summer.

Bright's Passage is lyrical and fascinating, but devoid of the joy that drew me to the songs. It makes sense; what joy is to be found in a hard world, where the trauma of the First World War is followed by the trauma of losing one's wife in childbirth and fleeing the raging inferno that has taken over your home? The chapters alternate between Bright's attempts to make his way with his newborn son and his experiences on the front lines of a war that was all over except for the brutal and senseless killing. Plus, we get a peek at the opaque menace that is Bright's father-in-law, out for revenge. As a result, the book just gets harder and harder and harder to read. Which is, I must believe, Ritter's intent.

Nothing has ever convinced me that war is anything other than hell. And this novel places it on a continuum of horrors that have followed Bright from childhood. No wonder he has picked up an angel, who offers the promise of something better. Perhaps.

The questions of redemption is left until the final pages, which is all I will say about that. Can there be such a thing as redemption in a world where such arbitrary violence is allowed to occur?

Aw, it's blue because... well, you'll see

2011-07-10T16:26:00.000-07:00

Something Blue - Emily Giffin (St. Martin's Griffin, 2005)

Have I mentioned anything about liking John Krasinski? Maybe once or twice?

Anyway, I'm so glad he's (I presume) going to be playing Ethan when they film this follow-up to Something Borrowed.

Um, there's really no way to talk about this book without spoiling the end of the earlier novel, so we'll have to deal with that. Darcy has spent 30 years as the golden girl, who always gets what she wants. And who is always wanted. And suddenly she finds herself alone, dumped by friends and loved ones, and pregnant. So she does what any woman would do - flee to London.

I preferred this book to the first, which I didn't expect. I never really got over my discomfort with Dex. I kept wondering... if I were Rachel's friend, wouldn't I tell her she's too good for him? That she deserves someone more willing to take a stand? In this novel, the ick factor was different. Darcy is a bitch, but she's also our first-person narrator, and it's nice to remember from time to time that shallow and selfish people aren't only shallow and selfish, that they often believe they are trying to be good, and that often enough, they are capable of growing up.

So we grow to like Darcy. And we are awfully fond of Ethan, the childhood friend who finds himself a sucker for Darcy's damsel in distress. And so it works. And works enough that I devoted an entire Saturday to devouring the book essentially in a single sitting.

You drive and you drive and you drive some more

2011-07-06T10:54:00.000-07:00

In a Sunburned Country - Bill Bryson (Broadway Books, 2000)

Last week I drove about 800 miles over 2 days. It made me a little cranky, and definitely sore. But I was driving between Southern California and the Bay Area, where there is plenty to see, even on that cow country stretch of the 5. So I felt a little sheepish reading Bill Bryson in Australia, where there are regular 1000+ mile drives to get pretty much anywhere.

Bryson is hilarious. I think I knew this, but here is proof. This exploration of Australia's cities, interior, features, people, culture, etc. is the result of 3 separate trips that expose him to much (and yet still just a small piece of) the land Down Under.

Themes: Places have a lot of weird stories. And when you're on the road, you get intrigued by all sorts of roadside attractions.

Australia has LOTS of things that can kill you. Lots and lots and lots. Animals mostly. And getting lost in the desert and dying.

Bryson walks a lot. He makes me wish I were better at going offline and just walking.

He also drinks a lot on occasion. Especially when traveling with a friend.

Travel plans get messed up pretty often.

Australia is awesome, and writers get to go there surprisingly often (well, to me) for book tours.

Also, you should probably find this book just for the description of cricket. I almost fell off the couch. It's most of chapter 7, although it appears here and there elsewhere in the book. This may be one of the lazier book reviews ever, but I promise, you will enjoy this read.

My Best Friend's Wedding

2011-06-27T19:13:00.000-07:00

Something Borrowed - Emily Giffin (St. Martin's Griffin, 2004)

I knew the book would be different from the movie. And I wanted to see the movie - um, hello John Krasinski! - and read the book. So: movie first. That way I wouldn't be disappointed by it.

It worked pretty well. Except I am sorry, but I still think Rachel is too good for Tom Cruise, or Dex or whatever. Maybe I just want to think that the right guy won't be so wishy washy about me. And the book and movie were surprisingly different. Even on major plot points. The book did things that just couldn't have worked on screen. I think we would have hated Rachel more. And maybe that's too bad, that we have to bow to convention, but so be it.

Rachel's "best friend" is bratty Darcy, whose fiancé is changing his allegiance. But her real best friend is co-worker Hillary. Although other childhood bud Ethan is pretty cool too. In the movie, rather than complicate things with another actress, we just wrap them both into Ethan (John Krasinski!) who has secret feelings of his own.

Anyway, totally enjoyable. I like that Rachel does something pretty horrendous - sleep with her best friend's man mere weeks before the wedding - and yet is portrayed as sympathetic and human. And while you root for her, you also do feel squeamish about what's going on. Except that you also don't. And you also - if you're me - can't decide if you think Dex is a cad or just a guy who misplayed his hand and is now figuring that out.

The sequel follows Darcy. And I bet we are going to learn to like this spoiled princess. But I sort of don't wanna. That said, I'll read the book. And watch the movie. After all: John Krasinski!

The Dark Side

2011-06-22T19:12:00.000-07:00

I Am The Cheese - Robert Cormier (Dell-Laurel Leaf, 1977)

First of all, my boy Corey Perry just won the Hart Trophy for League MVP. I'm a whole mess of happy about that. But I won't let that distract me from my book review.

It starts with Twitter, and the #YASaves trending topic that got big a few weeks back after a WSJ article posited YA lit today was darker than in past years, and even dangerous. (I am oversimplifying.) Anyway, the response was immediate and severe. The consensus: YA literature helps teens navigate the perils of adolescence, and adults who write for the WSJ need to calm the eff down. (Again, oversimplifying.)

I had a few discussions arising from some RTs of mine. A friend told me that while reading the article, he was reminded how I Am The Cheese was a really powerful book, that stuck with him. I decided to read (or maybe re-read?) it. Which I did on Monday night.

It's powerful stuff, this book. Adam's story is revealed in alternating chapters. His solo bicycle journey from his hometown to a Vermont town 70 miles away, where his father is in the hospital, and then the transcripts of taped sessions between him and a shadowy doctor of some sort, who is asking questions about his past. It quickly becomes clear that something in his life went dramatically awry, both recently and in his very early childhood. You fear for Adam, and reading this now, an adult, all my maternal instincts kicked in. I was troubled that I was obviously too late to protect this child.

1977, and this is dark. Apparently not as graphically dark as what's out there today. But powerful. Harmful? I doubt it.

Speaking of the impact of YA, another discussion led to Lois Duncan.... My friend brought up Don't Look Behind You, a 1990 novel about a girl whose family is in the Witness Protection Program. Of course I remember this book! I must have read it a bunch of times. But the one that stuck with me more is Stranger with My Face, the novel that introduced me to the concept of astral projection, and also terrified me away from ever being willing to give it a try. (Wimp.) Are these books still being read?

Before I wrap up, I want to mention that the books that stuck with me the most are the scary ones. I bet this isn't uncommon. And I wonder how much it relates to the central thesis of Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment, namely that dark tales enable children to safely grapple with their fears. I am sure there is plenty of scholarly literature out there on the topic. Maybe one of these days I'll do a little more searching. For now, just speculation....

In the Mood for Love

2011-06-17T18:21:00.000-07:00

The Bachelor - Carly Phillips (Warner Books, 2002)

First Lady - Susan Elizabeth Phillips (Avon Books, 2000)

No one has to pretend to be married! No fake marriages! Well, except in the latter, the widowed FLOTUS does pretend to be pregnant, and is at least once introduced as the wife of the guy to whom she's hitched her runaway self. And in the former, a fake illness forces our hero to find a lady to wed. In a hurry. Luckily his old high school crush is back in town too.

I should stop. Talking about romances makes me ironic. Because there's no way to admit you read and enjoy them without telling everyone that you are a hopeless romantic. Rolling your eyes dramatically at least shows you know they are foolish.

But who am I kidding, really? Would I keep reading them if I found them so moronic? (Well, maybe...) I am a sucker for them. I love the dramatic arc. Damsel is in distress, finds herself latched to vaguely abhorrent but totally sexy man, and as she falls for him, discovers all this strength within herself. I know there is plenty that is escapist and dangerous about this fantasies, but they really could be a lot worse. There are many worse things than believing that you can grow into your own best self and find true love. Right???

A Memory Palace

2011-05-23T20:37:00.000-07:00

Great House - Nicole Krauss (W.W. Norton & Co., 2010)

Nicole Krauss blows my mind. (I have mentioned this before.) A few years back, I gushed about The History of Love, and her latest novel employs a similar plot devise, being a sort of biography of a thing. In this case it's a desk, this monstrosity of a desk that is confiscated during Nazi occupation, and touches the lives of a surprising number of people. Strangely, I kept seeing the desk as almost like an organ - all the different drawers like pipes and .... I don't know.

Her stories are lyrical and haunting, and it's no surprise that many of the narrators are either authors or loved ones of writers. They speak in a high-flown language that doesn't really bear any relationship to how most of us talk, but carries the weight of intense sadness, loneliness, emptiness, and a struggle to know those we love.

I noted less than I would have liked, and this makes me sad. I'd probably direct you to the entire (long) chapter "Lies Told by Children." The first narrator, the author who owned the desk most recently, comments on how the things she loves she is reluctant to share with others, unlike those who want to share the music and literature that makes them who they are. She also has a lovely line about her youth: "I had been young and full, bursting with feeling, overflowing with desire; I lived closer to the surface of myself."

This is, perhaps, a book better meant to be reflected upon in conversation - or silence - than in a blog. It consists of interwoven parts, and leads to interwoven thoughts. I want to talk about it, and digress, and bring up other points, and wander down tangents. (That last might have been redundant.) So go read, and then come talk to me about it, okay?

Literary debates

2011-05-23T19:05:00.001-07:00

Michael Silverblatt generally makes me giggle. Because I'm like that. But I found his discussion with professor and author Marjorie Garber fascinating.

Have a listen:

Vacation Reading

2011-05-22T21:55:00.000-07:00

There's Cake in My Future - Kim Gruenenfelder (St. Martin's Griffin, 2010)

For my vacation, I brought a bunch of unread New Yorkers (of which I read one, on the plane ride home) and a serious novel (post to come), which I worked on at airport gates and on the plane. But for the meat of the trip, the hotel reading, I wanted light and fun. For that, I went with the Gruenenfelder.

The premise is cute. Three friends. One tries to direct the future through this cake pull charm thing. Except it gets messed up and fate has its own plans for the ladies. I like these "friends" books, b/c you get different stories. One woman tries to adjust to married life, one negotiates the problem of being best friends with the guy you love, and the third rebounds - or attempts to - after a breakup. All light, all fun, all funny. Also, set in Los Angeles. Hurrah!

One thing that got a lot of attention from me was the mention of the crushworthiness of John Krasinski; the other was this line, from the fiancé: "I love that you think that anything I do could be fraught with subtext. I'm a guy: we are rarely, if ever, fraught with subtext." I still don't really believe this is true, regardless of what guys tell me, but I thought it was adorable all the same.

Going back to find Gruenenfelder's first two novels. But first I really need to make a dent in that pile of magazines. My nightstand thinks it's still January, folks. :(

She's back!

2011-05-10T23:25:00.000-07:00

Dead Reckoning - Charlaine Harris (Ace Books, 2011)

I've sorta missed my girl Sookie. This series has long since been completely out there. I mean, there's suspension of disbelief, and then there's what Sookie's Louisiana requires. But, after 9 months or whatever, I realize I've missed it. It was oddly comforting to return to vampires and werecreatures and fairies and witches and demons ... and now elves? Well, elf.

Too much going on. And everyone is out to kill Sookie or someone she loves. Or is creating plots that impact Sookie or someone she loves. Also, everyone still wants to have sex with her. It's exhausting, but it's fun.

But this installment was also sad. I'm not sure what comes next for Ms. Stackhouse. Each book has a melancholy ending, but this one hit harder for me. I guess I have to wait until next spring to find out what's next.

Or, How I Found Love Thanks to a Bluebird

2011-05-03T19:44:00.000-07:00

Goodnight Tweetheart - Teresa Medeiros (Gallery Books, 2011)

It is getting to be the case that I can't read a serious book without having its lighthearted companion on the nightstand with it. And this was on an endcap at the library. I'm sure David Foster Wallace would appreciate the fact that while I was reading a novel that is in so many ways a meditation on presence and paying attention, I was also starting a short romance about Twitter, which is essentially a paean to short attention spans.

Abby is a writer who had an amazing breakout novel, and who is suffering less from sophomore slump and more from a crippling case of writer's block. Her agent puts her on Twitter so she can connect with fans and keep her name out there. And she immediately meets a guy, a literature professor. And most of the novel is the DM (direct message) banter between them. Lots of pop culture references, lots of flirtation, lots of ... well, mainly just flirtatious pop culture references.

There is a deeper undercurrent, of family and love and loss and connections and how they are difficult and frustrating and all that. And of course escapism, which is one of Twitter's strong suits. How does Twitter enable us to get away from who and where we are? And can that be a good thing? How strong of a connection can you really form with someone who you met in spurts of 140 characters? I spend a lot - a lot - of time on Twitter, so these are questions I've spent some time pondering. Answers? I might still need to get back to you on that.

Mindfulness

2011-05-02T20:50:00.000-07:00

The Pale King - David Foster Wallace (Little, Brown and Company, 2011)

Talking about DFW is something I do quite a bit, but that I find intensely difficult. (And I'm far from the end of the bell curve of his most devoted fans.) So I'm gonna skip all a whole bunch and go straight to an attempt to make some sort of sense for myself of this unfinished work.

I found myself wondering how long this novel would have been if finished. There's so much... it stands up well as it is, but then I think about Infinite Jest, and I start to think that maybe these 538 are really only about half. And that's.... well, it is. We can leave it there.

What DFW had in mind only really became clear at the end, in the notes, where I was like: ohhhhhh, so that's why everyone was so ... what's the word? They were all gifted. But these quirks all seemed to make sense in middle of the mind-numbing bureaucracy of an IRS building in the middle of a Midwestern field in the middle of the 1980s. It's as much about being present, and paying attention, and breaking through that wall. Thus.... a big long list.

"It was true: The entire ball game, in terms of both the exam and life, was what you gave attention to vs. what you willed yourself to not." (Esp, in the case of the character thinking this, when you are inundated with extraneous information.)
This unbelievable passage, too long to quote in full here, about the power of interrupting a conversation and asking "what's wrong?" which will shock the other person into wondering how you know. "He doesn't realize something's always wrong, with everybody. ... He doesn't know everybody's always going around all the time with something wrong and believing they're exerting great willpower and control to keep other people, for whom they think nothing's ever wrong, from seeing it."
§13 is a really quality depiction of the thought process in panic attacks, and the way anxiety about having anxiety becomes the central source of the anxiety.
This is (naturally) a footnote: "There are secrets within secrets, though--always."
The 100-page mega-chapter has several thought-provoking moments, although it becomes funny when you realize later one what its function is.
A callback here to that first quote I mention: "It had something to do with paying attention and the ability to choose what I paid attention to, and to be aware of that choice, the fact that it's a choice." Different speaker, same idea.
Oh, and that guy's mom becomes a lesbian in the mid1970s and opens a feminist bookstore called Speculum Books. I loved this.
Advice often merely points out "the wide gap between the comparative simplicity of the advice and the totally muddled complication of [the advisee's] own situation and path."
Wallace, as a character: "What renders a truth meaningful, worthwhile, & c. is its relevance, which in turn requires extraordinary discernment and sensitivity to context, questions of value, and overall point - otherwise we might as well just be computers downloading raw data to one another."
Back on the point of paying attention, there's another lovely long passage (by the DFW character) about concentration and studying and how most paying attention is done in "jagged little fits and starts" and is mostly all the things we do to distract ourselves.
Oh, and then we get to the uncomfortably true observations about the banality of certain immaturities... that no one truly understands and loves you for who you are and "you're also aware that your loneliness is stupid and banal even while you're feeling it, the loneliness, so you don't even have any sympathy for yourself."

And this doesn't even get at how interested and funny and annoying and actually quite tragic most of the characters are. At how fascinating and extraordinarily rich and DFWian. This book is a treasure, partially formed. And that, unfortunately, has to be enough.

It's a choice, mindfulness. It's a choice what we pay attention to. And everything about David Foster Wallace makes me want to remember that. And to make choices that I find satisfying. It's so difficult; it's unbelievably and maddeningly difficult. But still worth the trying.

Festival of Books + DFW

2011-05-01T10:48:00.000-07:00

Before I tackle The Pale King in full, I thought I would start with a quick and dirty overview of the panel I attended yesterday. Times book critic David Ulin moderated a panel with Wallace's biographer D.T. Max, agent Bonnie Nadell, and editor Michael Pietsch.

The discussion began with Nadell's and Pietsch's experience in the weeks and months following Wallace's death, compiling the thousands of pages of work and going through it to see how much of a book was there. It moved on to an exploration of some of the ideas he explores in the work and, for lack of space to consider it more fully, why the work remained unfinished.

Of our threesome, we had just finished the novel, were halfway through, and were about to start. But the discussion I think worked for all of us, although we were distracted by what appeared to be some tension between Nadell & Pietsch, who knew DFW much longer and more intimately, and Max.

A couple interesting lines I picked up from each:

Max mentioned the struggle of "pushing away extraneous noise and thoughts." Nadell noted that Wallace found non-fiction easier and more fun, and "he didn't trust how much fun it was." Pietsch formulated maybe my favorite question: "Is the plot what's happening while you think you're looking for the plot?"

Festival of Books - Trojan Edition

2011-05-01T10:35:00.001-07:00

It's that time of year again where I brave the ridiculous sun and crowds to celebrate books with tens of thousands of other people. This year, the LA Times Festival of Books moved to the University of Southern California, which totally worked for me, although I really missed my excuse to get Diddy Riese. On the other hand, this year there was free Ben & Jerry's! (Yay volunteerism!)

My friend, her bro, & I wandered around, checking out booths, ducking into shady spots, and filling out the group crossword puzzles. We also added our reads to the giant "What are you reading?" wall. There is nothing quite so awesome as putting both The Pale King and Goodnight Tweetheart. (Do I contradict myself? ....) I was totally gratified to see several references to Beverly Cleary on there. Hurrah.

We also went to the DFW panel on The Pale King, but that's for another post...

LOL Online Dating

2011-04-29T16:56:00.000-07:00

Love @ First Site - Jane Moore (Broadway Books, 2005)

This is an advance ready copy, just fyi. I assume it's close enough to the final product.

So, I really needed me some British chick lit. I miss Bridget Jones. This seemed promising. It's got the right ingredients: 30something, goofy gay male friends and sassy female friends, hilariously awful work environment, frustrating dating set up, etc. But I spent a lot of the book thinking that it was fine, but.... It was missing something. And the love story depends on a lot of scenes that are not only not in the novel, but don't seem to have time to be in the novel. When would they have happened? Hmm?

But then I got to the final few pages, and it got seriously adorable. Problems galore, but awwww. So. Cute. Anything more I say gives it all away. And I mean, you'll know what's going to happen, obviously. But still. Awww.

So it didn't really fill my chick lit need. But it was okay. Next up?

This is water.

2011-04-21T19:53:00.000-07:00

I have started DFW's The Pale King. As a result, he is much in my mind lately. (He is also much on the Twitter. Everywhere. Goodness.)

So I am listening to the Kenyon commencement speech from 2005. So powerful. Watch.

Part 2

National Library Week

2011-04-15T15:25:00.001-07:00

I enjoyed the heck out of this NPR blog post about how awesome libraries are. It's a lot about how it's free, but there was also this:

In particular, I found that all those cheap romance paperbacks were beaten, mangled, shaken and stirred. Not so that you couldn't read them, but just so you knew they'd been read a lot. Oddly, I found this ... comforting. I picked up some of those horribly abused books and felt like I was putting my hands on tangible populism. Those books are there because they're read, and it actually made kind of a good reminder that the library was trying to help, that the idea was to serve readers.

And anyone who manages to check out DFW's Infinite Jest and three Nora Roberts novels on a single visit deserves applause for sheer awesomeness. (Also for being quite a bit like me, although I needed my own IJ copy, and have different guilty pleasure authors.)

A likely match

2011-04-13T09:08:00.000-07:00

Sex, Lies, and Online Dating - Rachel Gibson (Avon Books, 2006)

Lenny and Eunice were really bringing me down. This totally beautiful and heartfelt story, no matter how satirically presented, was a little more than I could handle. Especially because it was, as promised, "super sad."

So I needed another love story to read in tandem. Enter Rachel Gibson. She writes contemporary romance novels, and first caught my eye (in a Booklist capsule review maybe?) because at least a few of her titles center around the fictitious NHL Seattle Chinooks. Yay hockey players! This one does not, but our protagonist is a fan of the minor-league team in Boise.

In addition to liking hockey, Lucy is a mystery writer who has decided to tackle the subject of a serial killer who meets men on dating sites and then sends them to their death via erotic asphyxiation. So she has to date some for research. The trouble is that someone in the city is acting out her book, even while it's still being written. Which leads her to Quinn, a cop who is dating around in hopes of drawing out the killer, who is, obviously, Lucy. Right? Blah blah immediate physical connection, growing emotional attachment, annoyance at lies and concerns about how the other one feels, etc. In short, the perfect antidote to Lenny and Eunice. So just what I needed.

What can love do?

2011-04-12T20:31:00.000-07:00

Super Sad True Love Story - Gary Shteyngart (Random House, 2010)

Once upon a time, I really enjoyed The Russian Debutante's Handbook and Gary Shteyngart in general. But you know how you get lazy about following the stuff you like?

So over the summer I read excerpts from SSTLS in the New Yorker. And that's how it ended up on my book list. Although it then took, what? 6 months to actually get my hands on it. But here it is.

In short: dystopian future. Shteyngart as always does a great job of creating a world that is recognizable and yet totally different. The US is collapsing, and is pure consumerism and cell phones and rankings and .... man, I hate doing these overviews in any sort of way that makes sense. So screw it. Let me skip to the interesting parts.

Lenny's diaries are interspersed with the e-mails and chat transcripts (although they have different names) of Eunice, the girl he falls madly in love with and who, for her own reasons, finds her way to him. What makes them so fascinating and heart-breaking is how much they cannot communicate at all, how little we can actually express to the people we love, the ones we want to understand us most. And how little sense life makes, even at the best of times, and certainly not in a country falling apart.

Some moments:

"keep a diary, to remember who we were, because every moment our brains and synapses are being rebuilt and rewired with maddening disregard for our personalities ..."
a passage I cannot find about Lenny's attempt to spend an entire week without books .... this in a world where no one reads, and no one has read for decades. And yet, despite this, the Naughty Librarian look continues to be desirable.
"the clarity of being alive during conclusive times, the joy of being historically important by association." [I remember feeling this - although far more dread - on 9/11, the wish that I could have lived when history wasn't happening.]
on bipartisanship's dangers: "When we lost touch with how much we really hate each other, we also lost the responsibility for our common future."
"I felt the weakness of these books, their immateriality, how they had failed to change the world." And I felt so much weight on much shoulders when I read that. And then, this lovely lovely line:
"The fading light is us, and we are , for a moment so brief it can't even register on our äppärät screens, beautiful."

Lenny and Eunice. They're each terribly flawed, but their flaws make them truly real and human. It's especially noticeable in Eunice, who starts out such a cipher, such a creature of this brave, unhappy new world. Lenny sees depths in her, and we don't. Turns out he was right, just not in the way he expected.

Starting Over

2011-03-28T23:59:00.000-07:00

The Season of Second Chances - Diane Meier (Henry Holt & Co., 2010)

(advance reader's edition)

Something I always seem to forget when I am sick or depressed is that I find narrative healing. So while I was spending a week fevered and coughing, I couldn't manage to read any of my New Yorkers. Why didn't I try a novel at the very start?

Finally I picked up Meier's, a reader's edition that I came into possession of somewhere along the line. It's about a middle-aged woman who leaves her teaching job in NYC when she is recruited for a new project at Amherst. She seems to have no spontaneity, no rich inner life, and yet there is already a promise of it, when she begins by buying this ramshackle Victorian house near campus. She gets drawn into a world of color and possibility, dragged slowly by her handyman - if such a term really gets at his talent for not only fixing a house, but unearthing its true potential - and her officemate. And a supporting cast of characters. Joy is, what? I think 48, when the novel opens, but she blossoms almost like a teenager, finding that there is strength in vulnerability, and freedom in tying yourself to a community.

Joy grows into herself in ways both expected and not, and loose ends maybe don't knot as nicely as one might like. But this book was a lovely break from my life, and even from the West Coast. And it made for a good reminder that life doesn't necessarily work on a schedule, and that maybe I don't need to worry so much about missing my chances or running out of time. We grow when we are ready to grow.

Awww

2011-03-22T12:08:00.000-07:00

The Cinderella Deal - Jennifer Crusie (Bantam Books, 2010/1996)

Remember how a couple months ago I was like "omg, Jennifer Crusie is like the most adorable thing ever"? I picked up another of her titles recently - this one a reissue of one of her earliest works - and I maintain that her work is just purely adorable. How can you hate on romance novels when they are this sweet?

That said. Will someone please explain to me why people in books and movies are always getting themselves into fake engagements or fake marriages? Does this ever actually happen in real life? (Psst Corey Perry, if you need a fiancée, call me. I won't ask too many questions.) This time, stuffy yet hot professor guy needs a family life in order to nail down his dream job (oh, and by the way, he is writing this crazy feminist book, just so you know) in some little town in... Ohio?... so he ropes in his aggravating kooky artistic neighbor. Who loves strays. And the rest is essentially what you'd expect, all done with a really light hand.

I am recovering (I hope!) from an awful flu, so I keep thinking back to the scene where the whole "family" gets some terrible bug and is laid up for ages. If they made it through, so will I, right?

Librarians to the Rescue

2011-03-22T11:55:00.000-07:00

This Book is Overdue! How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All - Marilyn Johnson (HarperCollins, 2010)

For the past two months, I have been working on my e-Portfolio, the culminating project for my MLIS. As I have pondered core competencies and looked for evidence that I have met them, I have been guided by Johnson's humorous and impassioned look at the library profession. She's popped up in 3 or 4 of my essays, and thus I don't have much desire to pull a lot of quotes for you here.

But I will recommend this book to library-lovers, as well as those who are interested in how we are navigating the Information Age. Also those who like charming looks at the hidden sides of "boring" professions.

Johnson covers a lot of territory - I remember hearing first that she gets into librarianship in Second Life and other adventures in cyberspace. And yes, she does. But that's only one part of it. She talks about Radical Reference and librarians out of the streets, hawking their trade for social justice. She talks about cataloging, and the cultural importance of good subject headings, the economic value of libraries, the tension between scholars and the general public at renowned institutions like NYPL, and the value of reading as a reliable cure for racing thoughts. (It was a relief to be reminded I'm not the only one who does this.)

Did she get everything perfect? Doubtful. Will she save librarianship? That's too loaded a question to even tackle. But it's a fun and often witty reminder that my chosen profession is home to as much variety and opportunity as I could ever hope for. (Provided I ever actually find a job.)

The People's History of the Fastest Game on Ice

2011-02-22T09:12:00.000-08:00

Hockey: A People's History - Michael McKinley (McClelland & Stewart, 2006)

So, the blog title is kinda lazy, but I'm going with it.

This monster tome is the coffee table companion to what I believe was a CBC miniseries about 5 years back. It's about 9x12 and weighs in at.... a bunch of pounds (kilos?), and is chock full of pictures and sidebars. Including some amazing ones from early in Canadian hockey history and of a shockingly sweet 13 y.o. Wayne Gretzky.

The book is a little like if a Ken Burns documentary got shoved into a book. It makes strange segues, and fades to sepia a bit. Which is probably all the case b/c it was a documentary shoved into a book. But such fantastic stories. Girls using their skirts to help hide the puck as they deked around a defender, dudes whose names are on trophies being actual people. Getting drunk and trading a player for $1million for example. Or forcing everyone on your team to enlist during WWII.

It took me weeks to get through this thing - lots of lapses in concentration and intervening life and whatnot. But experiencing it over time, in bits and pieces, was sort of the way to go. How better to go through >100 years of one's favorite sport, especially as interwoven into the history of a country?

I'd like to mention the severe lack of Paul Kariya, but I guess that's to be expected. *I* know that he was a crucial part of the 2002 Olympic team, and that'll have to be good enough. :)

Isn't it romantic?

2011-02-14T17:51:00.000-08:00

Call Me Irresistible - Susan Elizabeth Phillips (HarperCollins, 2011)

It was my grandmother that introduced me to Phillips. I was visiting and helping box up books to donate to the library (yay Grandma!) when I came across Match Me If You Can. Which I snapped up and read over the next 20 or so hours. I was smitten.

Anyway, one thing I like quite about about Phillips (although I guess this is common among romance novelists?) is the way the books inhabit the same world and include the same characters. For example, in this latest, the two leads are children of couples from her early books, and another former youngster makes a major appearance, and is set to star in an upcoming novel.

Meg shows up in small-town Texas just in time to break up her best friend's wedding to Mr. Perfect. Because she knows he's just not perfect for her friend. Then is stranded there. And she just keeps running into him, and from there romance ensues. The description of Ted's charmed life is hilarious. And while we eventually get his POV, it doesn't come until very late in the novel, so he remains as much a cipher to us as to Meg.

It's a formula, sure, but it works, and I really do find Phillips' books more charming than probably any other romance novelist out there.

Spun sugar

2011-01-27T13:50:00.000-08:00

Bet Me - Jennifer Crusie (St. Martin's Press, 2004)

Over the summer, I did some research on genre fiction and along the way came across a reader's advisory guide to romance fiction that pointed me toward Crusie. I couldn't tell you what it said, but I noted the name with a "maybe I'll check this out sometime" sort of attitude.

So Bet Me takes on your typical mis-matched, romantic comedy couple. She's serious and a bit overweight, he's hot shit with a bad reputation. And thanks to a pile of misunderstandings all set off by a ridiculous bet by her ex, they end up on a date. Which is where fate takes over.

This book was insanely charming. I found everybody adorable. Friends, sidekicks, evil exes and family... it was like living in a little fairy world. With great banter. Seriously, the banter - and not just between Min & Cal - was really well-done. When I read romance, I tend to read it with a cynical eye. (Because I am - or ought to be - too cool for it, too intellectual for it.) But maybe because I'm trying to be more sincere in my enthusiasms in general, or maybe just because Crusie got past my defenses, I was sorta smitten. It was a really sweet reading experience.

The freshman years of life

2011-01-21T15:25:00.000-08:00

Commencement - J. Courtney Sullivan (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009)

I am a sucker for books about recent graduates of elite colleges and universities, and how they adjust - in their different ways - to life outside of that bubble. Often enough this means constructing different bubbles, but that is of plenty of interest to me as well.

In this version, four women become best friends at Smith College, Sullivan's alma mater. And the narrative is interspersed with recollections of their time as students. And then they go in separate directions, and their friendships are stretched and challenged. For better and for worse.

Early on, the novel won me over with one of my favorite ever descriptions of Irish dance: "which Celia now credited with her perfect posture and complete inability to dance like a normal person." Love it :)

There was also a lovely description of the ways in which powerful relationships develop in college: "Back then, they had expanses of time in which to memorize one another's routines and favorite songs and worst heartaches and greatest days. It felt something like being in love, but without the weight of having to choose just one heart to hold on to, and without the fear of ever losing it."

And maybe it's for that that I keep reading these novels...

The Little Things Add Up

2011-01-16T21:26:00.000-08:00

The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun - Gretchen Rubin (Harper, 2009)

Sometimes it almost feels like certain books were written just so that I could read them. (No, I swear I don't really think the universe revolves around me.) This was one of those books. My friend Siel first recommended the book around this time last year. I couldn't tell you for sure why I didn't get it then, but when a patron had me add her name to the request list, I took it as a sign that the time had come. I mean, I had already looked at Rubin's blog, and read her contributions to Slate.

There were so many little things that Rubin mentioned that made me (literally, sometimes) exclaim, "Hey, that's just like me!" For one, the Pavlovian response that taking off contacts and putting on glasses means sleepytime. Another, the need to collect what she refers to as "gold stars." I could go on in this vein for a while, and certainly I ought to talk more about the philosophical underpinning of the book, but I sorta want to skip to the good parts... by which I mean how it relates to me. (Egoism, party of one.)

Rubin's premise is that while she's not unhappy, there is room to be happier, and she owes it to herself to see if she can be. Without making crazily life-altering changes. So for a year, she pursues her Happiness Project, complete with themes for each month, specific resolutions, and a chart to mark her progress. She acknowledges that each person's project will be unique, and indeed while I read it felt very clear which parts were important to me, and what other things are important to me that she didn't need to address in these pages. And so... my takeaways:

January: walk outside more; get more sunshine; get enough sleep - it really matters; there are so many types of clutter, and chances are you'll be happier without them; the wisdom of "engineer[ing] an easy success"
February: embrace physical contact (it's been an interesting road for me discovering when I am and am not a touchy-feely person); seek fewer gold stars; be considerate of the ones you love
March: have an expansive self-definition; enjoy the moment instead of always anticipating the future
April: remember the validity of others' feelings; keepsake happy memories; honor traditions; make time for projects
May: fun is energizing; relationships thrive on common interests
June: connect! - keep in touch; seek out new friends (hmm, writing this reminds me of that song about friends from Girl Scouts...)
July: don't be afraid to spend - know yourself; make and stick to decisions
August: appreciate the moment; be grateful; what we admire in others is a quality that is nascent in ourselves waiting to be fully realized (this from a commenter on Rubin's blog). [This is also the chapter where she discusses the fear of "tempting fate" with our happiness, an idea that I have struggled with since at least my freshman year of high school.]
September: accept what you love; push to grow within an area of passion
October: examine your "True Rules" - do they make you more or less happy? Hold onto my own mantra: Be Here Now.
November: be willing to laugh, even at oneself (but I personally should probably beware too much self-deprecation); value others in conversation; "Enthusiasm is a form of social courage"
December: accountability; acknowledge what makes you happy, not what you wish made you happy

So you see, there's plenty there. I feel like I will be meditating on different aspects of this book for weeks and months (if not longer) to come. How it will inform the ongoing project that is my life is not quite certain, but I already know I am grateful for it.

Every Unhappy Family

2011-01-04T09:41:00.000-08:00

Freedom - Jonathan Franzen (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010)

The opening lines of Anna Karenina came into my mind unbidden after I read the final page of Freedom. It occurred to me that there is something tragically beautiful in the tale of an unhappy marriage. Tragic, obviously. But there's real beauty there too. In the misunderstandings and the fears left unspoken, or spoken backwards. Why is there so much poetry in it?

Anyway. I liked this novel quite a bit more than I expected. I liked The Corrections, and this promised to be pretty similar (and was!), so I'm not sure why I was surprised. But I was all the same. Maybe I just didn't think I was in the mood to like something that received so much hype.

But Franzen writes the type of novel that tends to lower all my defenses. It is big and sprawling and delves deeply into the inner stories of most - if not all - of its characters. (Why do we not really get to know Jessica Berglund though?) Benefitting from something approaching omniscience, we get to see the bigger picture that the characters can't. And to wonder if it will become clear to them. And if such a thing really matters.

I suppose it is to be expected that I would think of Tolstoy, as Patty's experience of Natasha Rostova guides her thinking about fidelity to her husband. (Franzen - or Patty at least - provides a very different reading from my own about the triangle(s) of Natasha-Pierre-Andrei-that other jackass.)

I made a couple other notes, mainly about amusing cultural references like Conor Oberst, but nothing of great note. I am sorry to have forgotten a few of the other themes I had wanted to touch upon. The trouble with big books, I guess.

2010 WrapUp & Best Of...

2010-12-30T11:20:00.001-08:00

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

2010-12-27T18:47:00.000-08:00

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

2010-12-15T10:16:00.000-08:00

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)

2010-12-15T09:59:00.000-08:00

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

2010-10-27T13:16:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-13T23:00:00.001-07:00

Ad in a recent New Yorker:

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

Free books!!!

2010-10-11T21:09:00.000-07:00

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...

2010-10-07T20:57:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-09-26T18:13:00.001-07:00

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

2010-09-14T17:30:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-09T20:04:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-31T08:00:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-27T10:06:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-27T09:50:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-22T13:23:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-10T22:16:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-08T17:50:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-31T20:42:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-31T16:16:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-21T14:03:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-19T17:05:00.000-07:00

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)

2010-07-19T16:43:00.000-07:00

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!

2010-07-05T19:41:00.001-07:00

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

2010-06-30T22:19:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-06-28T18:28:00.000-07:00

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!

2010-06-28T18:15:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-24T19:24:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-24T19:07:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-12T17:42:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-05T16:32:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-31T20:17:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-27T18:50:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-22T19:20:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-22T19:12:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-03T17:47:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-30T18:52:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-28T16:30:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-18T17:59:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-17T14:47:00.001-07:00

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

2010-04-04T09:33:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-30T10:12:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-27T13:45:00.000-07:00

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!

2010-03-27T13:40:00.001-07:00

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

2010-03-16T15:44:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-05T16:57:00.000-08:00

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

2010-03-05T16:13:00.000-08:00

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. :)