Anne's secret diary? Kinda boring

Since this has seemed to be a kind of Elizabethan year (not providing links to past entries), I figured I would bring it to a close with the novel my mom lent me: The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn, by Robin Maxwell. I knew it wasn't likely to be "good" but I figured it could probably be pretty fun. And it's kind of a kick to compare all the pop culture portrayals of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. Plus, this offered the bonus of juxtaposing young Elizabeth settling into her reign while learning her mother's fate through her long-hidden diary.

Um, no. It wasn't bad per se, and the idea that it was Anne's fate that led Elizabeth to spurn marriage where she would have to submit to a man is a nice conceit, but it didn't really have any kick. Perhaps I'm just spoiled now and want something sexier and more colorful. Or perhaps I'm really ready to return to more serious fare. Either way, I'd say it's probably time to move on.

Light & serious reading = Egypt & Afghanistan

I've been trying to trade off between lighter fare and actual literary fiction. So this week I started out with an Elizabeth Peters mystery - Serpent on the Crown - and then moved on to The Kite Runner, the rather well-known book by Khaled Hosseini. I know there was a movie at the end of 2007, but I don't remember the source of the hype before. Was it a big book club selection?

Anyway, I knew what to expect with the Peters, although really I miss having Ramses as a more interesting character. I'm not sure she knows what to do with him as a full-fledged adult. Somehow I managed to not know much about The Kite Runner, except vaguely about one of the climactic scenes. And I think that Hosseini is a doctor, like Chekhov. (Yep.) But this novel seriously wore me down. Every time you think, okay, enough tragedy, something else goes wrong. Yet I think that Hosseini managed to avoid melodrama, which is impressive. The book is famous enough that I don't really feel like I'll have anything to add to the conversation, esp not today, when I am worn out from hiking in Griffith Park and very ready to go to bed. Perhaps next time I read a book, I'll manage to blog about it when I'm more awake...

New books are just more fun?

See? Just the other day I wrote about how I have a hard time reading the books I actually own. And today I come across a Booklist blog on the same topic. Based on this WSJ article and its comments, Keir Graff muses on the to-read pile.

And yet I still buy and hoard books. I’ve joked–joked–that I’ll have to quit my job as a book reviewer in order to read books. But given that I won’t, I imagine I’ll spend my first months of retirement doing math, dividing the number of pages per day I can read into the number of years I think I have left–and weeding my thousands of books to read accordingly.

Jesus, I hadn't even thought about doing that math. I need to get on this.

But it's mildly reassuring to remember that I'm not alone, b/c we all have more books to read than we ever will read. And we all let books sit for far too long. I think I might be unusual in that I am more likely to use the "But I will like it so much I just want to save it for a little longer" excuse. But in the end, it is still an excuse. And one that gives me time for re-reading Emma and watching deliciously bad teen shows.

Oops (which is also something a Soviet artist who gave up his dreams might say)

I am realizing that I'm not a very good blogger. I forget to post. I prattle on about the wrong things. But then, since I pretty much always intended this as a reading journal, perhaps it doesn't matter that much.

I am also not very good about reading books in a timely manner. Some books, yes. But others will languish unread for years. And strangely enough, this is not because I don't want to read them. (Well, sometimes maybe.) Rather, it is that I am looking so forward to them that I want to prolong the anticipation. I used to do the same thing with my favorite Halloween candy, which backfired when my parents ended up eating all my Twix. And there would often been Cadbury cream eggs in the refrigerator into the fall.

(Hmm, I was just struck with the thought that this delayed gratification streak is one of the things that is really good about getting so many of my books from the library. First, I get the delay while I'm waiting to get to the top of the list. But then! there are deadlines. I have to pick up the book by a certain date, and then I have to get it back to the library, read, just a few weeks later. It's very good for me.)

Anyway, I digress. One of those languishing books, a gift from almost 3 years back, was The Dream Life of Sukhanov, by Olga Grushin. (By the way, should I be spending mental energy wondering why Grushin, who grew up in Moscow & Prague before moving to the US, is Grushin instead of Grushina?) In Dream Life, we meet a self-satisfied art magazine editor in his late 50s, who appears to be on top of the world with a cushy job, all the perks of being high up in the Soviet apparatus, and a lovely family. But it's the mid-1980s, and there is a new Party Secretary, and a bunch else is about to begin to change. And more importantly, a quarter century earlier, Sukhanov, a talented artist, put aside his ideologically impure art in favor of security. Now, the decision is coming back to haunt him, literally.

As the past descends on Sukhanov, his grasp on reality and time grows shaky, as he slips into flashbacks. Grushin emphasizes these transitions by seamlessly switching from a third-person present to a third person past to a first-person past. And the flashbacks become longer, and deeper. Not only does the technique enable to reader to see how and why Sukhanov abandoned what he most loved, it also illustrates the way that he is sinking further and further into this dream life. And perhaps has inherited his father's insanity. The end comes in a dizzying whirl.

This reader's reaction to Sukhanov was complicated. His self-satisfied smugness at the opening is irritating, and I couldn't help being happy that he was going to be taken down a peg or two. And yet, especially as his vulnerability comes through, I pitied him, and wanted him to be okay. To somehow take the action that would save his (artistic) soul while remaining safe from the wild currents of history and madness. And the vagaries of bureaucratic displeasure. What can I say? I have an over-protective nature.

Grushin was a teen in Moscow in the mid1980s. I hope that her fiction will continue to engage this confusing and heady era, shedding light on how Russians of all stripes faced the promise and peril of the times.

AWWWW! I have one of those too.

Cats and books go well together. But you knew that already.

Also, I've been re-reading books in between writing papers. Like comfort food, in tough times I turn to Emma and Helen Fielding.

Interred with their Bones, or the Da Vinci Code for Shakespeare

I was mainly writing papers last weekend, but somehow I also found time to read a fun little mystery a la Dan Brown about Shakespeare. I had heard about this book on a podcast so figured when I saw it at the library that I deserved a change from library science, political blogs, and teenage vampires. (Seriously, what do I read these days?) (Edit: just wrote another two paragraphs without noticing that I hadn't given any other info on the book. It's Interred with their Bones (or "The Shakespeare Secret" outside of the US apparently) by Jennifer Lee Carrell.)

Like with Da Vinci Code, as well as I can remember it, there are two major plots tracking together. The first is the historical treasure hunt, with information that threatens to blow up everything we thought we knew about a historical figure. In this case, it's about a missing Shakespeare play... oh, and his very identity. The second is the willingness of someone to kill to keep the information safe.

I like to think I'm decently perceptive. But when I read or watch mysteries, I really don't get it sooner than the average person. I like to think this is because I enjoy the discovery process more than being right all along, but really, I have no idea if this is true. What is true is that I figured out the twists on the murder plot pretty quickly, and wasn't convinced when Carrell starting throwing up new misinformation. That was a suprise. On the other hand, I didn't mind all that much, because the far more interesting part was trying to follow her and her characters as they march through Elizabethan, Jacobian, and Shakespearean history, plus an overview of the major controversies of Shakespeare scholarship. It made me realize that I totally do not know my Shakespeare well enough. Have I read any of the English king plays? I don't think so. Or Lear? Have I read Lear? (Why, in my "Shakespeare's England" course in college, did we only read Coriolanus and Titus Andronicus? It was a history course, but still...)

I digress. The book is fun, but still sufficiently intelligent. And nicely creepy for curling up in bed at night.

Twilight update

That series is like crack or something. I don't understand it, but I'm willing to concede that I have really enjoyed spending three straight weekends working through the first three books. The fourth, well, that's going to wait until after finals.

A couple quick things worth noting: I know Romeo & Juliet and Wuthering Heights are fairly typical teen fare; now I'm trying to decide whether Meyer's explicit use of them has made them more accessible or has otherwise turned young readers onto the classics. Also, I love this poem. And well before I saw it as the beginning quote to Eclipse, I had been thinking of it in conjunction to this series. However, I think about it kind of a lot, so maybe that's not such a coincidence.

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Now playing: Dave Matthews Band - Warehouse
via FoxyTunes

My new president supports my new career

I know it's just one line from one speech to a special interest group, but still, yay!

“More than a building that houses books and data, the library represents a window to a larger world, the place where we’ve always come to discover big ideas and profound concepts that help move the American story forward and the human story forward. ... That’s what libraries are about. At the moment that we persuade a child, any child to cross that threshold into a library, we change their lives forever, for the better. It’s an enormous force for good.”

-Barack Obama, speaking at the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago, 2005

Edit: 11/10 - so, apparently I already knew about this quote 3 years ago... See, I was an Obama fan back in the day. Glad so many Americans caught up with me.

Okay Twilight

So the Facebook application "Pieces of Flair" may have gotten its inspiration from Office Space, but I sometimes wonder if it would manage to keep going were it not for Twilight, Stephenie Meyer's crazy-popular young adult vampire series. (I would post some, but it kept making the margins all funny, and also some of them seem to need spoiler alerts attached. Suffice it to say, "Team Edward" "I'm in love with a fictional vampire" and "I'm sending this to you because I needed more points for Twilight flair" are popular.)

I don't remember when/why I decided I would have to get around to reading these. Maybe it had to do with my teens. Maybe it was my way of punishing myself for all the times I have mocked my mom for her vampire craze. Or some sort of cruel irony since I missed the last young adult novel phenomenon that was Harry Potter. Anyway, doesn't really matter. The point is, last Friday I came home from the library, big book in hand, and only wondering a little if the librarian was smirking at me.

Twilight is back at the library, so I don't have a copy nearby to help with this post. (On the other hand, I do have New Moon, a fact about which I am not proud.) It is a ridiculously fast read, by the way. I am sure that someone could do a better recap than this, but here we go: Bella moves from sunny Phoenix to rainy Forks, WA to live with her dad. And she falls in love with a vampire, who may or may not want to eat her. And hijinx ensue. Well, not exactly.

To my mind, clearly the best part of the novel is the "will they or won't they?" aspect to Bella and Edward's relationship. I believe that Meyer knows her Jane Austen well, and was not surprised when Bella breaks out a copy of the collected novels. Edward is very much the Austen hero: wicked smart, extremely honorable, and tortured by his own imperfections. (This may be a coincidence, but as in Austen, any declarations of love are also oddly embarrassing for this reader, who feels both as if she is intruding on something private and wanting to correct the lovers - er, are you sure you want to say it that way?) Yet, unlike legions of Facebook users, I don't feel about Edward the way I feel about Mr. Darcy or Mr. Knightley. (And given that the character is 17 going on 107 or whatever, that's probably not a bad thing.)

So, as far as teen girls go, I totally get it. (Do teen guys read Twilight? Anyone have statistics for me?) Since the protagonists are teens, I imagine it has limited adult appeal. Vampire buffs can get their fix from other series, and romantics will probably seek out something with more sex. But it's awfully charming, and a little addictive - hence Book 2 on my couch and Book 3 somewhere in transit between libraries. I will try to put off Book 4, since really? There has to be delayed gratification somewhere along the way.

Cue Anxiety

Anxiety is actually a pretty good topic for a chick lit novel, as it Aurelie Sheehan's The Anxiety of Everyday Objects, which is almost not quite chick lit. But still is. I mean, it's important for the protagonist to be lovably neurotic, right? And what says lovable neurosis better than anxiety? (This is what I tell myself.)

Anyhow, TAOEO is the title of Winona's movie project, which she dreams about while working as a legal secretary. This is what it means: "Do you ever look at a sign and you think it says something different than it really does? Like the sign says TURN AHEAD and you read it as TURN AROUND, and you feel as if it's a personal message just for you?" [... questions from love interest, including whether this is magical realism or surrealism] "It doesn't have a name. That's part of the anxiety."

I liked this theme, but I never thought it got played to its full potential. I also never really understood Winona's infatuation with new attorney Sandy, who is beautiful and takes Winona out for a facial and as a result is somehow magical. Or something.

Perhaps the best way to put it is that I wanted to like this book more than I did. Which isn't exactly to say that I didn't like it. Maybe I just wanted a little more.

Blog Action Day: oh yeah, I signed up for this

Today, bloggers are harnessing the power of the web (or something like that) to foster a massive conversation on poverty. Thus... Blog Action Day. Last year was about the environment, and this year they are taking on an equally weighty topic.

I could probably have a lot to say. I could ponder about how John Edwards did so much to bring the issue of poverty out of the shadows during his campaign. Or I could make a pitch for the awesome microfinance site Kiva (here's my lender page.)

Instead, I'm going to revisit an old post from 2005 where I discussed economist Jeffrey Sachs' book The End of Poverty. Here's some of what I said:

I am heartened by the fact that Sachs sees the impoverished as people, not just numbers. And that he believes in the free market, but sees a role for governments and institutions in breaking the cycle of poverty. And I hope that he is going to do what he says, provide a step-by-step plan to ending poverty. (It will be interesting to see how "liberal" and humanitarian this is, and also how well it meshes with last week's G8 discussions. I know he believes in debt relief.)

Oh, I forgot. Foreword by Bono. He's kind of a funny writer. But he is lavish in his praise for Sachs, and credits him for providing the kinds of insight and knowledge that have made the rock star a credible speaker for third world debt reduction.

I'm reading a new book

The Anxiety of Everyday Objects (Aurelie Sheehan)

It seemed appropriate.

"This bright brute is the gayest"

...of his novels. This is how Nabokov described King, Queen, Knave, which he first wrote in exile in the late 1920s and which his son translated into English in the 1960s. Set in Berlin, the king is the moneyed entrepreneur Dreyer. He's a bit of a buffoon, like the caricatures of Germans in French literature from the late nineteenth century. (I did a paper on this in grad school. Don't ask. Actually, you can ask. It was really fun to read kids' books that made fun of Germans in Alsace.) The queen is his wife, Martha. She's kind of a cipher, beautiful and cold and bewitching. Except maybe also not that attractive. The knave is our naive (and any pun there is an accident of translation) Franz, Dreyer's nephew, who has come to Berlin for a job at his uncle's store and soon becomes a fixture in the Dreyer household.

I started reading and got swept up in it immediately. I loved the way it was so much a product of a gay and glittering and yet not-so-glamorous time. And so entirely Russian, even as it was set in Berlin with German characters. But then, after a few days, I found myself distracted, and picking up other reading material when I got into bed. The last 50-60 pages came well after the rest. And it shouldn't have gotten boring. I put it down right in the middle of a murder plot. So what happened?

I can't answer the question. I - or the book - just lost momentum. Sometimes that happens. When I finally did get to those last few pages, it came together in a perfectly satisfactory way. I can't complain. But all the joy and passion in my reading was gone. Strange. But still, for the first 100 or so pages in particular, it was a delight.

Oh, and this was my fourth and final selection for the Russian Reading Challenge. I do have one more bonus entry though before the year is through.

Library girl (that would be me)

I've been busy with school. The bulk of my reading has had to do with information science, or management theory (or political blogs or the ever-present New Yorkers, which have gotten the best of me again.) And even my airplane reading on the flight back from Hawaii turned out to be related to school...

Which takes me to Quiet, Please: Dispatches from a Public Librarian, from McSweeney's contributer and Anaheim librarian Scott Douglas. Douglas is about my age. Except he started working as a library page in college, and then went straight to library school. So he's been official for something like 5 or 6 years. And working in libraries for more like 10. (Also, most of my classmates are already longtime employees of some library or another. This makes me nervous for my future career prospects. How am I going to get hired when everyone else already has way more experience? Answer: quit my day job and get unpaid internships?) Anyway, I'm going to say that Douglas has certain writing quirks that mark him as part of the Dave Eggers cadre. (I'm not sure what I even mean by that, and am afraid of getting myself into trouble, so I'm just going to link to a wiki post for Eggers, and make a vague reference to a sort of self-referential, insouciant, nerdy hipsterism.) He also reminded me - with his penchant for wanting to share more information than he can possibly fit in through use of footnotes and "for shelving" asides - of David Foster Wallace, which just makes me sad.

Anyway. Douglas is funny. I laughed. He is good at noting the ridiculous. Yet everytime he edges toward being mean, he tries to take a step back, and I believe he is fundamentally a good guy who just happens to love telling a good story. None of the story of his time in school at SJSU or his early days at the library particularly makes me excited about what lies ahead. In fact, I sat at the airport wondering if I could run out of there and just live on my uncle's couch in Honolulu and swim in his building's beautiful new saltwater pool. But that's a life dilemma for another moment.

And Douglas isn't all "working in a library with librarians is C.R.A.Z.Y." He mocks them, and says they really don't read (working with books too much kills some of the joy, like Dr. Franzblau in this episode). But still, libraries will always be "the gateway to something greater." And the community that they inspire as they serve the community (tortured sentence structure, I know) is really something special.

Erin reads The New Yorker

...and links to random things that catch her fancy.

from July 28:
Jonah Lehrer, Annals of Science, "The Eureka Hunt," The New Yorker, July 28, 2008, p. 40
I knew I was right about this!

The insight process, as sketched by Jung-Beeman and Kounios, is a delicate mental balancing act. At first, the brain lavishes the scarce resource of attention on a single problem. But, once the brain is sufficiently focused, the cortex needs to relax in order to seek out the more remote association in the right hemisphere, which will provide the insight. "The relaxation stage is crucial," Jung-Beeman said. "That's why so many insights happen during warm showers."

fave Aleksandar Hemon has a new book, and is separated at birth from another fave?

(left, Hemon; right, Vladimir Mayakovsky)



from Aug. 4:
Sasha Frere-Jones explains contemporary popular rock:

The main antecedent [to Coldplay's sound] is U2, who invented the form that Coldplay works within: rock that respects the sea change of punk but still wants to be as chest-thumping and anthemic as the music of the seventies stadium gods. Translated, this means short pop songs that somehow summon utterly titanic emotions and require you to skip around in triumphant circles and pump your fist, even if it is not entirely clear what you are singing about.

from Aug. 11 & 18:
Matthew Dickman writes a lovely and haunting poem mostly about suicide, that includes the following line: "If you are/travelling, you should always bring a book to read, especially/on a train." Sound advice.