The Journal of Dora Damage

I can't decide whether or not author Belinda Starling's tale outshines her heroine's. A young mother, Starling had just finished The Journal of Dora Damage when a routine operation went awry and she died from septic shock. Her brother wrote an afterword to eulogize her, an author who did not live to see her book bound.

But for over 400 pages, Dora succeeds in taking the reader's attention away from Starling's tragic death. Dora is a London housewife in 1860 whose family faces ruin, and takes salvation upon her shoulders by manning her husband's bookbindery. Except it's a bitch to keep the creditors at bay, deal with a sick husband and daughter, and have time to ply a trade that women weren't supposed to do. Until she gets in with a crowd of aristocratic men with porno- and ethnographic tastes, whose secrets she keeps in exchange for them keeping her own.

And then things get more heated, in all sorts of senses of the term. But throughout it, Dora exudes a pretty impressive sense of calm. This is what (lower)middle-class women did; they shouldered what came at them, and kept households and communities afloat.

It's a bit embarrassing to be an avid reader who has never really thought about how books are made. Once you move past Book of Kells inscriptions and the tedium of typesetting, I'm entirely out of my realm. How do the pages all stick together? Dunno. Which provided another bright point in Dora Damage - the descriptions of the workshop, and of the binding process, were illuminating. And the individual attention taken, to match leather and border design with text.... Now, if only I knew how they made those trade paperbacks I love so much.

Suburban Sex Ed: The Abstinence Teacher

I LOVED The Abstinence Teacher, by Tom Perrotta. I first heard about it sometime in October, after finally seeing Little Children sometime in the summer.

There were so many times this book made me laugh aloud at the sheer ridiculous of the human situation, and just as many times I cringed in sympathetic embarrassment. And there are passages I marked down, but they all seem awfully risque for this blog. So you will just have to trust me, and hopefully go read it yourself.

I haven't read many reviews of this book besides Kellogg's, which I cited above and had forgotten by the time I started reading. But somehow I just decided everyone would like this book and was a big chagrined when I updated my books on Facebook and discovered that lots of other people were underwhelmed.

Anyway, I haven't said too much about the book yet. It's a culture clash b/t an emerging megachurch and the New England social liberalism embodied by sex ed teacher Ruth Ramsey. And while Ruth works to be a warrior and yet not entirely alienate her tween daughters, the clash is best exemplified by her foil Tim, the ex-addict rocker who found salvation in Jesus and in coaching her daughter's soccer team.

You really root for Ruth and Tim. At least I did. And while I, the former sex ed counselor, found myself quite clearly on one side of the issues, I still felt that Perrotta was both sympathetic and skewering on all sides. For a satirist, he's so nice. (Maybe a little like Jane Austen?) Anyway, I've gushed verbally and in e-mails to so many people in the past week that now I find myself all gushed out. Sigh. So read it for yourself, and decide for yourself. Making your own decisions, after all, might be the moral of The Abstinence Teacher.

Natasha's Dance, 19th & 20th Centuries

Finishing Figes' book took longer than I expected. (Largely b/c I spent a lot of time in the past two weeks falling asleep. Why is it that I always think I'll get more reading done when I'm sick and I never ever do?)

But I made it through. The last couple chapters dealt with topics I knew pretty well: the Tatar legacy, the Russian avant-garde, and Soviet culture. The final chapter however, "Russia Abroad" was about the exiles and what Russia meant and became to them after the creation of the USSR. That I never bothered to study too much, so it made for a lovely ending.

Most of the general comments in my earlier post remain relevant. I'm not sure that I have that much to add. What I did LOVE though was Figes' Guide to Further Reading, 29 pages of suggestions, all in English, so the reader won't get bogged down in a list of sources that may have been fantastic for Figes but probably aren't much good for him or her. That section alone could probably keep me happy for ages, and of course there was the joy of seeing him give high marks to books that I have read/owned/etc.

Getting through Figes in the first 3 weeks of the year means that I have time to catch up on library books (and the book for my new book club!) before turning to book 2 of the challenge.

What's in a Love Story?

It's a little creepy when you are discussing something (or someone) and then it pops up unexpectedly in a different location. Just last weekend I got a MySpace message from a childhood friend I hadn't been in touch with in 10 years, but had just been talking about.

And this weekend, after watching Jeux d'enfants (or "Love Me if You Dare") I had been thinking about what makes a love story. And what relationship the love story has with real-life love. (Thank you to my friends who made v thoughtful comments on this topic.) At any rate, I wondered how necessary conflict was to both the story, and the actual love. Was it strengthened by adversity?

Of course, I am not alone pondering this. (Obviously.) I open the LA Times Book Review this afternoon and discover Louisa Thomas' review of the Jeffrey Eugenides anthology My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead. And between them, Thomas and Eugenides restate my thoughts, and then respond to them. Check it out:

What makes a love story? The answer found in "My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead," an anthology of short stories edited by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jeffrey Eugenides, may surprise. The thread that binds these 27 disparate tales -- spanning 120 years -- is loneliness. Love here doesn't join people together. More often than not it cracks them apart.

The objects of love can take many forms: the beloveds who don't love their lovers in return. Or the beloveds who were once in love but then fell out. Or the beloveds who have died. Betrayal knows many guises. In each case, the root of these stories is unhappiness; rain is its sustenance (weather is a recurring motif). The blossom -- love -- can be beautiful, but it quickly withers and rots.

"A love story can never be about full possession," Eugenides writes in the book's introduction. "The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims -- these are lucky eventualities but they aren't love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name." (Tell that to Jane Austen, but he has a point.)

That quote by Eugenides said - far more coherently than I had been able to - exactly what I had been trying to all weekend long. So thanks.

Pretty Little Mistakes - a gimmick that mostly works

I don't know if there's still around, but kids of my generation read a fair amount of "Choose Your Own Adventure" books, where every couple pages you faced a decision and "chose" which path you wanted your protagonist to take. While there would be occasional overlap, generally your choices (obviously) influenced the course of the narrative, resulting in different endings.

The only one of these works that I remember at all was a time-travel one, set in Elizabethan/Shakespearean England. One of the endings involved being a lady-in-waiting to the Queen, and watching her try to get some ring off as she died. (Why do I remember these things????)

All of this takes me to Heather McElhatton's Pretty Little Mistakes, which is billed as "a do-over novel." It's a clever premise, beginning with a single decision: do you go to college with your boyfriend, or do you go travel? What major you choose, where you choose to travel, etc. sends you on entirely different paths. (Although crystal meth seems to figure in an awful lot of them.)

But therein lie the three problems I had with this book. 1 - I didn't know when I was finished. I still don't really. Each life takes about 10 minutes (probably less) to read, but I don't really want to try to ensure I hit all 150 of them. At this point, I feel pretty well over it. Maybe I'll try to find a couple more paths I missed. 2 - I didn't care about the characters. Because "you" are the protagonist (and this "you" wasn't much like me), she isn't defined, and the other characters pop in and out. It's not about plot or character development. And as a result, kind of boring. 3 - My first two complaints are kind of weak, b/c McElhatton's project wasn't meant to have a defined "I've read this" or rich characters. But the intellectual conceit of the gimmick is that the decisions you take send your life in wildly different directions. But really, one person wouldn't potentially make all the decisions in these pages. They require personalities that are just too different from one another. So it's hard for me to think of "you" as a single person.

Am I over-thinking this? Probably. It was fun to be a pharma rep and a lesbian in Ireland and to marry into the mafia and die of hepatitis in the London flat of an Indian transsexual. But do I feel enriched from having read Pretty Little Mistakes? Unfortunately, no.

Another thing I'm behind on...

For some reason, I never get around to reading Boldtype in a timely fashion. It arrives in my inbox once a month of so (except when it gets filtered into spam) and there it sits, waiting for me to realize that it'll only take me about 5-10 min to go through it.

BT is part of the Flavorpill network, which describes itself thusly: "Flavorpill loves culture. We embrace the high-brow, the underground, the low-brow, and the mainstream, and everything in between – as long as it's good." And BT does indeed have some good selections, alongside things that are just too too hipster for me. (And that link doesn't really get at the depths of hipsterdom.)

So why can't I get around to reading it? What is this procrastination?

BTW, did you know that Lily Allen, whose "Smile" brightened much of my spring, is a "passionate reader" who will be judging Britain's Orange Prize? Nor did I, until I read Boldtype.

SMART goal accomplished!

I don't know if it's officially a smart goal since I don't think I ever set a deadline or anything, but this evening I submitted my application for library school. Left to do: sending two transcripts and a one-page form. So maybe it's not entirely accomplished, but my credit card is being charged $64.75 (application fee plus Berkeley's fee to send my ONE CLASS transcript), so I'm not backing out.

A Big Book of Russian Culture

Happy New Year!

I decided to start off 2008 with a tome - and one from the Russian Reading Challenge in order to get started on that list - and I'm while reading is harder now that work has begun again, I am making decent progress.

The book? Orlando Figes' Natasha's Dance. Figes became one of my favorite Russian historians when I was in grad school; he was so personable and witty and vast. There was plenty to quibble with in his scope and analysis, but that was part of the fun too. In Natasha's Dance, he takes on the oh-so-manageable task of writing "a cultural history of Russia."

One of my happy discoveries thus far is that I haven't forgotten all my history in the 3 years since leaving Georgetown. Several times I've wondered "will he talk about this?" a few pages before he does. (In particular: philanthropy among the merchant classes in late 19th century Moscow, which btw was the topic of the first scholarly book I read in full in Russian) Another surprise: the Natasha of the title is the imperious heroine of War and Peace. The passage Figes references - where Natasha instinctively performs a peasant dance - represents for him Russian cultural history, the interplay between Western aspirations and the "Russian soul."

A little lighter on the history than maybe I would like, but lots and lots of books and art and music. Hooray! Oh, and architecture. Plus, I loved this little ditty by Turgenev, about one of the foremost critics of the day:

Argue with someone more intelligent than you:
He will defeat you.
But from your defeat you will learn something useful.

Argue with someone of equal intelligence:
Neither will be victorious.
And in any case you will have the pleasure of the struggle.

Argue with someone less intelligent:
Not from a desire for victory
But because you may be of use to him.

Argue even with a fool:
You will not gain glory
But sometimes it is fun.

Only do not argue with Vladimir Stasov.