Not the most uplifting of reading...

I finished Disgrace (J.M. Coetzee) sometime in the last week or so. I haven't written about it mainly because I wasn't sure what to say. Sometime, with the book club selections, it seems to work best to blog my review after the meeting, and incorporate others' views into my own coalesced opinion.

But I got bored of waiting. This novel is filled with disturbing events and internal reveries. In this respect, it reflects - sometimes overtly, sometimes implicitly - the confusion and readjustment of whites (even liberal ones) to the post-apartheid world. Sex is potent as a symbol of asserting manliness and power - as a weapon, a reassurance of attraction, etc. It reminded me a lot of Philip Roth in this respect. (I'm not very convinced that male authors like women very much. Are they representative of the average man's secret fears? I'd prefer to think not.) But there is also a generational dispute between the male pro(?)tagonist and his daughter. Like in Fathers and Sons (thanks to Michael and a review he found for the comparison), in a time of change and confusion, the eternal struggle between parents and children is freighted with extra meaning.

But attempts of erudition aside, what was most striking about Disgrace was how much of it I spent wanting to cover my eyes, urging the main character "What are you thinking?! - Stop." It's not that much fun, and I'm not totally convinced that it deserved the Booker.

For all my ambivalence, however, Disgrace is a far more accomplished novel than the one I just finished: Intuition, by Allegra Goodman. It made it onto my reading list after a promising review earlier this year. Set in a research lab in the mid-80s, Intuition addresses the ups and downs of scientific research and the intuitions (hence the title) that lead people to monomaniacal obsession with proving their instincts correct. In the end, intuition can ruin relationships.

Intuition is a fascinating topic for a book on scientific inquiry, a field that is supposedly ruled by reason and empirical evidence. And Goodman starts out with a fast pace, drawing interesting characters and setting up several intriguing story arcs. But around half-way through, it fizzles out, and the last hundred or more pages was just a slog to the finish. I also wondered why Goodman set the novel in Boston of 1986 rather than today - it was never clear to me why an era two decades past was crucial to her story.

So both books are pretty much downers, and while I wouldn't go so far as to say I disliked either, neither managed to capture my imagination for very long.

Meme, or, How I Learned a New Word Today

Until this afternoon, meme was one of those words (like trope and singularity had once been) that I vaguely knew but mostly dismissed as pretention. Until I got tagged by greenLAgirl, accused of falling for a pyramid scheme by Michael, and figured it was time I got an official definition. Hooray for Dictionary.com which built on Michael's expanded definition of "chain letter/thought virus" and explained that a meme was from same Latin root as "mime" and is "a unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another." Like a gene, except of ideas.

Anyway, but I believe I was tagged to talk about my literary tastes, not my fondness for etymology. So, without further ado:

A book that changed my life
The Fall of a Sparrow, by Robert Hellenga. Friends have challenged this one, but I read it at the exactly the right moment, in the right place.

A book I’ve read more than once
Emma, by Jane Austen. Possibly my all-time favorite book.

A book I’d take with me if I were stuck on a desert island
I am leaning toward Tolstoy, and War and Peace for the epic sweep. But I would also consider The Bible (King James), since I haven't read much of it and I'd have the time to consider a lot of stories.

A book that made me laugh
Anything by Helen Fielding - I am particularly fond of two that I know made me laugh aloud in public: Cause Celeb and Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination

A book that made me cry
A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving. That book tore me apart inside.

A book that I wish had been written
My dissertation? It was going to be on life behind the lines (i.e. where they sent all the promising students and most of the government) in Soviet Union during WWII.

A book that I wish had never been written
So many books have inspired hatred and violence - I could choose one of them. But I won't, because I don't seem to be able to find it in me to wish a book unwritten.

A book I’ve been meaning to read
I've had Herodotus' Histories on the backburner since I got through half of it the first week of my graduate program. Also at least 30 others.

I’m currently reading
In addition to my pile of New Yorkers, I have begun Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee.

Mr. Library (better known to some as the voice behind Vibes Watch) has graciously consented to be tagged. And I am realizing that my blogroll is pretty limited. So.... help me build it up, yo. I recognize that Rahul is probably above this, but just in case, I'll try tagging him too. As well as HH, whose i8 I just discovered. Will you come to LA and cook for me?

Three Lucys

A glimpse at three characters sharing the Library "Name of the Week":

She wore the prettiest sundresses, white and yellow and covered with blue and purple flowers. All wavy and loose. Sometimes she'd wear her hair up, to give her neck some air she said, and she looked nice that way. But then when she'd take it down, the way it tumbled off her heead and rolled across her shoulders in waves, and colored like fire, the way fire is not just one color but about seven, all becoming one another over and back again: that was her hair.

There was something that she did to me, just looking at her, knowing she was close. That was all I did, of course: look, pass her in the hallway on the way to supper, smell the scent of her in my room after she'd cleaned it, her presence everywhere, in this house, on my mind, her note in my pocket.

Now here she is, flowered dress, bare feet and all, in a house full of the smell of baking, no longer a child playing at farmng but a solid countrywoman, a boervrou.

Temptress and Madonna, these Lucys. Or maybe simply Eve. The former two are the magical women at the heart of Daniel Wallace's The Watermelon King; the latter is the stable daughter of a unstable academic in J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, my current read and next book club selection.