I have no self-control

Books that I have acquired on or since Christmas:

Fire in the Blood, Irene Nemirovsky
Man Walks Into a Room, Nicole Krauss
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
We Need to Talk About Kevin, Lionel Shriver
Lady Chatterley's Lover, D.H. Lawrence
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton

I have already read Bros K, so this is only for my library, but for the other five, any bets on how many will actually get read in 2008?

I love you, Orhan Pamuk

The Nobel Laureate, on what it's like to have won: "I recommend it to everyone."
(from KQED's Forum)

oh, I read a book

Last week or so. Donald Antrim's The Headmaster Ritual. I've already returned it, so can't refer back for witty analysis. It's set at a posh boarding school, and the headmaster is a crazy Marxist. The main characters are the new history teacher, and the headmaster's sorta-loser son. They both have girl trouble, and work trouble, and get shot at by North Koreans, and it all works out in the end. It's funny, but not particularly memorable.

My December resolution

I know there is no chance of my keeping up in the New Year, but I'd like to get off on the right foot, so I plan to catch up on all of my New Yorkers by December 31st. I'd say my odds are probably decent. It's not a sure thing, but I will try.

Paint it Black

I haven't read or seen White Oleander, so I can't compare Janet Fitch's new(est) novel to the one that made her famous.

It took me a week to get around to blogging about Paint it Black. In part because it's been a busy time, but more because I just wasn't sure what to say. The novel follows the life-worn (at all of, I think, 20) Josie, as she struggles to make sense of her lover's suicide. It's the early 1980s, and Josie is a runaway and punk; Michael was the son of a writer and pianist, who left Harvard for art classes at what I think is LACC.

The novel flashes back to Josie & Michael's short-lived happiness, and the darker times that preceded his death. The tragedy of love, and the inability to help the ones you love struggle with their demons - neither make this an easy read emotionally, and yet Fitch's writing has such ease and fluidity that it's a quick read. But then you're left with the weight of the pain, and the question of how some shoulder it while others simply cannot.

It's all madness

While I talk about the New Yorker incessantly in this blog, I've actually become much better over the years about not prefacing every remark with "I was reading in the New Yorker that..." But this somehow resonated so I had to share.

Adam Gopnik, on abridged books and director commentaries (abstract only): "Masterpieces are inherently a little loony."

Yes, exactly! Funny how I've heard (and repeated) time and again that line about no genius without a touch of madness (Seneca?), and yet never extrapolated to the work of the genius. So thanks New Yorker. And thanks Adam. Can I call you Adam?

My new job...

Well, probably not. But um, who knew you could make a career out of picking out Indiana Jones' books?

We all know I am several issues behind on the New Yorker, so I am just now discovering things more timely readers would have known back at the end of September. (Someday, I believe, I will catch up again.) Anyway, an October 1st "Talk of the Town" - linked above - is about Strand Bookstore and its books-by-the-foot service.

Since the program’s inception, in 1986, the Strand has built scores of imaginary reading rooms, from the prison library in “Oz” to the Barnes & Noble clone in “You’ve Got Mail.” Clients also include window dressers, commercial architects (the Strand furnished each floor in the Library Hotel with a different Dewey decimal category), and people with more shelf space than leisure time. Kelsey Grammer requested all hardback fiction in two of his homes, while Steven Spielberg, who, incidentally, is the director of the new Indiana Jones movie, allowed a wider range (cookbooks, children’s books, volumes on art and film) to penetrate his Hamptons estate. “There have been a lot of biographies on him, so I put those in there, too,” Nancy Bass Wyden, a co-owner of the store, said.

I wonder if Strand needs a West Coast affiliate...

About a Girl

Someone, if so inclined, could write a very interesting essay bringing together my last two reads: Ann Fessler's The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade (a mouthful) and Rajaa Alsanea's Girls of Riyadh, a novel of modern Saudi girls written as a series of mildly salacious e-mails to a listserv. Sadly, this someone is not going to be me. Not this week at any rate.

First Fessler. An adoptee herself, she began compiling an oral history of women who had given up children for adoption in the 50s and 60s, when good girls "didn't have sex" and single women were not mothers. Through the voices of these women, Fessler explores the cultural constructs that virtually mandated adoption - and the resulting trauma for girls who became mothers for an instant - except forever, really - and then surrendered their babies and were supposed to go back to just girls again. The book - and the deep, deep current of emotion it exposes - is a lot more than I can give justice to in a paragraph.

And the quartet of young women in Alsanea's novel represent a generation of women who live almost schizophrenic lives, navigating Arab Muslim and Western values. They aren't hypocrites though - they really are attempting to forge a place for themselves even among competing cultural messages and demands. One thing that I took away, even as the girls were falling in love and breaking taboos, is that they adamantly felt themselves good Muslims, and accepted or even embraced some of the practices we in the West would expect them to either struggle against or accept blindly. My only quibble with the book is that the conversational tone was probably more effective in the original Arabic. Alsanea co-translated the book, and discusses this in an author's note, but I still suspect that the "aha! I know these people!" familiarity readers should feel got lost in translation.

DC, Revisited

While staying on Capitol Hill (and on the plane back to LA) I chose to get a little political reading in with Kristin Gore's Sammy's Hill, chick lit for the wonkish set. (More stereotypical but also more enjoyable that Dog Days.)

Sammy is an idealistic aide to an eminently decent senator, and also a klutz and neurotic who puts herself in one ridiculous situation after another. While her personality quirks are a bit over the top (Gore was a television writer for Futurama, which may explain part of it) she is for sure likeable. You want her to get the guy and the bill signed and all of that.

So the plot is what you would expect. (See Bridget Jones and/or every other chick lit ever.) I'll spare you the details. But that doesn't mean that you aren't cheering for her.

(Also, I still really want a Blackberry every time I read one of these DC books.)

The Master Bedroom

The eponymous room of Tessa Hadley's novel was hard for me to envision, but apparently was a monster that ran along an entire side of what seems to have been a big English manor. It's also where Kate and her mother - whom Kate has moved home to care for - were both born. And more, but that comes later.

It's always strange when you come across a New Yorker short story in a novel, but it particularly threw me in this case because the story pulled from a plotline that stretched across the whole novel, rather that grabbing a chapter in whole.

I liked this book, because I found it touching how tentatively the characters reached out to one another. And also because the characters were mysteries, to one another but more importantly to themselves. But that said, The Master Bedroom was also deeply flawed. The mystery that makes a character intriguing also means that you never get to know them quite well enough to understand their actions, or at least to understand why their actions are incomprehensible. The teenaged Jamie is particularly unknowable, even as he seems perhaps the most adult of the bunch, and that's in some ways especially infuriating.

In the end though, the novel was sweet. And quick to read. And poignant. Like wrapping oneself in a warm blanket. And sometimes that's enough.

(oh, and one last thing. I loved how Kate describes Jamie on first meeting him: "Kate wouldn't have minded him in one of her classes: a Tolstoy type, not a Dostoevsky type, who were two-a-penny.")

Feeling Liberal

Erin hearts Paul Krugman. (Not enough to have paid for TimesSelect during that little experiment, but nonetheless...) So when the Library's Aloud series brought him to town, I decided I had to be there.

And being there was fun. Krugman is a good speaker. And UC Irvine prof and Nation contributing editor Jon Wiener was a decent interviewer, particularly good at letting Krugman wander as he would, then bringing him back. So the conversation ranged over a variety of topics, beginning in the 1950s and the middle-class society that emerged out of the New Deal. The rise and fall of America as a middle-class society is - so I gather - a central narrative for Krugman, and he argues that "politics have a huge impact on income distribution." And they are able to do so even in a democracy b/c of smokescreen campaign issues (like "gay married terrorists"). He had some fascinating observations on the ways Republican politicians, without necessarily being racist, have exploited racism and a deep sense of being wronged in order to win elections.

Health care: PK is a fan of single-payer ("Civilized countries don't let people fail to get basic health care"), but believes that it is more feasible right now to support the consensus plan put forward by leading Democratic candidates.

The financial climate: "I don't know." He's nervous about the fallout from sub-prime and other loans, but not as nervous as some. So we'll see.

And of course, Bush: the 2000 campaign was a "radicalizing experience" for Krugman. And while he won't make any argument for whether Bush & co. should be criminally prosecuted once they are out, he does believe that we need to "open the books" on the Administration, and learn the truth about everything that's happened.

Reading so much Wonkette has made me feel like I ought to be more snarky. But really all I have to say is Krugman is crazy-smart and witty and yet calm and thoughtful, and it was a pleasure listening to him.

War and Peace and Sex

This week's LA Times Book Review brought a few happy discoveries:

New translations of War and Peace. Tolstoy's tome is in my all-time top three, so the idea of new, updated interpretations thrills me. Plus, one of them (by Andrew Bromfield) is of an early draft of the novel, a shorter one, and one in which my favorite character appears to meet with a less tragic ending.

The Abstinence Teacher, by Tom Perrotta. Reviewed by Carolyn Kellogg, formerly of LAist. She notes that this book is getting lots of review attention. And speaking of, I heard Perrotta on last week's New York Times Book Review podcast.

When someone else's life hits too close to home

Yesterday I had some free time between work and a meeting, so I happily sat down with my tea latte (and later a scone) and finished John Lanchester's Family Romance. Somehow I had it set in my mind that it was a novel, so I was surprised when I first opened it and discovered it was a memoir of the author's English & Irish expat parents. And their secrets.

Lanchester's mother is the more compelling parent, not only because she had an enormous secret and a fascinating pre-mom life. She was also a more dominant character in his life - and much of the book is about how Lanchester makes peace with her and all of who she was. His father is somehow blurrier, and I found him sorrowful, a man who never stood up and made his own destiny.

It's a fascinating book about relationships and families. The secrets we tell our loved ones, and the secrets we allow to be told. But the final 50 pages I read on Wednesday changed the whole book for me, and turned it into something far more personal. Suddenly I could identify intensely with Lanchester - as he begins to write about his struggles with anxiety, struggles that began while in grad school at Oxford. Now in addition to being an only child and having a mother with a past that she didn't share in full (although I made that connection late) we both knew what it was like to suffer through a panic attack, and to know that another one was right around the corner. To live with that strange and unreasonable dread. His descriptions of the physiological and the mental response were so real to me, I find myself floundering as I search for the right way to phrase the recognition and empathy I felt. But now it was no longer a book about him, it was also a book about me, and that altered my reaction to it in unexpected ways.

So, since I can't recapture what the book was to me before, I will share a few passages from the first half of the book that struck me:

about his father - "The experience of being loved by someone tells you a great deal about that person, almost as much as loving them does, but differently. Love has many textures. W.H. Auden said - it was one of his most beautiful ideas - that when you love people you are seeing them as they really are."

hmm, this one is also about his father - "You may think that most people live inside their own heads, but plenty of them don't. In fact, if you do think that, you're almost certainly one of the minority whose primary life is internal."

Strange how his mother was the more vibrant, real of the pair, and yet it was in writing about his father that Lanchester most touched me.

Me and everybody else

Happy Blog Action Day! Apparently I am one of thousands of bloggers worldwide who are joining together today to post about the environment.

Those of you who know me know that I'm a bit compulsive about recycling. I have a friend who swears up and down that recycling is actually uses more energy and creates more waste than it saves, but has yet to send me any back-up documentation. So I say hmph.

We do however both agree that not creating the waste in the first place is ideal. And while I have given up plastic water bottles in favor of my Klean Kanteen, my favorite waste-avoidance tool is the canvas bag. I have oodles, and they go with me to the grocery store and just about everywhere else. Over the past few years, I have found I get far fewer confused and dirty looks from baggers. It's finally gone mainstream (and a little too hip), but I was at the head of the pack, I swear. If you need bags, check Siel at greenLAgirl, who is constantly having giveaways.

And for more reading, Siel is also blogging for the LA Times at Emerald City.

So while I'm only really going eco on here for today, I try to be green all year long. And so should you.

Memories

In my last post, oh so long ago, I wrote about England - where I was making memories, to sound cheesy - and Peter Nadas - whose novel was about memories.

Returning to real life in Los Angeles meant that it was difficult to get through the last 200 pages, much harder than it was on an airplane. And because A Book of Memories is so disjointed, reading catch as catch can just made it even more confusing. But I finally succeeded. (The "I'm not going to sleep until it's finished" proclamation helped.)

What struck me about the three narrators is how well (and yet how poorly) they read other people. How everyday occurrences were charged with meaning. How openly they stated their flaws, and yet so often told something less than the truth. It's the kind of book that seems designed to come from a place like Communist Hungary, with a confused and complicated history, and where people were never quite in charge of their own destiny.

Some passages, beginning with a evocative depiction of falling in love:

We told each other stories, and even that would not be an accurate description of the feverish urging to relate and the eager curiosity to listen to each other's words with which we tried to complement the contact of our bodies, our constant physical presence in each other

and more:

Lovers walk around wearing each other's body, and they wear and radiate into the world their common physicality.