Regency Vacation

Austenland - Shannon Hale
New York: Bloomsbury, 2007

I hadn't been to the library in ages. (Like since February probably.) So I was really excited a couple weeks ago to trek up to my local branch and see what from my "to read" list was in stock. And I was in the mood to find a book that I could read that afternoon. Hence, Austenland. (And how awesome was it when two hours later my friend e-mails and says, "My mom says hi. She wants to know what you're reading," and I had to respond, "um, Jane Austen fan lit.")

This was cute though, and a lovely weekend afternoon read. Jane (not the name I would have chosen, but whatevs) is about my age, and totally identifiable to a reader like me. She's single, relatively successful, and might be slightly obsessed with Mr. Darcy. Her great-aunt decides that Austen is keeping Jane from finding happiness in the real world, and bequeaths a vacation to an English resort where guests live in an Austen novel. With actors, and love affairs, and all sorts of ridiculousness. Jane goes, with the plan of getting Mr. Darcy out of her system forever, and being able to move on. And really? Do I have to say any more of the plot?

Another nice touch was that each chapter begins with the tale of one of Jane's loves, which run the gamut from the boy who kissed her in pre-school to her former fiance.

While nothing inspired by P&P can ever possibly be Bridget Jones, much less the real thing, this was a charming effort.

Like reading a dream

The Vine of Desire - Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
New York: Anchor Books, 2002

When I was in college, I went through a phase where it almost felt like I could get enough literature by South Asian female writers. Really this was pretty much just Divakaruni and Arundhati Roy, but in my head it was much more. Anyway, I heard both authors give readings on campus, which was lovely. And what I really liked about Divakaurni was that she was based in the East Bay, so everything had an extra tinge of familiarity. And there was a lyrical quality to both writers, where things seemed lush and rich beyond themselves. (This is also a trait I have ascribed to Canadian writers, thanks to Michael Ondaatje and Joy Kogawa.)

I digress. Vine of Desire is a follow-up to Sister of My Heart, which I read in college and do not remember AT ALL. Fortunately, the novel stands alone just fine. The main characters are friends, sisters essentially. At the opening, one has lost the baby she was carrying and is adrift. The other has lost her husband, so that she could keep her baby, and is likely drifting. Anju, the former, insists on bring Sudha and the baby out to California. This despite knowing that her husband has nurtured a desire for Sudha. So now you have three injured souls (and an adorable baby) in a single apartment. And no one is capable of communicating in any truthful fashion. And obviously things go badly.

The plot isn't much of a surprise. But the writing is simply lovely. Chapters come in different forms, different styles, and we see the perspectives of not only Anju and Sudha, but also Anju's husband Sunil, Sudha's suitor (if that's the right word) Lalit, and even the baby Dayita. Divakaruni is extremely compassionate toward her characters, and you ache for each of them, over the pain they feel and the pain they cause.

Welcome back Erin

This has been a strange spring. Not in a particularly interesting sort of way. But strange. And thanks to things like Twitter, I spend too much time on the internet as it is. Which makes blogging seem a lot less enticing.

Anyway, there have been books in the last 6 weeks. A couple. All by female authors. So posts to come right now...

hilarity, delayed

I am still chuckling to myself about what is probably the funniest thing I've seen in the paper in ages...

When sex isn't sexy

The Rachel Papers - Martin Amis
Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1984 (originally published 1973)

I went back and checked. It doesn't actually say "romp" on any of the cover blurbs. That was my imagination. But still, I feel like I was misled to expect a sort of screwball sexy comedy, British-style. Plus, I really liked Time's Arrow (spoiler alert on the link).

So. Charles is about to turn 20, about to go to Oxford, probably. He was sickly and effeminate growing up, and has decided to prove his virility by being almost monomaniacally focused on sex. Which I guess isn't that unusual for young men. But it's a scary look into their minds.

I guess I just found him troubling, and sad. His notebooks and careful over-thinking prevent him from really experiencing life as it happens. And really seeing himself and other people. He is a (very) little like Chuck Bass, although I am only making that comparison because I just finished watching Gossip Girl.

Anyway, romp it was not. Slightly painful journey into the mind of a neurotic young man? That's more like it.

Rahm Emanuel and I are not meant to be

Per Ryan Lizza:

Rahm Emanuel’s office, which is no more than a three-second walk from the Oval Office, is as neat as a Marine barracks. On his desk, the files and documents, including leatherbound folders from the National Security Council, are precisely arranged, each one parallel with the desk’s edge. During a visit hours before Congress passed President Barack Obama’s stimulus package, on Friday, February 13th, I absently jostled one of Emanuel’s heavy wooden letter trays a few degrees off kilter. He glared at me disapprovingly.

Sigh.

It's how you play the game

Friday Night Lights - H.G. Bissinger
Cambridge, Mass.: DaCapo Press, 2004 (originally published 1990)

I've gotten attached to the tv show. After roommates and friends and some growing up, I was finally ready to appreciate a little bit of Texas. So when I heard the book was good, I bought it. And when I was searching for something different to read a couple weeks ago, I turned to it.

And then, maybe 80 pages in, I found myself in a convention center hall in Riverside. And looking out at a room full of excited youth who spent their weekend competing, having developed surprisingly strong bonds with their teammates as well as their fellow competitors. And at their parents, and coaches, who give so much of themselves to help their kids succeed. Suddenly I was not-quite-eight again, at my first feis. Or 10, in San Diego, winning my first championship. Or 14, at Nationals, when I was supposed to make the final round as a soloist and failed and when my team paid more attention to our placement compared to other California schools and so was pleased with a 6th place finish. Or 17, at my last Nationals as a competitor. My teammates... we were a family. I didn't always like all of them, and I know they felt the same. But on stage, I trusted them implicitly. I knew exactly where they would be at any given moment, without looking. I don't think you realize how unique and rare that experience is until it's over.

But back to FNL. It's about a football team, and the town the team props up. Their heroes, their goats, the ways football fits into a broader social and historical context, and the importance of being part of something bigger than yourself.

Over my time as a dancer, I learned what it was like to be the newcomer, to be the small Cinderella school. And I experienced life on top, what it was to be part of the elite school on the West Coast, expected to win. And I also felt the confusion that comes when you are supposed to win, going to win, and somehow you don't. So maybe, in my own way, I know what it's like to be a Permian Panther.

And even more so, I know what Bissinger points out that these boys learn: it doesn't last.

They [the former players] might come back to the locker room after a big game [...] and paw around the edges of the joyful pandemonium and it would become clear that it wasn't theirs anymore - it belonged to others who had exactly the same swagger of invincibility that once upon a time had been their exclusive right.

It had been my right once too. And maybe that's why I enjoy watching these mock trial teams trying to guess their standings by analyzing the matchups. And why I cared so much whether the Permian Panthers made it to State. And why I do care about the games that end most episodes of the tv version of Friday Night Lights. And why I want them to win, and to lose. To experience it all. Before it's the next generation's turn.

Blank Slate

Man Walks Into a Room - Nicole Krauss
New York: Anchor Books, 2002

After the excitement of Stanford and Venice Blvd, I was able to get down to concentrating on the rest of Krauss' novel. It's haunting and minimalist and bizarre. It's not as deeply moving as The History of Love, but beautiful and interesting in its own right. The main character, Samson, a lit professor in his mid-30s, is found walking through the desert with no idea who he is. After a brain tumor is removed, his memory returns, but only through age 12. The last two dozen years: empty. But he embraces the emptiness, and his experiences as he puzzles through what it means and what it's worth to make connections with others make for a challenging and thought-provoking read. A couple moments that I highlighted:

• wanting to say to his estranged wife, with whom he cannot remember falling in love:

  "Tell me, was I the sort of person who took your elbow when cars passed on the street, touched your cheek while you talked, combed your wet hair, stopped by the side of the road in the country to point out certain constellations, standing behind you so that you had the advantage of leaning and looking up? and so on [...] But he didn't ask because he didn't know if he wanted the answers."

• on loneliness: "How can a mind know how alone it is until it brushes up against some other mind? [...] and now the magnitude of his own loss was impossible for Samson to ignore. It was breathtaking."
• and do I agree with this or not? How can you know for certain? "The mind cannot abide any presence but its own."
• Oh, and the epilogue. Which I wasn't expecting, but which completely fit.
  

Dislocation

I am currently reading Man Walks Into a Room, by Nicole Krauss. (I've written a little before about how I am terribly jealous of her.) Apparently sometimes I am bitchy. Case in point: when amnesiac Samson flies into LA, he tells the neuroscientist who picks him up, "I probably came [here] once or twice when I was a kid. I feel like I've been here." And the response: "You watch a lot of movies? Because it unsettles even people who live in L.A.: the nagging sense that they've seen a part of the city before, exactly like this." Um, I really don't feel that way. I recognize things, and am pleased or not, depending. It's certainly not unsettling. So minus points to Krauss.

Except then... 12 pages later another character tells Samson about sticking around at Stanford after finishing his degree, and hanging out with guys in Symbolic Systems. SymSys?? I didn't expect to see that in a book. And then, in another 4 pages: "They ate dinner at a plastic picinic table outside the India Sweets and Spices Mart on Venice Boulevard." Wait, where? The cheap Indian place down the street where they yell at you if you don't order quickly enough? The one I walked by this afternoon on my way back from Trader Joe's? And there, perhaps, is the feeling the neuroscientist mentioned. Unsettling, as though characters have been walking through my world.

So in the end, Krauss (if I attribute her character's observation to her) is right. Except for me, it happens in books, not in film.

"On beauty and being wrong"

On Beauty - Zadie Smith
New York: Penguin Press, 2005

I like Zadie Smith. I like her characters. They are rich and interesting and thoughtful and flawed and confusing. And not really all that much like me. At least, I don't find myself identifying with their foibles. Which is maybe why they interest me so much - they are entirely new people to learn about.

So On Beauty... is about a family. The middle-aged British professor, who is sympathetic despite being an intellectual prick, so far as I can tell, and engaging in a whole variety of stupid and hurtful actions. His wife, described by another character as being like an "African queen," big in body and spirit. Three children, all finding their own identities and wrestling with questions of being mixed-race and middle class. And another family, that of another professor, a bitter rival of the first. And the ways their families mix and interact.

In both this novel and White Teeth, I felt Smith was far stronger in developing her characters and setting a stage than in moving the plot along. The climaxes seemed strange and perhaps forced, as though they couldn't live up to everything that came before. But if you read more for character and less for plot, that becomes less of an issue. You have to leave the characters and hope for the best for them, rather than trust that Smith will bring them where you want them to be.

PS - a favorite moment: "When [the cab] arrived, the driver's door opened and a young Turk in the literal sense leaned out and asked Howard a rather metaphysical question: 'Is it you?' "
I don't know why, but I love that.

Human Nature, reduced

I had a few minutes to read yesterday sitting in front of the Central Library, waiting for my students to appear. And this moment, in a profile of movie marketing exec Tim Palen, made me laugh:

The collective wisdom is that young males like explosions, blood, cars flying through the air, pratfalls, poop jokes, “you’re so gay” banter, and sex—but not romance. Young women like friendship, pop music, fashion, sarcasm, sensitive boys who think with their hearts, and romance—but not sex (though they like to hear the naughty girl telling her friends about it).

Collective wisdom is awesome. And sad. Ooh, and it stays good even as we get older:

Older women like feel-good films and Nicholas Sparks-style weepies: they are the core audience for stories of doomed love and triumphs of the human spirit. They enjoy seeing an older woman having her pick of men; they hate seeing a child in danger. ... Older men like darker films, classic genres such as Westerns and war movies, men protecting their homes, and men behaving like idiots. Older men are easy to please, particularly if a film stars Clint Eastwood and is about guys just like them.

So if you've ever wondered how exactly the film industry saw you, now you know.

Tiny Tim, grown up

Mr. Timothy - Louis Bayard
New York: Perennial, 2004 (trade paperback)

I stopped reading books for about a month. I got distracted by things, such as:

• the inauguration
• work
• magazines (1, 2, 3)
• school
• a trip to the ER (albeit a largely unnecessary one)
• old tv shows about teen detectives

But this past week I was ready for an actual book again, so picked up one that has been on my bookshelf since my "Auntie Mame" (and yes, someday I will actually have to read the book and/or watch the movie) gave it to me for Christmas probably 5 years ago.

The book? Louis Bayard's Mr. Timothy, a thriller about the grown Tiny Tim and his efforts to save a young girl from a sexual predator. Interspersed among the action, and Timothy's quite touching relationship with two strong-willed and yet vulnerable urchins, is enough backstory to catch us up on what happened in the years after The Christmas Carol and Ebenezer Scrooge's change of heart. Tim is still trying to make sense of his relationships with his father and his benefactor, each of whom projected their own sense of whom Tim needed to be. Now, he's still trying to figure out his own identity. And finds it, unexpectedly, through his interaction with the two children.

The story moved quickly, and did not feel close to 400 pages. Yet it's not an easy read either, per se. It's an evocative, and disturbing, at times confusing, yet ultimately satisfying novel. And for a girl who hasn't particularly liked revisiting Dickensian London for probably 10 or more years, it was an unexpected pleasure.

Why my messy apartment is like Wikipedia

Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder - David Weinberger
New York: Holt, 2007

The semester starts later this week. I guess I don't mind, but it's not something I'm looking forward to in the way that I used to look forward to the new quarter and my new classes. Maybe because I'm only taking one class, and because I'm doing it during my busy time at work. Anyway, to prepare, my professor asked us to read the book above, in order to get a perspective about the possibilities for information in the digital age.

Weinberger's got a little Malcolm Gladwell in him; he likes to use interesting anecdotes to illuminate a broader theory. In this case, the theme is that instead of having an order of a single place and category for everything, we can now assign things multiple places and categories, sorting and resorting them according to our own individual needs and wants at that moment. (Note to self: should tag blog posts and photos better)

This argument necessarily embraces a seeming paradox about the desireability of having a glut of information. For example, "if [businesses] make their information messier, it'll be easier to find" and (italics Weinberger's) "the solution to the overabundance of information is more information."

While talking about some of the most popular Web 2.0 sites out there (and the way other sites have incorporated similar strategies), Weinberger has also reminded me about how exciting it will be to be a social historian of this era, sorting through this messy and miscellaneous pile of information about ourselves and what we deem important. Flickr alone could keep a researcher going for years. (Of course, what a historian leaves out is almost as interesting as what she includes, and with all this information, there will be an awful lot to leave out.)

What will be truly interesting will be to see how Weinberger's analysis stands up over time, as the trends towards miscellany continue and shift, and maybe reverse. What will the online world look like in the future?

Lost in Translation (going for the easy pun)

The Translator, by Leila Aboulela
New York: Black Cat, 1999

This book is seriously beautiful. And soothing. Even when Sammar, the main protagonist, is agonizing over circumstances and sad, it is oddly calming. Which reflects the role that Islam plays in Sammar's life, sustaining her through a tragic loss, her reawakening and love (which forms the actual substance of the novel), and the way her growth is challenged and reaffirmed.

Sammar's faith was actually the most difficult aspect of the book for me. I just could not relate. And the fact that a happy outcome depends on bringing another character into the faith... well, it was hard for me. But also an excellent reminder that my secular humanist view of the world isn't the only one.

A couple passages that I found worth noting:

Benches. White curved metal, each and every one bore a placard, In Loving Memory of this person or that. As if people must die so that others can sit in the Winter Garden.

An observation that just hit me as funny and poignant. And on the second page no less, setting the tone for this reader for the rest of the novel.

On the strange paradox of time passing:

The days were numbered. They dwindled and by their nature could not increase. But they were not normal days, they expanded as if by magic, they stretched out like trees, and the hours passed like the hours of a child, they did not flicker or melt deceptively away. She thought that it was not true what people said, that time passed quickly when you were happy and passed slowly when you were sad. For on her darkest days after Tarig died, grief had burned away time, devoured the hours effortlessly [...] Now each day stretched long and when Rae spoke to her a few words, when they only saw each other for a few minutes, these minutes expanded and these words multiplied and filled up time with what she wanted to take with her, what she did not want to leave behind.

(Also, back in the day, I read this other love story titled The Translator. Also recommended. Ooh, and you can read my review of it for the Daily Cal. I used to have a lot more to say, I guess.)

Salman Rushdie writes better than I do (duh)

After I read Midnight's Children, I went around thinking in the cadences and magic of Rushdie's prose for weeks. I don't know if the same will happen after The Enchantress of Florence - it's magical foreignness may be too far afield to take my own style captive again.

But I digress. Since I'd much rather read Rushdie than myself, I figure I would share some of my favorite passages from Enchantress, which is pretty and lush and bizarre and just absolutely all over the place, which is what I love most about Rushdie. He is large. He contains multitudes.

Perhaps Rushdie's overarching theme, here stated by the Florentine who is an enchanter in his own right: "This may be the curse of the human race. Not that we are so different from one another, but that we are so alike."

" 'For a woman to please a man,' the emperor said, 'it is necessary that' " and the list goes on and on. The Florentine "Mughal of Love" replies that well-bred women of Italy are not at all like this. " 'But the courtesan, she fulfills all your ideals, except, possibly, for the business about the stained glass.' 'Never make love to a woman who is bad with stained glass,' the emperor said solemnly, giving no indication of humorous intent. 'Such a woman is an ignorant shrew.' "

"Women have always moaned about men [...] but it turns out that their deepest complaints are reserved for one another, because while they expect men to be fickle, treacherous, and weak, they judge their own sex by higher standards, they expect more from their own sex - loyalty, understanding, trustworthiness, love - and apparently they have all collectively decided those expectations were misplaced." [In this instance, the spate of jealous animosity was cured by having all the women go naked for a day, so they could see each other for all their faults.]

And in the New World, "the ordinary laws of space and time did not apply," moving forward, backward, and at different speeds. A statement that could be applied to Rushdie's created world, where historical figures and magic and intrigue and the past and less-past all come weaving into and around one another.