Coming of Age

To end the year, I read two books which aren't especially thematically related (read: have nothing in common) but that I am grouping under the loose tie that both involve boys who are becoming adults.

The first is Peter Cameron's Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, which I have delighted in describing as "Catcher in the Rye, if Catcher in the Rye had been good." (I had issues with CINR, most of which I now blame on my 11th grade English teacher.) Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Cameron is also the author of The City of Your Final Destination, a novel I read a few years ago about a young doctoral student who gets involved with the family of his research subject, somewhere in South America. James Sveck, of STPWBUTY, is also surrounded by a cast of eccentrics, these his upper-class New Yorker family. James, like Sveck, has a keen eye for the absurd and fake (but thankfully, whines less about it) and has devoted the summer before college to figuring out a plan to avoid going to college - which he doesn't think he will like very much - altogether.

I laughed out loud often while reading this, and agree with whatever reviewer noted that while classified as Young Adult fiction, this book can be a joy for readers of whatever age. (Well, not too young - some of the themes are a bit mature. Use discretion before buying for a niece or nephew.)

The other read of the week is one of Elizabeth Peters' Amelia Peabody mysteries, which I continue to adore. Guardian of the Horizon was especially enjoyable, as it was written out of order and returns us to a lovestruck Ramses. Here he is 20, and kind of all over the place in terms of defining his adult relationship with his parents and their ward, and determining what is love and what is a proper course of action, etc etc. I'm stretching things a bit - mainly this is a typical Peabody book, where they end up on some fool adventure (this time a return to a lost oasis in the Sudan) and people are trying to kill them and they get captured and there are twists and turns and Emerson blusters and Amelia pretends togetherness and Ramses is, well, perfect.

And all that said, Happy New Year to all!

Russian Reading Challenge 2008

(crossposted from the Russian Reading Challenge blog)

I've only glanced at other lists, but what I've seen all sounds good and I am a bit envious and excited for the reading ahead in 2008. While I LOVE lists, I was overwhelmed by the prospect of figuring out what to choose, so I limited my choices to only books that I had already sitting on my shelves and hadn't read. Which was still too many, but eventually got whittled down to the following:

Natasha's Dance - Orlando Figes
Keys to Happiness - Anastasya Verbitskaya
The Winter Queen - Boris Akunin
King Queen Knave - Vladimir Nabokov

and for extra credit, since it was written in English and doesn't count: Olga's Grushin's The Dream Life of Sukhanov.

[My other challenge: reading at least 5 other books that I already own]

It is done

as of yesterday afternoon. I am pretty bloody proud of myself.

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.