Choosing a tribe

Divergent - Veronica Roth (Katherine Tegen Books, 2011)

I could NOT put this book down. I'm not sure whether those will prove to be empty calories, but I just wanted to be reading all the time. The day after I finished, after talking myself out of going down to the bookstore to buy Insurgent, I started it again. Lovely.

Blah blah YA dystopia. And love story. Young woman discovering she is stronger and more important than she ever imagined. So this world is a future Chicago, and society is split among five factions. At age sixteen, young people take a test that will tell them to which faction they are inclined, and then they get to choose one. That choice, determines the rest of their lives.

"Decades ago, our ancestors [...] divided into factions that sought to eradicate those qualities they believed responsible for the world's disarray. [...] Those who blamed aggression formed Amity. [...] Those who blamed ignorance became the Erudite. [...] Those who blamed duplicity created Candor. [...] Those who blamed selfishness made Abnegation. [...] And those who blamed cowardice were the Dauntless."

Beatrice, raised in Abnegation, has her test results covered up: she is what they call Divergent, with equal inclination toward more than one faction. (Or, you know, what we call being normal and human.) This is dangerous, and she must keep it a secret. And then she chooses her faction, and ... well, you know the drill. Exciting stuff happens.

But since I'm already doing a bad job of making this book sound as compelling as I found it, let me switch to why I found it so philosophically interesting. The end matter includes an interview with the author, where she mentions that she hadn't meant to create a dystopia, and makes the (obvious but sometimes overlooked) point that dystopias arise from the utopian systems put in place to make a better world. And her utopia is a little like the world she's created here. And I get it, because how cool to be trained to really amp up your natural inclination toward friendliness, knowledge, selflessness, straight-forwardness, and courage. Except the division seems so much like the way our current society is self-segregating by politics and socioeconomic status. The latter has always been a problem, but the way we congregate so much with those who share our world view... it's dangerous. And then suddenly I was tweaking Roth's creation, and imagining a world where you rotate through the "factions," honing your abilities in each one and creating a more well-rounded personality, and interacting with people much different from you.

And since our main character is Divergent, maybe that's sort of what we'll see happen in the next two books.

BTW, I am definitely Amity, with a strong undercurrent of Erudite. Which is to say, almost exactly Beatrice's opposite.

Decluttering never stops

Throw Out Fifty Things: Clear the Clutter, Find Your Life - Gail Blanke (Springboard Press, 2009)

Over the summer I went through a fairly massive uncluttering project. There were a bunch of boxes that I packed up when I moved out of my 1 BR and had sat in a garage for almost 3 years. And if you are like me, you know that at some point in the packing process, things start getting a little jumbled up -- office supplies, decorations, sentimental knick knacks, etc. I did a pretty decent job at getting rid of things, including letting go of some harder things, like gifts that I appreciated but knew I would never use.

But I didn't feel done, and when I heard about Blanke's book, the concept of an assignment (50 things, seems like a SMART goal to me - aside: I prefer action-oriented for A) really appealed to me. I needed someone to walk me through my house and force me to make a list. (List!) So while decluttering phase one was about trying to weed out some of the boxes of stuff, this phase was going to be about going through all of the unpacked items.

So far, so good. What I really needed was a reminder that holding on to something because of its history isn't a good idea if it comes along with too many (or any really) negative associations. There were items that I realized were too linked to times and people from which/whom I wanted to move on. Some of them I kept, but several I let go. Or at least tried to gather in a single place so there would just be one box of yucky memories. This was great. But my list had trouble, because I had already tossed so much stuff just a few months ago. And for a variety of reasons, I wasn't willing to deal with clothes in this go-round.

So I lost momentum. And then I got to the second half of the book, which is about letting go of the mental clutter and discovering your empowered self. None of this was bad, especially, and if you sit and journal and count each piece of defeatist self-talk that you promise to let go of as a thing, you can get to 50 much more quickly. But I found myself a little unmoved. I don't want to say it wasn't valuable, but I think it didn't come at the right time for me.

And that's really the thing about books like this (well, and most books, probably): they need to show up at the right time. If they appear when you need them, they are amazing. If you're not ready for them, they won't penetrate. So I'll take the good parts and let go of the parts that didn't work for me. And maybe I'll come back to this later and it will be a totally different part of the book that speaks to me.

Ideas that kill

Trotsky in Exile - Peter Weiss (trans. Geoffrey Skelton, Pocket Books, 1973)

I'm not sure how widespread this school of thought actually is, but I know that studying Soviet Russia in my youth, there was a strain of counterfactual imagination that wistfully contemplated how different things would have been had Trotsky outmaneuvered Stalin in the years following Lenin's death. In this world, we might have seen a kinder, gentler communism.

Ugh. While sure, the only thing we can really know is that Trotsky's USSR (and the rest of the world around it) would not have looked like Stalin's, it's certainly difficult to believe he would have ushered in some sort of socialist utopia. Trotsky was just as violent, just as conniving, and by a long shot more dedicated to the worldwide part of the worldwide proletarian revolution.

To me, Weiss's Trotsky is of the "man, if only it could have been him" ilk. We visit him in set pieces that travel around in space and time, Trotsky exiled from Soviet Russia at the same time he re-lives moments from his life in prison and exile from tsarist Russia, his intellectual debates and disagreements with Lenin, the chaos of revolution, and the show trials that cemented Stalin's consolidation of power.

I have to keep reminding myself that this play was written during the Cold War, during the Brezhnev Era and just a year after the Prague Spring. (The play dates to 1969, later published in English.) And not only that, it was written by a naturalized Swede of German and Jewish origin. I have the luxury of both a chronological and emotional remove. But still, I don't know how I was supposed to feel about Trotsky, as an intellectual or a revolutionary. Or certainly as a husband or father.

Or maybe I just don't get plays.

And it really felt like 27 years

History of the Peloponnesian War - Thucydides, trans. Rex Warner (Penguin Books, 1972 sorta)

Ten years ago, in my first week of grad school as a doctoral student in history, I was assigned both Thucydides and the Histories of Herodotus. For one class. Maybe I could have done that by the following semester, but it was essentially a non-starter. I got some ways into Thucydides, realized I could either finish it or start Herodotus, and so switched over.

And just like Sparta and Athens took a break of about eight years in the middle of their war, I took a nice long break before coming back to it. (And of course, re-starting from the beginning.)

This book is a beast. In short, starting in 431 B.C. the Greeks had their own World War. The Athenian and Spartan "empires" went at each other, often using proxy armies and invading/fomenting revolution in various other cities. They "laid waste the land" pretty much all the time. And there were lots of pretty speeches laying out reasons for and against various actions.

Eventually, Athens loses their upper hand by deciding it's a bang-up idea to go invade Sicily. This turns out to be a very bad idea, and eventually (although the work is unfinished and actually ends with an Athenian victory at sea) they fall entirely. But lots of detail in between.

Thucydides wrote essentially contemporaneously, although over the course of 27 years he had time to clean things up and insert additional information. Fortunately, his goal was to write an enduring work, so he really took time in crafting it (and hopefully in getting the details correct).

There are so many cities and politicians and generals and most of the time I couldn't remember who was on which side. Which makes for poor work in really understanding the ins and outs of the war, but was fine for providing a general arc of the brutal and complicated war and the set of shifting allegiances that brought Athens down. It took forever to read -- and required lots of stops and desires for lighter fare (I actually picked up Breaking Dawn last night) -- but I'm glad I finally did it. Now onto the next challenge.

Surveys!

Wife 22 - Melanie Gideon (Ballantine Books, 2012)

Another example of a book that got on my list somehow. I was at the library, trying to find something (unwarlike) for a weekend plane ride. And this was what was on the shelves. Of course, then I stuck to Thucydides on the plane, so got to this almost a week after I got back.

But then I blew through it. I didn't want to put it down.

Wife 22 is Alice, a Bay Area woman approaching a mid-life crisis. At the same time, her husband and children are having crises of their own. In her free-wheeling state of wondering what comes next, she finds an invitation in her spam folder to participate in a marriage study. The questions are open-ended (the researcher assigned to her case compares his job to what they do to songs at Pandora) and cover the past, the present, and the future. And as she goes through, her interactions with the researcher get increasingly personal.

Chapters are usually short, and the plot is presented in a variety of forms: first-person narrative, texts, emails, survey responses (without the questions!), and playwritten scenes. It's a difficult gimmick to pull off without feeling gimmicky, but I felt like it worked here, even when some of the social media facts felt un-true.

Don't want to give much more away, but I was enraptured by this tale of how a life and a love look from outside and from within.  

When the weather gets hot...

True Confessions - Rachel Gibson (Avon 2001)

...I start craving books about the rural Mountain West. Or the South. I'm kind of easy to please that way. What I do not crave is a 2500 year old text about the Peloponnesian War. So I'm still plugging along on that.

This was my break from that about 2-3 weeks ago. Hope takes refuge in an idyllic Idaho town to get her groove back in her tabloid stories. But it turns out the sexy sheriff also has ties to Los Angeles. And when they meet, sparks fly. In all sorts of directions.

Can I write the back covers for romance novels? Please? I'll keep practicing and getting better at it.

No fake marriages, but plenty of love under false pretenses.

Last gasp

Dead Ever After - Charlaine Harris (Ace Books, 2013)

I feel vindicated. The series wrapped up more or less exactly how I thought it would. (See previous entries here.) Which isn't particularly the arc I would have chosen, but I'm too colored by the actors playing various characters to have any real objectivity there.

(PS - what on earth is going on in HBO's Bon Temps?! I haven't seen this past season yet, but reading about it online makes it sound insane.)

But anyway, Sookie. Characters return from the past to seek revenge, and the repercussions of her use of the cluviel dor in the last book continue to ripple. With the usual amount of insanity - jail, murder attempts, etc etc etc - eventually things tie themselves in a neat enough bow. Sookie ends up not exactly back where she started, but somewhere near there. And with some promise that even if she doesn't get a happily ever after, the era of the constant threats to live and limb is coming to a close.

Fake marriage! Amnesia! Huzzah!

Tempting the Bride - Sherry Thomas (Berkley Sensation, 2012)

End trilogy. (Parts 1 & 2 here and here.) In the first book, one driving motive in the plot is keeping Baby Sis away from an affair with a married man. In the second, you get a bit more of that. So here in the third, Helena is frustrated like mad. In large part because her family got to her lover and now he's staying away (hmph) but also because her brother's best friend is continuing his role as "bane of Helena's existence."

And like any young boy on a playground, this is of course because he's madly in love. But of course Helena somehow is fooled by his caustic comments, and troubled by the twinge of attraction.

Fortunately, FAKE MARRIAGE! Helena almost gets caught in a compromising position, but Lord Hastings (ever the protector) makes sure she is caught with him instead of her lover. So they have to elope to save her reputation. (Natch.) And then, for good measure, she ends up losing her memory in a crazy accident, giving them the chance to start over in their relationship.

Cute, but.... I get the reasoning behind the accident. And it works. But the dramatic hum of energy that comes from watching them antagonize each other is more fun. I would have rather watched him win her over from that state.

And so I move on to Thucydides. Seriously. Which means that while I'm plodding through the Peloponnesian War, expect plenty more lighthearted distractions.

Murder most foul

A Great Deliverance - Elizabeth George (Bantam Dell, 1988)

Shortly after I moved to Orange County, three different people recommended Elizabeth George to me. It may have been partly coincidence, or it may have had something to do with the fact that she was an Orange County resident writing British mysteries. At any rate, she's been on my to-do list for awhile, until finally a copy of her first Inspector Lynley book made its way to me.

There's a rather huge cast of characters and the book visits all of them. The two inspectors, several people in some way near the crime - a farmer beheaded, his daughter confessed to the killing, but clearly something is off - and a few others who are more peripherally involved in the world of Scotland Yard. It gets a bit confusing, but allows for all sorts of red herrings.

Lynley and Havers find the whole situation ominous and unsettling from the start, but it took awhile for me to understand why, and while the climax made sense, I didn't see it coming. I found the relationship between them more interesting, as each battles his or her own inner demons. I suppose that is more how mysteries are supposed to work anyway.

A writer's writer

All That Is - James Salter (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013)

I've heard Salter described as a "writer's writer" and judging from the author names on the blurbs (John Banville, Tim O'Brien, Julian Barnes, Edmund White, John Irving) it seems it must be so. What I have read of these authors makes me lump them together as beautiful constructors of prose, but too masculine in some ways for my sensibilities (to grossly oversimplify, since A Prayer for Owen Meany made me bawl more than I think any book ever has). And it's almost too bad I went into the novel with that preconception, since the book pretty much fit right into it.

Salter is a gorgeous writer. I was struck again and again by the beauty of the sentences. It kept me reading. And I was interested in the characters too, I swear. But I felt like I was watching them from some remove. I never particularly cared, I just wanted to see how prettily they could be written about. And that's fine, but it's different from what I normally care to read. Maybe it's what has to happen when your characters are roughly Mad Men-era.

Some of the lovely lines I noted:

When Bowman first falls in love, almost blindly: "When you love you see a future according to your dreams."

About another character's girlfriend's ex: "He was destined to be a father who would never disappear because of the way he did."

The next woman Bowman loves: "The truth is, with some women you are never sure. They had traveled for ten days and he felt he knew her [...] but you could not know someone else all of the time, their thoughts, about which is was useless to ask."

Bowman's mother, reflecting on the afterlife: "I think that whatever you believe will happen is what happens." A reflection that Bowman comes back to at least once in the remainder of the novel.

Anyway, a step outside of my comfort zone, and one I'm glad I took.

I can't help myself, part 2

The Earl is Mine - Kieran Kramer (St. Martin's Paperbacks, 2013)

...and so we move on to the man named Brady, and the three boys of his own. Marcia got herself settled, so now it's Greg's turn. This time, the love interest is an old childhood friend, his godfather's niece. But he's pulled back from her and everyone else after learning a dreadful secret on his mother's deathbed. Oh, and she's off to follow her dreams, at least the ones that aren't him. Are you surprised that this leads to her running off and cross-dressing and much hijinks?

Like most romance novelists that I've come across (and the sample size is admittedly small), Kramer seems to care a lot about portraying women that are independent and willing to follow their dreams, and having that spark be what makes men love them. But she also plays around quite a bit with questions of legitimacy and parentage. It makes you wonder what's in store for the rest of the Bradys.

How we go on

Tell the Wolves I'm Home - Carol Rifka Brunt (The Dial Press, 2012)

Some books seem to drain you completely, drawing out all sorts of emotional and psychic energy and replacing it with a sort of melancholic emptiness. And of course they tend to be beautiful, because I don't think that trick would work if there wasn't beauty.

It's the mid-1980s, and AIDS is a mysterious and terrifying scourge. And adolescence - as in pretty much every time people - is mysterious and terrifying. So June has it rough, and enters into a relationship with the only person who could possibly have loved her lost uncle as much as she did.

Except what makes the book work is that it's about a whole host of other relationships too. June and her uncle, sure, in flashbacks to the moments before he knew he was sick, or before she knew, or before the end came. And June and Toby, of course. But siblings are maybe more important - June and her sister, and June's mother and uncle. Growing up and changing puts more pressure on those relationships than perhaps any others.

All of which is a weak description of some of the forces that left me so wrung out. Not in a crying way, although it probably would have helped to weep, but in the way that stresses how much more beautiful are the souls that were cracked and broken, and then stitched and glued back together.

I can't help myself

Loving Lady Marcia - Kieran Kramer (St. Martin's Paperbacks, 2012)

I am sorry, but I'm not sure how you resist a romance novel series starring the Bradys, three sons and three daughters, brought together when their parents married and somehow formed a family... you get the idea. It's been probably 25 years since I've seen The Brady Bunch, so I'm sure there were allusions all over the place that I missed. (I barely noticed Alice.)

Anyway, that's pretty much the most important thing to say about the book. This one's about Marcia, unlucky in love as a girl, and now trying to prove her independence, except for this guy who keeps getting in the way. The rest of the siblings still to come...

Paris, with a stench

Nana - Emile Zola (trans. George Holden) (Penguin Books, 1972 [1880])

Once upon a time (college) a friend recommended this novel. She was a great reader of classic literature, and while I forget the details, this was among her very favorite.

Nana is a courtesan. Or more than a courtesan, rather a force of nature. She takes Paris by storm, attracting lovers and riches. And spending both just as freely. And around her, constellations of other courtesans and the well-born men who keep them, constantly trading places in some whirling dance. And anyone who ascends from the gutter to rise as high as Nana does... can her end come with anything other than a fall?

This novel is highly readable. It's well-paced and rarely bogs the reader. I confess that a lot of French literature makes me very sleepy - this did not. On the other hand, I can't tell if Zola hated women, or just hated sex. Nana is less a person than a creature, almost like an exquisite tiger kept by a prince. She acts according to her whims, pouting and smiling and changing moods on a dime. She gives up her body for money, or for laughs, or out of pity, or... Zola's descriptions often verge on the grotesque. And the sights and (especially) smells of anywhere that women gather... those go well past the tipping point.

These two qualities made for an unsettling reading experience. I enjoyed reading, and I was curious about the fates of the characters, and yet I found them all reprehensible (Zola's intent) and found Zola himself fairly repugnant. Why so hateful?

Good intentions

The Road to Wellville - T. Coraghessan Boyle (Penguin Books, 1993)

I have a fairly sensitive digestive tract, so the idea of a whole novel dedicated to Kellogg's Sanitarium, where the wealthy went to be indoctrinated with vegetarian ideals and all manners of enemas and the like.... well, it didn't strike me as the best plan.

But T.C. Boyle is a pleasure, and so I survived the icky parts that made me uncomfortable. Here we go -- we're at the turn of the last century, when Kellogg and Post and the like were making up new cereals and pills and everyone was a health nut looking for the key to living healthfully (and forever). Sound familiar? [Actually, one of the funniest things to me about reading this was how half of Kellogg's meals had major amounts of gluten.]

John Harvey Kellogg is a major character, as self-righteous and awful as you'd probably expect. Will Lightbody is one of his patients, dragged to the Sanitarium by his wife, who throws herself wholeheartedly into whatever quack strikes her fancy. Charles Ossining has also come to Michigan to make his fortune in the health industry, except he finds that staying afloat in a glutted market is more difficult than he may have imagined.

And the games begin. A whole feast of minor (and mid-major) characters flood the stage, and an awful lot happens in a year. And each character appears on a roller coaster of ups and downs, suffering wild setbacks and imagining massive victories. Which is particularly exciting, since they are essentially all working at odds.

On a side note, was struck by Goodloe Bender, the confidence man. It is probably coincidence that he shares a last name with Ilf & Petrov's Ostap Bender, the comic con man of the early Soviet era. But I thought of him throughout. And since I've also been working on a project to organize my Russian books, now I want more than ever to go back and see that Bender in action.