BiblioAddict

Pushkin? What's a 'Pushkin'?...

2008-03-31T12:36:00.005-05:00

On relationships, literary taste, an Ayn Rand infatuation, too much Virginia Woolf, and complementary perversions:

When it comes to budding relationships, how much does a potential partner's taste in books (or their lack of interest in reading, whatsoever) really matter? For many - writers and bloggers, alike - a lot, apparently. According to the NY Times' Sunday Book Review essay "It's Not You, It's Your Books" literary taste has become a handy measuring stick for potential compatibility.

Anna Fels, a Manhattan psychiatrist and the author of NECESSARY DREAMS: AMBITION IN WOMEN'S CHANGING LIVES says that inspecting a date's taste in books is "actually a pretty good way — as a sort of first pass — of getting a sense of someone. It’s a bit of a Rorschach test."

Laura Miller, the book critic for Salon confesses to dumping a guy because of his infatuation with Ayn Rand. Jessica Crispin of Bookslut wouldn't undress for a guy who says his life was changed by an inspirational book about dogs, and James Collins, the author of BEGINNER'S GREEK, has written off potential partners for reading Baudrillard (too pretentious), John Irving (too middlebrow),and Virginia Woolf (too Virginia Woolf).

So is there anything to this judgment by book? Maybe. We all surely have our own standards when it comes to picking a partner. But this bookish girl has to confess to feeling that many of those described in the essay come off as incredibly superficial and, to borrow one of Collin's words, pretentious.

The article begins with one of the author's friends justifying breaking up with a boyfriend she still loved by yelling, "Can you believe it! He hadn’t even heard of Pushkin!" I hope the author did her friend justice by saying, "Okaaaay. And?" Is it really worth throwing away a partner you love because they don't know who Pushkin is? Or because they like Ayn Rand? Or because they read John Irving?

In a perfect world, we would all be partnered with those of similar literary tastes but this isn't a perfect world, and it seems silly to throw away a perfectly interesting and suitable partner because you think their literature is too high or low brow. If I were that picky about those whom I dated, I'd be preparing to be single for a very long time. I'm much more inclined to agree with this passage near the end of the essay:

Some people just prefer to compartmentalize. “As a writer, the last thing I want in my personal life is somebody who is overly focused on the whole literary world in general,” said Ariel Levy, the author of “Female Chauvinist Pigs” and a contributing writer at The New Yorker. Her partner, a green-building consultant, “doesn’t like to read,” Levy said. When she wants to talk about books, she goes to her book group. Compatibility in reading taste is a “luxury” and kind of irrelevant, Levy said. The goal, she added, is “to find somebody where your perversions match and who you can stand."

I'm not saying that literary taste doesn't matter, I'm saying on the list of things that do matter, literary taste is somewhere at the bottom. I'm much more likely give a guy the book for saying proudly and without any sense of shame, "I don't read" than I am the one who says, "Dan Brown is an excellent writer." That latter, at least, I can work with.

And the Weirdest Title Goes To...

2008-03-31T09:50:00.006-05:00

On closure, legs, sexism, pimps, hustlers, and big boom theories:
The NY Times has announced the winner of the Diagram Prize: the award given to books with the weirdest title of the year. This year's award: IF YOU WANT CLOSURE IN YOUR RELATIONSHIP, START WITH YOUR LEGS by Big Boom.

Now, I usually try hard not to be too sensitive when it comes to perceived offenses but... what the hell? Am I the only one who has a problem with this title? This sounds to me like the grossest kind of sexism - the kind that blames all relationship problems on the "oversexed" woman; the kind that absolves boys/men of their complicity in relationships gone bad.

But maybe I'm being too sensitive. Maybe the book's title is merely poking fun at such destructive sexism. The synopsis on the inside flap of the book's cover begins, "After decades of preying on women as a pimp and a hustler, Big Boom knows all the games men play," and convinces me that Mr. Boom is, in fact, very serious. No satire to be found here, which is just what I suspected.

Joel Rickett, deputy editor of The Bookseller magazine, said the title was "so effective...you don’t even need to read the book itself." Rickett just might just be on to something here.

The Megahearted George Saunders...

2008-03-28T15:00:00.008-05:00

On endings, beginnings, megaphones, essays, compassion, disgruntled dogs, immigration, and lonely bookmarks:

Last week's Booking Through Thursday question was:

You’ve just reached the end of a book . . . what do you do now? Savor and muse over the book? Dive right into the next one? Go take the dog for a walk, the kids to the park, before even thinking about the next book you’re going to read? What?

(Obviously, there can be more than one answer, here–a book with a cliff-hanger is going to engender different reactions than a serene, stand-alone, but you get the idea!)

I thought this question would be especially pertinent today since I finished a book last evening: THE BRAINDEAD MEGAPHONE by George Saunders. What did I do after I finished it? Well, a number of things, actually. The first of which was to restrain myself from going back to page 1 and beginning all over again, which usually means I enjoyed myself a great deal. I did. On a very random whim - and I do mean random - I pulled this book from my shelf on Monday. It wasn't as if I didn't have other things to read, nor was it as if I wasn't already in the middle of reading five other books. But as it happens from time to time, this book started calling to me from the shelf and my lack of resistance when it comes to beckoning books is well-documented by now.

For four nights and three days I engrossed myself in Saunders compassion, his empathy, his humorous prose, and his transparent love for and undying faith in humanity. Before I began this book, I already had a full-fledged literary crush on Saunders - now it's unabashed love. Any writer who can go from embodying the voice of a disgruntled dog contemplating biting off the "various hangie-down things" of his master because --

There are times, deep in the night, when you have been "tippling" and/or "imbibing" and/or "getting pershnockered," when, perchance overwhelmed by joy (I hope it is joy, and not something darker), you shed your puzzling overskin and stand in the kitchen, moving hips and all, to that melange of painful-high-pitch and human squawling you call "Purple Rain." ("Woof: A Plea of Sorts")

-- to putting human faces and human hearts on the "illegal alien crisis" --

Tonight, America seems like the for-centuries-dreamed-of rescuer of the Little Guy, the place that takes a guy like Hector and puts some pounds on him, sets him on his feet, puts a spring in his step, and ends, forever, his flinching hustle for two-dollar hot dogs. But first he has to get here. ("The Great Divider")

-- this guy is a guy I can love. Saunders doesn't wear his heart on his sleeve, he wears it in his writing, and it's our luck as readers that his writing is a great as his heart is big.

Which is why as soon as I finished THE BRAINDEAD MEGAPHONE I wanted to read it all over again. But we all know I don't have time for that. Besides, getting back to my original discussion, the second thing I feel after I finish a book is that unquenchable curiosity - the driving force behind my passion for literature. After I've finished one book, I begin to wonder about all those other closed books sitting on my shelves that have yet to reveal their secrets - secrets that have the potential to be as awesome, or if I'm lucky even more awesome, than the one I've just finished.

So I did what I usually do when I suddenly have a bookmark without a home: I went scouting around for another. I didn't go very far at all. It went from Saunder's collection of essays to his collection of short stories: IN PERSUASION NATION. To be fair, I started the stories long before I started the essays which was some time early last year. But I got bogged down, and the book got replaced with something else. But inspired, and on a Saunders high, I decided to give it a go again, and it's going much smoother now. The clear-sighted empathy I saw in his essays is not hard to find in his stories. I anticipate that in another week, I'll have added this to my "retired bookmarks" list as well.

And that's where we are now. To sum: what do I do when I've just finished a book? I turn right around a read another. Or, if I'm really in a good mood, I'll start five.

THE BRAINDEAD MEGAPHONE
by George Saunders
Riverhead Trade / Sept. 2007
272 pgs.; $14.00

Now 'N' Later Coveting...

2008-03-28T08:30:00.007-05:00

On prep schools, superstar English teachers, groupies, Michiko Kakutani, David Sedaris, flames, and impatience:

For some reason a few years ago I bought and read Tobias Wolff's short novel OLD SCHOOL. I'd never heard of him - or, more likely, I might have, and simply never paid much attention - nor had I heard of his book. But there was something about the New England prep school scholarship kid which caught my attention, and, as it happens with so many of the books I read, on a whim I picked it up, read it, and absolutely loved it.

OLD SCHOOL is, among other things, a celebration of literature and the potential momentous effect it can have on our lives. In the prep school of Wolff's creation, the English teachers are superstars; according the narrator they were the only ones who knew "exactly what was most worth knowing." And as superstars often do, the English teachers have a core of student groupies, which includes the narrator. In addition to competing for the English teachers' attention, the students compete in annual writing contests for the chance at a private meeting with heavy-weight writers such as Earnest Hemingway and Ayn Rand (the novel is set in the 1960s).

I loved every aspect of this book, from the clear and concise prose, to the narrator's love affair with literature; from the humorous portrait of those famous writers who visit the school, to the growing maturity of the narrator not only as a reader but as a writer. All of this, and the book is only 200 pages.

So naturally after having read this morning's NY Times book section, and in particular Michiko Kakutani's review of Wolff's new collection of stories OUR STORY BEGINS, I'm in full covet mode, wondering if I really want to wait for the paperback.

Then again, I was already in covet mode when, on my way out of the door this morning, I happened to glance at this week's issue of the New Yorker, and read this bit of info on the "Contributors" page:

David Sedaris ("April & Paris," p. 38), has a new book of essays, "When You Are Engulfed in Flames," coming out in June.

What's this? A new book? And I have to wait until June? Sigh, yet another reason summer can't come soon enough. But I greet the news of Sedaris' new book with a little worry because, since he writes regularly for the New Yorker I fear I've already read many of the essays likely to be included in the new collection. Of course, my concern is moot because I'm buying it anyway. I'm just wishing I didn't have to wait so long.

Growing Up With Goosebumps...

2008-03-27T14:14:00.014-05:00

On R.L. Stine's Goosebumps series, long summer afternoons, sacred texts, Stephen King, and, of course, Harry Potter:

Was anyone else pleased by the NY Times' article "Goosebumps Rises from the Literary Grave"? This former R.L. Stine fan was anyway. The afternoons I spent fighting slimy monsters or conversing with aliens all from the comfort of my bed are too numerous to count and almost all courtesy of R.L. Stine's Goosebumps series. The occasion on which I handed those books over to my younger siblings was frankly ceremonial, attendant with solemn promises that they absolutely would NOT wet them, tear them, draw in them, get food on them or in way disrespect my former sacred texts of horror.

I had, by this time, moved on much more scarier things than Stine's really only slightly frightening Goosebumps series. Apparently, during the height of his popularity - a popularity I was completely unaware of until reading the Times article 20 minutes ago - Stine was called the "Stephen King of children's literature." As a twelve year old, I must have thought so too since King is exactly what I started reading when I decided that evil ventriloquist dolls were just so elementary.

That doesn't mean, however, that I don't greet the news of Goosebumps' rebirth with not a little hint of nostalgia - and a bit of chagrined surprise since I wasn't aware Stine had stopped penning them in the first place. Which only goes to show just how completely I left the Goosebumps series behind when I decided to move on to more "adult" material.

I don't know how well the new Goosebumps books will go over with this new generation of children, especially following the Harry Potter series, which I can admit has a more sophisticated plot and better character development than most of the Goosebumps books. But what Goosebumps lacked in sophistication it made up for in the kinds of scary thrills that come cheaply and most welcomely on long and hot summer afternoons. Those it did well. Even now, thirteen years later, I'm still not too old or sophisticated for cheap and scary thrills. I'd like to hope that a large portion of today's children aren't either.

Stephen King wrote an interesting article for Entertainment Weekly some time ago on Harry Potter and his unacknowledged predecessors - the books by R.L. Stine.

What Novelists Strike?

2008-03-27T13:23:00.004-05:00

For those of you who missed this very funny article in The Onion: Novelists Strike Fails to Affect Nation Whatsoever --

The strike kicked off last fall when the NGA announced it had hit a roadblock in negotiations with the Alliance of Printed Fiction and Literature Producers, failing to resolve certain key issues concerning online distribution, digital media rights, and readers just not getting what writers were trying to do with a number of important allegorical devices....

So far, sources say, no one has attempted to cross the picket lines, most of which are located in private homes. However, unconfirmed reports indicate that at least one novelist may be breaking the strike by writing under the pseudonym "Richard Bachman."

"We must, as a people, achieve a resolution to this strike soon," novelist David Foster Wallace said at a rally Monday at Pomona College in Claremont, CA, where he is a professor. "The thought of this country being deprived of its only source of book-length fiction is enough to give one the howling fantods."

"I thank you both for coming," he added...
"If this situation is not brought to a halt soon, it could have serious ramifications for, you know, literary culture, I guess," said Kyle Farmer, a Phoenix-area real estate consultant and avid golfer. "It would be tragic if we had to go a whole year without a new novel from Kurt Vonnegut or Norman Mailer," he added, unaware that both authors died in 2007.

Wallace is right - I'd have the howling fantods if I was deprived of any new book-length fiction. Then again, I would have time to read those previously published stacks of un-read books I have scattered around my apartment...

Some Furry Confusion...

2008-03-27T09:34:00.012-05:00

On George Saunders' "The Perfect Gerbil" in THE BRAINDEAD MEGAPHONE, weird adult-sounding children, death, life and affirmations thereof:

In the blank space which follows the end of "The School" in my much-loved SCRIBNER ANTHOLOGY OF CONTEMPORARY SHORT FICTION (oh yea, marketing editors at Scriber, I am forever in your debt) I penciled in, "Uh...what?" An articulate expression of my confusion if ever there was one.

After reading George Saunders' lovely and convincing argument for Donald Barthelme's "The School" I decided to revisit "The School" hoping that Saunder's essay would elucidate some of those items which I found particularly problematic.

No such luck. While I do appreciate Barthelme's expert use of the "death" pattern in a way I hadn't before ("Mr. Lesser Writer...realizing with joy that he has a pattern to work with, sits down to do some Thinking. Barthelme proceeds in a more spontaneous, vaudevillian manner. He knows that the pattern is just an excuse for the real work of the story, which is to give the reader a series of pleasure-bursts."), the ending - oh the ending - still left me feeling as confused as ever.

I mean really, what is up with those suddenly intelligent adult-talking children? What's up with the students asking the narrator to have sex with Helen, a heretofore unmentioned character, so they can watch? Okay, I probably get this one - sex is an affirmation of life in the face of death, but really, two paragraphs ago I was under the impression that this was a class of five year olds who used words like "mamas and papas" and now they're asking the narrator for a sophisticated affirmation of life? What's happening here? And finally, what's up with the walking and knocking gerbil - the development which really left me scratching my head?

Saunders writes, the ending is "ambiguous, and it is funny, and somehow perfect: this little expectant rodent, politely waiting for its knock to be answered, all set to die, or to live. We, like the children, 'cheer wildly.'"

Hold up there, Saunders. I'm probably just being slow here, but while you're cheering I'm still trying to wrap my mind around that last furry paragraph. What purpose does the gerbil serve other than simply being the unexpected? Why does it exhibit anthropomorphic qualities that the other dead animals hadn't? For the life of me, I can't figure it out. Beyond thinking it exciting, Saunders doesn't seem to have much to say on the matter either.

Having said all that, I do agree that "The School" is good at doing what it does - giving us those little "pleasure-bursts" of excitement and unpredictability. I only wish a bit more had been given over to explication.

Gassing Up a Story...

2008-03-26T12:04:00.004-05:00

When I was a kid I had one of these Hot Wheels devices designed to look like a little gas station. Inside the gas station were two spinning rubber wheels. One's little car would weakly approach the gas station, then be sent around the track or, more often, fly out and hit one's sister in the face.

A story can be thought of as a series of these little gas stations. The main point is to get the reader around the track; that is, to the end of the story. Any other pleasures a story may offer (theme, character, moral uplift) are dependent upon this.

-- George Saunders on Donald Barthelme's short story "The School."

I read "The School" myself the first time a few months ago, and upon first reading I must say I wasn't that impressed. But Saunders' argument that "The School" perfectly exemplifies his gas station theory prompts me to take a second look. Mayhap there's something I missed the first time around.

Looking for Me?

2007-07-04T17:38:00.000-05:00

If you are, you've come to the wrong place. Blogspot and I have, sadly, parted ways. I can now be found at my new address BiblioAddict. And if you've a brave, adventurous soul, I can also be found at Scribblings of a Maniac Writer. See you on the other side.

Goodbye & Goodnight...

2007-05-21T21:34:00.000-05:00

After several sleepless and indecisive nights (well, only two really), I've decided to retire my blogspot account and move my BiblioAddict bags elsewhere. This blog has served me well, so it makes me a bit sad to leave, but I think that my new address will better fit my needs. I won't sob or reminisce about the good ole' times but I will say goodbye to each empty room, maybe carve my name into the boards beneath the stairs, and then slip my keys into the mailbox...Now I'm off to my new digs! I really like it, I hope you do too. See you there! And don't forget to bring a bottle of wine!! Click on the new BiblioAddict and meet me there!

A Double-Whammy!

2007-05-20T19:59:00.000-05:00

Well it appears I've been hit again, this time by Matt at A Variety of Words. But this one is really fun too! Here are the rules: “You simply have to grab the book nearest to you (no cheating here), turn to page 161, and post the text of the fifth full sentence on the page along with the body of the instruction on your blog. Then you tag 3 people.” Sitting right here, next to my computer is the book I've been trying desperately to finish by the end of the month for the New Notions 5 challenge - The Shakespeare Riots by Nigel Cliff:

He found him in his usual seat in the upper boxes, fixed his eyes on him, gritted his teeth, and asked if he was the writer of the article in his paper.
-- page 161, fifth full sentence

Wow, I think that's pretty good for a random sentence. I'm feeling pretty lazy this Sunday evening, so I'm going to take a page out of Stefanie's book and tell you that if you're reading this post, consider yourself tagged!

A New Neighborhood

2007-05-19T14:45:00.000-05:00

I'm thinking about packing up my BiblioAddict bags and heading to a different neighborhood. Head over to this address, look in the closets, scope out the piping and the lighting and tell me what you think...

And a Box of Cookies Please...

2007-05-18T10:35:00.001-05:00

Here, have a little laugh on this dreary Friday (at least where I am)...

"Prescribed Reading"...

2007-05-16T09:54:00.000-05:00

While God and “militant atheists” are duking it out on the bookshelves (see Anthony Gottlieb’s "Atheists with Attitude" in the New Yorker), Jerome Groopman, author of How Doctors Think, argues in the NY Times article "Prescribed Reading" that for medical students looking to learn about the more existential aspects of their profession - the miracle of birth or the specter of death - the Bible would be a good place to start. He writes:

Each spring, I address these nonscientific dimensions of medicine with 12 freshmen at Harvard College in a seminar called “Insights From Narratives of Illness.” We read about a dozen works, from short stories by Turgenev to Samuel Shem’s Rabelaisian hospital novel “The House of God.” The students are generally surprised to learn how the experience of illness touches every corner of human emotion and behavior. But they are even more surprised to discover that even as they read the assigned books, they are often reading, in the background, one of the world’s oldest books. That book is the Bible. Whether read as revealed truth or as a literary work, the Bible is a sourcebook of human psychology and an enduring inspiration for authors trying to capture the drama and dilemmas of medicine.

I think Groopman’s argument for the Bible as an essential sourcebook to which medical students should turn is interesting but, it seems to me, he makes a better case for all literature as required reading for pre-med students rather than simply the Bible. Groopman writes,

The seminar begins with the Tolstoy novella “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.”...We move on to Turgenev, Chekhov and Kafka before reaching Richard Selzer’s “Letters to a Young Doctor,” a set of autobiographical essays first published in 1982...Later in the semester we shift to New Age writing, examining the message of books like the surgeon Bernie Siegel’s “Love, Medicine and Miracles” and, new this spring, Rhonda Byrne’s “The Secret,” the runaway best seller that asserts you can solve all your problems, including “eradicating disease,” by correctly aligning your thoughts and aspirations...This semester, the class will end with a short novel that can be seen as a modern-day “Ivan Ilyich,” Philip Roth’s “Everyman.”

Such a wide-range of authors and style, seems to prove more than anything that literature, of which the Bible is merely a part, is the means through which, as Groopman says, pre-med students can engage “life’s existential mysteries: the miraculous moment of birth, the jarring exit at death, the struggle to find meaning in suffering.”

I've Been Hit!...

2007-05-15T17:38:00.000-05:00

Well it appears that I've been hit by a meme for the very first time by Sam Houston at Book Chase. As Sam said, this does seem like a good way to get to know each other better, so I'm in. As such, I am charged with these rules for the "8 Things Meme":

The rules -
1: Each player starts with 8 random facts/habits about themselves.
2: People who are tagged, write a blog post about their own 8 random things, and post these rules.
3: At the end of your post you need to tag 8 people and include their names.
4: Don't forget to leave them a comment and tell them they're tagged, and to read your blog.

So, first things first - my 8 things:

1. I'm the oldest of seven children.

2. I'm a trial clerk for the US Tax Court, located in Washington, D.C. (no we're not a division of the IRS and no, I can't give you advice on how to do your taxes. Trust me, you wouldn't want me to).

3. My favorite foods are buffalo wings, macaroni and cheese, and chicken fettuccini with broccoli (conveniently, these are the only three things I'm good at cooking).

4. I was born and raised in St. Louis, MO and, though it will always be home, I have a very strong aversion to ever living in the Midwest again (the reasons are too numerous and convoluted to enumerate. No offense to those of you who live in and love the Midwest).

5. I've never broken or fractured a bone in my body, except for my right middle finger, which I stuck into the crack of large school door when I was in kindergarten; it is now crooked at the first knuckle.

6. My favorite pieces of clothing are old, worn tee-shirts softened by a thousand washes and five sizes too big.

7. My first month in Japan, I ran into a moving car with my bicycle and drank an entire can of flavored Japanese beer in under five seconds before I realized that it wasn't orange soda as I'd originally assumed.

8. One of my most embarrassing moments in high school - and they are many - was when I stood up at a football game and yelled out, quite clearly I must add, "Home Run!"

Well, that's me and now for those who are getting hit:

1. Stefanie over at So Many Books

2. Historia over at BiblioHistoria

3. The Traveller at Around the World in 100 Books

4. Brandon at Bookstorm

5. SPF at Pages Turned

6. Gentle Reader at Shelf Life

7. Eva over at A Striped Armed Chair

...and that's it. Yes, I know the rules called for tagging eight people but everyone else whose blog I read on a regular basis has already been tagged! Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to notify my victims...

From Blog to Book...

2007-05-15T11:14:00.000-05:00

Zoe Margolis over at the Guardian Unlimited wonders if publishers aren't looking to blogs for their next best-sellers enough:

Yesterday's announcement of this year's winners of the award for blogs turned into books, the Lulu Blooker prize, would have us believe that many publishers are perusing blogs with the aim of adapting them into books. The website eagerly claims, "Traditional publishing houses, ever in search of the next big name author, have begun to mine blogs and websites for new talent...

According to the Blooker site, books based on blogs are "the world's fastest- growing new kind of book ... a new hybrid literary form". Yet last year, the first year of the award, there were 89 blogs-to-books entered for the Blooker prize. This year it's still only around 100. That doesn't seem to support the idea that every publisher and their dog is jumping on the bandwagon - I think it'll be a while before publishers treat bloggers with the same regard as authors. But perhaps not for that much longer: with a plethora of blogs showcasing good writing to a book-buying public, what publisher doesn't want to utilise a ready-made audience for their book?

Ms. Margolis, having had her own blog published into a book, certainly seems to support authors making the leap from blog to book. And she certainly makes a good point when she argues against the "inverted snobbery" of publishers who believe that anything written on a blog must inherently be of bad quality. However, the case that Margolis makes for blogs...

Unlike a book, a blog allows instant feedback. Readers can send in comments immediately upon reading a blog post. This can then initiate a dialogue between writer and reader that is both interactive and productive. Blogging is not writing in a private vacuum, rather it's about putting your thoughts into a public space and finding out what people think of them instantly. This can assist the writer in terms of developing their ideas: it forces you to write succinctly and with focus. While I'm not suggesting it is solely readers' input that makes blogs worthy of being published, I do think the interactivity and open access of blogging is what can make it so enjoyable for both writer and reader.

...could be construed as argument as for why blogs shouldn't be translated into books at all. I'm unsure how I feel about publishers surfing the blogosphere searching for the next Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist. On the one hand, certainly some bloggers are writing the kind of posts which would translate well into a memoir of sorts or a collection of essays. But, on the other hand, I think of blogs as an ongoing conversation and, for this reader at least, turning a blog into a books seems a lot like publishing one side of a telephone conversation.

Reading For the Ole' Red, White, and Blue

2007-05-15T07:30:00.000-05:00

The Miami Herald asks presidential candidates what last work of fiction they read:

DEMOCRATS

Delaware Sen. Joe Biden: "Runaway Jury" by John Grisham.

New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton: "Team of Rivals" by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd: "The Broker" by John Grisham.

Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards: "Exile" by Richard North Patterson.

Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich: "Einstein's Dreams" by Alan Lightman.

Illinois Sen. Barack Obama: "Gilead" by Marilynne Robinson.

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson: "The administration's energy plan."

REPUBLICANS

Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback: "The Dream Giver" by Bruce Wilkinson with David and Heather Kopp.

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani: "The Beach House" by James Patterson and Peter De Jonge.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee: "My oldest son's screenplay."

California Rep. Duncan Hunter: "The Democrats' proposal to balance the budget."

Arizona Sen. John McCain: "A Farewell to Arms" by Ernest Hemingway.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney: "Term Limits" by Vince Flynn.

Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo: "An Inconvenient Truth" by Al Gore.

I'm not going to take the obvious potshots at those Grisham and Patterson readers - hey, to each his own right? Right. I will say that I'm most impressed with Obama's read. Perhaps, the Miami Herald will next ask the candidates what they thought of their reads. Now that would be interesting reading.

The Long Arm of the Librarian Law...

2007-05-14T16:17:00.000-05:00

From the first chapter of The Case of the Missing Books by Ian Sansom, the first book in a series about a mobile librarian detective:

There is a terrible poignancy about a building intended for the public that is closed to the public: it feels like an insult, a reposte to all our more generous instincts, the public polity under threat, and democracy abandoned. Back home in London, Israel had always found the sight of Brent Cross shopping centre at night depressing enough, and his girlfriend Gloria, her family's swimming pool when it was drained in the winter, but the sight of the big red-brick library with its dark windows affected him more deeply, in the same way that the sign of a derelict school might affect a teacher, or an empty restaurant a chef: a clear sign of the impending collapse of civilisation and the inevitable bankruptcy, a reminder never to count your chickens, or to overspend on refurbishments and cutlery. No one likes to see a shut library.

Ah, very true. I personally think that shut libraries will be the seventh sign marking the end of the world. On a related note, just when I forget that truth is always stranger than fiction, I come across this little tidbit in an article entitled "Mobile Library Helps Extend the Long Arm of the Law" from The Gazette & Hearld:

Sam Walsh, a police community support officer based at Cricklade police station, has already travelled with the mobile library on two occasions on a route to the west of the town. The partnership enables people to get advice and help from the police while picking up the latest bestseller and it is proving popular.

There's somthing screwily funny about this. Shall I keep my joke ("Officer! Officer! There's a man robbing my house...But, can I check out this book first, please?") to myself? Yeah, I'll keep it.

The Final Solution, Final

2007-05-12T11:40:00.000-05:00

by Michael Chabon
Harper Perennial / Nov. 2005

I feel odd and a bit behind the times by reviewing Michael Chabon’s novella The Final Solution when all of the rest of the world is reading and reviewing his new full-length novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, released on May 1st. But I’m always behind the times (just ask the friend to whom I said a year ago, “Have you heard of this new thing called the iPod? It’s amazing!” I’m young enough where I should wake up just knowing these kinds of things). But I accepted my unfashionable fate long ago, so: The Final Solution.

It is the summer of a year sometime during World War II, and an old man whom we assume to be Sherlock Holmes spots a young boy with a parrot on his shoulder standing dangerously close to the rail road tracks. We soon learn that, between the boy, an orphan from Nazi-occupied Germany, and his African grey parrot, the parrot is the only one who can speak, rattling off a cryptic series of German numbers. So begins the mystery of The Final Solution. What do the numbers mean? Are they top secret SS-codes or access codes to Swiss bank accounts? And, after the parrot is stolen, who would take the bird and why? And what unspeakable experience lies behind the boy's inablility (or unwillingness?) to speak?

Such a mystery is fit for only the greatest detective ever known to the continent. But does a man whose sharp wit and predatory intelligence helped him solve even the most impossible cases still possess that same mental agility now that he’s reached the dottering old age of eighty-nine? Among many things, The Final Solution is a contemplation on the passage of time and how even the most heroic of us can’t hold back the inevitability of old age. Chabon’s old Sherlock, a Sherlock who’s tilting toward dementia, is as tragic to see as it was to see Christopher Reeves, the original Superman, consigned to a wheel chair. Hot on the pursuit of a lead, “the old man” finds himself outside of a locked bird store on a Monday:

The old man stood with spittle on his cheek…The light went out from his eyes. “A Monday,” said the old man sadly. “I ought to have foreseen this.”
“Perhaps you might have rung in advance,” Mr. Panicker said. “Made an appointment with this Black chap.”
“No doubt,” the old man said. He lowered his stick to the pavement and then, sagging, leaned heavily upon it. “In my haste I…” He wiped at his cheek with the back of a hand. “Such practical considerations seem to lie beyond my…” He lurched forward, and Mr. Panicker caught his arm, and this time the old man failed to shrug him off. His eyes stared as if blindly at the unanswering face of the shop, his face inhabited only by a hint of elderly alarm.

In a perfect world our heroes would never die; never grow old, but in that world we would always be a step removed from our heroes. The younger Sherlock, with his uncanny powers of deduction, was a man whom we could admire but, I suspect that most readers – or at least this reader– didn’t relate as much to Sherlock Holmes as they did to Dr. Watson, who seemed, in his confusion and awe, much more fragilely human than his super sleuth companion. In the The Final Solution, this super sleuth is brought down to ground and is now suffering from the kryptonite of old age. It’s a little sad to see, but Chabon has made Sherlock Holmes a much more sympathetic character, and he handles it with such deftness and respect – love, even – that you have to thank him for it.

Bringing the Rain...

2007-05-11T09:07:00.000-05:00

This is the very first book I fell in love with, Bringing the Rain to Kapiti Plain by Verna Aardema. I remember being six and harassing my mother as I asked her how to pronounce those secret words that went with the beautiful glossy pictures. I memorized every line. By the time I saw this on "The Reading Rainbow," I could narrate it word-for-word along with James Earl Jones. (Sigh) They just don't make tv like they used to anymore, do they? What was the first book you remember falling in love with?

And if you're looking for a great laugh, see this other hilarious Reading Rainbow clip. When was the last time you heard a rap song about reading? Someone posted in the comments, "Ha, ha. You'd think reading was gangsta (a.k.a. "hip," "cool," or "fashionable" - take your pick)." My response: reading is gangsta.

Prosthetic Shoulders for the Book-Needy

2007-05-10T12:34:00.000-05:00

Last Sunday, I flew to Houston, Texas (work again) and I decided that, although I was scheduled to be there for two weeks, I would pack light. This meant that, instead of bringing my super-large, heavy duty suitcase, I would bring my light, compact carry-on, which I would then "check" because the bad thing about leaving ole' Heavy Duty at home is that there isn't any room to pack any of my books. Luckily, I have a heavy duty bag/tote which provides ample room (probably too much room) for all of my books, magazines, wallet and all other feminine purse things which somehow find their way to being carried around on my shoulder. Imagine this list of books and magazines I thought it wise to put in my bag:

Big, Fat, American Baby by Judy Budnitz
Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris
How to Read Like a Writer by Francine Prose
Heat by Bill Buford
The Complete Plays of Christopher Marlowe by Christopher Marlowe
The Final Solution by Michael Chabon
The Shakespeare Riots by Nigel Cliff

Did I mention all of these were hardback? They were. Not to mention:

the current Bookforum
an old issue of The New York Times Review of Books
and...I'm counting...four old issues of The New Yorker

Not so bad, right? Sure, I was struggling but I'd rather lug around seven books than to leave one behind only to discover that that one is the book I'd rather to be reading on the plane. The problem with this arrangement is that I never leave room for books that I might likely buy while I'm away. I buy books at the airport. I can't help it. Even as I'm leaning over, almost buckling from the weight of my bag, those airport bookstores just beacon me (Hey you. Yeah, you with the big bag of books. Come and see what I've got. Come on, you've got time to kill. It never hurts to look, right?)

I don't usually pick anything up because the selection is often very poor (New York Times Top 10 bestsellers, eh, I'm not often very interested) but this week I had the misfortune of coming across some very well-stocked airport bookstores, one of which happened to be independently owned. So in addition to the seven books I was already carrying, I bought four more books - that's right, four more books. I bought two on the way to Houston and two more coming back:

In Persuasion Nation by George Saunders
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid
Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl
Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart

So there I was dragging myself through the airport in Houston carrying eleven books. The gentleman I sat next to on the plane looked at me as I jammed my grotesquely large bag under the seat in front of me, looked at my books, looked at me again as I opened the book I had in my hand - I was reading my first chapter of Special Topics in Calamity Physics - smiled and asked the question I get all the time: "So you're a student, huh?"

"No," I say with a smile. "I just like to read a lot." He blinked once, twice, shook his head (probably wondering why he had to sit next to the crazy book lady), then returned to the nice, single paperback he'd slipped into the seat pocket. I envied his leg space and his probably un-aching shoulder. But on the almost three hour flight from Houston to D.C. he only had a choice between one book and sleep. I, however, had eleven choices plus sleep. That's worth the prosthetic shoulder I'll probably need after my right shoulder falls off.

A Sumptuous Meal...

2007-05-08T22:54:00.000-05:00

In Chapter 5 of Francine Prose’s How to Write Like a Writer, she writes:

All this should begin to give us an idea of the different options available when a writer is choosing to write a story from a particular point of view, or when, as more often seems to be the case, the story is choosing the point of view from which it wishes to be written. To speak as if there were two major points of view - first and third - is like saying that the only thing we need to know in order to prepare and enjoy a delicious multicourse dinner is that there are five basic food groups.

I’m a quarter of the way through Joshua Ferris’ debut novel Then We Came to the End and already I know I’m sitting in the kitchen of a five-star master chef:

While waiting for Lynn to arrive, we killed time listening to Chris Yop tell us the story of Tom Mota’s chair. We loved killing time and had perfected several ways of doing so. We wandered the hallways carrying papers that indicated some mission of business when in reality we were in search of free candy. We refilled our coffee mugs on floors we didn’t belong on. Hank Neary was an avid reader. He arrived early in his brown corduroy coat with a book taken from the library, copied all its pages on the Xerox machine, and sat at his desk reading what looked to passerby like the honest pages of business.

And this is a gorgeously decadent slice of pecan pie (I’m real partial to pecan pie):

Jim made us wince with awkwardness, but we winced for his sake. Joe Poe’s awkwardness caused an entirely different brand of wincing and it was hard to put a finger on. “ ‘He was not only awkwardness in himself,’ ” declared our own poetaster Hank Neary, “ ‘but the cause that was awkwardness in other men.’ ” And like always, we had no earthly clue what Hank was talking about. Unless he meant to say that Joe Pope’s presence made us feel awkward. That was very true. Joe felt no obligation to speak. He would greet and be greeted like a normal human being, but beyond that he remained brazenly, stoically silent. Even in a meeting or a conference call, the man could let long episodes of silence fill the room while he was thinking of what he wanted to say, without hemming and hawing nervously in order to fill the oppressive silence bearing down upon us all. Perhaps that could be called composure, but it made the rest of us uneasy, so much so that Hank, determined to get it right, returned with a second quote pulled form his infinite lode of worthless erudition - “ ‘He inspired uneasiness. That was it! Uneasiness! Not a definite mistrust - just uneasiness - nothing more.’ ” - and when that quote went from one of us to the other via e-mail, we congratulated Hank on finally saying something comprehensible. Uneasiness. That was it precisely.

The Testament of Gideon Mack, Final

2007-05-07T22:00:00.000-05:00

by James Robertson
Penguin Group/March 2007

"What can this work be? Can it be anything other than the ramblings of a mind terminally damaged by a cheerless upbringing, an unfulfilled marriage, unrequited love, religious confusion and the stress and injury or a near-fatal accident? Who would dare, in this day and age, to suggest that Gideon Mack was, as he maintained to the end, telling the truth?"

So wonders the fictional, reluctant publisher of Gideon Mack’s memoir. Can it be the truth? Can a man who claims to have met and befriended the Devil be anything other than insane? The pleasure in reading The Testament of Gideon Mack is that even as you turn the final page, you’re not quite sure. This novel is full of slight tricks of hand. They begin, not with the mysterious appearance of a standing rock, but with Robertson’s introduction of this fictional publisher. This very effective literary device forces us to consider the extraordinary (perhaps supernatural?) circumstances that occur in and around Gideon’s life in the context of the real world. By doing so, he ensures that Gideon Mack’s testament is not easily dismissed. He forces us to share in the publisher’s own confusion: an inclination to disbelieve something so fantastic which battles the desire to entertain, at least, the possibility.

Is it a coincidence that this struggle between belief and disbelief is similar to the one many experience when it comes to the subject of religion? Indeed Gideon, an atheist minister, is the very embodiment of this struggle. But what makes Gideon, this lonely and desperate man, the hero of his own memoir is that, when confronted with the empirical proof of the existence of the supernatural -that is, if we accept Gideon’s own testimony, the veracity of which is highly debatable - he unhesitatingly believes. How many of us would have the courage to do that? How many of us wouldn’t dope ourselves up with the latest anti-depressant and check ourselves into a mental hospital after we recall memories of having spent three days in the company of a man whom we believe to be the Devil? To not only accept that as a reality but to also share that truth with the entire world makes you either very, very brave or very, very crazy. Robertson leaves it up to you to decide which.

But, like any great magician, he doesn’t make it easy. If the standing rock is real why doesn’t it appear on film? If it isn’t real why is Elsie, Gideon’s friend and lover, able to see it? Did she see it? After confessing to having seen the mythical stone, Elsie mentally backtracks:

”I think I saw it..That’s all I have from that night - a maybe. I might have seen it. That’s not enough. It’s not real.”
“So what’s real?” I said.

The “I” in this quote could very easily be Robertson asking us that very same question. What is real? If you’re an agnostic waiting for that empirical proof to make your final decision, how would you define it? The supernatural and the miraculous, by their very definition, don’t follow the laws of nature - at least not as we currently understand them. The supernatural can appear one day and disappear the next; was it real?

But even as we begin to consider such high-minded philosophical concepts such as the definition of reality, we’re never for one moment allowed to forget that it is all grounded on the crumbling pie crust of one man’s testimony. It isn’t even ever clear that the man whom Gideon believes saved his life is really the Devil. The Devil clearly never identifies himself as such. Instead, he’s sardonic and enigmatic, never answering a pointed question, leaving Gideon (and us) to draw our own conclusions. It says something about our main character that, when confronted with a supernatural being, he assumes him to be the Devil based on little or no proof. Perhaps it says too, something about ourselves and about what we choose to believe of this “man” dressed in black, who steals boots and lives a despairing existence in a cave with junkyard furniture.

This reader has her own suspicions about who this Devil actually is but, for now, I’ll keep them to myself since I haven’t quite found a way to make all the pieces fit (two days and counting - I’m still working on it and having a grand ole’ time). The Testament of Gideon Mack is at heart a mystery and it’s likely to leave you with more questions than answers. But that’s not entirely true. The Testament of Gideon Mack, like any great scripture, supplies all the pieces; you just have to decide what picture it makes.

Saturday Morning Cartoons...On Sunday

2007-05-06T11:04:00.000-05:00

If you haven't already, please, oh please check out the Weekend Extras over at Book Ninja. Cha-booooon!

So Bad It's Good

2007-05-06T09:59:00.000-05:00

Joe Queenan at the NY Times defends the pleasure in reading incredibly bad books:

Bad books have an important place in our lives, because they keep the brain active. We spend so much time wondering what incredibly dumb thing the author will say a few pages down the road. One caveat: As with bad movies, a book that is merely bad but not exquisitely bad is a waste of time, while a genuinely terrible book is a sheer delight. This is what made the late, great Mickey Spillane so memorable: he never tried to write poor man’s Raymond Chandler books like Robert Parker; he wrote pure trash. I feel the same way about those “Loins of Telemachus” or “Cuirass of the Myrmidons” books that retell famous stories from the point of view of a marginal character. The dumber, the merrier.

Speaking of wonderfully bad movies, anyone remember "Snakes on a Plane?"...

"I Know What You Read Last Summer"

2007-05-06T08:23:00.000-05:00

This is two weeks late but I just found this post on summer reading. Very, very funny with a few great reccomendations. I never think of my summer reading in this quite this way, but he makes it sound so fun that perhaps I should...

For me, summer reading is complicated, because I spend the months of June and July on the road. Every traveller knows the importance of packing light, but books tend to be on the heavy side. So leave them at home, you say. Not an option. Erasmus bought essentials like food and clothing with the change left over from acquiring new books, which makes perfect sense to me. I'm a book addict, a chain reader who finishes one novel and immediately starts the next. Sometimes I read two, three or even four books at a time. I can't go to sleep at night without reading.

Nine months out of the year, this isn't a problem. I'm surrounded by unread books. I've lined the walls with them, with stashes tucked away in closets and basements. So far, things haven't reached the point where I'm emptying the coffee jar and hiding a few paperbacks inside, but to be honest, I welcome that day.

Sound familiar?

Eat, Pray, Love, Final

2007-05-05T21:42:00.000-05:00

by Elizabeth Gilbert
Penguin Group / 2006

I have another confession to make. I finished Eat, Pray, Love a week ago. This time I have no excuse for not writing this post long ago. I meant to…but yeah. In my defense, what more can I say about a book that has already been reviewed and discussed extensively? The only thing I can say is that the praise heaped upon this book is well-deserved. Sometimes, books are so over-hyped that by the time you get to them, while you may have enjoyed it (if you’re lucky), you come away feeling as if you must have missed something, because you’re saying to yourself as you turn the last page, “What was all the fuss about again?”

I can say with all honesty that is not the case with Eat, Pray, Love. In so many words, it’s moving, inspiring, funny, educational, and altogether enjoyable. Some have called Ms. Gilbert self-indulgent or just plain old self-centered. I, however, think that the act of writing a memoir is inherently self-centered. Who else would write a book under the assumption that their lives and unique experiences are worthy of print and of interest to millions of readers? But what keeps this inherent self-centeredness from being obnoxious and off-putting is an author’s ability to reveal the universal within the particular. All writers aren’t capable of this; Ms. Gilbert is.

One night, alone on the bathroom floor Gilbert realizes that she doesn’t want the life she is living; she doesn’t want to be married, she doesn’t want to have children, she doesn’t want to deny her own unhappiness any longer:

It was a cold November, around three o’clock in the morning. My husband was sleeping in our bed. I was hiding in the bathroom for something like the forty-seventh consecutive night, and – just as during all those nights before – I was sobbing. Sobbing so hard, in fact, that a great lake of tears and snot was spreading before me on the bathroom tiles, a veritable Lake of Inferior (if you will) of all my shame and fear and grief. I don’t want to be married anymore.

So “seven difficult months later” she leaves her husband and proceeds to not only spend the next year going through a very messy and ugly divorce, but also gets involved in an emotionally unhealthy relationship with another man. Naturally, after the divorce is finalized and after she has extricated herself from her other poisonous relationship (kind of), she finds herself lower physically, mentally, and spiritually than she was when she was sobbing on the bathroom floor. So, Ms. Gilbert does what many of us only wish we could do: she takes a break from her life and packs herself up to spend a year abroad – three months in Italy, India, and Indonesia, consecutively.

What follows is one of the best travelogues I’ve read in a very long time, and not because Italy is my number one choice for Places I Have to Visit Before I Die. Gilbert takes a journey to put the pieces of herself back together again, and oh what a revealing, occasionally heartbreaking, and frequently funny journey it is. Much has been made about the food in Eat, Pray, Love for very good reason. On her pizza experience in Naples, home of the best pizza in the world, Gilbert writes:

The dough, it takes me half my meal to figure out, tastes more like Indian nan than like any pizza dough I ever tried. It’s soft and chewy and yielding, but incredibly thin. I always thought we only had two choices in our lives when it came to pizza crust – thin and crispy, or thick and doughy. How was I to have known there could be a crust in this world that was thick and doughy? Holy of holies! Thin, doughy, strong, gummy, yummy, chewy, salty pizza paradise.

Take it from me, you don’t want to read this passage on an empty stomach. In fact, I’d recommend skipping the entire Italian section all-together if you’re hungry. It’s not all about food but there’s enough food mentioned that you might damage its pages with puddles of drool.

But food is primarily the subject of only a third of the book. “India” is dedicated to her quest for spirituality. And while I expected to like this section the least (an entire three months spent in an Indian ashram versus three months exploring Italy?) I actually liked it the most. I found her personal revelations to be honest without being oppressively didactic. And we get to meet Richard from Texas, a man who, if this weren’t a memoir, you’d swear could only exist within the pages of a book.

The final section, Indonesia, is such a romantic fairy-tale – beautiful, caring man and all – that you have to wonder if she really did make all this up. Can one person’s life really change so dramatically and luckily in the space of one year? Gilbert anticipates such criticism by asking and answering it herself:

And, yes, I cannot help but notice that I am sailing to this pretty little tropical island with my Brazilian lover. Which is – I admit it! – an almost ludicrously fairy-tale ending to this story, like the page out of some housewife’s dream…Yet what keeps me from dissolving right now into a complete fairy-tale shimmer is this solid truth, a truth which has veritably built my bones over the last few years – I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue.

Indeed, that’s what Eat, Pray, Love is all about: looking for and finding the strength to save ourselves when no one else will or can. Which is why, when Gilbert sails “ludicrously” into the sunset, even as you’re choked up with jealousy, you can’t help but cheer. Gilbert reminds us that happiness is always possible; sometimes we just have to be courageous enough to actively look for it.

Threatening Iago...

2007-05-05T14:05:00.000-05:00

This passage from Nigel Cliff's The Shakespeare Riots got a laugh-out-loud response from me:

Shakespeare was revered as a seer and a prophet, the master spirit of the Anglophone civilization, but his plays were also the stuff of log-cabin wisdom, the staple of schoolboy speechifying, and above all the stock-in-trade of popular drama. With one or at most two theaters in all but the biggest cities, men and women of every class went to the same shows and watched the same medley of "legitamate" plays and the skits and songs, farces and acrobatic dsplays that were served up as after-pieces or entr'actes, and no one thought of removing Shakespeare to a separate category called Culture...Some spectators became so wrapped up in the action that they forgot they were watching a play at all. In Albany a canal boatman was enraged by Iago's scheming: "You damned lying scoundrel!" he roared as he rose to his feet, "I would like to get hold of you after the show and wring your infernal neck!"

Ah, the good ole' days when art could move us so...

Blogging at 'The Onion'

2007-05-04T14:13:00.000-05:00

The Onion pokes fun at us bloggers in the way only The Onion could...

My blog is more of a hobby than anything else, something to do for fun when I get home from my bookstore job. I've never dreamed of making a living from it. Though hypothetically speaking, if The New Yorker—a publication that I'm sure pays top dollar—wanted to publish my August 9, 2005 post "Creative Thinking Spots" in its "Shouts And Murmurs" section, I'd consider it. Didn't cross my mind when I wrote that post, and that's certainly not why I wrote it, nor why I have a Google news alert set up for New Yorker editor David Remnick, but I can understand how someone on their staff might think the piece is a good fit for that section.

James Robertson at 'Bookslut'

2007-05-04T09:18:00.000-05:00

Bookslut has posted an interview of James Robertson, author of The Testament of Gideon Mack, a novel I'm thoroughly enjoying at the moment. There are some interesting things happening in this book, which this interview helps bring into perspective...

Killing the Wicked Witch of the West...

2007-05-03T10:48:00.000-05:00

"I Don't Think We're In Kansas Anymore, Todo", Part 2

...After I finally make my sci-fi pick, I cautiously, very cautiously approach the graphic novel section. The first thing I see are shelves and shelves of manga. Now. I’ve read manga before - I spent a year in Japan. How could I not? - so I know this isn’t what I want. I am, by all means, no expert but I think manga is the paperback serial version of American comic books. I want to read a graphic novel, which I am told is something altogether different from comics. So I wander the aisles until I finally spot a single lonely bottom shelf dedicated to graphic novels.

Again, I’m no expert, but even I know that this bookstore’s graphic novel is sadly lacking. But I persevere and come up with...nothing. I find absolutely nothing on that single shelf of novels which strikes my fancy. This isn’t because I’m feeling repelled or distressed. It’s because I know I can do much better. There is V for Vendetta, but I’ve seen the movie; there’s also A History of Violence but - yep, I’ve seen that too, and there’s also 300 but - well, you know. So reluctantly I wander away from the graphic novel section empty-handed with some vague idea that I’ll surf Amazon for something interesting later.

I get half-way to the self-help section (god, help me) before I remember...wait...wait.. ...I got it! - a comic excerpt I read in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2006 a few months back! Naturally I can’t remember the guy’s name but, hey I haven’t spent half of my life in bookstores and libraries without learning how to do a little stack investigation. So, after I’ve found the The Best American Nonrequired Reading on the shelf, I quickly skim its contents and there it is: Guy Delisle, author of Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea. Now that’s what I want. Excited, I hop/run back over to the graphic novel section and...they don’t have it. I mark it down in my book to buy/order another day. July pick, down. Onwards to the self-help section.

For me, walking anywhere near this section is like walking toward a force field of opposite attraction. And these little voices in my head are whispering: Come on, you don’t want to do this. You don’t need to do this. Stop! Stop now before it’s too late!!! I quiet them - see, no pop psychology needed - ignore the twisting in my gut, and try really, really hard to wipe the cynical sneer from my face before I enter the SELF-HELP SECTION. What is it about this section that makes me so suspicious? Maybe it’s this: In next week’s issue of The New Yorker (Dana Goodyear’s "The Magus"), Mario Maestri says on Paulo Coelho:

Coelho’s narratives and self-help books have the same fundamental effect: of anesthetizing the alienated consciousness through the consoling reaffirmation of conventions and prevailing prejudices. Fascinated by his discoveries, the Coelhist reader explores the familiar, breaks down doors already open, and gets mired in sentimental, tranquilizing, self-centered, conformist, and spellbinding visions of the world that imprisons him. When he finishes a book, he wants another one that will be different but absolutely the same...yuppie esoteric narrative.

I’ve never read Coelho, including his ubiquitous novel The Alchemist, so I can’t comment how true Maestri’s comments are, but he does seem to get at how I feel toward all self-help novels. That, and I think a lot of self-help authors are out to make a quick buck. Which is cynical - yes, even I know that - so here I am standing in the self-help section against every skeptical bone in my body and I pull out the first book I lay hands on... ... How to Get a Rich Man: The Princess Formula by Donna Spangler? Come on, SELF-HELP, you’re not helping your case here. I flip through it, hoping against hope that this is joke. A self-help comic maybe? But no, Ms. Spagler is very serious with tips like: Learn How to Play Tennis. Why? Well, because rich men like women who know how to play tennis. Duh.

I thought self-help novels were about spiritual enlightenment and recovering from grief-stricken times, which - despite my sneering and suspicion - I can respect. There is no way, however, I can respect a book which encourages women to become - I don’t care how you put it - gold-diggers. Is this the spiritual enlightenment we’re seeking these days? The nirvana of platinum engagement rings, Minolo Blaniks, and Gucci bags bought with someone else’s credit card? But, I admit, I almost buy it. Not because I expect to learn anything but because, at the very least, I’m guaranteed to have rip-roaring time snickering at its superficiality for a month.

But that would be cheating I think. The point is to challenge myself, not reaffirm my suppositions, and reading How to Get a Rich Man will do exactly that. Following the most boring ten minutes I’ve ever spent browsing a bookstore - is it me, or is the main advise in every self-help book: “Think positive and all the joys of the world will come your way!”? - I give up. That's right. I give up and pick the most obvious pick: The Secret by Rhonda Byrne. I couldn’t give a flying tornado for what the “secret” is. In fact, I bet I know it already - “Think positive and all the joys of the world will come your way!” - but when the time comes I’ll try to be open-minded. I really will. I promise. August pick, down.

Legs aching, eyes burning, my head making it’s own tribal music, I stumble over to the US History section (another area of the bookstore which I find to be a roller-coaster of exciting fun); by this time, my patience meter has hit ‘E’. It’s all I can do to keep from running to the best-seller table, picking out the nicest cover and making an escape. But I can do better than that. Biographies on John Adams, George Washington - nope, nope, not interested. Books on the Civil War - nope, not interested. On the Dust Bowl? Sorry. Not interested. On World War I? World War II? Yeah, that would be - no, not interested. But suddenly, the clouds part, the sun shines, and the angels sing praise because there, situated perfectly in the American history section is The Shakespeare Riots: Revenge, Drama, and Death in Nineteenth Century America by Nigel Cliff, the very same book I promised to buy a few weeks back. This smacks of cheating - getting a book I planned to get anyway. But, I rationalize, nowhere in the challenge does it say I can’t enjoy myself. And if any book could challenge my associating American history with boredom it’s The Shakespeare Riots. So, Cliff it is. September pick, down.

It is now May 3rd. I’ve landed in the country of the Muchkins, killed the Wicked Witch of the West, and had ruby slippers placed onto my feet. Now I’m on my way to see the Wizard of Oz, strolling down the Yellow Brick Road, wondering at the amazing and unusual people I’ll meet along the way. Here's hoping I don't get eaten.

Housekeeping vs. the Dirt, Final

2007-05-01T22:49:00.000-05:00

by Nick Hornby
McSweeney's / Nov. 2006

I have a confession to make: I finished Housekeeping vs. the Dirt last weekend. Well, not last weekend but the weekend before that – the weekend of April 20. Yeah, that long ago. I’ve been meaning to write this review, really I have, but first I was in Seattle, then I was back and needed to rest, and then I planned to write it at work but forgot the book, and then...yeah, you’re not buying it, but it’s all true I promise you. In any case, onwards to Housekeeping vs. the Dirt.

The title of this slim collection does double duty. On the one hand, there’s the obvious, surface meaning. Housekeeping versus the dirt: one either engages in some housekeeping – cleaning out the corners, bleaching down the kitchen floors – or one accepts the reality of the dirt which will inevitably creep in. The second, is a play of words on two books Hornby reviews: Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson (“deep, and dark, and rich”), and – you guessed it - The Dirt by Mötley Crüe (“so grotesque are the characters and narrative events described in the Mötley Crüe book that it’s very difficult to see any ideal circumstance in which to read it”). I must admit it was a fun moment when I discovered this second, subversive meaning hidden within the book, the final piece to a puzzle I didn’t even know was missing.

Hornby was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism for Songbook (something else that’s been added to my TBR list) but I’d bet money that the kind of criticism he writes in Songbook is something more than a little different from what he writes in Housekeeping vs. the Dirt. I’m sure I’ve said this before, but Housekeeping spends much less time discussing the merits of the books which appear in his column than he does discussing his own reading life. He discusses the things we talk about everyday on the blogospheare: why he chose a book, how he chose a book, under what circumstances he read that book. He even has a list of the books he buys and reads each month at the beginning of each selection. In short, Housekeeping vs. the Dirt is the best blog you've ever read printed on paper.

I had fun reading this collection, despite my sharp feelings of jelousy (one day, I will be able to write like this - I will). I enjoyed this book because Hornby was obviously enjoying himself, even when he was throwing a book across the room in disgust. At 153 pages, I was sad to see this brief volume end. Until I remembered, that is, that he writes a still-running monthly column for The Believer. They may have just gained a devoted reader.

In "October 2005," Hornby writes:

There comes a point in life, it seems to me, where you have to decide whether you're a Person of Letters or merely someone who loves books, and I'm beginning to see that the book lovers have more fun. Persons of Letters have to read things like Candide or they're a few letters short of the whole alphabet; book lovers, meanwhile, can read whatever they fancy.

...and thank god for that, especially when you get to read things like Housekeeping vs. the Dirt.

For my previous posts on Housekeeping vs. the Dirt click here and here.

I Don't Think We're in Kansas Anymore, Todo...

2007-04-30T21:36:00.000-05:00

You might think this is strange, but when I accepted the New Notions 5 reading challenge, it never occurred to me that the challenge would actually be well...a challenge. I spent a very difficult time in the bookstore this afternoon, trying to pick out a book that didn’t make my lip curl with distaste. It was a lot harder than I thought! It started off well-enough with a first stop over into the poetry section because I never read books of poetry. Poetry is wonderful and I understand why it’s a revered form of creative artistry, but I myself tend to prefer prose. I find that I often have the same impatient response to poetry that I have to English opera, which is, to quote one of my favorite comedians Jerry Seinfeld: “You got something to say, say it!”

But this is a challenge, so poetry it is, only…I don’t know the first thing about poetry. Alright, I know the first thing. I know the classics: Lowell, Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, etc. But I want to read something new, something fresh. I want to know what’s happening in the poetry world now. So I do what any well-informed, sophisticated reader does: I start pulling books off the shelves based purely on attractive spines. Soon enough, I come across Hoops: Poems by Major Jackson. A quick browse of what’s inside sounds cool and hip enough (and, really, how can you go wrong with a name like Major Jackson?). May pick, down.

Floating on the ease of my first pick, I glide over to the sci-fi section when suddenly reality comes barreling down like a malfunctioning space ship falling from the sky. A quick browse of the wild, unfamiliar titles has me whispering aloud, “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore Todo.” For a minute, I’m standing in the middle of the aisle trying to remember exactly why I didn’t take John Otter up on his offer of a sci-fi recommendation (I seem to recall thinking, “Oh, it can’t be that hard! I’ll pop in, see something that strikes my fancy and pop back out!). I’ve read sci-fi before. Last year I read, Dune by Frank Herbert, a long time ago I read Tolkein’s The Hobbit, the entire Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring, and half of Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers before I gave up and decided that I’d rather watch the movies. And, for months, I’ve been in the middle of reading The Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick by Philip K. Dick.

So I’m not completely inexperienced, and there was that time when I was forced to read William Gibson’s Idoru for a class in communications. But peeking into the titles I pull from the shelf has my gut clinching in the same distress I experienced during the week of Idoru. I’m feeling literally repelled by this section of books. Just when did this section get so big? And why are all the books over 700 pages long? If I’m going to challenge myself with some sci-fi, must I be masochistic about it too? But finally, world of wonders, after I’ve decided upon Neil Gaiman’s Fragile Things, the light bulb goes off! There was this book I heard about months back called The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman...Ding! Why don’t I read that? And it’s located in the young adult section (another section you’ll never find me in) so I get to kill two birds with one stone! June pick, down...

This post has turned out to be entirely too long so I’ve decided to split it into two. Tune in later for the final installment of “I Don't Think We’re in Kansas Anymore Todo…”! Next up: choosing a graphic novel, needing help in the self-help section, and spending too much time in history.

My First Challenge Should I Choose to Accept It...

2007-04-27T16:29:00.000-05:00

The book blogosphere is bursting with reading challenges. Southern reading, Spring reading, Classics reading, Shakespeare reading, Out-of-the-Box reading... And they all really do sound fun and engaging. Yet - until recently at least - I've managed to keep my book nose out of them. Not because I have something against reading challenges but because well, it says it in my blog title: I'm a slow reader. I barely have time to get through the books already on my TBR list. And I don't like the feeling of being rushed (or rushing) through a novel to beat a deadline. It takes the pleasure out of reading for me. If it's a book I'm really enjoying, I like to take my time and stay a while; give it a chance to make the "long journey to my soul." So, while I applaud those people who can finish a book in a week (ha! I wish - no really, I do), I figured I'd be best served by admiring reading challenges from afar.

But, you know what? Forget what I just said because I've decided to take John Otter over at Grasping for the Wind up on his New Notions 5 Reading Challenge. He assured me speed isn't neccesary (you're nuts John, if you think I won't hold you to that). I'll will, however, be required to complete five books in five months and I'm pretty sure...yeah...yeah I'm pretty sure even I can do that. So, my challenge as I've so chosen to accept it is to read five books that challenge my preconcieved notions on any particular topic. This could be race, politics, religion, what have you. I like reading outside of my box. It's one of the things that makes the reading life worth living. So John, count me in.

I haven't decided exactly what my five books will be yet but I had a most interesting idea at work today. My five books will be chosen from genres that I very, very rarely - if ever - journey into for various reasons. This would include self-help books (because I tend to think they're useless), science fiction (because I get bored with the outrageous technology and talking aliens that look like pimples), most American history (because, for some reason, it bores me out of my mind - love European history though, can't get enough of it), anthing that comes out of the "spiritual" section (for the same reasons why I don't read self-help books), and comics (nothing against them, I just never venture into that section). I'm very, very sure I'm leaving off a long list of other genres. But you know what? I'm willing to accept that all of my preconcieved notions on all of those genres are likely wrong. So I'm going to give them a chance to prove themeselves (see how I transfered the reading challenge from myself to the books? - I'm tricksy, I am). Now all I have to do is actually pick five books. Perhaps this weekend I'll go to the bookstore, wander into unexplored territory, and see what I stumble out with.

Many, Many Apologies...

2007-04-25T21:45:00.000-05:00

Sorry to those of you who have been checking in wondering where in the world I've been for the better part of a week. Well if you must know (yes, I know I'm flattering myself to think that anyone actually cared but, I put it to you, if I don't flatter myself, who will?), I've been in Seattle, Washington. It was work-related but I've spent the day walking around downtown, checking out the absolutely amazing Pike Street Market and riding the monorail to the Space Needle (which, strangely, isn't as tall as it looks on television). I've spent the week - when I wasn't working of course - trying to find the now non-existent Betty's Book Shop (another indie bites the dust, apparently), and instead stumbling across both a Border's and a Barnes & Noble. (Sigh) And yes, rather reluctantly and guiltily I did end up buying something from both stores. I picked up Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris and Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife by Sam Savage. Of course, it's only after I run out of both money and time, do I come across an indie bookstore tucked down by the pier called Left Bank Books. I felt guilty for not being able to afford another book, so I bought three stickers instead, one of which which reads, "Reading is Sexy." I have no idea where I'm going to stick it but it was just too cute (and true as well, in my opinion but who's asking me?) to pass up.

And, while I've been neglecting my blog and not spending money in indie bookstores like I promised, I have been gobbling The Testament of Gideon Mack by James Robertson. What is it about the fictionalized memoirs of ministers? I'm not a religious person but Marilynne Robinson's Gilead was my favorite book of 2005. The Testament of Gideon Mack is proving to be just as engrossing. At the risk of repeating all those other folks who have reviewed The Testament, this book is well-told contemplation on the place of religion in the modern life. Take for instance this passage:

...why should the fact that I didn't believe in God debar me from ministry? Not only might faith be unnecessary in a modern minister, it might even not be desirable. There was so much talk about how churches needed to connect with people who had lost their faith or never had any: perhaps what the Kirk needed was an influx of faithless ministers. And if faith was essential, I would find out. I would be found out. It was in this frame of mind that, midway through my fourth and final undergraduate year, I began to explore the option of staying on Edinburgh to study Divinity.

And I've also re-engaged with Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. It's amazing, I think, how quickly books we couldn't wait to get our hands on fall to the wayside (or maybe it's just me and I'm projecting). Eat, Pray, Love was one of those books. I started it as soon as I bought it and, as often happens, I got distracted by something else and put it down for a new toy. Well, the neglectful child has returned and Eat, Pray, Love is reminding me why I was enthusiastic about buying this book in the first place. Gilbert has the power of inspiring great empathy with her writing. I've never been through a heart-wrenching divorce - or any break-up for that matter (yes, I know I've been incredibly lucky) - or found God again during a breakdown on my bathroom floor but Gilbert is so incredibly honest with herself and her feelings that it doesn't take a large leap of faith for me to feel L'ho provato sulla mia pelle, which is Italian for "I have experienced that on my own skin" or, in a more colloquial translation: I've been there.

Guilty Very Guilty Pleasures

2007-04-19T23:04:00.000-05:00

From Booking Through Thursday:

Okay, there must be something you read that's a guilty pleasure . . . a Harlequin romance stashed under the mattress. A cheesy sci-fi book tucked in the back of the freezer. A celebrity biography, a phoned-in Western . . . something that you'd really rather not be spotted reading. Even just a novel if you're a die-hard non-fiction fan. Come on, confess. We won't hold it against you!

Deep breath, ok here it goes - does this mean BiblioAddict's going to loose what few readers it has? oh, man! - my guilty reading pleasure is....

cheesy, very cheesy, so cheesy it could decorate a Domino's ultimate cheese pizza (do they even sell those?) romance literature. Do you know the horrible historical romance novels with a long-haired, pouty-lipped woman bent over the brawny arm of a warrior (or pirate) muscular god on the glossy cover? Yeah, those romance novels. What can I say? It's a remnant of the teenage girl I used to be who walked around with hearts in her eyes, waiting for her version of Fabio to swoop in, save her from her drab unromantic life, and carry her off into happily ever-after.

I confess, I'm a little less naive than I was back then but I'm still a hopless romantic so I periodically spend at least one afternoon a month gobbling a romance novel. I don't read those in public anymore. The feeling of respect being sucked out of a room once they get a glimpse of what I'm reading is highly palpable (or it could be my defensive imagination). I have to keep myself from childishly yelling, "But I read smart stuff too!" So now I've reverted to reading my "trash" in the judgment-free comfort of my own home...where I can hide the evidence when I have company. ; ) Alright, well that's enough of my guilty pleasures! What about yours?

Touching the Sides...

2007-04-19T19:54:00.000-05:00

Housekeeping vs. the Dirt, a collection of Nick Hornby's reviews for The Believer magazine, is everything I wish BiblioAddict could be (and hopefully will be one day). I'm finding it absolutely wonderful to read a collection of reviews in which it's clear on every single page that this author is obviously passionate about reading. He's informed yet incredibly self-effacing. I'm wondering just what I've been doing these past two months (alright, fine - three months) that have kept me from positively zipping through this slim collection. If Hornby himself should ask (hey, we can all dream right?), I'll tell him I'm trying to let Housekeeping vs. the Dirt touch the sides:

I have always prized the accessible over the obsure, but after reading Housekeeping [the novel by Marilynne Robinson - not his own collection] I can see that in some ways the easy, accesible novel is working at a disadvantage (not that Housekeeping is inaccessible, but it is deep and dark and rich): it's possible to whiz through it without allowing it even to touch the sides, and a bit of side-touching has to happen if a book is going to be properly transformative. If you are so gripped by a book that you want to read it in the mythical single sitting, what chance has it got of making it all the way through the long march to your soul? It'll get flushed out by something else before it's even halfway there.

-- pg. 100

A Persian Myth of the Kurds...

2007-04-19T15:52:00.000-05:00

I came across this colorful - though slightly morbid - myth of the birth of the Kurds (the very same group of people who reside in the Iraqi mountains and who were repeatedly shown at the start of the Iraqi war in 2003 dancing in the streets, celebrating the American invasion) in Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings. But first a little background: Zahhak, an evil king has been tricked by a devil who makes two snakes grow out of the king's shoulders. The devil then tells the king that in order to get rid of the snakes he must feed the snakes nothing but human brains. The king consents and has two young men brought to his palace every night where they are killed, their brains fed to the snakes (I told you it was a morbid). So enter two noble men who decide to infiltrate the king's palace disguised as cooks and save one man each night from their horrific fate...

They learned how to prepare numerous dishes and were accepted as cooks in the king's kitchens. When the victims were dragged before the cooks, and the time came for their blood to be spilled, the two men looked at one another with eyes filled with tears and rage in the hearts. Unable to do more, they saved one of the two from slaughter, substituting the brains of a sheep, which they mixed with the brains of the man they killed. And so they were able to rescue one of each pair, to whom they said, "Hide yourself away in the plains and mountains, far from the towns." In this way they saved thirty victims a month, and when there were two hundred of them the cooks secretly gave them goats and sheep, and showed them a deserted area where they could live. The Kurds, who never settle in towns, are descended from these men.

Don't Get Too Comfortable, Final

2007-04-18T14:24:00.000-05:00

by David Rakoff
Broadway Books

The subtitle to David Rakoff’s new collection of essays Don’t Get Too Comfortable is a long one: The Indignities of Coach Class, the Torments of Low Thread Count, the Never-Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems. I think, however, it would have been more apt if he’d called it ...and Other First World Absurdities, which is really the over-arching point of these essays: to spot-light how the privileged of the privileged first-world residents spend their time and money when they don’t have to concern themselves with where their next meal is coming from or with the genocidal war next door. Do they spend it on feeding the hungry, on clothing the poor, or on saving rainforests? Ha, ha - get real. They aren’t adopting third-world children (Madonna and Angelina Jolie notwithstanding); they’re not making documentary movies on the dangers of global warming (Al Gore not included).

In Rakoff’s world - in our world, really - if the privileged of the privileged are making movies it’s soft-core porn with hot Latino women. If they’re flying overseas it’s to attend an exhibition of the couture collections in Paris. If they’re having existential considerations on life after death, it’s to work out the logistics of how they’ll survive after having their cryogenically frozen bodies resurrected. But is any of this news really? Even the least informed of us know that our privileged first-world culture has the tendency to drift toward the self-absorbed and the vapid. So what's the point of these essays, which tell us things we already know? In many ways, it’s easy to get the feeling that Rakoff is only preaching to choir.

But part of the pleasure I think in reading Rakoff’s essays is his ability to make the reader seem as if she’s inside the joke, not a part of it. It’s the feeling of feeling superior without really being superior. He invites you laugh at those nutty folk who pay $36 a kilo for sea salt harvested in France and $300 for the formula to a two-week long fast. Ha, ha - oh, you crazy first-worlders, you. But before we get too comfortable (or begin to feel uncomfortable) with our self-satisfied superiority, the thing that keeps this collection from being a nasty behind-the-back snicker at the Richers is that, by the collection’s conclusion, the reader discovers that he hasn’t been laughing at them after all - he’s been laughing at himself. The joke isn’t on them, it’s on you. The clue is on the cover: Don’t get too comfortable.

In a perfect microcosm of the effect of Don’t Get Too Comfortable, Rakoff imagines “an impoverished seamstress, her fingers bloody from hours of painstaking needlework...being dressed down by an outraged couturier" in the beginning of the essay “I Can’t Get it For You Wholesale”:

“I asked for camellias. These are not camellias,” he says, ripping out the stitches. “Do it again.” He flings the garment at her, an errant bugle bead catching her right in the eye. She weeps softly. The designer’s teacup poodle, Salo Meneo, yaps agitatedly throughout.

Later, as Rakoff roams his hotel room in Paris he writes:

I have a sitting room with a tasseled damask sofa, a passageway with walnut-doored closets leading to a bedroom, and beyond that a bathroom with a claw-footed tub. I count no fewer than three vases of roses...Looking out to the central courtyard filled with statues, I realize that I have crossed the Parliament floor. I used to identify with the downtrodden seamstress in that story I told myself, but I have now thoroughly joined the ranks of the imperious monstrocracy.

Rakoff’s witty insight into not only the “culture of excess” but also into his own heart and mind makes this slim volume a funny and informative read. It’s not hard to find a great laugh-out-loud sentence followed by the deepest insight into the human heart. If Rakoff’s collection is the seat of being uncomfortable, I’ll sit in it any day.

My previous post on this book can be found here.

Roses? What Roses?

2007-04-17T14:40:00.000-05:00

Four months ago, on January 12, 2007 Joshua Bell, a world-renowned virtuoso agreed to pretend to be a street musician and play for one hour outside a Washington, D.C. metro station. It was a sociological test of sorts to see how many people busily on their way to work would recognize the beauty and art coming from a violinist whose concerts can cost over $100 to attend. This article in last week's Washington Post is an illuminating contemplation of art and beauty’s place in our lives. This isn’t exactly an article on books or on reading but it is on our ability to appreciate art - even of the written word - in the fast-paced, stressed-out, modern lives we lead today. I found this passage to be of particular interest:

A couple of minutes into it, something revealing happens. A woman and her preschooler emerge from the escalator. The woman is walking briskly and, therefore, so is the child. She's got his hand.

"I had a time crunch," recalls Sheron Parker, an IT director for a federal agency. "I had an 8:30 training class, and first I had to rush Evvie off to his teacher, then rush back to work, then to the training facility in the basement."

Evvie is her son, Evan. Evan is 3.

You can see Evan clearly on the video. He's the cute black kid in the parka who keeps twisting around to look at Joshua Bell, as he is being propelled toward the door.

"There was a musician," Parker says, "and my son was intrigued. He wanted to pull over and listen, but I was rushed for time."

So Parker does what she has to do. She deftly moves her body between Evan's and Bell's, cutting off her son's line of sight. As they exit the arcade, Evan can still be seen craning to look. When Parker is told what she walked out on, she laughs.

"Evan is very smart!"

The poet Billy Collins once laughingly observed that all babies are born with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother's heart is in iambic meter. Then, Collins said, life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us. It may be true with music, too.

There was no ethnic or demographic pattern to distinguish the people who stayed to watch Bell, or the ones who gave money, from that vast majority who hurried on past, unheeding. Whites, blacks and Asians, young and old, men and women, were represented in all three groups. But the behavior of one demographic remained absolutely consistent. Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away.

PostNote: Many thanks to the folks over at bookninja for bringing this to my attention. I live in Washington, D.C. and I had no idea. How's that for oblivious? And God knows with all of the ugliness in the world today - what with last week's Imus tornado and yesterday's killing on Virginia Tech's campus - I need all the beauty I can get.

The Reading Roller-Coaster

2007-04-17T12:50:00.000-05:00

Well, I guess I should do my part in spreading the word: The Litblog Co-op has announced its Read This! Spring 2007 pick - Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead: Stories by Alan DeNiro. Since I’ve just discovered this apparently popular, well-known litblog today, I’m also adding their Read This! selections from last year: Michael Martone by Michael Martone, Firmin by Sam Savage, and Wizard of the Crow by Ngugl wa Thiong’o. Added to that I still have to buy The Shakespeare Riots by Nigel Cliff (released today - yeah!). Not to mention I’ve already begun dipping into The Testament of Gideon Mack by James Robertson, which I picked up yesterday during a quickie bookstore stop on my way from the post office. Yes, I know I promised to spend my next $20 on The Shakespeare Riots but how could I pass up a book about an atheist minister who’s life is saved by none other than the Devil? It was a no-brainer, really.

I’ve realized just now that the reading life - much like life itself, I suppose - is full of ups and downs. Only two weeks ago, I was complaining that I couldn’t find anything worth reading in the bookstore. That isn’t to say there wasn’t anything there - because surely there was - but I spent a disappointing afternoon browsing Border’s shelves and, after a fruitless search, left with nothing. I hate leaving the bookstore empty-handed. I makes me feel as if I’ve failed somehow and puts me in a terrible mood.

Then last week, I stopped in an independent bookstore (in the airport of all places) and suddenly the sun came out again. I picked up three gems: Shahnameh by Ferdowsi, The Final Solution by Michael Chabon, and The Italian Secretary by Celeb Carr. When I returned home, there was a copy of Andy Mandelbuam’s translation of The Aenied waiting for me in my mailbox, which has been on my coveted-book list for many years now. And now, I’ve come across the Litblog Co-op Read This! list. (Contented sigh) What can I say? I’m thinking I need a second job. Suddenly, the reading life is good again. At least, it will be until I begin wondering when I’m going to find the time to read all these books...

Shakespeare...Again?

2007-04-16T13:30:00.000-05:00

I know I promised last month to move away from my obsession with Shakespeare and I figured that my completion of Will in the World would go a long way toward accomplishing that feat. But Philip Lopate’s LA Times review of The Shakespeare Riots by Nigel Cliff makes keeping that promise very hard indeed. The premise of Cliff’s The Shakespeare Riots:

One evening in May 1849, hundreds of stone-throwing rioters clashed with New York City police and state militiamen outside the Astor Place Opera House, leaving more than 20 people dead and scores wounded...Clashing fans of two Shakespearean actors, the American Edwin Forrest and the Englishman William Charles Macready, became so overwrought that they put their bodies on the line for their thespian idols.

If the riot itself isn’t intriguing enough, Cliff explores the underlaying tensions which sparked the riots. Lopate writes:

...we are given separate chapters on the hazards facing English troupes that toured America in the early 19th century, the reputation of actors as unsavory and licentious (sometimes quite justified), the literary accounts of English travelers who profited by insulting America as an uncouth wasteland, and the mounting ill will between England and her former colony. There were tensions over the Northwest Territories' boundary ("Fifty-four Forty or Fight!"), repudiation (the refusal of Pennsylvania and other states to pay their debts to English banks), the Mexican-American War and America's clinging to slavery long after England abolished it. These excursions into social and political history, crammed with entertaining nuggets, are still only the backdrop for the heart of the matter: a thwarted friendship between Forrest and Macready involving America's favorite playwright, William Shakespeare.

The Shakespeare Riots is set to be released tomorrow. I know where my next $20 on books is going.

The Hard Way, Final

2007-04-15T17:30:00.000-05:00

by Lee Child
Delacorte Press / May 2006

Jack. For such a simple name, it seems to invoke a sense of power, of purpose, and somehow, of heroism. It’s the name of one of the most popular action heroes on television today - 24’s Jack Bauer. And it’s the name of the hero in Lee Child’s consistently impressive action thriller series – Jack Reacher. What is in a name exactly? As it turns out, these two heroes seem to have much more in common than a name. They certainly share a sense of ruthlessness. There are whole websites dedicated to the body count Jack Bauer rakes up in a single episode of 24. And towards the end of The Hard Way, the most recent installment of the series – although a new installment Bad Luck and Trouble is slated to be released in May – Child writes,

…the remorse gene was missing from his DNA. Entirely…Where some men might have retrospectively agonized over justification, he spent his energy figuring out where best to hide the bodies.

And they both have an old-fashioned sense of honor in that women, children, and all other vulnerable subjects must be protected and defended at all costs (unless of course, they’re trying to kill them) and they never give their word unless they intend to keep it. They both, too, hold to a very simplistic view of right and wrong; good and evil. Neither of them have any qualms about cold-bloodedly killing – or, in the case of Bauer, torturing – the bad guys because nothing they do is wrong if it’s done for the cause of what’s right. When an ex-FBI agent expresses doubts about taking out the bad guy, Reacher explains, “We splattered a thousand bugs on our windshield yesterday. A thousand more today. One extra won’t make any difference.” For them, the end always justify the means.

But Jack Bauer is very much a man of his time. He is, as many people enjoy pointing out, a post-9/11 hero equipped with the kind of fictional high-tech computers and programs Homeland Security only wishes they had. In this morally fuzzy world of “War on Terrorism” Jack Bauer is the “whatever it takes” kind of hero who, if he’d existed, surely would have prevented the day which instigated his birth, or so the creators of 24 would have you believe. The truth of the matter is that without 9/11, Bauer wouldn’t exist. There would be no context in which for us to understand, whether we cheer them or not, Bauer’s tactics.

Jack Reacher’s appeal on the other hand is that he’s a man outside of time – or past his time – living as a nomad loner on the outskirts of society. He’s so out of touch that it’s news to him that cells phones have developed text messaging. At another point Child informs us:

Silent phones made Reacher nervous. He came from a world where a sudden dive for a pocket was more likely to mean a gun than a phone. Every time it happened he had to endure a little burst of unrequited adrenaline.

Though it’s safe to assume that Bauer and Reacher are both very likely in their early 40s, Reacher somehow seems older than Bauer. Reacher’s old school. He isn’t chasing nuclear bombs with semi-automatics and saving whole cities with the help of the super counter-terrorism unit CTU. He’s so old school, he doesn’t need a watch to tell the time within a minute and instead using computers to break open his newest puzzle, he uses plain old brain-power – the kind that keeps him up at night and haunts him during his morning coffee.

Reacher isn’t interested in saving the world, he’s merely interested in righting wrongs wherever he sees them. He defends battered women, kidnapped children, and guiltily accused men. If Bauer’s the kind of hero you wish could save the world, then Reacher’s the kind of hero you’d want to save your life.

Shahnameh, pt. 1

2007-04-09T20:23:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago, I caught some flack from a friend because, despite its admittedly many problems, I liked the movie “300.” It was, to my friend’s thinking and not without some justification, a racist depiction of not just the Persians (i.e. the modern-day Iranians) but of anyone who didn’t claim white Western descent. But where he saw racism I saw the dramatic depiction (alright, an annoying slow-motion, video game, bronze-tinted, senselessly brutal depiction with absurd dialogue - sure) of Herodotus’ account of my most favorite battle of antiquity, The Battle of Thermopylae. How do I recreate the shivers that crawled up my spine when I read, as an intrigued new college student, that when a Spartan hero, one of those incredibly and impossibly built killing machines, is informed that the Persian arrows were so many that they blotted out the sun, he replies, “Then we shall fight in the shade.”? No, it isn’t just a corny one-liner they put in the trailer. According to Herodotus at least, he really did say that.

But therein lies a problem: the only accounts of the Persian Wars are from Western sources. And for all of the things at fault with “300", being true to its sources - mostly - isn’t one of them. If the Persians seem both incredibly effeminate and vile at the same time, it’s because, according to the Greeks, they were. If the Greek warriors, despite their own atrocity, are made out to be heroic freedom fighters it’s because, according the Greeks, they were. For whatever reason, the Persians didn’t see any need to record their own account of the Persian Wars and, if they did, we’ve lost it to the oblivion of time.

Biased and one-sided though it is, I still love Herodotus’ Histories and I still love the Battle of Thermopylae. It’ll take more than an overdone Hollywood movie to change that. But I’ve felt the need to even my knowledge of epic histories out a bit per se, which is why I bought Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings by Abolqase Ferdowsi, newly translated by Dick Davis. And Shahnameh is an epic which covers the history of Persia, from the beginning of time to the coming of Islam. However, Shahnameh is a history in the way that The Iliad is a history. It is based on some historical fact but, like all those other tricksy poets like Homer, Ferdowsi takes some creative liberty.

As a result, either because of Ferdowsi’s story telling or because of Davis’ translation, Shahnameh so far reads like the bastard child of the Bible and the Lord of the Rings...in a good way. Compare this early passage:

The just and prudent Hushang was now master of the world, and he set the crown on his head and ruled in his grandfather’s place. He reigned for forty years, and his mind was filled with wisdom, his heart with justice...Mindful of God’s will, he set about establishing justice. He helped the world flourish, and filled the face of the earth with his just rule.

...with this passage that immediately precedes it:

He gathered together fairies, leopards and lions, savage wolves and fearless tigers, birds and domestic animals, and this army was led by the intrepid young prince...the black demon came fearlessly forward, and the dust of his forces rose into heavens, but the king’s fury and the wild animals’ magnificence rendered the demons’ claws harmless. When the two groups met, the demons were defeated by the animals; like a lion, Hushang caught the black demon in his grip, cleaving his body in two and severing his monstrous head. He laid him low in the dust and flayed his wretched body of its skin.

I haven’t even put a dent in this massive tome but over the course of what will be - yes, I admit it - months, I look forward to trying.

Who Says Librarians Lead Boring Lives?

2007-04-06T12:19:00.000-05:00

The online diary of Saad Eskander, Director of the Iraq National Library and Archive (INLA), is a moving daily account of Saad's life as a librarian struggling to replenish the library's looted collection in the middle of an unstable war zone. I was particularly struck by this succinct but very telling entry:

Saturday, 10 March: Three bombs exploded in my neighborhood. Two bombs went off at 7.30. They violently shook my flat, as I was watching some TV programme. At 13.20, another bomb exploded in my neighborhood. It shook my flat. I spent the whole day writing and reading in my room.

On March 5, Saad offers this heartbreaking entry on the bombing that took place last month in Bagdhad's outdoor book market:

As we were talking, a huge explosion shook the INLA's building around 11.35. We, the three of us, ran to the nearest window, and we saw a big and thick grey smoke rising from the direction of al-Mutanabi Street, which is less than 500 meter away from the INLA. I learnt later that the explosion was a result of a car bomb attack. Tens of thousands of papers were flying high, as if the sky was raining books, tears and blood. The view was surreal. Some of the papers were burning in the sky. Many burning pieces of papers fell on the INLA's building. Al-Mutanabi Street is named after one of the greatest Arab poets, who lived in Iraq in the middle ages. The Street is one of well-known areas of Baghdad and where many publishing houses, printing companies and bookstores have their main offices and storages. Its old cafes are the most favorite place for the impoverished intellectuals, who get their inspirations and ideas form this very old quarter of Baghdad. The Street is also famous for its Friday's book market, where secondhand, new and rear books are sold and purchased.... It was extremely sad to learn that a number of the publishers and book sellers, whom we knew very well, were among the dead...This day will be always remembered, as the day when books were assassinated by the forces of darkness, hatred and fanaticism.

What Does Make a Bookstore?

2007-04-06T11:54:00.000-05:00

A very old post on bookstores, "What Makes a Bookstore?", at The Millions (A Blog About Books) got me to thinking about my own experience at the bookstore a few days ago.

When it comes to hanging out, it's hard to beat the chains. Your nearest Barnes and Noble probably has dozens of plush chairs and couches where you can sit for as long as you want. The stores are vast wide open spaces with a controlled climate and a bit of piped in music wafting just overhead. The shopper can make a day of it, grabbing a snack and a coffee from the cafe and lounging through the uncrowded weekday afternoon...likewise if you need to pick up a specific title, but don't expect to walk away with anything unexpected from these forays. Don't plan for a literary discovery.

I’m a very frequent shopper at Borders. There are at least three on my way home and, as a Borders preferred member, I enjoy saving 10 and 20 percent when I can. In addition to that, I can usually find what I’m looking for in less than five minutes, even in the smallest Borders and I like making an afternoon of it, lounging in the “plush chairs” and the “wide open spaces.” Theoretically, I could do this at the library but the libraries in D.C. are so unesthetically depressing that I try to grab what I need and get out as soon as possible. A few days ago though, I went into Borders with no particular book in mind, looking to be pleasantly surprised I suppose, and found only...more of the same. All of the prominently displayed titles were books I’d seen on bestseller list after bestseller list for last two years and I thought, “Is this all the book world has to offer right now?”

I left soon after, empty-handed and disappointed, which is my own fault really. I should have known better than to expect to be pleasantly surprised at Borders. Needless to say, my recent experience and The Millions old post have reminded me as to the error of my ways. It’s not on my way home, but I don’t care; I’m going out of my way tonight to make a beeline to the nearest indie bookstore, the amazing Kramerbooks & Afterwords Cafe. I can hardly wait. And I'm pledging here and now that from here on out I will do all of my one-stop book shopping at independent bookstores, whenever and wherever possible. It's time I started doing my part in keeping the dying breed of independent bookstores alive.

Lethem on Writing, Reading, and Other Things...

2007-04-05T12:51:00.000-05:00

The only thing I’ve ever read by Jonathan Lethem was the introduction he wrote to The Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick. Despite the critical praise Lethem has received for both Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn I, for some reason, can never bring myself to buy his books. Most times, I'll go into the bookstore with every intention of finally buying a Lethem novel, but usually, after a quick perusal of the blurb on the back, I’ll put it back down with promises that I'll buy it later. The interview he recently gave to the AV Club (the surprisingly serious-minded entertainment supplement to The Onion), has me wondering if I should try again...maybe. On reading, Lethem says:

... The Fortress Of Solitude might be an exception in this, but for me, when I was a reader only, I was a very fast, voracious one. I would skeletonize the books that I read, and the things I skipped are the things I now skip as a writer. I wasn't really very patient with long evocations of clouds and trees and buildings and landscape, nor did I pause over elaborate descriptions of the facial characteristics or clothing styles of the characters. I always wanted to know what they were doing and saying. And also what the mysterious big idea of the book was, what the metaphors were. So I would rush to those things, and I would be very cursory as I read the descriptive stuff.

Now, there’s something you don’t hear writers admitting to everyday. I can’t admit to not skipping certain, overlong descriptions myself but I’d also venture to say that sometimes “facial characteristics or clothing styles” could be a writer’s hint to the “mysterious big idea.” Sometimes, it could be dangerous to skip those things the author has worked so hard to include. Lethem and I, however, are in perfect sync with this:

The other thing is that, I think, sometimes visualization in writing works by a kind of homeopathic process. The less you offer, the more readers are forced to bring the world to life with their own visual imaginings. I personally hate an illustration of a character on a jacket of a book. I never want to have someone show me what the character really looks like—or what some artist has decided the character really looks like—because it always looks wrong to me. I realize that I prefer to kind of meet the text halfway and offer a lot of visual collaborations from my own imaginative response to the sentences. And so I think that I invite the reader to do the same thing.

And this quote, an extension of an article he published in Harper’s magazine last month, is interesting commentary on the artist’s place (or birth) in the larger culture:

The image of the artist is sustained by this great myth of iconoclastic individual genius. A lot of great stuff is made up by individual iconoclastic geniuses, and that's fine, but a lot of other stuff comes burbling out of collective culture. That gets invented one way and then used an entirely different way, and different people work on it, and you end up with this sort of puzzle.

On Food...and Drink

2007-04-04T13:16:00.000-05:00

Adam Gopnik writes in next week's issue of the New Yorker:

There are four kinds of food in books: food that is served by an author to characters who are not expected to taste it; food that is served by an author to characters in order to show who they are; food an author cooks for characters in order to eat it with them; and, last (and most recent), food that an author cooks for characters but actually serves to the reader.

I can't remember the last time I read about food in a novel, which may be because the food was often just "Styrofoam peanuts in the packaging" of the novel's narrative. I can, however, recall the first sentence of a novel I've just started:

Jack Reacher ordered espresso, double, no peel, no cube, foam cup, no china, and before it arrived at his table he saw a man's life change forever.

I know Gopnik's talking about food not drink, but I think it's a prime example of a description that falls into the second category. Nothing could describe Jack Reacher, the loner, bare-minimum hero of Lee Child's thriller The Hard Way, better than that order of espresso.

More Scary News On Newspaper Book Reviews...

2007-04-02T14:13:00.000-05:00

The folks at the blog Critical Mass report:

As reported on CNN and other places, the Tribune Company will be sold to Chicago real estate tycoon Sam Zell in a deal for $13 billion. This will make the company which owns the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune, Newsday, the Hartford Courant and other newspapers (not to mention the Cubs and other radio and television stations) a private company, and less beholden to stock price above all else. In other words, the deal could be good news for book sections, especially if they can be seen as integral to building a bridge between newspapers' past and their future.

Which is good news, especially considering the news posted at the Literary Saloon last week:

As has long been feared and now widely reported on, The Los Angeles Times is doing away with its stand-alone Sunday book review section, 'merging' it with the opinion section, beginning on 14 April...(Yes, the press release says 14 April, which is a Saturday, and early reports suggested it would be a Saturday-section, but they do also write that it would be: "a combined Sunday section". We'll see.)

The future of newspaper book review sections seems precarious indeed. Is it possible that ten years from now the only major newspaper that may still be running a book review section is the NY Times? As much as I value the reviews in the NY Times, I sincerely hope not.

Double David

2007-04-02T13:25:00.000-05:00

by David Rakoff
pgs. 1-67

Unfairly or not, reading David Rakoff inevitably engenders comparisons with his namae frater David Sedaris, the superstar memoirist of the hilarious and critically-acclaimed compilations Naked, Me Talk Pretty One Day, and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. The two Davids are both witty gay men in their late 30s (early 40s?), whose sharp eye, self-deprecating humor, and ease with a pen makes most of their selections both informative and humorous reads. However - and this is where the comparisons really begin - Rakoff, simply put, just isn’t as funny as Sedaris. Nor has he quite yet developed Sedaris’ skill at using his comical set pieces to transcend their often zanny and (sometimes) toilet humor to something that comments on the larger human experience. But here’s what: it seems that with Don’t Get Too Comfortable (subtitled: The Indignities of Coach Class, the Torments of Low Thread Count, the Never-Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems), Rakoff has finally discovered that he doesn’t have to be. With this thus far engaging compilation of both new and previously published essays, Rakoff has eschewed riding the coattails of Me Talk Pretty One Day - a tendency so evident and poorly-executed in Fraud that I couldn’t finish it - and decided that a bit of investigative journalism intersped with occasional bouts of humor and personal, biting commentary is more his style. It’s a fine choice and a perfect fit.

In “Sesion Privada” Rakoff joins a couple of photographers, cameramen, their crew and three Playboy centerfolds on the paradise island Caya Espanto where they will film a Latin American Playboy television program. One would expect that a gay man on a Playboy soft-core shoot would be the perfect recipe for nothing but one-two knock-out punches of humor. But Rakoff seems to have discovered the art of subtle satire. Of the shoot, Rakoff writes:

The crew confers about her moves. The video-camera man demonstrates what they want. Sinking to his knees, he twists his torso and drags his open palms slowly up his chest to his head where they rub slow circles through a hypothetical jungle of tousled hair...Perhaps this is just the nature of soft-core, but the girls’ hands are kept so primly far away from their genitals that all of their crypto-masturbatory back arching and moaning for no apparent reason starts to look a little mentally unbalanced, frankly.

The joke is there; it’s just a whole lot quieter than what you would have found in Fraud. It’s not a knock-out punch to the face so much as it’s an unexpected soft blow to the back of the head. And, like I said, it’s educational too. In “Wildman” Rakoff informs readers:

...flowers were once thought to have no purpose greater than pleasing the human eye. It wasn’t until experiments in pollination during the Renaissance that people realized to their puritanical horror that even the loveliest of blooms were nothing more than sex organs. In Catholic Europe, people burned Carl Linnaeus’s books as corrupting filth. (To give them their due...they kind of had a point: Linneaus was a bit of a sexual obsessive, vaginally fixated, pushing his penchant so far as to name an entire genus of plants Clitoria.)

I don’t know about you, but my first order of business after reading that passage was to immediately drop what I was doing and see if Lenneaus’ genus name stuck. I’ll save you the trouble...It did.

The Best American Travel Writing 2006 (Final)

2007-04-01T19:55:00.000-05:00

There are plenty of reasons why people travel: vacation, exploration, and/or illumination to name a few. I myself, travel frequently for business, which is merely a convenient excuse for me to hop on a plane every two weeks to land in a city unseen by my eyes. But I have never before heard my desire to see what could previously only be explored through words or through pictures put as poetically and as succinctly as Kira Salak puts it in her piece “Rediscovering Libya”: “to see what cannot be imagined, to be taken into my dreams.” That, when it’s all said and done, is the reason why I travel and it is also why I find pleasure with no end in reading The Best American Travel Writing 2006.

So often, I find, people mistake travel writing for something similar to what you might find in a Lonely Planet guide (a book I never leave the house without when I travel). However, for those of you who might be tempted to ask me if I’ve discovered any hot new vacation spots while reading TBA Travel Writing, I’ll say that travel writing isn’t for those looking for the best restaurant in Tokyo in which to eat, or the hippest club in Amsterdam in which to pick up a hot foreign date. The best travel writing is a highly personal experience, more memoir-ish in its execution, and is written to illuminate something about the author, the place, its culture, or its people. The very best travel writing somehow manages to do all three.

Several of the stand-out pieces are of the journey taken in the literal sense, which eventually comes to stand for the one so often used as a metaphor to mean spiritual or revelatory progress. In one of the more heartbreaking pieces of the collection, Michael Paterniti in “XXXXL” travels to the Ukraine to visit the giant Leonid Stadnik, a man of extraordinary proportions, to escape his own unsettled discomfort with his growing feelings of normalcy. He writes, “I had two great kids and a pregnant wife whom I loved, but a part of me – my old self or soul or me-ness had been subsumed by fatherhood. I’d let it happen, of course, but there were still moments when I found myself going a bit haywire.” So, with the blessing of his wife, Paterniti goes to the Ukraine to visit a man tortured by his own uniqueness: “’In my life, I’ve done my best to become a normal person…to reach something. But because of my unusual body, I will never have a family or wealth or a future. I’m telling you, I’ve done my best. Everything that depended on me I’ve done…God punishes the ones he loves most.’”

But things aren’t all spiritually uplifting and morally illuminating in the world of TBA Travel Writing. Some are of dangerous exploration, as in Mark Jenkins’ “A Short Walk in the Wakhan Corridor”:

I’m surrounded by rocks painted blood red. I know what this means – it’s the first thing you learn upon arriving in Afghanistan: land mines…I am twenty feet into the minefield. Very carefully, step backward. I place one foot precisely in its own footprint…Delicately, imagining myself as weightless as the ghost I could become, I retrace my steps.

Others, like David Sedaris’ “Turbulence”, are - like all Sedaris pieces - hilariously irreverent. In “Turbulence” Sedaris has the misfortune of sitting next to a most unpleasant woman. This wouldn’t normally be an unusual problem for anyone who’s ever flown if it weren’t for this opening sentence: “On the flight to Raleigh, I sneezed, and the cough drop I’d been sucking on shot from my mouth, ricocheted off my folded tray table, and landed in the lap of the woman beside me, who was asleep and had her arms folded across her chest.” What follows is a classic David Sedaris piece with its classic self-deprecation even when, technically, he’s in the right. I mean, really, what sort of woman gets so angry just because a stranger doesn’t want to switch seats with her husband? If you ask me she’s the one who’s eight-lettered crossword clue might read, “Above the shoulders, [s]he’s nothing but crap.”

Despite the fact that it took me an enormously long time to finish this collection (nearly four months, sad, I know), TBA Travel Writing 2006 is excellent reading nonetheless. It’s exciting, it’s sad, it’s educational, and sometimes it’s scary. And if you’re going anywhere worth going, it’s essentially travel.

The New Yorker, April 2

2007-03-28T10:29:00.000-05:00

Alright, I received my April 2 New Yorker issue in the mail three days ago and I decided enough was enough. I am drowning in New Yorkers. I’ve been trying so hard to get through the books I’m reading that I simply haven’t had time to finish a single New Yorker since the end of February. This week’s New Yorker, which arrived a full five days earlier than it usually does, was the last straw. I am proud to say that, four days later, I have finally finished a complete New Yorker.

I decided to do something a bit different this week. Instead of reading the magazine front to back, which is what I usually do, I decided to read the articles in order of interest. So, I started with John Updike’s review of Walter Isaacson’s Einstein. In his own Picked Up Pieces, a collection of assorted prose, Updike lays out his own rules for writing reviews. One of those rules was:

Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending. (How astounded and indignant was I, when innocent, to find reviewers blabbing, and with the sublime inaccuracy of drunken lords reporting on a peasants' revolt, all the turns of my suspenseful and surpriseful narrative! Most ironically, the only readers who approach a book as the author intends, unpolluted by pre-knowledge of the plot, are the detested reviewers themselves. And then, years later, the blessed fool who picks the volume at random from a library shelf.)

It’s a good thing that Updike admits to breaking his own rules because plot summary is exactly what he did with this review of Isaacson’s biography. Albert Einstein is such an iconic figure that it’s unlikely that the new biography is fraught with suspense and “surpiseful narrative.” Only those who have read the book (I haven’t) would know whether Isaacson sheads new and shocking light on Einstein’s life and if Updike knows it, maybe he’s following his own advice and not telling us. But if it’s unknown whether Isaacson has anything new to say about Einstein’s life, it’s certainly clear that Updike doesn’t.

I don’t see how this article could classify as anything other than an elegant summary. Updike neither provides a new theory or way of looking at the man, nor does he provide any illuminating comments on the biography itself outside of calling it “thorough, comprehensive, [and] affectionate.” One wonders if, for all of its elegance, this article would have even been accepted by the New Yorker if it hadn’t come with John Updike’s byline.

Criticism of the Critics

2007-03-26T13:41:00.000-05:00

I posted this on my other blog and I just simply had to post it here as well. WARNING: Angry rant ahead.

In the April issue of Harper's magazine, Cynthia Ozick quotes an essay titled "Defeating the Poem" written by Denis Donoghue, a literary scholar and a professor of thirty years. In his essay, Donoghue reports:

"Those students who think of themselves as writers and take classes in 'creative writing' to define themselves as poets or fiction writers evidently write more than they read, and regard reading as a gross expenditure of time and energy. They are not open to the idea that one learns to write by reading good writers."

Oh, ye Gods of literature, say it ain't so. Have we sunk so low that even writers don't want to read? Or as Oznick puts it, "So is that where the readers of the next generation are going: to the perdition of egotism and moralizing politicized self-righteousness?"

I always get a bit defensive when writers lament and cry out in letters, "The readers have all gone! Where have all the readers gone?" I wish to say, "Here I am. I'm right here. Don't I count?" I know, of course, that that's not what they mean. What they mean is that there simply aren't as many readers like myself out there as there used to be. But, doesn't it seem just a bit self-defeating to write articles about people who don't read because, obviously, anyone who reads the article is, by definition, a reader? So, it begs the question, who is the intended audience for these articles anyway? Fellow writers, literary critics, readers, or all three? No ones seems to disagree with the fact that readership is declining in America (and in Britain, apparently) so what is the point of all these articles really?

The fact that libraries are getting rid of their Shakespeare and their Dickens because young readers find them too boring and too difficult to read is outrageous, indeed. But what's being done about it? Outrage without action is annoying, boring, and frankly, pointless. Writers, however, seem content to do what writers do - write - and leave the action for someone else. In the past, that may have all been fine and dandy. But to those writers who want the readers of yesteryear back, I'd tell them the same thing I'd tell a child crying, "Mommy! Mommy! He stole my candy." Go get it back. Getting readers to return to reading doesn't require beating, cheating, or stealing (especially if, as Oznick writes, people are already "Googling obsessively (hours and hours)" and "blogging and emailing and text messaging" which all requires reading for "hours and hours").

No, what getting readers back requires is ingenuity and creativity, two things which writers have in sufficient supply. But, most importantly, what it requires is action. Action not through words but through deeds. Large scale reading programs and fairs, and English teachers skilled enough to educate and impart to their students a sense of their own passion for reading. I always tell people who tell me they don't like to read that they simply just haven't read the right book. Where are the programs to help people find their inner reader in the same way that writers are encouraged and taught to find their inner voice?

Call me naive but I truly and honestly believe that there is a reader in everyone. Anyone will read if you place the right book in front of them. This is especially the case with children and younger students, which is where it should all begin, before they've convinced themselves that their time is better spent with television, the internet, and video games. But so often, we speak of these things as if it has to be either/or. Either you read or you watch television; either you play video games or you read. This simply isn't the case. I spend plenty of time surfing the internet - checking email, Googling, blogging (obviously) and all. I also take time out of my day to watch my favorite television shows. And yet somehow, miracle of miracles, I read. A lot.

This isn't - it shouldn't be - a battle of the internet versus reading. This should be a battle for reading, period. When adults who have trouble learning how to check their email and speak of not knowing a thing about computers as if they consider it a badge of honor, champion reading books they, in effect, make reading seem old, stale, and out of date, much in the same way that young people consider cassette tapes and records a thing of the past. But reading isn't something of the past. Even if we couldn't claim that books written years ago could tell universal truths transcendent of time, books are still a thing of the present simply by their virtue of being printed everyday. If books are thing of the present, so too then must be reading.

Internet, television, and video games aren't the problem. Inaction is the problem. There seems to be this idea that marketing reading and literature is sordid and beneath the pure act of reading, especially if one is going to read literature. But if you are above marketing the sacred past-time then you must also be above complaining about the declining readership. To get readers to come back to reading today requires the kind of work that wasn't required fifty years ago and, so what? If you want your place in the hearts and minds of the public and the larger culture, you must be willing to work for it. Some of us, like myself, don't require that kind of work but, as I've said before, obviously this isn't about me or other book lovers like me. This is about the poor people out there whose lives are sadly un-enriched by the mind-blowing, thought-provoking power of books.

If we, none of us, wish to see books relegated to the "deafening silence of irrelevance" then we must take our noses out of our books, our fingers from the keyboards, and demand reading's place in the heart and mind of our community and culture. The place is there; it hasn't gone anywhere. It's simply gotten smaller. If we want to make it larger we must take a break from our philosophizing and our agonizing over the declining numbers and do something, because time is getting short. If Donoghue is to be believed, then we are already fast approaching the day when even our writers won't read. When that happens, the time for arguing and debating will be over, because there won't be anyone to debate with.

To the Library and Beyond

2007-03-26T09:49:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine remarked that, for someone who reads as much as I do, I don’t go to the library very often. I told him what I tell everyone who asks: I don’t go to libraries because they always want their books back. I’m possessive about my books, especially books I like, and I don’t like having to give them back. It’s selfish I know, but after having accumulated $30 dollar fines on a number of occasions, I’d decided that everyone would be better served – my pocketbook and honest library patrons alike – if I got my books from the bookstore where, for a set price, my books could languish on my shelves as long as I liked.

My pocketbook, however, has of late been rather bare so this past weekend I bit the bullet, promised to be a good library patron, and applied for a new library card. I’d forgotten how much going to the library is like being a kid in a candy store with license to get whatever and however much I liked. Oh, the bounty I escaped with:

Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell
Tokyo: Cancelled by Rana Dasgupta
Nice Big American Baby by Judy Budnitz
Heat by Bill Buford
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro
And a bunch of plays by Shakespeare that I haven’t read in a while or ever (King Lear, As You Like It, and the Henry VI plays to name a few).

Habitually, I read the first chapter of any new book I acquire. It satisfies my curiosity and allows me to finish books I’ve already committed to reading. So I spent a very pleasurable afternoon dipping my toe into a new book before flitting off to a another pool. Here’s a sampling of the first sentence from a few of the books:

“One night last summer, all the killers in my head assembled on stage in Massachusetts to sing show tunes.” –- Assassination Vacation

“Not so long ago, in one of those small, carefree lands that used to be so common but which now, alas, are hardly to be found, there was a prince whose name was Ibrahim.” -- Tokyo: Cancelled (Alright, this isn’t exactly the first sentence in the book. Tokyo: Cancelled is modeled after The Canterbury Tales. This is the first sentence in the first story “The Tailor.”)

“There was a woman who had seven sons and she was happy. Then she had a daughter.” -- from “Where We Come From” in Nice Big American Baby. I’m not going to give away the story but someone please tell me: is it even possible for a woman to carry a baby inside for her for four years and not – I don’t know – die?

"Years ago, before the trains stopped running on so many of the branch lines, a woman with a high, freckled forehead and a frizz of reddish hair came into the railway station and inquired about shipping furniture." -- Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marraige

“A human being is primarily a bag for putting food into; the other functions and faculties may be more godlike, but in point of time they come afterwards.” – Quoted by George Orwell, from The Road to Wigan Pier as preface to Heat

Will in the World, Final

2007-03-23T10:41:00.000-05:00

If you’ve read my last post on Shakespeare (“Shakespeare Everywhere!”), you’d know I’ve found myself unexpectedly surrounded by the legendary playwright for the past month. He’s been popping up in the strangest places like a hidden element in a “Where’s a Waldo!” picture (“Where’s Will!”). Today, not only is he gracing the cover of my April 2007 Harper’s Magazine (“The Mirror of Life: How Shakespeare Conquered the World” by Jonathan Bate) but he’s also making a surprise appearance - ok, not so much a surprise considering the forum - in my April/May “Bookforum.” In its ‘Pub Dates’ section, “Bookforum” informs readers that Abrams Books is releasing Manga Shakespeare: Hamlet and Manga Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet in April. Manga Shakespeare...uh, no comment. Actually, I think it might be kind of cool but, alright, no further comment.

I will, however, say that I have finally completed the reason for my recent Shakespeare inundation, Will in the World by Stephen Greenblatt. Will in the World is a massive achievement, not least of all because it is a compelling biography of a man whose known facts of life, according to John Mitchell, “can be written down on one side of a sheet of notepaper." Thus, the nearly four hundred page Will in the World is basically, in the words of Greenblatt himself, “an exercise in speculation,” but it is engrossing speculation nonetheless. Greenblatt uses the only true records left of Shakespeare’s inner life, his plays, to breathe life into not only the man but also the plays (although, conspicuously, Greenblatt fails to mention that authorship of many of the plays he uses to recreate Shakespeare’s life have been called into question by several Bard scholars).

Greenblatt is less concerned with literary conspiracy theories than he is with the life of the man on whom the book is based. He’s more concerned with showing readers how Shakespeare could have lived and developed as a playwright if only we, the audience, are willing to approach the history of Shakespeare in exactly the same way the playwright demanded of his sixteenth century audiences - with suspended belief and the power of our imagination. What we get in return is entertainment of the highest value and, if we are paying attention, an education on and illumination of all those dark, secret places.

I spent three months in a course on Shakespeare and never learned as much as I have in reading Greenblatt’s elegant biography. Granted, there are some glaring omissions of explanation (i.e. just how did an untraveled man with no university training manage to read untranslated Italian plays?), but those holes in his biography only serve to make the playwright more intriguing. Was he bisexual or wasn’t he? Did he hate his wife or didn’t he? Was he a recusant Catholic or wasn’t he? Perhaps we’ll never know and, in the end, none of it really matters because after it’s all said and done “what matters most are the works.” Shakespeare made poetry of the English language and, in his biography of the poet, so does Greenblatt.

Quote of the Day:

2007-03-17T19:58:00.000-05:00

Books are the main source of our knowledge, our resevoir of faith, memory, wisdom, morality, poetry, philosophy, history, and science. Daniel Boorstin, former Librarian of Congress

Word of the Day:

2007-03-16T19:32:00.000-05:00

blazon: the ecstatic inventory of a beloved's features.

Example: Stephen Greenblatt writes, "If a mare could write a love poem to a stallion...she might write this:

Round-hoofed, short-jointed, fetlocks shag and long,
Broad breast, full eye, small head, and nostril wide,
High crest, short ears, straight legs, and passing strong;
Thin mane, thick tail, broad buttock, tender hide."

(Shakespeare sonnet lines 295-98)

Shakespeare Everywhere!

2007-03-15T19:01:00.000-05:00

When I was about thirteen years old I noticed a little something I like to call the “new car phenomenon.” Around that time, my mother had just purchased a used, sky blue Ford Escort. Happy as a car full of clowns, which is what we looked like with my me, mother and my four siblings packed into that little bitty car, we piled in and took the long route home. On the way, I noticed another sky blue Ford Escort driving in the opposite direction. Then I noticed another turning a corner, then I noticed another in a parking lot. Why, the streets were practically crawling with sky blue Ford Escorts! Where had all these cars come from?

Later I learned that, when you buy a new car, because your mind has trained itself to recognize that make and model as your car, your blinders have been removed and suddenly you recognize what you hadn’t before. Of course, you’d probably seen that car before but, because it’s your car now, it’s taken on a greater significance. It’s called the “new car phenomenon” and it’s a law of nature.

I say this all to say that since I’ve been reading Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World I’ve been seeing Shakespeare everywhere. There seems to be a higher number of Shakespearean plays in the theatre, flyers for Shakespeare-related events are being slipped into my mailbox, and friends are re-reading and discussing Shakespearean plays that they haven’t read in years. Shakespeare here, Shakespeare there, Shakespeare everywhere!

And then today, while riding the metro to work, I decided to take a break from Will in the World and pulled out Nick Hornby’s Housekeeping vs. The Dirt. Among several other books that Hornby discusses in his “March 2005” selection, he takes a special interest in Sarah Vowell’s Assassination Vacation, which is “a book about the murders of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley.” If that isn’t reason enough for Hornby’s special interest then the fact that Ms. Vowell was the voice of Violett in The Incredibles, or that Vowell and Hornby were once good friends, or that Hornby makes a walk-on appearance in Assassination Vacation as a “smoker from London called Nick” might be.

Following the “March 2005” piece, Hornby includes an excerpt from Assassination Vacation of the scene in which he makes an appearance. Two pages into the excerpt, someone else also makes a walk-on appearance - that’s it, you guessed it – Shakespeare. It seems that Edwin Booth, brother to the Lincoln-assassinator John Wilkes Booth, was “only the greatest Shakespearean actor of the nineteenth century” and was apparently known as “the Hamlet of his day.”

Now, I knew enough of my American history to know that John Wilkes Booth had been an actor. But that the Booths, as Hornby says, were “a prestigious acting family, a sort of nineteenth-century Baldwin clan” and that they just happened to specialize in Shakespearean theatre, came completely out of left field for me. Not only that, but years later, after he had gotten over the shame of being related to the man who murdered one of the greatest presidents in American history, Edwin just happens to rescue a young man who had fallen onto the train tracks in Jersey City – a young man who turns out to be President Lincoln’s son, Robert Todd Lincoln! Who says fact isn’t stranger than fiction?

Personally, I suspect Edwin pushed him off the platform when no one was looking and then jumped down to save him to redeem the family name. I mean really, what are the odds? But I won’t quibble with fate. Especially not when the lives of the Booths and the Lincolns seem to have been intimately connected in the stars while William Shakespeare himself is somewhere grinning the background.

To Be a Critic or Not to Be...

2007-03-14T08:00:00.000-05:00

(Sorry. I've been reading Greenblatt's biography on Shakespeare "Will in the World" and it's effecting my thinking)

Yesterday, Meg Rosoff posted an article on "The Guardian" weblog entitled Who'd be a Critic? In it, by way of questioning why anyone would want to be a critic, Rosoff seems to argue that not writing a negative review which might hurt the author's feelings is more important than writing an honest review.

Nowadays, I only review books I really like. It's cowardly, I know, but I figure it's not my job to make people unhappy.

To put it mildly, not everyone agreed with Ms. Rosoff. The folks at the Literary Saloon responded:

How can you possibly worry about whether or not you're hurting an author's feelings when reviewing their book ? Sure, it likely hurts them if you say nasty things about their baby, but the reviewer's only obligation is towards the reader.

And the first reply posted to Rosoff’s blog reads:

As a reviewer, you have one single duty: and that is to your readers. Sod the bloody author. If they have such a thin skin as can't cope with a bad review, then they really are in the wrong trade. Your job is to inform, or at least entertain, your readers. If you can't do that, then leave the reviewing to a professional. There's plenty of them about.

In my humble opinion I think Ms. Rosoff’s critics are right. A review, after all, isn’t about the author. It’s about the book. That’s the only thing a critic should consider when they compose their review, not that the author is “shy, unable quite to believe his luck, and really not a person whose feelings you'd want to hurt even if he hadn't (in my humble opinion) written a book worthy of selling like hot cakes.” The Literary Saloon points out that good people write bad books everyday, which is true. The fact that an author brakes for pigeons in the street and volunteers down at the local soup kitchen shouldn’t, and doesn’t, at the end of the day, have any bearing on his skills as a writer.

But Ms. Rosoff’s article raises a more important question than whether a critic should do what they’re paid to do: at what point does an author’s creative work become an entity of its own, separate from the author? At what point does the creative piece cease to belong to the author and become the possession of the larger community and culture? I would argue that as soon as a finished piece is printed and set out for sale, it is no longer simply the author’s book, it’s ours. As such, we have the right and the privilege to judge as we see fit. You, the author, are - sorry to say - a nonentity.

The Literary Saloon uses a common term often used to refer to an author’s novel: “a baby.” Like all parents reluctant to let their children go, authors are often possessive of their work. But novels, like children, after they have been given all the love and care that a parent can bestow, must stand alone and face judgment. Sometimes our children don’t perform as well as we’d hoped and no one wants to be told they’re a bad parent. But it would be less than unkind to lie or pretend otherwise. It would be a betrayal of literature, of culture, and in the end, of the author, for if you don’t know how bad you are, how can you improve? It’s elementary, really.

Letting Go on "The Guardian"

2007-03-13T10:08:00.000-05:00

A copy of my post on "The Guardian" blog about books I've left and let go:

I struggled through and finally gave up on Jared Diamond's "Collapse." I loved "Gun, Germs, and Steel" but I found "Collapse" entirely too dry. It seems as if Diamond made absolutely no attempt to interest his readers in what, at least in theory, should have been a compelling subject. Also, sigh, I never finished "War and Peace." One day I will though. I loved Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre." It's on my top ten list, in fact. But I was absolutely unable to make it through "Villette." I absolutely hated "The World is Flat" by Thomas L. Freidman and left it unfinished with no regrets. Also never finished Nick Hornby's "How to Be Good." I love Hornby as a critic but I have my reservations about his novels. And finally "Love in the Time in Cholera" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Prose was great, subject (unrequited love for a woman who absolutely doesn't deserve it) wasn't.

That's all I can think of so far but I'm sure there's more. My only defense is that I've finished plenty more than I've given up on and it always leaves me feeling a little defeated when I just have to move on, which I think is a good thing.

And here's the response I got from Carefree:

Blimey, LitChild [that's me], I loved Collapse by Jared Diamond, and I'm usually a strictly fiction reader, but I've always been fascinated by the myths of Easter Island and the Viking sagas, so I devoured this - and subsequently leant to a friend about a year ago and desperate to get it back so I can read it again one day!

On an off-topic note, I think EVERYONE should read Collapse to try and get some historical perspective on what we're doing to the planet. And then act on it - it was an inspirational read for me.

Blimey?! Ha, ha! Oh, you gotta love those Brits. But come on, surely, despite its noble purpose, I wasn't the only one who couldn't wade through Collapse.

Oh, You Lazy Reader, You

2007-03-13T07:47:00.000-05:00

Alright, I admit it. I haven’t been reading as much as I should be, or even as much as I’d like to. I’ve just been so darn tired lately. As soon as I get off work, all I want to do sleep. Even on the weekends when I have absolutely no commitment to be anywhere else other than in my apartment all I want is sleep. This past Saturday I did manage to clean and wash clothes and stay awake long enough to see “300" (it’s what you’d expect if you don’t expect too much) but Sunday passed in a narcoleptic haze. I couldn’t stay awake even when I tried, and I did try.

Of course, now I’m beginning to feel the symptoms of reading withdrawal plus I’m getting incredibly behind. It’s also taking me an incredibly long time to finish anything, even for me. Even I know I’ve been working on the same four books for entirely too long. So I’ve promised myself to put some pep back into my biblioaddict step. So, my friends, inspired by The Guardian’s list of unfinished books (http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/), I’ve decided that there are a few books on my own reading list that I just need to let go of. The two that will be biting the dust this week are David Eggars’ You Shall Know Our Velocity and Michael Chabon’s McSweeny’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales.

You Shall Know Our Velocity wasn’t a bad book but I found it entirely too depressing. If I want to feel that depressed, I’ll throw myself off a cliff. As for Chabon’s Mammoth Treasury, well let’s just say, I didn’t find the tales very thrilling at all. The concept, like that of Collapse, was great but the execution was underwhelming. I won’t toss it into my Bookmooch pile yet but it’s going on the waiting list.

Mailbox Goodies

2007-03-12T16:26:00.000-05:00

I've just returned home to find a pleasant surprise in the mail - a complete catalog of the classical literature published by New York Review of Books. In the interest of full-disclosure, technically this catalogue doesn't belong to me. It belongs to the previous tenant - D. Williams, wherever you are - but since it was so nicely lodged in what is now my mailbox I saw no need to give it back. I mean really, could I be so cruel as to banish it to some gray, nondesript postal warehouse of unclaimed mail? Not even I. Not even I. Besides, does flipping through a catologue qualify as stealing someone else's mail? It's not like I a took a knife to an envelope or held it over a kettle of hot steam. If flipping the pages of a catologue or a magazine is stealing, then I think my mailman and I should have a chat. Maybe I could bribe him. I am hard up for cash right now...

But I was talking about my catologue, not defending myself to the likes of you. Now, I don't claim to be familiar with every book that rolls off the presses these days [who could be?] but I do pride myself in being at least remotely familiar with the classics, even if I haven't read half of them - you know, Dickens, Orwell, Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Wolff, and the the like. But, ahem, I'm pretty chagrined to say I've never heard of the classics in this catalogue. Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker, The Diary of a Rapist by Evan S. Connell, The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton...who the heck are they? I've never heard of them or their books a day in my life! Is there an alternative list of classics circulating about or am I just being completely oblivious? Come now NYRB, why not just call it what it is - a bunch of previously out-of-print books that deserve a second chance at canonization?

Some of the titles do sound interesting enough, like The Tenants of Moonbloom by Edward Lewis:

Norman Moonbloom's brother, a slumlord, hires him to collect rent in the buildings he owns in Manhattan. Making his rounds, Moonbloom confronts a wild assortment of brilliantly described urban characters, among them a gay jazz musician with a sideline as a gigolo, a Holocaust survivor, and a brilliant young writer modeled on James Baldwin. He finds he is drawn, in spite of his best judgment, into a desperate attempt to improve their lives.

Why "in spite of his best judgment" though? Because the "urban" characters are irredeamable or because Moonbloom realizes he is in no position to improve someone else's life? I've always thought that to improve someone else's life for the them was rather presumptuous. But before I presume too much, I should probably save my questions until after I've read the book.

The New Yorker, Anniversary Issue

2007-03-11T18:33:00.000-05:00

At the risk of repeating myself, I love the New Yorker. Lately, however, my favorite magazine’s recent and obvious democratic political slant has been disturbing me in ways that are getting harder and harder to ignore. One of the things that initially pleased me when I began reading the magazine in 2002 was its seemingly bipartisan political stance. I liked that, while there were incredibly informative articles on politics and the current state of affairs in Washington, the magazine writers seemed content to merely provide the facts while letting you draw your own conclusions. Yet, since the New Yorker’s endorsement of the Gore campaign in the 2004 presidential election, it seems as if the New Yorker’s bipartisanship is a thing of the past and that, no matter how much of a Democrat I am, saddens me.

In The Financial Page’s “Troubled Waters Over Oil” (Feb. 16 & 26 Anniversary Issue), James Surowiecki, after arguing that threatening war with Iran makes oil prices rise through an effect called “risk premiums” which in turn only strengthens Iran and its president, writes, “Talking tough may look like a good way of demonstrating U.S. resolve, but when tough talk makes our opponent richer and stronger we may accomplish more by saying less.” It’s an interesting point, probably even a valid point, but does it have to be such an obvious refutation of the Bush administration’s Iran foreign policy? Mayhap my memory is faulty, but I recall a time when The Financial Page followed the money instead of the politics.

Immediately following The Financial Page is the article on “24,” “Whatever It Takes” by Jane Mayer. The obvious disapproving liberal slant of this article was palpable. In fact, Mayer made almost no attempt to hide or subvert her own opinion. Disclaimer: I’m an avid fan of “24,” and despite what Mayer would have you believe about anyone who watches the television show, I don’t advocate, support, or believe in torture. In the perfect fantasy world in which “24” exists, torture – and there is a lot of it – is always practiced on the “bad guy” and it always garners some key information which allows Jack Bauer to save the world at the last minute. In that perfect world, Bauer is a patriot and torture is never wrong. Yet, I’m perfectly capable of separating fact from fiction; I’m perfectly capable of recognizing that this isn’t a perfect world and that torture is never right because it often causes more harm than good and that it isn’t always practiced only on the “bad guys,” but on the innocent ones as well.

Unfortunately, it seems as if everyone isn’t as smart as I am, at least according to Mayer they aren’t, and the creators of “24” are rabid conservatives with dangerous ties to the White House. Mayer goes to considerable length to quote military opponents of the show and its tactics (“The kids see it, and say, ‘If torture is wrong, what about ‘24’,” says Patrick Finnegan, the dean of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point) and conservative fanatics who support it (“They [the public] love Jack Bauer…In my mind, that’s as close to a referendum that it’s O.K. to use tough tactics against high-level Al Qaeda operatives as we’re going to get,” says Laura Ingraham, a talk-show radio host). However, at no point does Mayer even make an attempt to speak to Democrats who are also fans of the show, such as Bill Clinton and Barbra Streisand. What ever happened to balance?

What did ever happen to balance in New Yorker? I miss the magazine that assumed I was intelligent enough to draw my own conclusions. I miss the magazine that wasn’t so blatantly liberal as to offend a Democrat like me. I miss the magazine that already knew I don’t read to reinforce my assumptions; I read to broaden them.

Coincidental Circumstances

2007-03-03T22:06:00.000-05:00

Life is so often filled with the strangest coincidences that for a skeptic like me, who believes that there is no such thing as a grand plan for any of us, the unexpected intersections that occur out of the infinite possibilities of life are endlessly amazing. For reasons which I fail to remember at the moment (and probably never will), about a month ago, I decided I wanted a collection of essays written by David Foster Wallace and added both A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster to my wish list on Borders.com.

Then a few days ago, while on a business trip to Baltimore (that sounds so sophisticated, doesn’t it – “business trip”, ha, ha) I went into the most beautiful Barnes & Noble bookstore I’ve ever seen. Initially, I went in to just look around but, since I can’t go into a bookstore without leaving with something in my hand, I decided that it would be a good time to get a few things from my wish list. After an hour or so of browsing (for such a large bookstore, its selection was fairly poor), I finally went in search of David Foster Wallace. With a little assistance from a Barnes & Noble saleswoman, I found the last copy of A Supposedly Fun Thing on the shelf, its edges wrinkled and looking rather pitiful.

In any case, as I often do, at the last minute I decided I just didn’t feel like spending $13.95 on Mr. Wallace. Instead, I bought a romance novel I don’t care to name, The Best American Science Writing 2006, and Don’t Get Too Comfortable by David Rakoff.

Now, if you’ve been paying attention to my posts, and I’m wise enough to know that no one actually does, but if you have, you’d know that it was only a few weeks ago that I admitted to not being able to get though Mr. Rakoff’s previous book Fraud. In fact, I said some very disparaging things about him. I believe I may have called him something in the way of “an un-funny, less-talented David Sedaris rip-off.” But, if you remember that, you’ll also remember I said that, after having read Mr. Rakoff’s selection in TBA Nonrequired Reading, the excellent “Love It or Leave It”, I’d decided that perhaps Mr. Rakoff deserved a second chance. Since I was unaware that Mr. Rakoff had already come out with a new selection of essays, when I saw Don’t Get Too Comfortable on the shelf, I snatched it up and clutched it to my chest all the way to the check-out line.

That still, however, left me David Foster Wallace-less. But, wait! Unbeknownst to me, a coincidence was right around the corner. That coincidence happened today when, after an attack of cabin fever, I went on a wandering stroll around my neighborhood, vaguely in search of some food and some trouble to get into. Unfortunately, my radar for trouble always seems to lead me into bookstores, which I guess, if you’re my wallet, could actually be considered trouble. In any case, my feet inexplicably led me to Idle Time Books, a cute little used bookshop that, unfortunately, opened up a few years ago. I say unfortunately, because the last thing I need is a used bookstore within walking distance from my home.

As usual, I was drawn in by the sale books they always set outside on nice days like today. Browsing the .50 cent box of throw-away books found me a wonderfully ratty edition of five Euripides plays, three of which I don’t already have in my collection. And since I had to go in to purchase the book, well, I figured I might as well browse and see what else there was to see, right? Right.

So, I looked around, picked-up and put back down Alice Munro’s Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (I’m not really into Munro but I love the title of that book), found nothing in the travel literature section, picked up and put back down P.D. James’ The Lighthouse (eh, maybe another day), and then finally, I looked to my right, glancing over at a few books displayed at the top of a shelf and what do I see? Oh, come on, I’m sure you can guess – that’s right, David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing!

It appeared as if the book gods were smiling down on me with favor this day. Three days ago, I’d balked at paying $13.95 for a novel I wanted and now, here it was, in a used bookstore, as crisp and as clean as the day it rolled off the press, and half the price! Sure, I got a few odd glances when I let out of squeal of delight and danced a little jig right there in the store but I didn’t care (truthfully, no one else did either. I’m sure they all assumed I was a part of the odd Halloween grocery cart relay race that was taking place outside. I have no idea what it was or why it was happening, so don’t ask).

Naturally, I purchased the book ($7.50 - beat that Barnes & Noble! Ha, ha.) along with my Euripides, of course, and grinned all the way home. These days are the days when I love being alive. The clouds part, the sun shines, you leave in search of adventure, and return home with some good books, and an extra seven dollars in your pocket. As far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t get any better than that, I don’t care what anyone says.

Captain Alatriste, Final

2007-03-03T19:50:00.000-05:00

By Arturo Perez-Reverte
pgs. 71-End

If a series’ first novel is meant to both satisfy and inspire curiosity within its readers, then Captain Alatriste fulfills its duty well. While I was satisfied with the novel’s conclusion, Mr. Perez-Reverte leaves just enough loose ends hanging so that my next order of business, as soon as I get the money to do it, is to buy Purity of Blood.

After finishing the book late last night, I lay back with the lights off and fell asleep in awe of Perez-Reverte’s artistry. This wasn’t due to any admiration on my behalf of his writing, though it deserves that too since the beauty of Perez-Reverte’s sentences lies in the simplicity of his words and the unadorned way he has of shaping a story. No, my admiration lay in the question that had nagged me since I turned the last page: How is that, in Captain Alatriste everything is resolved and yet…nothing is resolved?

I risk giving away too much of the story here, so I shall tread carefully. Captain Alatriste, who finds himself in a bit of trouble after saving the life of a very important person – a person whom he was hired to kill – gains more than a few enemies, who try to kill him several times. At the novel’s conclusion, Captain Alatriste manages to escape torture and death by the a very thin hair, but his adversaries remain at large and still strongly desire to put a few “sword-tailored buttonholes in his body.” At the novel’s conclusion, the only things Captain Alatriste has for defense is a small letter of protection and his Toledo steel.

But Captain Alatriste is about so much more than shady characters and sharp swords. It’s about seventeenth-century Spain. Spain makes so many descriptive appearances in the story that she becomes more of a character, rather than simply a setting. Coffers filled to over-flowing with gold from the New World, Spain is decadent, Spain is dying, Spain is “in the midst of all that corruption and madness, moving against the course of history, like a beautiful, terrifying animal that still slashed and clawed yet at the heart was eaten by a malignant tumor.”

Indeed, Captain Alatriste seems to be not only an action-adventure but also a tribute to the golden age of Spain when she was at the height of her beauty and power. It’s clear that the author loves his country as much as his narrator. In the hands of Arturo Perez-Reverte, seventeenth century Spain seems as real today as it did four hundred years ago. And, though she may be filled with characters willing to “put hand to sword, or to knife another being, merely to get into a theater performance”, Perez-Reverte's Spain is a country I plan to revisit as soon as I get some cash in my pocket and manage to carry my butt to the nearest bookstore.

Only a Duke Will Do

2007-03-02T01:16:00.000-05:00

by Sabrina Jeffries
pgs. 1-End

Romance, the bastard child of literature, never gets the respect it deserves. It’s purely pleasure reading, and, of course, we should never read for pleasure. We should educate ourselves and expand our minds as we examine our lives or lives of others. And while there is nothing wrong with reading for any of those reasons - I read for those reasons myself - there should also be nothing wrong with reading simply to feel good about being alive, and few things are more life-affirming than love. It’s true that romance novels rarely have a greater philosophical point, unless it is the universal point that love can overcome any problem and that happily ever-after endings are possible, but whenever I need to escape a circumstance that threatens to plunge me into a sea of depression, a wonderfully-written romance novel never fails to lift me out.

Which brings me to my next point: there is a such thing as a well-written romance novel. Sure, the romance market is flooded with mediocre or even less-than mediocre writing, but then so is the market for any writing genre, even the prestigious “literature and fiction” fiction. So, why then do those who call themselves “serious” readers sneer at anything that comes in glossy paperback with lovers thrown across the cover? Because it looks like trash and often it is but, just as often, if you’re adventurous enough to look beyond the cheesy covers, you’ll find some surprisingly readable writing.

Sabrina Jeffries is one of those writers. The covers of her books are horrendously cheesy, although they have gotten better since she’s grown more popular, but her writing is wonderfully well-done, her characters exquisitely crafted. She, like any great writer of any genre, creates characters to whom you feel intimately connected; characters whom you shall wish to revisit time and time again. While Only a Duke Will Do (a misleading title since the Duke’s status has nothing whatsoever to do with the plot) is not her best novel - To Pleasure a Prince and Pirate Lord tie for first place in my book - it is, nevertheless, a breeze of a read sufficient enough to lighten any dark wintry day.

On the other hand, though Simon and Louisa come vividly alive on the page, I found their story the least satisfying of all of her books. There are perhaps several reasons for this, one of them being that my expectations were unreasonably high after having waited for their story since reading To Pleasure a Prince. I reject that theory, however, in favor of the theory that the “trouble” with their relationship - Louisa’s inability to trust Simon, Simon’s consuming ambition, and his fear of love (a common theme in Jeffries books) - despite Jeffries’ effort, hardly seems like trouble at all.

After having been banished to India for six years by the king at the behest of Louisa, Simon returns to England and his ill-feelings are suddenly forgotten in the face of Louisa’s beauty (it sounds cheesy, I know but hey, it is a romance novel after all). Louisa, of course, puts up a rather perfunctory resistance, and that’s exactly how it feels, perfunctory, especially since two paragraphs later she’s getting married to the man and happily at that. Indeed, Louisa’s easy capitulation in every argument they had was the most bothersome. For someone who had supposedly learned from her mistake of trusting Simon six years ago, she is certainly easy to get around.

But I nitpick. My annoyance with Louisa’s easiness, in no way, or at least, in a very little way, affected my enjoyment of Only a Duke Will Do. A quick tour of Sabrina Jeffries’ website will find you these words, “I believe reading should always be a good time, with lots of wit and sensuality and laughs and even the occasional sigh or tear.” Thus far, all of Ms. Jeffries books have accomplished this feat, which is why I look forward to reading the upcoming release of Beware a Scot’s Revenge. In the meantime, I think I’ll work on my own novel, which shall be titled, Beware of Judging a Book By Its Cheesy Cover.

Selling My Soul for Five Dollars or Less

2007-02-23T11:20:00.000-05:00

I have just made a bargain with the devil. With sulfur on his breath and lies on his lips, he asked for my soul in exchange for five dollars (or less) and I gave it to him. Let me explain.

I'm broke. In fact, I'm worse than broke - I'm in debt. I owe so many people so much money that my paycheck, the one I thought would be noticeably substantial now that I've started my new job, is gone before I get it. I just got paid today, and guess what - I'm broke.

So after receiving a lecture from my most ruthless creditor, my grandmother, on the error of my spendthrift ways (and this is after I told her I've been eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dinner), I decided it was time to investigate some supplemental income options. Surely someone is willing to pay me for my witty insights and educated opinions on literature. Right? Right.

And while I was building the courage to send a query email to some of the more respectable publications, I happened to come across www.allreaders.com. What do I see at the top of the web page? "Enter a book review or reviews online (click here) and make $5!" Oh, man. This is too good to be true, I thought. They're willing to pay me five dollars outright for my review, samples unseen?

I'm no sucker (at least, not most of the time), so before I got too excited I surfed the site looking for anything that screamed "Scam!" As it turns out, there is no scam. The editors of allreaders.com will pay you five dollars or less, depending on how much they like your submission, but there's a catch. The catch is they don't want a review, they want a summary a la high school book report-style. They want their "reviewers" a.k.a. "paid scholars" to give away the book's every detail except the ending.

Oh, the horror! What an insult to reading! Don't they know the journey is just as important as the destination? Who would read such a site ("Over 2,000,000 monthly visitors!")? Who would contribute to such a site? Sigh...That would be me. What can I say? I'm desperate.

I've just finished writing a plot summary (oh, god) of Angela Knight's Master of the Moon. I feel terrible. I feel cheap. I've gone against every bookworm bone in my body for a measly five dollars; if the editors don't like my review I might get even less. I don't know what's worse: having my plot summary rejected by the editors of a site I despise or having it accepted, knowing that if it is, I'll be writing another.

Will in the World, pt. 1

2007-02-22T16:07:00.000-05:00

by Stephen Greenblatt
pgs. 11-105

Lately, it seems I've been reading several books set in Europe or - as in the case of All Souls' Rising (Haiti) - set in countries which fell under the scope of European rule. Together, with Captain Alatriste (Spain) and now with Will in the World (England), they have reinforced one undeniable fact - my European history sucks. Once upon a time, I knew the names of the kings and the queens, the princes and the princesses. I knew who married whom, what religion started where, who had a revolution, when, how, and why. But that was a long time ago. Now all these books set in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe has my head spinning. Sadly, I've been spending a lot of time on Wikipedia.

In spite of (or maybe, because of) my crappy knowledge of European history, I've wanted Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World for a long time. For years, in fact. I've only recently added it to my collection because I don't like hardbacks. (I'll buy a small one but I find the larger hardbacks too heavy, I don't care how good they look on my bookshelf.) So, I bidded my time and waited. When I saw the paperback Will in the World in the bookstore, I snatched it up like it was the last copy.

I fell in love with Shakespeare the day I read my first Bard play, The Tragedy of Macbeth. I won't torture you with talk of how much I love that play ("Out damned spot! Out!") but when I attended university, I bravely took a course in Shakespeare with the hardest professor in the department because I absolutely love the Bard's way with words. Unfortunately, during those four blissful months, I learned much about Shakespeare's plays and very little about the man. Will in the World is intended to rectify that situation.

Yet I'm beginning to doubt that it can. The facts of Shakespeare's life are based on more speculation than I thought. Several of Greenblatt's sentences begin with qualifiers such as: if, could have, it's possible, and maybe. When discussing Shakespeare's (possible) early education, Greenblatt writes,

"No surviving records indicate how often the Stratford teachers during Will's school years had the boys perform plays or which plays they assigned. Perhaps there was a time, a year or so before Will left school, when the teacher - Oxford-educated Thomas Jenkins - decided to have the boys perform Plautus's frenetic farce about identical twins, The Two Menaechmuses. And perhaps on this occasion..."

Thanks to Greenblatt's writing, the scholarly speculation which composes much of Shakespeare's early life, hasn't become annoying. Instead, it just seems honest.

A New Yorker Occurance on the Bus

2007-02-20T12:53:00.000-05:00

by Me

Ah, ha! This morning I saw a man reading the January 15, 2007 issue of the New Yorker on the bus. Now I don't feel so bad for just beginning the January 29 issue. This week though, I am making a concerted effort to catch up (this week's anniversary issue has an article on the creators of "24" that I can't wait to read). However, I'm also determined not to skip ahead. I will give my New Yorkers their due respect and read them in the order they were published.

While I'm on the subject, I guess I should write a New Yorker post, which I've been neglecting to do as much as I have the magazine. --

Jerome Groopman's article on how doctors think ("What's the Trouble?") validates, sadly, my grandmother's belief that doctors don't know what the hell they're talking about. We all know that doctors are occasionally wrong - they are human, after all. But of course, the scary part is, frequently when doctors are wrong someone dies. The even scarier part is that the problems which often cause misdiagnosis are problems that seem to be the result of, well, human nature. For instance, a heuristic to which doctors may be particularly prone is "availability," which refers to "the tendency to judge the likelihood of an event by the ease with which relevant examples come to mind."

If you are an overworked doctor with a roomful of patients waiting to be seen, how likely is it that, given human nature, your diagnosis will not be based on how quickly examples of the relevant symptoms and diagnosis come to mind? My guess is, not very likely. Of course, all doctors should try to be as thorough as possible, especially since not doing so could put lives at risk. But the likelihood that that will happen every time, all the time, is idealistic. Yet, as with all ideals, it is certainly something to which doctors should aspire.

Steve Martin's "Seventy-Two Virgins" was surprisingly funny. I say "surprisingly" because reading an article in the "Shouts & Murmers" section is often like reading a mystery: I'm always trying to figure out where the hell the joke is. Yet, "Seventy-Two Virgins" was entertaining and even, on occasion, laugh-out-loud funny. For instance, Virgin No. 16: "Even I know that's tiny." Or, Virgin No. 49: "I really enjoyed that. Thank you very much. Gee, it's late." Or even, Virgin No. 45, "When you're done, you should really check out how cool this ceiling is." Come on, you gotta admit, it's a little harsh but it's funny.

David Sedaris' piece "The Birds" is typical Sedaris fare - a memoir-ish piece in which he finds the funny in a situation that, in anyone else's hands, would be a typical, everyday occurance. On this occasion, two birds begin to ram themselves crazily into Sedaris' window for no apparent reason. Sedaris' plan - to tape album covers onto the windows to discourage them from attacking - strangly enough, works. "There I filled the windows with Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Joan Armatrading, and Donna Summer, who has her minuses but can really put the fear of God into a chaffinch." Only David Sedaris. Why can't my life be that crazy? Then again, maybe it is and I'm just not observant enough to notice.

What the hell is happening in Russia? In "Kremlin, Inc." Michael Specter writes, "Since 1999, when Vladimir Putin, a career K.G.B. officer, was, in effect, anointed as President by Boris Yeltsin, thirteen journalists have been murdered in Russia. Nearly all the deaths took place in strange circumstances, and none of them have been successfully investigated." And here I'd thought Russia was trying to work its way out of its Communist era. Apparently though, with the permission of his people (at least, according to Specter), Putin is working Communism back in.

Specter is quick to point out that, though the death of dissenting journalists may be placed at the feet of Putin and the K.G.B., the destruction of free media is as much the media's fault as it is their government's. In an effort to ensure that Yeltsin would win the 1996 presidential election against a pro-communist conservative, the media purposely skewered their reports in favor of Yeltsin. But, Specter writes, "...when Russia's young democrats jettisoned the rules of democracy they also forfeited their independence."

Because democracy has been a part of the United States' fabric for so long, it's easy to forget that applying its principles may not be as simple as it looks to us Americans. In fact, half the time, it's not even simple for us (see abortion rights and gay marraige) and we've been doing it for a few hundred years. Even still, the protection of the rights we hold so dear require constant viligence and clarification. If they didn't, what would the Supreme Court do with its time? So we have to ask ourselves, if we were forced to make the same choices that Russians have had to make recently, would we choose differently? "In today's Russia...stability is everything and damn the cost," Specter writes. It's a tough choice: civil liberty or stability? Which would you choose?...Are you sure?

Captain Alatriste, pt. 1

2007-02-17T14:09:00.000-05:00

by Arturo Perez-Reverte
pgs. 1-70

I haven't read a good action novel in a while. A few days ago I decided I wanted to read something that would send a rush of blood through my veins and make my lungs burn as I held my breath. Because Jack reacher never fails to leave me with an anxious heartbeat, I thought I would be best served by picking up Lee Child's The Hard Way. But as I browsed my shelf, attempting to make a decision, Captain Alatriste kept whispering my name. So, I drew it out, stuck a bookmark in it and hoped I wasn't making a decision I would regret. I offer my assurances, here and now, I don't.

"Cling, clang; greetings and godspeed," will be a good way, I think, to summarize Arturo Perez-Reverte's Captain Alatriste. It's dark, it's dangerous, and it's full of cloaked characters engaged in swordplay. Yet, to call this book a swashbuckler would be a vast understatement. It is set in seventeenth-century Spain and it does involve swordplay but "swashbuckler" - at least in my understanding of the term - in no way hints at the creepy suspense or the dark shadows, the damp streets, and the shadowy characters that populate well-written Spanish historical adventure novels. "Swashbuckling" is too cheery a term to apply to something written in the same vein as the dark and dangerous Alexandre Dumas stories, Count of Monte Cristo or The Three Musketeers, which are nothing like their various romanticized Hollywood treatments.

Atmosphere, including the characters, is everything in a novel such as this and Perez-Reverte does it brilliantly: "In one corner of the room stood a man muffled in a black cape; a wide-brimmed hat of the same color covered his head...The only signs of life visible between the cape and the hat were dark, gleaming eyes, which the candlelight picked out among the shadows, lending their owner and menacing and ghostly air." Doesn't a passage like that just make you sigh with unadulterated pleasure?

And oh! It reads like a serial. Like most modern readers I suspect, I tend to sneer at obvious page-turner attempts. It can turn reading into an exercise akin to watching soap operas and I hate soap operas. But Perez-Reverte is a skilled enough writer to know that, by including sentences at the end of the chapter - sentences you know that, in an earlier day and age would have been followed by the words "To be continued" - adds to the atmosphere and further entrenches the reader into seventeenth century Spain. And it's hard not to love a chapter that ends with: "And I was left standing in the middle of the street, enslaved by love, watching that girl who to me was a blonde angel. Poor fool that I was, oblivious of the fact that I had just met my sweetest, most dangerous, and mortal enemy."

Luckily for me, I'm not a seventeenth-century reader and Captain Alatriste isn't an actual serial but a novel. That's one of the many wonders of this modern day and age - instant gratification.

The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2006 - 3.0

2007-02-16T14:38:00.000-05:00

The New Mecca by George Saunders
Peg by Sam Shaw
Here Is a Lesson in Creative Writing by Kurt Vonnegut
Kenyon Commencement Speech by David Foster Wallace

Ok, this is the real real final post on TBA Nonrequired Reading 2006. I promise.

I love George Saunders. It's not too often that one finds a sentimental yet skeptical, let's love everybody and learn together soul-mate but I've found mine in Saunders. In "The New Mecca", while stading outside a wild water-ride in Dubai with an eclectic crowd of people, Saunders writes, "Then the [American] Navy Guys notice the Glowering Muttering Arabs, and it gets weirdly tense there in line." Here's why I love Saunders. Later, as they're all lounging in the water while their pulse rates slow, Saunders relates, "...in my tube at Wild Wadi, I have a mini-epiphany: given enough time, I realize, statistically, despite what it may look like at any given moment, we will all be brothers...Look what just happened here: hatred and tension were defused by Sudden Fun." Saunders is a man who believes in the essential goodness of man. He believes that, no matter our differences, we are all united in our need for love and the desire for our own slice of peace and happiness before we die. But Saunders isn't all rose-tinted glasses. He's also self-depricating and funny, which makes the sentimentality more edible for those of you more cynical than I am.

Sam Shaw's "Peg" is another one of those stories I'll forget as soon as I put it down. I understand the guy George was lonely and all. I also understand that he had dependency/power issues. I don't understand, however, if I'm supposed to think this guy isn't insane when casually takes the decapitated head of car accident victim home and proceeds to talk to it. This guy was nuts, certainly unhinged, and if I had been his wife I'd have done more than back into the bedroom and close the door. I'd have run hysterically to the neighbors and made a call to the guys in white who drive the paddy wagon.

"Here is a Lesson in Creative Writing" by Kurt Vonnegut is another one of those cool, funky pieces I wish I was cool enough to like. I don't dislike it. I even get what he's trying to do (I think), which is to poke fun at creative writing programs which begin by telling you to write one way and end by telling you to break all the rules. I get it, great point. But, eh. It didn't leave a lasting impression. Though it isn't as forgettable as "Peg" I won't be rushing back to re-read this piece and I need all the lessons in creative writing I can get.

And finally, last but not least, is David Foster Wallace's "Kenyon Commencement Speech." Wallace's commencement speech isn't anything like the one I received when I graduated college. I can't even remember who gave out commencement speech, which shouldn't be a suprise since I was asleep during most of the graduation program. Wallace's speech though is true, inspirational...sort of, and, most of all, it's funny. Whoever said that commencement speeches should be humourless and didactic should be made to sit under the hot sun while some windbag drones on and on about how our lives are really beginning.

When Wallace writes, "...my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and it's going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way, and who the fuck are all these people in my way?", I wanted to stand up and clap. Finally, someone who knows how to explain the life college graudates can expect to have as adults without sounding pompous and know-it-all! I didn't stand up and clap of course, but I did laugh out loud. Wallace's piece was a good note on which to end the anthology.

From "Kenyon Commencement Speech": "There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, 'Morning, boys, how's the water?' And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, 'What the hell is water?'"

I love reading The Best American Nonrequired Reading series because I always feel a little smarter for it. The 2006 installment has been no different. Though it was heavy in Iraq-related material, I can't complain it wasn't relevant to the times. And no matter how off-the-wall some its selections are, I know that I'm just a little step closer to ensuring I won't be a fish who's asking what water is - I'll already know.

The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2006 - 2.0

2007-02-16T13:18:00.000-05:00

Pirate Station by Rick Moody
The Kidney-Shaped Stone That Moves Every Day by Haruki Murakami
False Cognate by Jeff Parker
Love It or Leave It by David Rakoff
Trauma on Loan by Joe Sacco

Obviously my plan to fit all of my final comments into one post didn't work. I could have tried but I figured no one wanted to read a blog post three full web pages long. Naturally, I could try not to be so long winded but, what's the point in writing a journal if you can't be as long-winded as you like? Yes, yes, I know I'm the one always harping on concise writing but, hey, I'm not here to talk about me. I'm here to talk about TBA Nonrequired Reading 2006 and, if you don't mind, that's exactly what I'm going to do.

Now, "Pirate Station." There's a metaphor in there somewhere. I know there is but I'll be darned if I can find it. It could be I just didn't look very hard - a perfectly feasible supposition - since, although "Pirate Station" is funky and out-of-the-box, I never find pieces like this very interesting, even though I earnestly want to. It's the story of my life. A cool person would like a cool piece like this. I'm not cool so I just don't get it. Why is the pirate station anthropomorphized at the end of the story? Moody writes, "The pirate station goes off its medication. The pirate station quarrels frequently and is testy about things that never used to bother it." Huh? Isn't this the same pirate station that was broadcasting music a page before? Yes, I'm uncool, I don't get it and, now I'm moving on.

A bit of fatherly advice - "Among the women a man meets in his life, there are only three who have real meaning to him. No more, no less" - becomes the driving force behind a man's relationships in Murakami's "The Kidney-Shaped Stone that Moves Every Day." Despite how much I liked reading Junpei's story, I think I enjoyed the fictional story from which the title of this piece is derived. "The Kidney-Shaped Stone that Moves Every Day" is the title of the story Junpei is writing when he meets a woman with whom he falls in love. "She steps down into the dry stream bed and notices an odd stone...She realizes right away that it's shaped like a kidney...Every morning she finds the stone in a different place." Those are the kind of out-of-the-box stories that, nerd that I am, I like reading.

I have no thoughts on Jeff Parker's "False Cognate" whatsoever. It was one of those stories that, though the writing is exceptional and the story - an expat in Russia with no friends takes a bus ride into the country and narrowly escapes being blown up - is well told, I will forget as soon as put down the book. There was simply nothing remarkable I found about this story. I feel sorry for that but there it is.

I have David Rakoff's Fraud on my shelf. I've read half of it and I've done thatby skipping around. I hadn't decided whether I wanted to read the other half because I had slowly approached the conclusion that Rakoff was a less-funnier and less-talented version of David Sedaris. I still don't know if I'll ever finish Fraud but Rakoff has redeemed himself in my book with "Love It or Leave It", in which Rakoff, a former Canadian, confesses, "George W. Bush made me want to be an American." The description of his subsequent naturalization is funnier than anything he's written in Fraud. And if officially becoming an American so you can vote to get Bush out of office doesn't reflect good ole' American values, I don't know what does.

Joe Sacco's "Trauma on Loan", the last graphic piece in the anthology, is long way from Delisle's funny and deprecating "Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea." "Trauma on Loan" graphically illustrates a series of actual interviews Sacco has with two Iraqi men, Thahe Sabbar and Sherzad Khalid, who were held by American soldiers in an Iraqi prison. They have traveled to the States to be defendants a lawsuit against Donald Rumsfield which holds him responsible for the Abu-Gharib-like torture they endured while imprisoned. The story is well told but I didn't find the graphics necessary. Sacco's illustrations are nothing compared to the atrocities my imagination creates when I read these men's horrific stories.

The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2006

2007-02-15T21:57:00.000-05:00

Wading Toward Home by Michael Lewis
Are Iraqis Optimistic? by The Lincoln Group
Room No. 12 by Naguib Mahfouz

As you can see, I've been a very, very bad girl. Within the past three days, I have devoured the last half of TBA Nonrequired Reading 2006. I read it so uncharacteristically quickly that I didn't have time to keep up with their respective blog posts. As a result, I've decided to be lazy and economical with my space by attemping to squeeze my thoughts on the final half of TBA Nonrequired Reading into one post. (Large inhale.) Here it goes:

"Wading Towards Home", another personal account on the Hurricane Katrina tragedy in New Orleans (and after reading the articles in the New Yorker it feels as if I've read many), is surprisingly original. It has added a new layer to my understanding of the tragedy by telling the story of the people on the other side of town, opposite from those in the Lower Ninth Ward, the upper middle class. I haven't read too many stories about the people on the dry side of the flood most likely because most of them weren't the ones sitting on their roofs waiting for rescue, or herded into sports centers or shipped out on buses.

What I also didn't know is that some of those who did stay (or in some cases, came back) were preparing themselves for the race war of the century. At one point a misinformed police officer advises his white friends, "If I were you , I'd get the hell out of here. Tonight they gonna waste white guys, and they don't care which ones." Another young man who has just flown in on a Russian assualt helicopter (where in the world did he get that thing?) says, "Hell, yes, I was scared. We didn't know what to expect. We thought Zulu Nation might be coming out of the woods."

Yet, in all of his travels through his middle-class neighborhood, Lewis never comes across a raiding, bloodthirsty black person and it doesn't take a genius to figure that what the young militant man really meant was that he was hoping the Zulu nation might be coming out of the woods. Then he would have had a reason to shoot, therby giving him an outlet for his repressed racist anxiety.

This anxiety seems to be the real subject of "Wading Toward Home". Lewis writes, "They harbored a deep distrust of their own city and their fellow citizens - which is why they were so quick to believe the most hysterical rumors about one another." However, Lewis is optimistic: "The ghosts have been flushed out of their hiding places; now there's a chance to chase them away, or at least holler at the a bit." I wish I could be as optimistic as Lewis. I wish I could believe that the floods exposed the nastiness hiding in New Orleans, which will then melt away like the water flowing back into the sea. I wish I could, but I don't. I will hope though.

"Are Iraqis Optimistic?", a newspaper article written by an American soldier posing as an Iraqi journalist who denounces terrorism and puts a positve spin on the Iraqi, is a part of a PR campaign sponsored by the Pentagon. There isn't anything surprising in this piece. In fact, once you know who's writing it, the article says everything you would expect it to say. For instance: "Our national wealth is once again our own, instead of that of a terrible dictator. Hundreds of thousands of satellite TVs are in Iraqi homes...most important, we can now practice our religion as we choose, whether we are Sunni, Shia, or Christian." Huh. No comment. The only thing surprising about this piece was its existance but, then again, even that's not a surprise - not in the world we live in today.

I'm not quite sure what I think about "Room No. 12" by Naguib Mahfouz. Its ending in certainly a suprise. Mass murder by drowning is not quite how I expected the story to fold. I suppose, however, when one considers the hotel manager, a man so in need of control that he becomes unhinged when he's presented with a situation beyond his comprehension and power, a situation which comes in the form of mysterious woman and a large party, the fact that he condems the party to death is not so much of a surprise. After he gives the order that the people in Room No. 12 should be left to drown, Mahfouz writes, "...he felt his great burden lighten, as his confidence returned with his clarity of mind." As it turns out, in the little world of his hotel, the manager is nothing more than a petty dictator and he acts the part to perfection.

Ok ladies and gents, it's getting late and I'm zoning out. I think this is as good a place as any to stop so I will. I promise I'll finish this post tomorrow. Until then...night, night.

Housekeeping vs. The Dirt, pt. 1

2007-02-15T21:13:00.000-05:00

by Nick Hornby
The Preface

I've decided today that I will begin reading the one book on my shelf that is sure to break my heart with jealousy - Nick Hornby's Housekeeping vs. The Dirt. If you will remember, this is the book that plummeted me into a pit of depression when I discovered that Hornby, a much better and more successful writer than I could ever hope to be, was doing what I'm trying to with this blog in a monthly column for "The Believer." I bought it grudgingly because reading it would be an education after all and, as an aspiring writer who's never had a thing published, well I should be in the business educating myself. So I've begun reading The Dirt and damnit so far it's great. I hate it.

I hate it not only because Hornby, a writer of whom I had promised to steer clear (I really did hate How to Be Good - really), is a much better writer than I am, or not even only because he has my dream job ("Yes, I would be paid for it, but I would be paid to write about what I would have done anyway, which is read the books I wanted to read."), but also because Hornby tells the world the message I had always thought it was my duty and destiny to impart: Reading should always be pleasurable and if it isn't you should be reading something else. Hornby writes, "...if you're reading a book that's killing you, put it down and read something else, just as you would reach for the remote if you weren't enjoying a TV program."

Not only has Hornby taken my message but - and here's the real kicker - he's inspired me. He's finally turned up the volume to the little voice inside my head, the one that I've been ignoring for the past two months, which has been telling me that I need to put Jared Diamond's Collapse down and simply walk away. Slogging through that book has been a dreadful chore. Hornby has forced me to realize that by continuing to read it, I'm merely reinforcing the despicable myth that "books should be hard work, and that unless they're hard work, they're not doing us any good." So I'm putting it down and picking up The Dirt.

I can't claim that I don't feel the sour swallow of jealousy worming its way around in my belly still but I'll get over it. Who knows, maybe I'll learn something while I'm at it.

Letting Go of God?

2007-02-15T14:36:00.000-05:00

by Julia Sweeney
from The Best American Nonrequired Reading

These days it seems as if God and who's a "true believer" or not is on everyone's mind. I suppose I shouldn't say everyone, if who I really mean are the politicians running in the 2008 presidential election hoping to get the religious right votes which ferried Bush into office twice, those people who are the religious right, and those of us deathly afraid that those religious right folks might give us another pean of Bush-style religious sanctity.

But its relevancy to the political environment isn't what makes Julia Sweeney's autobiographical piece which charts the devolution of her belief in God such a wonderful read. It was wonderful because - and I'm being completely subjective here - I related to her journey every step of the way. Step one: The smug superiority Sweeny feels towards the Mormons who come knocking on her door, I've felt that. I was raised as a Jehovah's Witness, which is as much a fringe faith as Mormonism is but I still felt that sting of superiority when I could question my Baptist friends on the origin of Christmas accutremon and they would come up empty.

But then, Sweeny writes, "I realized that I had been getting a bit lazy about my faith...So I decided to rededicate myself to my church." That's step two, we have in common, except my rededication wasn't a result of missionary Mormons but the consequence of reading a library pamphlet which included an unflattering history of Jehovah's Witness. That's one of the few places Sweeny and I diverge - Sweeny rededicates herself to her faith to prove herself right. I rededicated myself to prove someone else wrong. Our rededications both had the same result though: surprised disgust, growing disbelief, and an undying hope that things are going to get better as soon as we learned a bit more and had a little more faith.

During my own Bible study and struggle, I too had the conversation that Sweeny has with her priest as he tries to explain away her confusion and disillusionment with the Old Testament: "Well, the Exodus story is myth in the sense that it never actually happened. But it's not a myth in the fact that the story was believed by a group of people who shaped their identity in the world based on thinking it was true...You have to read [the Bible] with the eyes of faith," the priest says. That speech didn't work for Sweeny and neither did it work for me. I mean really, if the priest is right then he can't seriously argue that there's any difference between Christianity and Greek mythology if it's all based on myth, nor from any other religion in history of the world for that matter. What religion in the world isn't used by its believers to shape their identity in the world? According to the words of the priest - and according to the words of my own spiritual leader - it's not required that the stories in the bible be true, only that we believe they're true. If that's not the largest crock of bull I don't know what is.

And finally Sweeny and I took that last step together: Admitting to ourselves that we believe there is no God and learning how to live with that. "And I began to see the world completely differently," Sweeny writes. And she's right, you do. Sometimes the world looks better than the way it did before with God in it and sometimes it looks worse but mostly it just is.

"Letting Go of God" is a journey. Like any good journey, there's suspense, drama, love, and loss. I loved it because it's a journey I've taken. You'll love it too because it's a journey we should all take, even if we don't end up in the same place.

Harmony's Way, pt. 2

2007-02-13T23:44:00.000-05:00

by Lora Leigh
pgs. 200-End

It took me forever to get through the last forty pages of this book, mainly because I needed a break from Harmony and Jonas for a while. Though they are less annoying and more interesting than Megan and Braden in Megan's Mark, Harmony and Jonas also became a little boring towards the end. Harmony was beginning to harp on her confused feelings a little too often and Jonas was beginning to turn into that typical Breed male stereotype. I dislike it when authors repeat themselves, which I understand is fraught with complication since every Breed novel is essentially the same. Have I mentioned that's why I don't read Christine Feehan's Dark series anymore? I'm willing to pay $6.99 for a novel about a tortured Carpathien and his angelic mate but so many times.

Reading should always be a progression and great, even good, writing is never stagnant. Why then do I feel I've read the tortured and confused scene with the heroine sitting around with a frown on her face, wondering how she is ever going to make it through the emotions she's never felt before pulling her apart? In yet another scene of Harmony standing around contemplating her feelings, Leigh writes, "She shook her head unconsciously, frowing as she tried to make sense of herself." Sigh. Again? Earlier, Leigh wrote, "Emotions rose, twisting, churning inside her chest until she wondered at the fact that she could breathe for them." Sigh. Again? Apparently, along with the heightened hearing, strength, and agility of Breed genetics, Harmony also inherited - along with Megan - an exhausting enlarged capacity for emotion. Is there anything more stereotypically female than a woman stading around analyzing her feelings every second? Is there any wonder that I skip these two page passages?

I hate that I get so annoyed with these novels yet I still return for more hoping for an improvement. As I've said before, Harmony and Jonas are an improvement over Megan and Braden but, after having gone back and re-read the other Breed novels published on the Ellora's Cave website, I've realized that that doesn't really say much. Sheera and Kane from Kiss of Heat, Amanda and Kiowa from Soul Deep, Merinus and Callan from Tempting the Beast, and Roni and Taber from The Man Within are all, by far, better characters than Harmony and Jonas could ever hope to be. If Leigh really hopes to gain a new following of readers through her mass market paperbacks, I would suggest printing the early Lion Breed e-books. I'd buy those anyday.

Me and You and Everyone We Know

2007-02-12T23:38:00.000-05:00

by Miranda July
from The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2006

This is an excerpt of five scenes from the original shooting script of the film. I've never seen the film and I'm not sure if that improves or hinders my reading of script. I am sure, though, that if I were an actress given a copy of these five scenes to study, I would certainly ask, "What's my motivation?" because everyone's motivation in the excerpt is obscure, to say the least.

In the very brief synopsis of the film precluding the excerpt we're informed that Richard "sells shoes in a department store and is prepared for amazing things to happen. One of these amazing things comes in the form of a persistent customer named Christine." Why then, is he so abrupt with her when she invites herself into his car? He's angry and maybe a little afraid without, it seems, any reason for either, especially when one considers how well their conversation had gone before their angry exchange. Richard seemed to be almost reluctant to end their conversation but when he's given an opportunity to continue it, he kicks her out of his car.

And what kind of relationship does Richard have with his two sons Robby and Peter? There seems to be some kind of tension between them although that too is never explained. Granted, the synopsis does mention that Richard is newly divorced, which may explain the tension but is it an angry, confused, or resentful tension?

As it stands, this excerpt reads like what it is - an excerpt. It's tellingly incomplete and reads like a script would if you followed someone around with a camera for a day. It's simple to observe a lot but, without the proper background, it's difficult to learn much at all. I don't think that this excerpt was included for it's revealing character studies. More than likely, it was chosen for it's off-kilter scenes not because they work so well together but because, as stand-alone pieces, they are wonderfully odd and make for some compelling reading.

Before he kicks Christine out of his car Richard says, "See, you're acting like I'm just this regular man, like a man in a book who the woman in the book meets." The irony of it is, this selection unintentionally reduces Richard to that which he seems to despise. He is just a man in a book. It's clear that I'll have to watch the movie or read the complete script if he'll ever be otherwise.

All Souls' Rising, pt. 3

2007-02-05T23:32:00.000-05:00

Madison Smart Bell
pgs. 120-261

I had no business complaining about the violence in All Souls' Rising at page 119, especially when I had no idea just how much worse it could get. Believe me, it does get a lot worse. How much worse, you ask? How about this: "He stooped, smiling, and placed the screw gently against the white man's eyeball and with a slow precision began to turn it in." Or this: "Blood gushed over the edges of the skull and matted hair where it hung beneath and spilled over to darken the gold braid on the cuffs of Jeannot's coat." Or even this: "The epidermis had been peeled away strategically to reveal the workings of the musculature on the hands and arms and thighs; even the cheeks were laid bare, and the lips had been cut away (so that the man must scream without the proper mouth to do it with)." And here I was complaining about a little crucifixion. What was I thinking?

Obviously, slavery is an atrocious institution. I was prepared with this knowledge when I started reading the book. And no matter how much I complained about the violence before, it wasn't anything that I hadn't expected. What I wasn't prepared for was the reminder that violent revolution can be just as unpretty. All of the quotes provided above are taken from violence that blacks and mulattos visit upon their former white masters. In fact, the last excerpt of a man being skinned (and eventually gutted) alive is performed by a mulatto on his white father.

I imagine that having such atrocities visited upon yourself and others whom you love could desensitize a person enough to perform the same torture methods upon those responsible. But just because it's understandable doesn't make it any less horrendous. There are no heroes in a story such as this, at least there hasn't been thus far. In these beginning days of the revolution, the revolutionizers seem more concerned with revenge than they are with freedom. Again, it's not incomprehensible, but it's difficult to find a piece of humanity within this 'forest of revenge' to empathize with.

There are a few characters - Toussaint and Dr. Hebert, for instance - who seem to have maintained their humanity in the midst of the bloodlust and the violent retaliation on both sides. But their reason, their fear, and their understanding for the other side is so overwhelmingly outnumbered by those who don't, can't, or won't share their empathy that, half-way through the first book of a trilogy, it all already seems so very hopeless. Can there be any winners in a world like this?

Of course, it's a moot question since I know how this story really ends. Yet, Bell's writing is no less poetic for all of its vivid and descriptive violence. I will most likely read this trilogy to its end. Yes, this isn't the type of novel I generally read in my free time, but regardless of how often I cringe and my eyes water at mans' inhumanity against man, I'm still pleased to be reading out of my box.

Oedipus at Colonus

2007-02-02T09:24:00.000-05:00

by Sophocles

I confess, I haven't been reading anything on my list these past few days. Instead, I've been reacquainting myself with some classical literature. A friend of mine is taking a course in Greek literature and his comments on the Oedipus trilogy ("Oedipus the King", "Oedipus at Colonus", and "Antigone") inspired me to pull out my classic plays (I have a degree in Classical Civilization, so I have many) and revisit some old friends. "Oedipus at Colonus" is the second installation of the trilogy.

It was good to say hello to the old, dying Oedipus and his long-suffering daughters but since it's late, I'm tired, and I've already written more than one analytical paper on the Oedipus trilogy I don't really feel like going into right now. Sorry.

I will say one thing that I found a little disappointing, though I should have known better. That friend of mine - let's call him Paul - remarked that he liked "Oedipus at Colonus" the best, the play which is easily the most ignored of the trilogy. Paul also stated that his favorite line of the play was, "It is I, the accursed." So, I admit, because I couldn't remember the details of "Oedipus at Colonus" as well as I'd liked and because I wanted to go searching for this line, I pulled my copy from the shelf and started reading.

I was disappointed to learn that the line Pual loves so much can be found nowhere in my copy of the play. I should have known better and at least have entertained the possibility that the line Paul quoted wouldn't be in my copy if we had read a publication of the play by different translators. Apparently we did. Reading different translators can be a lot like reading different books altogether. I remember that I disliked Virgil's Aenied until I read the translation by Allen Mandelbaum. In his hands, the epic poem was, well, sheer poetry.

Oh well, the play was still worthy the two days I spent reading it. After I read "Antigone" maybe I search through my books to see if I have copy of "Oedipus at Colonus" that proves to be a bit more poetic than the one I've just finished.

Minority Report

2007-01-28T19:10:00.000-05:00

by Philip K. Dick
from Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick

I liked "Minority Report" the movie. It continues to stand as one my favorite Tom Cruise movies, not least of all because it was created in those magical pre-Scientology and Oprah couch-jumping days. The sleek, futuristic sophistication of Steven Spielberg’s production, combined with the adequate tortured-father, hunted-lawman acting of Tom Cruise, and the exceptional screen writing all worked to make what I thought was a suspenseful, entertaining, and thoughtful movie. There are worse things to spend summer movie money on after all, "X-Men 3: The Last Stand" comes immediately to mind. In any case, "The Minority Report" was one of the reasons why I decided to buy the Selected Stories in the first place. I say this all as preface to my review of Philip K. Dick's "Minority Report" because I wish to concede, even before I begin, that it's possible that my opinion of the short story is negatively effected by how much I liked the movie.

I didn't like "Minority Report" the short story. The phrase "Based on a story by Philip K. Dick" is vast overstatement. Yes, there is a suspense plot involving pre-cognitives who predict future crimes; yes, the main characters' names are all the same; and yes, the story is set in the future. That, my friends, is where the similarities end. Instead of the young, capable though troubled Anderton that Cruise plays, the Anderton in the story is old, paranoid, virtually clueless, and finally smug. He doesn't have a missing son, an illegal drug problem, or an ex-wife. The only problem he does have is that he's old. The Anderton of the story isn't motivated by a desire to find his son's kidnapper but rather by the paranoid need to protect his job. He isn't tortured, he's middle-aged, which does have its own problems, sure, but not enough to justify his often frank idiocy.

Among the other many differences which I found particularly disturbing is that the procogs are actual mentally-challenged vegetables. They have no personalities nor do they even receive the reverent respect displayed in the movie. In fact, they are derisively referred to as "monkeys". When Witwer expresses his surprise at the precogs' deformity, Anderton instantly replies, "Deformed and retarded...The talent absorbs everything; the esp-lobe shrivels the balance of the frontal area. But what do we care? We get their prophecies." And here's a sampling of the way the precogs are treated: "The dwarfed, hunched-over figure had sat buried in its wiring and relays for fifteen years...'Jerry', however, remained in the aimless chaos of idiocy; the burgeoning faculty had absorbed the totality of his personality." Poor dude. Don't they have human rights organizations in the future?

Strangely enough, out of all the stories set in the future in Selected Stories, "Minority Report" seems to have aged the worst. The precrime reports are kept on paper cards and recorded on cassette tapes, which don't jibe very well with phones that come with aud and vid lines and ID cards that include brain-wave patterns. Nor did it play very well in my mind as I pictured the moving, wall-sized video screens and the hard, incriminating red balls so sleekly dished out in the movie. Tapes and paper cards? Surely Dick could have done better than that. We'll be lucky if readers ten years from now even know what those are.

Harmony's Way, pt. 1

2007-01-28T18:56:00.000-05:00

by Lora Leigh
pgs. 1-199

I am very much aware that I complained incessantly about Leigh's Megan's Mark only less than a month ago. In my defense though, I feel the need to point out that I did say, in spite of my many complaints with Leigh's writing, especially with that of her female characters, I planned to read the next Breed novel, thus, I am merely being true to my word. And I am happy to report that I'm more than half the way through this book and I haven't a single complaint. Alright, that's not entirely true but my complaints are considerably less than they were when I was reading Megan's Mark. But let's start with the good.

Lance is a likeable character - of course most of the alpha males in the Breed Series are. Lance, however, isn't so alpha and bossy that he's an obvious exaggeration of himself. In a word, Lance is perfect, which does have its own problems but I was talking about the good. The biggest surprise of them all is that I actually like Harmony, the heroine. Of all the female characters Leigh has recently written into existence, Harmony's situation gives her the most reason for the characteristic bitchiness that is thankfully absent. The fact that she's rational, understanding, and smart enough to know the difference between being stubborn and stupidity could be attributed to the cold rationality that is surely a requirement to becoming an assassin dangerous enough to claim the moniker "Death". For all her notorious skill at killing molesters and murderers with her knife, she also knows her own heart, even when confused. She may not like what her heart tells her but she doesn't inexplicably lash out at those trying to help her either.

And now for the bad. Lance is beginning to seem a little too perfect. Where are this man's flaws? As far as I can tell, he has none. He's accepting, understanding, honest, loving, protective, silent when he has to be, and forceful when it's called for. Perhaps it's unfair to call that a troubling aspect of the book. Maybe it's only another surprise to find a character so well-balanced in a Breed book. He isn't mocking, inscrutable, or arrogant without explanation. He's simply a generally nice guy. And since I've decided to save my comments on Harmony's brother Jonas for a later date, that, ladies and gentlemen, is my only complaint with Harmony's Way. I know, I'm as suprised as you are. I was beginning to think it was time to begin to migrate away from the Breed Series. It appears as if that time may a little way off yet.

Where They Love Americans...for a Living

2007-01-24T23:30:00.000-05:00

by Sean Flynn
from The Best American Travel Writing

If I have ever read a candid article on prostitution written by a man whose agenda isn't either to justify a man's right/need to pay for sex or to fervently pronounce his solidarity with the feminist stance that prostitution always equals exploitation, it was a long, long time ago - if ever. Sean Flynn's article was refreshingly different in that, while he is often sneeringly superior, he is also realistic, informed, and frankly funny, especially when he's poking fun at the "particular class of whoremonger" who convinces himself that the women with whom he pays to have sex actually like him.

But, as Flynn points out, fantasy islands like the Philippines, Thailand, and Costa Rica - the top three destinations for adult vacationing - are popular just because, on these tropical islands where the women are “passionate and easy,” you don’t simply pay for sex. You buy, as one enthusiastic vacationer called it, the “GFE” - i.e. “girlfriend experience”. GFE, of course, referring to the beautiful and sexy girlfriend who hangs on your every word, keeps her opinions to herself, and enthusiastically performs every sexual act for as long as you want it whenever you want it - all for an established fee naturally. In Costa Rica, you don’t pay for the sex, you pay for the fantasy.

The problem however, is not the fantasy but the fact that so many of the men who frequent these places mistake the fantasy for reality. Inexplicably, they fail to realize, or refuse to realize, that prostitutes, especially the really great ones or the really expensive ones, are Oscar-worthy actresses whose job is dependent upon their ability to convince you that you’re the smartest, largest, and sexiest man she’s ever met, irregardless of your beer belly, your receding and graying hair, or your repulsive personality. That’s her job and - trust me, Flynn, or the experts who’ve studied it - most of them don't even like it.

Philosophically, I have no problem with prostitution when it is between CONSENTING ADULTS. I am, however, a firm believer that a woman has the right to do with her body whatever the hell she wants with it. If she wants to sell it for sex, hey - you do you. If a man wants to pay for it, hey - you do you. Unfortunately, things are infinitely more complicated than that, especially when you begin to believe the lies you’ve paid to have whispered in your ear.

The New Yorker, Dec. 11, 2006

2007-01-23T01:26:00.000-05:00

Yes, you read that correctly - I have only just read the Dec. 11 issue of The New Yorker. On occassion, especially when I'm traveling, I get horribly behind in reading my New Yorkers. I have issues from 2005 that I haven't read yet - and yes, I do plan to read them, and no, I'm not throwing them out, I don't care what you say. I'll admit that when they're a month or more old, the articles aren't as relevent to the times as they were the week they were printed but that just makes the reading all that more interesting. There is an untold superior and smug pleasure in reading news-based articles with the informed eye of hindsight.

The Al Sharpton snapshot "Fifty Shots" in Talk of the Town transports me back to week an unarmed black man was shot 50 times and killed on the eve of his wedding. And although I may have predicted it, I'm able to look back with a month and half worth of hindsight with the knowledge that one week was all that unjustified over-kill recieved in the national news.

And then there's the David Denby review of "Blood Diamond" and "Deja Vu" that makes me regret not having shown either of those movies enough attention. Well, that's not particularly true of "Deja Vu", which, as Denby informs us, "makes beautiful pictures out of carnage." Intended complement though it may be, it is the very reason why I decided to pass on "Deja Vu" - carnage should never be beautiful, mindless action movie or no. The fact that this is the very case that "Blood Diamond" makes is the reason why I wonder if I can still find this film playing in a theatre. Having enjoyed - if that's the proper way to describe a movie that "breaks your heart" - "Hotel Rwanda" and "The Constant Gardener", movies "set against the background of civil wars, ethnic conflict, and Western meddling and exploitation", Denby has convinced me as all the other rave reviews weren't able to that "Blood Diamond" was worthy of my $9.00. Ah well, another benefit to reading an old movie review - I'm just in time for the DVD.

Upon the Dull Earth

2007-01-18T18:27:00.000-05:00

by Philip K. Dick
from Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick

Something else I don't usually read: science fiction - at least not on a regular basis. I try to get in at least one sci-fi book a year but even that's often too difficult to do. I'm impatient and often bored, I've found, with talking, furry aliens from other worlds, disgusting creatures, space travel, robots, and all other manner of fantastic technologies. And I've had the misfortune of reading sci-fi authors whose only point, it seems, is to write about cool aliens and fast space jets. But I refused to give up and last year I finally decided to stop dicking around (pun intended) and bought The Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick, mainly because I'd seen most of the movies based on his short stories and liked them well-enough to wonder and hope that the stories would be better, as is often the case, than the movies they had inspired.

There isn't a movie based on the short story "Upon a Dull Earth" but if there was it would have definitely been a horror flic. This is the creepiest, most disturbing in a send-shivers-down-your-spine kind of way story that I've read in a long while. Jonathan Letham hits the nail on the head when he says that it "reads like a Shirley Jackson outtake." It would be easy to say that "Upon a Dull Earth" is a lesson in being careful what you ask for. In this case, the main character Rick only wants to marry his girlfriend Silvia, have some kids, and grow old with her. Silvia however dies prematurely and when he tries to get her back, he and her both bite off quite a bit more than they can chew. It sounds a bit like Stephen King's "Pet Cemetery" but it's much more subtle than that. Silvia comes back - a lot of her comes back - but she doesn't eat or kill anyone. She's just there and it is creepy.

But to simply qualify this as a "be careful what you ask for" story would be an injustice. In the process, Dick reinvents heaven, angels, humans, God and the "dull earth" between. I'm half-way through The Selected Stories... and I have already decided that Dick has written the best sci-fi I've ever read. I have only just discovered that that's because, although, like other writers of the genre, Dick writes of the future, technology and otherworldly creatures, they are all second fiddle to the men and women who populate his stories. The stories are not about the science, they're about the man. Those are the kind of stories, sci-fi or no, that I would read any day of any year.

All Souls' Rising, pt. 2

2007-01-17T18:49:00.000-05:00

by Madison Smart Bell
pgs. 56-119

I knew it, I knew it before I even started reading All Souls' Rising that I would have to suffer through some horrible, violent images, the type of images I generally avoid if only because they leave me with a disgusted and disappointed view of humanity. But brutality is just as much a part of life and its beauty, and it's salubrious, I think, to remind myself of that every once in a while. Though it isn't the reason why I chose to read All Souls' Rising, it is certainly serving as that reminder whether I like it or not.

The meat of the story, in fact, begins with the live crucifixion of female slave for killing her illegitimate baby. Three sentences into the first chapter, Bell writes, "There had been some bleeding from the punctures and the runnels of blood along her inner forearms had hardened and cracked in the dry heat, from which the doctor concluded that she must have been there for several hours at the least." Alright, I thought when I read that line, I knew that was coming. It was a fully expected blow to the imaginary senses and as much as anyone could take an image like that in stride, I did.

What I didn't expect was the long, excruciating scene in which Claudine Arnaud, mistress of a plantation, drunk, drugged, jealous and crazed, cuts out a slave girl's growing fetus and then proceeds to violently cut her neck. The girl's only crime, it should be said, was to accidentally spill a tray of coffee but the spill was merely an excuse for Claudine to punish the girl for having sex, most likely unwillingly, with Mr. Arnaud. Unfortunately, no detail is left out in this horrifying scene. Try this on for size: "The blade furrowed through a whitish layer of fat; there was no blood, oddly, until the viscera slithered and slapped down tangling over Claudine's feet, and then she bled."

But in his way, Bell illustrates a point that many writers before have tackled. Claudine, sold as she was to her husband - albeit in a much more civilized way - purchased for nothing more than as a breeding mare, forced to leave her home, family, and friends, and openly despised and mocked when she fails at her one task to produce and heir, she is little more than a slave herself. It is a sympathetic view of such a despicable character but it is, I think, a real one as well. It's not hard to understand that the reason Claudine hates Mouche the slave girl so much, isn't that she has sex with her husband and is pregnant with the child she herself can never produce. It is that Mouche, fresh off the boat from Africa, isn't broken in who she is or in her belief that she belongs to no one else but herself. "The voice [Mouche's singing] came out of her essential African self, and Claudine recognized that after all she was still untouched in her identity; it was infuriating."

Such is just another vulnerability of slavery: to be subject and held accountable for someone else's unhappiness, fears, anger, and disappointments. And through it all, All Souls' Rising reads like a dream, a horrible dream but a smooth, irresistible dream nonetheless. I can't put it down.

The Iraqi Constitution

2007-01-14T22:59:00.000-05:00

fromThe Best American NonRequired Reading

Reading a constitution, any country's constitution, is informative and beneficial to our understanding of the world and the way other countries view governance, law, and citizenship. In the world we live in today, that understanding is becoming more and more vital to our everyday lives. Reading a constitution, any country's constitution I would imagine, is also much like reading a contract. Given that that's what it is - a contract - it's not surprising that it reads like one. By the same token, much in the same way that I find reading a new software contract too long, dry, and unworthy of my time despite how informative and beneficial to my life and understanding it may be, I also find myself wishing to run through the dry, contractual language of the Iraqi constitution so I can simply skip the bottom of the page where I click "Accept."

That's not to say that all of it was uninteresting reading. The Preamble was telling and, in parts, in it's own way, poetic. It also included one the longest run-on sentences I've ever seen in my life. This sentence was composed of nineteen lines of approximately fourteen words to each line. I'm too lazy to do the math - you do it - but I know enough to know that's a lot of words for one sentence and if anyone is supposed to get any since of that it certainly isn't I.

I also thought it interesting that the second line of the constitution reads, "We have honored the sons of Adam." Yeah, yeah I know that it's supposed to be a democratic Islamic state but what about Eve? I thought it took two to make a son and as far as I know Adam didn't reproduce asexually. And what about the daughters of Adam - and Eve - ? Article 14 reads: "Iraqis are equal before the law without discrimination based on gender, race, ethnicity, origin, color, religion, creed, belief or opinion, or economic and social status." Yet, Article 2 reads: No law that contradicts the established provisions of Islam may be established." I don't much about the Islamic religion but I know enough about the treatment of women in Islamic countries to hope that the two articles don’t already contend with each other.

The Discreet Charm of the Zurich Bourgeoisie

2007-01-14T17:51:00.000-05:00

by Alain De Botton
from The Best American Travel Writing 2006

In "The Discreet Charm of the Zurich Bourgeoisie" De Botton is attempting to argue that boring is beautiful. "[F]ew places in the Western World have been quite as deeply unfashionable as the city of Zurich," De Botton writes. Why is this? Because Zurich is just plain old ordinary. The streets are clean, the neighborhoods are safe, and the people are unfailingly polite. Why should the anti-social, the dangerous, the consciously different and the purposefully exotic have the market on interesting? Why isn't ordinary just as beautiful, just as worthy of interest?

I don't know, I think they both have their merits. I understand how the mind can tire of monotony and routine. I also understand how monotony and routine could make our lives easier and longer. And I also think, that if we dig deep enough, if we look closely and honestly, there is something worthy of review and interest in any walk of life, even the happy suburban kind. I have always disagreed with Tolstoy's proposition that all happy families are the same and therefore unworthy of a writer's critical mind and time. No one person's happiness is the same, just as no one person is the same. To assume so, is to ignore half of life and half of the people who live it, if not more. I don't have statistics to back me up but I believe that there are just as many happy people in the world as there are unhappy.

Perhaps this is just me standing up for my people. Yes, I am a generally happy person and proud of it. Why shouldn't the story of my life and the city in which people like me would choose to live like Zurich deserve a story or interest beyond boredom? After all, we happy people will live longer than the curmudgeons and I have the statistics to prove it.

After the Fall

2007-01-14T16:40:00.000-05:00

by Tom Bissell and Morgan Meis
from The Best American Travel Writing

There were some amazing lines in this piece. Morgan: "The night that lay upon this massive, malfunctioning, astonishing city was vast, starless, as warm and secret as an embryo." Tom: "We walked through a near-noon heat so overwhelming it had a sort of oceanic weight." The city these two vivid sentences are describing is Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Vietnam and our two adventurers are there to observe the 30th anniversary of the day South Vietnam formally surrendered to the North Vietnamese army.

Besides being educational and my learning that the communist Republic of Vietnam is just as crazy as that of North Korea, "After the Fall" was also, given the circumstances in which they find themselves, surprisingly funny. Why some the funniest moments in TBATW should involve bowel movements I don't know. I'm not sure it that says something about the editors of TBATW or about me. What I do know is that I found Bissell's description of his debilitating diarrhea laugh out loud hilarious. "My stomach burbled out some many-syllabled sound that was loud enough for Morgan to hear, my eyes filled with stunned tears, and I began walking toward the bathroom around the mausoleum's corner...'Is it your stomach?' 'Right now it's my whole body.'"

And of course, as Bissell and Meis somewhat haplessly interview government dissidents, they are promptly followed and watched by government agents - a development that they don't find at all discouraging and, in fact, take some pleasure - and Meis, along with their photographer, are eventually taken in for questioning, then kicked out of the country on the grounds that they didn't enter on journalist visas. Meanwhile, Bissell experiences shock-induced recovery from his fever and wanders the streets of Vietnam alone. Well, not technically alone since he's being followed. "I...decided that if I indeed I had a tail, then this tail of mine was going to get a fucking workout. He would walk around Hanoi's Lake of the Returned Sword again and again and again." Eventually tiring of the game, the tail approaches Bissell and wishes him a quick and safe journey out of the country.

I admit that though it was obvious that Bissell and Meis were both alive and well enough to write this piece, I was scared for them much of the time. I have no idea how seasoned, well-traveled writers such as these two managed to seem so clueless and lost but they did. But then that was the charm of "After the Fall." As for Vietnam and the impression it left on me, I'll quote Bissell and say that it is either "beautiful or insane." Of course, what country isn't, if isn't both at the same time?

BookForum

2007-01-13T23:00:00.000-05:00

DEC/JAN 2007 Issue

Strange though it may seem, I have only just started researching and reading book review magazines. I'm not in a place in which I could explain why that is, especially given what I'm doing now and that, second only to reading books myself, my favorite pastime is reading about people's opinions on other reading. In any case, I decided to start my overdue research with "The New York Review of Books." Who could argue that what's written between the pages of the NYBR is anything but great writing? Certainly not I. What I could argue is that, much in the same way that "New Yorker" articles have a tendency to run on too long, those in the NYRB also tend to stay way past their welcome. I appreciate great writing as much as the next person - what kind of obsessive reader would I be if I didn't - but I also think that if there is a word limit imposed upon the critics who write for the NYRB, it is much too high. However, I shall persevere, even if it does take me a month to finish a biweekly magazine.

And then just two weeks ago, I came across a wonderful magazine called "BookForum." It looked more colorful and definitely thinner than NYRB so I decided, what the heck, couldn't hurt right? As it turns out, I was right and I have found a new favorite magazine. For one, the articles are only one, maybe two pages long. I sound like one of the horrible readers who have the attention span of a fly don't I? I'm not really. I simply appreciate clear and concise writing. But besides concise pieces, "BookForum" also features some great writing. In this issue there were pieces written by Andrea Walker, a member of the editorial staff for the "New Yorker", Francine Prose, author of How to Read Like a Writer, and Rob Spillman, editor of the much-esteemed "Tin House" literary magazine.

Reading "BookForum" was not just enjoyable - though it was that, and reason enough for why I finished it in one day, unheard of for me - but it was also educational. So this, I thought as I reading, is how a criticism should look, how it should sound. So this is to what I should aspire. The difference between reading the NYRB and "BookForum" is the difference between listening to a lecture and having a conversation. The former can be educational, no doubt, but the latter is more engaging. I felt engaged as a reader as I breezed from one article to another in BookForum and it is the same feeling that I would like my readers to have.

It seems this will be a year of education and improvement for me. But I suppose, if we're lucky, that's what every day of every year should be.

Valley of Silence

2007-01-11T23:08:00.000-05:00

by Nora Roberts
Book 3 of the Circle Trilogy

It's never a good idea to stay up late reading a book when you've just started a new job. You run the risk of waking up late the next morning with horrible black bags under your eyes, hair sticking up at odd angles, and the title of a book creased into your cheek. It was worth it though. It's safe to say that Valley of Silence was the best book of the trilogy.

Cian and Moira's story was a much more compelling read than the other two; the love story more moving; the danger more urgent. It still suffered from the problems of the other two books: i.e. too much dialogue and not enough action. There were more conversations on why Moira and Cian couldn't be together than was needed. But because the love story between Cian and Moira was so great, those problems were less annoying than in the other two. I enjoyed reading of their struggle to love each other, knowing that it could go nowhere and would end in pain. I also enjoyed reading a story in which the characters were emotionally honest with each other and with themselves. Those are the type of characters, the kind of people, I can respect.

I also respect, Roberts' willingness to show the gray area that lies between good and evil. Roberts, as so few popular authors do, has the courage and the wits to show that what we would call evil can have sympathetic facets. "Evil" can love, it can know pain, it can know fear, it can feel the need for family. I appreciate Roberts including the sincere affection between Lilith, the Vampire Queen, and Lora, her companion.

What I didn't appreciate, however, was the detail that Lilith sleeps with the five year-old vampire "son" Davy. I didn't see the point in including such a nasty detail. In particular I could have done without this sentence: "In the moonlight he [Davy] saw the battlefield, and the beauty of it made him shake as he did when his mother let him put himself into her and ride as if she were a pony."

I had to read that sentence at least twice over to make sure I'd read it right. When I was sure I had, I wished I hadn't. I mean really Nora, was that necessary? I can handle uncomfortable plot lines but that little detail just wasn't needed. I'd gathered that Lilith and Davy were "lovers" already, I didn't need it thrown in my face. And it just seemed incongruous with the style of the rest of the story. In many ways, this trilogy is a way for Roberts to push the envelope but I think she pushed it a little too far with Davy's storyline.

In any case, I suppose I should also add that the conclusion of the book, and the trilogy was satisfactory but predictable. But then what popular romance story isn't predictable? They all mostly end one way, happily ever after, which is why I read them when I just want to feel good. After all, I saw the resolution to Cian and Moira's love story coming a mile away. But it was great romance reading nonetheless and one I'll return to again. I wish the other books had been as good as this one, I wish this trilogy had been as good as the Three Sisters Island Trilogy or the Key Trilogy, and I wish there was time enough to stay up reading all night and still get a good night's sleep. On a completely unrelated topic Cian says, "But the hours mattered, every minute of them." Damn right they do. Now, I'm off to get some sleep.

Dance of the Gods, pt. 2

2007-01-11T21:05:00.000-05:00

by Nora Roberts
pgs. 125-316 (End)
Book 2 of the Circle Trilogy

Still a lot of talk...Yadda, yadda, yadda. Blah, blah, blah. I don't have a problem with dialogue at all. What I do have a problem with is with dialogue that is repeated over and over again for - I don't know - space? How many conversations must the members of the circle have about how they need to stick together and tell each other everything? It was a concept I grasped quite well in the first book; why do the characters need to be reminded of it every other page? Why do I have to read about it every other page?

And Blair's repetitive inner dialogues grew, well, monotonous. I appreciate getting a glimpse into a character's head. It's one of the things that makes Roberts' characters come alive and something at which she usually excels. I can't figure out exactly what happened here. It could be that, because Roberts had to spread the action out over three books, there was less action in each and more dialogue than was needed or wanted. Yet, that argument becomes difficult to make when one considers that this isn't Roberts' first trilogy. She's done several, most of which are much more compelling reads than the Circle Trilogy thus far.

It's interesting too that, despite all the dialogue - inner and otherwise - I didn't understand the characters all that well at the end of the day. As characters in a book, I liked Blair and Larkin perfectly well. As people I could imagine actually existing, they fell fairly flat. And, I said it before, Blair is simply too much of an Eve Dallas rip-off for me to really appreciate her as a separate character. There were some differences, i.e. Blair doesn't mind doing typical girly things; Eve doesn't even have an idea what that is. But those differences weren't substantial enough to make me feel as if wasn't reading the story of a poor and uninteresting descendent of Eve.

Despite all of that, I do look forward to reading Valley of Silence. I can't wait to read Cian and Moira's story. It is my sincere hope that it turns out to be worth mostly uninteresting reading I've had to put up with so far.

Collapse, pt. 1

2007-01-07T19:45:00.000-05:00

by Jared Diamond
pgs. 1-156

I'm trying really hard to get through this book - I really am. The premise - a study of collapsed societies and the factors that led to their downfall - is right up my alley. And, though it was slow going in the beginning, I loved Guns, Germs, and Steel. Granted, there were some parts that I thought were eye-crossingly boring, especially that parts in which Diamond discusses the pollinization and fertilization process of plants. It was enlightening but it wasn't the most exciting reading I've ever done. And anyway those parts were few and far in between. So I made the mistake of assuming that just because I enjoyed one Diamond book, I would enjoy another. Thus far, that just isn't so.

I keep pushing myself to make it to just one more chapter, hoping that the next one will be better than the last. I can't say it isn't interesting reading; like I said, the premise is right up my alley. I absolutely love reading about the history and collapse of Easter Island and the Pitcairn Islands. What I don't care to read about, in detail, is the scientific methods archeologists used to come to their conclusions. I don't need a two page explanation on how dendrochronology (tree ring dating) works. A short, simple, one-paragraph summary would work just fine for me. Anything longer and my eyes begin to roll into the back of my head with boredom.

There's a lot of method detail in this book which leads me to wonder if this book is really meant for a layman reader like me. I think it is, but I also think that, by including the scientific methods and terminology, Diamond is attempting to attract the experts and scientists as well. So then maybe I shouldn't feel bad about skipping the methodology parts. Then again, maybe I feel guilty because I'm not too long out of college and Collapse reads so much like a text book, I feel as if I'll be quizzed on the parts I skip. Of Collapse, "BusinessWeek" wrote, "It's [also] the deal of the year - the equivalent of a year's college course by an engaging, brilliant professor, all for the price of a book." Now it all makes sense, so that's the reason why I'm determined to finish this book - if I don't, I'll have failed my first history course. Because at this moment "BusinessWeek" and I disagree on whether Diamond is an "engaging" professor, I'll just do what I've always done with a long class and a boring professor: buckle down, stick it out, and pray for the end.

The Innocents

2007-01-05T00:33:00.000-05:00

by Gipi
from The Best American Nonrequired Reading

I'm indifferent about this graphic story. It's not bad but it isn't particularly moving either, though I think it tries to be. My largest problem is I didn't connect at all with any of these characters. I didn't understand the little boy. Just how old is he anyway? Why does he look like he's twelve and act as if he's five? And what's up with the uncle? Does he even like his nephew? Are the insulting comments simple joking around or am I supposed to take him seriously? I thought the point of graphics was to illustrate and answer some of these questions but guess I was wrong. If the uncle is joking, he definitely isn't showing it in any of the graphic frames.

And what I am supposed to feel for Valerio the friend? Should I empathize with him? It certainly would have made the graphic story more interesting if I had. Yet, how can I, when the reason for his anger and fear is never clearly explained? Given that the uncle is telling this story to his nephew, it's understandable that he didn't explain the gory details, but couldn't he have given them to me, the reader, in a thought bubble or something? As far as I can tell, Valerio is just a scared boy who went to prison for attacking abusive police and came out a psychopathic man. That's a bad deal but I don't really care.

Nor did I care for the art. It was a tad too bleak and full of angles for me. Perhaps, it works to fit the dour story but it didn't work to appeal to my eye. I found myself speeding through the frames to get to the end, rather than studying them for hidden, revealing secrets. If "Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea" is the reason why I should read more comics, then "The Innocents" is the reason why I wouldn't.

The Insurgent's Tale

2007-01-04T23:18:00.000-05:00

by Tom Downey
from The Best American Nonrequired Reading

In the beginning, I thought this was a fictional piece. No one, I assumed, could tell an actual Iraqi insurgent's story in such detail without making it up. Apparently, I was wrong. "The Insurgent's Tale" is the actual life story of an actual Jihadist. Needless to say, it was engrossing reading. It's always enlightening, I think, to hear the story of someone from the "other" side tell their story honestly. It helps to remember that the people fighting on the other side of the war in Iraq are just as human as the warriors that hail from America. It helps to remember that Jihadists are more than the evil, robotic suicide bombers that the Bush regime would have you to believe. In the words of Downey, ""To hear a polite and thoughtful man talk casually about his friends in Al Qaeda is to have the whole enterprise reduced to a more fragile, human scale."

"The Insurgent's Tale" does just that. It reminds us that the "War on Terrorism" is "not a mythic struggle between our supermen and their ghosts." It serves as a perfect juxtaposition to Military Blog excerpt by Zachary Scott-Singley (unreviewed by me) included earlier in the compilation. Yet, it also confuses me, or rather, it doesn't enlighten me as much as I would like to be enlightened. It shows me how a Jihadist is born - in this case, through anger inspired by a video showing Muslims being slaughtered in Afghanistan - but it doesn't really take me inside the insurgent's heart, which is where I really want to be. It doesn't tell me how Khalid, the insurgent, feels living peacefully among Londoners who trust him more than they do their own children one month, and fighting those same Londoner's children in Iraq the next. Is there ever a conflict of emotions; is there ever a moment of hesitation, of self-doubt? What is his actual stance on the American forces in Iraq? Does he have a position, or does he simply go where he's needed, questions un-asked?

I don't assume I know the answers to any of these questions but it would have been nice to see those questions answered in "The Insurgent's Tale." Again, my problem seems to be that I simply want this piece to be longer than what it was. Maybe if it was as long as this war is turning out to be, I'd be satisfied. Maybe.

The New Yorker, Winter Fiction Issue

2007-01-02T18:26:00.000-05:00

The Nobel Lecture
by Orhan Pamuk;
The Bible
by Marguerite Duras;
On Chesil Beach
by Ian McEwan

When I can, I try really hard to read my New Yorkers from cover to cover. It is a rare occasion when that happens. The fiction section gets me every time. Most of the time, I just don't get New Yorker fiction. It just never goes anywhere. At the end of a typical New Yorker piece I always feel as if I've wasted ten minutes of my time reading great writing that has absolutely no point. And it is great writing - that's undeniable. But what I want is a story. I get bored with reading great writing just for the sake of great writing. I read because I love a great story just as much as I love great writing - maybe more.

But occasionally, I try. I do try. I started with Orhan Pamuk's 2006 Nobel lecture "My Father's Suitcase." It was an amazing contemplation on the writing life; on how writers are shaped by their country and culture, and how they shape the world around them with their words. There are some wonderfully crafted sentences that clearly express the reason why he was the deserving recipient of last year's Nobel Prize for Literature. A sentence like, "A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is," will have me thinking for hours. That sentence is just one of many that will get written on an index card for further contemplation.

The one thing that troubled me about Pamuk's piece was that it made me question why it seems that great writers are always unhappy, depressed, and/or addictive. At the end of a beautiful paragraph on why he writes - why we all write - Pamuk says, "I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy." Is tortured unhappiness a job requirement? I understand that great writing can come from angst and pain but does that disqualify me, the chronically content and generally well-adjusted, from writing the kind of literature that will win me a Nobel Prize? I sincerely hope not.

"The Bible" and "On Chesil Beach" was typical New Yorker fiction fare, i.e. a supermodel all-dressed up with nowhere to go. "The Bible" I found bearable simply because it had a short running time of two pages. "On Chesil Beach" on the other hand, was too long with a running time of nine whole pages and ends right at the moment when things are starting to get interesting. Whatever my problems with Chabon's Thrilling Tales, Chabon and I certainly agree that the now-popular in-the-moment revelatory fiction "pieces" are an annoying turn-off for readers like myself. Maybe it's an acquired taste but it's one that I will gladly do without.

Dance of the Gods, pt. 1

2006-12-30T23:52:00.000-05:00

by Nora Roberts
pgs. 1-124

Dance of the Gods is the second book in the Nora Roberts Circle trilogy. Like many of the popular new romance writers on the market today, Roberts has apparently decided to try her hand at the dark vampire romance genre. And, like most of the reviewers on www.amazon.com, I have decided that Roberts should stick with what she does best and leave the paranormal romance writing to such heavyweights as Christine Feehan, Laurell K. Hamilton, and Angela Roberts, just to name a small few.

Roberts is well-known for her prolific writing. In fact, she has so many books on the market today under her own name and under her psudonym J.D. Robb that her new books come with a special logo so that fans don’t confuse them with books she’s already published. I myself have been a long-time Roberts fan which is perhaps why her characters are beginning to seem as if they have less depth than they did in earlier writing. The characters in The Circle Trilogy are a prime example.

I want to like these characters. I want to empathize with these characters. I want to care what happens to these characters. But I don’t, not really. I seems as if Roberts is so out of her depth in this area that she concentrates so hard on making the vampires and the goddesses, and the witches, and the sorcerers, and the shape-shifters seem plausible that she leaves herself little time to work on that little thing called “character development.” These characters are so flat they border on being just plain boring. As a reader, I’m on the outside looking in when where I should be, is on he inside looking about. Simply put, thus far, The Circle Trilogy lacks the main draw of her other books, which has always been the strength of her character’s personalities.

I guess, by now you’re asking why I’m even bothering to read the second installment of a disappointing trilogy. Why didn’t I just stop after the first book Morrigan’s Cross? Because, damnit, I’m curious. The story isn’t bad – it’s Nora Roberts, after all – it’s just lacking her usual sure hand. Besides that, the only character I’m really curious about is Cian, who’s story isn’t told until the last book Valley of Silence. Unfortunately, I have to get through Dance of the Gods before my curiosity is satisfied. It isn’t a trial but it isn’t the most pleasurable reading either.

The story is essentially: blah, blah, fight, blah, blah, fight some more, sex, blah, blah, fall in love, fight, some more blah, blah, the end. Well, I haven’t made it to the end yet but it’s the pattern Morrigan’s Cross followed and it’s the same pattern Dance of the Gods seems to be following pretty well. I stopped in the middle some blah, blah between Larkin, the shape-shifter, and Blair, the Eve Dallas-derivative (see J.D. Robb’s In Death series) to write this installment. I guess I’ll get back to it now. I sense some sex on the horizon, which will probably be just as bland as the characters. That was mean, wasn’t it? I don’t take it back.

The Story of Me, pt. 1

2006-12-30T14:13:00.000-05:00

by J.S. Peyton
pgs. 1-3

It's discouraging to discover that what I am doing, or rather in this case, what I have only just started trying to do is already being done by someone else. Not only that, but that someone else is doing it much better than I could ever do it. I have no illusions that my little book blog is in no way one of a kind. After all, there is no shortage of opinions in the world and a quick navigation to www.amazon.com will reveal that there are a plethora of people only-too eager to share their opinion on books with the world. And then there are the professional critics who make a living, however wanting, offering their studied criticism up for consumption in stately publications such as The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books.

But I had hoped that, even if certain elements of my blog couldn't be original, at least my unique combination of such elements would be. Sigh, no such luck. Only yesterday, as I'm browsing in Olsson's, a D.C.-based indie bookstore, I come across Housekeeping vs. The Dirt: Fourteen Months of Massively Witty Adventures in Reading by Nick Hornby. Shit. But I don't really like Nick Hornby. His book How to Be Good was one of the few books I never bothered to finish and I gladly gave it away to a used bookstore, which is something I never do. This book, however, is a collection of essays and every writer deserves a second chance, I figure. So I open it up and what do I see? He has, at the beginning of every section, a list of books he bought and of books he read for every month of 2005.

Double shit. It is at this point that I realize that I am essentially holding my blog, in print, written by an author who, as the cover his book so kindly tells me, was the National Book Critics Circle finalist for criticism. Great. Just great. Disgusted, I went to buy it and then realized that I didn't have any money. Even more disgusted (I get testy when I can't afford to buy books), I returned to my apartment in a piss-poor mood, talked dispassionately on the phone for a while, then rouded out the night by burying my nose in a book until finally, I dozed off.

Today, I have just returned from Kramerbooks, another fabulous indie bookstore, where I bought, unethusiastically, Hornby's book, in addition to Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading by Maureen Corrigan (another obsessive reader), and Empires of the World: A Language History of the World by Nicholas Ostler. I bought the first two, because even as it depresses me by reminding me of how unoriginal and inexperienced I really am, maybe, please God, I'll learn a thing or two. Perhaps by reading the masters, I'll learn how to write like one.

The 48 Laws of Power, pt. 2

2006-12-28T23:28:00.000-05:00

by Robert Greene
Laws 14 – 18

I don’t know if the editors of the 48 Laws of Power did it by design or not, but the Laws are certainly getting progressively more interesting. I’m beginning to feel as if I should apologize for my earlier dismissal but it’s early yet and I haven’t even gotten half-way through the book. Let it be sufficient for me to say that I am certainly beginning to read The 48 Laws of Power with more respectful eyes.

I still stand by my earlier statement that attaining “Master”-status power is too much ruthless work. But oh, what interesting reading it doth make. One of the stories I have made it my business to remember is that of Wu Chao, daughter of a duke and member of the emperor’s royal harem (from Law 15: Crush You Enemy Totally). The story of this woman’s rise to power is absolutely amazing. She begins by seducing the emperor’s son in the “royal urinal”, escapes from a convent, and over the course of several years falsely befriends the emperor’s wife, the empress.

Then, Greene writes, “In 654 Wu Chao gave birth to a child. One day the empress came to visit, and as soon as she had left, Wu smothered the newborn – her own baby.” The empress is framed for murder, executed, and Wu is made the new empress. During her reign as “Empress Wu”, she poisons her niece as well as her own son, the heir apparent. She exiles the other son and, following numerous failed coups, has herself declared Divine “Emperor” of China and rules for forty years.

Now how could you not enjoy a story like that? Many of the historical examples in Laws 14-18 seem to come from China. It has made me realize that I need to brush up on my knowledge of Chinese history, which is sadly lacking. In fact, what I do know about Chinese history could probably be traced back to “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” and “Hero.”

To be fair, the Laws themselves are getting more interesting as well. Law 15 (see above) is a ruthless edict but I can certainly see it usefulness when Greene reminds us: “Your enemies wish you ill. There is nothing they want more than to eliminate you. If, in your struggles with them, you stop halfway or even three quarters of the way, out of mercy or hope of reconciliation, you only make them more determined, more embittered, and they will someday take revenge.” It’s brutal but I can’t deny that Greene has a point. I could argue that mercy is just as likely to inspire gratefulness as it is to bitterness but certainly, expecting the worst is the safer course to take.

I can see the wisdom in Law 16 (Use Absence To Increase Respect and Honor). Greene’s examples of romantic seduction and product availability work really well here. And if you really want to read about the wisdom of Law 18 (Do Not Build Fortresses To Protect Yourself – Isolation Is Dangerous) read Mark Bowden’s “Tales of the Tyrant” in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2003.

All Souls' Rising, pt. 1

2006-12-27T00:30:00.000-05:00

by Madison Smart Bell
pgs. xxi-55

I blame it on all that French Revolution history I’ve been reading about in The 48 Laws of Power. That’s the reason why I’m reading All Souls’ Rising right now instead of the many books that were in queue before it. All Souls’ Rising is the first of a trilogy that tells the story of the Haitian Revolution. I don’t really remember how I heard about this trilogy. If memory serves me correctly, I believe I read a selection by Madison Smart Bell in last year’s The Best American Travel Writing 2005, which, apparently, I enjoyed enormously. However it happened, Bell’s books ended up on my Amazon.com Wish List and, very recently, I finally bought the first book.

In the preface to his book, Bell writes, “Occupied with their quarrels among themselves, the whites of Saint Domingue [the colonial name for Haiti] gave little thought to the possible effects of the French Revolution on the mulattoes and almost none at all to its possible effects on the black slaves…Meanwhile, Revolutionary conceptions like 'the Rights of Man' circulated freely and noisily through the entire colony and were as audible to the black slaves as to anyone.” Thus, begins the story of the slave uprising in Haiti that will eventually lead to the creation of the first Black republic.

The story itself is beautifully told thus far. Bell’s writing is smooth and quiet. It makes you feel as if he’s taken you to a quiet corner of his fictional world and, if you’re silent and still, you will see wondrous and horrible things. And they are wondrous. See: the renegade slaves calling on the gods to bring them food and the slave Riau being possessed by the spirit Ogûn. And they are horrible. See: the slave woman being crucified for killing her illegitimate newborn child and the male slave wearing a head and mouth guard as punishment for being caught eating cane in the field.

Generally, I rarely read books about or set during the period of slavery, unless it’s assigned reading. I dislike reading them for the same reasons that I tend to avoid stories with unhappy endings: too sad. Just too damn sad. And at times, physically painful. How else can I explain the gut-wrenching agony that always comes when I read about the atrocities of slavery? I hate that feeling. Maybe the pain serves as a way to remind us of the horrors of slavery. But I don’t need to be reminded. I live with it every day; it runs in my blood, and, as far as I’m concerned, there are enough horrors today sufficient enough to keep me occupied.

But the Haitian Revolution is a story I’ve never heard before. I know the fact that it happened; I know the fact of it’s result, but I don’t know the story. It’s a different kind of slave story than the American one I learned about in school. So I’ll work my way through Bell's trilogy a teach myself a thing or two. Even if it’s not required.

The 48 Laws of Power

2006-12-24T23:30:00.000-05:00

by Robert Greene
Laws 6-13

Apparently, during the year that I spent in Japan The 48 Laws of Power became extremely popular, especially among those in the hip-hop community. This was all news to me, particularly since I'd bought the book about six months before I left the States and hadn't found it terribly interesting. I'd made it to Law 5 ("So Much Depends On Reputation - Guard It With Your Life") and decided that I could wait until I returned from Japan to finish it. Well, I'm back now and I'm determined to finally finish it. Strangely enough, I'm finding it more interesting reading the second time around, but maybe not for the reasons that have made it so popular.

I'm less interested in the Laws themselves than I am in the history that Greene uses to illustrate those laws. Even if I do think that most of the Laws are little too cutthroat for my idealistic tastes, I love reading about the disastrous love affairs of Lola Mendez, the double-dealings of Talleyrand, and the gullibility of Al Capone. The only explanation I have for this is that, having studied Classical Civilization for four years, it makes sense that I would find the story of the Corinthian and Corcoran ambassadors at Athens more interesting and, to me at least, more informative than the law itself ("Law 13: When Asking for Help, Appeal To People's Self-Interest - Never To Their Mercy Or Gratitude").

As for the Laws themselves, well I've already stated that I think I'm a little too idealistic to fully appreciate their feasibility and usefulness. There are certainly some Laws I can appreciate ("Law 10: Infection: Avoid The Unhappy And The Unlucky" and Law 13: (see above) for instance). But most of the Laws I find too ambiguous and too dependent upon your own particular situation and the people with whom you are dealing to be of any use at all. Few of any of the laws are infallible. In fact, the only one that is infallible so far is Law 10 (see above) according to Greene himself.

The one thing that Greene has managed to impress upon me so far is something I knew before I even picked up the book. That is that attaining and keeping power is difficult, arduous, and, at times, dangerous work. I can understand the reasons why someone would like to have the kind of power that Greene discusses in the 48 Laws. After all, we all like to have at least a little power over ourselves and others. But to attain the kind of power it takes to reach "Master" status just seems like too much manipulative, unhappy work to me. There never seems to be a point at which you're allowed to just enjoy your life and your position. During Law 11 ("Learn To Keep People Dependent On You") Greene writes, "You cannot rest at ease, and what good is power if it brings you no peace?" Amen, Greene. Amen. That's the kind of law I can get behind.