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

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...

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

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...

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...

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

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.