Trouble in Paradise

I keep getting distracted by work. Not the good kind of distracted, either, where things get done. The cruddy kind where I'm worried about things that are my fault but mostly out of my control. I am a worrier, and mostly not in a constructive way.

But the topic of the day is Literary Fiction: Why? Why? Why? And the answer, I often find, is simply, "For no reason but that the world is a bleak and uncaring void."

First, let's look at what set me off. Alice Munro's Runaway, which is the one I made Brenda lend me, when she would have started me off with a different Alice Munro book. I will first off say that it is extremely well-executed, only rarely falling into what I consider to be the pitfall of literary fiction, which is not being about anything particular. By this I suppose I mean bad LF, although it's also possible that I'm not perceptive enough to get it (this is ENTIRELY possible). But often, I find that these tiny slices of average life in which nothing particular happens are supposed to lead me to a deep understanding of something that I'm not sure even the author knows what. It's like abstract art; Jackson Pollack clearly knew what he was doing, but there are a lot of people out there who took that to mean they could make squiggles and people would buy it.

But Alice Munro is clearly getting at something, and although the actual events in her stories are often very small (even when they could have been made large, like the story of a woman who spent most of her life committed to an institution she should not have been in, she tells them as small and personal), they are interesting and clearly important. There is definitely a density to her stories, and a sense that the entire story is a heavy velvet curtain--there is probably something behind it, but even if there wasn't, the curtain is thick and rich and has a gravity of its own.

She wrote lovely, rich stories with characters who make you feel like you're learning about humanity as you read about them. So why is everything we learn so tragic? Why is it about betrayal, failure, pain, and fate kicking people when they're down? I really can't understand why nothing good ever happens to any of these people. A woman gets married--that's happy, right? But there's no sense of joy in it; it's 1927 and someone has finally asked her. She has a friend with a special gift, but she likes showing it off, and are they really friends?

Every story in this anthology, and, I often feel, most literary fiction, is an exploration of unhappiness, disappointment, and the ways in which unease can creep in where you're expecting small joys. I don't find this useful. Though I know I tend to be a cheerful sort of person, I'm not even asking for all cheer (I've read that book, it was called Three Wishes by Barbara Delinksy, and it was HORRIBLE), but life is a balance of tragedy and joy, of disappointment and pleasure. The pleasure is not made less real or sweet by the joy, anymore than pain is alleviated by the fact that you were once happy.

Katie's observation is that writers fear sentiment, and the positive often smacks of sentiment, so they shy away. This is why I have a philosopy called the New Sincerity, in which irony and cynicism are banished as old-fashioned, and it's once again "cool" to care about things, to love in a sensible and reasonable way (not just passionately and destructively), and to be interested in and pleased by the world around you. I don't always live it, but I'm fond of this philosophy.

In conclusion, I will reluctantly mention Mike's point that A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by David Eggers is literary fiction with a downer of a topic, but an upbeat tone--striking the balance I'm looking for. I begrudge him this point, true or not, because 1) I don't like that book, and 2) I found it sad, in the manner of something cheerful that has become grimy--a child's favorite toy trampled on in a muddy front yard.

That is all.

Think of the Children!

Okay, Anna pointed out (via her mother--I understand she won't start typing classes till she's at least 6 months old) that there are certain disturbing elements in the story of Babar the Little Elephant. And surely, the fact that he marries Celeste, who is not only his cousin, but still in short dresses, is somewhat troubling.

But I'm more concerned about his callous and selfish relationship with The Old Lady, who takes him in when he's alone and naked (literally!), clothes him, and supplies him, sugar-momma-style, with all his material needs and wants. Then she also supplies cash for gifts for the relatives who start showing up on his doorstep. And what does he do? He takes off with barely a backward glance, in HER car, and doesn't even invite her to the wedding! "Hey baby, it's been great, but you're tying me down, and I gotta be free!"

WHAT???

So in short, this book is full of loose morals and is not appopriate for small children.

There will be another entry later about literary fiction and The New Sincerity, but I need to settle my nerves after that brush with loose French morals.

Feeding the Monster

It looks like the consensus is that I should be a librarian. Thank you everyone who voted--it sounds like a pretty obvious fit, to be honest. I think it's the schooling that scares me more than anything--while I think I could be a librarian, I don't feel confident that I could qualify as one. And I've always resisted the idea of grad school in general. But to be a children's librarian or to work in YA, I think, would be pretty cool. Before I did anything, though, I'd have to find a part time or volunteer position, to figure out if I'd really want to do this every day. I think this is a thing I would plan for after Mike and I get married and get a house.

Besides that research (I really only looked at Simmons, which has a very good program, just to get an idea), this weekend has been full of feeding the addiction. We ordered a new bookshelf (!), which will be a pretty tight fit, but much-needed. Mike seems to think that buying books isn't a big deal, but buying a bookshelf is feeding my addiction. As though I were addicted to furniture. No, needing a new shelf (which we definitely do need) is a sign of the addiction, and what I should probably NOT have done was buy some used books at the Harvard Book Store. But I'd thought long and hard, and really wanted to reread both of them (The Poisonwood Bible and The Midwives). So that's done, and with that and the Amazon package arriving today, I have all the books I'm getting for a while. But oh, what a great ride it was this weekend.

I think today's a library day, too, though I'm not singing the song yet, so it could still go either way. I'm going for returns, but I really want to reread Jon Stewart's Naked Pictures of Famous People, which is light and dumb and funny, so I've started a list, and that's growing. Prince Caspian, Anna Karenina (I have my doubts, but I will try), and The Girls at the Back of the Class, a short, fast book by the author of Dangerous Minds.

Librarianism. I have to get used to it. It's kind of exciting to think about the things my life might hold for me in a few years that are so different from anything I'm doing now. I'm not usually excited about change, but getting married seems to be bringing on all kinds of good things.

Do You Speak for the Trees?

I have to say, Dr. Seuss's The Lorax is a little, well, preachy. It gets kind of didactic toward the end. Like about how people cut down trees and it destroys the world, but only YOU can prevent forest fires...no, wait, I mean REGROW THE FOREST. It leaned a little hard on its message, is all I'm saying.

The final Travelling Pants installment was delightful.

And now I'm drifting between the very, very literary Alice Munro (stories, Runaway), The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, which is good but not really holding my attention, and The Law of Similars, which I want to read, have been carrying around with me, but have not yet begun. I really loved The Midwives, which was Chris Bohjalian's story about the family of a midwife who has been accused, in effect, of malpractice. And I want to read Trans-Sister Radio, a book which, despite its too-precious title, I'm hoping will be an intelligent and sensitive take on transsexualism.

Lynne is reading Anna Karenina, and I'm tempted to try it with her. I'm tempted, in fact, to see if Renegade Book Club would like to read it in stages--maybe read a few chapters and then meet. Or not--whatever. Still, they had a whole winter study course on it at Williams, and it's one of those books that one ought to read. Plus, I can get it half price from the publisher I work for. What's not to love?

These Days

My aunt (well, second cousin, technically) said this weekend that I should go back to school and get my masters as a librarian. The truth is I've thought of that, and I think I'd love to be a children's librarian, or to build a collection. But something I've learned about myself in the working world is that, in spite of the many skills I have, I'm really quite incapable of being organized. I'm not a systematic person. I'm a stack-it-all-in-the-corner-and-let-god-sort-it-out kind of person. And I think that's pretty sad, because working in a library would, I think, make me very happy.

I also mentioned to my aunt that I'm about to take a bit of a dive into nonfiction. Not that I don't read plenty of it (though I've got a new policy against exposés), but I've got some good stuff on my list. Like The Scientist in the Crib, about how young children try to figure out the world and use logic to come up with all sorts of random conclusions about reality. And Cures, which is the memoir of a gay man who spent a lot of years with therapists who were trying to cure him of being gay. Finding Your North Star (that might not be exactly the title) is a little self-helpy for me, but it's by Martha Beck, whose other books, both memoirs, I really love.

And maybe her career counselling advice will send me back to grad school to become a librarian.

Sad Times

It's been a pretty emotional week--the excitement and party at July 4th, and the death of a fellow I knew that happened this week. It's hard to think about other things, but it's hard not to, as well. Right now, I'm mostly reminded to value the people I care about, and to tell them so. I hope everyone takes that advice.

Yesterday we had the first Renegade Book Club meeting, after much diddling around on my part. I have a hard time talking about a book so long after I've read it, especially since I didn't take good notes. It was an excellent book, though I don't know if I'd call it an excellent novel. Gilead was much more of a meditation than a novel. Lynne speaks of dipping into it rather than sitting down to read it, and I must say I agree. The narrator is elderly, and it is often like talking to someone old--somewhat drifty, stream-of-consciousness, moving back and forth between the past, the present and the abstract. But it is also poetry, because it's the story of a man who loved life, and the world, and people, full of flaws--everything. It's warming to meet a very good man in fiction, and to observe him trying to be a good man, when he is truly, of course, just a man.

I hope we keep Renegade Book Club running, and maybe get it a little tighter. I'm not really happy with Old Book Club at this point, so I consider it valuable. But it's hard to keep up with everything. Right now I'm reading a number of things that aren't even on my list. I'm slipping behind. I could use another long weekend, just sitting at home and reading. Sadly, it'll never happen.

Pants Pants Pants

Okay, clearly this book is a winner. Although, for the record, I think the names are going downhill. I mean, Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants is a good name for a book. The Second Summer of the Sisterhood is kind of weak, but at least it has alliteration on its side. But Girls in Pants is just shorthand for Another One of those Books about Those Girls You Like to Read About. I'm sure it'll be a wonderful book, but still.

I don't think I've met anyone who hasn't liked that book--a random girl in the elevator at work spent a long ride and a walk to the sidewalk gushing (with hand gestures). E Ben, who is a MAN, liked it. Mike liked the parts he read over my shoulder. Sensational!

I think, in the first book, I liked Bridget best. I liked that she was such a together, confident person, but that she didn't fully grasp what was going on inside herself. I thought it was a very complete depiction of someone who's skimming along successfully on the surface of life, but who doesn't even know what to do with the depths. Carmen was most like me, though. All temper and no self-control. There were so many moments, in all the stories, that just hit you with their perfect description of exactly what you've felt at one time or another.

Thanks so much for writing, Rachel! Becky's told me that I should talk about books with you, since it's 90% of what I want to talk about. It's nice to find someone who's interested in this Quest to Read Everything.

Ah-HAH!

After many laborious weeks, I have finished reading Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. It was a long book. There was a lot of information in it. He assimilates it very thoroughly--despite its scholarly air, he simplifies his means of arguing by repeating connections he's made over and over again. This gets a little repetitious (yes, Mr. Diamond, I understand that the east-west axis of Eurasia made it easier to spread agricultural advancements quickly across the continent), but on the other hand, I would never have been able to read it if he'd gone with underkill instead of over.

I'm now full of cocktail party tidbits that I suspect I'm going to be boring people about for months to come. Almost all crops native to the Americas are actually native to South America. One of the reasons Europe and Asia developed so quickly compared to other continents was simply that they had a lot of good crops and animals to start with, when it came to farming. If you can't farm, you can't increase your population as fast, and you can't feed yourselves fast enough to have leisure times to develop things like microchips. For example, one factoid I liked was this: a nomadic hunter-gatherer can only have one baby ever 4 years--basically, you can't have a new baby till the old one can walk, otherwise you're not mobile enough. So even if you have enough food for everyone, you still can't increase your population as fast.

Anyway, it was a really interesting book. Well designed, too--because of the repetition I mentioned before, even if you put it down for a while, you can come back to it later and details or conclusions that slipped your mind will be reiterated. This is why I was able to take over a month to read it and yet still retain a lot.

Besides this, I've been reading a LOT of young adult material. I'm running low on steam for it, actually. Now that I've finished The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in time for the movie that will be out in about six months, I can get back to other things. Oh, except that my turn with Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood just came up at the library. I swear that's it, though--after that, I'm reading only serious adult tomes for at least a month.

Well, maybe not serious. I'm eyeing Ladies' No. 1 Detective Agency.

A Little Embarassing

I really feel like, between the Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants and rereading all my Susan Isaacs once a year, I've missed out on a lot of important things. See the following, for example.

And in case you don't scroll all the way down, commentary first.

1) I suspect that One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch was banned in communist Russia. A very different standard.

2) Speaking of standards, whatever nutjob banned Little House on the Prairie probably has hypersensitivity problems. How do you walk down the street if you're that easily offended?

3) I have already added a few of these to my list, and I'm proud to say that some were already on it.

4) At first I was embarassed by the number of titles that I not only haven't read, but haven't heard of. But now I'm a little skeptical about this list. I mean, I would expect that The Happy Hooker has been banned lots of times--possibly more often than James and the Giant Peach, because, while more libraries are trying to include the latter, astronomically more people would have complaints about the former.

And I think the advice to read more is not necessarily solid. Some of these are wonderful books, but there are plenty of good non-banned books out there.

So that's my two cents. I have to mark up the list, which may take a while.

Here's a list of the top 110 banned books. Bold the ones you've read. Italicize the ones you've read part of. Read more. Convince others to read some.

#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Koran
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
#11 The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Das Kapital by Karl Marx
#37 Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
#43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
#58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Emile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Emile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

Trade Off

So Melissa showers me with new things to read (The Innkeeper's Song, by Peter Beagle, which I was too young to appreciate last time). I need to move faster through what I'm reading now, though, to get to it.

I'll DEFINITELY need to undergo a Personal Library Renaissance this time. No more BPL books (except book club books and reserves that I've been waiting for, assuming they ever come in) until I've read a certain percentage of the books I own and have borrowed from others. Right now all my reading is borrowed--GG&S is from Elizabeth (because she beat me to it at the book fair), Alias Grace from Lynne (who hopefully is reading The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants and enjoying it) and The Ruby in the Smoke from Katie, who will have to read Philip Pullman's Golden Compass series soon.

I also need to read the Chronicles of Narnia. I've only ever read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but I've become fond of C.S. Lewis in my dotage, and the movie's coming out. Once again, my reading comes in waves--before it was books about finding God and parenting, and now it's YA fiction (mostly fantasy). I also really want to read When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro, which Becky was kind enough to say I could keep if I wanted. I'm too greedy, because I really really do want.

I'm looking forward to finishing GG&S and Alias Grace, because I'd like to be able to look at both of those rather vast books more objectively, and maybe write about them here. Instead of about trips to the library and, basically, biblioporn.

Impressed with Myself

Wow, so I'm almost out of library books. I had seven items out so assumed I had a lot, but I'm returning three of them, one's an audiobook that I'm going to rip to MP3 and listen to at my leisure, and the other three are either minor or done. So I'm...purged. Clean. I can go where I want, do...whatever I want. Horrible, horrible freedom.

Well, Guns, Germs and Steel is going to take a while. Sara, Sara's father and I all seem to have the problem that that book takes forever to read. I'm on page 255 (which I remember because I creep along page by page), and I'm so proud! It's enjoyable, though. Then there are the Alice Munro books I borrowed from Brenda, and the one last book Melissa lent me. Yeah, and Katie just let me have the Philip Pullman--okay, it's a lot. A lot of it is Young Adult, though, so I suspect I'll breeze through some of it.

And then I'll come back and read a bunch of adolescent girl nonfiction, which seems to be my current thing (Stick Figure, Queen Bees and Wannabes, maybe reread Reviving Ophelia). I'll tell you, I'm going to be woefully underprepared for parenting a boy.

Book House

http://www.liviodemarchi.com/casauk.htm

A crazy person after my own somewhat obsessed heart.

No...no, I have to admit--he's nuttier than I am.

Countdown

If I keep my wits about me and my eyes shut in the bookstore, I'm going to have the list back down in the 30s. When it's there, I feel less like I'm trying to beat it back and get somewhere, and more like I have a menu to choose from when it's time to make a book selection. Of course, this depends on the fact that about eight of the 46 books on my list are currently either actively being read or on deck.

The Name on the White House Floor and Other Anxieties of Our Times. Judith Martin before Miss Manners. Collected essays--"our times" being the early 70s. This was a lot of fun--I recommend it.

Which, by the way--add to my top ten list: Miss Manners Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior. I'm not kidding anyone--I'm going to get a copy of the new updated version very very soon.

Top Ten?

A top ten list? I don't know if I can do that. I can only think of two books that I would come back to in the category of "favorite book," and even beyond that, these opinions change? Best book I read this year, even, would be hard.

We'd have to start with The Nun's Story by Kathryn Hulme. I've been squawked at, "It's not a true story, you know!!!" (By a librarian, no less--the one in Hudson who used to comment on all your books as you were checking them out.) Yeah, and I only read true stories. That's what all the dragons, spaceships, and true unending romance are about.

Then there's Shining Through, by Susan Isaacs. I don't think I could understand someone who didn't like that book, or at least find it funny. If Bridget Jones were smart and together and funnier, you'd come close to this book.

Um...I'll have to think about the rest of the top ten list. But I can tell you about the next ten.

I'm reading Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond, and How to Be Lost by Amanda Eyre Ward, both very enjoyable books. I'm listening to Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell on my MP3 player. And I've got George Takei (you know, Sulu)'s autobiography and an old and obscure book of Judith Martin essays from the library. Plus The Law of Similars (Chris Bohjalian), The Final Solution (Michael Chabon), The Thief Lord, two books of Alice Munro stories, the collected short works of Dorothy Parker, not to mention the MAMMOTH Autobiography of Henry VIII: A Novel. And that's just the borrowed stuff.

Too...Many...Books....

Joy, rapture, the autobiography of George Takei has made it to the library in time for me to pick it up with an obscure and probably boring essay by Judith Martin that I've reserved. And the author of the book I just started, Amanda Eyre Ward (How to Be Lost is the book, and so far so good. She went to Williams, I'll point out for the tenth time) wrote a review a long time ago of a book I had changed my mind about wanting to read; the review changed it back. The book is Strip City, and it's a non-fiction account of a road trip that an ex-stripper took just before settling down to marry a fairly straight-laced military man. Basically, she strips her way across the country. I wasn't sure at first that I'd want to read about someone who thinks that flesh trade is a positive life experience, but it sounds from this review like there's a little more to it than that. (The review is here, by the way)

So my list is back up to 48, though I'm working my way through two of them, and my two library books are going to be another two. Then I really need to get to some books on my shelf, mostly borrowed, that are not on the list, though.

I'm so excited! So very!

The O.S.C.

Just to confirm for everyone; Orson Scott Card's work is spotty at best.

Misogynist or Misanthropist?

My newfound comprehension of Mormons makes me see pretty clearly how Orson Scott Card feels about women--or anyway, how he addresses them in his books. That is, they can be good people (chiefly by being good wives and mothers), but they are weak and ignorant, and need protecting. That's overstating the case, but if he wasn't understated, it wouldn't have taken me this long to figure it out. Rachel & Leah of his Women of Genesis series brought this one home.

And this has made me think about male writers who address women. It's not the kind of thing I usually notice; I suspect that's mostly because I'm less aware of the differences between men and women than some people. Everyone is "people," and then whether you're a man or woman will have an effect on what kind of person you are. That sounds kinda sickeningly simplistic, but the personal insights behind it are not the point here.

The point is some books in which I've disagreed with people on how men write women (I can't speak to how accurate women are when they write men). For example, She's Come Undone, by Wally Lamb. I might be the only person I know who thought that was NOT a very good depiction of a women. It was a very well-written person, especially for someone so troubled and messed up, which is hard a hard thing to do appealingly with your narrator and protagonist. I don't think I would have any complaints if everyone hadn't ranted about how well the male author wrote the female character. I don't think she was very specifically female at all--if anything, I felt a disjoint between the fact that her personality was formed by sexual abuse (in her early teen years, not as a young child) and the aggressive, active, self-sabotaging attitude of the character. Not that women aren't that way, sometimes, but for a book lauded as having a feminine sensibility, I wasn't convinced.

Let's see, then there's The Color of Light, by William Goldman. Possibly the only people who have read this book are the ones I've lent it to, but I've loved this for a long time. Mostly this is because William Goldman is a hilarious and brutal writer. When Jo borrowed it, though, her reaction was, "He doesn't really like women, does he?" which was the first time I realized that all the female characters in the book were pretty messed up in one way or another. I brooded on that for a while and then realized that ALL the characters were pretty messed up; the reason the women were notably unredeemed was mostly because Chub was the only redeemed one at all. So that's men 1, women 0--not a great score for either team.

(Two Brew wasn't redeemed--he was just rich and funny)

As a partially relevant side-note, I've always thought Stephen King wrote women in a style that I would call poor but likeable. He thinks women know something he doesn't--have some grasp of Truth or Humanity that any man (or at least King himself) lacks. But I find that kind of appealing, in a flattering way. Heck yeah, I have a deep grasp of the cosmos. I'll take that kind of credit wherever I can get it.

And then there's Orson Scott Card. I retain my fondness for Ender's Game, and I'll say that I enjoyed Enchantment, Homebody, and Speaker for the Dead. But these Women of Genesis books, besides tricking me into thinking I knew Bible stories when I really learned Book of Mormon stories, are full of men who, even when they're CLEARLY WRONG--within the context of the story--are treated as right for being men. And when women are right, they're still just women. It makes for a weird imbalance of character.

I was quite old before I thought of myself as a girl. I mean, I was never a tomboy (though I wanted to be), but I think there are a lot of moments that make people identify with their gender that I'm missing, either because of how I grew up or because I've always been a little dim that way. But I've often felt like I was watching these interactions involving gender with a certain objectivity. I wonder if that's at all valid, or if everyone feels that way.

Roseanne Barr

So I read a book that was later made into a Roseanne Barr movie. (Was there more than one Roseanne Barr movie?) The movie was She-Devil, and the book was called The Life and Loves of a She-Devil. By Fay Weldon.

I try not to be too much of a Polyanna, and I have appreciated some pretty grim books in my time. But I didn't like The Epicure's Lament, our last book club selection. That was because you couldn't like the main character, and you couldn't see the world without him. He was an unreliable narrator, but not as funny or smart as he thought he was, and the author didn't let us work around him at all.

Anyway, there is no one in She-Devil whom you care about. There's a clear protagonist--the wronged wife out for revenge. Normally, I'd love to be on her side. But she is not a very nice person, does not learn anything, is not redeemed by any positive traits. Being put-upon is not a positive trait.

And no one else she encounters in her long journey has any kind of wisdom, or dignity, or integrity. All the men want to have sex with her--most do. All the women are dim, pointless, reproduction and/or sex machines.

She-Devil and Epicure share this: both are trying to make me feel that the human race is pretty worthless. I've felt this way before: I used to have a list of things that make me ashamed to be a part of the human race (#1 on that list was that commercial for I Can't Belive It's Not Butter, the spray that starred Fabio. That convergence of elements was too much for me). I wouldn't put these books on that list, but I can say that they don't make me happier about humanity.

Not like French Martinis.

Fast, Cheap, Out of Control

Miss Manners is coming! Miss Manners is coming! Oh, I am beside myself! She will speak at the Boston Public Library, and I hope I can go. Linden, I'm sorry if it means a short dinner on Wednesday, but it's Miss Manners. I hope you understand.

This weekend I read (very quickly) My Posse Don't Do Homework, which was amusing and heartwarming, as it was intended to be, and bore little or no relationship to the movie they made from it, Dangerous Minds. I liked the movie, liked the book better, though it was schmaltzier. Best, though, I liked the segement of This American Life where the author of the book--the teacher who was played by Michelle Pfeiffer in the movie and Annie Potts in the short-lived TV series, rips into Hollywood for turning these mostly good, hard-working kids into violent gang members who aren't motivated or interested. It's more complex than that, and in spite of the schmaltz (did I mention the schmaltz?), the book did a better job of portraying kids who want to succeed but are afraid to try, full of anger, or just have other priorities.

There will be plane trips coming up soon, which are good for reading. But also weddings and busy weekends, which are not. But I'm going to start obsessing about the weather now, because I have a goregous new dress, but am apparently attending an outdoor wedding in what promises to be the rain and mud this weekend.

Wish me luck.

Mormon Fever

Regarding books that come in spells. It seems like parenthood and religion are the thing now on my list. I tried to avoid it, somewhat, but I've got Bible story retellings (Rachel and Leah), religious autobiography (Son of a Preacher Man), and a teacher memoir (Dangerous Minds) from the library.

Leaving the Saints was just as good as I had hoped. Martha Beck is witty and perceptive, and does not suffer from cynicism in spite of a life that really should have engendered it. Funny without being ironically distant. Also, Mormons are wacky. Also, if you don't like your therapist, fire your therapist. That's what I say.

I also learned that a number of Bible stories I thought I knew are NOT actually Bible stories but Book of Mormon versions of them (thank you so very much, Orson Scott Card). My whole world is turned upside down.

Now I want to get a little bit away from the religious thing, mostly because I've gotten too deep into it. I read Travelling Mercies by Anne Lamott, and found it a little too preachy for me. I thought Son of a Preacher Man would be a somewhat skeptical indictment of mainstream Christianity and/or televangelism from Jay Bakker, son of the famous Bakkers. But it looks like he's a pretty mainstream (albeit tattooed) Christian, and the story itself looks a little haphazard and apologetic. So I might not even read it right now.

The parenthood/children thing I might be able to maintain, though. It's not so much a reading theme yet as on my mind, since I've been reading Rebecca's blog about Anna, and since I've been reading Dooce for a while now. I guess it's my online reading that's parenthood oriented. But there's a book called Raising America about the history of parenthood theory in the US--Dr. Spock to Dr. Phil--that I'm curious about.

And book club went well yesterday. After the renegade meeting, we might just see how the real thing pans out. I have hope again; this is a valuable thing.

Another Book Club Thing

Katie and I have reached a compromise about this month's horrible Mainstream Book Club selection, The Epicure's Lament. I'm about 1/3 of the way through, and I hate it. Katie read a few pages and then skimmed the rest, and hates it. So she's going to use this amazing power of skimming that she has to get the whole plot down, and I'm going to find passages and details from the language in the 1/3 I've read, and we're going to pool our resources in our own little set of Cliff's Notes to avoid reading the rest.

Huzzah; it is an awful book.

Fellow Alumni

Linden says she doesn't feel like there are a lot of good books out there to read, and she doesn't know where to find them, except through recommendations. This is how I do it:

I'm on the Boston area Williams alumni listserver. Amanda Eyre Ward, a Williams alum, was going to be reading from her new book. I couldn't make the reading (I really try not to do things that require me to trek too far out on the Green Line), but I looked her up at the library and idly checked out her first book, Sleep Toward Heaven. It was really quite a good book--simple, but true, and personal. She did a great job of creating three characters, and also of tying them together without (mostly) being heavy-handed about it.

This method is often hit-or-miss. It includes things like books that are reviewed on Slate, books that are mentioned in the reviews of other books, books that we read for book club, or that were considered for book club but discarded, or books I see on my friends' shelves, or on display at the bookstore. There are a lot of duds in this pile, though I think I'm a pretty good judge of what I'm going to enjoy at this point.

I've also gotten comfortable with stopping after 50 pages if I really don't like it. I'm getting older, my time is too valuable to waste. That's been a very liberating thing--I rarely have to regret picking a book up, because it never wastes more of my time than it's worth. Fifty pages of wasted time is worth experiencing a cautionary example.

For example, I'd stop reading The Epicure's Lament, if I didn't feel this dragging obligation of Book Club. Urg--another story.

Rhapsody

Kazuo Ishiguro wrote The Remains of the Day, which was a good movie, and which now I have to read, along with When We Were Orphans. And all this because I just finished his new book, Never Let Me Go, which was so good I had a really hard time returning it to the library. Which is not to say that I need to own it, but that when I finished it and sat back, I felt strongly like it wasn't really done with me.

It's deceptively simple--the voice of the main character is not of someone speaking poetry, or even trying. It's the voice of a friend of yours, a 30-year-old woman recounting stories from her private-school childhood. She tells them in the meandering way that one recounts one's own life, because in reality, a lifetime of moments do not all point to some cataclysmic ending. Rather, she tells stories she remembers, about her relationships with her best friends, about their growing up. Kathy will begin with a story that sticks out in her memory, then backtrack to an earlier incident that gives more meaning to the later incident, and hint at how it's affected who she is now.

But I think what makes this book wonderful is that it's about an alternate world. The England in the story is one with an alternate history, but only slightly. And the characters in the story inhabit an alternate society that lives side-by-side with the rest of us in their England, but it's not about us. Kathy is familiar, moreso than most characters in books, I think, because she is the same distance from you as people you meet--you're listening to her talk to you, rather than living inside her head with her. And that makes the separation of her world more poignant.

Also, the book is about injustice without being about change. I think this is very powerful. Almost every social injustice that has been or is being fought against was once and for a long time accepted as fact, without fanfare. I feel like there aren't a lot of those left--plenty of injustices, but few that aren't recognized. But these people live lives that make you at first want them to rise up and change things. Gradually, though, you realize this book isn't about change. It's about realization, and the meaning of life. It doesn't give answers, but yes, I'd say this book is about the meaning of life.

On a Promised Topic

The good news is that I can release a little of my library list guilt. I just realized that at least 17 of the titles on that list are not so much things that I want to read as things that I want to remember the existence of so that I might someday go back to read them. This means that there are not 50 books I'm trying to cram into my brain at the same time--only 33.

As advertised: Why I Didn't Finish Up the Down Staircase. I expected a book about teaching, and this is a book about having a job. This young woman, just out of graduate school, who has studied English with passion and has been excited to share it with students arrives at her first teaching job to discover that it's not what she expected. This is exactly what I signed on for--excellent!

But what she found had nothing at all to do with students or connecting to people. It was about bureaucracy, bosses who micromanage trivial things, other bosses who are oblivious to reality, janitors who don't show up. There has been one scene that even involved students, and that was based entirely arounder there being too many directives from the office and a broken window that nobody would clean up. It was in no way about students.

The structure of the novel makes this feel inevitable. It's an assemblage of memos from the office, clippings from the school paper, notes written back and forth between teachers, and letters to the main character's friends. This leaves a lot of room for her to talk about the nitty gritty of her day-to-day, but not a lot for actual interaction with people.

It's too bad--I saw the play based on this book once, and it was quite good. Probably there's a story in here somewhere, but it's a long book, I'm not enjoying it, and I've got other things to do. I'm going to read Dangerous Minds, though, because I suspect that book will fulfill my need for a story about teachers reaching out to kids who aren't eager to learn.

Also, a note on my observation that books I read come in waves I can't necessarily predict: I'm currently reading three books about people with genetic abnormalities. Expecting Adam, about a woman who finds out her unborn son has Down's Syndrome, Middlesex, about a child who is born with ambiguous genetalia and is raised a girl, only to grow up and find out himself a man, and Fearless, a really TERRIBLE young adult book (by the Sweet Valley High author, if that tells you anything) about a girl "born without the fear gene." Ugh.

Slacker

March has been a wonderful and horrible month. Work has been draining and hideous, I've felt overcommitted and have not had enough rest or kept my personal life in the state I prefer it. On the wonderful side, Mike and I both got promoted and engaged. So I guess this month goes down in history, huh?

I hold out hope for April, in part by refreshing here. March doesn't actually end for me, work-wise, till next week (courses pub this Friday, next week devoted to troubleshooting, and then we're back in the land of the normals). So I will stop here long enough to say: more soon.

And also to make the point--where does the BPL order their books? The two books I want to read have been "On Order" for weeks now. If they would just use Amazon, they'd have them by now. I really wish I could work there part time, processing new books or something tedious and refreshing like that. But they won't hire you unless you live in the city of Boston. What kind of a deal is that?

Updates I owe: Why I didn't finish Up the Down Staircase. How Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonders reminded me of college. And, long overdue, What I thought of my first Joyce Carol Oates novel.

Not a Busy Weekend

Tomorrow is Pi Day (3/14), and being a math-based business, we celebrate. There are actually very few math geeks in my office--many more grammar geeks--but there's no dessert-based quasi-holiday centering around grammar, so we get behind Pi. I made strawberry pie.

I finished two books this weekend--my first Ursula LeGuin, Gifts. I've read a novella of hers, called Solitude, which was excellent, and I liked Gifts as well. She has a deft touch at worldbuilding--she captures the depth of reality without giving you more than you need to know; she creates a place where you know and believe that people live these lives even after you, the reader, stop paying attention. The story itself is fairly standard and low-key, and it's much more about the experience of a certain life and its implications.

And Baggage, which was somewhere between drama and chick lit. It doesn't quite come together the way you'd expect it to. She's on the run, she's about to get found out...mostly it's about dealing with a media hubbub, but the first half is so much lead-up that you expect the end to be a little more pointed. It was definitely a fun read, though, with a lot of funny moments, especially about pregnancy and in-laws, and a lot of interesting characterization. A woman who changed herself to someone else, personality-wise, to escape, but who finds weird bits of the old person lying around. But she's not crazy, or evil, or anything. She just does thing in the most complicated way possible.

Anyway, I'm diving into the tough stuff now--Gilead and Black Water. The latter is short but, being Joyce Carol Oates, requires brain-power. Wish me luck.

Too Busy

Work is such hard work! This weekend was great, in that I did almost nothing, but I find it frustrating when, after running myself ragged, I get bored and restless with just sitting around on the weekends. I want to sit around--I ache to sit around more. I read most of a book on Saturday, which is great. But still, a little antsy.

Anyway, I finished Protecting the Gift, which is about turning fear into a tool for detecting and preventing danger to your children, instead of letting it turn into worry or panic, or trying to ignore it as irrational. It was a pretty good book, entertaining and interesting in its assumptions about how the human mind works. I think he's far too dismissive of people's tendencies to worry too much or about the wrong thing. He acknowledges this, but then he seems to think his book's going to solve it. Giving someone the right things to worry about doesn't necessary squelch their concerns about the wrong things.

I'm too anxious and busy to write anymore. Hopefully I'll remember to bring my book to read on the T tomorrow.

Sad Surrender

I have rarely been this busy or stressed. Last summer was a bad one, work-wise, and was pretty consistantly awful, but for most of the time, it was just a pervasive sense of grinding despair, and you slogged along through the mud, dragging your metaphorical pick-axe behind you. This is frenetic, rushing and jittering, working like a woman with a caffine addiction and possibly a cocaine addiction, when I never indulge in either. I am unable to concentrate on work because of other work that is distracting me.

And what this means is that I have a big sloggy pile of mush between my ears. And what that means is that I'm having terrible time concentrating on the beautiful, slow, thoughtful and spiritual book I'm trying to read. Gilead needs attention and thoughts. I just can't do it. I'm so sorry, Renegade folks. I'm sorry for myself, too, because I was so excited to read this book.

Instead I'm reading Baggage, which is definitely chick lit (picture of a woman's torso wearing jeans and a pink shirt that exposes her belly button on the cover. totally unrelated to the story, except possibly the focus on the belly relating to the fact that the main character is pregnant; seems like a stretch). That's on the T--at my bedside I'm reading Protecting the Gift, which is by the author of The Gift of Fear and is about raising children who trust their instincts and can protect themselves from danger. Really I just thought his first book was interesting, and this was the other one he wrote; I'm reading it to recapture the pleasure of the first one. He also wrote one about terrorism, but I'm skeptical about reading it.

Oh, and I just finished 84, Charing Cross Road, a charming little compilation of 20 years of letters between a funny lady in NewYork and the London bookshop where she orders all her books, starting right after WWII. It was just so funny and sweet and you wish you could meet all those people and be that clever. It is a perfect example of Lynne's whole person that she would know about this book, love it, and lend it to me.

And I borrowed Middlesex and Black Water (from Beth and Jo, respectively) last night. I'm excited to read both of those, too, though I hope work unwinds soon, because I could use more energy and attention for the things that are really important.

Rich Weekend

So aside from being a lovely weekend of good food and wine, this was also a heck of a weekend for finishing things. After being failed by two personal copies and two libraries, the BPL came through with Einstein's Dreams for Standard Book Club, which I whipped through in a morning. It's not so much literature as prose poetry, with the idea of relativity, both in the human and the physical senses, being central.

Finished The Speed of Dark, which I liked very much by the end. It did a very interesting job in dissecting the main character's predicament (do I cure this condition--autism--that is such a core part of who I am?), of shedding light on the various aspects and relevancies. For a while I felt kind of annoyed, as though the book was intending to reveal how "normals" are going about things all wrong, but as the narrator grows on you, it becomes clear where the gap between him and the world is. And the subplots--he's stalked; his department at work is being threatened with closure--are really a little nail-biting, even when you can guess how they'll end.

Let's see, what else? Regarding My Antonia, which I thought was a very sweet tale of atmosphere. I think it's kind of funny that the book is about Antonia, because really it's entirely about the narrator, Jim. Antonia doesn't appear in large chunks of the book. She's that person you never forget, but she is the focal point for him as he tells his own story, and often other girls in her position stand in for her. It's a good story, though, and really the only way to tell it, I think. The beauty and lonliness of the prairie is the main character, the main theme. Growing up at that time and in that place--I've heard that story before, but Willa Cather can indeed make you feel how it wouldn't be boring to watch the prairie dogs all afternoon and eat then melons till dark.

I started Gilead, which is slow and ruminative. It's very much about the nature of leading a godly life, and though it's told through the view of the one character, and his definitions of godly and challenges to that goal, it's definitely a broader theme, and definitely the author dealing with it. It is more of a contemplation than a novel (though it is that, too) and I hope I have not steered my fellow Renegaders wrong.

Slacking Off

Not that I haven't been reading. Far from it. But when I read many books at the same time, I don't finish them as quickly (laws of physics, nature of time, etc. being what they are). Today, however, I proudly finished My Antonia, by Willa Cather. Lynne loves this as one of her favorite books, and a number of other people remember it as one of the most boring books they ever read. I can explain that: this is a book for people who like Little House on the Prairie, and not for people who don't. Rarely can the world be divided so clearly along those lines, but this book's audience is quite clearly Those Who Revel in the Pioneer Spirit and Enjoy Small Heartwarming Farm Life Anecdotes. Including moi.

I also grabbed Einstein's Dreams at the library. I was many times thwarted in my quest for this book; I own a copy, somewhere, which I can't locate. My sister owns a copy, somewhere, which neither of us can find. The Somerville West Branch Library claims to have a copy, which neither the librarian nor I could find on the shelf. The Somerville Main Branch has a copy, but because of the holiday weekend and some bizarre scheduling decision to generally be closed on Tuesdays, it was "in transit" when I went to pick it up. So now, here, I finally have it in hand. I will read it, and all book club will revel in my insight.

I also went a little nuts when I went to the library, ostensibly to pick up the book that WASN'T THERE. So I got three others. Protecting the Gift, which is Gavin de Becker's follow-up to The Gift of Fear, which was a pretty cool if overly unnerving story of how if we trust our instincts we're less likely to be mugged. I don't think that's wrong, exactly, but my instincts tell me to be afraid an awful lot, and they're almost always wrong so far.

I also got something called Baggage which is about someone on the run from the law, but looks like chick lit, which seemed like a good combination at the time. And I got an Ursula LeGuin book that practically jumped out and bit me, called Gifts. It was on display, and I should read Ursula LeGuin, right?

Double extra plus, I just got an email from Adrian, who got the book I wanted in England (it's not out here), and will be bringing it home soon. It's called George and Sam and is about a mother with two autistic sons. Nick Hornby loved it. Thank you Adrian! Hooray for you!

I am feeling pretty darned sated.

That Old Feeling

Sheepish aside: the Bloggies make me jealous. I was reading some of the blogs that are up for awards, and they're wonderful, and I wish I could be them. But I'm not 1) funny, 2) poignant, or 3) topical. Or really 4) well-researched or 5) interesting to others, for that matter.

Okay, back on topic. I'm almost done The Firebrand, and the end is definitely the best part of the book. The whole book--tone and style as well as plot--conveys the sense of impending doom. I think the rest of it was a little too long, and also a little too simplistic in character development.

I finished The Song at the Scaffold, which was much better than I had expected. It was an old book about nuns in the French Revolution, and I thought it would be light. But it wasn't--it was very internal, very much about the nature of grace and faith, and also a very grim portrait of the Revolution. It made me think a lot, actually, about something that was very peripheral in the book--how violent revolution becomes inevitable after a certain point, because situations become so polarized that there's no way to start the process of backing down to a sensible medium. Looking at France, for example--who could have instigated a change in how lavishly the rich lived? How could they have done that. I can't think of an example--this is the reason that a happy medium--specifically the middle class--is such a useful thing.

And--here's the part that's so exciting! I think I'm going to the bookstore tonight! I've decided what to do with my gift certificate, and I think the time has come. The funny part is that I'm buying two books I've already read, so I'm not adding to my pile of things I need to read. But they're to lend and reread.

Actually--I've been buzzed about this all day, and now that the time is closer, I don't really feel as excited any more. I think I might hold off. The point would be to go into the store with this same thrill. Get the most for my money.

Suggestions out of Context

Linden recommends The Brothers K, though not to me. I probably won't even read it, actually, since it sounds, as she says, like a very masculine book. This is quite far from my style. Also, it's about baseball, at least in part, which is not so much up my alley. But it sounds like a good family drama, and I'm willing to plug it, in case (unlikely as it may be) I have a reader who prefers masculine books. (I'd say "Greg, I'm talking to you," except I don't think he reads this.)

Also, if you like this sort of thing, or are 5, there's The Color Kittens. I actually bought a copy for my cousin when she had twins and then couldn't bear to part with it and now it's mine. "Pink as a pig, pink as toes,/pink as a rose or a baby's nose." The kittens are named Brush and Hush. I think the very word "hush" evokes something for me, something still and special.

So, off the beaten track, some options.

And hey Linden, you got blogged again.

Wandering Thoughts

I'm about to finish Howl's Moving Castle, which is a most excellent kids' fantasy book. It does, in fact, feature a moving castle, but I don't blame that for my wandering thoughts. I don't know why I've been thinking of Alias Grace lately, but for some reason it keeps crossing my mind.

It's a Margaret Atwood book that I listened to as a book-on-tape a few years ago. It was good--I liked it better than I've liked most of her other books. It's the story of a murder in the early 1900s, and of the servant girl who is accused of it. The book is divided into chapters that are told from the servant's point of view, and those that are told third person from the point of view of an investigating doctor who's trying to figure out if she's crazy. I think there's a strong possibility that the reader really made a difference in my enjoyment of this book--she was an actress who did a lovely Irish accent for Grace, and it was an auditory pleasure. I don't know if I feel like rereading it, especially now when I've got a lot of new stuff that I'm excited about, but it's been in my mind. Maybe I'll buy the book, to have on hand and reread at leisure.

I've also been thinking about She's Not There, which I think I just will buy. I want to lend that out--it's such an amazing story, and such a great telling of a true life in which there's no right answer, no way to make everything okay, but people manage to do their best. It reminds me of the This American Life episode that I caught part of on NPR yesterday, which had a long story about transsexual men--men who were born women.

I was listening to NPR (she segued casually) on the way home from Louisa May Alcott's house, where I learned a great deal--much from the tour guide, and some from the precocious little girl who had read the biography, knew a lot, and was very excited. That was pretty cool. Louisa May made $100,000 from Little Women over the course of her lifetime, and $250,000 total from her writing, while her father was earning $100 per year as the superintendant of schools. Also she wrote a book called Moods in which a character based on her was wood by characters based on Thoreau and Emerson (two of her neighbors and her father's friends). The character, according to the back of the book, "marries the wrong one." A few things occur to me here, among them what a great time that would have been to live in Concord, MA, and which of those two gentlemen was "the wrong one?"

I hope Lynne and Adrian had as much fun as I did yesterday. It was a gorgeous day and a great trip.

He Said, She Said

So Mike and I both read The End of the Affair, by Graham Greene, with surprising results. It was my idea, because I so admired The Comedians when we read it for book club, and I wanted Mike to try him. The result of this experiment was, I feel, unexpected.

We had completely different ideas of the book. I think we even had different experiences of it. He hated all the characters, wondered where it was going, and found it, at best, interesting toward the end. (I apologize, Mike, if this is an unfair description of your opinion.) And while I wouldn't say I loved it, I liked it very much, found it interesting, and found most of the characters, if not sympathetic, at least believable and intriguing. Even when they were being total bastards.

Without giving too much away, I have theories on why our opinions differed.

1) There is a plot twist and I knew what it was. I actually didn't know it was a twist--really more of a mystery. I read the back of the video box long ago, and the blurb they use to describe the plot gives away something the reader and narrator spend the first half of the book trying to figure out. This is why our experience was different.

2) I think having read The Comedians made a difference. The main character, despite having a very different life, has a very similar personality in many ways. He behaves much the same toward his lover. Heck, he has a married lover in the first place. The love affair is less promient in that book, but the echo of that other, somewhat nobler--or at least less horrible--narrator influenced my opinion of him, I think. Another strike on the side of different experiences.

3) A lot of the book is about struggling with God. Although Mike found this to be the most intersting part of the story, we had very different opinions about what was happening. What I took to be a real, if perhaps misdirected and hysterical, search for truth and meaning, he took as a nervous breakdown. I can see how one could read it his way, but because some of the emotional and intellectual places the character goes on that search are familiar to me, I cut her a lot more slack for the outrageous or nonsensical turns her search takes. A lot of what she went through looked familiar to me, while to Mike, it looked crazy. And the parts he sees as crazy are crazy--but in a direction I can imagine going.

4) Related to #3, I liked Sarah a lot more because I felt like she was being foolish but not nuts. I can see all the arguments for not liking her, and it's more than possible that I'm just completely missing the "unreliable narrator" component of this book, but that was my feeling. So there was that.

And that's that. We had a great conversation about it, though, I think. The kind of conversation I love and that never seems to come along often enough, mostly because I can't hold my own very long. Those are the conversations at a good book club, and always when we all get together in Atlanta, and that Mike and I have been having a lot lately. Ones where I feel like I've thought well, and expressed it well, and heard ideas I wouldn't have thought of and internalized them. Heady stuff.

Feminist Fantasy

So, The Firebrand, by Marion Zimmer Bradley. I think that the best way to explain what's been troubling me about this book is by comparing it to The Mists of Avalon. Most people would consider the latter her masterpiece, and I can't disagree. The thing these have in common is depicting a matriarchal society, a world in which women are powerful, equal to men or better, possessed of the truest power and beloved of their own goddesses. Druids, in Mists, and Amazons, in Firebrand. I think the Amazons are less convincing.

First, there's less history behind them. Not that I require historical accuracy in my fantasy, but when you have history, you get a certain verisimilitude, just because you're telling the truth. The main problem, though, is that in her Arthurian story, the society seems to fit. There is a place for men, beside the women and intertwined with them, and they don't seem extraneous or pointless. In this book, however, it's hard to believe that anyone has babies, the men and women hate each other so. They visit a city, for example, where all the guards are women, a city ruled by a Queen who has no consort (there is no such thing as a King). And yet the Queen's daughter is a little chit who thinks that being a warrior would make her "manly." Only women can be blacksmiths, for various spiritual reasons. Okay...but the question remains: what are the men doing? Are they allowed to use their physical strength in any way at all? I mean, I'm not a very intense feminist, but is it still considered very wrong to admit that men often have stronger bodies than women? And I have trouble really believing in a world in which every character who isn't an idiot believes that staying indoors, pursuing intelligence, not being a warrior is just stupid and useless.

I bet at some point we get a wise man, though. But for some reason, it seems like it would be bad form to have an intelligent, respectable woman who doesn't kill people for a living.

Deep Sorrow

Richard Yates wrote Revolutionary Road, which we read for book club a while ago. It was very good, but also both sad and tragic. And I just finished The Easter Parade, a later book by Yates. Sad, too, and with a stunning tragedy that sort of comes from behind. It was really so good--the main character was just perfectly rendered. You could sort of see the author's own life echoing, though the main character is a woman. But based on some interviews I read, the alcoholism and lack of meaningful relationships was something he knew about.

But the tragedy that both follows inevitably from the whole story and also creeps up on you at the end, really hit me for some reason. Partly it's because the book spans 40 years in a short storytelling space, and you're still feeling for a five- and twelve- and twenty-year-old girl, while you're watching her life age, get stale, dissolve. And the emptiness that you can clearly perceive throughout the book becomes solid and real so quickly and brutally at the end--I think it hits home with me for some reason. I have no reason to really fear dying alone as much as I do, since I have a big close family and a lot of great friends. But I guess it's a neurosis--or maybe you can just blame Yates. Maybe anyone would have felt this insidious discomfort. He does write squirmers.

Despite this, I really, really recommend this book. Emily is an amazing character, running out of time.

Neverwhere

I blame Charles DeLint for my opinion of Neverwhere. I have heard criticisms that I can agree with--the bad guys and grossness are a little over the top, to the point where you feel like maybe Neil Gaiman is enjoying Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar a little too much. And there are a lot of things he does in his fantasy world that are fun but don't hold up past the moment of delightful cleverness that they deliver. You can't picture all these creatures he created continuing on their underground ways after we've moved out of their scene.

But still, I think Charles DeLint is to blame for my reaction to this book, because he filled me up with "invisible people who have slipped through the cracks of society and now live in a world that goes on side by side with the world we know, but in the shadows." (That probably didn't deserve scare quotes, but still.) Now that I think about it, though, there's something neat about the confluence of psychology (what's the difference between invisible and ignored?), quantum physics (worlds existing beside each other, but slightly skewed) and pure fantasy (the Marquis, the Hunter, the Beast). And at least Door, unlike every single DeLint heroine does not have a short bushy haircut, a fitted tank top, baggy jeans and combat boots. She's got a leather jacket.

Gaiman is better than DeLint is (than DeLint is most of the time; I've only read a few of his, and I really liked Jack of Kinrowan). He's great with clever, and he understands the difference between things that are inherently important, things that can be considered unimportant, and things that must be considered important. Dignity, responsibility, loyalty.

This all sounds kind of fishy when I tell it. I'm trying to take a loftier look at what is basically a good story, with a traditional English fellow (I kept thinking of him as Arthur Dent) in the middle of it. I enjoyed it very much as such, but I'm not sure how book club will take it.

Package Day!

Ah, Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Aside from celebrating a great American and getting the day off from work, we get UPS deliveries today (UPS lists this as a holiday "recognized but not observed," whatever that means). And Barnes and Noble, after failing us at so many turns, finally delivers.

We got the new Alton Brown cookbook, Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson, and Locas, which is a Love and Rockets collection and weighs about eight pounds (thank heaven for free shipping). The things that excite me, though, are The End of the Affair, which I'm excited to read now that I've learned that I like Graham Greene (I'd like to see the movie, too, eventually, though I can't imagine that Hollywood could do with a romance-based plot what I suspect Greene is going to do). I'd also like to read The Quiet American, and see that movie, I think. Though a book written about an American in Vietnam in the 60s can't be anything like a movie made out of the same plot in the 90s.

And Gilead. I haven't been so excited about a book I barely know anything about by an author I've never read in I don't know how long. And I will make this statement, for the public record (such as it were): if I don't get the book club pick in time to bring this to the table, I'm going to call a Renegade Book Club. I will bring together those who will rally to my banner, and together we will begin a new tradition, firm and bold in our faith that change can be good, and new beginnings are always possible.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Oh, Thank Heaven It's Over

For the record, I finished Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. And I bow my head in a moment of silence for all those who have suffered this book, as I have.

The last bit was okay, though. It really hustled toward the end.

Also, more incidentally, I think I'd be enjoying Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere very much except for the fact that I'm reading it for book club. I think it will be tough to talk about, particularly in the context of this book club. But it's a good fantasy book, I think.

Self-Control

So I've been thinking lately about self-control. For a few reasons, but mostly because of a couple of things I read recently. One was Mosaic, by Soheir Khashoggi, and the other an article from the New York Times about a month ago. The article was about autistic people who are denouncing the idea of curing autism or treating it as a disease, instead of as a complex series of personality traits, like shyness. It was an interesting article, but I find the position to be somewhat frustrating. (If you want to read it: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/20/health/20autism.html?oref=login) For people with Asperger's, or similarly functioning people with autistic traits, I agree that the public could be a lot more tolerant, and that this kind of tolerance would solve a lot of problems. But the adovcates mentioned in the article specifically refer to violent outbursts. I'm sorry, but the point where you become a danger to others, or to yourself, is the point where a personality trait becomes a pathology.

I feel like it's a huge part of being an adult member of society to practice self-control. We grown-ups have to do things we don't like, deal with people we don't like, behave in ways that are not always exactly what we want to be doing. It's part of what makes us adult human beings. Only one part, but a big one, and that's a large part of why society works. We can debate the ends toward which this self-control is put, but I think not having violent outbursts is at the top of my list.

The other thing I read that fits with this theme was Mosaic. First, though I haven't read it in a long time, I think I'd still recommend the author's other book, Mirage. This one had an all-right plot, though nothing to write home about. The amount of time given to the best friends of the main character seemed out of proportion--if the book is about these three women of different races living and loving in New York, they should have had more time. If it was about Dina, the main character, trying to get her children back, they should have had less. But the characters were just terrible. They were wooden--solid, beautifully carved of oak and mahogany, but unjointed and immobile.

When Dina's children are taken by her husband--out of the blue, while she's at work; she didn't even suspect that there were problems in their marriage--many words, mostly cliched, are given to her inner turmoil. But the author does little more than state that she is angry. If you picture the movie of this book, it involves Dina sitting and thinking a lot. And calm, deliberate thinking--some depressed, some productive, some angry, but not impassioned, not ridiculous. Only once does she hurl something across the room in anger, and never does she scream or yell, never while talking to her husband does she shout at him. When either of them even begins to speak rudely to the other, they stop themselves immediately and say things like, "Is this what we've come to?" She doesn't interrupt when he's explaining his behavior, or try to claw his eyes out, or even claim to want to.

And I'd think it was a character trait, but everyone is like this. Mothers don't snap at their children, they are unendingly patient and often concede to the children, not because they're right, but because they're confident. The teenagers seem like the most realistic characters in this book, and mostly because we never get inside their heads--they just act out, and we're left to assume why. As though adults never do that. As though the self-control required to be a member of society is, once attained, inevitable, and runs bone deep.

I don't know. I think of myself as an adult. I take care of myself financially and physically, I function in the world, socially and professionally. I do things I don't like because they need doing or they're good for me. I don't have a great deal of self control, personally, but even those who do have something more complicated going on under the skin. I think that's what makes it such an appealing trait--knowing that beneath the calm and pleasing surface, there's someone just as messy and complicated as I am.

Impulse Buy

So this was kind of a weird thing to do, particularly for someone who is as reluctant to buy things as myself. When I see something I want at the store, I generally go home, and if I'm still thinking about it in a few days, then I go back to buy it. I resist the impulse to buy.

But when Linden was here the other day, and we were looking at the used and remaindered books at the Harvard Bookstore, and I saw about three books I liked or wanted to read, right in a row on the remainders table, I gave in and bought...

Now here's the weird part. Not Lucky, by Alice Sebold, which I really enjoyed, recommend to people, and would read again. Not Our Lady of the Forest, which is on my library list and everyone on the train is reading (or maybe it's the same person every morning--I only ever notice the book). No, I got Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Nonfiction Reader.

What? Why? I mean, most people read The Yellow Wallpaper and appreciate her voice for oppressed women in the 19th century. And I have her novel and a lot of her short stories. But the thing is, they aren't that great. First of all, they're the same story over and over again: three men--one overbearing, one indulgent, one respectable--are confronted with a strong woman, and their characters are revealed to us. The novel is the same--it's schlock sci fi, about three explorers (see above) who discover an isolated mountain community composed entirely of women. (If you wish hard enough, apparently, you don't need sperm to have a baby). It was absolutely trite and one-sided. She's a cheerfully furious writer.

But I bought her nonfiction. I blame Virginia Woolf--I don't like her novels, but I really love her essays. So when I opened to a random page and read the essay title "A Defense of Advertising for Marriage," I thought I'd give her a shot. What the heck, it's only $6.

Susan Isaacs

I just finished Any Place I Hang My Hat, by Susan Isaacs.

It's not bad--not at all. There are just bits that seem out of place, and it's unclear where it's going at times, and the emotional climax isn't quite as cathartic as I'd have liked it to be, and she overuses some of her best writing tricks--her detailed observations of annoying people, for example, or being inside the head of someone having an instant panic reaction caused by jumping to conclusions.

I will say only this: read Shining Through, read Lily White, and read Almost Paradise. And, for my money, stop there.

Library Sated

Caved yesterday. Went librarying. Susan Isaacs, excellent as she's been in the past, is not promising me much with Any Place I Hang My Hat, but I have to give it a shot. The Song and the Scaffold is a translation from a German book about nuns during the French Revolution (by the way, does anyone besides me see parallels between America today and France before the Revolution? Hint: Halliburton=Marie Antoinette). Then there's Mosaic, which I've mentioned, and The Easter Parade, by Richard Yates, who wrote Revolutionary Road. The latter was a book club read a while ago, and it was quite good, in a tragic way. I wasn't planning to try another of his books, but I was in the Y section and I liked the first line.

It's a terrible burden, and a great pleasure, all these books.

Booooooooring

I've been reading Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

"Why?" asks Brenda, sincerely puzzled.

I've been asking myself that, too. I decided to read it because it's a classic, and I never had, and I had a comic book version of it as a kid that I liked a lot. As it turns out, there's about a comic book (read: 32 pages) worth of interesting material in that book, and furthermore, the pictures would be the best part, as it's almost exhaustively descriptions of various fish. It's hard to comprehend without reading it how exhaustive such descriptions can really be.

(I'd like to point out that I also had a comic book version of Jane Eyre, which I went on to read in full and cherish as a literary treasure.)

Both a drawback and my downfall in this Verne adventure is the fact that I'm reading it online. Someone has put it on their website (http://jv.gilead.org.il/fpwalter/1/index.html), neatly split up into chapters, with an irritating and distracting background that I have to highlight the text to ignore. So, though I feel like I'd like to just stop reading it, I feel that, as part of my reading online experiment, I need to stick with this. I'm half-reading Vanity Fair online as well, but that book isn't split as neatly into little chapters that can be read in ten or fifteen minutes, constituting the non-smoker's equivalent of a cigarette break.

Assuming it doesn't put you to sleep, in which case Jules Verne can be blamed for my low work productivity.

Uh Oh...I Hear the Music

I have a library song. It's a bad sign that I hear it tinkling around in my head today. There's a book on reserve waiting for me...I haven't read for book club yet, and I have a million other borrowed books to take care of, but I hear that siren song, the library jingle tinkling through my head....

Oh, who are we kidding? I'll go. It'll happen. It'll be fine; there's nothing wrong with going to the library. It's not an obsession. I'm going to get Any Place I Hang My Hat, by Susan Isaacs. I don't hold out much hope--her last couple of books haven't been the greatest--but she has great moments, even when the plots are thin.

And then Neverwhere for book club...and then we'll see.

Just Worse and Worse

Oh, this book! It hurts to read, and it's getting worse and worse. I'm fully prepared and rooting for the farm to go under--to end everyone's misery. If only the characters would run away from their troubles.

Sometimes you're really enjoying a story, yet you long to get to the end so you don't have to watch the suffering anymore. And sometimes you're reading about people's troubles, and you feel that you're like them, and their lives are so familiar that when you, say, look up and find yourself on the train on the way into work, there's a split second of confusion as to whether it's your boyfriend who's not speaking to you, or Ginny's husband who's not speaking to her. Or maybe you feel a little residual anger at your grandfather for being such a jerk (though, I feel obliged to point out, nothing like this character Larry).

Anyway, Katie, thanks for recommending A Thousand Acres. That may sound sarcastic, but it's really so good.

Farm Tragedy Books

Well, looks like I've found a new genre of books that's almost unbearably painful for me: farm tragedy. I'm reading the excellent book A Thousand Acres, by Jane Smiley. It's very well written, an excellent portrait of a woman who's spent her whole life working to keep her head down and happy with that. I know about keeping a low profile as a way to fend off bad things, and I know about the way farm people work--always moving, always looking a few hours ahead to the next piece of land to take care of, the next rainstorm, next year. I'm hurt by the fact of farms vanishing, and watching this successful farm go under in the book--as it clearly must--makes me squirm.

The father, too--Lear, Larry--is that person whose existance I can't tolerate. The person who doesn't acknowledge the real existence of others, the fact that they have, as he sarcastically puts it, a "point of view." The physical abuse in the book is more tolerable to me, because it's just mean, twisted. It doesn't deny the very fact of the daughters.

This might not make sense if you haven't read the book. I'm a little distracted. It's a wonderful book, but in the painful way of so many great stories.

Strong Enough?

That is, I have to return library books today. And the new book I want to read, Mosaic, is in the library. This would always require self-control, but since this is a new book and might not be available next time I go in, it's especially hard,

Ah, but I've got at least five books that I've borrowed from other people that I should work on next. Plus the next book for Book Club, and another Graham Greene that Mike and I are going to get that I really want to read. It's important to stay focused, book-wise--but Mosaic!

Mike and I also have over $100 of Barnes and Noble gift cards to spend (and a big shout-out thank you to everyone who made that happen). This is pretty exciting, and I'm dithering about how to best apportion it. Ooooh!

I Wept

Oh...oh...The Amber Spyglass...I finished it...I cried and cried. It's so good, and exciting, and true. The characters who you don't like but are on the side of right, or who are cruel but then do good things and you can't see why. Decisions that are made foolishly, things that could have saved the day but are forgotten until too late. Real and true and oh so sad but oh so lovely.

Exciting Discovery

A long time ago, I found a book called Mirage by Soheir Khashoggi. I found it because it was next to Stephen King on the shelf the year I decided I'd try some of his books. For all its flaws--primarily oversimplicity--it was a very enjoyable book. I've been looking for another novel by the author for a long time.

And what did I see at the new bookstore in Porter Square last week? Mosaic! It sounds like a similar storyline--I think there's something autobiographical about her writing. A woman from a wealthy family in a middle eastern country tries to reconcile her experiences in the wider world with the world at home. She's surrounded by both wealth and abuse...I can't wait to read the new one--I hold out great hopes.

Literary Gifting

I got the coolest present last night: Pride and Prejudice, the board game! I'm now trying to think of people who will be interested in playing this game (besides, of course, the lovely person who gave it to me). It's for two to four players, so she and I can play with just the two of us, but what other Austen fans are out there? The 8 videotapes have been condensed onto two DVDs, so we can get them from Netflix and watch our favorite scenes while we play. I need true fans, though, because there are trivia questions.

I'm going to have to reread the book now. I'm really very excited. Thank you, Brenda and Jason!

Moral Conundrum

So...is it wrong to give someone a book for Christmas if it's a book you want to then borrow back from them? I mean, this person will like this book, I have a reason to buy it for them, but I fully intend to borrow it. Mike says you only get 75% credit for giving a gift like that. I think that's enough credit, if the gift is good.

But now that I realized I was doing that, I think I'm going to have to pick a different book and just get myself this one. I have a short list of post-Christmas gifts I'm going to get myself; ways to spend the Barnes and Noble gift certificate, things I don't want enough to let people buy me new (my mom doesn't shop online, so she doesn't buy the cheap used books at Amazon).

Christmas will last a couple of weeks this year, between parties and gift exchanges. I love the holidays.

Literary Fate

I think I said before how books tend to come in batches without my realizing it. Once it was books about Shanghai--I was expecting it with one of them (The Binding Chair), but the other one (The Diamond Age) took be my surprise. I would like to submit the following evidence to support my theory: I am reading two books with characters named Stanislaus. Think I should have seen it coming? One of them is a nun. Mother Stanislaus.

What a world.

Anyway, I finished The Subtle Knife, by Philip Pullman, and it was even more of a cliffhanger than the first one. If I wasn't off in the world this week, I'd already have found a way to get the last one in the series, but it's better that it wait--anticipation, you know. But to all you Harry Potter fans, I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but these are better. I thought they were slow at first, but they're just mature, and real. The author doesn't have to make up reasons for the grown-ups to ignore Harry's troubles or fail to run the world properly--the grown-ups are working as hard as the kids. The danger is real and scary--scarier than Voldemort. "Evil" for evil's sake is a childish notion, not complex. Misguided, power-hungry, faithless--it looks just like evil, but the way it looks in the real world. Like, say, the decisions of major corporations.

Not that Harry Potter isn't good. It's more subtle than a lot of books, and full of inspired fun. But it didn't pull on me the way His Dark Materials does. Go Pullman!

Oh, and I've decided what I'm going to pick next time it's my turn to choose for book club. Pick me, pick me!

Well, That's Done

I finished The Planets, by James Finney Boylan. I really hate to pan something as my first real book-review-type posting, but I really don't think you want to read this book. At first I didn't like it, and then I realized that was because the first character we meet is kind of dumb--it's the character, see? And when I met the next character, I found her quirky and not entirely unpleasing. But no, no--this book is nuts. It's supposed to be funny, I know, in a poignant way. Mostly, though, it's just ridiculous and full of characters with no common sense. Where there is meaning or there are themes, they're thrust at you so aggressively that you want to stagger back from them. Between the time that I started counting and the time that I gave it up (maybe 50 pages?), I tallied about 8 references to the idea of a person feeling divided from him/herself, or feeling like they're two people. That's once every six pages. I get it already.

I don't suppose it helps that I've read this author's most recent book, which is a memoir called She's Not There. I'm very happy to recommend that book highly to anyone--it's very honest and funny and open. The author was born a man; the memoir is about how, in his 30s, he made the final decision to have his sex changed (or rather, his "gender reassigned"). Knowing that he lived his whole life feeling out of place like that, I have to say that the sense of being divided and not really being comfortable with who you are makes sense in his other, much earlier book, but even that understanding made me uncomfortable. I don't want to be psychoanalyzing the author of my book with my B.A. level expertise. I want to be aiming that discernment at the characters.

Anyway, in short, don't read The Planets, by James Finney Boylan but definitely read She's Not There, by Jennifer Finney Boylan.

The List

I try to keep my library list at around 30 books, which means it's usually at 35 or so. And by "keep it at" I mean "keep it down to," because if I drop below the 30 mark I will be pleasantly surprised. It goes on the library list if I'm going to have to acquire the book--from the library, a friend or the bookstore. The pile of books that I own and haven't read yet is just as daunting.

Well, I hit 40 today, possibly for the first time ever. It'll drop soon; I'm reading about four books and will probably be done at least two of them by the weekend. Still, though, it's daunting. Thrilling, but daunting.

I've been thinking about this blog and how boring it would be to readers (espcially since I haven't written much about the actual books I read yet), but the truth is, it exists primarily to preserve Katie and Elizabeth from having me run over to their cubicles every half hour explaining exactly how many books are on my library list now. Not that I'm not bugging them every day, but not quite every half-hour anymore.

Book Club Politics

Anyone who's reading this is familiar with Book Club politics. It's like living in that teacup where they keep that tempest. I have some very firm opinions, and some other more nebulous ones. It's always evolving, is Book Club, and changing because no one quite owns it, and so everyone's invited and everyone gets a partial share. This is what I have against democracy; this is why George W. Bush is president.

So there might be the inklings of an offshoot or renegade book club in the works. We'll see how the next few months pan out. I'll say that it's not entirely due to the quality of the picks--I'll read 'most anything. It's the nature of the meetings. Of course, how do we have meetings without inviting everybody?

First rule of Book Club: you don't talk about Book Club

Anti-Bunny Prejudice

All right, everyone. I'm very sorry to say this, but until you at least START reading it, you are not allowed to make that little moue and say "Isn't it about bunnies?" when I mention Watership Down. I understand that you all have very sophisticated tastes and all, but it's a rich, well-crafted book with complex themes and wonderful characters. You are, as always, allowed not to like it if you've tried to read it, but the way you say the word "bunnies" is positively slanderous!

Supplemental Book Club

So I did, in fact, make three trips to the book fair yesterday, and I got lots of lovely Christmas gifts....plus any random thing that seemed vaguely interesting as I held it in my hands. Not good. I'm not, sadly, the poster child for self-control.

There are many books that I refer to as "interesting," primarily because I can't say they're awful (for awful, try The Burning Times), but I can't say I really love them, either. There's a category of quality that I can "appreciate" without liking, and that's something else, but the book I'm finishing up now, Mariette in Ecstasy is more along the lines or "interesting." There's poetry here, in the minutiae of life at a convent, on a farm, in 1907. And the book is full of thoughtful contrasts--solemn prayer and penance beside chatter and gossip, the lust for holiness and resistance to miracles. If the end (which I'm fast closing in on) was more decisive, or if my hopes for the book had been a little lower, I might feel differently, because I really like this book. But the poetry and the ecstasy made me wish to be swept up in it, and I sadly was not.

Today we had a brief lunchtime supplemental book club, and realized that a month later is too late to discuss a book in-depth. The book was The Comedians by Graham Greene, and I think part of the problem is that it was such a complex book. The things I wanted to say at the original book club (which seemed inadequate at the time and led to the supplemental meeting of our rogue or "subversive" cell) were mostly questions; the book was like a night in the jungle, with a full and complex gloom. I enjoyed very much the layers I could perceive, but I felt the presence of a lot more profound material. I think that my inability to relate to life in an oppressive dictatorial regime might have locked me down, though that might just be in my mind.

And we talked about And Now You Can Go, by Vendela Vida (and don't you just want to say that name over and over again?). All three of us had read it, and all three of us found it unsatisfying to the point of wanting to talk about it. Not bad, you understand--we can talk about bad all we want, but that only needs quantifying. This needed qualifying--how, what kind, why did we dislike this book. Because the main character is numb and promiscuous? Not quite. Because the plot points don't properly support the character study? Mmm...part of it. Because we don't know this character at all, and even when we feel like we might be with her for a moment, it's lost when she does something meaningless, or feels something we can't relate to? Yeah, that's it.

Oh, and I'm not the only one who's not 100% sure about A Carnivore's Inquiry. That book is bizarre--upsetting but enjoyable, and really amazing at telling the story when you're not even looking. I can't call it great (as Katie says, if you can skim it it's not great), but I'm pretty sure it's good.

I will point out for the record, though, the tendency for books to enter my life in batches, entirely out of the blue. A Carnivore's Inquiry and And Now You Can Go: books about disaffected art history students who are moved by the painting The Raft of the Medea.

Thank you and good night.

Book Sale

They're having a book sale at work today. New books published by us, and used books donated by employees, proceeds going to charity. I'm having a hard time deciding what to do. There is a hard and fast rule in my family about buying things for yourself at Christmas time. But if I can get a lovely, brand new copy of a book (say, Matilda, by Roald Dahl) for less than someone else could get it for if they got it second-hand...what's the right decision? Also, I was thinking of getting My Antonia, by Willa Cather, which they have in trade paperback for only $4, but I've never read any Willa Cather and I don't know for sure I'll like her.

How do I make decisions like this? How? Though to be honest, I don't know how I ever make any decisions, I'm so bad at it. Grr.

Any advice?