Word a Day

Don't you think we should all try to use the exclamation "Welladay!" sometime today? I've decided to find somewhere to work it in--something vaguely surprising always happens, right?--but I wonder if I'm going to have any luck. See if you can do it, and let me know.

On a Good Stuff Streak, with an Aside

Did I tell you how much I liked Carter Beats the Devil? Because I did. It's by Glen David Gold (interestingly, husband of Alice Sebold, also a great writer, but of a very different type of book. It reminds me of how Nicole Krauss's The History of Love is thematically as well as stylistically very similar to Jonathan Safran Foer's work--interesting how different sets of literary spouses are so different).

Anyway, what a fun book. I have a thing about stories about magicians, and about the idea of the importance of magic (speaking here of the vaudeville type of magic, not necessarily of just the idea of magic in the human psyche). My thing is, I think, that I kind of don't get it. I mean, the magician knows it's a trick. I know it's a trick. While I'm impressed by the tricks, what I'm really impressed by is showmanship and their ability to trick me, as opposed to really thinking there's anything fabulous going on.

This is similar to my issue about people who talk about the importance of Storytelling. You would think that as a voracious reader and consumer of fantasy (both in the High Fantasy tradition, and in the Made Up Things genre), I would really be someone who felt that Storytelling Is What Binds People Together, and Society is Defined by Its Stories (see Neil Gaiman--anything by Neil Gaiman). But I don't really get it. I think because there is no part of my mind that is not suffused in stories--there is no way for me to picture a story-less world and therefore to see how stories act on the real world. It's like picturing true nothingness, like before the universe. You can't imagine it, because there's nothing there to imagine.

Okay, that was way off-topic. Anyway, Carter Beats the Devil does some amazing things: it combines someone's life story (ie. a chronic story) with an immediate "now" of action (ie. the acute story), without boring me with the first or rushing me with the latter. (As much as I loved Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, the first half was acute, the second half chronic, and they did not fit together in the least). It was neither all sunshine and roses, nor was it about how the human condition is tragic and we may as well just grin and bear this veil of tears. It was such a hopeful story. I really recommend it. If, that is, you have a few weeks--it's almost 500 pages long, and, though fast moving and fun, not really challenging, it is so rich that it took me a while to read.

Totally different book: The Dogs of Bedlam Farm, by Jon Katz. I just finished A Good Dog: The Story of Orson, Who Changed My Life, by the same author. It's interesting, because they cover a lot of the same ground--Bedlam Farm was written first, about his first year living on a farm with his dogs, and A Good Dog was written later, covering earlier and later material, too. These books are flawed but charming. As memoirs, I accept that they jump around a little in time, because they're arranged thematically instead of chronologically, but it often gets confusing--if you got that chicken more than a year after you got there, why did you mention him in the first chapter? If you said goodbye to that dog so early, why do you describe your life on the farm as your life with him? Things like this.

The stories were nice--it was interesting to see someone who was eager for farm life, then, it turns out, pretty unprepared for it, and finally, it turns out, thrilled by it, though it was harder than he expected. I love that he's blunt about the difficulties, and gets his hands dirty with things like that. I don't always love the author/narrator, but I liked the stories he told. I felt sometimes like he would acknowledge and own his faults, but with such a sense of distance (or maybe it was a sense of his own virtue in acknowledging them?) that it didn't really make me feel close to him.

And finally, now I'm reading The Pirates! In an adventure with Scientists, which is a silly, Monty Python sketch of a novel starring Charles Darwin and the Pirate Captain. If it wasn't so fluffy it would probably drag, but it IS so fluffy, and it's glorious. I'll be done in a day.

Once again I overcommitted at the library--just after promising myself another Personal Library Renaissance!--but it'll have to wait till I finish all these glorious reads! I have a Tamora Pierce YA fantasy, another of Louisa May Alcott's grown-up books, and a book of short stories, from which the plot for the movie Secretary was (I gather) culled. I have two books by Jo Walton--the one I'm reading now is a true Victorian novel, only all the characters are dragons. It's interesting, because it has all the ponderousness of a Victorian novel, plus lots of raw meat and gold. It's not funny, or really fantasy--it's Victorian. The other is an alternate history thing about an England that made peace with the Nazis.

I'm so on a roll. It's about time!

The Purge

I was trembling, but I did it. The great purge. The list was too long, something had to go. I couldn't face the list of 57 books. (I added NINE books to my list this week. NINE. I'm not allowed to read about what people online are reading, ever). So Mike sat down next to me and held my hand, and we went through the list and threw out anything that I'd put on there years ago and was pretty sure I was never going to read.

It hurt. It was hard. Part of the point of the list was not just the possibility of reading them, but remembering them, considering them, MAYBE reading them at SOME point. But they were hurting my heart--I was feeling responsible for those books I was never going to read.

So, in tribute to the departed To Reads, here's a partial list, created from memory, of the books we said goodbye to before we ever really got to say hello.

Strip City, by Lily Burana. A former stripper's pre-wedding last-hurrah stripping road trip across America.

Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, by David Simon. The true life, true crime account of a Baltimore police department on which the TV show was based. Mike told me it was good.

The French Lieutenant's Woman. I have no idea why this was on my list. I don't even really know what it's about.

Oh, God, that's all I can remember! See, that's why I have a list, so I don't have to remember these things. It breaks my heart, though, that they were forgotten so soon. If I remember, I'll write them down, I promise!

On the Road Again

Not literally, but the road to literary happiness. I spent December slogging. I worked on "good for me" stuff that was dragging me down, books that I thought I owed my time to. I abandoned about two or three books last month. I was down.

But now! Oh, the joy you'll find when you start reading things that are fun and pleasing. A Good Dog, by Jon Katz, was a light and pleasing read. The Tao of Pooh, though it did not clear up my confusion about how, in an all-Taoist world, anybody cooks a meal or cures a disease, was composed at least 20% of excerpts from The House at Pooh Corner, and, though perhaps didn't live up to the literary expectations of my English professors, was pretty enjoyable.

As an aside, it also really touched off a lot of thoughts for me about fitting square pegs into round holes, and how it sets you up for defeat. This has kind of hit home for me, and it's funny that, though I don't get Taoism, I'm grateful to it for having a relatively legitimate line of thought that makes me feel like less of an idiot than I've been feeling lately. But end of aside.

Anyway, I love this feeling of skimming along on top of the literature. Carter Beats the Devil, which I'm reading now, is a little denser, but it's still a well-paced novel about the life of a magician, so it's not dragging. I've also got something called Pink Think, which is sort of a sociological study of late 20th century femininity, as symbolized by the color pink and explicated though women's magazines, health guides, and product advertisements. So that, while pretty disturbing (according to one 1967 Cosmo quiz, I think I'm actually a boy), it's still pretty entertaining.

And, bless it, FAST-moving. December was a boggy month in so many ways. It's nice to be parasailing for a bit.

Bad Run

Okay, December has been a craptastic month in more ways than one. We could start with the illness (1) that kept me from doing most of my favorite holiday activities (2) or any particularly thoughtful Christmas shopping (3). The extremely unpleasant culmination of an extremely unpleasant workload makes (4). I have such high hopes for January, but mostly because December was so hard.

But more on-topic, it was a horrible, horrible month for books! I started some ill-fated outings this month, and I only finished about four books. And one was the audiobook I've been listening to for who-knows how long. I finished two books in the first couple days of the month, and then I just slogged through a bunch of CRAP for the rest of the time. I'm really feeling off-center because of this, though I'm trying to use the "fresh start" feeling that comes with January 1 to clean all the fog from my brain and start fresh.

So, what shouldn't you read? Well, first of all, my outing into the nun aisle at the library led to some bad stuff as well as the good stuff. There was the history of nuns' habits, which turned out to be less what I expected (a history of nuns as told through the lens of their clothing) and more of a history of scapulars, undergarments, and coifs. Sleepy stuff. Unveiled, however, was a great book, a really frank look at modern nuns, how they reinterpret a lot of the old vows to make their lives both modern and religious. In the end, I think the nun aisle paid off; since I abandoned The Habit in the middle, you can't say I wasted a lot of time on it.

But every one of those abandoned books adds to my emotional load. Like How We Believe: The Search for God in the Age of Science. This book seemed to really promise a skeptic's examination of faith, and reading the first few dozen pages, it seems to be a really fair and reasonable look at how people choose their beliefs and how they think about them. The author talks about letters he's gotten from people who argue that faith is horrible, and he seems to find those letters misguided. I felt confident.

About halfway through, though, he really revealed his attitude as something besides what I had expected. Maybe I'm not a great logician, but I feel like you can't argue with a person's personal experience of God. You can argue about the truth of the history of Jesus, the philosophical proofs that the watch implies the watchmaker, etc. And you can absolutely get into a fistfight about how your beliefs impact your behavior in the world and how you interact with others (and, usually, try to curtail their freedoms). But if someone says that the only reason they're sure God exists is because they've felt God's effect in their life, you can say you don't believe that, but you can't say "stop believing that, because I can't replicate your feelings." The standard that if you can't replicate it, you haven't proven it works for a system, but I really don't think it works when you're talking to a person about their ongoing experience.

I've completely quit reading this book. He's getting smugger and smugger, and he's not here to smack so it's all I've got. I really thought it was going to be "your beliefs are different from mine. How did you arrive at them, and how do you live with them?" But it turned out to be "oh, I see--it's because you're ignorant."

So that was a waste of time. There's also Other Voices, Other Rooms, Truman Capote's first novel. Wow, talk about a book in which nothing happens. It's sort of a coming of age story, with a lot of eerie Southern gothic trappings. I ended up skimming it--I'm not even sure I've ever done that before. It wasn't even horrible, just long and boring and yes, yes, I know there are a lot of plants in Louisiana, STOP DESCRIBING THEM PLEASE.

So that's been my Christmas. We'll see what comes up next--I'm trying Jon Katz's A Good Dog, which, while I'm not much of a dog person, seems promising. Also some of the many lovely books I got for Christmas, and the library books I couldn't resist. I need a vacation.

20 Years Later Their Therapy Bills Are Enormous

Another one of my pet peeves: YA books in which I need to suspend my disbelief by a noose from the chandelier to understand why, exactly, the world requires a twelve-year-old to save it.
This is done well in such book as His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman (fate, coincidence). It's not done at all in books like the Blossom Culp series by Richard Peck (oh, do read these, really), in which the drama is not about saving the world. It's done pretty poorly in the book I'm reading now, The People of Sparks, by Jean DePrau. This is a sequel to The City of Ember, which had a similar flaw, though somehow not as troubling.

Really, though, a village of 300 is inundated with 400 refugees, neither group has any adult who takes even an informal leadership role. Instead, one kid starts fomenting rebellion and another couple of kids try to stop him. The adults are sheep--not in an unconvincing way, but there isn't even ONE adult who'll step up?

A Series of Unfortunate Events is the worst offender here. After the fourth time the kids foil the evil Count Olaf and expose him to their trustee Mr. Poe, you'd think the fifth time he'd believe them, or even listen to the end of their sentence, when they explain that the tall skinny guy with one eyebrow IS in fact Count Olaf again.

Harry Potter is interesting here. The first three books bothered me a bit in this regard. Why don't the adults see anything? Why don't they listen to him? He's powerless, and under attack, and it seems to fly under everyone's radar.

It's gotten much better as it moved along, though. As the stakes go up, everyone IS fighting, as hard as they can. But they can't fully protect him, which I think is a complicated and touching conflict. Trouble is finally thrust upon Harry by fate and life, instead of just by J.K. Rowling.

It's kind of sad about The People of Sparks, because the setup is interesting, and the high points are pretty exciting. But the lack of coherent adult behavior is a huge flaw, and affects the book in a lot of ways that are kind of dragging down my experience. Sorry to say.

Further Conjunctions

First: I had always known the word "decimate" to mean "destroy utterly; to wipe out." Well, what it actually refers to is the Roman practice (if that's the word I want) for the destruction of one tenth of your men. Apparently it was a punishment that was laid against the army for failure or cowardice--the men were required to kill one in ten of their own comrades. Good GOD, are you kidding me?

The source of this is Dreaming the Bull, which is one of the Boudica books (she's the Warrior Queen, you know). There's a little too much Rome and not enough British Islanders, if you ask my opinion, but it'll do for a sweeping historical saga.

Also, TWO conjunctions on the same day. Both stemming from the same book, in fact--the interminable Busman's Honeymoon by Dorothy Sayers. Weakest Wimsey mystery I've read yet, mostly due to its prolonged examination of the romance of the newlywed protagonists. (The subtitle is "A love story with detective interruptions," and well-named.) But I found a reference to a Gordian knot on page 123, coincidentally not half an hour after I learned what a Gordian knot was while reading The Wide Window by Lemony Snicket. And neither five pages nor ten minutes later, Lord Peter mentions that, unlike Dickens, he wouldn't hang Fagin for being a pickpocket. This not one week after reading John Sutherland's complaint in one of his "literary puzzles" books that there was really no reason to execute Fagin, except that he's the villain of the novel and we hate him. Legally, they hadn't a leg to stand on.

This post kind of sucks, but Blogger's being a pain, so I'm going to post and go see if I can fix my interface. Wish me luck.

Choirs of Angels

Yesterday was a red letter day in my personal history. It was the day, will forever be known as the day, on which I discovered the nun aisle in the Boston Public Library.

A moment of silence, please.

I picked up Unveiled, The Habit, and (this is SO exciting, you think I'm exaggerating but I'm totally sincere here) The Rule of St. Benedict. The latter is the handbook by which Benedictine monks and nuns live. It's about both how to be a religious, and establishes a lot of rules and ideas about how to live in a community, how to turn a group of people into a community.

In honor of this red letter day, here's a rundown of my top five nun books.

1) The Nun's Story, Kathryn Hulme. I've probably gone on about this before. It was a movie with Audrey Hepburn, which I saw on A&E many years ago, which led me to nun books in general. It's a perfect explanation of why and how a person would choose this life--not as a default or an escape, but as an ambition.

2) In This House of Brede, Rumer Godden. This is one of those books that observes the seasons turning and the small dramas of life--will Sister Agnes ever finish her book? How will we pay for the new sculpture Mother Superior ordered before she died? Will the Japanese novices learn our ways? It's just such a warm and comforting story.

3) Lying Awake, Mark Saltzman. A sister in a small convent in California is having visions, which have revived her faith and her passion for her calling. But when she finds out that they're caused by a medical condition, the book examines the question of how science and faith fit together and conflict with each other. But it does this with a practical simplicity, not a philisophical tirade.

4) Cloister Walk, Kathleen Norris. I still count this as a nun book, even though it's really not. It's the journal of a woman who spends time as an oblate in a monestary. It's a mixed-gender community, many of whose members are oblates (sort of like an extended retreat--temporary vows). The book talks about the things that a "typical" person who has a full life (and husband) in the World might find for herself in a place like that.

5) Confessions of a Pagan Nun, Kate Horsley. This is a strange but intriguing novel, set up as the diary of an Irish pagan who joins the church. Mostly it's about how strange and foreign the Christianity of the 4th or 5th century is to us. I don't love it, actually, but I learned a great deal from it that I'm glad to know.

Bonus: Nun TV. Brides of Christ, an Australian series (or miniseries) about the lives of one convent in the 60s. With special appearances by a very young Naomi Watts and Russell Crowe!

Now, what's this I've heard about nun blogs?

Too Much Of Nothing

Have you heard my rant yet about books in which nothing happens? It's a classic problem with literary fiction. Sometimes it's so bad that even when things are happening it feels like nothing happens. A lot of these books are about young people coming of age or marriages slowly falling to pieces. It's a lot of carefully observed everday moments strung in a row for me to find "meaning" in.

Now, I'm the first to admit that I'm kind of an idiot. I watched the movie The Hours and didn't realize it was about depression until someone pointed it out to me. (In my defense, I blame Meryl Streep for blinding me with her forced cheerfulness.) I'm not the first one to catch onto subtle themes. I need things pointed out to me--it doesn't have to be heavy-handed, but it has to be there.

This book, though, The Memory Keeper's Daughter, is the absolute worst of both worlds. The setup, the idea, is so promising in terms of things happening. A doctor delivers his own children on a stormy night. The girl has Down's Syndrome. It's the 60s, people are ignorant, chances are she'll have health problems. He asks the nurse to take her to an institution, then tells his wife (when she wakes from the anasthesia) that they have a son but their daughter dies. The nurse, instead of sending the kid away, leaves town with her and rears the girl as her own.

Wow! Ripe with possibility! First of all, there's the single mother bringing up a disabled child in the sixties. That's got to be tough--lots of interesting things to learn there. There's the idea of being someone on the run, that there might be someone looking for you. There's the doctor keeping a secret from his family. Maybe searching for them. Conflict and high passion.

What a dull, flat book. The whole book is about the doctor keeping the secret from his wife, and how it makes him emotionally unavailable. Really, the whole movie is about a couple in a marriage where the husband is emotionally unavailable. That's all I'll grant the damned thing credit for even TRYING to do. Phoebe, the daughter, appears so far in about three scenes (though her mother has lots of scenes, mostly about being haunted by the memory and idea of this doctor). This is a book about a marriage falling apart. It's a book about people who don't talk to each other. It's a book full of painful silences.

Unfortunately, it is exactly what it's trying to be: a successful "literary" novel.

More of the Same

I say things like this so often that I'm starting to wonder if this just happens to everyone all the time, or maybe it's just a factor of how many books I read. But it happened again! Twice in the same hour, I learned the same esoteric factoid from two different books.

In A Short History of Nearly Everything, during a short discussion on the history of magnifying lenses, I was informed that Vermeer is reputed to have used a camera obscura to capture the quality of light and detail that he did. Apparently he had a good friend who produced some of the most amazing detailed drawing of highly magnified specimens know at the time. This friend, whose name I don't remember, was very secretive about his methods, and it is suspected that he introduced Vermeer to the camera obscura.

When I got on the T, I turned off my mp3 player and opened my book, The Memory Keeper's Daughter. The book is only okay--slow, standard examination of a marriage falling apart. Kind of boring, kind of overblown. But on this day, on the first page I read (178, maybe), one of the main characters, an amateur photographer, explains to a guest how Vermeer used a camera obscura to create some of the best effects in his paintings.

The mind reels.

The Night of the Hunter

By Davis Grubb. I can't say enough about this book. I think I can pretty much recommend it to you, whoever you are, sight unseen.

The movie was amazing--I'm not usually one to go on about artistry in a film, but this one was both stylized and natural. It does thing with shadows that are startling and create such an atmosphere. It has an amazing performance by a nine-year-old boy, and another by Robert Mitchum. (We won't go into the little girl who plays Pearl--you can't blame a kid that young for being stiff.)

But the truly amazing part is that all of these things--even some of the visual devices--are directly from the book. It's such a faithful adaptation, I'm truly amazed that both pieces--book and movie--are so great.

If you can't stand Kids In Danger movies (my father is like that), then this is definitely not the story for you. But anyone else--what a fine experience. I'm so glad I read that. It's one of those moments when I don't regret the fact that every book I ever so much as hear about makes it onto my list. Because otherwise, when would I ever have read this?

Things I'm Learning

What did Bill Bryson teach me today, you ask? Maybe I'm fascinated by unlikely things, but I have to say, this thrilled me. Do you know what a lichen is? And why they can grow on rock outcroppings in places like the Arctic where there is no other life? Well, I know now and I'll tell you.

It turns out that a lichen is actually a symbiotic arrangment of an algae and a fungus. The fungus dissolves the rock into a substance that the algae can then digest into nutrition for both of them to consume. How symmetrical is that? How neato? Of course, it's not much of a life--the only living thing for thousands of miles around, sitting on a rock for a long, long time (it can take 50 to 100 years to reach the size of a quarter). But how clever of them to team up like that!

I'm feeling pretty proud of myself for surrendering. In the past week, I've decided not to read three books that had been on my list and that I even had out of the library already. It was in my hands, I opened it up and started reading, I didn't find it interesting, so I put it down. Apparently I wasn't as interested in the life of St. Theresa of Lisieux as I thought I was. Or I Am the Messanger, by Markus Zusak. Just didn't catch me, after ten pages or so. Couldn't do it. I'm not even going to book club this month--the book doesn't interest me.

Just doesn't interest me! So proud! I feel liberated.

Oh, and Night of the Hunter? Awesome, amazing book. It helps that it's an amazing movie, and it's almost exactly the same. But it's just so sweet and scary and stylish, and yet still old-fashioned and charming. Oh, and in case you never noticed that a switchblade is phallic--well, it is.

Props

Big shout-out to Mike for finishing The Sound and the Fury, which I'm sure I couldn't have done. Just looking at a page of that book was a challenge beyond me. I have never felt an urge toward Faulkner, and everyone who tells me about it solidifies that non-urge.

So kudos to Mike for climbing that particular mountain!

Personal update: Night of the Hunter on the train, Groucho and Me next to the bed, and dabbling in something called Can Jane Eyre Be Happy? in the living room. The latter is a collection of essays exploring "inconsistencies" or unanswered questions in classical literature. Pretty entertaining, in spite of a tendencyto go way out of its way to find a convoluted answer after dismissing an intuitive one as "unlikely." (Example: In Mansfield Park, Fanny's aunt has a pug when Fanny is little and still has it 11 years later. This book dismisses the idea that the first one died and she got another one as "unlikely" and proceeds to calculate the dog's age and breedability. It's like reading Young Earth science--nonsense, but the level of mental gymnastics these folks went to is astonishing!)

Anyway, that's my brief update.

Public Service Announcement

Oh, you SO don't want to read this book. It tricked me, see, by being mostly just blah and okay and amateurish, so that by the time I realized that these things can add up to a really overwhelming badness, I was more than halfway through, a point at which I have no choice but to finish the entire thing.

The book is a memoir about the author's life as a waitress. You know how sometimes you read an industry expose, like Kitchen Confidential by Tony Bourdain, where you learn all sorts of juicy insider things? Yeah, this isn't like that. Or you read a book like My Posse Don't Do Homework by LouAnne Johnson--you remember, it was made into that movie, Dangerous Minds--in which someone with an ordinary job that you think you understand gives you the inside scoop, and tells you about extraordinary circumstances? Nope, not that either. Maybe we'll just go with one of many, many literary novels, in which someone whose life is not particularly interesting drifts through the world and has profound observations expressed to us in a lyrical prose style? Mmm.....nope.

Instead, you get Waiting: True Confessions of a Waitress, by Debra Ginsberg. It reads like a high-schooler's report for English class about her after-school job. A solid B+/A- student, but not someone in the AP class. And the teacher grading this composition would FILL these margins with "show don't tell" scrawled in red ink. Generalizations instead of stories. Repeatedly informing us after every job that she learned a lot of about human psychology there. Withholding what might be juicy bits (personal romance, near-nervous breakdowns) with brief phrases like "my latest relationship had recently ended with a lot of bad feelings on both sides," and "I was feeling burned-out."

Imagine a memoir in which every anecdote, EVERY one, was preceded by a phrase like "allow me to illustrate," or "let me give you an example," mostly because there's only about one per chapter, used to follow up pages and pages of generalizations. Imagine an author who doesn't even seem to understand that she's using cliches. Seriously--I've read books in which familiar phrases are recast, and you can tell the writer chose those tried and true words carefully, but I've never read any published book intended for adults that used phrases like "striking in their similarities," "sneak a peek," and "the appointed hour." Seriously, if she's said "peek" instead of "sneak a peek" on that line (page 287), I wouldn't even have noticed it. But no, she reached for the tritest phrase she could find. Oh, oh, and also, I don't think there's a passive verb in this book. It's like she ran a search and replace on the word "is" and excised it from the book entirely.

Whew. I'm glad I got that off my chest. Books that are straight-up, up-front bad from page one I can just put down or rant about righteously. But this book was insidious, creeping up in its badness, its amateur style and total lack of profundity, until I actually began to believe that the world the boring, meaningless place that this writer painted. I'm out from under that now; thank you.

ps. She always wanted to be a writer. She was always "really" a writer, and waiting was just to make ends meet. But when she talks about people who don't think waiting tables is a "real" job, she lambasts them. Also, her list of movies about waitresses and how they're all looking for love and therefore crap is awesome, as it follows the chapter about how all restaurant employees are feverishly looking for love. And ignores the fact that all movie characters are looking for love. I could go on and on and on and on....but I'll stop.

Tidbit

What kind of a person dedicates his true crime novel about a murderer of widows and small children to his mother?

Davis Grubb, author of Night of the Hunter, that's who.

I haven't read it yet, so I can't say if it's a good book, but it's an amazing movie, really amazing, and you should see it.

Audio Epiphany

Okay, this is turning into "You Learn Something New Every Day" every day. Did you know that Yellowstone National Park--the ENTIRE park--is one giant volcano? I can't believe this is not public information. The last time it blew, 75,000 years ago, it covered 16 states (almost everything west of the Missississippi) with four inches of ash. WHY WAS I NOT INFORMED? It doesn't look like a volcano for two reasons--1) it's a caldera instead of a cone, meaning it's sunken instead of a peak (different ways of forming), and 2) it's so incredibly BIG that there's nowhere on the ground from which you can observe its shape.

I'm finding this book fascinating. It's called A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson, and I don't think I would have liked it at all if I'd picked it up in print. I saw it in the bookstore the other day--it's long, and if you flip open to a page, you'll often find the author describing someone's quest for some esoteric piece of scientific knowledge. I think it would not hold my attention as a print book.

But as an audio book, it's delightful. The narrator's British accent is kind of swoony, to start with. Also, the narrator clearly sees a lot of humor in facts that I might not necessarily have found funny. I think Bill Bryson's intent is, in part, the same as Sarah Vowell's--where she rummages through history for the juicy, human, funny bits, he does the same with the history of science. At the same time, though, he's giving you an overall science lesson, plus fascinating tidbits like this week's You Learn Something New fact.

So what makes a good audiobook? It's tricky. I tried to listen to The Time Traveller's Wife a few weeks ago. I've heard it's a marvellous book, and I believe it, but I ended up buying it, because I couldn't bear to listen. This is because it started, early on, with a pretty randy sex scene between the two main characters on their first date. Now, at that point the narrator has let you know that they're going to end up married, but this early in my acquaintance with the characters, the sex squicked me out a little. But I feel confident that won't happen in the book.

Why? Because in print, the reader as a voyeur is tucked away in a corner, quiet, unobtrusive, unobserved. I'm watching these people live their lives, but they are alone together. The voice of the narrator adds another person to this equation (even though, in this case, the narrator is one of the characters). It's me and this guy watching these people have sex, and that's weird. Alternatively, it's this guy telling me about having sex with his wife. Again, weird. Reading is solitary; listening to a book on tape is slightly less so.

Also, it's harder to zip back and forth in an audio file than on paper. If your mind wanders, you can't stop reading--the machine is running. You can't slow down to savor, or rush to find out what happens (though in the latter case, I love the suspense). So I feel that a good choice in an audiobook is a story less densely packed than others. It's a little loose, with enough room for you to miss a sentence or two during the slow parts and not lose track of what's going on, or miss out on sumptuous prose that you'll regret for the rest of your life.

Narrator is a HUGE deal. Never get an audiobook you haven't heard a sample of. I really want to listen to Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods, but the guy who reads the unabridged version available on Audible is just so EXCITED to be reading it, I couldn't stand it. You want someone who can do different people's voices without sounding like he's faking--someone who uses rhythms of speech and gentle cadance instead of falsetto and lisping to capture different characters. I sometimes find it a little distracting when they have multiple narrators for different characters, but when well executed, that can be the perfect solution. Memoirs can be great, if read by a good author.

Audiobooks I've enjoyed: Anansi Boys, by Neil Gaiman. My Sister's Keeper, by Jodi Picoult. Self-Made Man, by Norah Vincent.

So, there's my buyer's guide, for whatever it's worth.

Concurrence Redux

Again with the coincidence that two books I'm reading fall together. It's like the universe is a grand tapestry revealing itself to me through books. How spiritual, how kabbalah.

Anyway. I was reading a book about recovered memory, Suggestions of Abuse, by a Dr. Yapko (Richard, maybe? With a last name like that, I've forgotten his first name). I reserved this ages ago, after listening to an episode of This American Life about recovered memory syndrome.

Simultaneously and unexpectedly, Michelle thrust Vanishing Acts upon me. I have been barrelling through the work of Jodi Picoult--too fast, in my own opinion.

To end my anecdote anticlimacticly, I don't want to give away the book. Suffice to say that the topic of what a person might accurately remember from when they are 4 years old is quite relevant to both volumes.

Speaking of Jodi Picoult, I'm going to have to take a break from her, just because so many of her books are so very similar. They're all family dramas based around a court case. I think the structure of the legal system is a useful one in narrative--it allows information to be parcelled out in certain ways, and for people to tell their stories and argue about different angles on the same factual information. But I think she overuses it in some ways. The lawyer is always a player in the case, even in cases where it's a very bad idea, even when they're acting extremely unprofessionally as a lawyer.

It's a strength that there's always a certain amount of obscurity to what's going on--either the facts of the case are obscure, or (as in My Sister's Keeper, her strongest), there really is no right or wrong answer--everyone is right, and everyone suffers for it. But there's the added obscurity of people who withhold information--not just key information for good reasons, or painful information for emotionally understandable if not "good" reasons, but useful information for NO reason. Seriously. It really seemed like the lawyer didn't interview the father at all in Vanishing Acts, and the father kept saying things that summed everything up instead of explaining "I had to take her because her mother was a drunk. Ask anyone." It took like four interviews to get to that.

Okay, I'm done about Jodi. It's really a good book--if I hadn't just finished The Pact a week ago, I would have liked it even more than I did. Next up: well, I haven't decided yet. I'll let you know.

Bookend: You Learn Something New Every Day

So much to relate of my vacation reading, my library trip once back home, the conclusion of this PLR. But to get myself started, to prevent the enormity of the task from overwhelming me, I present you with the tidbits I've gleaned so far today from Nine Parts of Desire, by Geraldine Brooks. This book about the lives of Islamic women does not appear to be related with the play of the same name, except to the extent that they address the same topic and share a title drawn from Islamic texts.

First, and on a pleasingly practical basis, I finally learned the basic difference between Sunnis and Shiites. I still don't know what I should about what the two groups are doing right now in Iraq, but I know that that Sunni is from a word meaning "tradition," and after Muhammad's death they advocated the traditional method of the elders electing a new leader, while Shiite comes from the word for partisans, for the partisans of Ali, Muhammad's son-in-law, and the idea of a blood lineage. Shiites like revolution and fighting the power, historically. Whaddaya know?

But the best thing I've learned already from the beginning of this book is that Islam looks remarkably and eerily like Mormonism when you look at the history. Muhammad was married to a slightly older and very successful businesswoman for many years. After her death, he started having revelations that men shoudl take many wives. As his wives, being young and caught up in his power, began exciting scandal, he started having revelations about cloistering women. When he desired the wife of his adopted son, but couldn't have her (even after said son divorced her out of respect for his adopted father) due to previous revelations categorizing this as incest, he had new revelations declaring all adoptions invalid, so that he could marry this woman.

It looks JUST LIKE MORMONISM. It's like when Joseph Smith had a revelation that directed his wife by name to stick by her husband and stop complaining about the other marriages he kept having.

Creepy old men have really messed the world up, huh?

Welcome back from vacation.

Hiatus Entry

Okay, I won't be around for a little bit, due to various obligations that pretty much everyone reading this will already know about and have gotten drunk at and/or be expecting to see photos of.

But before I go, let me tell you something I learned last week, just because don't we all love to learn?

It is this: Sherpa is not a job description. It's a cultural and racial affiliation. There are about 20,000 Sherpas living in Asia, and about 75% of them live in the Himalayas. So, though a lot of them climb mountains for a living, you can be a Sherpa who's never been above, say 10,000 feet above sea level.

They say you learn something new every day. I know I do, but I started out pretty ignorant.

Sweetness and innocence

I'm all syrupy. Tammy and the Bachelor, starring Debbie Reynolds and (in my favorite Hollywood WTH moment) Leslie Nielsen as the romantic lead, is one of my most beloved and heartwarming movies. If you've seen the movie, you know the book. It's pretty much exactly the same--sweet and all about the wisdom of the naive. Tammy Out of Time, it's called, by Cid Ricketts Sumner. Ricketts! Cid Ricketts! I love it!

The Blue Castle, by L.M. Montgomery. You all know her Anne of Green Gables, of course. This isn't an Anne book, but it's so good. The main character, Valancy, has been ordered around by her stuffy mother and relatives all her life. When she learns that she has only a year to live, she suddenly starts living life the way she wants to. And the book has all the visceral satisfaction that you'd expect in that synopsis. And I don't think I'll really be surprising anyone or giving anything mysterious away when I say that in the end, she's not really dying and she lives happily, ever so happily ever after, in her rustic cabin with the reclusive millionaire love of her life.

When it comes to books to read in the week leading up to your wedding, both of these are much more uplifting than The Year of Magical Thinking, which I finished last week. That book, while beautifully written and moving, had my trying to love Mike less so I won't miss him so much when he passes away many, many decades from now. Eventually I came to my senses and realized that we'll all die anyway, and it's a waste not to love passionately until then. Still, it was tough for a while there.

So this might be my hiatus announcement. I read 11 books last month, and 2 so far this month. This month will also include the honeymoon, so I hope to have a high count then. God, I'm shallow. Wish me luck!