Been a Slacker

I've meant to write more; I like to keep this up a few times a week. But it's been a pretty stressful week at work, and I've also felt kind of slow and dumb, and not up to analyzing things.

This is particularly sad, since I had some interesting thoughts I wanted to put down earlier this week about a talk I went to. Ed Burger, a math professor at Williams, just published a book called Coincidences, Chaos, and All That Math Jazz, and I went to see him speak about it at the Harvard Bookstore. It was really interesting, and I asked a question, which made me very proud. (My question, for the interested, was this: in his book he discusses how cryptography depends on the fact that it's very, very hard to factor number. So if a HUGE number has only two HUGE prime factors, it can be used in cryptography. My question is, if you can't factor huge numbers, how do you know if a number is prime?)

Anyway, I had just finished his book, which is in large part about how our intuition is often wrong about things, and how math points us to the right answers. And I had just started a book called The Scientist in the Crib (I have to stop reading nonfiction, it's not nearly escapist enough), which is about how babies explore the world around them and come by all the knowledge that seems given the rest of us.

And I had in my head this big long discussion of the idea of being surprised by the nature of reality, and how these two books fit togther. Only now I'm feeling mentally logey, and it turns out the Scientist is really more about how amazing it is that babies are born able to understand seeing and hearing, etc. which doesn't seem THAT amazing to me since animals are born like that, too (I like the parts of the book about social skills and language much better). So we're going to abandon that lofty plan.

Yeah, I really need to read some fiction.

Personal Library Renaissance, Redux

I had made a resolution to read some fiction, finally, after glutting on nonfiction. I enjoy nonfiction, but it's not as engrossing, and it doesn't give me the same rush that fiction does.

So after I finish The Scientist in the Crib, which I'm hoping has lots of cute little kid anecdotes, I think I'm not only going to move on to fiction, but to reinstate the Personal Library Renaissance that I've been talking about forever. No more library books for me! No deadline, though--I just won't go through the usual cycle of returning some and getting new ones on the same trip. I'm learning not to ask too much of myself.

I do still have the library book n.p. by Banana Yoshimoto. I don't think it's a great translation, since a lot of the more casual language looks very stilted. The dialog, especially, looks like it's been translated word-for-word and without much style. But the plot sounds intriguing--a young woman tries to solve the mystery of her boyfriend's suicide. It turns out everyone who has tried to translate a certain story by a certain author has committed suicide, as indeed the author himself did. I worry it'll be a letdown, but I'll take what I can get.

Then I think When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro, which Becky was kind enough to lend/give to me. I've been so excited about that book that I've held off on it, because once I read it, I won't be able to look forward to it anymore. Or maybe I'm worried that it won't live up to my hopes. Whichever.

And The Final Solution by Michael Chabon. And then Ceci's going to lend me Pledged (non-fiction, but trashy nonfiction!) and We Need to Talk about Kevin. I think I'll reread Midwives.

I think that's it. That's enough to promise myself; who knows what will need to be read between now and then?

Cocky Fellows

I imagine my post title might get some interesting google hits. Bring 'em on!

I read Freakonomics. I have to say I was disappointed. It was slight, smug, and cocky, and this from both of the authors.

The economist clearly thought he was imparting something very, very special. But anyone who's ever read Slate's occasional column "The Dismal Science" knows that this is what economics is about--applying the theories of incentives to explain data. And, sadly but often, applying monetary figures to non-monetary transactions. The economist, in analyzing the effects of parenting on children, chose school test scores to measure success. The conclusion he reached is that who your parents are has an effect, but not what they do (so your parents' socioeconomic status and level of education will affect you, but not whether they read to you, talk to you or spank you). Now, at the beginning of this whole argument, he admits that he picked test scores as an indicator just because they're quantifiable and available in large numbers. But by the end of the chapter, he had drawn sweeping conclusions that I suspect would have been shattered if you were able to measure an effect like how happy and well adjusted the children turned out.

Really, it's just that he acted like he was giving me this magical gift of his insight, when really all I felt like he was doing was the tedious work of crunching some interesting numbers for me.

The writer, in the meantime, was using excerpts from an article he wrote about this guy for the NY Times Magazine for epigraphs for each chapter. Not only do I consider that kind of lazy, but the point of each excerpt was not about economics, but about how cool and punk rock this guy is.

My favorite bit of bad writing is in a place where the writer (the guy's name is Stephen J. Dubner) tries to build suspense in a sentence. Check this out. "...are we to assume that mankind is innately and universally corrupt? And if so, how corrupt? The answer may lie in . . . bagels."

Now, check out the use of ellipses there. That's in the original book. He wants to build tension before startling us with his revelation that bagels may hold the key to mankind's corruption. What a cheap way to do it.

The next book I picked up is How to be Alone by Jonathan Franzen. I borrowed this from Lynne a while ago and just picked it up. After reading the preface, I almost put it down. The preface was about how he had been defensive about what a jerk everyone thought he was till he went back and looked at his essays of a few years ago and realized what a jerk he was. The way he addressed this subject made him look like a real jerk. But I've been sucked into his essay about the crappy Chicago postal system, and while I still have no desire to read about his theories on the demise of the American novel, the postal system stuff is really interesting.

In sum, cocky, but we'll give him a shot.

I Can't Believe I Didn't Tell You This One Yet

Okay, it's time for everyone to understand what a BAD library companion Melissa is.

She reads, we share books--so I thought I'd bring her to the BPL. I have a list of about four books I need to pick up. It'll be fun, right?

Now, when I go shopping with friends who have self-control problems, I consider myself very good at hurling myself between them and temptation. Not that I'd forcibly prevent anyone from making a good purchase, but when Kerry would approach the bath products, I knew it was time to divert her. And you can only let Sara spend so much time in the handbags section before things get a little hairy. Isn't it your duty, as a friend, to make sure the person doesn't hurt themselves when temptation is near?

Melissa, you let me down. She kept pointing things out. She stopped me in the bridal section. She stood on silently as I debated picking up that random Young Adult book that caught my eye, and then said "why not?" when I asked her directly if I should take it.

Why not? I'll tell you why not--do you know how heavy twelve books can be? When you don't have a bag to carry them in? THAT'S why not. What happened to support? What happened to picking up the slack when someone's weakness comes into play.

Melissa, I adore you, but next time we go to the library together, you're getting a cue card with the word "NO" written on it. It looks like I'm going to need self-control for both of us.

Odyssey

I'm not quite done reading Cures: A Gay Man's Odyssey, but I think I'm ready to pick it apart.

First, I like the word "odyssey," but probably couldn't have spelled it if the book cover wasn't right here. I don't know for sure that I would call this story an odyssey, though I suppose it was subjectively. It's not really a story of someone having adventures, though I have no doubt there were many adventures to be had in the New York gay scene in the '60s. In fact, it's implied that he had some of them. But they're not central to this book.

Central to the book, as you can tell by the title, is therapy. Psychoanalysis to a lesser extent, but psychological explanations in general--Erikson's developmental stages Freud's ideas of repression and displacement, etc. The author, Martin Duberman, debunks a lot of the conclusions psychology came to over the years about homosexuality, but he totally buys psychology. It's his primary lens for everything. I find that interesting in a refreshing way, in that he was able to reject the conclusions of a field whose methodology he considers valid. It's almost like he thinks psychologists aren't using their toolbox properly. I also found it a little tiresome, because he spends a lot of time quoting his diary, in which he delves a lot.

I don't think I would recommend this book as a casual read, though I think I would strongly recommend it to someone who had a specific interest in the topic. It's just not compelling enough to stand on its own--he repeats the same patterns in his life, and fills much of his time with his work as an historian and civil rights and anti-war activist. All of those things are not merely related, but reflected in the prose. Still, it's almost unfathomable to me how the world thought--and often still thinks--about people, and he relates many of these circumstances very well.

Also I disagree with him about promiscuity (meaning, I think but am not certain, also infidelity) being fine and dandy just because it's natural. We restrict a lot of natural urges for the good of society, and I think it's important not to say that just because we once thought homosexuality was sick, but we were wrong, does not mean that it's wrong to demand any restriction on sexual behavior by society.

But I'm not arguing well, possibly because my wrist hurts. This is all for now.

Can't Figure out How to Stop It

I'd like to hear from any Virginia Woolf fans. I was supposed to read To the Lighthouse for a class once, but after the first ten pages and the first class discussion in which I began to see what I was up against, I didn't even really make an effort. (I certainly hope Professor Case never finds this site.) The one thing I remember is that you would start out a passage knowing who was thinking, and about what, and by the end of the paragraph two pages later, you would have no idea who or what was under discussion.

I loved A Room of One's Own, though, because I thought it was well argued, with the right amount of incidental and anecdotal information, along with the more sweeping points. I also thought she was very clear, when she wanted to be, in that essay.

Orlando, my first even completed Virginia Woolf novel, was...well, I couldn't figure out how to make the book stop except by finishing it. The wonderful things about it were the very, very funny moments, and some of the very well-parodied characters (the first and last man ever to toast cheese in the Italian marble fireplace large enough for a tall man to stand in). The hard parts--well, the magical realism wasn't that hard. I might even put that in the "assets" column. The bizarre interludes where Modesty, Chastity, and Purity come and dance around the young man Orlando, who then wakes up a woman...well, that was pretty weird. But the unlikeable parts were the soliloquizing that I just couldn't figure out. I found myself, in long passages, forgetting what the point of the description was. I definitely lost track of a number of points the author must have been trying to make.

Clearly, the whole thing was a parable. What was I supposed to learn? There was something important about writing, about finding the role of writing in the writer's life, and the writer in society. Okay, I think I mostly got that. There were quite a few lessons about being a woman, though not as many as I expected at first. By turning from a man to a woman, Orlando really ends up being a woman who had a boyhood, and also someone who has both and neither sex. It's a very modern viewpoint, actually--I feel that, often enough in my life, it doesn't matter that I'm a woman. Based on other things I've read, I hadn't expected Woolf to come across this way. Cool.

But there was a whole thing about "The Spirit of the Age," and then another thing about Orlando's philandering, and I don't know what-all else. Let's just say, I feel like I missed a lot of the book, enjoyed a great deal of what was there, and will see the movie. I think that's all I have to bring to this; I wish there was more.

Totally Off Topic

Okay, this has nothing to do with books, except to the extent that poor Ray Bradbury's name was attached. But I feel I need to warn the world. I need to put the the word "abysmal" and the name of the movie The Sound of Thunder in the same post so that someone might find them and realize what a an awful, horrible, bad movie this was.

How long has it been since you've seen actors fake walking in front of a projection of a city street. Remember the skiing scene with Ingred Bergman and Gregory Peck in Spellbound? Like that. And the background moves by at a perfectly steady pace that's just a hair faster than they're actually walking? And they sort of sway back and forth because it's the only way to move your body out of the way of your own feet? Yeah, that.

Terrible CGI, no fewer than three contradictory theories of how time travel works, a mysteriously unpopulated city, and a whole slew of things I can't tell you about without giving something away. Oh, spare yourself! Doom, doom!

Things You Probably Already Knew

Stephen King needs an editor. Bag of Bones is a pretty good book, but really just way too long in some places. He can't resist a thought full of clever word play that might cross the narrator's mind, relevant or not, credible or not. This man is thinking of clever puns while being scared out of his mind. Really, it's any appearance of cleverness at all that he can't bear to cut. It reminds me of William Goldman's truism, for screenwriting but probably for all writing--you must kill your darlings. Sometimes your best work is the part you have to cut. C'mon, Stephen. Be merciless.

Okay, so maybe you didn't know that. Maybe you're like that smug librarian in my hometown library who used to remark on every book you were checking out, often unfavorably. She wrinkled her nose whenever I checked out Stephen King, which I never did till after high school. But then again, I got to feel smug when she said she couldn't understand Like Water for Chocolate, which I actually enjoyed a lot.

You also probably knew that the 50s was a lousy decade to be gay in America. I knew that, too. This fellow, Martin Duberman, has seriously internalized a great deal of psychoanalytic theory, to the point where even when he's refuting things, he speaks their language. This has led me to do some thinking about the word "pretentious." It occurs to me that genuine highfalutinness is not actually pretention--if you're a world-renowned academic, you're not pretending to anything when you talk like a world-renowned academic. It's only when you're a freshman, or just plain ignorant, that you can call it pretentious.

I grant him that--he's not pretentious--though I still don't much like it.

I guess this entry wasn't mostly about things you probably already knew. Except the Stephen King thing. So, Thing You Probably Already Knew.

Eaten by a Bear, and Other Comforts

Despite a fairly significant amount of downtime over the weekend, I don't feel like I've made forward progress in my goals. Sadly, when I think about why I feel that way, I realize that my goal is to get all these books read. You know, the ones I'm planning to read. Now, somehow that doesn't seem very life-affirming; get it done, cross them off the list, and everything will be fine.

I spent most of the weekend rereading. A little of Expecting Adam, which really had an impact on me the first time I read it, but which a more skeptical second reading is revealing as more of a good read than maybe the gospel I took it for. I feel a little gullible for buying wholesale into th whole thing; not that I disbelieve it, but a healthy skepticism makes you evaluate how well everything ties together, and whether you REALLY had those thoughts before those other things happened. Anyway, it's still well written, and I'm sorry to lose my excited first reaction, but I have.

Mostly, though, I was reading The Clan of the Cave Bear. Linden and I used to sit around and talk about what we thought would happen in the next sequel to come out. What basic element of civilization would she discover next? She's tamed animals--will she domesticate crops? She invented the sewing needle. Next? Discover the wheel, perhaps? Anyway, it was really soothing to read. I'm kind of skimming--there are a lot of descriptive passages that I've enjoyed in the past, but this time I'm just skimming through the story. It's so soothing and reassuring. A childhood favorite, despite, you know, the sex.

Now that I'm back to the commute, though, I'm reading my Commute Book, which is currently Cures. This is a memoir of a gay man who spent the fifties alternately cruising bars and bath houses and in therapy trying to get "cured" of his homosexuality. It's told in a very matter-of-fact manner, very like sitting down and having someone outline his life for you, going into detail when necessary to make the point. It also does a good job of evoking the social environment of the time--not just the facts, but the sense that not only is heterosexuality the norm, so is monogomy, and that this is a big part of the problem.

But I sort of feel like he does his story a disservice when he discusses some of these topics. He presents very clearly the objective and subjective facts of his life at the time, but he doesn't do much tempering of the subjective part through a modern lens.

I might be misreading my own reasons for being thrown off, but I think it's because he doesn't sort out some of the jumbled mixed-messages there were in the fifties. He equates the perceived wrongness of homosexuality and the perceived wrongness of promiscuity together. And of course, at the time, for him, they were all mixed up. But I think, whether or not both of them had equal validity, in modern times it's worth trying to work out how they were separate things.

I'm working through about seven library books right now. Wish me luck.

Who's a Wannabe?

Queen Bees and Wannabes, which folks may have noticed was cited as the "based on" book for the movie Mean Girls, is a lot better described by its subtitle, Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends & Other Realities of Adolescence. (Note that the lack of the last serial comma is not house style here where I work, but to each publishing house its own.)

This book is really a self-help book. It's very much about how to talk to your daughter, prevent her from rolling her eyes at you, and help her make good decisions, instead of locking her up for five years. I'm not fully convinced it's possible to prevent the eye-rolling, but the message of respect and letting go was good.

There were way fewer personal flashback moments than I would have expected. I think I managed to dodge much of the later-adolescence stuff in my own life. The boys, drugs, sex, partying parts were very interesting, but in a much more anthropological way. Also in a "crap, I'm going to have to rear children one day and deal with this mess" kind of way. But the middle school, cliques, best friend swapping, girl cruelty parts at the beginning of the book were really fascinating. It's an incredibly complex society these kids have, mostly because they're smart enough to think and plan and machinate, but not mature enough intellectually to analyze what they're doing and control themselves.

Upcoming: books I'm planning to read.

Do You Think I'm Crazy?

So the library's updated website indicates that you can "log in before clicking Add To My List to retain titles in the list for 90 days."

The 90 day limit was pretty upsetting, since I keep all my books to read in that list, and sometimes I don't read them for months. So I clicked the "Give us your feedback" link and gave it: while I understand that there are space constraints, that limit makes me sad.

Within the hour, I received a reply stating that the entire list is retained, and only deleted after 90 days of inactivity. I have no worries there--I'm in there all the time. Hooray!

Now, when I told this to Mike, he seemed to think the salient point of the story is that I'm someone who calls the library to ask how long it keeps my list. Now, I think that since they had a big BUTTON asking for my advice, there was nothing presumptuous about me offering it. But I'd like to know if I'm alone in thinking that there's nothing obsessive about this.

Long Weekend

So we went to Mike's cousin Matt's wedding this weekend, in upstate Michigan. It was chilly, rainy Saturday morning, but ended up gorgeous for the wedding itself. But travelling to upstate Michigan takes a long time. Especially when you misread your itinerary and get to the airport three hours early.

From 10:30 am until 9:30 pm (or so) we were travelling on Friday. Sunday, it was 9:30 am till 7:30 pm. Saturday was pretty much spent at the hotel, due to being exhausted. And then in the evening, the wedding. There was a live Motown band, called the KGB, which was really cool. I'm a little weddinged out, sadly; I get tired much earlier than I used to.

But the long plane trips made for a ton of reading. I finished The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which is the third Narnia book and is getting a little boring in its blatant moralism. It's a series of lessons, and just as the characters are about to go irrevocably awry, Aslan appears and shows them how to be right. And then he explains that in our world he's called Jesus and you should really listen to him. It's pretty much that blatant, though he doesn't use the name "Jesus" directly.

Anyway, I don't know if I'll go any further in that series. I also finished Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. This was excellent, even better than Gilead, I think. It definitely worked more tightly as a novel, though it was still full of very well-expressed thoughts on belonging, and sorrow, and inevitable sadness. There is no lasting happiness, certainly not in the cold northern town of Fingerbone, and not in the whole world she inhabits. Not just the character, I mean, but the author. There's little even of the transient joy she allows for--sparkly shoes, huckleberries. It's a very sad story.

And now I'm reading Queen Bees and Wannabes, which is inflicting fewer painful middle school flashbacks than I might have expected. It's interesting, though dense. I'm curious how well these methods would really work for communicating with a teenager. First, self-reporting is a notoriously unreliable way of getting information from anyone, especially kids (not the most self-aware creatures to begin with). Secondly, it's hard to reconcile her reliance on affirmation as a method of staying close with the real need to stop certain behaviors. Anyway, I think it's a great book for someone who actually has a teen, but it only reads as moderately interesting for the rest of us.

I have 11 library books out now. We'll see how the rest of them wind up.

Technically...

...I didn't finish. But the epilogue looked boring, and I can read it later when book club swings around. So I think I'll take credit for The Devil in the White City.

All Signs Point to Yes

It looks like I'll make it! It seems like I can read 15 pages between now and when I go return it at the end of the day.

The question is, when I go to return it, will I be able to restrain myself? I still have 5 books from the library, and I'm picking up one for Mike. His book is upstairs, quite close to a couple of books I want--Queen Bees & Wannabes, which was the basis of the movie Mean Girls, for example.

So will I be taking more than five library books to Michigan this weekend?

See entry title.

Race Against Time!

The library book is due tomorrow, and I can't renew it because there's a wait list! I'm 90 pages from the end, and I have to get ready for the next wedding trip tonight! Can I do it???

Time Crunch

I went on a five day vacation and read hardly a word.

I finished rereading In This House of Brede, which was a beautiful book and which I'm so glad I got for Christmas. I won't go on about nuns again except to say that good nun books are very pleasing to me. I got through maybe ten more pages of The Devil in the White City, and started The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which is short, being a kids' book, so I'll probably get through it soon. Still, I'm disappointed in myself, especially since White City has to go back to the library on Thursday and I would really like to finish it. But I guess a good vacation is more rare and valuable than getting some reading done. I'll let it go.

White City does seem to have put Colombian Exposition Fever in my blood, though. The book is a little limiting, in that it's about the architects--which is fascinating--but doesn't get into the nitty gritty as much as I'd like. It gives examples of logistic problems, but doesn't detail how they're solved. Not that I want a pedantic list of these things, but it'd be nice to learn a little more about architecture. I got Fair Weather, a Richard Peck children's book about a girl who goes to the fair, when I went to the library, just because I feel like I want to know a little more about the sensational parts of the fair, which are breezed by in favor of the truly astounding engineering feats--the first Ferris Wheel!

This weekend will involve a plane trip--there will be much reading.

Nuns Revisited

Well, I think I've given up on Our Lady of the Forest. I was always a little doubtful, but I tried it anyway, and I don't hate it, but I really really just don't like it. It has a few of my pet peeves, including lots of dialog without quotation marks, as well as characters who cross the line on some of my own personal hygene pet peeves. Let's preserve the family-friendly nature of this blog and leave it at that; it's sufficient to say I just am not enjoying it at all.

Surprisingly, the same is not the case for Orlando: A Biography, by Virginia Woolf. I'm not sure how she's going to pull off the things that the back cover says she'll do, but I'm enjoying the trip so far. It looks like it's going to be a magical realism--emphasis on "magical"--type of story. So far, it's just about a romantically flaky courtier. But I'm caught up, which I've never been able to say about a Virginia Woolf novel before.

The Devil in the White City is pretty enjoyable, too. I don't necessarily feel that the two stories--the mass murderer and the architect--really fit together, and I have my suspicions that they might never really come together. But the juxtaposition isn't hurting either of them. My one hope is that all the architectural problems they've been teasing me with get wrapped up. I suspect that they present these specific issues more as background color, and that they're not going to resolve them to my satisfaction. For example, the level of Lake Michigan changes by as much as 4 feet over the course of the year. How can the landscape architect manage the flora so that there is neither a bare 4 feet of ground, nor a bunch of drowned plants?

And finally, I've started re-reading In This House of Brede, by Rumer Godden. I asked for and got this for Christmas, after reading it at the library last year. It's just such a good book. I think one of the reasons I like behind the scenes nun stories is that I just like behind the scenes stories. Just the day-to-day that you would never have guessed. Kitchen Confidential was good like that, though I prefer nuns to trash-talking ex-cons. But rarely do you get books in which not much happens that don't come out boring. In This House of Brede is right up there with The Nun's Story, and I rather wish there were more.

I'm on vacation for the second half of this week, so it will be next week before I'm back. In case, you know, anyone's reading this.

My Childhood Crush on Michael J. Fox

It was only a little crush, and I suppose it was really on Alex P. Keaton, though I've always enjoyed Fox's work. His book was pretty good, too. His childhood was only minorly interesting, mostly because it was so typical, but the entire story of his acting career was quite interesting, and his account of living with Parkinson's Disease is quite fascinating. I had sort of wondered why he let himself be typecast for so long; it was because felt he needed to work on as many moneymaking products as fast as he could, to ensure his family had enough money when he couldn't work any more. He speaks so well of his wife, you know she must have SOME flaws. He loves his kids. Etc.

That's the one thing about the book, actually; he's telling the story of the parts of his life he really kind of screwed up, and he's trying to be pretty sincere, but he's also trying to be balanced, and you can see the balance tipping in his favor in some places. In telling the story of a fight with his brother right after the death of his father, he acknowledges that his renown caused stress to his family in that time (of course not his fault) and that he made a remark that was funny in his head but not out loud (happens to all of us), but he sidesteps the part where, you know, probably part of it was that fame actually HAD kind of gone to your head. He admits his own flaws, but in a very carefully screened and structured way.

I listened to it on tape, too. Fox (it's weird to call him that; that's how you talk about authors, not actors) read chapter 1 himself, and an actor read the rest. Fox's reading was quite good, though you could tell it wasn't terribly easy for him. Knowing he was sick, you could hear how words were sometimes swallowed and cut short. But his reading was much better than that of the actor--who overacted in some places, and hit a lot of words too hard.

Anyway, that's a lot to devote to that one book. In other news: I'm reading The Devil in the White City, which is really pushing the line between colorful nonfiction and fictionalized scenes, and doing it well. Also, I kind of wish I wasn't saving money for a wedding and a house and had the option of really pursuing this librarian thing. I don't know if I actually would, but right now quitting my job is not remotely an option (how do people who DON'T make large salaries buy houses anywhere NEAR this city?), so I just have to keep dreaming.

From the Rulebook

I instigated a policy a while ago, that I should not read exposés. This was after I read Bushwhacked and The Amercian Way of Death in close succession and found myself questioning the worth of humanity and whether it might be better to just go live in a yurt somewhere in Mongolia (shout out to E Ben, here, who just test-drove that life plan). Anyway, since I also have some strict policies on toilet facilities in my life, a yurt is not a good option, so no more exposés, unless I'm fully braced, and only if consumed in small amounts.

I did not, however, expect For Her Own Good: 150 Years of Advice to Women to be quite so exposé-like. The first chapter explains the patriarchy, not as just any male-dominated society, but the pre-industrial Western world in which the family unit is the basic unit of a person's destiny, and the father/male head of the family is the authority. It was quite interesting, particularly in how women were more valuable then for their unique skills, which capitalism as an economic and social system rendered alien and somewhat irrlevant. (The book was written in the mid-70s, so it's a very different "modern" situation being compared to history.)

Anyway, as soon as you start talking about the social structure of capitalism, and how the personal and the buisness are separate spheres but people are raised to function in the public or "business" world, making the personal sphere secondary and perhaps irrelevant...well, I can't read anymore.

And that's that.

A Wash

Last night was, on average, a neutral night for literature in my little world. On the one hand, the library was just pathetic. Few or none of the books I wanted were there, even when a) the online catalog said they would be there when I checked earlier in the day, or b) there is no EARTHLY reason they shouldn't be there. I mean, don't you think there should be at least one copy of Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana just SITTING on the SHELF???

And Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the third Narnia book. Let me complain briefly: the library system owns about sixty copies of this book. But because some are different editions or even different printings of the same edition or even, I suspect, the same exact copy of the book entered into the database by two different people, I have to sort through twenty five listings for this title before I prove that yes, the main branch carries it, and yes, they're all checked out.

Ah, but on the other hand, you now have to climb over a bookshelf to get into our bathroom. Luckily, that's not the literal truth, but the little corridor does feel rather like a submarine made of books. Yes, we have added a shelf to the pantheon. It has a WHOLE shelf for books that are borrowed from other people, plus three full shelves that we haven't filled up yet. This is all the expanding I'm allowed to do before we buy a house fifteen years from now, when we've saved up the $8,000,000 down payment you need to buy around here.

I'd like to put in a plug for my fiance here, too--Mike was a rock, when this somewhat cheapo bookshelf was letting me down (unhelpful directions, an Allen wrench that didn't match any of the sizes in our tool kit). He was very patient with my snippy impatience, and has once again made me a very happy lady.

Wish me luck making it through the last three hours of the work week.