Read This Now

Nice Knowing Ya....

2006-04-09T22:44:00.000-05:00

I have an announcement to make.

So long, fair Blogspot. It was nice to have met you. Our relationship was long and enjoyable. But it's time to move on.

Yep, I have a new online alcove. I now rant and rave from my very own fortress: http://www.read-this-now.com.

I look forward to seeing you all there!

Heavy

2006-04-06T20:21:00.000-05:00

It’s hard to know what Tim O’Brien was trying to say in his (autobiographical?) novel The Things They Carried. It’s hard to tell truth from fiction. It’s hard to know what he was getting at, beyond an understanding that it can’t be understood.

Let me try to explain. The book opens with a chapter that is little more than a list with brief personal anecdotes thrown in. It is a list of the things they carried. Photographs. Bibles. Comic books. Medicine. Marijuana. Flak jackets. Grenade launchers. Guns.

The guilt and confusion that came with being a young, clueless soldier in Vietnam.

O’Brien, himself a soldier in Vietnam, and having written several nonfiction books about his time there, obviously pours himself into the book. The short vignettes that comprise the rest of the book are set mostly in Vietnam, but one follows a young man—a young man named Tim O’Brien—who sets off for the Canadian border hoping to escape the draft, but ends up lacking the courage to bail for real. You wonder what might be real and what might not. Several chapters address this directly; notably, “How to Tell a True War Story,” which begins, “This is true,” and which I maybe believe and maybe don’t, and “Good Form,” which implores, “I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.” As a novelist, I understand what he means, completely and unquestionably. That’s how novelists live; that’s what they swear by. You lie to tell a greater truth, and, within the context of the book, people believe those lies, and they walk away recognizing those lies as such but clutching that greater truth in their place.

But what was the greater truth here? O’Brien says repeatedly that no real war story should have a moral, and that if it does, it isn’t true. War is senseless, he says. War is weird. War makes people do things, become people, that they aren’t. True war stories don’t give people a new view of the world. They just make people cringe. So tell me, what was the truth? What did I walk away from it with? When everything is laid out on the table, I don’t need to dig, and I read to get my hands dirty. I love to dig. This book made some excellent points, and it was phenomenally written. The blurring of fact and fiction was at times frustrating, but after I learned to take everything I read at face value, even the corrections and supposed truths which supplemented the supposed lies, it was the right choice for the book.

My only other gripe about the book had to do with the lack of continuity in the storylines. I understood that it was really just a collection of vignettes, a collection of “true war lies,” as I’ve dubbed them. But to really understand a character, and to come to truly care about him, you need to see his everyday life. The most stable and continuous character in the book was Tim, the only one you saw before departure for Vietnam. It was after his draft notice, though, and he was running for his life and for his values. The book deals only briefly with his return from Vietnam. In any novel, but particularly, I think, a war novel, one needs to see the monotony of the before, the excruciation and occasional beauty of the during, and the irreducible change of the after. The before was undersized, the during choppy, and the after interesting only in the story of one of O’Brien’s comrades. I could appreciate the stories for what they were, but I could never really get inside the people and see it through their eyes.

Maybe that was the point. You can’t understand unless you’ve been there.

Drop Everything! Thud

2006-04-01T14:55:00.000-05:00

Jose Saramago’s Seeing makes no attempt to directly follow the genius that was Blindness. If it had, it would have, in all likelihood, failed miserably. But with a master’s intuition and prudence, Saramago gave the first space to breathe, letting the second speak for itself until the two collide with terrifying, breathtaking violence.

I find the near-identical cover designs for the two absolutely fascinating. The only main difference is the inversion of color between them. The symbolism inherent in that visual is alive and well in the books: Seeing tends initially toward a more lighthearted, satirical veneer, a brighter picture of society. Gradually, though, the persevering strength that the city’s people at first appear to possess after overcoming the events of Blindness begins to falter, and the atrocities of human nature are again unmasked by a catastrophe of quite a different order.

On a torrentially rainy early morning, the staff of a polling center sit around the ballot box and talk. They cast their votes. They wait. It gets later, then later still. No one else arrives. They call their families, they call the other polling places, seeking absent reassurance. People trickle in, still in abnormally halting fits and starts.

Then, at four in the afternoon, people begin to pour into the streets, bombarding the polling places. There is no immediately apparent reason for this sudden amassing of people. The staff are too relieved that anyone showed up at all to register with more than the most perfunctory concern the profound oddity of such a situation. The lines dissipate, the polls close, the votes are counted.

More than seventy percent of the ballots are blank.

The polling is repeated. This time eighty-three percent of the votes come back unmarked.

This is the rather interesting situation in which the (still-unnamed, as are the characters, though it is once postulated in one of Saramago’s narrative digressions that, purely hypothetically of course, the country in question just might be his native Portugal) country’s government finds itself. The situation escalates to epic proportions, with protesters wearing buttons and carrying banners that proudly proclaim, “I cast a blank vote,” and marching on the president’s mansion. It’s all entirely nonviolent, but quite enough to put the fear of god into the government’s hearts, and they flee the errant city to the surrounding countryside.

The book is full of Saramago’s characteristic meanderings and asides that, coming from any other author, would seem very strange—if not downright annoying—but from him are welcome and fascinating breaks from his unrelenting, intense narratives. The narrative of Seeing doesn’t even approach the horror, the commentary on human nature, the repulsing beauty, that Blindness’s did, but in its own way it keeps the focus tight, the narrative thread stretched taut at all times.

So, you’re probably wondering, how is this supposed to connect to Blindness at all? The plot seems entirely unrelated, and it’s set four years after Blindness was. The only connection is that of location.

Ostensibly, yes. But, as the government investigation on the genesis of the blank votes wears on, a member of the party led by “the doctor’s wife” in Blindness makes the tenuous mental leap to surmise that she might be somehow behind the blank votes. (If anyone has read Blindness, play guess the traitor!) Truth be told, the characters I got to know and love in Blindness make little more than cameos in Seeing, but I don’t think it really could have been any other way; as I’ve said before, the respectful distance with which Saramago treated the connection between the two books allowed them each to stand on their own, preventing the mutual reliance that many pairs of books have, which weakens the narrative independence of each. This isn’t to say that Blindness shouldn’t be read before Seeing: it is by far the better of two phenomenal books, and the jarring conclusion of Seeing would be far less so without experience with both books. I simply appreciate how Saramago allowed Seeing to speak for itself, without constantly looking over its shoulder for support.

While several key issues in Seeing are never resolved, that’s a hallmark of Saramago’s work, and to expect a straight answer from him would be slightly crazy. In fact, during one of his musings on writing, he refers to “one of those analytical readers who expects a proper explanation for everything,” later going on to say that “it is difficult to give…an answer likely to satisfy such a reader totally.” While this remark is made within a very specific context, it would easily be applied to any of Saramago’s work, and the many puzzles he proposes within.

It’s not Blindness—but then it never tried to be. While I’m not overly pleased with Saramago right now, that’s for reasons of my own, and he’s still my favorite author, ready with another book full of ups and downs and sadness and anger that I’m glad to feel, because it means he reached me.

Geography

2006-03-27T13:30:00.000-05:00

Michael Cunningham’s pointed A Home at the End of the World is an uncompromising and heartfelt, but sometimes slightly farfetched, vision of modern life.

Jonathan Glover and Bobby Morrow are teenagers in a tiny, sleepy Cleveland town. Bobby is loud but strangely, paradoxically polite, free of most, if not all, ethical qualms. Jonathan is quiet and impressionable, gay and unsure of himself, living somewhat on the social fringes. The two quickly become inseparable.

There is a time jump to years later, when the boys are in their twenties. Jonathan is living in New York with outlandish, irritable, but somehow likeable Clare, ten years his senior. Bobby is still in Cleveland, living with Jonathan’s parents and attempting to open a restaurant. When Jonathan’s parents move to Arizona, Bobby is forced to do something—and so Jon’s apartment phone rings.

The book is really about what family really means, and what each person can bring to an arrangement. It’s hard to define, especially in the context of the book, unless I’m going to give away the entire thing, which I’m not. The book was good—the writing superb—and the ending, while, to me, somewhat unsatisfying, was surprising. Ordinarily I think I would have enjoyed it, but while I was reading the book I was just looking for something different.

My pet peeve about the book has nothing to do with anything between the covers: it has to do with the fact that the entire book, pretty much, was given away on the back cover. There were seventy pages in the book that were not detailed by the blurb. This, understandably, rendered the book rather suspenseless, which was a disappointment. I don’t know who writes these things—according to Max Barry, in Australia at least, the authors do it—but they should really refrain from rendering actually reading the book pointless.

Sometimes I’m just not in the right frame of mind to really read and process certain books. This was one of those things, one of those books: I really think I could have enjoyed it more—and certainly would have had more to say about it—had I read it when I didn’t already have so much on my mind.

Shoes, Eyes, and Other Assorted Metaphorical Body Parts

2006-03-23T11:55:00.000-05:00

It never does get easier to write about memoirs.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately, both as a writer and as a reader, about the idea of inside-out and outside-in perspectives. The outside-in perspective maintains a modicum of narrative remove. It allows you, the reader, to draw your own conclusions. You might be able to hear a character’s thoughts, in a novel, but you’re not truly seeing the world through her eyes. Motivations, thoughts, symbolism, reasons, are all up to the reader to puzzle out, giving each person a little wiggle room.

But in the inside-out perspective, you’re literally looking out through his eyes. Everything is being interpreted by the character—or the person. If they’re confused about something, trying to figure something out, then it might leave room for the reader to speculate, to supply them with a solution of their own. But motivations, reasoning, all of those fun things, are already done, analyzed, dug through. They might have been interpreted completely incorrectly. But there’s no room for an outsider to do it. You don’t climb into his brain to see through his eyes; he’s inside yours. That’s what’s great about the inside-out. It’s immediately arresting, unflinching, compelling. But it doesn’t lend itself well to analysis. Novels sometimes use each perspective, sometimes waver between the two within the same book. Memoirs, though—all the analysis has to be done for you. It’s someone’s life. You’re not there to make sense of it. You’re there to live it.

Frank McCourt’s Teacher Man details the years of his life that he spent teaching English in New York high schools (and, briefly, a college). He’s the kind of teacher everyone wants to have: mildly clueless (about teaching, not his subject), engaging, caring, fun. He maintains always that he is the one learning, which seems like a cliché but sounds really true here. You can’t help but like him, and the kids he teaches.

Teacher Man was McCourt’s third memoir, and I think I would have had a better understanding of his motives in this one had I been more familiar with his earlier life, which was obviously—isn’t it always?—incredibly formative and affecting. I’m not sure, though, having seen where his life goes, that I’d go back to find out where it was. Who knows? You can’t have a future without a past. You can’t even have a now.

So, as usual with halfway decent memoirs, I did enjoy the book. We’re actually discussing it in the Barnes and Noble book club tonight, and I have no idea what we’re going to talk about. If anyone figures out how to dig into memoirs and analyze them the way I rend novels limb from limb, please let me know.

White Noise

2006-03-20T11:41:00.000-05:00

I have come to the conclusion that all of Nick Hornby’s early work is the same. That’s okay, because it’s what he does well, and he had to find his bearings somehow. He’s better when he branches out a bit, though.

His first novel, High Fidelity, resembles in initial structure his subsequent two. It begins with a malcontented, promiscuous man (although in How to be Good it was a woman) who recognizes that something is wrong with his life, but is somewhat apathetic as far as actually doing anything about it. Rob has just been dumped by his live-in girlfriend, Laura, and pretends he doesn’t care, and then does care, and then does a lot of things to attempt revenge, which are completely ineffectual. He works at a record shop, and cares about little other than music and sex and, it turns out, Laura. Maybe.

It’s not as briskly plotted or disguisedly deep as his other novels. It spends a great deal of time wallowing in Rob’s previous girlfriends, and attempting to make sense of the reasons why they all left him. The great personality changes and reversions and mood swings, all seeming perfectly authentic in their very exaggeration, that characterize Hornby’s other novels are mostly absent here.

For some reason, this novel just doesn’t lend itself to dissection. But since I’ve now read all of Hornby’s novels, and liked them all—just to varying degrees—and since a large part of High Fidelity involves making lists, I think I’ll make one.

A Long Way Down—the only one of his novels that breaks the promiscuous-middle-aged-relationship-mending cycle of Hornby novels, though, given that the book revolves around a bunch of attempted suicides, the malcontented part is here in force.

How to be Good—clever and smart, and the novel in which Hornby elevated exaggeration to an art form. He’s also at his most socially aware here, looking out beyond the screwed-up lives of his protagonists, which are plenty colorful on their own.

About a Boy—sweet, simple.

High Fidelity

As a first novelist, I feel terrible that those are ranked, as well as in order of my favorites, in order of publication. It’s the unfortunate truth, though—Hornby is without question a writer who improved significantly with each novel. I guess practice is good for something.

Gray Areas

2006-03-16T14:04:00.000-05:00

This is a prime example of the reason why I attempt never to put a book down without finishing it, even if I don’t think I’m going to be thrilled with it. Because occasionally, I am.

I was initially terribly unimpressed with Intuition. Allegra Goodman’s book seemed clunky in its prose, unrefined for a fifth novel. The characters seemed strained and somehow off. I swore I could see the author’s laborious efforts clearly in the book, to the point where I saw the writing rather than the story, never a good thing.

And then the paint started to crack. The book pulls you into a glossy microcosm, so glossy that at first it seems more like a lurid picture out of a magazine than any representation of reality. Things feel forced because they are forced, but not on Goodman’s side of things. It’s that way because it has to be. And as the luster wears away, stained with blood and sweat and tears, the characters come to light, the people and their fundamental, gritty realness.

The novel details the struggles of a small Massachusetts laboratory and the people who work, some quietly, some not so, in its depths. Frustrated young postdoctoral Cliff Bannaker has continued his research into using a virus to treat cancer, against the wishes of the lab directors, Sandy Glass and Marion Mendelssohn. The incipient stubbornness on all sides continues to grow, until Marion and another postdoc, Xiyang Feng, discover that Cliff might, in fact, be on to something. A flurry of papers, work, and enthusiasm envelops the lab, as a newly radiant Cliff floats on air. Robin Decker is less excited, though. Formerly Cliff’s girlfriend, she feels neglected and forgotten, luckless and bitter. The publicity storm rises to dangerous strength. And then Robin gets the little comment, the insinuation of falsification, she needs to bring it all crashing down around them.

The striking thing about the book is its characters. You come to know them, and you come to love them—all of them. You love them for their vulnerability, their fallibility, their humanity. Sandy, the interestingly named lab director, and his confidence, his brash insistence and surefooted resilience. Marion, Sandy’s co-director and counterpoint in her skepticism and insistent caution, along with an incisive concern. Cliff, sly and wily but high on an almost endearingly arrogant vision of the stars within his reach. Robin, methodically intelligent, bitter and needy, willing to do whatever it takes to get what she thinks is revenge. Feng, clever and quiet but determined to stand his ground when he finds his own feet. Kate Glass, Sandy’s starry-eyed teenage daughter, an adherent of literature—and of Cliff. These people simply scratch the surface of the cast of fascinating, well-rounded characters that make this book the triumph that it is. Goodman is a master of observation and invention—above all a master of plausibility, which is first and foremost as far as I’m concerned. (You know how inconvenient it is to not be able to say “In my book” because you’re a novelist? Although I could have said it there, because it would have been true.)

Some would probably protest that the book moves slowly. It’s true; I noticed it, I just didn’t mind. It’s not an “action” book. It’s a cross-examination of its various characters, a lightly-treaded investigation set alongside the lumbering one that drives the plot. Each reader must draw his or her own conclusions about everything and everyone, which to me seemed Goodman’s main point.

So I guess, if you really want to know, you’ll have to read it for yourself.

Because Pennies Don't Sound As Good

2006-03-13T13:52:00.000-05:00

It seems the world will never run out of intrepid people willing to do really interesting things in service of journalism.

I’d been intending to read Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed for quite a while. I’ve meant to read most books on my shelf for a while, since there are so many of them. But that’s another story.

In the vein of Norah Vincent’s Self-Made Man and John Griffin’s Black Like Me (which I haven’t read, but intend to at some point), Ehrenreich devotes her book to infiltrating a corner of society to which she definitely does not belong: that of minimum-wage workers. She starts in Florida, where she lives, and travels to Maine and Minnesota, and gets essentially whatever job and housing she can without using her education—a PhD in biology and years of experience as an essayist.

In Florida, she works as a waitress at small hotel restaurants, first a small one that she finds at first overwhelming but has no problems adapting to, and where she even bonds with some of the other workers. The pay there isn’t enough to support her housing in an “efficiency” a ways up the road, though, so she leaves for another restaurant, this one overwhelming, busy, and completely impersonal. She moves into a trailer to be closer to the restaurant, but the staff there is a clique to which she can’t seem to win entry, and she ends up walking out, ending the Florida phase of her adventure.

In Maine, she does a little better, getting two jobs as a nursing home kitchen attendant and a cleaner with The Maids. The nursing home job was fairly comfortable and easy-ish, the time she had to serve the entire Alzheimer’s ward and the time a resident deliberately pitched a cup of milk at her aside. The cleaning job is another story altogether. Physically and mentally demanding, she also gets to know her fellow maids fairly well, and their stories seem to comprise much of this section of the book.

Her last stop, in Minnesota, results in a glamorous job as a floor stocker for that ubiquitous shopping…place, Wal-Mart. Here she does perhaps the worst of anywhere, with huge financial problems and trouble finding housing, along with horrible job dissatisfaction, like that’s any surprise.

It’s hard to summarize or condense what the book was trying to say, even for the purposes of reflection. It’s not terrible “thought-provoking,” simply because understanding and appreciating the book doesn’t require a great deal of independent thought. The stories Ehrenreich tells, hers and those of her coworkers, are fascinating and devastating. At only 221 pages, it’s a quick read, with a lot of power per page. (That’s the ppp, the newest addition to the Tori Borland System of Measurements, along with the rf, or Ruinability Factor, which is how good a book was multiplied by the complexity of the plot, or any other good thing that moviemakers tend to bungle.)

Anyway, the one thing that did really strike me about the book was how often Ehrenreich ended up cheating. She says right up-front, at the very beginning, that she wasn’t going to starve herself or sleep in her car in service to the project. At each of her three stops, she ends up dipping into funds brought from home, as well as occasionally sneaking out to check her e-mail or letting her friends take her out for dinner and a movie.

If she couldn’t make it without cheating, then how do the people without an easy out?

Something Fishy

2006-03-10T18:11:00.000-05:00

I honestly have no idea what this book was trying to say.

Before one of my friends points out that I never stress what a book “has to say,” I’ll reiterate my position: characters first, story second, something to say third. It’s there, it’s important, it just can’t (usually) carry a book on its own. Pretty much every book has something to say. If we didn’t have a point to make, we wouldn’t be writing. The characters and the story are what makes the book interesting while you’re in it. The something it has to say is what keeps you thinking about it afterward. Brian Strause’s Maybe a Miracle was memorable only for its sheer inscrutability.

A slightly clichéd family setup and coming-of-age plot sets the stage for the novel: high school senior Monroe, a quiet skeptic, lives with his too-concerned mother and nearly-absentee lawyer father, along with his eleven-year-old sister (and best friend) Annika. All is happily dysfunctional until Annika decides that Monroe’s prom night would be a good time for a swim, and cracks her skull on the diving board. Monroe is then forced to be the reluctant hero and do CPR, but she goes into a coma from oxygen deprivation anyway. Fun. (Shut up, Brittany.)

Over the next two years, Annika gradually becomes a religious icon who sparks a massive pilgrimage of the sickly faithful (be my guest and take that in either sense) hoping to divine a miracle from her bleeding palms. Yeah. The poor kid’s got stigmata. Monroe stands by and watches, horrified and cynical, what he is sure is the exploitation of his sister. His mother has become a religious freak, and his father is well on his way. Monroe’s own life keeps on, bit by bit, but mostly it revolves around Annika. Things continue to horrifically, and fascinatingly, build.

And this is where I must ruin the ending. If I were you I’d TURN BACK NOW, but it also might be worth continuing, to watch me bleed some more sarcasm. I’m not sure it was worth reading this book, but, while I’m having trouble writing this blog, it’s kind of fun. I don’t get to be this sarcastic very often.

Annika and Monroe are big fans of the Cincinnati Reds. Monroe had promised to take her to a game before she took the big splash. At a gruesomely imaginable stadium tribute to Annika, Monroe steals the tractor on which her bed rides, puts her in a wheelchair, and takes off for the game. Where she gets whacked in the head with a ball. Where she wakes up. Where it is discovered that she was “locked-in” all along, fully conscious of everything going on around her. Where everything’s suddenly okay.

Double-you tee eff? (That’s WTF for you non-fans of phonetics.)

I want me my payoff! I fail to see, really, at all, what the point of all that was. Yes. Yes. It’s the journey and not the destination, of course. That’s true. But it’s hard to know what stance the author was really taking. Monroe’s coming-of-age takes a backseat to—and is reliant upon—Annika’s situation. Both Annika and Monroe roll their eyes at her religious-icon status, but it’s hard to know what it was supposed to mean. Ostensibly it was a statement about humanity’s blind faith and lemming-like behavior, but that wasn’t at all how it came across in the book: it almost seemed like an endorsement of belief, hope, faith—but I think that kind of hope and faith is pathological. Also, as the founding member of Novelists For Scientific Accuracy (sign up today, just $1 million a month, membership cards are gold-plated), the whole “locked-in” thing really irked me. I know. It’s a novel. And I know. We never know. But…but!

It was a puzzling journey that the destination failed to illuminate, and that was what bothered me.

Reporting For Duty

2006-03-03T15:43:00.000-05:00

In his unconventional memoir/diary Just Another Soldier, Jason Hartley paints a fuller picture of himself than most do in such books. His writing, about his tour of duty in Iraq and the training that preceded it, began as a blog, www.justanothersoldier.com (which, incidentally, is an even neater place to visit once you’ve read the book; I wasn’t planning to even look at it until I just typed the web address, and it distracted me from this review for about twenty minutes). He was ordered to take said blog down after being told that it compromised military security and flaunted behavior “unbecoming” of a sergeant. Hartley complied. For a while. The blog reappeared near the end of his tour of duty, after a (rather amusing) execution of “The D.I.E. decision making process: Drink Jim Beam. Intone ‘Fuck it.’ Execute Decision.” This act of rebellion resulted in his demotion, a temporary pay cut, and many, many unpleasant things during his last month in Iraq. Hartley seems not in the least remorseful about it. He shouldn’t be. (I haven’t been able to find any information about what he’s done since returning from his tour in April of 2005.)

The thing that really got me about this book was the extent to which Hartley was willing to tackle the big issues head-on, so that, even if he didn’t have the answers, it was clear that he cared, and that he was thinking. Most memoirs basically follow the pattern, “I did this, and I was just terrible at it, and I did this, and I was really selfish and awful, and I did this other thing, and I was just absolutely fantastic at that, but then I did something else and it was really awful, and….” Hartley is willing to take the wider view, making the book not so much about himself but about the war, and the world. He speaks for every soldier, while simultaneously retaining his own compelling and distinctive voice.

He writes about civilian casualties, how difficult they were at first, how as time went on he became removed from them all. He writes about how, in order to be willing to kill someone, one must be willing to dehumanize the person on the other side of the sights. He follows that declaration up with a short story he wrote from the perspective of an Iraqi, a hypothetical backstory from an ambush they carried out. Open and honest, almost heartbreakingly so, about his desire to make the world a better place, Hartley also doesn’t shy away from the admission that all of those noble urges melt away as soon as he has a grenade launcher in his hands. He tells archetypical stories of valor and courage. He tells stories of drunken escapades and juvenile humor that would sound more in-place if set in a college frat house.

He writes at length about what he calls “The Monastic Order of Infantrymen,” an exclusive, unofficial designation to which he and several of his friends belong. The basic criterion for admission is that one have no significant emotional ties to home: no girlfriend, no wife, no children. He says that this is the only way to go for someone in the army, that if you leave home for a tour of duty, even if your relationships are still extant when you get home, that things will be different; painfully so. He seems really convinced that he’s happy free of any attachments beyond his own sentimentality. At times, though, it is clear that he wishes he had something to come home for.

The moral duality inherent in the entire process does not escape him by a long shot. He’s open and honest and in denial. He’s brave and he’s terrified. He’s serious and carefree and regretful and delighted.

He’s real. And it shows.

Viva La Vie Boheme

2006-03-01T09:33:00.000-05:00

Anthony Rapp’s Without You is a must-read for hardcore fans of the musical Rent, and a might-read for everyone else.

The memoir is a no-holds-barred account of the years during which he rose to Broadway superstardom as Mark in the controversial bohemian rock opera, and in which his mother died of cancer. His relationship with the other cast members and with Jonathan Larson, Rent's author, who died tragically during the previews of the show, is detailed, sometimes heartwarmingly, sometimes heartrendingly. Rapp also writes with openness about his discovery that he is bisexual, and his roller-coaster relationships with a series of boyfriends.

The extent to which Rapp's life parallels that of Mark is fascinating, at times even slightly spooky. His relationship with his brother, with whom he shared an apartment, was rocky but always loving, and struck me instantly as being very similar to Mark's relationship with his roommate Roger, and Rapp at one point makes the comparison himself. As Rapp struggled to deal with his mother's illness from afar--he had lived in New York for many years, far from the small town in which he grew up and his mother never left--he eventually ended up at a meeting of Friends In Deed, the organization on which Larson based Life Support while writing Rent.

Some of the anecdotes Rapp tells in the book are mesmerizing to fans of the musical and/or movie, like the preview show they held the night after Larson's death, flying in his friends and family. The plan was to simply sit at tables at the front of the stage and sing the songs, since they didn't want to deal with the still-problematic set and lighting changes on such a difficult night. At the end of act one during a normal show, Rapp, as Mark, climbs up on a restaurant table to sing the lighthearted but powerhouse anthem "La Vie Boheme." The energy in the room on that particular night was apparently electric, and Rapp, on a whim, pushed his chair back and got up onto the table, unwilling to sing that song docilely perched on his chair. By the end of the song, the entire cast was up on the tables, and they performed the second act as usual.

Stories like that comprise most of the Rent portion of the book, and wouldn't make much sense to someone who hasn't seen either the play or the movie. (If you haven't seen either the play or the movie, you should do it soon. The movie is fantastic, and now I'm trying to make plans to see the show.) As a fan, I loved the opportunity to peek into that world.

The parts dealing with his mother were mostly just spectacular shows of self-loathing. I seriously wonder why people write memoirs now, having read many of them recently. Yes, everyone does things that maybe they regret. Yes, it's important in a memoir to tell the truth and the whole truth, and no, that doesn't mean I don't still adore James Frey. But why put yourself out there to be berated--and that's after you finish berating yourself? Rapp felt guilty that he didn't spend more time with his mother, didn't help more, wasn't there. He felt guilty about his relationships with his boyfriends when they didn't work out. He did some things that were worth feeling guilty about, and wrote about some less-than-stellar behavior on his part. At least he didn't have to worry about his readers judging him, because he'd already ripped himself to pieces. I saw the same sort of thing in Sean Astin's book, where one got the impression he was much harder on himself than anyone else was on him. I almost think that if one member of a cast of something--a movie, a play, whatever--writes a book, the rest of them should have to as well. Then maybe you'd get the whole story. Or some interpretation, your own interpretation, at least.

The memoir is a form that has come into vogue lately, and for good reason. Truth is, in many cases, far stranger than fiction, with the added bonus of the author not needing to make anything up, one of the only potential pitfalls being salivating lawyers. Rapp doesn't need to worry about that, I don't think. But you never know, really.

Honestly, though, I'm sad to see the novel superseded by a form that is, in many ways, just as--if not more--sensational. My argument, my lament, was much more eloquently stated by Julia Glass in her New York times op-ed piece. So, for the first time in a while, I'm going to say: read this now.

2+2=4, Really

2006-02-27T09:19:00.000-05:00

George Orwell’s 1984 is one of those books that you probably can’t get through life without reading. Dystopian societies are fashionable: just look at Lois Lowry’s work on the Giver trilogy, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Max Barry’s Jennifer Government, even Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. It’s a well of plots that seems unlikely to ever dry up, a different spin on the engine of all fiction: with dystopias, the peeling wallpaper, scuffed carpet, and rusting fixtures are on the outside.

I’m actually unsure what I think of this book. It’s difficult to say whether or not I even “liked” it. Obviously I didn’t care so much for the ending—which I generously won’t spoil for other ignorant folk like myself just two days ago—but the rest of the book provoked a certain amount of confused ambivalence. I haven’t yet decided if I disliked the book—which is the way I’m leaning—because I didn’t like what happened, or I didn’t like the book. Heh. Isn’t it interesting that I italicized that?

I also, as you’ve probably noticed, have a horrible tendency to overanalyze everything I read. Thus I wonder about the entire book, wonder after the big reveal near the end about everything that happened at the beginning. I came away from the novel unsure what really happened, which, in context, was probably just fine. It seemed slightly odd to me, though, because I’m used to always knowing what happens in novels—or feeling like I do. Because that’s the beauty of books: each reader comes away with something a little different. Even the author, I maintain, only thinks he (or she) knows what really happened.

When I told my dad that I was reading the book, he said that it was a satire. I’m going to have to disagree. Really disagree. I suppose one could see it that way: a satire of the state of the world and everything that was happening at the time. I have to argue that it was presented with far too straight a face to be outright satire. It wasn’t funny in the least, and I don’t really see how it could be construed as such.

As seriously as it was presented, though, in the guise if nothing else of a cautionary tale, I think one of my biggest problems with the book lay in its subject matter. That sounds like an easy way out—don’t all problems with books lie in their subject matter, or almost all anyway?—but I think it’s true. Orwell wanted to produce a threatening, dystopian view of the future, and that’s certainly what he did. He did it in such a way, however, that half the time it simply came off as absurd. My line on “suspension of disbelief” when reading fantasy and science fiction is that I don’t want there to be any disbelief to suspend in the first place. Oceania, the conglomerate of England, the U.S., and several other (former) countries in which 1984 is set, was too ludicrous to even try to suspend the mountains of disbelief that amassed as the book progressed. And maybe I’m too optimistic, but I don’t think that ending is at all within the realm of possibility, even within the context of Oceania.

Maybe that’s why some people think it’s a satire.

I think I’ve finally figured it out: the thing that bothered me about 1984 was the fact that it begged to be taken seriously, and then begged to be let off the hook on simple matters of logic and human nature, both of which it callously disbands—in order to make another point. The “points” in the book supersede believability. It’s a cautionary parable if anything.

I can’t leave the discussion without pointing out something that’s incongruously—and hilariously—1940’s. In 2006, would a twentysomething girl carry on a passionate affair with an older man—and call him “dear” every other sentence?

I didn’t think so.

Clubbin'

2006-02-24T09:19:00.000-05:00

So: the update.

Well, no one at the club managed to convince me that the book was any better than I had originally thought. I’d say it was pretty much a consensus that the main characters were entirely unlikable and rendered the book such as well.

As for the club itself, it was…interesting. I’d go again, but I’m definitely not their target member. They know only that I’m in college, and even if I were “normal college age,” I’d be easily 20 years younger than anyone else there. As it is…well. One member in particular couldn’t stop remarking on my age. But I’m used to that, I suppose.

So yes, I’d go again, and I’m planning to. Next month they’re discussing Frank McCourt’s Teacher Man, so I guess I’ll end up with another two-part blog, hopefully one with a bit more substance to its follow-up.

Also: the eight words an author never wants to hear: “I don’t know if you can say that.” (See also my word of the day.)

Stasis and Solipsism

2006-02-22T14:13:00.000-05:00

J.M. Coetzee’s novels try to be ponderous and literary. They try to address the big issues, twist themselves into knots with self-referential metafiction and overexerted turns of phrase. All they end up being is indifferent.

In Disgrace, David Lurie, a professor at a university in South Africa, is fired after having sex with a student. Now fallen from grace, he retreats from his city flat to his daughter’s smallholding in the country. He ridicules her small-scale existence but slowly slips into the country life. All seems to be normalizing, until three black men break into the house, robbing, beating David, and raping his daughter Lucy.

The book wants to be about racial politics. The book wants to be about desire and its suppression. It wants to be about the profound effect of art on people. It wants to be about the value of trust. It even wants to be about animal rights. Somehow, it manages only to be about one slightly whiny man for whom I could have sympathy but never empathy.

The ending of the book is rather puzzling as well; not because it doesn’t make perfect sense, but because a turnaround seems to occur in the last few pages. The entire book stubbornly maintains that David won’t change, that nothing really ever changes, until the last couple of pages where maybe something does.

I was intrigued by Slow Man, though not overly impressed, because there at least some of the metafiction worked to interesting effect. This book left me disappointed; I’ve really been turned off of the author, which for me happens very seldom. Also, I hate to make generalizations on the basis of two books—it’s really not fair—but Coetzee seems inordinately fond of passionate (read: sex-crazed), aging, malcontented male main characters.

However: I keep an open mind. The book is the local Barnes & Noble book club selection for the month, and I picked it up mostly for that reason. It’s been years since I’ve been to a book club meeting, and I’m planning to go tomorrow just to see what it’s like. I’m sure I’ll be writing a follow-up report on the dynamics of the meeting and whether anyone managed to talk me into more generosity towards this particular novel.

Ghost Stories

2006-02-19T12:27:00.000-05:00

I’m glad this book is over.

I wish I’d had the time to give it the attention it deserves.

José Saramago’s The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis tries to be so many things at once that when one’s mind is at all elsewhere, it’s difficult to discern so much as one.

The story of a man—Ricardo Reis—who moves from Spain in 1936 back to his native Portugal, the book details his personal life before moving increasingly into the inscrutable details of Portuguese politics during World War II. Personally, I found the first half of the book far more engaging, in large part because I know nothing about Portugal, least of all in 1936, and didn’t look into it as I normally would have (more on that later). Reis lives in a hotel for a while, enters into a relationship with a chambermaid that has entirely intriguing dynamics, and wonders about a young woman whose left hand is inexplicably paralyzed. He scratches out lines of poetry that no one ever sees while keeping up the pretense that he really does intend to set up a practice again, having been a doctor in what seems to him a previous life. All while conversing with the ghost of his poet friend, whose death summoned him back to Portugal.

Then politics intrude on our nice, plot-less meditation on life. Ricardo is summoned by the police due to the fact that he has come from Spain during a delicate civil situation there. They, unsurprisingly, want to know why.

It is difficult to ascertain Ricardo’s political positions, because he meditates on what he reads in the newspaper and hears on his radio without giving much of an impression of what he believes, which may have helped me get more of a handle on the situation. For a while he seemed to be a Nazi sympathizer, a supporter of the dictatorship in his native country, but, especially after a scene near the end of the book in which he attends a political rally, he seemed more than anything apathetic.

When I’m in school, I want quicker reads. I would love to be able to philosophize about a book. But I just don’t have the time, or the mindset. I think differently. There were several places in the book when I actually wanted to write down a line or observation that I found particularly meaningful or astute. I didn’t, and I don’t remember them now. Had I been in a different place—had I read this three weeks ago—I’d have pages of quotes, which I wouldn’t need because I’d have memorized them.

I enjoyed the book; I enjoyed Saramago’s usual philosophical meanderings, I enjoyed his beautifully smooth, consistently eloquent prose. I enjoyed—though was slightly befuddled by—his trademark devastation of an ending. He’s still my favorite author. Any blame to be laid for my feelings about this book falls on me. I think I know better, now, than to read one of his books when I cannot devote to it my undivided attention. I probably won’t read him again until April, when I will happily snatch up Seeing the day it arrives in the bookstore.

But who knows? If one calls to me, I’ll read it.

Parting thought: I do believe José Saramago is one of the only living writers who gets away with giving away his plot twist in the title.

Identity Crisis

2006-02-08T15:44:00.000-05:00

John Colapinto’s debut novel About the Author suffers from one major problem. I don’t like the author.

Not Colapinto—I know nothing about him—but Cal Cunningham, the metafictional author of the book. The author of About the Author, that is, not about Almost Like Suicide, which the character purports to have written but really didn’t…it’s complicated.

Cal Cunningham is a young man living in New York City. He likes women, and he likes glamour almost as much. He dreams of living the life of a famous novelist, but there’s one problem. He can’t seem to put so much as a few words down on paper. So he lives in a cramped apartment with Stewart Church, a law student who, to Cal, seems incredibly dull and lifeless.

That is, until Stewart shows Cal one of his short stories. The short stories he’s been writing without telling Cal. The novel, we learn, he’s written without telling Cal.

Stewart sets out for a class…and never comes back. He’s met his end in a crash involving his bicycle and a motor vehicle. The locked file cabinet in Stewart’s room proves far too tempting for the permanently blocked “writer” who lives in the room next door.

The novel is a labyrinth of fairly contrived plot twists and U-turns. It’s too difficult to summarize, and even by trying I’d strip it of any enjoyment it might hold. There was nothing inherently terrible about the book, and its narrative voice—Cal’s—is interesting. I simply couldn’t bring myself to like the main character. Some of the jacket copy, Thomas Mallon’s endorsement, says “John Colapinto…make[s] his nefarious hero, Cal Cunningham, a little more charming with each increase of his own bad behavior and desperation.”

He was never quite charming enough for me.

Your Attention...Please

2006-02-05T19:30:00.000-05:00

I must begin this discussion with a completely straightforward “DISCLAIMER DISCLAIMER DISCLAIMER,” as Kirstin and Justin of the highly amusing and informative This Week in Science podcast say (often). The situation Brooke Foster dissects in her new The Way They Were, the one of adult children whose parents are divorcing, is not one I have ever been in or am particularly familiar with. The book has positioned itself as “The only guide for adult children….How to deal with your parents’ divorce when you’re not a kid anymore.” Being the way I am—i.e. the kind of person who will read absolutely anything, with fairly little regard to subject matter—and being that Brooke is a family friend, I read the book without hesitation. Still, my lack of firsthand (or second- or third-) experience renders my appreciation and comprehension of the book rather less than it would be for someone seeking advice from within that situation.

Each chapter addresses a specific challenge the children (and divorcing parents) must face during and after the breakdown of the parents’ marriage. They address topics such as parental regression, feeling caught in between parents, stepfamilies, adultery, and trust, pointing out both differences and similarities to the experiences younger children might have in the same situation. Each chapter concludes with a bulleted list of things to remember from the chapter, a kind of checklist.

Foster (isn’t it funny, that when you know someone, you want to use their first name? I keep wanting to call her Brooke—and up there in the first paragraph, look what I did) uses bits of her own personal story, as well as numerous anecdotes from interviewees and comments from psychologists. Taken as a whole, they paint a realistic picture of the situation while retaining optimism for the future.

If I had been reading the book looking for advice, I think I might have appreciated hearing a more cohesive story about Foster’s (and I just had to erase “Brooke” to write that) experiences, rather than others’ anecdotes, many of which seemed to make the same point in many different ways while breaking up the book’s flow. I have a very definite position on books: tell me a story. I hold nonfiction to that standard as much as I do novels. I want to hear about experiences—real or fictional—and take from them what I can or choose.

But the book isn’t, and was obviously never meant to be, a tell-all memoir. It’s a guide, a how-to. While I don’t take well to being told what to do—and this book seems to try at times—I know many if not most people do. And how can I possibly say what I would want or need if I were in that situation? I’m not—and because of that, I’m not authorized to so much as guess at how I’d feel. When your life is in so much turmoil, sometimes I guess it’s easier to have someone sit you down and gently, compassionately tell you what to do.

Ultimately, I can say with confidence that the book is well-written; while Foster’s journalistic tendencies (she’s a staff writer for the Washingtonian) probably cause the anecdotal choppiness, they also enable her to write with self-assured expressiveness. Her experiences will of no doubt be of help to many others.

And a Man, and a Woman (Well, Several Women)....

2006-02-02T21:06:00.000-05:00

About a Boy, Nick Hornby’s sophomore effort (novel-wise anyway), is a sweet tale of deception and redemption in the world of…single parenting.

Actually, it’s amazing that Hornby gets away with what he does. His characters aren’t the most three-dimensional in the world. Everyone lies to everyone else—it’s practically a requirement, at least in Boy, How to Be Good, and A Long Way Down, the three of his four novels that I’ve read. Everyone starts out horrifically flawed and ends…usually still horrifically flawed, but having learned to moderate/appreciate/utilize those flaws. Still, despite their seemingly flat and repetitive constructions, somehow he always manages to make you think. By exaggerating, I think, by making his characters so onerous and melodramatic that they couldn’t possibly walk the earth with mere mortals, he makes his points, points that most people wouldn’t catch for their subtlety, except in the particular way Hornby presents them. As I told a friend earlier, “If you want deep, measured prose to disturb you about life, read José Saramago. If you want to laugh while being disturbed about life, read Nick Hornby.”

But on to the novel itself. Will is a middle-aged man keen on women and having a good time, and mostly satisfies the two desires simultaneously. Still, as he gets older, it gets harder to get the girls—until one day he meets a single mother. Here is a woman who likes him, who can’t get another guy, and who he considers undeniably gorgeous. Bingo! Will joins a group for single parents, along with his imaginary two-year-old. Never mind that he’s never been married, never had a kid, never even worked—he lives off royalties from a Christmas carol his father wrote, and regretted his entire life—in other words, never done any of the things that characterize the lives of SPAT’s (Single Parents Alone Together) members.

Meanwhile, twelve-year-old Marcus lives with his single mother. Marcus is hopelessly nerdy, living the wholesome but wholly boring life his mom has foisted upon him. This mother, incidentally, is depressed and quite possibly suicidal. Young Marcus is in a bit of a bind, especially between his mother, and the fact that he gets beaten up on a daily basis…and it goes on.

The two collide, with messy results.

It’s typical Hornby, as described above. A quick read—I’ve found all of his novels to go by pretty fast—but thought-provoking despite its briskness.

For some reason I thought Hornby had been more prolific. Now I only have High Fidelity, and perhaps Fever Pitch if I feel like nonfiction. How sad.

Group Hug...Maybe Not

2006-02-02T13:25:00.000-05:00

Owen King’s first novel(la), and its accompanying four short stories, provide a glimpse into a colorful, youthful, and (perhaps above all) liberal mind.

The titular novella itself, We’re All in This Together, concerns itself with a teenage boy, his grandfather, his divorcee mother, and her boyfriend. In the wake of the 2000 elections, George’s grandfather, a staunch democrat, erects a 15x15-foot billboard in his front yard: a diatribe against George Bush, complete with an ink portrait of Al Gore (one cannot help but wonder if it was intentional, and if so, why, that the protagonist shares the loathsome President’s first name). Before long, though, the sign begins to collect colorful expressions of dissention in blindingly pink paint. The young paperboy, having previously been accused of pilfering the Style and Travel sections from the New York Times, is the prime suspect. George, his grandfather, and his grandpa’s friend Gil embark on a paintball-, peanut-, and marijuana-filled mission for revenge.

Meanwhile, George’s mother, Emma, a worker at the local Planned Parenthood clinic, where she combats the local GFAs (short for God’s Favorite Assholes) on a daily basis, is dating Dr. Victor Lipscomb, and George is nursing a classic case of replacement anxiety. His mother’s old boyfriends he liked because they let him choose his level of emotional involvement. Victor’s fatherly ways, dorky and misguided but well-meant, catch George off-guard. This he isn’t pleased about.

The story is most compelling perhaps in George’s relationship to his elderly grandfather and his friend Gil, both of whom in their own ways force George to think about his own mortality. The ending is unexpected, but not necessarily bad; the quick paragraphs about what goes on far beyond the bounds of the tale that frequently conclude short stories often seem to me to be a way of writing the lazy man’s novel, i.e. the events sans the emotional trappings, but here they work better than usual.

Four short stories, all about 25 pages, round out the book. They are in no way related except in that they nearly all include drugs and liberal politics. Frozen Animals relates the story of a dentist visiting a patient far afield and having an experience that may or may not have been real; Wonders describes a player on Coney Island’s baseball team, and his sympathy for the “freaks” that make up the mid-game show—and some comparatively normal ones; Snake tells the tale of another young and similarly confused young man who meets a snake handler and suddenly learns to distinguish fact from fiction, and My Second Wife is about a man whose wife leaves him for the baker down the street, and some of the weirder things humanity is capable of.

I am not ordinarily a big fan of short stories; I want to know everything there is to know about a story, a subject, a person, real or fictional, and so they frustrate me, promising one delicious, sugary bite when I want the whole cake. As such, the novella was the highlight of the book for me, telling me (almost) all I wanted to know. It’s never enough.

The writing is far more than passable—obviously writing runs in King’s blood, as the son of Stephen—and the characters, while slightly repetitive, are fairly colorful and three-dimensional. For a collection of less-than-novel-length stories, I enjoyed this more than I thought I would; now I want to see what the younger of the King men can do with a full-length novel.

Sex Change

2006-01-31T21:09:00.000-05:00

Norah Vincent’s Self-Made Man describes the kind of experiment seldom dared or expected possible, but that, with sufficient determination, can be not only possible but entertaining, even thought-provoking.

Vincent, a middle-aged, lesbian (not transsexual, as she is quick to point out) female, went undercover as a man for eighteen months. She had the idea for the project as a young woman after being convinced by a friend to go out in drag, and for one night not needing to contend with the leers of men on the street. The idea was filed away for a while, until an A&E reality show brought the idea rushing back. The treatment the reality show gave to people cosmetically switching genders was shallow and milked only for its entertainment value. Vincent, on the other hand, felt that it had powerful psychological and cultural implications as well, and quickly jumped in with both feet.

Vincent, as “Ned” (a childhood nickname with a colorfully traumatic story), joins an all-male bowling league. She goes to strip clubs (and, as a lesbian, it is interesting that she found them as revolting as she did). She dates. She gets a door-to-door sales job. She lives with Catholic monks. She joins a men’s therapy group and goes on their weekend retreat.

All as a man. And all without being found out.

The stories and anecdotes are interesting, and the book is beautifully written, a bonus I hadn’t expected when I first picked it up. Vincent is entertaining and compelling, as are the people she writes about.

It is difficult, though, to know exactly what point she is trying to make. She argues that men wield sexual power over females, but that females rule the dating world. She argues that men have feelings and express them differently from females, but express them in such a way that friendly intimacy between men is more valuable for its rarity. She also takes every opportunity to say how glad she is to be a woman. Overall, you gather that everyone—people of both sexes—think they are both all-powerful and powerless, and that people, regardless of (fill-in-the-blank) are just people.

And gosh, we’ve heard that before!

Nearly every story is a story worth telling. Vincent’s is one of the more interesting ones. Still, I have to put this book somewhere on the line between memoir and one of those trendy pop-psychology books like Blink and Freakonomics: an entertaining, mildly informative romp that claims to go where no book (or person!) has gone before, but only ends up presenting old news as the cutting edge.

Indecision

2006-01-28T13:49:00.000-05:00

Though lacking the wider societal implications of Blindness, José Saramago’s The Double is special in its own ways.

The premise is somewhat odd and certainly unique: while watching a film, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, a middle-aged history teacher, finds that one of the bit parts is played by an actor who looks exactly like he. Máximo then sets out to find the man who resembles him so strongly—enough that he begins to wonder which of them was the “original” and which the “copy,” as if one of them were not entirely real.

Slow-paced and given to pontification, the book is a mediation on truth and individuality that requires at times patience and tolerance, but the payoff, for those willing to wait, is…well, bewildering, but somehow worth it. The frantic energy of Blindness gives way here to slow-paced thoughtfulness and smoldering silences. There is a fundamental difference between the large-scale and the more personal, and while Blindness blended the two with masterful skill, Double follows the every twist and turn of its protagonist’s mind as he struggles with questions that are of enormous consequence to him—and, ostensibly, his double—but that the world at large cares little about. There is something to be said for both approaches.

One of the things that made Double so fascinating was its opinionated (and shamelessly opining) narrator. Most narrators in works of fiction are impartial observers, obviously separate from both the story and the author, and beyond an expected amount of sympathy for the protagonist(s), simple conveyors of fictional fact. Having read two of Saramago’s books, I can state with reasonable certainty that he narrates his own books. That is, Saramago, the author, is the one commenting and describing the action. It sounds odd, but it’s incredibly charming, thought-provoking, and occasionally funny. For instance:

“There are moments in a narrative…when any parallel manifestation of ideas and feelings on the part of the narrator with respect to what the characters themselves might be feeling or thinking at that point should be expressly forbidden by the laws of good writing. The violation, either out of imprudence or a lack of respect, of such restrictive clauses, which, if they existed, would probably be of a nonobligatory nature, can mean that a character, instead of following, as is his inalienable right, an autonomous line of thoughts and feelings in keeping with the status conferred upon him, finds himself assailed quite arbitrarily by thoughts or feelings that, given their provenance, cannot be entirely alien to him, but which can, nonetheless, prove, at the very least, inopportune and, in some cases, disastrous.”

The narrative is positively chock-full of musings like this one, and the narrator finds it difficult to keep his mouth shut entirely for more than a page. Furthermore, and as yet more evidence for my Saramago-as-narrator theory, there is an unmistakable reference fairly late in the book to a scene in Blindness, despite the fact that the books give the impression of being set in different places, even different universes, and having nothing to do with each other.

This is not to mention Máximo’s protracted conversations with his entirely independent common sense, which often has its own nuggets of wisdom to impart.

While not approaching the pure genius that was Blindness, The Double is an interesting diversion, reasonably thought-provoking, and Saramago’s ability to spin words into pure gold—or, as John Updike remarks in his back-cover endorsement, “Our impression is…that he can bring any impossibility to life by hurling words at it”—is on prominent display.

Missing Pay Dirt

2006-01-23T09:51:00.000-05:00

Louis Sachar’s Small Steps means well. It even starts slightly promisingly. In no time at all, however, it dissolves into a quintessentially young adult (and I detest that label) parable, filled to bursting with clichés and void of the incredible originality that made Holes such a fun read.

A “companion” to Holes, there is no mention of either Stanley or Zero, the protagonists of Holes; instead, the story follows Theodore (a.k.a. Armpit) and Rex (a.k.a. X-Ray), also former inmates at Camp Green Lake juvenile correctional facility. Theodore is working for a landscaping company, still digging holes, but for money now. X-Ray comes to him at work one day and proposes a plan: that they become ticket scalpers for the hottest new concert act in town, a young woman named Kaira DeLeon. The only problem: Armpit (as Rex still insists on calling him) will have to front (almost) all the money.

He agrees, reluctantly, and a story ensues.

There were elements of Holes that could have been seen as preachy or sentimental or weird, such as when Stanley had Zero dig his holes in exchange for teaching him to read. But those elements sounded believable, to the extent that any of the book was believable. Perhaps it’s that Steps is set in the (ostensibly) “real world” that make the moralizing bits stick out more. Exhibit A: the close friendship between (older African-American in his late teens) Armpit and the (ten-year-old Caucasian with cerebral palsy) girl who lives with her mother on the opposite side of the duplex. I’m not saying that such things don’t happen in real life—and it is at one point integral to the plot—but it felt gratuitous, like there might have been another way to pull off that particular plot point. Ginny’s cute and I liked her, but it didn’t feel real, thus breaking my First Rule of Novels.

There’s an exhibit B, too, and a C, and a D. I could probably do the whole alphabet if I tried hard enough.

I’m really not trying to be vindictive; like I said in my review of Company, it’s not like I wouldn’t read the author again. I just know he can do better.

Organization

2006-01-19T11:13:00.000-05:00

Amy Rosenthal’s autobiographical Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life was one of those impulse purchases, something I see lying on a table in Borders and just can’t bear to pass up. There are a lot of those.

A compilation of encyclopedia-style entries, alphabetized and cross-referenced, it strives to paint a picture of a typical American life in the 21^st century. On the front cover, below the title—in such a way that it cannot be logically called a subtitle—the book reads, “I have not survived against all odds. I have not lived to tell. I have not witnessed the extraordinary. This is my story.” But, of course, everyone has a story to tell, fictional or otherwise.

What initially intrigued me about the book was the seemingly obvious similarity to A.J. Jacobs’s The Know-It-All, which appends stories from his own life to entries from the Encyclopedia Britannica, the entire text of which he read and commented on in the book. As I read, it became obvious how different they really were—Rosenthal writes encyclopedia entries based upon her own life, where Jacobs uses existing entries to discuss his life and the travails of reading the Britannica. What was similar, and fascinating, was that they both used the format to comment on universality. Everyone can relate to the things catalogued in Rosenthal’s book; it is, after all, the encyclopedia of an ordinary life. Reading Jacobs’s book, you realize that all of the disparate entries in the encyclopedia, the stories of many extraordinary—or is that ordinary?—humans (and things) really do relate to each and every one of us.

Rosenthal’s musings make it clear that this is a writer writing about life, when she’s not writing about writing. I thought she was a novelist, with her fixation on human suffering and the quirks of society, until she made it abundantly clear that she couldn’t abide by the form. That is, until page 200, where under U: Update, she informs her readers that she has just discovered that novels are okay after all. Go figure.

There is a place in the world for cute, quickly readable memoirs written in inventive formats. It’s just hard to write about them. Lives speak for themselves, don’t they?

That’s why people write memoirs. And oh, yeah, those pesky novels too.

Overly Ambitious

2006-01-18T19:43:00.000-05:00

Some things—not many, but some—work best on film. Others should never, ever, ever leave the printed page. Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain is one of them.

After seeing the movie adaptation of Proulx’s short story, I was incredibly disappointed. The hype (and heaps of awards) surrounding the film seemed inexplicable to me. The plot was stop and go, literally zero-to-sixty and back, Heath Ledger’s acting wasn’t what I expected it to be, and the ending was completely bizarre and unanticipated. I had purchased one of the tie-in books published, compiling the original story, the screenplay, and essays by Proulx and the screenwriters. I held off on actually reading it until I saw the movie, however, and now I’m glad I did.

The original, words-on-paper version of Brokeback Mountain more than deserved its O. Henry award for best short story of 1998. The lyrical, tender story of two young Wyoming ranch hands who fall in love in the sixties and must deal with the consequences in the homophobic west, the short story contains all of the tenderness and emotional honesty promised—but lacking—in the movie. The prose is utilitarian but pretty, and the story says what it needs to say in the most compelling way possible and then exits stage left with a metaphorical bow. I won’t go into a long rant about the movie, because I may be one of two people on the planet who disliked it for reasons other than its content, but I didn’t think the story was sufficient to carry a movie, as gorgeous as it was, and that the expansions that were necessary for a respectable running time distracted from the heart of the tale.

So, in case you haven’t figured it out yet, my advice is to skip the movie and the jumbo tub of popcorn and spend your twenty bucks on the book instead. You’ll laugh. You might even cry. And you’ll never leave your armchair.

Working For Peanuts

2006-01-18T14:34:00.000-05:00

I’m sorry, Mr. Barry, but your recent work just hasn’t been up to par.

That might seem a little harsh. But Max Barry’s new novel Company cuts corners that his phenomenal Jennifer Government—and even his first novel, Syrup—rounded with exuberant glee.

Stephen Jones is fresh out of business school and heading for the corporate world with a spring in his step. He gets an entry-level job at Zephyr Holdings as a sales representative’s assistant, and is soon promoted to sales rep. When he realizes that the sales department sells training packages to other departments of Zephyr, and fails to find any explanation for this, “Jones feels faint. He is realizing that he took a job at a company without knowing what it does.” Jones, intrepid young sales rep that he is, makes it his mission to find out what, exactly, it is that Zephyr does do.

So begins a tale of corporate woe, intrigue, and Barry’s requisite gorgeous woman. Barry’s trademark razor wit is here, but the devastatingly funny—and at times just devastating—insight that made Jennifer a standout is nowhere to be found. Part of my less-than-enthusiastic response is likely due to the fact that I’ve never actually worked in an office, and hope I never do. For that reason alone, most of the “office humor” is probably lost on me.

The plot and characters seemed flatter than is typical for Barry as well. Jones seemed single-mindedly righteous, without much emotional wavering (except when in the arms of said requisite gorgeous woman). The rest seemed either single-mindedly ruthless or single-mindedly, blindly devoted. Eve, the gorgeous woman, was of the callous variety and showed none of the depths of Syrup’s 6 (yes, apparently Neal Stephenson isn’t the only one who can’t resist weird, numerical names) or Jennifer’s Jennifer. The really big twist wasn’t all that unforeseen—even though my mind hadn’t gotten around to stating it explicitly, I knew what was going on before realization ever dawned on Jones’s fresh face. It was obviously supposed to be a huge paradigm shift, but it didn’t have the devastating (I like that word today) impact that I felt it should—and could—have had. Even the climax, a cluster of scenes obviously designed to combine Syrup’s lightning and Jennifer’s thunder, amounted to little more than a listless rainstorm as far as I was concerned.

I don’t mean to mercilessly bash the book—it’s solid stuff, worth a few chuckles, and probably more enjoyable to people who warm seats in cubicles five days a week. I simply feel that, having read his earlier work (and his infrequently-updated but always amusing blog at www.maxbarry.com), that Barry can do better than this, and that we readers deserve better. I’ll eagerly await his next book with the hope that he realizes the same.

Just Deserts

2006-01-17T13:36:00.000-05:00

Clive Cussler's Sahara is an adventure novel like no other. I’m not normally a big fan of the genre, and this book doesn’t stretch the emotional bounds of such books overly far. Sometimes, though, there’s a little something to be said for a lighter read—this one narrowly escapes classification as either “brain candy” or “fluff.”

Its complexity also sets it apart from most adventure books, though it doesn’t spare us the saving-the-world cliché. I suppose you can’t have a proper adventure without several billion lives at stake. Anyway.

I was somewhat surprised to open the book and find that it began back in 1865, on a civil war battleship. From there it makes its way to an airplane in 1931 flying over the African desert. These seemingly misplaced chapters make it a bit difficult to get into the book, particularly for a total non-history buff like me, and are forgotten about for quite a while. Just when you had really started to wonder what they were there for at all—or forgotten about them completely—they come back. So that’s okay.

Once the plane goes down, the fun begins. Back in the present—or 1996 if you prefer—U.N. scientist Eva Rojas is in Africa to investigate a strange disease that is causing natives to become insane and cannibalistic before dying. Tourists are an especially popular snack. Before striking out on this gruesome mission, though, Eva decides to take a side trip to the beach, where several people promptly attempt to strangle her. Enter Dirk Pitt, the hero of the tale, a worker for the National Underwater and Marine Agency in the country to look for a long-lost Egyptian funeral barge.

Sound complicated enough yet? But we haven’t gotten to the governmental intrigue!

I swear, this book has everything—and at more than 550 pages, I’d be disappointed if it didn’t. With its myriad of subplots, near-constant plot development, and surprisingly three-dimensional characters, it was a good change from my usual fare—not that I really think I have a “usual fare.”

Great. Now I think I have to see the movie. I mean, I want to see the movie, but I believe this book has a Ruinability Factor (RF) of approximately 999.8/1000.

O:-)

2006-01-15T09:34:00.000-05:00

Katie Carr is a good person. She thinks. She’s a decent mother to her two children. She’s a doctor, which she thinks is an inherently “good” profession.

She’s also having an affair. Granted, her husband is David Carr, who writes a newspaper column proclaiming him the “Angriest Man in Holloway,” which is the comfortable London suburb in which they reside. The two of them have put up with each other for long enough that when Katie asks for a divorce—on a cell phone, in a car park—David refuses to comply. So they fight, and jab, and Katie holds her own, and she goes to work and drowns her guilt.

And then, as Yeats says (a reference fueled by too many viewings of The Stand), things fall apart.

Things take this particular course of action when David meets a man who alleges to have magical powers originating in a particularly powerful acid trip several years before. He also has a powerful drive to change the world for the better—and not in the donating-to-Oxfam kind of way. David—no longer the “Angriest Man in Holloway”—has been converted to this particular philosophy and starts handing wallets-full of money to homeless kids and refusing to serve fresh-cooked dinners because of all the starving people in the world. DJ GoodNews—the decidedly undescriptive moniker David’s philosophical leader has adopted—is evicted from his apartment and moves in with David and his clan. Katie must learn to be good.

The themes addressed in the book are, while a bit stale, worth rehashing, and Nick Hornby’s biting take on where the line falls between good and evil, and even good and bad, is interesting and amusing if not particularly enlightening. Sometimes Katie’s arguments go too far, and her irony and derision for David’s position causes her to toss off lines that are more tragic than humorous. Of course, you can’t help but wonder if that is intentional—if maybe Hornby is implying that Katie, for all her realism, doesn’t have as much heart as she should.

The writing is classic Hornby, demonstrated in a phenomenal grasp of realism and the finer points of conversation. It is also narrated in the first person by Katie, which is typical Hornby style and works particularly well here, with all of the narrative options it provides. What better in a novel than to hear constantly the inner monologue of the character with the most right to be aggrieved by events? The light satire doesn’t detract from the heavier moments, and adds to the less weighty ones.

For all the book’s narrative and personal perceptiveness and realism, something about the final line rang false—or, at least, unforeseen. The last line of A Long Way Down was odd too, but at least it made sense, and illuminated the book as a whole. Isn’t that what a last line is supposed to do? I can’t say it’s a gripe, because it does make a certain point, but the last line came somewhat out of left field, which things are supposed to rarely do in a novel, and certainly not smack at its conclusion.

I suppose the point was made, though.

Was it a Ten-Speed Bike?

2006-01-14T17:26:00.000-05:00

Medals and prizes don’t impress me. But when I picked up J.M. Coetzee’s Slow Man on impulse, and was intrigued by the book jacket, it was the Man Booker nomination that ultimately made me dig out my money. I’ve spent my life leery of books that win awards—they always struck me as too similar to “classics,” which Mark Twain called “something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.” After two (admittedly unsurprisingly) good experiences with Nobel-prizewinning authors, however, I’m trying not to avoid award-winning or –nominated books on principle.

Slow Man tells the tale of an older man, Paul Rayment, who is hit by a car while riding his bicycle and ends up losing a leg. This apparently cataclysmic event necessitates his employing a home nurse for several days a week. He fires a few in quick succession before finally hiring a middle-aged woman with whom he promptly falls in love. The only problem is that she—Marijana Jokić—is married with three children. Oh, and that it’s a monstrous cliché.

The novel plods along for a bit, making me less and less enthusiastic about it as Paul moans continuously about being old and having unrequited love and then whines about being old some more. Then Elizabeth Costello marches into the picture.

I believe that Elizabeth should be considered the true main character of the novel. She was certainly its saving grace as far as I was concerned. She takes up residence in Paul’s house and prods him relentlessly, telling him to take more chances, to be adventurous, to start doing something! For a while it seems as if she’s simply a slightly unstable old woman. But then all becomes clear.

Paul Rayment is a character.

Elizabeth Costello is his (metafictional) author.

And suddenly the book is much more interesting. The two of them work in uneasy partnership, as he repeatedly tells her to get out of his life, and she replies that he wouldn’t exist without her. The time he actually does shoo her out of his apartment, Paul sits around doing, predictably, not much of anything, until he is forced to go out looking for her. Paul, Marijana, and other fringe characters continue their drama of minor proportions as Elizabeth stands in the background, machinating, arranging, taking notes, having the occasional outburst when someone behaves unpredictably or uninterestingly.

As an author, I may be biased on this front, but upon the novel’s conclusion, I felt as though the book had not been about Paul and his various trials, but about an author’s process of getting to know her (or his) characters. It seemed more like notes an author might make on a character’s backstory than a real story in its own right, and that was okay.

Characters are an annoying lot. They ask questions that you aren’t ready to answer. They insist on having their way with you. They take idiotic risks at inopportune times and then refuse to do anything at all at a more opportune moment. Slow Man felt like Coetzee’s exploration of all of those qualities, and of why we authors stick it out at all. It was interesting for me, but I’m not sure that someone looking for a good story would be well advised to look for it here.

A Hobbit's Tale

2006-01-10T09:26:00.000-05:00

I enjoy being completely in awe of the mythic beauty of something, reveling in its flawlessness, and then methodically deconstructing its magic, all of the elements that made me admire it so much in the first place. I’ve always been inclined to do that; it’s been a part of who I am since preschool, when I dismantled the play kitchen I so enjoyed playing with. I think the proclivity for demystifying and deconstructing things has become stronger since I started writing, and it’s probably, in a way, part of the reason I wrote what I did. Of course, as a writer, you have to be able to operate the crane and the cement mixer and the wrecking ball with equal finesse, something that’s harder than it might look.

But this book is about Sean Astin, not me, and the above musing was an attempt to rationalize to myself why I have watched and/or read nearly every piece of behind-the-scenes information available for both the book and movie versions of The Lord of the Rings. The three movies are my three favorite movies, and the books rank as well, though not quite so close to the top. The movies are the only ones I’ve seen that I think for the most part measure up to the books on which they were based. And despite my wonder at both forms of the story, I enjoy being nosy about the way the movies were made and the books written. It is a testament to the strength of both that, knowing what I know, I can still enjoy the books and movies without having my pleasure sullied by my technical knowledge; I am still able to observe them as if I’d never seen them before and had no insider knowledge, a standard to which Peter Jackson’s—the director of Rings—most recent film, King Kong, sadly did not measure up.

I digress.

Astin’s There and Back Again does an overview of his career, starting from his first few movies, before delving into his experiences playing Samwise Gamgee in Rings. Astin is likeable and fairly honest about his flaws; his continual promises that he was working on his tendency towards self-centeredness seemed mostly for the reader’s benefit. He must be doing something, though, as he's still married!

The book doesn’t really shed light on how Rings was made, at least any more than the hours of documentaries I’ve watched did, but where it did shine was in anecdotes of other cast members’ behavior—some of which were, to one extent or another, disillusioning. They’re actors: when cameras are rolling, they act. Apparently the fact that sometimes the cameras were filming documentaries made no difference.

Since the book is written in a conversational first person, I wondered what the role of the coauthor, Joe Layden, really was: did he interview Astin and transcribe the results? It seemed to me that his job was solely to replace words with bigger words, which didn’t fit with either the rest of the style or Astin’s personality. Coauthors are nearly always a puzzling business, for the reader at least, and knowing what this one actually did would have shed a little light on the book.

All in all, not literature, but certainly a worthwhile read for any Rings fans.

Oh, and Astin—or Layden as the case may be? It’s “Osgiliath.” And “Theoden.”

Just When You Thought You'd Seen It All...

2006-01-08T17:16:00.000-05:00

Stefan Fatsis’s Word Freak is an affectionate, comprehensive look into one of the more bizarre—and certainly more esoteric—subcultures: that of competitive (and professional) Scrabble players.

A la Steven Johnson in his fascinating Mind Wide Open, Fatsis initially writes under a pretense that this is really, truly a journalistic endeavor, but it doesn’t take long for our intrepid reporter to get sucked into the Scrabble scene himself. His biographical sketches of the characters involved in the game—and characters they are—morph gradually into explanations of how those quirky players mentored him as he clawed his way to the top of the Scrabble pyramid. Gradually personal stories and tales of friendship and camaraderie take the place of accounts of the history of Scrabble and other people’s competitions. Word Freak begins to feel strangely, and strangest of all for Fatsis, like a memoir.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a better tour guide for this bizarre and alluring landscape. (I guarantee that, no matter how many years it has been since you last picked up a tile, you will play a game of Scrabble while reading this book.) Fatsis describes every detail of the game, from strategy to rules and organizations to the game’s humble origins. As always in books of this nature, it is the people rather than the thing or event in question that take center stage. Scrabble minutiae abound, but the bizarre minutiae of personality are far more interesting and compelling.

You meet Brian Cappelletto, the youngest Scrabble expert and comparatively normal young man; Joe Edley, whose transcendental way of playing the game gains him both respect and askance looks; Matt Graham, who is more dependent on performance supplements than your average NFL quarterback. You meet Joel Sherman, a.k.a G.I. Joel, whose myriad physical imperfections render Scrabble the only pursuit he can truly devote himself to—that and pounding out Billy Joel songs on hotel-lobby pianos. You meet a motley crew of hundreds of nearly religious devotees from around the globe.

And, of course, you cheer for Fatsis. Even as you gain an increasingly firmer grasp of just how dysfunctional most truly devoted players are, you’re rooting for Fatsis to get in deeper.

He’s still playing.

Four People and a Boat

2006-01-06T10:28:00.000-05:00

I must admit that this book was purchased solely on the strength of its title.

Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits tells the story of four people from Morocco who have decided to risk immigrating illegally to Spain. Their stories are varied and diverse: Faten is a devoutly religious young woman who ends up on a vastly different path than the one on which she began. Halima is an unhappy mother of two longing to escape an abusive marriage. Aziz is a trade-school graduate, a repairman, for whom the nonexistent job market forces him to leave his loving wife. Murad is an intelligent man with a college degree in English who discovers just how scarce jobs are, even for those fully educated, when he ends up as a struggling tour-guide-for-hire. The only connection between the four is shared passage on a lifeboat bound for Spain. (I would have liked to have learned more about some of the other passengers on the boat, but an author can do only so much!)

The narrative structure of the book is peculiar: the opening pages describe the group and their efforts to cross the water between the two countries. The book then returns to their lives prior to their trip, enumerating the reasons for the decision to emigrate. After all of the backstories have been told, the book returns without fanfare to their lives after the boat trip. While this structure can be somewhat wearying in the beginning, since obviously you want to know what happened to the characters after their trip, it is an interesting way to “hook” people into the book initially, and I found it very effective.

I cannot decide whether it is preferable to read a book set in a country about which you know nothing, or a book set in a more familiar locale. Obviously all fantasy novels somewhat address this question, and as the reader, you can take what you’re told about the setting in such novels at face value. In realistic fiction, however, since impressions of reality are so incredibly subjective, it is difficult to figure out what, if anything, the writer was trying to say about the country. Lalami is a native Moroccan herself, but now lives in Oregon, and her fondness and ambivalence about its state and culture were clear. Still, I feel that my understanding of the book would have been enhanced had I known more about its setting going in; on the other hand, it’s a two-way street, as my Moroccan education has now begun.

With its vivid settings and compelling characters, the book was a quick and worthwhile read.

(Check out Lalami’s book review and informatively musing blog: http://www.moorishgirl.com)

Mystery

2006-01-04T11:39:00.000-05:00

Futuristic cop novel in which Eve Dallas investigates the murder of a prostitute. Not brain candy exactly, but nothing earth-shattering.

Computer Lingo

2006-01-02T15:49:00.000-05:00

In 1992, Snow Crash was the novel that rocketed Neil Stephenson into the science-fiction spotlight. I’ve finally gotten around to reading it.

Hiro Protagonist (yes, Hiro Protagonist) lives in a world where pretty much everything is privatized, and the government minds its own business and pretends not to care, reminiscent of Max Barry’s Jennifer Government. Hiro delivers pizzas for the mafia. At least, he does until he drives one of their delivery cars into the backyard swimming pool of a “burbclave” home. In his spare time, he holes up in his U-Stor-It unit, where he lives with his neo-rockstar roommate, and does freelance hacking in the metaverse, a 3-D internet world accessed via virtual-reality type glasses. He feeds the intelligence that he gathers there to the CIC, the Central Intelligence Corporation—a conglomerate of the CIA and the Library of Congress—in hopes of depositing something he’ll get paid for.

Y.T. (short for Yours Truly) is a Kourier for RadiKS, a delivery service whose messengers ride skateboards to their destinations, connecting to cars via electromagnets to hitch rides. She’s attached to Hiro’s delivery car when he goes diving, and offers to deliver his pizza for him. They later end up in an intelligence partnership, gathering bits and pieces to post in the library of data. All seems well, both in the metaverse and in reality.

Then things get a lot weirder. In the metaverse, Hiro’s friend Da5id Meier (yes, Da5id) is given a hypercard—something like a business card, but with data inside—containing something dubbed “snow crash.” Both Da5id and Hiro are curious, and they decide that the worst the card could contain is a computer virus, which Da5id’s systems are more than equipped to handle. He opens the card. At first, nothing seems to happen; Da5id is shown a scroll containing nothing but computerized “snow” indicating a system crash, but his computer is still in working order. Then his avatar begins to behave strangely.

The next day, Da5id is hospitalized with bizarre neurological problems.

The rest of the book is an exuberant sci-fi romp that takes itself seriously enough to be taken seriously, but that nods to enough sci-fi clichés that the reader knows that when the book begins to get contrived, it’s really being satirical—or at least knows it’s being contrived. It incorporates capitalism, virtual reality, Japanese swordfighting, the mafia, ancient Sumerian myths, religion, programming, linguistics, and human rights with such overwhelming zeal that you feel simply taken along for the ride. And what a ride it is. There is nothing terribly profound about the novel, but it’s certainly a piece of delicious science-fiction goodness, not a genre typically known for its profundity.

The only major complaint that I have about the book is the way it concludes. The ending itself, the climactic scenes, are perfectly acceptable. Without giving anything away, I object to the fact that the climax comes so close to the end. I seem to be in the minority, but I am of the opinion that books are about change, so I want to see the main characters’ lives both before and after the driving plot event, to see how, if at all, they, or their world, have been affected. The plot, the central mystery, was resolved, but several of the more personal elements were simply absent, and the fate of one person in particular was left completely un-addressed. It wasn’t even left ambiguous; I really felt as if the series of events that kicked off the plot of the entire novel had been simply forgotten somewhere along the line.

That (fairly major) complaint aside, the book was a solid piece of subtly satiric fun, clearly worthy of its reputation.

Finders Keepers

2005-12-31T23:06:00.000-05:00

Amanda Ward’s How to Be Lost is a novel that defies definition. It also defies reviewing, for reasons that are not entirely clear.

Caroline Winters leads a dreary, lonely life as a cocktail waitress in New Orleans. Her life is torn apart—not for the first time—when she is summoned home for the annual Christmas party at her mother’s New York home. Her younger sister, Ellie, disappeared when Caroline and her sister Madeline were teenagers, just before they were to carry out their plot to run away from their troubled home. There has been no sign of her in the years since, and Madeline is ready to write Ellie off as dead in order to go through with trying a possible killer. The search is back on, however, when Caroline’s mother rips a page from an issue of People magazine, showing a photo that she swears contains her long-lost daughter.

The complex tale that ensues is woven together from an intricate combination of letters, first-person narration, flashbacks, and history. Caroline discards her New Orleans existence for an adventure of faith, and the reader learns about her mother’s spurned fiancée, his life, her life, Caroline’s, both new and old, as well as ambiguous correspondence written by a woman as she courts an Alaskan man from afar.

As these disparate pieces come together like strands of wool in a carefully woven blanket, I had the impression that a few threads had slipped a little, or even if all the stitches were tight, that the picture was off somehow. Not to say that the plot didn’t make sense: it became far clearer as the book went on, and I felt that I sensed every major twist immediately before it happened. It simply never became crystal-clear. Normally I don’t mind ambiguity; in fact, I tend to revel in it. The difference here was that everything seemed to make sense, and there was no logical reason for leaving the reader in the dark by the end. I simply would have liked clarification on one of the farther-reaching aspects of my assumptions, since I suspected I may have been inventing connections that didn’t exist.

The message of the novel also seemed disappointingly vague. Again, I don’t generally like books to slap me across the face with their morals and messages. Some books have none; others, like those of Saturday, simply take some work to unearth, work that I am more than happy to put in. But I was never sure quite what Ward wanted her readers to walk away thinking. With the way things keep happening, especially to Caroline and her immediate family, and the way those events played out, I got the feeling after a while—given the ending especially—that the message was one of faith. Not necessarily a religious faith, but a faith in fate, I suppose. As James Frey repeatedly states in his masterful A Million Little Pieces, “I have faith in people.” Fate, as a general rule, is overrated. As such, as this missive sharpened in my reader’s focus, I was left feeling vaguely empty, if not cheated.

My further explorations of the inner workings of my mental movie projector continued while I read this book. While it’s in no way technical, except perhaps about gumbo recipes, I didn’t have a chance to answer the question I posed in my review of Saturday. However, I did notice something else, something at once annoying and slightly disturbing.

I hadn’t realized that a significant portion of the book took place in New Orleans before I started reading. As Caroline remarked, in that intimate first-person narration, on various locations, I realized that, though I’ve never been to the city, I had seen those places before.

Underwater.

It took at least twenty pages for me to convince myself that Caroline’s city was the pre-submerged version, and to mop up all the water in my internal movie.

The Best of 2005

2005-12-31T11:34:00.000-05:00

Fiction—Books I Read (published anytime)

Jose Saramago’s Blindness, a novel of such pure and terrifying honesty that it is absolutely unforgettable.

Ian McEwan’s Atonement, which will forever change the way you think of the truth.

Stephen King’s The Stand, the most epic fantasy/realistic fiction/horror/thriller/action/romance/mystery/speculative novel I’ve ever read.

Anne Lamott’s Joe Jones, a lyrical ode to friendship and community.

Rand Miller’s Myst Reader, possibly the most underrated fantasy novel(s) of all time.

Nonfiction—Books I Read (published anytime)

James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, a harrowing, take-no-prisoners six-week memoir.

Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, a one-of-a-kind tale of love and loss.

Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, a story of perseverance and literature in the face of crushing adversity.

Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains, which proves that some people still try to make a difference.

Ben Mezrich’s Bringing Down the House, a fun, truth-is-weirder-than-fiction Vegas romp.

Fiction & Nonfiction (published this year)

Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking.

Ian McEwan’s Saturday, an impressive character—and world—study.

James Frey’s My Friend Leonard, a must-read follow-up memoir.

Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down, a tale of friendship in the face of a tall building.

Myla Goldberg’s Wickett’s Remedy, an ambitious novel brought down only by its rather bizarre ending.

And the Winner Is...

2005-12-30T21:16:00.000-05:00

Let me start by stating that the subtitle of this book—“Life and love with the world’s worst dog”—is patently ludicrous.

I own the world’s worst dog.

However, my dog’s size prohibits him from causing any major damage. Marley took care of drywall, doors, cages, and a multitude of household objects; the best my five-pound ball of fur can do is a plastic bag.

Despite their multitudes of flaws and neuroses, dogs are, after all, man’s best friend. Marley and Me could well have been subtitled “A life in dog years.” It’s a memoir of Grogan himself, his wife, his children, and, of course, their very large, very affectionate, very deranged golden retriever, Marley.

Anyone can own a dog. But once you really love a dog, welcome one with open arms into a full-time position as family member, you begin to, to a greater or lesser—usually greater—extent, measure your life in dog years. Grogan certainly does. Marley is something of a baby with training wheels when adopted into his fairly new marriage; he is with them through the childhoods of their human babies. He moves with them from sunny Boca Raton, where he caused an uproar among the posh residents, to their new home in the Pennsylvanian countryside, squashed comically into a travel crate too small for his nearly hundred-pound frame. He is with them through every trial and tribulation, every instance of joy and laughter. In fact, he is frequently the cause of the laughter, as numerous anecdotes suggest. His penchant for drywall also implicates him in several tribulations.

The book covers the entirety of Marley’s life, including his inevitable, sad death. Grogan’s account is tender and heartbreaking, the outpouring of support he receives from the readers of his newspaper column almost more so. Most of the messages he received expressed their condolences. The second most popular message was to—as I did—dispute Marley’s title as the World’s Worst Dog.

The sweetest part of the whole thing was Grogan’s realization of something I’ve espoused for quite some time: dog as dispensary of life lessons. “Marley taught me about living each day with unbridled exuberance and joy, about seizing the moment and following your heart. He taught me to appreciate the simple things—a walk in the woods, a fresh snowfall, a nap in a shaft of winter sunlight. And as he grew old and achy, he taught me about optimism in the face of adversity. Mostly, he taught me about friendship and selflessness and, above all else, unwavering loyalty,” Grogan wrote in his column elegizing Marley.

I think those are lessons we can all take to heart.

The Other Six Aren't Nearly as Interesting

2005-12-30T13:26:00.000-05:00

Ian McEwan’s simultaneously microcosmic and ambitious novel Saturday takes on many of life’s big themes: acceptance, happiness, current events on both large and small scales, and forgiveness, a difficult-to-miss missive shared with another of McEwan’s masterpieces, Atonement.

The premise is relatively simple. The novel follows a middle-aged neurosurgeon through one day—a Saturday—of his life.

Henry Perowne is a rational man who prides himself on his clinical detachment, which extends, unbeknownst to him, far beyond the hospital in which he works. His family life is just another thing to be analyzed, processed, and filed away into the compulsively organized reference library of his mind. This emotionless, clinical approach to the world extends to Perowne’s encounter with a slightly unstable young man after a minor traffic accident. Pinned in a doorway on an otherwise deserted street, the course of action that occurs to Perowne is to tantalize young Baxter with hopes of nonexistent treatments for the neurodegenerative disorder Perowne assumes—correctly, as it turns out—Baxter suffers from.

To say the encounter ends amicably would be going too far, but end it does, and Perowne gets on with his day. Through an angry, determined squash match, to a detached visit to his Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother, to a trip to the fish market that indicates an empathy for animals that seems to be void from his attitude toward humans, his every action reveals a different aspect of his character, as well as aspects that are clearly lacking. Baxter preoccupies his thoughts over the course of the entire day, and apparently the reverse was true as well, because neither the reader nor Perowne has seen the end of him yet.

Meanwhile, current events loom over England as well as the world. A large anti-war protest march is massing and moving on the fringes of Perowne’s world as he goes about his own business. The protest at first seems gratuitous, a meaningless nod to the time period in which the book was written, but soon proves that it is much more. Perowne’s lackadaisical approach to the war, his refusal to take a steady side, is symbolic of his overall apathy about aspects of the human condition that refuse to be quantified.

McEwan has a rare gift among writers. In most books, it is clear that it is either the archetypical not-the-destination-but-the-journey, or without question the destination. McEwan manages to provide lush, vibrant prose that rarely drags and enough philosophical meanderings to keep me quiet and happy, proving him a master of the journey. The destinations, however—as judged by the two of his works that I’ve read—provide insights and shockers of their own. Thus, McEwan seems to possess talent that I have rarely if ever before seen: the ability to make it both the journey and the destination.

A slightly strange thought before I conclude. When I read a book, I see not words on a page, but a “movie” inside my head as I mentally translate what I’ve read into what the characters are seeing. The book contains a moderate amount of jargon and one fairly detailed account of brain surgery. Consequential of too many hours spent in anatomy and physiology classes, my slightly gruesome mental image was allowed to play on happily. Not to say that anyone is completely clueless about the subject or that the book is particularly inscrutable, but nor does it go out of its way to explain itself, and someone without knowledge of most of the terminology and technicalities would not have been able to sustain that mental movie. Am I the only person who reads this way, or do people’s mental images short out—or at least go staticky—when they encounter something they don’t understand, visually at least? Or do they simply make things up? I’ll have to pay attention next time I read a book with details about a field with which I have only a passing acquaintance.

Saturday is not the type of book that you put down in a revelatory haze as Atonement was. It requires thought, consideration, a careful examination from all angles and viewpoints—Henry Perowne’s type of analysis. But to really appreciate the book, you must also look at it from the emotional, insightful angle. When I finished the book, I was respectful and admiring of the prose and thought the story acceptably decent, but on further consideration, I think I’ll leave it at “admiring.”

Acceptance

2005-12-28T10:36:00.000-05:00

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go presents a dystopian near-future type vision more than slightly reminiscent of the young adult novel The Giver. Children are raised in sheltered conditions to prepare them for futures and careers with implications that none of them are equipped to understand. Morally questionable and obviously wrong actions and concepts abound unremarked-upon. The difference is that in Giver, someone finally does find it in himself to remark upon what is happening and make an effort to change it. In Ishiguro’s novel, even once the truth comes out, the characters at the very heart of the horrors are decidedly unconcerned. They have been raised for these toils and this fate, and so they will live them out as has been preordained since their birth.

I am sure that this lack of concern from the characters with the most vested of interests—the narrator and her friends, in fact, as the book is written in first-person viewpoint—is intended to be heart-wrenching, to show how helpless and brainwashed these poor people really are. But I like my characters with spines, and once they know the ugly truth, shouldn’t they be making an effort to act upon it? The world depicted in the story has such different moral codas from the one that we live in that we somehow feel that what is happening is okay within the context of the book. The characters’ blasé reactions certainly didn’t do anything to get a rise out of me either. Orson Scott Card wrote in Characters and Viewpoint, his book on writing, that “If your characters cry, your readers won’t have to; if your characters have good reason to cry, and don’t, your readers will do the weeping.” I never understood the logic behind that. If your characters have good reason to cry and don’t, then the book is unrealistic. In the context of Never Let Me Go, if the characters don’t care enough about their fates to get upset about them, then why should I?

The concept of the novel is intriguing, though not entirely novel. Each component, fitting perfectly with the others, creates a puzzle that readers haven’t seen before, but the components have been used—some overused—many times before. I can’t really elaborate on what those components are, as cleaning the rust off each individual piece makes up most of the novel. Suffice it to say that overall the book is unique, but provokes the occasional flash of déjà vu.

My other minor complaint involves a concept in the novel called “possibles.” Again, it’s difficult to explain without giving away the main concept of the book, but “possibles” are things that each character in the novel looks for, but none of them actually find. I’m not sure what the implications would have been of finding a possible, but it would have been interesting to watch, and it wouldn’t have seemed like such a gimmick. Since nothing ever came of it, the entire concept of “possibles” seemed to be an excuse to get the characters to a certain place at a certain time.

I can’t find fault with the writing. The prose is pretty, descriptive but not overly so. First-person narration is used well here, with the narrator reliable and getting to the point but chatty enough that it seems believable that a character is really telling the story.

I’m not sorry I spent my time on this novel, but, in one of the few times I truly disagree with book critics, the very ignorance, innocence and apathy that everyone else seemed to find so compelling did nothing for me.

Holding On

2005-12-27T09:22:00.000-05:00

A Million Little Pieces, James Frey’s heartbreakingly honest, astonishingly beautiful memoir, more than lives up to the hype. As he wrote on Powells, “If I am in pain, I want the reader to be in pain. If I feel joy, I want the reader to feel joy. If I feel sick, I want to make the reader sick.”

Fasten your seat belt.

You’re in for the ride of your life.

His take-no-prisoners account of his time in a Minnesota rehab facility for his multitude of addictions treads the emotional spectrum practically into ultraviolet, where the most powerful feelings shouldn’t be visible, but are. The book starts in confusion and despair and periodically returns there over its course, but there are equally powerful moments of joy and discovery and love.

That said, the book is not a pleasure cruise.

Got it? Not a pleasure cruise.

Frey is neither an antihero nor a hero, simply a human being struggling to get by. I could not bring myself to deplore his actions, though of course no one, least of all himself, could condone them. From his most minor infraction to his worst transgression, his brutal truthfulness makes the reader aware of every detail of his past and present, but always with the knowledge that he is struggling toward something better.

He is reckless. He flaunts authority, both prior to the rehab facility, and—perhaps more blatantly—while in it. He discards every concept and idea and program they offer up as assistance. He doesn’t cooperate. And at the end, he barrels off a metaphorical cliff all but certain that he’ll find a ledge to land on.

It only makes you like him more.

His writing style is oft-mentioned in reviews of the book. It is clean and repetitive and nearly always run-on and involves a lot of “ands.” Sometimes an entire page will be filled with one-word paragraphs. Which aren’t indented. Not a single paragraphs in the book is indented. The style is obtrusive, but never a stumbling block. It is the only way the book could have been written.

The other stories told in the book, those of the other people in the rehab facilities, the counselors, the old friends, are compelling as well. But you’re inside Frey’s head, and everything you see is through his eyes. There is no objectivity or any pretense of objectivity. That is also the only way the book could have been written.

You cheer for Frey every step of the way, sometimes loudly, sometimes quietly, sometimes internally with bated breath as you wait for him to make his next big decision. You watch as he rises ever higher, sinks ever lower, and you hope you know at what altitude the ending will be.

Immediately after finishing A Million Little Pieces, I went to Borders for the sequel of sorts, My Friend Leonard, a sequel that picks up essentially where Pieces left off. I can’t talk too much about it without needing to explain a lot of things; the book definitely requires prior knowledge to read. Nevertheless:

The book chronicles Frey’s continuing relationship with Leonard, a friend he met in rehab. Leonard, who always wanted children but never had them, takes to calling Frey “my son,” and their friendship blossoms as Frey tries to get back on his feet in the real world after a crushing loss. Leonard just happens to be a mobster. Frey just happens to need work. Temporarily, at least.

Guess what happens?

But Frey is struggling to kick the illegal lifestyle, and his relationship with Leonard is not professional for long. The book becomes a tale of Hollywood corruption, friendship, and what exactly constitutes an “ordinary life.”

The subject matter of Leonard is not quite as gripping, not quite as immediate or dangerous, but just as compelling. The writing style is slightly more conventional, but still carries Frey’s flair for clean, descriptive prose with a twist.

I have said that both books are an unmatched example of truth being stranger than fiction. Frey has had one of the weirdest lives it is possible for a human being to have.

Lucky for us, he’s chosen to write about it.

Honesty

2005-12-19T13:20:00.000-05:00

The Diary of a Young Girl is one of those books that everyone should read, simply because of its historical significance and widespread esteem.

I’m not sure I can say qualitatively what I “thought” of the book, because as with many similarly well-known books—none of which come to mind at the moment—so many opinions have been formed before I even laid my hands on the book that my own feels slightly buried. It is always interesting to read about historical personalities like Anne Frank, since they are seldom quite what the popular knowledge of them would suggest. Helen Keller is another who comes to mind.

The chronicle of Frank’s time in the Secret Annex creates a vivid picture of life inside and the people with whom she shared the tiny space. As always in any book, fiction or nonfiction, there are certain people and events of which I would have liked to see more. On the other hand, the fact that it is a diary, and that it was Frank herself who was deciding which things were worthy of inclusion, gives tremendous insight into her mind, even if it does deprive a reader of the whole picture at times.

I have often wished that I was fluent in at least one foreign language, if for no other reason than to allow me to read books originally published in that language in their native format. My favorite novel, Blindness, was originally published in Portuguese, and the prose was so beautiful that I’m sure it was even more astounding in the language in which it was written. I had a similar feeling here: I remarked several times on how skilled a writer Frank was, and though I don’t doubt her proficiency at the craft, something written in the introduction gave me pause. “Naturally, Anne’s spelling and linguistic errors have been corrected.” Spelling is one thing, but what exactly is a “linguistic error?” If there were many such “errors,” and if they were all duly corrected, then I believe that this practice detracted from the power of the book. Nonstandard writing can be used intentionally to great effect, which she may have been trying to do, and even honest mistakes provide insight that otherwise might never be revealed.

In all, I am glad that I read the book. I knew, as most people do, the stories of the atrocities endured by Frank and her family, and the others in hiding with them, and of every Jew and protector and human being during World War II, but getting to know the person who witnessed those things firsthand was, if not enjoyable, an experience I won’t soon forget.

Upstanding Citizens

2005-12-15T09:40:00.000-05:00

My first Stephen King novel, an epic tale of apocalypse and the true meaning of good and evil, was a pleasant surprise. Of course, the novel was rarely pleasant, but, having heard very mixed reviews of The Stand and all of King’s books, I was unsure that I would be as delighted with this one as I was.

The cast of characters speak for themselves (with one notable exception). Stuart Redman, a tough-talking, wisecracking East Texan with an insatiable desire for knowledge…or at least information. Fran Goldsmith, a pregnant woman with an irrepressible sense of humor. Lloyd Henreid, a small-time criminal that got into some big-time trouble with his new “friend.” Nick Andros, an intelligent young man largely unbothered by his inability to hear or speak. Donald Elbert, better known as the Trashcan Man, a mildly insane man with a nearly magnetic attraction to all things pyrotechnic. Nadine Cross, a former schoolteacher with a lifelong secret. Harold Lauder, an adolescent scribbler with resentment issues. Larry Underwood, a rising rock star before the lights went out.

Randall Flagg, a denim-jacketed freewheeler; Abigail Freemantle, an ancient hymn-singer—make of them what you will.

There are more.

All of these people, survivors of a superflu pandemic, known colloquially as “Captain Trips,” must make a choice between “good” and “evil.” As a society desperately splintered makes two last-ditch attempts to reform, the lines are always clearly drawn but dangerously easy to overstep. Powerful, commanding dreams haunt the night, and the pressures of nature and each other make the days sometimes worse. What side someone belongs on may not be clear, least of all to them, and the subconscious is a powerful force.

The breakdown of society, and its subsequent rebuilding, albeit from slightly different plans, is frequently commented on by Glen Bateman, the resident sociologist and slightly doomsday-ish maker of predictions, though doomsday, it seems, is already over. It really is an interesting question to ponder: what would happen if the vast majority of the world’s population vanished, more or less quickly? And with the gathering-together of the survivors, would the world change—for better or for worse—or would we simply go right back to the old ways? It is pointed out many times over the course of the novel that everything is still right there—the computers, the televisions, the material lives—if they can get them working again. Manpower and knowledge become society’s greatest assets. But haven’t they always been? The paradigms of the old world are shattered, and they must pick up the pieces—but which ones will serve them? One of the characters remarks at one point how ridiculous it is that money is simply blowing around in the streets…and that so many of them still stop to pick it up.

The writing was fantastic. King switches gears so effortlessly that it’s truly impressive. Despite the (almost) relentlessly third-person style, each character’s chapters really do have a distinctive voice, and when King needs an even more distinctive style, he pulls it out easily. I was impressed by the emotional sincerity of the whole book, but primarily the beginning and the end. Probably the writer’s hand in the whole thing is most evident in the beginning with the advent of Captain Trips, as the sense of impending doom grows gradually and threateningly stronger. One of my friends once complained to me about her writing over IM as I read Stand, to which my immediate response was, “I'm comparing myself unfavorably to Stephen King in the apocalypse department, so you're in good company.”

I honestly have very few complaints about this book. Those complaints that I do have mainly consist of not liking certain characters and as a consequence not wanting to read about them. This is not a valid complaint, since if I genuinely dislike certain characters, then the author has done his job.

The ending, which I won’t go into, was spectacular, at least by my standards. The book, and the ending in particular, is of the love-it-or-hate-it variety. I’ll bet by now you can guess which one I did. Another point on the ending: I won’t spoil it for anyone, because that would just be evil, but for anyone that might have already read it, I have a question. When I read the ending, I felt sure I had seen it before, perhaps in a different book or movie. I know I’ve never had the ending of The Stand spoiled for me, and I didn’t foresee the ending until about fifty pages prior to it, but I felt as if I’d seen the ending before. Perhaps someone can enlighten me?

Practically as soon as I finished the book, I went out to Suncoast Video and bought the miniseries based on the book. Having finished the first of four parts, it seems okay up to now. With the movie Bee Season on the agenda, I think I may start doing a spinoff blog series that compares books to their TV/movie counterparts, so look for The Stand comparison in the next few days.

2005-12-10T18:45:00.000-05:00

Warning: major spoilers. Mainly discusses the book’s ending.

(Required Reading: sixth (and last) in a series)

Atonement—Ian McEwan

Let’s talk about deception.

Deception—and its close relative, confusion—exist at, and make up, the heart of the novel. Briony Tallis’s confusion over the actions of her older sister, Cecilia, and her lifelong friend Robbie Turner is the driving force of the story. It is a confusion that morphs with frightening speed into deception when Briony frames Robbie for the inexplicable rape of her cousin Lola. These dark half-truths and misconstrued actions provide the plot of the book, though lighter and more innocuous usages of deception arise as well, as in the way Cecilia and Robbie write their letters so as to carry on their courtship even while he is imprisoned.

Most interesting to me, however, was the deception inflicted on the reader: the way Briony, the metafictional “author” of the body of the tale, twisted events to suit her still-idealistic view of the world. You as the reader have been promised for hundreds of pages a bittersweet, painful tale with a clean resolution and happy ending—not so unlike the first of Briony’s works of fiction the reader encounters, her fanciful melodrama The Trials of Arabella. You sit back and let the story wash over you, convinced somewhere deep down that even as progressively darker storm clouds roll in, eventually the sun will break through all the more gloriously for what the characters—and you—have been through.

And that’s what happens.

For a little while.

Then you turn the page to the epilogue, and it dawns on you perhaps that something doesn’t sound quite right, and then it hits you, shockingly, suddenly, that you’ve been lied to all along.

And up until then, you were the only one who’d escaped it!

But what took me even more by surprise was that, subconsciously, I think I may have anticipated it all along. The surprise was that Cecilia and Robbie had died painful, unanticipated deaths alone, each without the other. The surprise wasn’t that Briony Tallis, seventy-seven but somehow still her younger self, had sugarcoated—erased—the truth to pave the way for her own utopian visions. After all, history tends to repeat itself. There’s a frightening feeling of you lied to me, so I’ll lie to—or about—you to Briony’s actions. Despite the fact that she changed events to make the fates of Robbie and her sister more pleasant, there is an unmistakably symbolic note in the way Briony generates a grand deception about the people she feels shoved her into the cycle of lies and self-blame she has been trapped in since the age of thirteen.

Making life even more difficult for the reader, the real author of the book, McEwan, sees fit to mention that the aging Briony has just been diagnosed with vascular dementia, a memory disorder. This introduces the unlikely—but not impossible—notion that Briony has even less of an idea about what happened, at least at certain key points, than the reader does.

Thus McEwan forces the reader into a pattern of confusion and circular reasoning not unlike the one many of the book’s characters were chained to throughout the novel. This, I believe, is yet another metafictional device employed by the author to do just that: thrust the reader into a position where the characters’ actions become crystal clear, because you now understand how it feels to be utterly lost. You also understand, if you connected with the characters as strongly as I did, how it feels to desperately want something to have turned out differently than it did. Briony’s motivations become understandable as the truth becomes more and more desperately muddied.

I’m still happily confused.

Hoarding History

2005-11-30T20:14:00.000-05:00

Neither travelogue nor guidebook, Myla Goldberg’s Time’s Magpie is a charming insider’s guide of sorts to a charming and unique place. Goldberg, a former expatriate of Prague, in the Czech Republic, makes the locale seem at once exotic and comfortable, cozy and dazzlingly new. As she travels from place to place within the city, recounting the histories of buildings and attractions as well as her own travails, she creates an instant familiarity with the city. She takes you there.

The title of the book is a puzzle that she is quick to solve, providing the premise for the book, the filter through which the tour is viewed. Prague, she explains, has such a layered and multifaceted history that it is impossible to erase the relics of long-bygone days. They are simply layered over with new décors, which will later become relics in their own right, and Prague is the magpie squirreling away these years of history and guarding them fiercely. A poetic analogy, sure, but one that does indeed prove apt as the book progresses.

One can tell that she is in love with the locale about which she writes, but she also has an eye for deprecating humor and certainly isn’t blind to the city’s seedier sides. When describing Prague’s enticing but oddball amusement park, Lunapark, she mentions that “Coney Island’s earliest amusement park contained a carousel,” where Prague’s must be content with a ring of actual ponies, circling endlessly within their confines. Later she observes wryly, “Empires rise and fall, ideologies wax and wane, language evolves and words take on new meanings, but the smell of pony dung is forever.”

Goldberg’s writing is not at its best here—to see her at her full, nearly lyrical power, you need to pick up one of her novels—but the feeling behind each sentence is entirely genuine. She loves Prague for what it is, and what it has been, and even, somewhat more reluctantly, for what it will become. That true passion for the character of a place is seldom seen in travel books, and its presence in Time’s Magpie showcases her novelist’s flair for texture and personality, which, apparently, can extend to places as well as people.

As one admittedly not well versed in geography, Time’s Magpie was an excellent guide through times and places that, without it, I likely never would have noticed. Any book that shows me something, introduces me to a new idea or experience that I could or would not get any other way, leaves a happy impression on me.

In other news, I have hereby broken my resolution to blog about every book I read: this review is perhaps two weeks delayed, and I also read Lynne Truss’s Talk to the Hand, which I would give approximately three out of five stars. Now, having technically “blogged” about it, I suppose I am sticking to my resolution, aren’t I?

Well, maybe.

Oddly Flawed

2005-11-30T20:01:00.000-05:00

Forever Odd, Dean Koontz’s eagerly awaited sequel to Odd Thomas, is quite possibly stranger than the original. It is also far inferior.

With the same charming, self-deprecating voice that made Thomas so appealing, wise-beyond-his years Odd is still the same caring, nervous young man, though no longer a fry cook—the job became too stressful for him. When one of his childhood friends, Danny, disappears in a kidnapping that he witnesses, through the hasty maneuvers of a newly-minted ghost, he resolves to get his friend back any way possible. As one might reasonably expect, he quickly finds himself—both literally and figuratively—in way over his head.

The story itself is somewhat more classic Koontz thriller than Thomas was; I’ve read five of Koontz’s other novels, and while each has a distinctively emotional component that sets it apart from other “scary” thrillers, Thomas’s story was mostly raw emotion that just happened to include several thousand pounds of plastic explosive. Forever, on the other hand, is creepier and somewhat less emotional. It focuses even more on the supernatural than its predecessor did, though not Odd’s supernatural abilities: one of Danny’s captors is obsessed with the kind of paranormal occurrences even Odd can’t facilitate.

Most of Thomas’s allure was the fact that a young man, unsure of his own potential and reliability, had been thrust into a situation in which hundreds if not thousands of lives lay squarely in his hands. How, and, indeed, if young Odd dealt with this large-scale ordeal was the driving force that kept me turning pages. In Forever, he is faced with a more obviously personal but decidedly smaller challenge. The negativity I felt about this difference could have been remedied by larger involvement on the part of Danny, Odd’s acerbic but loveable childhood companion. Flawed both physically—having osteogenesis imperfecta, a condition subjecting him to easily broken bones—and emotionally, he was a fascinating and immediately compelling character, who, disappointingly, put in relatively few appearances.

I also have some pretty serious beef with the ending, but I won’t discuss that here for fear of the wrath of those, who, like me, think spoilers to be one of the unfortunate evils of the world. All in all, I thought the book a worthwhile read for thriller fans, but a probable disappointment for people looking for Odd Thomas all over again.

Haunted

2005-11-29T21:12:00.000-05:00

(Required Reading: fifth in a series)

The Woman Warrior was an interesting glimpse into Chinese history, culture, and, perhaps most importantly, pride. The most fascinating aspect of the book, for me at least, was its use of the term “ghost.” Obviously the idea of ghosts is prominent in the book, beginning with its subtitle: “Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts.” Since the book blends its fiction seamlessly with its reality, I at first believed the “ghosts” to be fantasy, physical representations of the Chinese mentality. As the book went on, however, I gradually realized that the ghosts were real people: it was simply a manner of speaking. The next logical question, then, was, “What sort of people are considered ‘ghosts?’”

I concluded eventually that anyone not participating in the Chinese mythology and manner of thinking was considered by the participants to be a “ghost.” There were scientist ghosts, schoolteacher ghosts, even a newspaper-boy ghost. So what can be inferred from that? Perhaps that the Chinese, or at least those in Kingston’s family, considered to be “real” only those who were like them? Is reality then synonymous with conformity?

It seemed that sometimes in the book, Kingston’s family’s treatment of her was reliant upon a conviction that if she stepped outside the circle of their beliefs, she would become a ghost, disconnected, impenetrable, and even harmful to them. In fact, by the end of the book, she is referred to as a “Ho Chi ghost,” the exact meaning of which is an enigma to her. The fact that she managed to go her own way even under threat of being scorned or forgotten is a testament to her own tenacity.

But how much of it really was “her,” Maxine Hong-Kingston? As I mentioned earlier, the book mixes fantasy and reality with so little fanfare that it is at times impossible to tell the two apart—and, in fact, the identification of that distinction would, I think, defeat the book’s purpose. Is the book a fictional but realistic account of an immigrant childhood, liberally spiced with Chinese myth, or are the “realer” parts her own memories? No one really seems to know: the internet sources I consulted were confused on the point. The bookstore didn’t know; the book’s placement in the memoir/culture section conflicted with the “Fiction/Literature” inscription on the book itself.

That ambiguity gives the book its shape and drives its point home: everyone’s memories are different, and denial is a powerful thing. In the book we see memories cleanly and sharply realized, but whose memories are they? Are they really more ragged, less clear, than they seem?

In the end, the book asked more questions than it answered, but that is one of the qualities I like best in a book. If a book leaves me to ponder my own life and the realities of the world, then it has been worth my while. This one was.

Rewriting History

2005-11-13T13:58:00.000-05:00

Penelope Lively’s Making it Up is a clever and fully realized answer to the question that every author is asked, usually often: “How much of what you write comes from real life?”

Outside the specific context in which Lively places her book, it would be regarded as just another book of short stories. The tales are diverse, mostly engaging and compelling. One would never think of the book as representing a real life, or fragments of it. Because, see, all of writing comes from real life, in one form or another. But in the notes that preface and end each chapter, Lively explains in detail exactly what part of her life inspired the tale, which characters resemble herself or others she knew, and what parts are—or so she thinks—pure confabulation.

It is interesting to read a bit about an author’s life and speculate on what parts of their works of fiction might have been inspired by specific events. But it is also fascinating to have it spelled out for you, to have, as Lively calls it, an “anti-memoir,” telling the simultaneous tales of a real life and the “imagined alternatives,” the paths that might have been chosen but were put aside for a brighter, more convenient, or simply easier one. You watch as Lively grows up, and you watch the characters mature along with her; you see the parallels and digressions in the swirling vortex of pasts real and imagined; you see the stories attached to reality by one fraying thread and those firmly anchored by real-life experiences.

So the concept of the book is captivating, especially for a writer like me. I would love to see a book like this from each of my favorite authors; knowing nothing about Lively’s other books, I feel I may have missed something in the reading of this one. But even the best concepts need good execution. What about the individual stories?

As I said before, they are incredibly wide-ranging tales, as Lively herself had something of a nomadic life. Their settings are, in general, vivid, though with my personal preference for less description over more description, it dragged a bit at times. Her dialogue was skilled and her character development, difficult in short stories, was excellent. This book was obviously the work of a skilled writer.

The plots of the stories were, as short story collections generally are, hit or miss. This has more to do with my personal reading preferences than the book itself. A few more of the stories were romances than is generally to my liking (read: one, and others with it as a side plot). Only two of the stories contained “moments,” as I call them: snap. A sentence, and everything changes. There’s a terrifying beauty in those sentences, the ability of a simple string of words to change the way you look at everything. Whether they’re gifting you with hope or robbing you of it, facilitating love or hate or sheer and total confusion, they’re the kind of lines that make you look up from the book wide-eyed before continuing. Some entire novels are devoid of such gripping moments—I don’t think two in a collection of short stories is anything to shake a stick at.

The first story especially I found incredibly compelling. The story of a young nanny from Egypt fleeing to Cape Town with her charge and the child’s mother to avoid the fighting that threatened to encroach on the city, it details their travels…up to a point. The romantic subplot didn’t even bother me all that much, since it was believable and even likeable. I seldom find myself rooting for two characters to get together, but I was particularly taken with these two.

Snap, and wow. Stop. Take a breath. And finish the story.

It’s easy to say that this first of the collection is my favorite. But the others—tales of soldiers at war, bookshop owners and old houses, feuding families, questions of belonging—are each special, different, in their own ways.

Different people will get different things out of this book. What they get out of it will be affected by the roads that they have taken in their own lives, their own choices and paths gone untraveled. As you learn more about Lively and her motley crew of fictional spawn, you eventually start to reflect on your own life and choices. You ask yourself, what might have happened if I’d done that one thing differently? Whether or not self-reflection was the intended effect of the book, it was one deftly accomplished. Despite its occasional slowness and lack of one-size-fits-all continuity between the stories (really, is anyone ever going to like every story in a book of short ones?), Lively’s engrossing alternate history is worthwhile reading for anyone looking for a peek into someone else’s world.

The View

2005-11-08T20:55:00.000-05:00

(Required Reading--fourth in a series)

The Bluest Eye—Toni Morrison

Morrison’s novel is a vivid and gripping description of life as an African-American during a turbulent time. The voices in which she chose to tell the novel were diverse and intriguing, especially in the way they changed as the book progressed. From the wide-eyed not-quite-innocence of Claudia MacTeer (and her subsequent education) to the oppressed and abused Pecola Breedlove and onward through Pauline and Cholly Breedlove and “Soaphead Church,” the narrative structure helped to underscore the theme of a loss of innocence. Beginning with the voice of a child and segueing into the stories of increasingly abused and abusing adults—and ending with the voice of a child who has seen far too much—was tremendously powerful.

The themes in the book are numerous and diverse. Apart from the aforementioned stripping away of innocence, a major theme that emerged was the concept of freedom. Cholly spends a great deal of time in the novel searching for “freedom” from the people and oppression of his youth, but just ends up in a different kind of entrapment, one he engineered himself. The way that the disdain and avoidance that Cholly and Pauline endured in their youth was virtually the same as that endured by their children was interesting. It is expected that the world will change for the better, and that people will become more tolerant and open-minded with each passing generation, but the stubborn stagnancy of the human race is still the primary barrier to true acceptance.

Despite the fact that I recognized and appreciated the messages of the novel, I felt that it did not affect me emotionally in quite the way I thought it should have. The characters were likeable enough, in their own peculiar ways, and I found Claudia in particular endearing. But the terrible oppression and feelings of inferiority battled by the characters, and the abuse, rape, and incest that occurs later in the book, failed to get a rise out of me.

I think this occurred for a multitude of reasons, but foremost because of the time in which I live. That is not to say that the same things that occurred in the 1960s, when the book was written, do not occur today. Rather, it is to say that they occur in the public view rather than in dark rooms. People today are so inured to rape, violence, and the rest of the laundry list of atrocities that the human race is capable of that they have simply become disaffected. It was slightly surprising to realize that this has happened to me too.

I have nothing but praise for Morrison’s prose, storytelling, and ambitious desire to get her message across. But rather than provoke thoughts about the plight of the underprivileged and African-Americans, as I believe it was intended to, it made me think about something altogether different: the modern mentality and human condition. Which, really, isn’t so different after all.

Playing Catch

2005-11-01T20:35:00.000-05:00

(Required Reading—third in a series)

The Catcher in the Rye—J.D. Salinger

The title of the book was the first thing that really grabbed me. It was a rather cryptic and seemingly strange thing to call a book, and as I went deeper and deeper into the novel, I kept waiting for it to be elucidated. Then, finally: “What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day.”

The pronouncement itself is fascinating, one of our first major glimpses into Holden’s true character. Holden obviously feels a need to protect others, but he can’t even protect himself, and it seems that half the time he needs protection from himself. He really isn’t the tough, world-weary person he makes himself out to be. He’s really just a lonely kid unhappy with his situation.

Holden seems to define himself by other people. Despite the fact that he is the only viewpoint character in the novel, the reader gets intimately acquainted with several others by way of Holden’s reminiscences. It’s an interesting commentary on human perception if nothing else: he sees his current situation as something terrible but the past is tinted by his sentimental rememberances. It’s just another way for him to state, loud and clear, anything would be better than what I have now.

The two most arguably defining characters besides Holden himself are Jane Gallagher and Phoebe Caulfield. Jane Gallagher, the cause of Holden’s fistfight with his roommate Stradlater near the beginning of the book, was a childhood friend and crush. She never actually appears in person in the novel, but her presence is felt throughout. Holden often expresses a desire to see her, making me wonder if she is really meant to be a metaphor for both the innocence and enthusiasm for life that Holden has lost and for his fragile but present hope for the future.

Phoebe Caulfield, Holden’s younger sister, does appear in the final quarter of the book. Unable to deal with a string of unhappy dates and failed meetings, he decides to sneak home to visit Phoebe. She is his link to the “real world,” a place where he feels incredibly outcast and out of touch. They have a lengthy conversation about Holden’s life and circumstances (“You don’t like anything that’s happening”), and later on in the book it is Phoebe who convinces him to return to the real world by reminding him that he really isn’t as alone as he thinks.

Holden Caulfield himself is a complex and interesting character. He spends most of the book acting tough and mocking, denouncing “phonies” and anything remotely sentimental. This is ironic given that he shows hints of his own sentimental nature throughout, specifically in the quote that explains the title, and eventually turns to his friends and family to bail him out of a bad situation. He keeps his cynical tone throughout, but his cynicism loses its edge towards the end of the book. This tone, as well as his own disarmingly caring nature, is embodied in the quote that ends the book: “Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”

Unless You Write 'Em

2005-10-28T16:50:00.000-05:00

Life is Not a Fairy Tale is Fantasia Barrino’s sweet, idealistic book, written with the help of Kim Green. Fantasia was the winner of American Idol in 2004, and wrote both about her childhood experiences and her time on Idol and its aftermath.

The book is basically a moralizing memoir. Fantasia talks about growing up poor, without enough to eat. She talks about her family issues and her teen pregnancy. Perhaps most compelling was her generalizations of her story to many African-American young women, showing the reader that her plight was not unique.

It’s meant to be uplifting, reaffirming, and so on. It is. But it’s seldom sappy; she had enough hard times in her life that it would be difficult for the book to degenerate into sap. That’s not to say that some of the idealism and “lessons” in the book didn’t become wearing after a while: the constant refrains of believe in yourself and stay in school and such do get old. Fantasia’s voice as a narrator was likable and unique, one of the book’s major pluses.

This is probably the shortest review I’ve written. I’m not sorry I spent two days of my time on this book, but it simply wasn’t overly thought-provoking beyond its covers.

Searchlighting for Meaning

2005-10-25T19:56:00.000-05:00

(Required Reading—second in a series)
To the Lighthouse—Virginia Woolf

“Mrs. Ramsay dead; Andrew killed; Prue dead too—repeat it as she might, it roused no feeling in her.”

So went the thoughts of Lily Briscoe, one of the principal characters in the book. So went, too, my own thoughts as I read. While Lily eventually changed her tune, I never did.

Though my inexplicable distance from the book could be ascribed to the rather antiquated and “difficult” style of prose, I don’t believe that to be the case. I read books—all books, be them fiction or nonfiction or somewhere in between—primarily to connect with the characters. Emotional complexity, but more critically emotional truth, must be evident in a book for me to really make a connection with it. The novel strove for those things, certainly, primarily in the many characters’ relationships with Mr. Ramsay. But they never rang true for me, and I was never able to plug into that world.

Maybe it happened because of the ambiguity of the book, or the “poisoned well” effect that the characters had on one another. The most obvious example of this is the aforementioned array of relations to Mr. Ramsay. Such varying and contradictory opinions are held of him by different characters—just look at the final pages and the differences in the perceptions of Cam and James—that you’re never sure what to think. You know what everyone else thinks of Mr. Ramsay, but you never actually see enough of Mr. Ramsay himself to formulate an opinion of your own. There are rare exceptions to this, of course, as when the reader is given the chance to watch his alphabetical thought process, but to truly learn about his inner soul you would have needed to know the object of his methodical thinking. Mr. Ramsay exists for the reader only through the filters imposed by the other characters. The same or a similar phenomenon exists between Paul and Minta: you know that Mrs. Ramsay wanted them married, and you know that their marriage ended up rather bad, but you had no way of predicting this outcome, since you saw nothing of their relationship that wasn’t tinted with Mrs. Ramsay’s rose-colored glasses.

I would be quick to write this off—or even to praise it—if I truly thought that it had been done intentionally, making a statement about people’s perceptions of each other. But it didn’t seem that way to me, and if that was the intent, I thought its execution rather clumsy. Instead of emotionally complex, intentionally obscure, it felt only devoid of true feeling.

A multitude of metaphors can be stuck on the lighthouse, on each character. Searching, striving, expectations and how we do or do not live up to them. The novel’s themes were ambitious, its goals appealing. But in the end, it let me down.

The Inexplicable is Inescapable

2005-10-24T21:30:00.000-05:00

How to begin?

Ah. Like this.

“This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself. I have been a writer my entire life. As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind and increasingly impenetrable polish. The way I write is who I am, or have become, yet this is a case in which I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room, equipped with an Avid, a digital editing system on which I could touch a key and collapse the sequence of time, show you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now, let you pick the takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant readings of the same lines. This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself.”

Words with which I, for many reasons and on many levels, identify. Words that, for me, truly kicked off Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking.

After that lengthy quote, you’ve probably gotten a feel for both the tone and content of the book. This is Didion’s forthright nonfiction account of the year following her daughter’s near-fatal illness and her husband’s sudden death from a heart attack.

I don’t know how to “review” the book, nor even really to talk about it. It was good: beautifully written, fully and uninhibitedly rendered. Painful but persevering, with none of the platitudes typically offered for or about such situations. The account feels unpolished, but that’s because it is. It was written during and immediately after the events themselves, an extended musing on all of the things Didion referred to in the passage I quoted. It also felt unfinished because it ended up being unfinished. Despite the fact that the book deliberately shied from any platitudes, I managed to extract an uplifting subtext—until I read the Wikipedia article on Didion. If you read the book, don’t read the Wikipedia. Unless you want to know the whole story. Which of course you would. But frankly, it’s a mistake.

I just…don’t know. Frankly, I don’t know how Didion wrote the thing. I give her—well, what’s bigger than a truckload?—truckloads of credit. She must have written it for herself. In fact, she says so, in so many words, in many places, most notably at the end of the quoted passage.

But writing it is one thing. What of publishing it? Leaving it there, for everyone to see? I’d love to know why. Why did she want to do it? Did she feel that as a well-known author she was obligated to share any piece of writing of any value with the world? I can’t imagine she did it to help anyone else. It hasn’t the right tone for that—especially not if you know the whole story. Maybe she published it as a eulogy to her husband. She talks repeatedly in the book about not wanting to give away, say, his shoes, in case he ever returned for them. Was the publication of the book that same thing? Why did she publish it? How did she publish it?

Why? Why me? Why now? Why anything, why the world? We all ask those questions, somewhere, somehow, but usually not all at once. The key word there being usually. When all those questions hit you at once they push you under. But under where? And why do we sink? Why do we float? What makes the difference? Are there answers to these questions? Sometimes the book feels like one big extended question. If I had to guess, that question’s definitely why—and to a lesser extent, how?

How does the world work? Naturally the answer to that question leads to, And why does the world work that way? Sometimes we can figure out how. But that how leads inexorably to a why, and science doesn’t know why, religion doesn’t know why, you don’t know why and I don’t either. Things change; people change. Why? Just because. Horrible things happen. Why? Because of…chance? What is chance, anyway? Why, why this person, why not that person, why, why couldn’t I do anything, why can’t I help? The book is almost numbing as you read it, but reflecting on it now it ties my brain in knots. The continual chant of why and its younger cousin how is an incessant theme that underlies everything in the book.

And the title. The Year of Magical Thinking. Didion talks about faith and also luck, but neither seem on her side. Did she gain something personally from her ordeals? If so, it never comes through. If she’s talking about hope, that isn’t a prevalent theme either, except in her dogged perseverance. Again, I’d love to know what lead to that title. [Update: apparently it's a term psychologists use to describe the changes in thought process that occur while grieving. But my question stands.] Why did she publish, why that title, why, why?

Why?

Go On, Twist My Arm.

2005-10-18T21:07:00.000-05:00

(Required Reading--first in a series)

I am taking a literature class. This is foreign territory for me, reading books that other people tell me to and writing about them when and how other people tell me to. Fortunately, my professor has given me some leeway in what and how I write, so I can still enjoy it at least a little. I thought that instead of leaving my blog barren while I read what other people tell me to I would post my responses to those books here. The first book is Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine, about modern Native Americans. The professor has obviously read the book, so I didn't spend a lot of time synopsizing, and there may be a few minor spoliers, depending on your definition of spoiler. But here: find out if I write differently when I'm getting a grade. ; )

What a fascinating book.

It completely lacks any semblance of plot, but what it lacks in linear plot it more than makes up for in heart, dynamic, and an unmistakably hideous beauty.

It’s nearly impossible to pin down the theme of this ambitiously convoluted novel. Is it the power of love, or that of lovelessness? The inescapable pull of home, or how easy it is to spin out of its orbit? The power of faith, or the way it deserts you when you need it most desperately? Does the dynamic of a family in powerful opposition serve to tear it apart or lash it together? Does that depend on the people in question, the places, the minutes and seconds in which it is taking place? The novel asks all of these questions and more, and the answers it provides lead only to more questions. There are no neat and tidy presents in this novel, revelations tied with satin bows, waiting for you to open them and realization to light on your face. Author Louise Erdrich forces you to work for your conclusions, when you can even find them. More often she leaves you stunned, momentarily frozen, as lost as her ensemble cast of characters, stretching desperately for some answer lurking just out of reach.

The past hovers constantly over every person in the book, a force in their lives that they try hard to escape but that almost always prohibits denial. The novel dips its hand into what was and uses it to baptize those who live in what is. Repetition seems to be a recurring subtext in the novel. The constant mental replay of what really was or what might have been drives many characters, perhaps most notably Lipsha Morrissey in the haunting shadows of his parents which take him the length of the book—and maybe beyond—to banish.

There is repetition in the present as well, with many of the characters slipping into patterns that they cannot escape. Gordie, who couldn’t deal with his losses, turned to alcohol, which nearly always becomes a pattern in those without any other place to turn. Moses Pillager turned from the world and found it impossible to turn back; the banishing of reality that he embodied was something that many of the other characters narrowly avoided. Lulu Nanapush so prized her wildness that when it began to run away with her she grew even more proud and insisted that everything was perfectly under control, although whether or not she wanted control she had none. Her constant manipulation and desire for power is a trap in which many of the others become ensnared.

But it is Marie Kashpaw in whom a clear cycle is most present. It isn’t even a cycle with herself. Of all the numerous relationships she has over the course of the book, it is her relationship with Sister Leopolda that is most memorable to me. Marie respects her for her tenacity and blind devotion to “good”—what is “good,” anyway?—but she hates her for those same things, and for the often destructive strength of Leopolda’s commitment to her beliefs. Of course, by the end of the book she comes to resemble Leopolda so much that the two seem virtually identical, down to the way they’ve each scarred another with a blow to the palm.

One other repeating idea in the book seems to be that of effort versus indifference. Some people seem to think that everything they ever got in life came from doing absolutely nothing. In fact, Nector Kashpaw in particular insists that even when he set’s Lulu’s house on fire, “I have done nothing.” Conversely, Lyman Lamartine, who works diligently for all he has, has his work repeatedly torn to pieces, once by fire and another time by inter-family dynamics, quite as destructive a force. This pattern may be a comment on a strange form of faith, or it may be something else. It may even be a statement about the helpless plight of the Indians: that they can only gain by sitting quietly and not making nuisances of themselves. Several of the characters are quite vocal in speaking out against the whites, the government. If this idea of repression is the intended sentiment, is it that of the characters, or that of the author?

Altogether, I found the novel to be fascinating in many different ways. It had the ability to draw you into a world that seemed at times strange and at others utterly familiar. The characters resonated deeply, even their wildest actions tightly gripping a grain of truth. But what I found most fascinating was the way it promised revelation and then denied it to me, but somehow kept me from feeling cheated by its lack. The tantalizing mystery shrouding the entire book isn’t the dropped threads of an inattentive author. It’s the knots left behind by someone who knows too well that there are no easy answers in life.

God of Machine

2005-10-12T20:17:00.000-05:00

Depending on who you are, Kim Addonizio's Little Beauties has either a lot going for it, or nothing whatsoever going for it. The tale of two completely cliched characters--a bitter, pregnant teenager and a recently divorced obsessive-compulsive--and one unique voice: that of the teen's unborn, then newborn, child.

Written in alternating first-person and third-person voices, as well as the quirky voice of the baby, which defies classification, the book is made up of simple but adequate, at times even elegant, language. Addonizio was a poet before she wrote Little Beauties, so the occassional lyrical phrasing doesn't come as a big surprise. In fact, I expected more flowery language, which, while it wouldn't have suited the book as much as simpler prose, would have made it more elegant. As it was, it had a very gritty, unkempt feel, like an unmade bed with a beautiful quilt that's thrown on the floor.

The book spends a lot of time saying not very much, which doesn't bother me a bit, but apparently exasperates other readers. Addonizio tries to build bridges between the reader and the characters, but both the young mother and the obsessive are too far gone in their respective directions for me to feel a real connection with either of them. More character development and more realistic base characterizations would have helped me feel more tuned-in to the human aspect of the story. I'm not sure what exactly the big idea was, but I get the feeling that it didn't quite hit home for me.

Little Beauties was fine, nothing special, but not bad, until I neared the end. The book was going strong at page 202 of 242 with no sign of resolution or even real conflict? Climax? Anything? Sorry, no. I wondered how in the world this woman planned to set up the ending, wrap it up, and end the thing in forty pages.

Then it went deus ex machina on me.

For the unenlightened, deus ex machina is Latin for "god of machine." It means basically that something has fallen from the sky to drastically alter the plot of a story, usually used to cover gaping plot holes or--you guessed it--patch impossible endings.

I won't ruin the ending for anyone who might be interested in reading it, but I will say that it's a pretty happy ending, but it occurred as a direct result of the main characters doing absolutely nothing. Come on, people! I want to see some character development that comes about because people want to change, have to change, to survive, to be happy, to whatever. I felt the overwhelming urge to shout at the main characters, "Work for it, people! It won't fall in your laps!"

Until, of course, it did.

Deus ex machina is fun to say, but it's not much fun beyond that.

(On a completely unrelated note, Myla Goldberg and Gregory Maguire are doing online book groups with Barnes & Noble!!! Witness one of the only things that will provoke me into using multiple exclamation points to punctuate a single sentence: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/bookclubs/RG_cds2.asp?pid=8236&userid=EK6d9aLCEp)

Can You Spell S-U-C-C-E-S-S?

2005-10-10T01:03:00.000-05:00

Bee Season, Myla Goldberg’s ambitious debut novel, required an impressive sequence of events to find its way to me. Newsweek declared her forthcoming second novel, Wickett’s Remedy, their book to watch for fall. After reading the synopsis for that book, I eagerly awaited its release, which when it finally rolled around proved the book to be every bit as good as promised. Soon after reading that, I had the opportunity to meet Goldberg at the New York Times Great Read in the Park and talk a little about the novel I’d read. Her first novel was always on my reading list after I fell in love with Wickett’s Remedy, but it took one more thing to push me into the bookstore.

I was at the movies with one of my friends, waiting to see the film adaptation of the Nobel-Prizewinning play Proof. We were sitting quietly through the previews when one came on that seemed familiar to me. Didn’t that sound like the little I’d heard about that other book? When the words “based on the novel by Myla Goldberg” popped up on screen, I leaned over to my friend and whispered, “I met her!” That night I went straight to the bookstore; by the next afternoon I had the book finished.

Not quite as good as the even more ambitious Wickett’s Remedy, which with its historical relevance, skillful characterization and head-spinning array of subplots won me over immediately, Bee Season was still a phenomenal read. The story of a suburban Jewish family, the main plot of the book begins when the allegedly rather slow fifth-grader Eliza Naumann wins her class spelling bee. Then the school spelling bee. Her newfound success astounds her father Saul, a devoted Jew who spends all of his time in his closed study, poring over Hebrew texts in search of as much knowledge as his mind will hold. Rounding out the family is Saul’s wife Miriam, a professed lawyer whose lifelong quest for “Perfectimundo” is increasingly becoming a compulsion, and Aaron, Eliza’s sixteen-year-old brother who thought he wanted to become a rabbi until he decided to widen his spiritual horizons.

As the book progresses, each of the characters retreats increasingly into his or her own microcosmic world: Saul into his books, Miriam into her neuroses, Aaron into his searching and Eliza becoming more and more mired in the world of words and letters and sounds. Something is needed to yoke the family back together again—can Eliza spell H-A-P-P-I-N-E-S-S for them all?

Much of Goldberg’s skill is in illuminating the horrible as something that carries some transcendent beauty somewhere beyond the surface. This technique blossomed in Wickett’s, which infused its scenes of pain with some energy, a kind of light, that when funneled through the fully developed protagonist, Lydia, lit the book up like a Christmas tree. The same kind of beauty in the darkness suffuses Bee Season as well, just not to quite as great an effect. This may be associated with the subject matter, also: the plight of a family contrasted to one of a world. The quiet suits Bee Season, while Wickett’s begs for volume.

The frantic pacing and sense of despair that occasionally grips Wickett’s is absent from Bee Season, which opts for a tone of quiet anticipation and gentle foreboding much more conducive to its content. The two books differ dramatically in tone and content, but at the same time it’s easy to see that they share an author. The same sense of place, immediacy, and above all that what the book is saying is immensely important right at that moment, is deeply ingrained in both novels.

Although Goldberg has only published two novels, themes already begin to emerge, such as her apparent fondness for the written word in letter form, at least as a plot device. Letters are the modus operandi of the titular Wickett’s Remedy (looooooong story), and they also figure strongly into Bee Season, as Miriam’s letters to the editors of various publications reveal important things about the character. In fact, in both cases, the very act of letter-writing, for two very different reasons, tells the reader more about Henry Wickett and Miriam Naumann than the content of the aforementioned letters. Communication through letters can mean an unimaginable number of things, and Goldberg’s use of the concept is inventive and fresh.

It was a huge jump from a tension-filled, discontented suburban household to the empty streets of flu-ridden 1918 Boston, but it was a leap made with grace and surprising deft adaptability. Goldberg is obviously the kind of person who writes about whatever happens to catch her fancy—the story of the genesis of Wickett’s is enough to prove that. I promise I say this with no bias whatsoever when I tell you I think that’s the best way to write.

I think I’ve found a new favorite author. Now all I have to do is get her to write faster.

The Time of My Life

2005-10-03T12:37:00.000-05:00

Introduction

Sunday, October 2nd, 2005, was the first New York Times Great Read in the Park, a hopefully annual event involving over 150 authors. Intrepid soul that I am, I made the trek to New York to be a part of this momentous occasion. Since it is book-related, and I found out a truckload of fascinating things that I want to share with everyone, I'm going to post my recounting of the event.

Chapter One: Punctuality Pays

The first of many authors I wanted to meet that day was Steven Johnson, author of Mind Wide Open and Everything Bad is Good for You, which I reviewed. Everything Bad was a terrific commentary on popular culture today, and how it really isn't quite as awful as it's made out to be. I was sitting at a table across from Johnson's tent about fifteen minutes before the signing was to begin. I had just taken the book out of my bag and was flipping through the first few pages when a man walked up to me.

He indicated the book. "If you're waiting for me, why don't I just sign that now?"

I nodded. He signed the book while asking me if I had had a chance to read it yet. I told him that I had, and enjoyed it thoroughly. "What made you decide to write a book about it [pop culture]?" I asked him.

"Originally," he said, "it was going to be a book of essays." He told me how the book was to be a compilation of essays, both ones he had already written and ones he had yet to write, with a focus on video gaming. The main piece was to be the longer essay about gaming that ended up opening the book.

As he was beginning work on the book, he and his wife were watching The Sopranos and Six Feet Under on DVD, and he concluded that "Television has never been better!" It also happened to be around the time of the Janet Jackson Super Bowl scandal. Johnson realized that it wasn't just games that were interesting; it was all of pop culture.

He called his editor and asked, "Can I write a book completely different than the one I told you I was going to write?"

"It started out," he told me, "as maybe the least organized of my books, and ended up the most organized." He talked about how in most of his books, he says, "let me take you to an interesting field and show you around," whereas in Everything Bad he actually tried to make a structured argument.

It was great to hear a nonfiction author's thoughts on the creative process--while the genre is different from mine and from that of the other authors I had met up to that point, it's interesting to hear that even nonfiction work can run away with you and take you in directions you never would have expected.

(That's Johnson there in the lower right/middle of the picture, with me and the little red book.)

Oct. 2, 2005

Bryant Park

For Tori-

Steven Johnson

Chapter 2: Disconnect

The brunch at 11:00 was nice, but not particularly engaging. I like to get up close and personal with the authors, to talk to them--and have them talk back. With one exception, the authors speaking at the meal were, as I like to say, famous enough to forget that we pay their electric bills.

That said, the authors did give fascinating pre-signing talks. The comedian Robert Klein, whose memoir The Amorous Busboy of Decatur Avenue was released recently, spoke about his hope that technology does not lead children away from reading. He also told a hugely entertaining story about boating with Rodney Dangerfield, which, though included in the book, was far more enjoyable straight from the author.

Sue Monk Kidd spoke about the many possible interpretations of her bestselling romantic tale The Mermaid Chair, offering another author's quote after confirming that she had never, in fact, fallen in love with a monk: "We don't necessarily write autobiographically, but we write about things we'd like to try!" She then discussed her realization that the true power of fiction is its ability to affect people.

The unflappable Salman Rushdie opened his talk with the statement that he would say only one thing about his feud with the Ayatollah: "I would like to point out that one of us is dead...you know what they say, 'the pen is mightier than the sword?' ... Don't mess with novelists." He followed that with a wide-ranging discussion of the line between fantasy and reality, saying that it had been determined that when the gods of Indian mythology were tallied, there was one god for every 3.3 Indians, and that as such, "At one point, the divine population of India was larger than the human one."

Patricia Cornwell, author of the hugely popular Kay Scarpetta forensic mysteries, was the next to speak, talking about how she had helped to launch the forensic-crime genre of entertainment, and how ambivalent that made her. She spoke briefly on trying to get published: many of the first rejection letters she received read, "No one wants to read about laboratories and morgues." Then she launched into an impassioned diatribe about the state of crime fiction today: she feels that in much of the genre, the victim is simply a rack on which to hang a lot of cool technology. Keeping her victims from becoming faceless, she felt, is one of the most important aspects of her writing.

John Berendt, whose phenomenally successful Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, a nonfiction novel set in Savannah, Georgia, has finally been followed, eleven years later, by a second book, The City of Falling Angels, spoke last. He began by telling a story about a young boy who ripped the pages out of books. That boy was him. So, as he laughed, "I didn't start out creating books; I started out destroying them!" He also talked about how authors write about "freaks" and "wierdos," both because they're more interesting than so-called "normal" people and because it serves as commentary: "If you write a book about a man with one arm," he pointed out, "you're making a statement about men with two."

The signing began a little while after the author talks. The first book I got signed at brunch was Berendt's. As I prepared to move on to the next author, he suddenly pointed to Midnight. "Was that 'Tori?'"

I nodded the affirmative. "Oh," he chuckled, "I wrote 'Tom.'" He took the book back and inscribed it again.

For Tom, (Tori!)

John Berendt

10/02/05

Neither Cornwell nor Rushdie were personalizing books, and they weren't talkative either. Rushdie at least spared me a friendly smile; Cornwell apparently couldn't manage even that.

Patricia Cornwell

Salman Rushdie

Sue Monk Kidd was a bit more personable, asking if I enjoyed the book and smiling as she jotted an inscription.

To Tori,

Sue Monk Kidd

Robert Klein, however, holds the award for geniality. He complimented me on my shirt ("I edit, therefore I am") and asked me if I was an editor. "No," I told him, "I'm a writer."

"Oh? What do you write?"

"Fiction. I'm editing my first novel."

"Good for you," he told me. "I'm fifty-nine, so you've got a head start on me."

"How many times did you edit your book?" Dad chimed in.

Klein had just launched into a complex story when his publicist put a hand on his shoulder, stopping him midsentence. "I'm sorry," she told him, "but we have to move people off stage."

He looked for a moment perturbed before nodding. He waved as we walked away. "Good luck!"

To Tori,

from

Robert Klein

Chapter Three: Organization Leaves Something to be Desired

After the brunch, we hit the ground running in search of Gregory Maguire, the highly acclaimed author of Wicked, on which the Broadway musical is based, and its new sequel Son of a Witch. Table fifteen, his designated spot, was deserted but for one young volunteer who directed us to table eight. Maguire was still nowhere to be found. At information they directed us to the Barnes and Noble tent, where, after a lengthy and involved search, we finally found him tucked away behind the cash registers.

I praised both the book and the show, telling him that I had just seen it. "Just last night?" he asked. "I'm glad you liked it."

"The show was wonderful," I told him. "But I have to tell you--the book was better."

for Tori-

Gregory Maguire

Chapter Four: Ignore This Sentence

After the Maguire signing, we left the fair for a few minutes in order to get some Disney pins that Dad wanted for his collection. This part of the day was only important to persons other than myself. I shall not elaborate.

Chapter Five: The Five W's

At 2:30, for lack of better things to do, we dropped in on a panel about writing young adult fiction. Not that I'd know anything about that, or anything. Of course not.

As an avid reader and writer and fierce opponent of the dividing line between "young adult" and "adult" fiction, I was interested in hearing what the authors thought the essential difference was between writing for those allegedly separate audiences. A few of them thought that there was no difference; naming no names, a certain other seemed more concerned about the net total of "likes" and "you knows" in her books than anything else.

When the subject of characters came up, one of the authors' responses really stuck out to me. Coming from an acting background, she talked about the idea of "becoming" your characters, another does a psychological survey from the point of view of each of her characters. The idea of really being one with your characters is something that really interests me, because I wondered why I felt at once connected to and distant from my characters as I was writing. I've concluded that, at least in my personal experience, as I told dad later that night, "Each character is really just a place inside the author. ... In the beginning it's hard to get to that place, but as the book progresses, you build inroads to those places. When I started writing, I had to step back and ask myself, 'What would this person do in this situation?' By the time I got to the end, I knew."

Chapter Six: Read Before You Enter

Our next stop was to meet J. R. Moehringer, the author of the new memoir The Tender Bar. I haven't yet read it, but I've heard no end of wonderful things about it, and I thought since I wanted to read it anyway I might as well get it signed. He showed up a few minutes late, but when he arrived, the short line that had formed moved quickly.

"Have you gotten a chance to read it yet?" he asked as I handed him the book.

"No," I admitted, "but I've heard great things about it. I'm looking forward to it."

He nodded. "I hope you enjoy it."

As I collected my book, he pointed to my shirt. "My editor would love that. I bet you could sell it to her for a lot of money."

(That's Moehringer on the lower left, signing my book.)

To Tori-

Hope you like it!

J.R. Moehringer

10/2/05

Chapter Seven: Save the Best For Last

Slowly we drifted over to the two tables that were to be occupied by two of the people that had made me beg to come: A.J. Jacobs and Myla Goldberg.

Jacobs, author of The-Know-it-All, about his adventures reading the Encyclopedia Britannica, showed up at around 4:15. (Read my review, and my review of the review of the review (long story). A.J., if you're reading this, you've been on my blog three times now!) As the first (and only) in line, I got an opportunity to talk to him for a few minutes.

He greeted us with big smiles and shook our hands.

"I have a blog about books," I told him, "and you're the only author who's been on it twice--once for your book and once for your response to the New York Times review."

"Really? Thanks. I'd like to read it. What's the address?"

After some confusion over my blog's URL, Jacobs jotted it down.

"Are you working on anything else?" Dad asked him.

"Yes," he said. He told us about his work-in-progress, which sounds fascinating. It's going to be great...I can't wait to see what he does with it!

Dear Tori,

Thanks for blogging me twice!

If I had a blog, I'd blog your blog.

Trivia is not trivial!

A.J. Jacobs

My next, and, sadly, final, author was Myla Goldberg, author of Bee Season and the new book Wickett's Remedy, a historical fiction-type novel about, among a myriad of other things, a young woman who becomes a nurse during the 1918 flu epidemic. I also had the good fortune (for me, not necessarily for her) to be the only person in her line.

"I loved the book," I said. "You must have done a ton of research." The book is packed with historical detail, and actual period news clippings are interspersed with the text.

"I did," she grinned, "but I love that! To go to the library and read and read."

"It's a fascinating topic," I agreed. "What made you choose it?"

"I saw an article in the Times about the five worst epidemics of all time and this was one of them, and I had never heard of it, and the more I read about it I wondered why I'd never heard of it. So then I started thinking about memory--things that get forgotten." The fallacy of human recollection is a main theme of the book.

To Tori-thanks for reading!

Myla Goldberg

Epilogue

There really isn't anything I can add to all of that, except that it was one of the best days of my life. I want to give a huge THANK YOU to (sigh) my Dad for taking me, the Times for organizing the event, and a truly grateful thanks to the authors who brighten my day through the written word and, I've found, even more so through meeting them personally. They are truly my "rock stars!"

Please? For Them.

2005-09-01T20:13:00.000-05:00

I really hesitate to post this, both because it's a little bit of a departure from what I usually post and because it's kind of cliched. But it really, really needs to be said.

I've been watching way, way too much news coverage of Hurricane Katrina's aftermath. It's really impossible to tear your eyes away. And it's impossible to watch, too. The way I see nearly everything through the lens of some book or another, the situation in the Superdome actually reminds me rather disturbingly of the last book I blogged about, Blindness: masses of people crammed together in way-too-small quarters, with too little authority, too little food, too little medical attention. It's impossible to wrap your mind around.

The images on the television seem contrived, almost. The lens is too narrow. No matter how many hours of coverage they show, I'm sure it can never give the slightest inkling of how it must actually be to be there. The stories are as compelling as they are horrifying, as fascinating as they are repulsive.

But we can make them uplifting.

Do what you can. Because we're all they've got.

The Red Cross
Habitat for Humanity
The Salvation Army
The Humane Society
MSNBC's Katrina homepage with more charities

Thanks. On their behalf.

Read. This. Now.

2005-08-22T15:03:00.000-05:00

There are books that Everyone Must Read. This is one of them.

Imagine a world in which everyone is forced together in increasingly trying circumstances. A world in which the powerful are brought to their knees, the playing field brutally leveled by forces beyond anyone's control. A world in which the only person who can help you is the same person who double-crossed you ten minutes ago. A world in which children sob inconsolably and hookers kill thieves with their high heels.

Now imagine that this world is ours.

That's the dystopian vision portrayed in Jose Saramago's Nobel Prize-winning Blindness. (Giving credit where it's due, it was masterfully (I think, being unable to read the original Portuguese) translated by Giovanni Pontiero and Margaret Jull Costa.)

The basic premise of the book is that a sudden outbreak of "white blindness," a form of blindness where one sees only white, occurs in a nameless city. The blind are sent into quarantine at an abandoned mental hospital, left in a strange, perpetually bright world and forgotten about, left to fend for themselves and fight tooth and nail for survival. As the book cover says, "There is one eyewitness to this nightmare": the wife of one of the blind, who managed to accompany him into confinement by feigning sightlesness.

Also imagine that no one uses quotation marks.

The writing style seemed a bit odd, mostly because there is not a single quotation mark in the entire book. A single sentence may contain two, three, even four different speakers: sentences freqently run to paragraph lengths. Only a comma and the occasional capitalized word lets on that the speaker has changed. Despite this stylistic oddity that may have come out of translation or may have been the author's original intent, the book was beautifully written. The slightly repetitive prose too may have been either a stylistic choice or a casualty of translation, but either way it was used to tremendous effect.

This novel is "my kind" of book, which may mean something to my friends and family: a showcase of the best and worst human beings are capable of, how they somehow hold on to hope in the most desperate times of their lives. Excruciating mental and physical torture with the imminent threat of worse. I don't want to be spared when I'm reading a story; I want to cry out in pain and fear and torment along with the characters. Books are not good entertainment. That's what television and video games are for. Books, when well concieved and written, are for plunging you into a world that may or may not be like your own, making you feel joy and confusion and sadness, making you think about things that often as not you'd rather not ponder. They're for holding you down until you feel like your lungs will explode, and then--sometimes--they let you up for air.

The book is sheer beauty. Plot, character, and prose come together seamlessly in a story that will literally leave you gazing around in wonder and horror at the realities of human existence. Despite its slightly odd premise, it's not hard to see that events in the real world could--would--unfold in precisely the same way given a similar situation. Diversity is quashed, outspokenness silenced. It's every man for himself in a world plunged instantly into chaos (comma, uncontrolled).

There are no villains in Blindness, which makes me a very happy reader. Plenty of characters act in ways that seem monstrous, inhuman, but each of us can, if not see ourselves acting that way, at least envision a situation in which the social constructs of the world break down sufficiently that behavior of that sort becomes imaginable. Most people are doing only what they deem to be in their own best interests, frequently warping and twisting said declarations so that they appear to be looking out for the masses. Some really do try to look out for each other, to varying degrees of success. Everyone has power, and no one has power, save for one tortured woman who refuses to use it.

A fascinating stylistic choice makes itself evident as you progress further into the book. The characters are all identified by their profession or by some physical characteristic: "the girl with dark glasses," "the doctor," "the thief." No one has a name. Never. Not once do you read an actual name, a Tom, Dick, or Harry. Because, as a character ("the writer") says at once point, "Blind people do not need a name, I am my voice, nothing else matters." When reminded that his books carry his name, and that ought to count for something, he replies, "Now nobody can read them, it as if they did not exist"--and by extension, that he did not--does not. They are all one and the same, nameless, faceless, distinguished only by their actions towards others. It's a fascinating stylistic choice--kind of makes you think, doesn't it? When people forget your face and your name, they'll still remember you--but how?

Without giving away parts of the plot (which is not terribly tightly structured, so it wouldn't be a tragedy if I did), I can't really go much further into my rantings on symbolism, but this book is laden with it, which makes me very happy. It's an amazing musing on human nature, dark and raw but somehow also uplifting. Go read it. Now.

Hershey's Semi-Sweet Chocolate for Baking: Nutrition Information...

2005-07-30T20:25:00.000-05:00

After reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and, like nearly every other fantasy fan in the world, theorizing endlessly on the seventh book, I got around to thinking about what I wanted to happen in the seventh book. While I won't state explicitly what that is, in deference to those people who may not have yet found time to read the sixth (imagine that!), it did make me think about what satisfies me in books, what makes me feel like my time reading the book was well spent.

As I talked to my friends, I slowly came to realize that what I really like in books, specifically in book endings, is at odds with what most other people--at least the ones that I talked to--like. Most people are looking for a happy ending in Potter, and, by extension, the other books they read. I, on the other hand, go in more for the bittersweet. I don't necessarily want anything horrible to happen to the main character right at the end, but I definitely don't appreciate pat endings where everyone goes home happy either.

I think this is partially because no ending in real life is ever truly happy. An ending by definition is something drawing to a close, too frequently something pleasant, that we wished to draw out as long as possible. Even if the ending is of something less welcome, there is no such thing, really, as the perfection depicted in too many fictional happy endings.

For a book to be interesting, it has to, obviously, have things happen that are difficult, traumatic. It has to put its characters through the basest form of torture, but only after you've known them long enough for it to rip you apart as it does them. It can't pull its punches. And too often, these characters, fresh from whatever unique form of sadism the author has devised for them, walk away at the end without either a physical or emotional scratch.

Since we insist that characters in a work of fiction must grow and change, why does it seem like in so many books, children's books especially, there is an obvious change in the characters over the course of the book, but at the end they suddenly regress? It almost seems like someone's saying, "Okay, let's forget this ever happened, shall we?" If it never happened, why did the author spend so much time contriving it and writing about it, and why did the reader spend his or her time hearing about it?

Am I alone in my love affair with the bittersweet? Most people seem to want, expect, even demand happy endings. Maybe most people's fixation on happy endings has to do with the stance that many people take on reading fiction: that it is a form of escapism from the real world, a place where "ordinary" cares can be forgotten. They may like the happy ending precisely because it isn't realistic, because it could never really happen quite that way.

I, on the other hand, see fantasy as the real world reflected through a funhouse mirror: distorted, stretched to its limits, but still eminently recognizable. Happy endings without the necessary counterbalance challenge my suspension of disbelief: I can believe in fantastical events, I can accept the twisted recollection of the world, but I expect people to behave like people do. Real-world hardships are not soon forgotten: the scars on memory alone can linger for years, or forever. Too often in fiction you see a high-five-and-walk-away. They did it, right? They accomplished their goal. So it's over. Right?

What do you think? Is it okay for the author to leave things unresolved? Is it okay for the sky-high odds defied over the course of a story to shift at the end in favor of the characters, but not to guarantee a win? I read books for many reasons, but high on the list is to watch the power and perseverance of the human spirit, no matter the odds, no matter what happens, and no matter if the person in question is real or not. Real people struggle against something, or somethings, their whole lives; it's only the reason for the struggle that differs. If a fictional struggle ends with complete and total resolution, and frequently with accompanying memory erasure, fifty pages from the end, I'm going to feel cheated.

Would you?

24 hours (8 reading-hours). 652 pages (and then some). Four hours of sleep. Whee.

2005-07-17T10:10:00.000-05:00

Well, I'm finished the sixth Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I actually finished it yesterday, the same day that it came out. Yeah, I have no life, really. I freely admit it. I have a terribly limited life outside books--reading them and writing them. Oh well. At least I enjoy it. (Wow, that was a lot of very short sentences.)

I really enjoyed the book. I would say that it was probably my second or third favorite out of the six books. It was just as unpredictable as any of her other books: I gave a friend a complete plot prediction when I was on page 275. I managed to be wrong on every count except one, which, incidentally, had been made while I was on the first chapter and on the basis of no evidence whatsoever. Fascinating.

The characters are pretty much the same as they have always been, but that's not really a detriment to the book: I think, for younger children especially, the familiarity is what keeps them coming back. The books really succeed on the strength of their characters, and that's one of the things the Rowling does with masterful skill. She obviously remembers just what it was like to be the age that her characters are. Her characters' realism is sometimes astonishing.

I also find it kind of entertaining the way Harry Potter has influenced the rest of the fantasy world. While Harry Potter itself, I'm sure, was influenced by many, many other fantasy novels, patterns have emerged that are either direct results of Potter or I just didn't notice them until I'd read Potter. More recent fantasy novels especially tend to sort of borrow from the Potter character scheme. There's the comic relief, the flagrant rule-breaker, and the brilliant friend. Actually, the genius female has been a type in fantasy forever. Nobody ever pays her much attention, and then she's never there when you need her. How unfair is that? (See Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.)

The only thing that bothered me about this book--all the books--was that they bring in all of these characters and things, and spend so much time on those things that you expect them to be more important than they really turn out to be. The structure of the books is somewhat odd, too: they all follow this pattern of hundreds of pages of relatively mundane occurrences and information-gathering, and then the last fifty pages have to be A REALLY BIG BATTLE! It's just...a little strange.

Dad says they're red herrings, and they work, and you shouldn't mess with what works. J.K. Rowling has made a nearly obscene amount of money writing these books. But...but...people don't know what will and won't work until they try! Um...yeah.

So that was the book. I don't really want to review it because most sane people that are going to read it have not done so yet, and if anyone ever told me details about a book like that I would be quite furious, and if it was a blog I would likely never return. So I'll spare you, and just say that everyone should go out and read it as soon as they can.

(On a side note, I also finished Madeleine L'Engle's A Wind in the Door, which I'd read many, many years ago, but I happened to pick it up while going past the "Young Adult" section in line. I'd started reading it around 11 P.M. while waiting outside the Barnes & Noble (they kicked us out of the store this year!). It was good, though it did make me feel terribly inadequate. Rawr.)

Write. Read. Edit. Scream. Rinse, repeat.

2005-07-08T00:50:00.000-05:00

So. Draft two is finished and has been read through by someone other than yours truly. It was deemed better than draft one, which I should be happy about. And I am, I guess, but it seems with every "improvement" I find myself roped into attempting further "improvement."

The original plan was simply to let my family read my book, because it would have been cruel not to, after they begged for a year. After they finished, it was to go into the graveyard of lost manuscripts, where I could wave it goodbye and start my next book. I never thought it was anything special. Now having been told that it's something special, or could at least become special, there's an empty plot in the graveyard and I'm the one who's six feet under with the whole business.

First off, everyone has a different opinion. I've had pretty much the same thing in first draft deemed strange, repetitive, and fascinating. Not to mention the multitudes of things in second draft that have been declared "weird." (As I think to myself, it's fantasy, isn't it supposed to be weird? But in context the comments are helpful.)

Seriously though, it's a whole different ball game writing for other people than it is writing for yourself. I wrote the novel with no intention of publication or really of having anyone outside my immediate family read it. It was written strictly for myself: the first novel I had to write before I could write the books I wanted to write.

As an author, it's both helpful and horrifying to have to face up to other people's comments and questions. (Or maybe that has nothing to do with being an author and everything to do with being me and being paranoid: my friend who likes to write seems to have no problems with it.) A discussion that I had with my dad after the first draft--involving a series of questions that I stumbled through with much "I never really thought about that" and "Um, well, maybe (insert incoherence here)"--resulted in my figuring some things out that made a significant impact on the second draft (and will continue to help me through the third). Unfortunately, there's a flip side, which is a question that both parents have been needling me about for weeks, and I still haven't the slightest idea what the answer is. If it weren't for them, I'd never have thought of it, and that's one of the weird things about writing with other people's thoughts in mind.

So questions and answers often come from the same source. The process is wonderful and bittersweet and scream-inducing. And it's far from over.

Okay...Now Put Down the Book and Back Away Slowly.

2005-06-22T20:06:00.000-05:00

I haven't been posting here a lot for many reasons, foremost of which is all of the stuff that's been going on around here, which I invoke so frequently as an excuse that most people probably ignore it by now. I swear it's true! Over the past three days, though, it's been something else.

I have been engaged in a power reading of The Lord of the Rings. I love the books, and I was obligated to read them for a discussion group that I was in...which I had forgotten about until Monday. I had read the books before, but it had been about two years, and I didn't remember enough details to discuss them intelligently. Therefore, I've been going through a book a day, and I'm currently almost finished Book 3 (half of The Two Towers).

Check out my word of the day: it's from page 514 in LoTR. I had never heard it before...and it's cool.

With that slightly more original excuse, regular programming will resume next week, after this thing is over, unless all of this medieval prose has robbed me entirely of my ability to write coherently.

Summer Reading

2005-06-14T21:26:00.000-05:00

Cliche, and yet classic: the Summer Reading List. The Today Show has one. So does People Magazine. You would be hard pressed to find any major media organization without its considerable public influence acting on behalf of a handful of authors and shiny, mass-appeal books. Therefore, I would like to offer up my own list: a collection of both well- and lesser-known books that I had found entertaining, informative, or just plain beautiful in their prose.

I have a unique categorization system for these recommended reads. I'm going to divide them the same way that my bookshelves are divided: Fantasy/Science Fiction, Nonfiction, Fiction, Memoir/Biography, Books on Writing, and Other. Notice the lack of a "Young Adult" category. (I do have a children's category on my shelf, for the benefit of the little guys I babysit.) The conspicuous absence of this category stems from many reasons. One of these can be found in a previous post here.

Another is that "Young Adult" books seem to exist in a little world of their own--a microcosm, if you will. Adults will read children's books (How nostalgic! How sweet! I can share it with little Dick and Jane!) but they will not, under any circumstances, venture near the young adult section. This has not been backed up by any big-shot science, but by virtue of personal observation I will vouch for its truth.

The "Young Adults" themselves, on the other hand, seem drawn as if by magnetism to the section named for them. Proudly and somewhat stubbornly "too old" for children's books and declared "too young" for adult novels, they haunt their personal section like vengeful ghosts in bad horror novels.

I have a vested interest in this topic because people randomly throw books into categories without really understanding them. (I once found one of my recommended fantasy novels in the roleplay section.) Not that I expect my book to get published, but if it was, I'm sure it would be unthinkingly thrown in with the Young Adult books simply because it was written by a young person and because two of the three main characters are teenagers. (I suspect that the third, at 21 and acting half that most of the time, is not old enough to save it from this fate).

So, in other words, I caution you now that your search for any of these books might lead you to the dreaded "Young Adult" section.

I've also devised another, rather more unorthodox strategy for categorization. This stems from the reputation of "Beach Reads" as light, airy, often romantic novels. Rather than giving each a numerical rating, I'm going to rate their relative "heaviness" of subject. What would be the point of numerical quality ratings anyway, since they would all get five? That's why I'm recommending them. So that you might choose your level of engagement while relaxing in the sand, I will provide numbers regarding the weight of the book, ranging from 0 (lighter than air) to 5 (a ton of bricks). I encourage you not to choose all the fluff. Come on, what could be better than the hot sun, screaming children, and international politics?

Section 1: Fantasy

The Myst Reader--Rand and Robyn Miller and David Wingrove
Weight: 4
On the heavier side for fantasy, but beautifully written and--forgive the ultimate reviewer's cliche--masterfully characterized. The rise and fall of worlds, civilizations, and relationships are chronicled here in intimate detail, giving the large and small equal weight and power. Loosely related to the bestselling Myst computer games, the books don't require game experience to be enjoyed or understood (I never made it past the original game). Two parting words of advice for this one: first, it's big. Really big. It's three full-size novels crammed into one, and is far larger than an ordinary paperback in both height, width, and actual physical weight. Bring a big beach bag. (The individual novels are now out of print as far as I am aware.) Second, if you buy or borrow the anthology, do me a favor and read the second "book" first. I'm not sure why they're bound that way, but chronologically the second in the anthology precedes the first, and reading the "first" first gives away the entire second book.

Feet of Clay--Terry Pratchett
Weight: 1
This is my favorite work by master satirist Pratchett. One of his Discworld novels, it may not be the best to start with if you aren't familiar with the series. On the other hand, there is no chronological "order" for the books, so I suppose it's as good a place to start as any, although the subtle interplay between the characters is better understood if you know their histories. While Pratchett is typically known for his "funny fantasy," I prefer the books that at least pretend to have an actual plot. (Some of his books...well...don't.) And he is capable of plotting. Quite well. This book is a truly brilliant mystery story--quite as good as many books by authors who write exclusively mysteries. I almost guarantee you won't figure it out, even though he drops enough hints that a second reading will leave you kicking yourself.

Trickster's Choice and Trickster's Queen--Tamora Pierce
Weight: 2
I've already ranted about this book in this former blog. Great characters, slightly predictable but fun plot, and lots of spying. Spying is cool. What more could you want?

Section 2: Nonfiction

Blink--Malcolm Gladwell
Weight: 3
I have been reading a lot more nonfiction than I used to, and so two of these three recommendations are recent reads...with blog entries! Rather than trying to summarize them again, I will simply leave you with a link to my long and rambling blog on the topic: http://readtoday.blogspot.com/2005/02/blink.html

Everything Bad is Good for You--Steven Johnson
Weight: 2.5
Same goes for this one: http://readtoday.blogspot.com/2005/06/old-cw.html (Or you could just scroll down.)

The Language Police--Diane Ravitch
Weight: 4
I read this book several years ago when it first came out, and it hasn't yet ceased to impact me. It deals with censorship and freedom of expression in textbooks, tests, and other materials in public schools. I admit that I might be biased here, but the writing and examples were so compelling that I was horrified. Some of it makes sense, although I don't agree with censorship in any capacity or location. Some of it is simply bizarre; some of the things one can't mention on tests according to some regulations include fossils (okay, it's an evolution thing), parents arguing (right, some people have an unhappy home, I get it), and birthday parties. Not everyone believes in evolution. Not everyone has a blissful home life. But everyone has a birthday! I suppose some people can't afford celebrations. That's why I started my charity. But even still. A bit absurd, don't you agree? Trust me: that doesn't even begin to explain it.

Section 3: Fiction

Jennifer Government--Max Barry
Weight: 2.5
This fun romp follows the intertwining stories of several ordinary people in an extraordinary world. Set in a place close enough to home for me to call it "Fiction" rather than "Science Fiction," it is nonetheless a somewhat frightening picture of what our world could become: every "company" is public, including the government. People take the last names of the companies for which they work (hence "Jennifer Government"). It could be Orwellian, and not in a nice way, but Barry's phenomenal sense of fun prevents it from becoming too weighty. The characters make the novel; amazingly realistic (character writing and development is one of Barry's strong points), the motley cast has just enough talents between them to turn their world upside-down.

Life Expectancy--Dean Koontz
Weight: 2.5
This book is another that I am somewhat reluctant to put in the "Fiction" category, but as the only slightly fantastical element is within the first few pages and the rest is wildly improbable but technically possible, I will allow it to remain there. It's hard to sketch out the plot without giving everything away, but the basis for the novel is that a young man's dying grandfather predicted a series of five dates in his life when some unspecified horror would occur. The rest of the novel jumps from event to event, following him through each of his trials. The ending, which I never saw coming, was uplifting and made all my time (which was the complete consumption of a day--I read the entire thing in one sitting) worthwhile.

Joe Jones--Anne Lamott
Weight: 4
Anne Lamott writes about nothing. Ordinary people living out ordinary lives in ordinary places. The thing is, she has such an astounding grasp of human nature and writes with such beauty that nobody cares. The plot of the novel, fragmented and invisible as it is, revolves around the workers and customers of Jessie's Cafe, a small-town eatery. It's written in the present tense, which I at first found somewhat disconcerting, but it's handled so well that I found myself wanting to write that way afterward. The novel is a metaphor for life, even a metaphor for its characters: time passes, people come and go, but the cafe lives on.

Section 4: Memoir/Biography

Mountains Beyond Mountains--Tracy Kidder
Weight: 4
I am generally leery of "classics" and "award-winners." Just because other people think that a book is amazingly wonderful doesn't mean I'll think anything special of it. I don't know. I haven't had good experiences with award-winning books. But this one deserved every medal it got--and it got the Pulitzer Prize. The story of the life and work of Dr. Paul Farmer, it balances politics, people, and poetics in an organic, compelling...something. It's not quite a biography, because it isn't about him, really. It's about the world. I know that sounds cryptic, and maybe it doesn't make sense, but trust me on this. It's a good book.

Reading Lolita in Tehran--Azar Nafisi
Weight: 4.5
Read my blog about this book here. Actually, this is a good read, but not a good beach read. Seriously. I found myself needing absolute and total silence while reading this book, and it took me two weeks to finish, while by virtue of its size it shouldn't have taken longer than two days. Everyone should read it, but only when they are able to truly concentrate and absorb its message and meanings.

Honeymoon With My Brother--Franz Wisner
Weight: 1.5
Brotherhood, boarding passes, and booze: that's what comprises most of this fun memoir. After being dumped just a day before he was to be wed, with the plane tickets already paid and not refundable. So what did Wisner do? He went...on honeymoon with his brother. When they returned, they decided to extend it...and extend it...and extend it. As they traveled the world, they discovered not only its treasures but the treasure of friendship and discovery of themselves. Wisner never lets it get too preachy, though. It's too much fun for that.

Section 5: Books on Writing

On Writing--Stephen King
Weight: 3
Part personal stories, part how-to manual, it's hard to pin down the aim of this book. Of course, I didn't agree with everything that he had to say, but that's what's nice about reading books like this: even if you don't find out what you do want to do, you know what you don't want to do. Personally, I found the stories to be far more compelling and enjoyable than the actual bits on writing, but I've talked to people that thought the opposite. I have mixed feelings about books on things anyway, because people tend to read about doing things and never get around to actually doing them. This book, though, is a good place to start for people who are thinking about embarking on a large writing project.

Bird by Bird--Anne Lamott
Weight: 3
This is a book by a writer for writers. While a fun read for anyone, you really have to have written something substantial before you can truly appreciate this book in all its glory. Lamott (the same one of Joe Jones above) uses her tremendous powers of prose to depict what it's really like to "be a writer." I had read it a few years ago, but I recently reread it after I finished the first draft of my novel, and all I could do was laugh and nod my head. Acknowledging the difficulties and celebrating the successes, I found this book to be tremendously valuable while trying to convince myself not to throw the manuscript out the window.

Eats, Shoots, and Leaves--Lynne Truss
Weight: 1
The punctuation mavens' canon. At times hysterically funny and at times inspiring indignation (I definitely have punctuation police tendencies), this book deserves all of the attention that it got.

Section 6: Other

The Imponderables series, by David Feldman
Weight: 1.5, but the compiled volumes are physically enormous and heavy!
It's impossible to summarize these books, because they simply can't be. The books answer bizarre questions submitted to Feldman through mail, e-mail, or radio shows. It's mostly things you never will have thought of, although occasionally he does answer a question that everyone wonders about but no one seems to know the answer to. To get a better idea of what I'm talking about, visit his website.

So that's the end of my reviews. I hope that everyone found something that sounds interesting to them!

In case you're wondering what's on my list, and what you might be hearing about in the future, I stocked up on books in the past few days...they should last me a week or two.
*Candy Freak--Steve Almond
*The Unfolding of Language--Guy Deutscher (Nonfiction)
*What is Life Worth?--Kenneth Feinberg (Memoir/Biography)
*The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos--Brian Greene (Nonfiction)
*Raven's Gate--Anthony Horowitz (Fiction/Fantasy (Cryptic book jacket!))
*Mind Wide Open--Steven Johnson (Nonfiction)
*Crooked Little Heart and Rosie--Anne Lamott (Fiction)
*The Bookseller of Kabul--Asne Seierstad (Memoir/Biography)

And many more. What do you think of my choices? Want more recommendations? Feel free to e-mail me or leave comments!

The Old CW

2005-06-07T09:45:00.000-05:00

Wow. First, I have to apologize for my total lack of posts. If anyone is still coming to my blog after my extended silence, I offer my apologies. There's been a lot going on.

I've just finished reading Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You, the latest in a stream of pop-science books dedicated to explaining everything (more on that later). As a critic of pop culture (I don't believe that it is too violent or promiscuous or any of the arguments frequently put forth by concerned parental advocacy groups, but I do sometimes feel as if there is no intelligent television left) I wasn't sure how I would react to this book. I am more gentle on games and the internet. I will confess that I do love the internet. But the internet is as good as its contributors--and there are a lot of those. Television is limited to the input of its team. (I am a Wikipedia junkie for a reason.)

Surprisingly, despite my initial skepticism, Johnson managed to win me over with his persuasive prose married to hard facts, a la Freakonomics. He acknowledges that he isn't trying to say that people should never read (if he had, I would have a much less glowing review of the book to offer), or that all media is brilliant, but simply that it is less unintelligent than it used to be. I don't think anyone can really argue with that.

I'm making a little too much sense. I think it's time to deviate into the land of only partially comprehensible essays. ;)

Looking at the explosion of books that try to explain our world, it seems rather curious to me. People have been doing it for thousands of years. The Greeks did it: when it thundered, the gods were bowling (or the period equivalent). You would think that by now people would have realized that there are things that stubbornly will not be explained away, but apparently not, given the variety of new books devoted to that same pursuit.

Not to diminish the achievements, either scientific or artistic, of the authors. But these books, among them Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s Freakonomics and now Everything Bad is Good for You, try to do your thinking for you. I have read and enjoyed all three of them, and I found their opinions thought-provoking and certainly worth the investment of time that I gave them. On the other hand, these books seem to be trying to replace good old-fashioned thinking. Even in Blink, which happened to be my favorite of the three, much of the knowledge disseminated as astounding new revelations was rather commonsensical upon further analysis.

These authors do enjoy an informational advantage. Levitt’s background in economics—and access to the numbers required to prove his point—could provoke the argument that he knew more about the topic than the general population, and thus was qualified to write about it. This is true. On the other hand, those numbers support theories that many people might have come up with on their own.

At risk of sounding redundant, I will reiterate that I thoroughly enjoyed all of these books. I am simply a bit argumentative by nature, and since I’ve noticed this trend I’ve given it increasing thought, and giving things thought tends to lead to giving them voice here on good old Blogspot.

Anyway, those odd thoughts aside, I must say that I enjoyed this book. The charts of television show complexity were particularly fascinating. Several of them were printed in the New York Times Magazine a few weeks back, with an article adapted from the book. This book must really be seen to be believed, and so I offer an excerpt here if you're interested.

I really enjoy blogging, but like I said before, a lot has been going on in my life, and I have had time to read but not blog. So without a lot of elaboration but with my approval, I offer this list of books that I have recently read and enjoyed:

Dean Koontz's Life Expectancy and Velocity
Anne Lamott's Blue Shoe and Joe Jones
Levitt and Dubner's aforementioned Freakonomics

I'm sure there are others, but they're slipping my mind--I've been too busy writing. The second draft is finished, though. I'm getting there!

“Are you okay?”

2005-05-13T22:24:00.000-05:00

Yes, it’s that time again…time for yet another essay about my book. Since nobody has seen my book, you might be thinking, then why in the world do I keep writing about it, and why are you supposed to care? Well, I care, and this is my blog, you see, so until I’m finished and moved on I’ll keep talking. This book was my life for the past year…it deserves more blog space.

Actually, people have read my book. Yes, I’ve finally turned that corner. I still can’t believe myself, but I guess I’m glad that I did it. People actually seem to like it, which was a bit of a surprise. It makes me happy, at any rate.

It’s really been a weird journey since I finished my book. The book itself is a journey…in a weird sort of way…and it was inspired by some real-life weirdness. So I suppose it’s only fitting.

I still haven’t quite figured out what it is that makes me so overprotective of my writing. Even my school papers I find difficult to let people edit, much less actually hand them in for grading. A book, as you might imagine, is much, much different—and that much harder. I think it’s that I work so hard at my writing, and I put everything I’ve got into it—including some things that I’ve never really let anyone see. Seeing them all compiled into one big piece of writing, where the delineations and inspirations for things glare so bright to me (but probably don’t even occur to others), is a little disturbing.

The first review, then, is positive. I’m still not entirely sure I believe it. I’m certainly happy about it. I was able to have a nice little discussion about things that I would like to improve on and that need “help,” as I kept saying. It’s said countless times that all good writing is in the rewriting, which I never really wanted to believe, but I guess I don’t have a choice now.

The final pearly word of wisdom: “If you had a dollar for every time one of your characters says ‘Are you okay,’ you’d be a millionaire already.”

“Yes, but there isn’t exactly a thesaurus option for that!”

Of Power and Pretense

2005-05-06T15:13:00.000-05:00

Yes, that goes for both my essay topic du jour and my foreword to same. Basically, I'm ready to shed any pretense that this is a place for me to actually (gasp) review books, or even really comment on the books themselves. What I've found of late is that I'm more interested in the concepts and ideas embodied within the books than the books themselves. I do care about the quality of writing and that sort of thing--it would be impossible for a bibliophile to overlook writing that was blatantly lacking in one way or another. But I think in concepts, and in particularly thought-provoking works, to "comment" on it, or worse, to "review" it, seems almost derogatory.

I began reading Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran about a week ago. It has taken me longer to get through than most books, both because of my annoyingly encroaching school schedule and its tremendous depth. It is the kind of book that begs to be read in absolute silence, while the reader is alone, in order to seize her totally and pull her roughly into the author's world. The book is a full-body tackle.

Anyway, I was about a third of the way through the book when, one night, at 11:30 or so, I had an almost compulsive impulse to write an essay. I love to write, and when I do, I give my all, but few things really drive me to go write something that instant. Sometimes I don't listen, especially when it's a really odd compulsion (like the time I wanted to wax rhapsodic about a sinuous line of shopping carts at Target). But this one was a little more normal, and the first few sentences had already crowded into my head, so I dutifully got up, flicked my computer on, and began to write. This is what resulted, beginning late that night and taking shape over the next week, as my progress in and understanding of the book moved forward.

Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran contains many themes, but the one I personally found most fascinating was her recounting of the revolutionary faction and events in Tehran during the Islamic revolution. One of the constants in history, and by extension, art, seems to be revolution--force. Almost every book--or at least many--depicts, and usually spends a great deal of time on, war and/or revolution. The theme appears disproportionately more often than other topics do, both in fiction and nonfiction. Nafisi's account of the Iran-Iraq war was chilling as well, but there is something about internal disquiet, civil war and revolution, where no one knows quite where they stand, that gives me pause.

And it seems that the more force used, the happier people on both sides are. Human nature is really odd that way; nobody ever wants a compromise. During her time in the university, Nafisi observed that "Never once was there a protest against the killings: the demands were almost always punctually for more blood." Blood, blood, always blood, as if violence was the only way to solve anything. Revolution can never be the idealistic panacea that people think it will be. People revolt towards something, often with little thought for what they’re leaving behind, or even what they’re running towards. Too often it turns out that it wasn’t what they wanted in the first place. Nothing ever quite works out as people plan it to.

Revolution is certainly a pattern in history. No one ever seems content with what he has. Not that revolution isn’t frequently warranted, in the situations in which it occurred, but when you really step back and look at it, oftentimes the end result is no better—or no different—than the original. It was part of what I found most striking about Reading Lolita—a calm, levelheaded examination of revolution gone horribly wrong. Of course, this aspect too is biased and personal—there are some even today who will defend the Islamic revolution. Nafisi is not one of them.

No modern civilization seems to have gotten by without a revolution. They also seem to be ideal subjects for works of art of all kinds. Reading Lolita is unmistakably a work of art, and while it focuses on other things, its dealings with the Iranian revolution fascinated me as much as anything else. The French revolution begat Les Mis and Marat/Sade, memorializing the pain and struggle of people we never knew in a time we cannot fathom for the enjoyment of a modern audience. It strikes me as almost vulgar, or it would but for the self-consciousness with which the subject is dealt. It’s not really enjoyable. It makes me squirm, and rightly so.

The human race is not a peaceable collection of animals. We are bloodthirsty, for reasons unknown to us, or to me at least. Every revolution is bloody, and the people involved seem inevitably to call for more blood, more pain. There seems to be no end to human suffering, and to the extent to which others can order it with a chilling indifference. Even the Americans, whose revolution, most grade school textbooks would like you to believe, bled only tea, seem to have an only perfunctory respect for this fact of human nature. They triumphed, for sure, over a tyrannical regime. But at what cost? In that case, it was worth it. But in many, it is not.

Everyone has his or her own set of beliefs. For some they are fervent and specific, for others lackadaisical and vague. The one constant, however, seems to be that humanity at large seems unusually keen to force their opinions on others. After all, isn’t that the tendency that breeds civil war and revolution? That everyone knows what is right for them, but are not content to allow it to be right for them; oh no, it must be right for everyone. In this way whole countries, whole civilizations engage in a violent tug of war which must ultimately produce a winner.

It is an ethical swamp. At what point does expressing one’s beliefs become forcing them on others? Even many devout Muslims, Nafisi points out, were upset by the proclamation that the country was to be the Islamic Republic of Iran. Forcing everyone to believe as they did somehow devalued their faith. If the veil was something every woman had to wear to avoid arrest and worse, then for those who wore it voluntarily, the act became meaningless.

In a world such as this, it is no wonder that Nafisi and her students escaped to their fantasy world of books. Originally their talks were rigidly structured: personal talk was reserved for the break, and seemed discouraged even then. Increasingly, however, it crept into their discussions even of seemingly unrelated literature. For isn't that what truly good fiction does: reflect the real world in a way that we can understand it? Because truly, the world generally doesn't make all that much sense. As the group became closer, their discussions became more personal, intertwining and interacting with the literature. They discovered each other's deepest scars, physical and emotional, left from years of abuse and repression. For some it came from husbands and families. But for others, there were memories of imprisonment and other travesties inflicted by the revolution and the regime that followed.

Is that the mark any person would choose to leave on the world?

What does it mean to write? What is the meaning of life?

2005-04-09T22:11:00.000-05:00

The two questions aren't really that far apart. After my little jubilant outburst last week, I've done a little thinking, and a little reflecting, and gained a little perspective. From nowhere, this little essay took form. I thought I should do something with it other than let it rot on my hard drive, so here it is.

So What's it all Mean? Really?

I just printed out my novel. For some reason I feel a need to write an essay about this. Not about my novel—I already wrote a novel about my novel, it doesn’t need an essay. But about the actual act of printing it out, and how writing feels, and all that other existential crap that you hear people spout off about in the New York Times Book Review.

I hold in my hands three hundred and fifty-four pages, say about four pounds. On one hand, it’s four pounds of my deepest hopes and dreams and fears, and my rather horrid plot treatment of these really delightful people who lived in my head for the better part of three years.

On the other hand, it’s four pounds of used Hammermill copy paper, brightness eighty-four.

So why do we write, really? Why do I write?

The simplest answer would be, “Because I want to.” I believe some famous writer said that. In fact, I believe that I read the quote in Ann Lamott’s book on writing, which was very good, and I may or may not be writing about in the future. In any event, I doubt she could remember who said it either.

The next-most-simple answer would be, “Because I have to.” This is also possibly attributable to someone famous. Or maybe I actually did have an original idea. Anyway, I never “chose” to write. One day I just realized I had to. That I had this idea in my head, and it would not leave until I got it down on paper.

The other thing I’ve realized is that the idea won’t leave you alone until you not only get it down, but get it down right. I’ve written three hundred and fifty four pages (and if you’re wondering why I keep writing it out, it’s because it sounds nicer each time). Out of all those pages, there are little moments, little golden Pulitzer prize for fiction moments. These are the moments that make me really think, that make me cry, or laugh, or whatever. Trust me, if you can make yourself cry while reading your own book, you’ve done something right. Unless, of course, you’re just crying about how crappy it is. I’ve done that too. But those are the tiny snippets that make me realize why I started writing in the first place, or alternately cause me to fantasize about a nice big vacation house on the beach in Hawaii that I bought with my six-figure advance.

After you write a little golden moment, you know. You just know that it’s perfect, that it works. It’s the best feeling you ever get when you’re writing. It is, like I said, why I write.

But you write for those moments. For each of those little golden chapters, pages, paragraphs, sentences, there are fourteen hundred parts that most definitely do not work. Sometimes it’s hard to see what does and doesn’t work. Most of the time it’s not. And, unfortunately, most of the time it’s not the few little black patches you have to search for, it’s those little pinpoints of light that take the digging to unearth. The ones that that finally convince you that yes, you do need a complete rewrite, except maybe for that little bit on page 271, or those few lines of dialogue on the top of page 198, or that hysterical satirical tone of page 60.

That’s where I am now. And guess what? It’s worth it. Because even though I’ve already used up a tree’s worth of printer paper and two cartridges of ink printing the first draft, I know that there will be another, and probably another after that. I’ve put so much work into it already that to do any less would be a waste. I love my characters, and I love most of my story, except for that gaping plot hole most of the second quarter of the book falls through. I need to do them justice. I need to do myself justice.

And I need to get the voices in my head to shut up.

2005-04-03T20:35:00.000-05:00

ALL RIGHT!!!

Well, most people that need to know have already been told, but I'm so excited that I just have to put it somewhere else too. So say it loud and say it proud: MY BOOK IS FINISHED!!!

I'm so excited.

(See also my word of the day.)

Vegas, baby!

2005-03-21T22:08:00.000-05:00

Title: Bringing Down the House
Author: Ben Mezrich
Read (an excerpt from) this now at: http://www.ereader.com/product/book/excerpt/7688

What if you could go to any casino in the world and have an advantage over the house? An advantage of up to two percent?

That's great, says the team at MIT. But let's up the ante.

The book tracks young MIT student Kevin Lewis as he goes from clueless roommate, watching his buddies throw around fistfuls of cash and chomp on expensive sushi, to wide-eyed initiate in a windowless room down a dark corridor deep within the core of MIT. From there we travel to a smoky room in the heart of Boston's Chinatown before it's finally time to hit the strip.

Nothing is quite as it seems in this glittering real-life action-adventure, the first nonfiction work by Mezrich. Described by the team members themselves as a David-and-Goliath type setup where David ends up with a bag of cash instead of just bragging rights, the MIT team hit the Vegas strip and other casinos all over the U.S. with a single mission in mind: to make the numbers work for them.

With their math and science backgrounds, they knew that the so-called "art" of card-counting, which could determine the probability of high or low cards coming out of the deck, could give them not just a two percent advantage but a much larger one, and with it an equally large pile of cash. Headed by Micky Rosa, the youngest graduate of MIT, they played nothing but blackjack, flitting from casino to casino in an elaborate dance, orchestrated by Micky and his seconds-in-command to ensure that they weren't found out.

Card-counting isn't illegal. But the pit bosses sure aren't thrilled with it. And in Vegas, where the Eyes in the Sky watch the patrons' every move and private investigators seem to appear around every corner, it's not always the safest thing to do. Casinos can and will throw people out without any reasoning whatsoever.

But that all existed before Kevin. The most fascinating part of the tale is not the actual aspects of the game and the strategy (although those are enthralling in their own right), but the transformation visible in this very impressionable young man. He struggles to decide what he really wants out of life as he quickly transitions from the team rookie, boarding a flight to Vegas with a hundred thousand dollars in cash under his clothes, to the "BP," or Big Player, throwing down $50,000 bets, to the fun-loving drifter pouring his winnings back into craps. Even more heartrending is his shifting relationships with his friends and family as he tries desperately to play both sides of the table.

But it isn't all relationship drama and psychoanalysis. There's plenty of adrenaline flowing through the book as well. The team's signals, communicating to the other members how the shoe is going when they join play, begin to be recognized by the pit bosses. We witness everything from bannings to "backrooms," private eye stalkings, strip clubs, and bathroom brawls. There is the inevitable scattering, splitting, hitting and running as they desperately struggle to keep themselves off the hit list and out from under the scrutiny of the pit bosses.

This book is a fantastic coming-of-age tale, with enthralling characters and situations so improbable they could only have come from real life. The Ocean's Eleven-esque side of the story only adds to its overall value. Actually, it's one of the most "balanced" books I've read in a while.

Oh, one more thing. Word has it that Micky's still got some teams out there. So here's a word of advice: next time you go to Vegas, don't play blackjack.

Hi Everyone!

2005-03-14T19:25:00.000-05:00

Wow, what a week. I've been so insanely busy with schoolwork and life in general that I haven't written here forever. I have at least one book that I really wanted to write about here, and still might if life can ease up on the gas a little.

Basically, what I mean is sorry for the lack of posts. But, since most everyone who reads my blog has some sort of vested interest in me finishing my book, will it make you feel better to hear that I only need another week?

Review Madness

2005-02-14T22:23:00.000-05:00

This is a review about reviews. Primarily the review of A.J. Jacobs, the author of The Know-it-All. I reviewed his book two or so months ago, and found it quite entertaining. The New York Times, apparently, thought otherwise.

Source: The New York Times Book Review
Title: A Little Learning is a Dangerous Thing
Author: Joe Queenan
Read This Now at: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B07E7DE1E39F930A35753C1A9629C8B63

This review first appeared in the Times Review on October 3, 2004. One of the most unforgiving reviews I have ever read in the paper, it called the book "corny" and "juvenile," among many others. The insults to Jacobs himself were not exactly subtle either.

I am not really out to criticize the reviewer or the review. One of our foremost rights in this great country is to speak our minds freely and unadulterated. (Besides, this review is where I first heard about the book. I bought it despite the bad review. If you get a review in the Times at all, you can count yourself lucky.) I really wrote about this so that I could write about Jacob's rebuttal.

Source: The New York Times Book Review
Title: I Am Not a Jackass
Author: A.J. Jacobs
Read This Now at: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/13/books/review/13JACOBSL.html?
Also read the editors' foreword here: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/13/books/review/13UPFRONT.html

After reading this rebuttal of sorts to Queenan's review, I am left with a respect for Jacobs that I didn't have even after reading his book. Far from making me feel as if he is a sore loser and needs to defend himself, Jacobs has managed to write such a hysterically funny but painfully true account of writing and being reviewed that I just can't help but love it.

Jacobs is a little heavy on criticism of Queenan personally, which I found a bit of a turnoff. However, I believe that it was done for comic effect and not in mean spirit. The rest of the piece is such a brilliant commentary on writing that I felt I had to share it.

As a reviewer, here in these digital pages, it is an interesting perspective to gain on the process, and how the writers feel about it. As a writer, albeit not yet a published one, I can already feel the sting of the reviewers' pens. Although, if my name ever graces a reviewer's pen, I might not be complaining.

Before I move on, I would like to share one of my favorite portions of the review, which happens to be the end:

"In the end, the only useful lesson was a simple one: As a writer, I have to accept the lack of control. Publishing a book is like having a child. You can do everything right -- feed him, clothe him, show him Baby Kierkegaard videos -- but a bully at kindergarten can still make him eat clumps of dirt. You have to come to terms with that. And you have to appreciate that your child is able to run around the playground at all, and is even having fun on the jungle gym when not being pummeled. Oh, and you can make sure the Amazon ranking for the bully's new book is much, much lower than yours. Which it is. "

Title: Things Critics Do That Piss Me Off
Author: Max Barry
Read This Now at: http://www.maxbarry.com/writing/bits/critics.html

First, let me apologize for the slight profanity in the titles of both of the articles I'm writing about. It appears that when writers and critics are combined they cannot help it.

Anyway, this is a slightly similar piece, written by the author of a brilliant book called Jennifer Government. It's a short piece, and there's really not too much to say other than that it's entertaining. I would also like to share a few passages from this one:

"#2: Spots Plot Holes That Aren't There
Example: Much of the novel is ridiculous; however, when we are expected to believe that Randy survives a flood and still hangs onto his cellphone, our thin remaining thread of belief finally snaps.
Max Responds: He got the cellphone later, you dumb ****! For crying out loud, it's right there on page 208! He dries off, goes home, and collects his cellphone! Holy mother of God!

#3: Spots Plot Holes That Are There
Max Responds: Shut the **** up! Go write your own novel, you hack!"

I'm well aware that these are much more lighthearted articles than I usually comment on, but as a writer I can't help but be entertained by these sorts of things. When something entertains you, you want to share it! And if you couldn't care less what authors think of critics, give me until later in the week to think of something more consequential to write about.

Blink!

2005-02-12T19:28:00.000-05:00

Title: Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
Author: Malcolm Gladwell
Read (several excerpts from) This Now at: http://www.gladwell.com/blink/blink_excerpt1.html

So what do you think of my blog?

If you were to answer, you might say, "Well, it has a good collection of links, comments on important issues, and the writing is solid." Or you might say, "I hate it; the writing is awful and I don't care about the topics," although I really hope you wouldn't say that.

But that's not what I'm talking about. I mean what do you think? What do you think of the background? What single thought pops into your head? Maybe it looks to casual, too colorful, for the subject matter. Or maybe the pastels are perfect. Maybe, even in that, we're overanalyzing things, for the purpose of this book.

Surely you would react differently to the blog if it was written in stark, plain black on white, or, for that matter, white on black. If it had big pink flowers all over it? Or it was electric green? You would definitely think differently of it if it was scrawled on a yellow legal pad and taped to a wall somewhere. Maybe you wouldn't take it as seriously. But maybe, just maybe, you wrote a love letter on a piece of paper just like that once, and that, too, would color your opinion.

By this point, you may be thinking, What in the world? Why is she doing this to me? What's the point? I'm here to tell you what the point is. My point in writing circles around the book at hand was to illustrate one of its essential concepts: that, correctly or incorrectly, we judge things by minute, immediate, individual perceptions about those things. You don't need to think about something to gain an understanding of it in all cases. Just take a quick glance and let your subconscious do the work.

There's much more to the book than just that, however. It discusses every possible aspect of this topic, from how stereotypes color our first impressions of things to how police officers read facial expressions to determine the intent of a suspect. In fact, the examples are easily the most compelling parts of the book, and they comprise the vast majority of it. Gladwell met personally with many foremost experts in the field, and the stories he tells about the people themselves are often riveting.

The scientific parts of the book are also interesting. The book often refers to something called "thin-slicing," which is basically an easy way to understand the way the brain unconsciously (and, with practice, consciously) breaks down events into easily processed pieces. Many terms and processes are carefully written about, broken down so that everyone can understand them.

So is it pop science? Maybe. But none of the scientific details are spared, even though care is taken to make them understandable. Besides, the topic is so heavily people-based that the bits of hard science come only occasionally.

The book was well-written and intriguing. Gladwell does a fantastic job keeping the reader's attention through a multitude of examples and explanations. He doesn't shy away from failures of cognition either, with a whole chapter devoted to the shooting of Amadou Diallo in the Bronx.

So next time you do something, see something, or meet someone, don't stop and think.

Blink!

Ten Car Pile-Up (Well...not really.)

2005-01-19T21:43:00.000-05:00

I'm sure you're all wondering about the title of this post (or maybe you weren't, but I'm sure you are now). It refers to the enormous amount of reading material that seems to have attacked me over the past day. Usually I get most of my comment-worthy articles on Mondays, when the major magazines come out, but with the lack of mail on Sunday and the holiday on Monday, the printing schedules got all confused. This is not to mention the fact that the New York Times has been particularly intriguing.

(For anyone who gets the New York Times: read William Safire's column. He has an op-ed occasionally, and he has a regular "On Language" column in the Sunday NY Times Magazine. I disagree with many of his political views, but his arguments are well-presented and eloquent, and while I may disagree with his opinions, I have a deep respect for the way they are presented. The "On Language" section, while not usually politically oriented, manages to tie recent events in with linguistics. I find it absolutely fascinating. (While it's a difficult piece to comment on as such, I can still endorse it. Read his latest "On Language" here: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/16/magazine/16ONLANGUAGE.html?oref=login) This is some of the highest praise I could give a writer. So go read him. But finish reading my blog first.)

Since I've just ranted on about the New York Times, I should probably talk first about the two articles of interest that I found today. Curiously, they are both op-eds, which are opinions in and of themselves (obviously) and I would think that they would be difficult to comment on for that reason, since it would then be an op-op-ed, or something like that! However, you will soon find out that I have absolutely no trouble commenting on these two.

Source: The New York Times (1/19/2005)
Title: Caught Between Church and State
Author: Susan Jacoby
Read This Now at: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/19/opinion/19jacoby.html

I wholeheartedly agree with the offset sentence (what are those sentences that are offset, bolded, and in large type in newspaper articles called anyway?) in this article: There was a time when God and Darwin got along. The article concerns itself with the heated debates surrounding the teaching of evolution and so-called "intelligent design" in schools. I, myself, am somewhat of an agnostic and a strong believer in evolution. But if you are a creationist, that's your choice. But really, I can't tell you what's right for you, and you can't tell me what's right for me. Since when do people think they know what's right for everyone? Live your life the way you want, but please don't tell me how to live mine. Besides, as the article says, "There was a time when God and Darwin got along." Creationist principles don't proscribe God creating protozoans and evolution doing the rest.

So, as I said, I don't really have a problem with those that want evolution taught as "a theory, not a fact" (as stickers on textbooks in Atlanta once proclaimed). The people that I take issue with are those who want "intelligent design" (the idea that life is too complex to have been created through Darwin's natural selection and so must have been guided by a supreme being) taught as science. Dictionary.com defines science as "The observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena. " Theoretical, maybe, but no observation, experimentation, or even detailed description has been going on here. How about we teach evolution as "a theory, not a fact" if people feel so strongly about that, and if religious people choose to have their children taught "intelligent design," it can be done in Sunday school.

Source: The New York Times (1/19/2005)
Title: Should We Stay or Should We Go?
Authors: Frederick Barton, Bathsheba Crocker, and Craig Cohen
Read This Now at: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/19/opinion/19barton.html

Wow. I think that this is a fantastic idea. One of the best I've heard regarding the Iraq situation in quite a while, actually.

I never thought that the Iraq war was a good idea, but now that we're there, we have to make the best of it and make a concerted effort to change things for the better. The way to do this is not by having people in military uniforms traipsing through the streets, although that might be needed in some situations. The answer is to teach them how to run their own lives, and to a certain extent, we can do this by allowing them more freedom to control their own lives. It can even be equated with raising a child: you teach them to make responsible decisions, and then give them the freedom to make those decisions. While we haven't done a whole lot of teaching, the choices still have to be made, and would be better made by the Iraqi people than Washington bigwigs. It might not be the right decision for us, but it is the right one for them; while it may sound harsh, if it turns out wrong, it's not our problem any longer.

The premise of the article is that we should make a referendum allowing the Iraqi people to vote on whether American forces should stay or go. If they voted to have us stay, we would repeat the referendum every nine months until we were voted out or decided to leave. Freedom of choice is one of the most important rights we have in this great country. Isn't that something that we should share with them?

Now, on to the other magazines!

Source: U.S. News and World Report (1/24/2005)
Title: Big Box Meets Big Brother
Author: James Pethokoukis
Read This Now at: http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/050124/biztech/24rfid.htm

As I was flipping through the magazine, this small article caught my eye. It concerns Wal-Mart's recent edict that its 100 main suppliers must tag their shipments with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags. The tags allow the companies (both the supplier and Wal-Mart) to keep track of pallets of merchandise without hand-counting or scanning. (RFID tags, unlike bar codes, don't need a "line-of-sight" with the reader to be read accurately.) By tracking the tags, the companies could ostensibly tell when a product needed to be restocked or which products frequently got picked up and then put back.

However, the manufacturers aren't too fond of the idea of paying some $500,000 to put in an RFID system, only to have to replace it for the next generation of tags. Some consumers also shy away from the "big-brother"-like aspect of the tagging. I'm curious to see how and if it will work, and what effect it will really have on retailing.

Source: Time (1/24/2005)
Title: Can Iraq's Election Be Saved?
Authors: Bill Powell and Christopher Allbritton
Read This Now at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1018071,00.html

There is just so much at work here, it's almost difficult to think about in a way that makes it possible to talk about it. I don't think that the article does the best possible job of explaining things, either, but I think that it is a tremendously important issue, and so I feel I need to comment on it.

American troops in Iraq say that they are "ramping up...for the elections." While obviously they need to make sure that there are not immediate terror threats or dangers to polling places and/or voters, if you were an Iraqi, wouldn't troops thundering past your window kind of intimidate you? I think it might even discourage voters. To encourage the voters who are afraid to venture to the polls, they need to have voting caravans or something that are guarded by troops, not random patrols now.

They also say that "many voters...don't even know who is on the ballot." Aren't the Americans doing publicity things? Shouldn't they be? I know that they would be "targets," but wouldn't it be worth it, for the increased voter education and turnout? Even we, in America, don't know who's on their ballot! I haven't seen any articles about it. When they had the first Afghanistan election, the candidates and (afterward) president were widely publicized in America. The Iraqi people, as well as the Americans, have the right to know who they are voting for and who they are offering up to be voted on, respectively.

The different groups within the population, the Shi'ites, Sunnis, and Kurds, need to be better explained, so that readers can have a more thorough grasp of the situation. Regardless, I think that the Americans should try to ensure that approximately equal numbers of each group turn out, by encouraging members of the groups that are not as eager to vote. Or maybe we should leave them to their own devices. We won't know until the election is over what works and what doesn't. All we can do is cross our fingers...and wait.

Source: Time (1/24/2005)
Title: Diapers for Fatima
Author: Sean Gregory
Read This Now at: http://www.time.com/time/insidebiz/article/0,9171,1018097,00.html

This article is inriguing just because it is such a perfect illustration of The First Principle of Marketing, as I call it. The article talks about Procter and Gamble's bid to gain Hispanic customers. The way they have built a completely different marketing style just for Hispanics is truly fascinating--and, it appears, very effective.

My First Principle of Marketing is: Know your audience. Pander to your audience. Love your audience, and they'll love you back. Believe me, it's the first thing you learn when you take an advertising class. Procter and Gamble has done it brilliantly and effectively. This article is a definite worthwhile and educational read for anyone interested in or doing advertising or marketing.

Busyness

2005-01-17T19:19:00.000-05:00

Hi everyone.

Sorry about the lack of posts. I've been really busy lately, and I haven't been reading too many books. I have a whole stack ready for me! The magazines don't have very much good fodder right now, what with the tsunami. (Which is absolutely horrible and tragic, but unfortunately cannot be helped by my adding to the already astounding quantities of material that have been written about it.) The inauguration coverage should be interesting, and I'm sure you'll be hearing about that when my Time and Newsweek come tomorrow. The New York Times has been interesting, but I've forgotten to save any articles for comment (oops).

I've also been focusing more on my novel. I was aiming to finish it over the last month, but the end is, unfortunately, not yet in sight. It's like one of those tunnels where you keep on walking and walking and it just gets longer. I'm sure most writers can relate!

So, in short, don't give up on me yet! I'll be posting lots more soon, I promise. And when/if my first book is published, you'll all get to read that instead of my blog!

2004-12-21T19:50:00.000-05:00

Title: The Know-It-All
Author: A.J. Jacobs
Read (an excerpt from) this now at: http://www.simonsays.com/content/content.cfm?sid=33&pid=500363&agid=2

This is an interesting book.

A really interesting book.

Okay, it's just weird. But it's lovably weird. Which I think is just the way Jacobs would want it. You get a sense that that's how he is himself.

Before I get ahead of myself, let me explain what the book is all about. One man. One book. In thirty-two volumes. 33,000 pages. 44 million words. It's story time!

The Encyclopedia Britannica. Why would you ever read such a thing? Jacobs has an interesting answer to this. He feels like he knew a lot as a young man. A lot. He thought he was the smartest kid in the world. Which might seem pretentious. He acknowledges that. In reading the encyclopedia, however, he hopes to reclaim some of the knowledge that has leached out in years reading celebrity biographies and watching MTV as the senior editor for Esquire. An interesting idea, but does he succeed?

Jacobs has some interesting ideas about intelligence. In the beginning, he oscillates between talking about how facts will make him the amazingly intelligent person he used to think he was and saying that knowledge can't be gleaned from books alone. I got the impression that he was more than a little confused himself. In fact, the encyclopedia reading may have been a way to compensate for a distinct lack of real-world experience from the self-described "borderline agoraphobe" Jacobs. This, of course, was much to the chagrin of his socialite wife Julie.

As the book progresses, both the encyclopedic one and the one I hold in my hands right now, he gains a sense of perspective. This newfound perspective comes from many diverse sources, such as an excerpt from Ecclesiastes and the words (last and otherwise) of many poets and historical figures. It helps him cope with people's doubts about the encyclopedia quest, an awkward family situation, and his distinct lack of baby. This is truly inspiring, and an example of how, with the right outlook, certain kinds of knowledge can indeed become wisdom.

Of course, there are two sides to every coin, and Jacobs' quest to prove his newfound 'intelligence' borders on the obsessive. He joins Mensa (on his SAT scores; he failed the test), tries out for (and gets onto) Who Wants to be a Millionaire, and takes on a college debate team, among many others. He manages to fail spectacularly on all above pursuits. Randomly inserting facts into conversation seemed a bit show-offy to me at first, but try reading this book without starting to do it yourself. You won't get far. In all fairness, though, I think that sticking his neck out to do all of those things must have been hard for him, inept as he was. It also helped him put all of what he was learning, as well as life, into context, and helped him realize that he didn't need to prove anything to anyone.

The coincidences in this book are amazing. Both the Britannica and Jacobs cover such diverse ground that much more than you realize will ring the bell in your head that Jacobs so often refers to. Take "character from Uncle Vanya," a question that tripped him up on the Mensa test. I had to read that play for a class last semester. Jean-Paul Marat, the French revolutionary who rated on Jacobs' list of wierdest deaths in history (stabbed in his bathtub by Charlotte Corday)? Marat/Sade is my favorite play, where I learned about the events surrounding his death. The definition of Erythrocyte, the question that tripped Jacobs up on Who Wants to be a Millionaire? A red blood cell, as I learned in my Anatomy and Physiology class last semester. Doubtless you will find your own familiar topics in the book, and it's a worthwhile read for this reason alone.

One more thing.

Jacobs claims to love and respect books more than any other means of communication.

He doesn't. He can't.

He writes in the margins of books.

Oh, the horror.

Another Book Review!

2004-11-28T16:09:00.000-05:00

Title: Feet of Clay
Author: Terry Pratchett
Read (a badly punctuated excerpt from) This Now at: http://www.harpercollins.com/catalog/pratchett/site/books/excerpt.asp?isbn=0061057649

This is my favorite book of all time.

I have just finished reading it for the second time. This is saying something, given that I almost never reread a book.

This is saying even more, considering that it is a mystery and I already know what happens.

And I enjoyed it almost as much the second time around.

But let's get on to the book, shall we?

This is one of Terry Pratchett's famous Discworld novels, which means that it is guaranteed to be full of laughs and fun. Like Going Postal, however, this book tends to rely more on story and characterization than humor. There are more than ample opportunities for a laugh, though. As per usual in the Discworld, nothing is sacred--every fantasy stereotype in the book (pun not intended) is turned on its head. From werewolves to vampires (occupational hazards) to dwarves (feminism with a beard) to golems and even overzealous priests...well, you'll have to read it.

Without giving too much away (it is a mystery, after all), I'll try to summarize at least the beginning of the book. The leading figure in the city of Ankh-Morpork, the Patrician, has been poisoned. Two seemingly innocent citizens are found murdered. (Wow, it's a mystery novel--do you think there will be a connection?) And among all of this, the golems of the city are no longer content to work like slaves.

Pratchett's characters are definitely one of his strongest points. They are predictable (but never too much) and distinctive (but not stereotypes). In fact, Pratchett's specialty is disposing with stereotypes. If you're at all familiar with the Discworld, you'll want to know that the characters in this book are from the City Watch. As usual, Vimes takes himself too seriously, Carrot takes everything too seriously, and Detritus shouts at people. The new characters don't disappoint either.

When I read this book for the first time, I was astounded that Pratchett had managed to craft a masterful mystery novel that was so different from his other books, but yet so similar in spirit. It's the kind of mystery that leaves you wondering all through the book without a clue and then kicking yourself at the end because it should have been so obvious. Part of what was so much fun about rereading the book was knowing what to look for, and if you keep your eyes open there's more than enough there to figure it out. So pay attention if you decide to read it! The little things make all the difference....

Bravo to Terry Pratchett for writing a fantastic mystery/fantasy/satire that completely defies categorization but manages to be my favorite book anyway. Before I end my review, I'd like to share a quote from the book that I hope doesn't give away too much...

"You seem to have infuriated most of the leading figures in the city." He sighed. "Really, it seems I have no choice. As of this week, I'm giving you a pay raise."

Newsweek, Nov. 29

2004-11-23T22:05:00.000-05:00

Wow, a "juicy" Newsweek (to quote, although not in the context he intended, a Newsweek reporter!). It's mostly horrifying...so bear with me while I extort the little information available from this week's issue.

Title: Nov. 22, Now a Game
Read This Now at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6543127/site/newsweek/

This is just horrifying. Just horrifying. There is no point you could possbly make that validates such an abhorrent creation. Recreating JFK's demise to prove that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone...we knew that already. And even if we didn't, do we care? Certainly not enough for this.

Title: Broken Furniture at the CIA
Read This Now at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6542350/site/newsweek/

I might even grant Bush a little leeway if he wouldn't populate his organizations with his acolytes. Both Murray and Goss have erred, and should admit it. If they do, maybe people will allow them to move past their mistakes. But Murray's blatant and Goss's implied anti-democratic sentiments need to be dealt with. We live in America, for goodness sakes, where the Declaration of Independence of our country states that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Which takes me to my next article...

Title: The Hot Sound of Hate
Read This Now at: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6542890/site/newsweek/

No, actually, don't. *Covers ears, closes eyes and whimpers.* Tell me when it's over. Seriously though, I'm not even going to grant it the good grace of a review. Simply consider it spat on. (Oh, and see the Declaration of Independence.)

Title: Sex and the Suburbs
Read This Now at: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6542185/site/newsweek/

Welcome to my rant for the evening! Pull up a chair and make yourself comfortable.
I'll start by saying that I haven't seen the show (and don't have any desire to). However, I have no personal vendetta against the show or those who watch it. I do question the sanity of newsmagazine editors, though. We have in this issue a CIA expose of sorts, an article about Condi Rice, and an article about white supremacy (ptooey). And the "Desperate Housewives" get the WHOLE ENTIRE COVER! Sorry about the shouting, but please! Don't people have anything better to do?
To which I can only respond: no, they don't. The really sad part is is that Bree and co. will probably sell more magazines than Condi has in her whole life. It's a not-so-flattering reflection on the obliviousness of collective America, and it's kind of scary. The show sounds...intriguing (yes, I read the article), but I'd rather read about issues affecting my life than the housewives'.
Tell me what you think by leaving comments or e-mailing me!

Second Book Review!

2004-11-14T21:58:00.000-05:00

Title: Trickster's Queen
Author: Tamora Pierce
Read (an excerpt from) this now at: http://www.teenreads.com/reviews/0375814671-excerpt.asp

I'm going to start this review with a tirade against "Young Adult Books." Not the books themselves, but the label. I've liked Tamora Pierce's books since I was little, and continue to read each new one, because they're good books. I don't think that it's exactly fair to label a book as "children's" or "young adult" or whatever, because it implies a kind of limit on who can (or should) read it. I'm especially appalled by what the New York Times did when Harry Potter locked up the top slots of its "adult" bestseller list--they created a "children's" list just so they wouldn't feel ashamed that a "children's" book was outselling the "adult" ones! (Sorry for all of the "quotation marks"--do you detect a hint of "sarcasm?")
As an aspiring fantasy author myself, it disturbs me to think that someday people will try to label my books as "children's," "young adult," or "adult." Anyone willing and able to read a book should be able to, without being labeled. This may seem a bit extreme, since no warning bells go off when someone "too old" or "too young" picks up a book, but it's about the psychology of the thing. And people look at you funny--I've experienced it myself, since I always loved to read (mostly books "too old" for me). Oh, and just to clarify...if any of my books ever gets on a bestseller list, I don't care which one it's on.
Okay, my tirade is over (aren't you relieved?). On to the review!
Trickster's Queen is the second in a pair of books (the first is Trickster's Choice). It's impossible to read the second without the first. If you have any interest at all in them, read them in order. You'll thank me later.
The book follows Aly, the daughter of Alanna (featured in some of Pierce's early novels). I won't give away too much of the plot, which unfolds so rapidly that any detail would ruin it. Sorry. I will say, however, that it is a finely spun fantasy tale with well-developed characters and good writing. The characters especially really impressed me. With Pierce's tradition of writing stories set in the same fantasy world, there are several I'm hoping to see again (My personal favorites are Zaimid Hetnim and Taybur Sibigat--are you curious now? Or just wondering how she pronounces the names at book readings?).
My only reservation about the book is not personal but deals with the book's target audience. This book, unlike many of Pierce's, is not blatantly "girl-power" junior feminism. It certainly features many strong female characters, but doesn't chronicle their struggle to equal the males--which is fine by me. I just wonder how loyal Pierce fans in the target audience will react. (What is the target audience? You've probably guessed from my above tirade that I will decline to spell it out for you)
My conclusion is that Trickster's Queen is a worthwhile read for anyone who likes well-written fantasy with well-developed characters--of any age.

Book Review--Finally!

2004-11-07T16:34:00.000-05:00

Whew! I've been so busy that I haven't gotten to read many books lately. Fortunately, I found myself in the bookstore yesterday and picked up a few books. I'm already finished one...

Title: Going Postal
Author: Terry Pratchett
Read (an excerpt from) this now at http://www.harpercollins.com/catalog/pratchett/site/books/excerpt.asp?isbn=0060013133

All I can say about this book is wow! Quite possibly one of Pratchett's masterworks, he manages to turn out another hilariously entertaining book while only improving his command of character, dialogue, and plot. I've read almost all of Pratchett's novels (they're all worth reading!), and this one was probably my second favorite.
Going Postal manages to poke fun at government service, in Pratchett's careful, predominately PC way. You can tell that this is as much fun for Pratchett as it is for his readers, since all of his books radiate enthusiasm. That's not to mention the writing--he has a wonderful command of language, and spins dialogue and setting with ease. Let's not forget, either, the humor that he's renowned for, although it is somewhat obscured by the characters and plot in this latest installment. The story may seem in the beginning slightly reminiscent of one of his other books, The Truth, but it's a great story, and quite different in the end (the ending is brilliant--top form Pratchett!).
The main character, Moist Von Lipwig (yes, the name is used to its full comic potential), is a petty criminal. He doesn't think twice about sleight of hand and even thievery, but prides himself on never having actually hurt anyone. Nevertheless, he is condemned to death by hanging, and so it goes. But in Discworld nothing can go exactly as planned, and the leader of the city, the Patrician, is inclined to step in.... Lipwig quickly finds himself in a government job, doing what he avoided all his life.
The whole of Going Postal is well summed up by part of a conversation heard early in the book:

"Oh, all right. Of course, I accept as [a] natural-born criminal, habitual liar,
fraudster, and totally untrustworthy perverted genius."
"Capital! Welcome to
government service!"

Now, if this whole thing seems like a giant testimonial to Terry Pratchett...it
is. He's one of--if not the only one of--my favorite authors. If you don't like
his work, that's okay--everyone has different tastes. But if you haven't been
introduced to the wonderfully twisted Discworld, now's a good a time as any! If
you've read the book (or any/none of his books), don't hesitate to e-mail me or
leave comments. Thanks for reading!

Nov. 15 Forbes/Generic Media Ramblings

2004-11-03T21:21:00.000-05:00

First off, let's get one thing out of the way--yes, I read almost every magazine in existence ;).

The media in general has been going a little crazy because of the election. Speaking of which, I'm not too pleased that Kerry lost, but at least it was won fairly this time (hopefully...). The one media statistic that I've read several times and seen on TV is that only 17% of voters 18-30 even bothered going to the polls yesterday. Being a college student myself, I'm tremendously ashamed of that number. Watch some TV (or even better, actually read something!), formulate an opinion, and then GO VOTE in '08! It doesn't even take that long, and I doubt you'll find a college student who prefers studying to driving to their voting location (absentee voting is even easier!). Come on, people. There's no place for apathy in politics. And besides...if you didn't vote, don't complain!

O-kay, I'll stop lecturing now. I hope I made my point!

Forbes, Nov. 15

Title: Defining Charity Upward
Read This Now at http://forbes.com/business/forbes/2004/1115/052.html

This really is a vicious cycle. People graduate from wealthy institutions with flashy degrees, land fantastic jobs, and send their alma mater a kickback...leaving less fortunate schools and organizations (and, by extension, those they serve) to try to "make it" on their own. The money that might go to installing a fun but extravagant amenity (such as the university ski slope mentioned in the article) in a well-off university could--and should--go to feed hungry kids or help people graduate from high school in a charitable organization. Even less well-endowed schools could use the money. Ugh. It should stop.

That's it for now! Just wait until the election results articles start to come...

A Really Uneventful Week

2004-10-27T17:49:00.000-05:00

Well, I've read my usual week's supply of magazines, and there's really not much to say! I'm amazed at how one-track the minds of these magazine writers can be. Between five-plus magazines, I'd think that they could find something to talk about other than the Election (not that that's not important...GO VOTE!) and the flu vaccine shortage. It would help if they'd write NEWs istead of OLDs. Anyway, hope to read some more fresh material soon. (The NYTimes has been more promising, but I didn't save any articles for comment.)
Sorry!

Newsweek, October 25, 2004

2004-10-22T00:57:00.000-05:00

I have several articles to comment on in this issue of Newsweek.

Title: Stem Cell Division
Read This Now at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6263270/site/Newsweek/

The first (and arguably most controversial) regards stem cell research. . To begin with, let me state my opinion loud and clear. I agree with stem cell research. I think it's great. Do it. If you disagree, though, that's okay. I can't tell you what to think. The only thing I ask is that you hear me out.
For those unfamiliar with the specifics of stem cell research, it entails growing a human embryo until it becomes a ball of 100 cells, called a blastocyst. The blastocyst yields stem cells that differentiate into multitudes of different types of cells within the human body. If they were able to be given to people with cell damage, stem cells could replace the cells that were there naturally before. As you might imagine, they could be a huge boon to those with spinal cord damage, Alzheimer's, and a variety of other problems.
As you also might imagine, however, the involvement of human embryos causes huge amounts of controversy. There has been a great religious outcry over it, saying that using human embryos is killing a human being. It is also often argued by the opponents of stem cell research that it offers a false glimmer of hope to those who might benefit from it, because an applicable use is so far off.
I think that any hope is better than none for people who might ultimately benefit from stem cell research. The tragic death of Christopher Reeve brings back into the spotlight his tireless advocacy for research, illustrating how important it is to these people. My personal feeling is that the embryos used do not have the capacity to feel, and it would be a tremendous step forward for science to put them to good use. I know that most of them would be discarded if they weren't used for research.
It is my opinion that President Bush is not providing enough funding and opportunities for stem cell research. According to the Newsweek article, of the purported 78 cell lines that the President made "available" for research, only 22 lines are truly viable, and even they could be problematic. John Kerry will provide $100 million for stem cell research, but even that is inadequate. You can never spend enough money on saving lives.
So that's what I believe. If you believe differently, I can accept that. I'll get off my soapbox now!

Article: Inventing the Future: This is Not a Real Diamond
Read This Now at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6256766/site/newsweek/

I'm sorry, but this is just cool. A man-made diamond? Imagine the implications for the computer industry. Diamond microchips could transmit more information in a smaller space. They just needed a way to make them cheaply. It looks like they've found it. Not to mention the fact that the jewelry industry's probably jumping for joy...or not....

Article: Sony Gets Personal
Read This Now at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6262043/site/newsweek/

Wow. There's a lot here. The article is about Sony's new gaming device, a handheld, called the PlayStation Portable. It will not only play games but be a digital picture, movie, and music player as well. I am a gamer. I play a lot of video games. But as with all new tech, I've got to see it to believe it. The short battery life (the article describes it as 8 hours gameplay, 2 hours movie-watching) is also a negative. I'll hold out further judgment until I see the thing.

So that's it for my first blog/magazine analysis! I hope you enjoyed it/learned something/didn't fall asleep (circle one). Don't forget to leave comments or e-mail me! Thanks for reading!

Test Post

2004-10-21T21:01:00.000-05:00

Hooray! I'm now officially a Blogger. First "real" post coming soon!