What a great book. I really enjoyed reading this story about a young journalist who is asked by a dying author to write her biography. The book jacket accurately describes the book as "...a tale of Gothic strangeness featuring the Angelfield family, including the beautiful and willful Isabelle, the feral twins Adeline and Emmeline, a ghost, a governess, a topiary garden and a devastating fire."
The style of the book took some getting used to. It was written in an old-fashioned tone, more like what I would expect from a book written in the 19th century. The narrator is a young woman, ostensibly in modern-day Enlgand, but many of her comments and her lifestyle suggest an older time. Perhaps if I had read more Austin or Bronte it would be humorously familiar. For example, here she describes her return to the author's mansion:
"When I went back to Yorkshire, I received no explanation for my banishment. Judith greeted me with a constrained smile. The grayness of the daylight had crept under her skin, collected in shadows under her eyes. She pulled the curtains back a few more inches in my sitting room, explosing a bit more window, but it made no difference to the glloom. "Blasted weather," she exclaimed, and I thought she seemed at the end of her tether."
There is a lot in the book for book-lovers specifically. Not only is the main character the daughter of a bookseller and herself a bibliophile, but she is interviewing an author, and several pivotal scenes occur in libraries. At one point she runs a fever and faints, and a doctor is brought in. He suspects that her ailments are in her head. "I reached for the prescription. In a vigorous scrawl, he had inked: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes. Take ten pages, twice a day, till end of course."
The book is a mystery, and a good one. There are several great twists, and enough clues that the reader could play along if desired. But it's also a great novel. There are wonderful moments of symbolism, plot, and good thick characters. The charaters form a wonderful canvas where Setterfeld gives us parallels and comparisons between them throughout the book. Each character individually taken is complex and compelling, but the real beauty is each of the characters taken in contrast to the others. In some cases it's governess/doctor or twin/twin or mother/daughter or lover/lover, but the pairs are amazingly effective in further elucidating the characters.
I often felt spooked and chilly reading it, as if it were raining outside, which in the book it often was. Setterfield created what I would describe as several layers of a fairytale world, and I fell right into it.
Friday, March 23, 2007
Monday, March 19, 2007
What is the What by Dave Eggers
This was a special book. I am an unabashed Dave Eggers fan; he is one of the few authors whose books I look forward to prior to their release. This book is a fictionalized account of the journey one of the "lost boys" of Sudan across Sudan and ultimately to Atlanta, Georgia. Valentino, the protagonist, is one of thousands of young boys who walked across Sudan during the country's Civil War. The book alternates between present time in Atlanta, and his childhood in Sudan.
Strangely, Eggers and Valentino position the book as a novel, not as a biography. Given how broadly Eggers interpreted his own life in A Heartbreaking Work... and still called it nonfiction, that this was considered fiction was a surprising choice. Valentino explains it in the preface:
"This book was born out of the desire on the part of myself and the author to reach out to others to help them understand the atrocities many successive governments of Sudan committed before and during the civil war. To that end, over the course of many years, I told my story orally to the author. He then concocted this novel, approximating my own voice and using the basic events of my life as the foundation Because many of the passages are fictional, the result is called a novel."
Voice is probably the most impressive aspect of the book. Often while I was reading, I forgot that it was not written by Valentino. Given that English is not Valentino's first language, it is hard to believe that there is not a little bit of Eggers in the voice. However, I did hear an interview with the two of them where Valentino remarked that he was amazed that Eggers captured his voice as well as he did.
The Eggers/Valentino team portrayed certain events with amazingly succinct descriptions. I was impressed by how effectively Eggers combined a short episode with an emotion. As the reader, I was easily led through Valentino's range of emotions: most notably, fear, grief, anger. The following scene took place during the boys' march across Sudan.
"Deng walked behind me, insisting on holding my shirt. This was a practice favored this night and on later nights by the youngest boys--holding the shirt of the boy ahead. Deng and I were certainly among the smallest of the walking boys. The most accommodating boys would remove an arm from its sleeve and allow those behind them to use the sleeve as a leash. Many boys did this with their younger brothers. There were many pairs of brothers in the group, and in the morning, when roll was called, when I heard their names called I felt such envy. I knew nothing about my brothers now: whether they were alive or dead or at the bottom of a well."
And this episode occurred once he was living in a refugee camp in Ethiopia:
"More boys arrived every day, families too. Every day I saw them crossing the river. They came in the morning and they came in the afternoon and when I woke up more had come in the night. Some days one hundred came, some days many more. Some groups were like mine, hundreds of emaciated boys, half of them naked, and a few elders; some groups were only women and girls and babies, accompanied by young SPLA officers with guns tied to their backs. The people came without end, and each time they crossed the river, we knew it meant that the food we had would need to be further divided. I came to resent the sight of my own people, to loathe how many of them there were, how needful, gangrenous, bug-eyed, and wailing.
One day a group of boys threw rocks at a group of new arrivals. The rock-throwing boys were beaten severely and it never happened again, but in my mind, I threw rocks, too. I threw rocks at the women and the children and wanted to throw rocks at the soldiers but I threw rocks at no one."
Eggers and Valentino do no less of a superb job describing Valentino's life once he makes it to the U.S. Several months ago, I saw a movie called "Lost Boys of Sudan" at a local theater, then met a few of the men who had immigrated here. The theme of that movie, mirrored in this book, was that while moving to the U.S. certainly got the boys out of danger and offered them many opportunities they would not have otherwise had, it was an extremely difficult transition.
Many of the "lost boys" had minimum wage jobs, difficulty adjusting to school, unfriendly neighbors, and a life-long culture shock. The structure of the book, juxtaposing this life with his life in Sudan, succeeds in demonstrating the different universes of suffering and how experiencing a small injustice after a large injustice does not make it any more just.
In one passage, Valentino says:
"The thought of all that time wasted, so much time sitting on that wooden stool, cataloging, smiling, thanking, filing--all while I should have been in school--is to much for me to contemplate."
"I was taking home less than $200 a week after taxes," he comments, "I knew men in Kakuma [Ethiopia] who were doing better than that, relatively speaking, selling sneakers made of rope and rubber tires."
I realize there are a lot of quotations in this entry, but the writing in this book was really special. One thing I did not mention is that it's funny, too. There are laugh-out-loud moments, and a drifting sardonic internal monologue that found humor in tragedy. Finally, Eggers did a wonderful job structuring the book so it had an ending. Since Valentino is still living, I was pleasantly surprised to feel some amount of closure (albeit mixed with curiosity) upon finishing the book.
Overall, I really enjoyed this book, and learned a lot, too.
Strangely, Eggers and Valentino position the book as a novel, not as a biography. Given how broadly Eggers interpreted his own life in A Heartbreaking Work... and still called it nonfiction, that this was considered fiction was a surprising choice. Valentino explains it in the preface:
"This book was born out of the desire on the part of myself and the author to reach out to others to help them understand the atrocities many successive governments of Sudan committed before and during the civil war. To that end, over the course of many years, I told my story orally to the author. He then concocted this novel, approximating my own voice and using the basic events of my life as the foundation Because many of the passages are fictional, the result is called a novel."
Voice is probably the most impressive aspect of the book. Often while I was reading, I forgot that it was not written by Valentino. Given that English is not Valentino's first language, it is hard to believe that there is not a little bit of Eggers in the voice. However, I did hear an interview with the two of them where Valentino remarked that he was amazed that Eggers captured his voice as well as he did.
The Eggers/Valentino team portrayed certain events with amazingly succinct descriptions. I was impressed by how effectively Eggers combined a short episode with an emotion. As the reader, I was easily led through Valentino's range of emotions: most notably, fear, grief, anger. The following scene took place during the boys' march across Sudan.
"Deng walked behind me, insisting on holding my shirt. This was a practice favored this night and on later nights by the youngest boys--holding the shirt of the boy ahead. Deng and I were certainly among the smallest of the walking boys. The most accommodating boys would remove an arm from its sleeve and allow those behind them to use the sleeve as a leash. Many boys did this with their younger brothers. There were many pairs of brothers in the group, and in the morning, when roll was called, when I heard their names called I felt such envy. I knew nothing about my brothers now: whether they were alive or dead or at the bottom of a well."
And this episode occurred once he was living in a refugee camp in Ethiopia:
"More boys arrived every day, families too. Every day I saw them crossing the river. They came in the morning and they came in the afternoon and when I woke up more had come in the night. Some days one hundred came, some days many more. Some groups were like mine, hundreds of emaciated boys, half of them naked, and a few elders; some groups were only women and girls and babies, accompanied by young SPLA officers with guns tied to their backs. The people came without end, and each time they crossed the river, we knew it meant that the food we had would need to be further divided. I came to resent the sight of my own people, to loathe how many of them there were, how needful, gangrenous, bug-eyed, and wailing.
One day a group of boys threw rocks at a group of new arrivals. The rock-throwing boys were beaten severely and it never happened again, but in my mind, I threw rocks, too. I threw rocks at the women and the children and wanted to throw rocks at the soldiers but I threw rocks at no one."
Eggers and Valentino do no less of a superb job describing Valentino's life once he makes it to the U.S. Several months ago, I saw a movie called "Lost Boys of Sudan" at a local theater, then met a few of the men who had immigrated here. The theme of that movie, mirrored in this book, was that while moving to the U.S. certainly got the boys out of danger and offered them many opportunities they would not have otherwise had, it was an extremely difficult transition.
Many of the "lost boys" had minimum wage jobs, difficulty adjusting to school, unfriendly neighbors, and a life-long culture shock. The structure of the book, juxtaposing this life with his life in Sudan, succeeds in demonstrating the different universes of suffering and how experiencing a small injustice after a large injustice does not make it any more just.
In one passage, Valentino says:
"The thought of all that time wasted, so much time sitting on that wooden stool, cataloging, smiling, thanking, filing--all while I should have been in school--is to much for me to contemplate."
"I was taking home less than $200 a week after taxes," he comments, "I knew men in Kakuma [Ethiopia] who were doing better than that, relatively speaking, selling sneakers made of rope and rubber tires."
I realize there are a lot of quotations in this entry, but the writing in this book was really special. One thing I did not mention is that it's funny, too. There are laugh-out-loud moments, and a drifting sardonic internal monologue that found humor in tragedy. Finally, Eggers did a wonderful job structuring the book so it had an ending. Since Valentino is still living, I was pleasantly surprised to feel some amount of closure (albeit mixed with curiosity) upon finishing the book.
Overall, I really enjoyed this book, and learned a lot, too.
Saturday, March 03, 2007
Country of Origin by Don Lee
This book was recommended to me by Deena last June. She and I overlap somewhat with books, although she is more of a fan of mysteries than I am. Her comment on it was that she liked it, but it was "nothing spectacular." I think that's a fair assessment.
The book is about an American who disappears in Tokyo and the various people connected to her life. From the jacket, this book purports to be not only a good, old-fashioned mystery, but also a search for identity. I did not find that to be true. True, many of the characters were multi-racial and struggling with identity. And Lee did include some colorful descriptions of various groups within Japan. "The Japanese were yasashi, wet," he writes, "They stuck to one another in tribes like wet, glutinous rice. They were warm, gentle, emotional, whereas Westerners were dry and hard and individualistic, like thir rice, which fell apart into solitary grains."
But as a whole, the struggles with identity and race and background were not fully enough explored to make for good reading. The book was too pulpy to be an identity book and too poetic for a mystery. I was also distressed by some of the depictions of the sex trade in Japan, even though I'm not typically a book prude.
The narrative itself read quickly and the mystery aspect of the story was reasonably compelling. I also liked that as a mystery, it was possible to play along with the characters and start figuring out different aspects of the story.
I did enjoy the humor written into the book. The main character collects idioms incorrectly munged into Japanese, and her list of them is hilarious. I also appreciated how well-developed some of the characters were. Contained in one of their backstories was a great description of someone's thoughts about a huge mistake he made, "Occasionally he thought what had happened in Sao Paulo had changed him, had disrupted his development from the person he had wantd to be in to the person he was now..."
Overall, I think that this book needed to more fully commit to being either a great mystery or a great novel. I would most strongly compare this to another mystery I was not crazy about, Case Histories by Kate Atkinson. However, I read a lot of novels set in other countries that address identity, so I'm open to the idea that I am spoiled that way.
The book is about an American who disappears in Tokyo and the various people connected to her life. From the jacket, this book purports to be not only a good, old-fashioned mystery, but also a search for identity. I did not find that to be true. True, many of the characters were multi-racial and struggling with identity. And Lee did include some colorful descriptions of various groups within Japan. "The Japanese were yasashi, wet," he writes, "They stuck to one another in tribes like wet, glutinous rice. They were warm, gentle, emotional, whereas Westerners were dry and hard and individualistic, like thir rice, which fell apart into solitary grains."
But as a whole, the struggles with identity and race and background were not fully enough explored to make for good reading. The book was too pulpy to be an identity book and too poetic for a mystery. I was also distressed by some of the depictions of the sex trade in Japan, even though I'm not typically a book prude.
The narrative itself read quickly and the mystery aspect of the story was reasonably compelling. I also liked that as a mystery, it was possible to play along with the characters and start figuring out different aspects of the story.
I did enjoy the humor written into the book. The main character collects idioms incorrectly munged into Japanese, and her list of them is hilarious. I also appreciated how well-developed some of the characters were. Contained in one of their backstories was a great description of someone's thoughts about a huge mistake he made, "Occasionally he thought what had happened in Sao Paulo had changed him, had disrupted his development from the person he had wantd to be in to the person he was now..."
Overall, I think that this book needed to more fully commit to being either a great mystery or a great novel. I would most strongly compare this to another mystery I was not crazy about, Case Histories by Kate Atkinson. However, I read a lot of novels set in other countries that address identity, so I'm open to the idea that I am spoiled that way.
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
The Blind Side by Michael Lewis
Let me start by saying that I loved this book.
When I read, I dog-ear the bottom corner of each page that I enjoy so I can return to them while writing my blog entries. For this book I started dog-ear-ring on page 45 and gave up on page 71 since it was nearly every page. I think I noticed this book on Slate.com's booklist, although once I started reading it, I realized I had also read excerpts from it in the New York Times Magazine a few months back.
The book interweaves two stories. One is of the aggressively rising salaries of the left tackle in football, tracing the history back to Lawrence Taylor's dominance as a defensive lineman. Now, if you are reading that sentence and don't know what a left tackle or defensive lineman is, don't despair. One of Lewis' gifts is his ability to explain what is going on in the strategy of a football play without dumbing it down. I started the book knowing just how the scoring works in football, but little else. By the end of the book, I had learned a significant amount about football, prompting me to wake up my ever-agreeable fiancee Webster one night and have him draw out all the players and their positions. Did you know that unlike baseball, the offensive and defensive players are different guys??
The second story Lewis tells is of the high school career of a black child named Michael growing up in inner city Memphis. "Big Mike" is discovered as a football prospect, and then adopted by an affluent white family and placed in a suburban Christian high school.
It's Mike's size that first attracts attention (although his agility and his memorization skills follow shortly after), "Hugh's next thought was that he misjudged the boy's mass. No human being who moved that quickly could possibly weigh as much as 300 pounds. 'That's when I had them weigh him,' said Hugh. 'One of the coaches took him into the gym and put him on the scale, but he overloaded the scale.' The team doctor drove him away and put him on what the Briarcrest coaches were later informed was a cattle scale: 344 pounds, it read. On the light side, for a cow, delightfully beefy for a hgih school sophomore football player. Especially one who could run."
Many issues around affirmative action, privilege, and education are themes throughout the book. Unlike other books I've read that cover the same subject matter, Lewis describes the situations incredibly clearly, and the ethical concerns are laid out for the reader with no prejudice in any particular direction. One way he does this is through his descriptions of the other people in the story, "Leigh Anne Tuohy [his adoptive mother] was trying to do for one boy what economists had been trying to do, with little success, for less developed countries for the last fifty years. Kick him out of one growth path and onto another."
In another passage, Lewis writes, "Sean [his adoptive father] was interested in poor jocks in the same way that a former diva might be interestd in opera singers, or a Jesuit scholar in debators. What he liked about them was that he knew how to help them. 'What I learned playing basketball at Ole Miss,' he said, 'was what not to do: beat up a kid. It's easy to beat up a kid. The hard thing to do is to build him up.'"
I am still unsure of Lewis' opinion on the issues surrounding Michael's getting into college and subsequent college career, which is fine with me. As a mark of a good book, I am unsure of my own opinion on some of these issues as well. But I have not stopped thinking about him. I have nothing but praise for this book, and can't wait to read his baseball book, Moneyball. My only regret is that football season isn't for another several months, so I won't be able to apply what I learned in this book.
When I read, I dog-ear the bottom corner of each page that I enjoy so I can return to them while writing my blog entries. For this book I started dog-ear-ring on page 45 and gave up on page 71 since it was nearly every page. I think I noticed this book on Slate.com's booklist, although once I started reading it, I realized I had also read excerpts from it in the New York Times Magazine a few months back.
The book interweaves two stories. One is of the aggressively rising salaries of the left tackle in football, tracing the history back to Lawrence Taylor's dominance as a defensive lineman. Now, if you are reading that sentence and don't know what a left tackle or defensive lineman is, don't despair. One of Lewis' gifts is his ability to explain what is going on in the strategy of a football play without dumbing it down. I started the book knowing just how the scoring works in football, but little else. By the end of the book, I had learned a significant amount about football, prompting me to wake up my ever-agreeable fiancee Webster one night and have him draw out all the players and their positions. Did you know that unlike baseball, the offensive and defensive players are different guys??
The second story Lewis tells is of the high school career of a black child named Michael growing up in inner city Memphis. "Big Mike" is discovered as a football prospect, and then adopted by an affluent white family and placed in a suburban Christian high school.
It's Mike's size that first attracts attention (although his agility and his memorization skills follow shortly after), "Hugh's next thought was that he misjudged the boy's mass. No human being who moved that quickly could possibly weigh as much as 300 pounds. 'That's when I had them weigh him,' said Hugh. 'One of the coaches took him into the gym and put him on the scale, but he overloaded the scale.' The team doctor drove him away and put him on what the Briarcrest coaches were later informed was a cattle scale: 344 pounds, it read. On the light side, for a cow, delightfully beefy for a hgih school sophomore football player. Especially one who could run."
Many issues around affirmative action, privilege, and education are themes throughout the book. Unlike other books I've read that cover the same subject matter, Lewis describes the situations incredibly clearly, and the ethical concerns are laid out for the reader with no prejudice in any particular direction. One way he does this is through his descriptions of the other people in the story, "Leigh Anne Tuohy [his adoptive mother] was trying to do for one boy what economists had been trying to do, with little success, for less developed countries for the last fifty years. Kick him out of one growth path and onto another."
In another passage, Lewis writes, "Sean [his adoptive father] was interested in poor jocks in the same way that a former diva might be interestd in opera singers, or a Jesuit scholar in debators. What he liked about them was that he knew how to help them. 'What I learned playing basketball at Ole Miss,' he said, 'was what not to do: beat up a kid. It's easy to beat up a kid. The hard thing to do is to build him up.'"
I am still unsure of Lewis' opinion on the issues surrounding Michael's getting into college and subsequent college career, which is fine with me. As a mark of a good book, I am unsure of my own opinion on some of these issues as well. But I have not stopped thinking about him. I have nothing but praise for this book, and can't wait to read his baseball book, Moneyball. My only regret is that football season isn't for another several months, so I won't be able to apply what I learned in this book.
Thursday, February 15, 2007
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See
This book was also on the New York Times list for 2006 (or was it Slate.com?). I really enjoyed the story and the cultural background that See so skillfully painted. It could have been just another "Ya-Ya sisterhood," or just a depiction of 19th century Hunan province, or just a coming-of-age story, but it was all of those things and more.
This story follows two "Old Sames" -- girls matched at a young age as soul mates based on the characters in their names and on the dates of their birth. As the narrator (Lily) says early on in the book, "How could we conceive of deep love, friendship, and everlasting commitment when we were only seven? We had not even met, and even if we had, we didn't understand those feelings one bit. They were just words I wrote, hoping that one day they would come true."
Old Sames are just one of the structured women's friendships mentioned in the book. Other characters are part of "sworn sisterhoods" after marriage as an alternative. A women's writing style called Nu Shu also played a central role in the story. Women wrote to each other in this poetic language. Lily and her Old Same pass a fan back and forth on which they correspond in Nu Shu.
The story begins when the girls are seven and follows them through their senior years, which in the 1800s in rural China is actually about 50. During their lifetimes, the girls have parallel experiences with footbinding, marriage, sexuality, the pressure to have sons, and the changing political (and thus economic) climate. See plays with fate and destiny through the book, leaving Lily to comment at one point, "But this is the nature of fate. You make choices that are good and sound, but the gods have other plans for you."
The scenes that describe the girls' footbinding are especially memorable. I had read about footbinding in the past, but the mechanics were explained in complete and grotesque detail. Also memorable were the relationships between the girls and their mothers-in-law...what they described as fair treatment sounded downright abusive to me. Later in the book, the women make a treacherous trek through the mountains during the Taiping Rebellion which has some unforgettable scenes.
My only negative criticism of the book is the occasional modern idiom that Lily used. Her voice sounded otherwise authentic, but I think the editing missed a few phrases. This surprised me, since the book was obviously well-researched and carefully thought out.
I would definitely recommend this book. Bring your passport -- you will be transported to 19th century China.
This story follows two "Old Sames" -- girls matched at a young age as soul mates based on the characters in their names and on the dates of their birth. As the narrator (Lily) says early on in the book, "How could we conceive of deep love, friendship, and everlasting commitment when we were only seven? We had not even met, and even if we had, we didn't understand those feelings one bit. They were just words I wrote, hoping that one day they would come true."
Old Sames are just one of the structured women's friendships mentioned in the book. Other characters are part of "sworn sisterhoods" after marriage as an alternative. A women's writing style called Nu Shu also played a central role in the story. Women wrote to each other in this poetic language. Lily and her Old Same pass a fan back and forth on which they correspond in Nu Shu.
The story begins when the girls are seven and follows them through their senior years, which in the 1800s in rural China is actually about 50. During their lifetimes, the girls have parallel experiences with footbinding, marriage, sexuality, the pressure to have sons, and the changing political (and thus economic) climate. See plays with fate and destiny through the book, leaving Lily to comment at one point, "But this is the nature of fate. You make choices that are good and sound, but the gods have other plans for you."
The scenes that describe the girls' footbinding are especially memorable. I had read about footbinding in the past, but the mechanics were explained in complete and grotesque detail. Also memorable were the relationships between the girls and their mothers-in-law...what they described as fair treatment sounded downright abusive to me. Later in the book, the women make a treacherous trek through the mountains during the Taiping Rebellion which has some unforgettable scenes.
My only negative criticism of the book is the occasional modern idiom that Lily used. Her voice sounded otherwise authentic, but I think the editing missed a few phrases. This surprised me, since the book was obviously well-researched and carefully thought out.
I would definitely recommend this book. Bring your passport -- you will be transported to 19th century China.
Sunday, February 11, 2007
My Name Is Bill by Susan Cheever
I heard about this book on NPR, when Susan Cheever was being interviewed about a more recently published book. Having read several books about about addiction and recovery, I decided to learn a little more about the life of Bill Wilson, the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.
The first half of this book was about Bill's early life, and there were many characteristics of his upbringing that probably reinforced his alcoholic tendencies. He was a guy who strove for perfection, never felt comfortable in his own skin, and who had low self esteem and a mother with high expectations. Bill seemed to develop an alcoholism that was in part a product of the puritanical New England world he grew up in.
The later part of the book covered both Bill's evolution as an alcoholic (and ultimately recovering alcoholic) as well as the evolution of the organization that became Alcoholics Anonymous. There was a lot of administrative conflict within the organization which was discussed. As a business person I found the sections around how AA was conceived and the arguments around the mission of AA very interesting.
While the story was inspiring, I was not a fan of Cheever's writing style. She was too poetic at times, and sometimes it seemed like she was working too hard to tell a specific story. Early in the book, she told several anecdotes out of chronological order, which I did not like. These factors made me feel like I should have considered one of the other biographies about Bill that had been written. (I would definitely like to read Bill's wife's biography -- she was the founder of Al-anon.)
As someone whose main exposure to AA was through NYPD Blue episodes, I enjoyed learning about the spirit of the group and some of the thought behind it. I was interested to learn that Bill insisted on anonymity not just to protect the members, but also to protect the organization. There are strong connections between alcoholics and grandiosity, so anonymity removes the potential for fame. Bill himself even turned down an honorary degree from Yale to ensure the validity of AA.
I also enjoyed thinking about what makes meetings effective. Webster suggested it was knowing that you were not alone, and that you were answering to a room of people depending on you. In the book there was also a lot of discussion of the importance in AA of recovering alcoholics helping other people to get sober. There were several years while Bill was starting AA before it was successful when all it was doing was keeping him sober.
This book sparked my curiosity not only about Al-anon, but also to read about how the philosophy of AA translated to Narcotics Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous, and the other similar organizations. I was also interested to investigate Cheevers's dismissive treatment of whether AA works for non-religious people. I remember hearing about an organization that was atheistic rather than deistic (like AA) and wonder what percentage of alcoholics recover through the 12-step methods from AA specifically.
The first half of this book was about Bill's early life, and there were many characteristics of his upbringing that probably reinforced his alcoholic tendencies. He was a guy who strove for perfection, never felt comfortable in his own skin, and who had low self esteem and a mother with high expectations. Bill seemed to develop an alcoholism that was in part a product of the puritanical New England world he grew up in.
The later part of the book covered both Bill's evolution as an alcoholic (and ultimately recovering alcoholic) as well as the evolution of the organization that became Alcoholics Anonymous. There was a lot of administrative conflict within the organization which was discussed. As a business person I found the sections around how AA was conceived and the arguments around the mission of AA very interesting.
While the story was inspiring, I was not a fan of Cheever's writing style. She was too poetic at times, and sometimes it seemed like she was working too hard to tell a specific story. Early in the book, she told several anecdotes out of chronological order, which I did not like. These factors made me feel like I should have considered one of the other biographies about Bill that had been written. (I would definitely like to read Bill's wife's biography -- she was the founder of Al-anon.)
As someone whose main exposure to AA was through NYPD Blue episodes, I enjoyed learning about the spirit of the group and some of the thought behind it. I was interested to learn that Bill insisted on anonymity not just to protect the members, but also to protect the organization. There are strong connections between alcoholics and grandiosity, so anonymity removes the potential for fame. Bill himself even turned down an honorary degree from Yale to ensure the validity of AA.
I also enjoyed thinking about what makes meetings effective. Webster suggested it was knowing that you were not alone, and that you were answering to a room of people depending on you. In the book there was also a lot of discussion of the importance in AA of recovering alcoholics helping other people to get sober. There were several years while Bill was starting AA before it was successful when all it was doing was keeping him sober.
This book sparked my curiosity not only about Al-anon, but also to read about how the philosophy of AA translated to Narcotics Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous, and the other similar organizations. I was also interested to investigate Cheevers's dismissive treatment of whether AA works for non-religious people. I remember hearing about an organization that was atheistic rather than deistic (like AA) and wonder what percentage of alcoholics recover through the 12-step methods from AA specifically.
Friday, February 09, 2007
The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards
Finally, a book I liked reading. This one made it on to my booklist from the New York Times’ 2006 best-books list, I think.
Memory Keeper’s Daughter told the story of a couple who have twins, and the husband discovers that the daughter has Downs Syndrome. He decides to tell his wife that she died at birth and gives her away, ostensibly to live in an institution. However, the nurse charged with bringing her to the institution decides to keep her instead. So far we are on page 20, so I’m not ruining anything for you.
This book had a significant number of well-written characters, at least seven. Following their lives over thirty years is no small feat, but Edwards does a great job of it. And the book ends up being only marginally about Downs Syndrome, although it is worth mentioning that the attitudes towards D.S. in the 1960s and ‘70s portrayed in the book are disturbing. This book is about what all great books are about: love, betrayal, siblings, marriages, regret, and so on.
There were some great contrasts in this book, between the mothers of the babies (Caroline and Norah), the fathers of each of the children, the birth mother and her sister, and of course the children themselves as they grow up. I’ve been thinking a lot about how siblings can often reveal an alternate version of one’s self, a more extreme or less extreme picture of one’s fears and desires. This book takes that concept and applies it to all the parallel characters masterfully.
Caroline, the mother of the child with Downs, was probably my favorite character, and I think she is supposed to be. One of the things about her I loved is that she sees her struggles as a mother as specific to her child’s disability. It is clear to the reader (partially through the contrasts to Norah, the other mother) that these concerns are specific to mothering, not to mothering a child with Downs. As she learns this through the story, one cannot help but think about one’s own pains and examine whether they are unique to us or more universal.
There was also just some plain great writing in the book. At one point, a character's sister asks her, “Do you and David talk about big things or small things.” At another point, one of the characters "nodded, unable to speak above the sound of the river, the smell of its dark banks, the starts roaring everywhere, swirling, alive." Though this is not a short book, at times Edwards says a lot with a few carefully chosen words.
Towards the end of the book, Norah finds boxes of photographs that her husband had kept. "Norah glanced at the boxes of photographs, wanting to take that young woman she had been by the arm and shake her gently. Keep going, she wanted to tell her. Don't give up. Your life will be fine in the end."
And for many of the characters, it is.
Memory Keeper’s Daughter told the story of a couple who have twins, and the husband discovers that the daughter has Downs Syndrome. He decides to tell his wife that she died at birth and gives her away, ostensibly to live in an institution. However, the nurse charged with bringing her to the institution decides to keep her instead. So far we are on page 20, so I’m not ruining anything for you.
This book had a significant number of well-written characters, at least seven. Following their lives over thirty years is no small feat, but Edwards does a great job of it. And the book ends up being only marginally about Downs Syndrome, although it is worth mentioning that the attitudes towards D.S. in the 1960s and ‘70s portrayed in the book are disturbing. This book is about what all great books are about: love, betrayal, siblings, marriages, regret, and so on.
There were some great contrasts in this book, between the mothers of the babies (Caroline and Norah), the fathers of each of the children, the birth mother and her sister, and of course the children themselves as they grow up. I’ve been thinking a lot about how siblings can often reveal an alternate version of one’s self, a more extreme or less extreme picture of one’s fears and desires. This book takes that concept and applies it to all the parallel characters masterfully.
Caroline, the mother of the child with Downs, was probably my favorite character, and I think she is supposed to be. One of the things about her I loved is that she sees her struggles as a mother as specific to her child’s disability. It is clear to the reader (partially through the contrasts to Norah, the other mother) that these concerns are specific to mothering, not to mothering a child with Downs. As she learns this through the story, one cannot help but think about one’s own pains and examine whether they are unique to us or more universal.
There was also just some plain great writing in the book. At one point, a character's sister asks her, “Do you and David talk about big things or small things.” At another point, one of the characters "nodded, unable to speak above the sound of the river, the smell of its dark banks, the starts roaring everywhere, swirling, alive." Though this is not a short book, at times Edwards says a lot with a few carefully chosen words.
Towards the end of the book, Norah finds boxes of photographs that her husband had kept. "Norah glanced at the boxes of photographs, wanting to take that young woman she had been by the arm and shake her gently. Keep going, she wanted to tell her. Don't give up. Your life will be fine in the end."
And for many of the characters, it is.
Sunday, February 04, 2007
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
This book first came to my attention as an Amazon recommendation. I recognized it from the Barnes and Noble table that has the Oprah-esque trade paperbacks I usually enjoy. The Haftorah for my bat mitvah was about the city of Gilead, so I thought I might also have a connection to the book that way. Unfortunately, it’s probably my least favorite book in a long time.
Gilead is a novel written as a series of letters (or maybe one long letter) from a minister to his son, when the father finds out that he is dying. It is set in Iowa in the 1950's. The letter format is a device the author uses to enable the narrator to tell his life story; unfortunately for the book it is not believable that this man’s secrets and concerns would go into a letter to his son.
The first third of the book goes through the minister's life story slowly, weaving his family's stories with mundane events taking place in the present. I enjoyed this part of the book, expecting that it was properly preparing the reader for what he’d face later in life. Many of the stories were charming and some of them captured charaters with incredible detail.
"Once we baptized a litter of cats. They were dusty little barn cats just steady on their legs, the kind of waifish creatures that live their anonymouse lives keeping the mice down and have no interest in humans at all, except to avoid them. But the animals all seem to start out sociable, so we were always pleased to find new kittens prowling out of whatever cranny their mother had tried to hide them in, as ready to play we we were. It occurred to one of the girls to swaddle them up in a doll's dress--there was only one dress, which was just as well since the cats could hardly tolerate a moment in it and would have to have been unswaddled as soon as they were christened in any case. I myself moistened their brow, repeating the full Trinitarian formula."
However, at about the third-mark, the narrator begins to hint at bad feelings he has towards his best friend’s grown son, Jack. The focus of the plot in the remainder of the book is foreshadowing the events Jack is involved in and finally telling his son (and the reader) what they are. While the actual story about Jack was compelling and surprising and everything you’d want it to be, its placement in a letter someone else was writing was not well done. And the supposed suspense around what it was, the supposed hesitancy the narrator had about telling his son the story, did not achieve anything.
This is the second book in a row that I’ve commented had the reader wondering about some future bad thing that was going to happen through most of the book. In both cases, the focus the author put on this anticipation and buildup was not enjoyable to read. It’s not a fundamentally flawed style, for example, God of Small Things does this quite effectively. But particularly in Gilead it had me impatient, not engaged.
One thing I did like about the book was the actual narrator. He comes across as a humble, pleasant, kind man. Though fictional, he restored a little faith in me that in fact there is a way for religion to be a completely positive force in the world. He reminds me of a minister I once met on a plane to Kansas. That said, the book was hardly worth the read just for the narrator.
Gilead is a novel written as a series of letters (or maybe one long letter) from a minister to his son, when the father finds out that he is dying. It is set in Iowa in the 1950's. The letter format is a device the author uses to enable the narrator to tell his life story; unfortunately for the book it is not believable that this man’s secrets and concerns would go into a letter to his son.
The first third of the book goes through the minister's life story slowly, weaving his family's stories with mundane events taking place in the present. I enjoyed this part of the book, expecting that it was properly preparing the reader for what he’d face later in life. Many of the stories were charming and some of them captured charaters with incredible detail.
"Once we baptized a litter of cats. They were dusty little barn cats just steady on their legs, the kind of waifish creatures that live their anonymouse lives keeping the mice down and have no interest in humans at all, except to avoid them. But the animals all seem to start out sociable, so we were always pleased to find new kittens prowling out of whatever cranny their mother had tried to hide them in, as ready to play we we were. It occurred to one of the girls to swaddle them up in a doll's dress--there was only one dress, which was just as well since the cats could hardly tolerate a moment in it and would have to have been unswaddled as soon as they were christened in any case. I myself moistened their brow, repeating the full Trinitarian formula."
However, at about the third-mark, the narrator begins to hint at bad feelings he has towards his best friend’s grown son, Jack. The focus of the plot in the remainder of the book is foreshadowing the events Jack is involved in and finally telling his son (and the reader) what they are. While the actual story about Jack was compelling and surprising and everything you’d want it to be, its placement in a letter someone else was writing was not well done. And the supposed suspense around what it was, the supposed hesitancy the narrator had about telling his son the story, did not achieve anything.
This is the second book in a row that I’ve commented had the reader wondering about some future bad thing that was going to happen through most of the book. In both cases, the focus the author put on this anticipation and buildup was not enjoyable to read. It’s not a fundamentally flawed style, for example, God of Small Things does this quite effectively. But particularly in Gilead it had me impatient, not engaged.
One thing I did like about the book was the actual narrator. He comes across as a humble, pleasant, kind man. Though fictional, he restored a little faith in me that in fact there is a way for religion to be a completely positive force in the world. He reminds me of a minister I once met on a plane to Kansas. That said, the book was hardly worth the read just for the narrator.
Thursday, February 01, 2007
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
This was an unusual book, which reminded me almost immediately of Atwood’s The Handmaiden’s Tale. Lisa Olin and Sara Coe each recommended this one to me, so it quickly rose the top of the to-be-read list. I had never read Remains of the Day by Ishiguro but I ignored my standard guilt at skipping a classic by the same author and plucked NLMG off the shelf at the library.
As Lisa said when she recommended it, the book is good but is not about what’s on the book jacket. I’m going to try to write about the book without giving away the major pieces of the plot. It’s ironic, or coincidental, or something, because in the book, the characters are referred to as having been “told but not told” about the unusual circumstances under which they live.
I would categorize this book as “mainstream science fiction,” in that it is science fiction incidentally not primarily. (I’d also categorize The Time Travelers Wife and a childhood favorite Girl with the Silver Eyes similarly. Even Passages, which probably falls more squarely in the fantasy realm could be described this way too.) There are elements of the book that are not possible with today’s science and medicine but these aspects of the story are juxtaposed with people who live in a society that is otherwise recognizable as ours. Certainly, social commentary emerges. One of the things Ishiguro does quite well is to effortlessly teach the reader his specialized vocabulary for this alternate world. Only in Handmaiden and perhaps Everything is Illuminated have I seen language used this way this well.
The book follows three main characters, Kath (the narrator), Tommy, and Ruth, starting when they are all students at Hailsham, ostensibly an idyllic boarding school. There are clear, well-written moments of adolescent angst; the manipulation and volatility of some of the characters also felt extremely accurate. I also related to the following passage, highlighting the importance of certain possessions:
"I don't know if you had collections where you were. When you came across old students from Hailsham, you always find them, sooner or later, getting nostalgic about their collections...You each had a wooden chest with your name on it, which you kept under your bed and filled with your possessions--the stuff you acquired from the Sales or the Exchanges. I can remember one or two students not bothering much with their collections, but most of us took enormous care, bringing things out to display, putting other things away carefully."
At first it is easy to read those personality characteristics as standard pre-teen behavior but as the book progresses, additional underlying forces emerge that explain the behavior more fully. As the narrator comments, the students are "...waiting for the moment when you realise you really are different to them; that there are people out there, like Madame, who don't hate you or wish you any harm, but who nevertheless shudder at the very thought of you--of how you were brought into this world and why--and who dread the idea of your hand brushing against theirs." Waiting and anticipation was a strong theme in this book. At a later point in the story, the narrator comments, "it was like she'd been waiting and waiting for me to do something to her and she thought the time had come now."
The characters know, having been "told but not told," that something ominous is coming. In one passage, Tommy is describing a new type of animal he had begun to draw, unconsciously describing society's responsibility to him:
"If you make them tiny, and you have to because the pages are only about this big, then everything changes. It's like they come to life by themselves. Then you have to draw in all these different details for them. You have to think about how they'd protect themselves, how they'd reach things."
There were some choices Ishiguro made around Kath's voice that I question. Given his (the author’s) recognition for excellent writing, I can only presume that the tone of her voice is intentional. However, the lack of emotional connection that Kath has in telling the story is surprising and not entirely justified from within the story. She also has a habit that I can only describe as annoying where she ends each chapter with a “teaser” such as, "We started to walk back toward the main house then and I waited for her to explain what she meant, but she didn't. I found out though over the next several days." In some ways, this mirrors the imperfect information that the characters have about their own lives, but it didn’t draw me in to her story as I think it was supposed to.
I hesitate to even comment on the climax because I don't want to give it away. I'll limit my comments to the following: the climactic moments are wonderful and horrible, and a scary commentary on the myths we create for ourselves.
I struggled while I was reading this book because of my problems with the narrator. However, having written about it here I appreciate the story and the themes more. As I felt after seeing The Sixth Sense , I want to go back and read it again knowing the ending. That's probably the best recommendation I can give a book.
As Lisa said when she recommended it, the book is good but is not about what’s on the book jacket. I’m going to try to write about the book without giving away the major pieces of the plot. It’s ironic, or coincidental, or something, because in the book, the characters are referred to as having been “told but not told” about the unusual circumstances under which they live.
I would categorize this book as “mainstream science fiction,” in that it is science fiction incidentally not primarily. (I’d also categorize The Time Travelers Wife and a childhood favorite Girl with the Silver Eyes similarly. Even Passages, which probably falls more squarely in the fantasy realm could be described this way too.) There are elements of the book that are not possible with today’s science and medicine but these aspects of the story are juxtaposed with people who live in a society that is otherwise recognizable as ours. Certainly, social commentary emerges. One of the things Ishiguro does quite well is to effortlessly teach the reader his specialized vocabulary for this alternate world. Only in Handmaiden and perhaps Everything is Illuminated have I seen language used this way this well.
The book follows three main characters, Kath (the narrator), Tommy, and Ruth, starting when they are all students at Hailsham, ostensibly an idyllic boarding school. There are clear, well-written moments of adolescent angst; the manipulation and volatility of some of the characters also felt extremely accurate. I also related to the following passage, highlighting the importance of certain possessions:
"I don't know if you had collections where you were. When you came across old students from Hailsham, you always find them, sooner or later, getting nostalgic about their collections...You each had a wooden chest with your name on it, which you kept under your bed and filled with your possessions--the stuff you acquired from the Sales or the Exchanges. I can remember one or two students not bothering much with their collections, but most of us took enormous care, bringing things out to display, putting other things away carefully."
At first it is easy to read those personality characteristics as standard pre-teen behavior but as the book progresses, additional underlying forces emerge that explain the behavior more fully. As the narrator comments, the students are "...waiting for the moment when you realise you really are different to them; that there are people out there, like Madame, who don't hate you or wish you any harm, but who nevertheless shudder at the very thought of you--of how you were brought into this world and why--and who dread the idea of your hand brushing against theirs." Waiting and anticipation was a strong theme in this book. At a later point in the story, the narrator comments, "it was like she'd been waiting and waiting for me to do something to her and she thought the time had come now."
The characters know, having been "told but not told," that something ominous is coming. In one passage, Tommy is describing a new type of animal he had begun to draw, unconsciously describing society's responsibility to him:
"If you make them tiny, and you have to because the pages are only about this big, then everything changes. It's like they come to life by themselves. Then you have to draw in all these different details for them. You have to think about how they'd protect themselves, how they'd reach things."
There were some choices Ishiguro made around Kath's voice that I question. Given his (the author’s) recognition for excellent writing, I can only presume that the tone of her voice is intentional. However, the lack of emotional connection that Kath has in telling the story is surprising and not entirely justified from within the story. She also has a habit that I can only describe as annoying where she ends each chapter with a “teaser” such as, "We started to walk back toward the main house then and I waited for her to explain what she meant, but she didn't. I found out though over the next several days." In some ways, this mirrors the imperfect information that the characters have about their own lives, but it didn’t draw me in to her story as I think it was supposed to.
I hesitate to even comment on the climax because I don't want to give it away. I'll limit my comments to the following: the climactic moments are wonderful and horrible, and a scary commentary on the myths we create for ourselves.
I struggled while I was reading this book because of my problems with the narrator. However, having written about it here I appreciate the story and the themes more. As I felt after seeing The Sixth Sense , I want to go back and read it again knowing the ending. That's probably the best recommendation I can give a book.
Sunday, January 28, 2007
Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt
Somewhere along the way, I've missed out on reading certain books that it seems everyone else has read. For example, on my reading list right now is "anything by Jane Austin or a Bronte sister" because that covers a class of books from which (embarrassingly) I have not read anything. Angela's Ashes is another example. In retrospect I may have skipped this book intentionally: every once in a while there is a book that is passed around as a must-read and sometimes it is good (Kite Runner, Life of Pi) but usually it is indicative of how little America reads (Da Vinci Code). Don't get me wrong, I liked the Da Vinci Code and I read most of Oprah's picks, but I don't always find the most hyped books (even the more serious-looking "trade paperbacks") to be the best. I think I had categorized Angela's Ashes as such, obviously incorrectly. Maybe the Pulizter Prize should have tipped me off.
Angela's Ashes is a memoir about growing up in abject poverty in Ireland. McCourt's family begins in America and then as economic and family pressures build, they move back to Ireland when McCourt is five. He chronicles different events in his life through age nineteen; at that point he returns to the U.S., where he lives now. (His story continues in Tis, which is now on my reading list.)
I was shocked by the conditions under which he lived. In a world of antibacterial soap and Tupperware and "use by" dates, it is hard to internalize what his life was like, although he describes it in detail. There are heartbreaking scenes throughout the book such as his licking the newsprint that fish and chips were brought home in, and flipping a mattress to confuse the fleas. Thus, I was shocked at how much humor he found in his childhood. As a narrator, his trustworthiness is reasonably confirmed by his self-depricating style. As Frank in the story gets older, McCourt writes with an increasing amount of self-awareness and humor. For example, this passage is from the night before his first day at work:
"The next worse thing is to be out in the backyard filling the kettle from the tap with the moon beaming away and Kathleen Purcell from next door perched up on the wall looking for her cat. God, Frankie McCourt, what are you doin' in your grandmother's dress? and you have to stand there in the dress with the kettle in your hand and explain how you washed your clothes which are hanging there on the line for all to see and you were so cold in the bed you put on your grandmother's dress and your uncle Pat, The Abbot, fell down and was brought home by Aunt Aggie and her husband, Pa Keating, and she drove you in to the backyard to fill this kettle and you'll take off this dress as soon as ever your clothes are dry because you never had nay desire to go through life in your dead grandmother's dress."
Alcohol played a very prevalent role in the lives of the characters he wrote about. This aspect of the story reminded me of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, where Francie's father is an alcoholic who can't hold down a job. The similarities between the themes in the two books was strong; despite TGiB being fiction, the two books bridge the geographical distance between the U.S. and Ireland to tell a single narrative of poverty and culture. At the beginning of Angela's Ashes, McCourt summarizes the story of the Irish:
"People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless, loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years."
Indeed, McCourt tells the story of an entire demographic just by telling his own life story. Recommended.
Angela's Ashes is a memoir about growing up in abject poverty in Ireland. McCourt's family begins in America and then as economic and family pressures build, they move back to Ireland when McCourt is five. He chronicles different events in his life through age nineteen; at that point he returns to the U.S., where he lives now. (His story continues in Tis, which is now on my reading list.)
I was shocked by the conditions under which he lived. In a world of antibacterial soap and Tupperware and "use by" dates, it is hard to internalize what his life was like, although he describes it in detail. There are heartbreaking scenes throughout the book such as his licking the newsprint that fish and chips were brought home in, and flipping a mattress to confuse the fleas. Thus, I was shocked at how much humor he found in his childhood. As a narrator, his trustworthiness is reasonably confirmed by his self-depricating style. As Frank in the story gets older, McCourt writes with an increasing amount of self-awareness and humor. For example, this passage is from the night before his first day at work:
"The next worse thing is to be out in the backyard filling the kettle from the tap with the moon beaming away and Kathleen Purcell from next door perched up on the wall looking for her cat. God, Frankie McCourt, what are you doin' in your grandmother's dress? and you have to stand there in the dress with the kettle in your hand and explain how you washed your clothes which are hanging there on the line for all to see and you were so cold in the bed you put on your grandmother's dress and your uncle Pat, The Abbot, fell down and was brought home by Aunt Aggie and her husband, Pa Keating, and she drove you in to the backyard to fill this kettle and you'll take off this dress as soon as ever your clothes are dry because you never had nay desire to go through life in your dead grandmother's dress."
Alcohol played a very prevalent role in the lives of the characters he wrote about. This aspect of the story reminded me of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, where Francie's father is an alcoholic who can't hold down a job. The similarities between the themes in the two books was strong; despite TGiB being fiction, the two books bridge the geographical distance between the U.S. and Ireland to tell a single narrative of poverty and culture. At the beginning of Angela's Ashes, McCourt summarizes the story of the Irish:
"People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless, loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years."
Indeed, McCourt tells the story of an entire demographic just by telling his own life story. Recommended.
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading by Maureen Corrigan
I picked up this book at Barnes and Noble on New Year's Day because the title was the story of my life. The first line of the book was also familiar: "It's not that I don't like people. It's just that when I'm in the company of others - even my nearest and dearest - there always comes a moment when I'd rather be reading a book." so I bought it.
Corrigan is the book critic for NPR's Fresh Air. I hadn't heard her on the radio before reading this book, although I have my ears open now. In this book, Corrigan weaves autobiographical pieces of her life with three genres of books: "female extreme adventures", detective novels, and secular Catholic martyr tales. She recommends several books (of these genres and others) throughout the narrative and provides an extensive booklist in the back. What I liked most about these recommendations was that she didn't have any shame in what she enjoyed, beach reading and classics alike.
This book inspired me to engage more with the books that I read. I envied the fact that she was able to place her life through books. For example, she discussed her preoccupation with detective novels immediately following 9/11. I might be able to figure out what I was reading then but I've never thought that much about the significance of it. I guess I've always viewed reading as something that I treated myself to, that nobody questioned my interest in (because reading is noble, right?), and thus something I didn't bother to assign significance to.
Reading Corrigan's book, however, I was struck by having lost the opportunity for introspection offered by deeper engagement with the books I so addictively read. The last time I felt this type of "book envy" was when a college roommate showed me a book list she had kept since childhood with titles in her book journal like, "Books read during the summer of 1990."
Recently I read Kim Chernin's The Hungry Self, although I left it out of the blog with a handful of other "body image books" because I thought they would seem repetitive. However, Chernin's book includes the following passage about reading:
"I find that there was a book, written by a woman, that helped me greatly during a difficult summer in my early twenties. As it happens, it was not a book about women and food. It did not come right out and tell me that an eating disorder was a serious form of identity crisis. But it scattered seeds, it turned my thinking in a particular direction, it set me dreaming and musing as I made my way through its pages. Reading it changed me in ways I would not then have been able to specify. But that is the way with reading. it gets in under the skin, and there, in darkness, it begins to prepare the work of fully conscious understanding. At the time, one reads and loses oneself in the reading and forgets to look up when the telephone rings, and one is transformed beyond one's wildest hopes and imaginings by this act of slipping into the aching silences of oneself, brought there by another woman's words."
There is something that Chernin is doing with books, that Corrigan is doing with books, that I am missing out on.
I also liked Corrigan's book (err, probably "I also liked Corrigan") because she was feminist in her behavior but not in rhetoric. Like certain professors and coworkers I've had, she was feminist in that she was a woman "doing her thing" and doing it well, not because she strived to be "a woman doing her thing". She had no shame in her identification with female heroines and themes. I definitely struggle with feeling like my reading list (or my behavior or my appearance or my...) is sometimes "too female."
Finally, I liked Corrigan because she had made her love of books her life. Here I will replace the ever-so-refined "envious" with the punchy "jealous." There are plenty of reasons why I ended up with books as a pastime rather than a career, but I don't always things they're good ones. By her own admission Corrigan is incredibly lucky to have built a career around books and it gives me (again) inspiration to engage more with books. "I have a great job--or, to be more accurate, cluster of jobs--for a bookworm," says Corrigan.
Recommended for fellow bookworms.
Corrigan is the book critic for NPR's Fresh Air. I hadn't heard her on the radio before reading this book, although I have my ears open now. In this book, Corrigan weaves autobiographical pieces of her life with three genres of books: "female extreme adventures", detective novels, and secular Catholic martyr tales. She recommends several books (of these genres and others) throughout the narrative and provides an extensive booklist in the back. What I liked most about these recommendations was that she didn't have any shame in what she enjoyed, beach reading and classics alike.
This book inspired me to engage more with the books that I read. I envied the fact that she was able to place her life through books. For example, she discussed her preoccupation with detective novels immediately following 9/11. I might be able to figure out what I was reading then but I've never thought that much about the significance of it. I guess I've always viewed reading as something that I treated myself to, that nobody questioned my interest in (because reading is noble, right?), and thus something I didn't bother to assign significance to.
Reading Corrigan's book, however, I was struck by having lost the opportunity for introspection offered by deeper engagement with the books I so addictively read. The last time I felt this type of "book envy" was when a college roommate showed me a book list she had kept since childhood with titles in her book journal like, "Books read during the summer of 1990."
Recently I read Kim Chernin's The Hungry Self, although I left it out of the blog with a handful of other "body image books" because I thought they would seem repetitive. However, Chernin's book includes the following passage about reading:
"I find that there was a book, written by a woman, that helped me greatly during a difficult summer in my early twenties. As it happens, it was not a book about women and food. It did not come right out and tell me that an eating disorder was a serious form of identity crisis. But it scattered seeds, it turned my thinking in a particular direction, it set me dreaming and musing as I made my way through its pages. Reading it changed me in ways I would not then have been able to specify. But that is the way with reading. it gets in under the skin, and there, in darkness, it begins to prepare the work of fully conscious understanding. At the time, one reads and loses oneself in the reading and forgets to look up when the telephone rings, and one is transformed beyond one's wildest hopes and imaginings by this act of slipping into the aching silences of oneself, brought there by another woman's words."
There is something that Chernin is doing with books, that Corrigan is doing with books, that I am missing out on.
I also liked Corrigan's book (err, probably "I also liked Corrigan") because she was feminist in her behavior but not in rhetoric. Like certain professors and coworkers I've had, she was feminist in that she was a woman "doing her thing" and doing it well, not because she strived to be "a woman doing her thing". She had no shame in her identification with female heroines and themes. I definitely struggle with feeling like my reading list (or my behavior or my appearance or my...) is sometimes "too female."
Finally, I liked Corrigan because she had made her love of books her life. Here I will replace the ever-so-refined "envious" with the punchy "jealous." There are plenty of reasons why I ended up with books as a pastime rather than a career, but I don't always things they're good ones. By her own admission Corrigan is incredibly lucky to have built a career around books and it gives me (again) inspiration to engage more with books. "I have a great job--or, to be more accurate, cluster of jobs--for a bookworm," says Corrigan.
Recommended for fellow bookworms.
Friday, January 19, 2007
Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky
This is a remarkable book.
It's hard for me to separate the quality of the book itself from the history surrounding its publishing, so I won't try. Nemirovsky was an accomplished novelist living in France during WWII. She was also a Russian Jew by birth, so before finishing the book, she was deported to Auschwitz and killed. Her daughters, not yet in their teens, had the presence of mind to pack her notebook in their suitcase when they were hidden to live out the duration of the war. It was not until the late 1990's that it was further examined, and archivists realized that two-thirds of a book (as well as notes on the rest of it) was among its contents.
That book was published, with few changes, as Suite Francaise. I have no opinion about whether I would have liked the book without the history, but as it stands I really enjoyed reading it. The first half of it describes the journeys of various Parisians who leave Paris - on foot, bicycle, horseback, car - as the Germans begin to occupy France. The characters are representative of a wide spectrum of classes within France and the time, and the human spirit, from generosity to selfishness, is well-depicted.
Reading this part of the book reminded me somewhat of reading Huck Finn. I hazily remember an excellent high school English teacher trying to get us to understand the journey that Huck takes by drawing the river on the blackboard. I didn't really "get" what he was trying to teach us at the time, but I wish I had paid more attention, because this book's "journey" story surely had some shape that I did not pick up on.
The second part of the book was about a small French village that was occupied by German soldiers. The story follows a few of the complex relationships arising from the occupation. I had never thought about what it meant for a village to be occupied, so I enjoyed reading this half too.
There are two other gems to be found in this book as well. One is the author's personal notes on what she had written so far and what she planned to do with the rest of the book. She saw in her book all the flaws that frustrated me when I was reading (e.g., too many disconnected characters, missing connections between parts one and two). She also suggested continuations for the book that I did not even begin to imagine. As such a book lover, I was delighted with the chance to read an author's work-in-progress and accompanying notes.
The final part of the book is quite sad. Many people have compared the experience of reading this book with reading Anne Frank's diary, and I did not have that feeling while I was reading it. There was very little talk of Hitler or Aryans or Jews within the book; mostly it was about the French's reactions to occupation. However, the last part of the book chronicles dozens of letters between Nemirovsky, her husband, her publisher, and various other people in her life as the situation for Jews gets progressively worse. I worked hard on beginning to grasp how much potential had really been lost when people like Nemirovsky were deported and killed. Here was one woman's unfinished manuscript and personal story, and she is just one of millions.
Needless to say, recommended.
It's hard for me to separate the quality of the book itself from the history surrounding its publishing, so I won't try. Nemirovsky was an accomplished novelist living in France during WWII. She was also a Russian Jew by birth, so before finishing the book, she was deported to Auschwitz and killed. Her daughters, not yet in their teens, had the presence of mind to pack her notebook in their suitcase when they were hidden to live out the duration of the war. It was not until the late 1990's that it was further examined, and archivists realized that two-thirds of a book (as well as notes on the rest of it) was among its contents.
That book was published, with few changes, as Suite Francaise. I have no opinion about whether I would have liked the book without the history, but as it stands I really enjoyed reading it. The first half of it describes the journeys of various Parisians who leave Paris - on foot, bicycle, horseback, car - as the Germans begin to occupy France. The characters are representative of a wide spectrum of classes within France and the time, and the human spirit, from generosity to selfishness, is well-depicted.
Reading this part of the book reminded me somewhat of reading Huck Finn. I hazily remember an excellent high school English teacher trying to get us to understand the journey that Huck takes by drawing the river on the blackboard. I didn't really "get" what he was trying to teach us at the time, but I wish I had paid more attention, because this book's "journey" story surely had some shape that I did not pick up on.
The second part of the book was about a small French village that was occupied by German soldiers. The story follows a few of the complex relationships arising from the occupation. I had never thought about what it meant for a village to be occupied, so I enjoyed reading this half too.
There are two other gems to be found in this book as well. One is the author's personal notes on what she had written so far and what she planned to do with the rest of the book. She saw in her book all the flaws that frustrated me when I was reading (e.g., too many disconnected characters, missing connections between parts one and two). She also suggested continuations for the book that I did not even begin to imagine. As such a book lover, I was delighted with the chance to read an author's work-in-progress and accompanying notes.
The final part of the book is quite sad. Many people have compared the experience of reading this book with reading Anne Frank's diary, and I did not have that feeling while I was reading it. There was very little talk of Hitler or Aryans or Jews within the book; mostly it was about the French's reactions to occupation. However, the last part of the book chronicles dozens of letters between Nemirovsky, her husband, her publisher, and various other people in her life as the situation for Jews gets progressively worse. I worked hard on beginning to grasp how much potential had really been lost when people like Nemirovsky were deported and killed. Here was one woman's unfinished manuscript and personal story, and she is just one of millions.
Needless to say, recommended.
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
Every Secret Thing by Paricia Campbell Hearst
I bought this book a while ago, used, and it's been sitting on my "to be read" shelf for at least a year now. It came without a jacket, so it's navy with gold writing and smells like an old book. A few years ago I read a good book by Gillian Slovo by the same name about her life as the daughter of anti-apartheid activists.
This book is Hearst's account of her 1974 kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army, a radical political group. She tells of living as a member for the SLA for 18 months, committing several crimes under duress, and then the trial that followed. I liked how she began the book with a short history of her childhood before describing the kidnapping.
I was very conflicted about this book. One part of me was very sympathetic to Patty Hearst. She describes being a victim of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse as a prisoner. The other part, however, went into "skeptic mode" and found pieces of her story unbelievable or at the very least lacking support from within the story.
I checked with someone who was in his 20s when Patty Hearst was kidnapped since it happened before I was born. He says that once she was rescued and interviewed, the general feeling in the country (and in the psychological community) was that she was forcibly kidnapped and brainwashed into doing these things against her will. The book jacket suggests that the book will answer the "why" behind her behavior and subsequent trial, but I think it was poorly edited. Hearst did not come across as a sympathetic character. There was something about the style of writing that was very emotionally disconnected and journalistic, despite its obviously being a personal memoir. This distant treatment of the subject matter made it hard to connect to the content.
My "source" and I also talked about how much the media and the FBI/law enforcement had changed from that era to now (imagine, e.g., heiress Paris Hilton being kidnapped and held for 18 months!).
Now here is where I would like to trade in my mathematics degree for some language around feminist theory. This book was written in 1982 about events occurring in 1974. Putting the main subject material aside, this book represents a very specific state of women during these time periods.
Hearst goes from her father's house to her husband's house. The Hearst who is kidnapped does not seem to be fully actualized as a person, rather she is a wife with half a degree. Her description of her doubts about her fiance is that of a woman rejecting the housewife lifestyle of the 1950s but unsure of what models to consult for her life. Kidnapped, Hearst is a "damsel in distress" from the outside. And the loose activity around sexuality within the SLA is a sad commentary on both men and women. I wonder if Hearst's narrative seemed detached and un-emotional because that was her attempt to seem strong as a woman.
All in all, I like knowing a little about another piece of our country's history, but I am not sure this is the only book I would have liked to read on the events surrounding the SLA.
This book is Hearst's account of her 1974 kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army, a radical political group. She tells of living as a member for the SLA for 18 months, committing several crimes under duress, and then the trial that followed. I liked how she began the book with a short history of her childhood before describing the kidnapping.
I was very conflicted about this book. One part of me was very sympathetic to Patty Hearst. She describes being a victim of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse as a prisoner. The other part, however, went into "skeptic mode" and found pieces of her story unbelievable or at the very least lacking support from within the story.
I checked with someone who was in his 20s when Patty Hearst was kidnapped since it happened before I was born. He says that once she was rescued and interviewed, the general feeling in the country (and in the psychological community) was that she was forcibly kidnapped and brainwashed into doing these things against her will. The book jacket suggests that the book will answer the "why" behind her behavior and subsequent trial, but I think it was poorly edited. Hearst did not come across as a sympathetic character. There was something about the style of writing that was very emotionally disconnected and journalistic, despite its obviously being a personal memoir. This distant treatment of the subject matter made it hard to connect to the content.
My "source" and I also talked about how much the media and the FBI/law enforcement had changed from that era to now (imagine, e.g., heiress Paris Hilton being kidnapped and held for 18 months!).
Now here is where I would like to trade in my mathematics degree for some language around feminist theory. This book was written in 1982 about events occurring in 1974. Putting the main subject material aside, this book represents a very specific state of women during these time periods.
Hearst goes from her father's house to her husband's house. The Hearst who is kidnapped does not seem to be fully actualized as a person, rather she is a wife with half a degree. Her description of her doubts about her fiance is that of a woman rejecting the housewife lifestyle of the 1950s but unsure of what models to consult for her life. Kidnapped, Hearst is a "damsel in distress" from the outside. And the loose activity around sexuality within the SLA is a sad commentary on both men and women. I wonder if Hearst's narrative seemed detached and un-emotional because that was her attempt to seem strong as a woman.
All in all, I like knowing a little about another piece of our country's history, but I am not sure this is the only book I would have liked to read on the events surrounding the SLA.
Tuesday, January 09, 2007
The Friend who Got Away edited by Jenny Offill and Elissa Schappell
This book had been on my booklist for a while. The first time I went to Barnes and Noble for it, I thought the name was, The One who Got Away and lost a couple hours tracking down all the books with that title. The second time I went, it was out of stock (although, interestingly, the hardcover had found its way into Self-Help while the softcover had found its way into Women's Studies) so I found it at the library.
This is a collection of twenty essays written by women about friendships that somehow ended. The subtitle of the book says it is about friendships that "blew up, burned out, or faded away." As the subtitle suggests, in some cases, the endings were a surprise to the authors, while in other cases they were obvious fallings-out. In some cases, the author left the friendship, and in others it was the friend who pulled away.
Not unsurprisingly, boyfriends, lesbians, and abortions play roles in many of the stories. However, each friendship described was incredibly complex. Two of the essays detail opposite sides of the same friendship, which was unique to read. My only criticism is that, with the exception of a handful of pieces, the editors may have homogenized the "voice" of the pieces too much.
However, what I felt most strongly when reading this book was relief. I, too, have lost friends along the way. In some cases, I know the reasons, and in others I don't. Reading this book made me understand that not all my lost friendships were my fault. It also made me realize that not all the explanations I've chosen to craft for each ended friendship are accurate. One day maybe I will write my own essays about my friends who got away.
There were many passages and phrases that stood out to me as special or well-written or familiar, and during reading Heather Abel's piece, "Emily," I dog-eared the section that I connected to most:
In describing her relationship with Emily and why it was not initially competitive, she writes:
"I would decide that certain things were mine and that I alone could claim them. In return I'd abstain from other things. Early on, the color red was mind. Blue was my sister's, even though I quite liked it, so I would not choose the sweet blue sweater at the store. Later, Nicaragua was mine. Marxism was also mine. Doc Martens were mine. Having best friends was mind. Having boyfriends was not mine. (This got confusing because I actually had a boyfriend through much of high school and into college, but I still didn't identify as someone with a boyfriend.) Discussing was mine. Making out was not mine. Apartheid was mine. Athleticism was not mine. Deep, difficult things were mine; I wasn't actually depressed but I liked to talk animatedly about depression. Drinking games, TV, and one-liners were not mine. The environment was mine, both the outdoors (yes, I claimed the wide world) and the defense of the outdoors.
This is the thinking, I can say in retrospect, of a scared girl."
I loved that passage and the type of person it suggested Abel is/was. I once (when it was in vogue to listen to Billy Joel's Greatest Hits I & II ad infinitum) stated that "She's Always a Woman" was about me and "She's Got a Way" was about someone else in particular. I guarded my less-desirable but unique image fiercely. I once asked the other girl not to wear a particular dress to a formal dance because it was too similar to mine and I didn't feel special enough. I, like Abel, was a scared girl.
In any case, I'd recommend this book if you're interested in the interpersonal interactions within women's friendships.
This is a collection of twenty essays written by women about friendships that somehow ended. The subtitle of the book says it is about friendships that "blew up, burned out, or faded away." As the subtitle suggests, in some cases, the endings were a surprise to the authors, while in other cases they were obvious fallings-out. In some cases, the author left the friendship, and in others it was the friend who pulled away.
Not unsurprisingly, boyfriends, lesbians, and abortions play roles in many of the stories. However, each friendship described was incredibly complex. Two of the essays detail opposite sides of the same friendship, which was unique to read. My only criticism is that, with the exception of a handful of pieces, the editors may have homogenized the "voice" of the pieces too much.
However, what I felt most strongly when reading this book was relief. I, too, have lost friends along the way. In some cases, I know the reasons, and in others I don't. Reading this book made me understand that not all my lost friendships were my fault. It also made me realize that not all the explanations I've chosen to craft for each ended friendship are accurate. One day maybe I will write my own essays about my friends who got away.
There were many passages and phrases that stood out to me as special or well-written or familiar, and during reading Heather Abel's piece, "Emily," I dog-eared the section that I connected to most:
In describing her relationship with Emily and why it was not initially competitive, she writes:
"I would decide that certain things were mine and that I alone could claim them. In return I'd abstain from other things. Early on, the color red was mind. Blue was my sister's, even though I quite liked it, so I would not choose the sweet blue sweater at the store. Later, Nicaragua was mine. Marxism was also mine. Doc Martens were mine. Having best friends was mind. Having boyfriends was not mine. (This got confusing because I actually had a boyfriend through much of high school and into college, but I still didn't identify as someone with a boyfriend.) Discussing was mine. Making out was not mine. Apartheid was mine. Athleticism was not mine. Deep, difficult things were mine; I wasn't actually depressed but I liked to talk animatedly about depression. Drinking games, TV, and one-liners were not mine. The environment was mine, both the outdoors (yes, I claimed the wide world) and the defense of the outdoors.
This is the thinking, I can say in retrospect, of a scared girl."
I loved that passage and the type of person it suggested Abel is/was. I once (when it was in vogue to listen to Billy Joel's Greatest Hits I & II ad infinitum) stated that "She's Always a Woman" was about me and "She's Got a Way" was about someone else in particular. I guarded my less-desirable but unique image fiercely. I once asked the other girl not to wear a particular dress to a formal dance because it was too similar to mine and I didn't feel special enough. I, like Abel, was a scared girl.
In any case, I'd recommend this book if you're interested in the interpersonal interactions within women's friendships.
Saturday, January 06, 2007
Rise and Shine by Anna Quindlen
I started off the year with the newest book by Anna Quindlen, one of my favorite authors. A critic writing about Quindlen's former column in the New York Times commented that she was the sort of author you liked even when you did not agree with her. I've always liked that comment about her columns, and have read all of her novels as well.
Certain of her novels (e.g., Black and Blue, and One True Thing) have gotten a lot of press but my favorite has always been her first novel, Object Lessons. In fact, Object Lessons is one of my all-time favorites, along with Starring Sally J. Freedman by Judy Blume and A Tree Grown in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. All Bildungsromans about lonely girls that felt like my life just taking place at a different place or time.
What I loved about Object Lessons, and what I have not quite found in any of her more recent books, was certain passages of writing were just plain perfect. For example, "He realized that she was the closest he would ever get to not being alone. His parents would die, and the children would change and leave, and there the two of them would be, in their living room, perspiring and talking in fragments."
Rise and Shine did not have those small perfect passages, but it was a good book. It followed the story of sisters, one of whom worked in a homeless shelter and other of whom was a morning show personality. The morning show sister accidentally says something terrible on air and this changes her life pretty drastically. I thought it had some good commentary on the role the media plays in our lives, although I like that Quindlen is moving away from "issue" novels and towards good stories. It was definitely a book that kept my attention. But please, Anna, Please, write me something as good as Object Lessons.
Certain of her novels (e.g., Black and Blue, and One True Thing) have gotten a lot of press but my favorite has always been her first novel, Object Lessons. In fact, Object Lessons is one of my all-time favorites, along with Starring Sally J. Freedman by Judy Blume and A Tree Grown in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. All Bildungsromans about lonely girls that felt like my life just taking place at a different place or time.
What I loved about Object Lessons, and what I have not quite found in any of her more recent books, was certain passages of writing were just plain perfect. For example, "He realized that she was the closest he would ever get to not being alone. His parents would die, and the children would change and leave, and there the two of them would be, in their living room, perspiring and talking in fragments."
Rise and Shine did not have those small perfect passages, but it was a good book. It followed the story of sisters, one of whom worked in a homeless shelter and other of whom was a morning show personality. The morning show sister accidentally says something terrible on air and this changes her life pretty drastically. I thought it had some good commentary on the role the media plays in our lives, although I like that Quindlen is moving away from "issue" novels and towards good stories. It was definitely a book that kept my attention. But please, Anna, Please, write me something as good as Object Lessons.
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