Beginning Infinite Jest

So I am trying to commit to this Infinite Summer program on the web where a set of smart people help me read David Foster Wallace's 1000+ page Infinite Jest this summer. I am intimidated by the book. I am sad to lose some of the time I would otherwise spend reading other stuff. I am concerned that I don't know enough about Hamlet. I am heartened that Jason Kottke says I don't need to worry about the Hamlet stuff. I am loathe to get one of the Infinite Jest readers' guides that is recommended because the 1000+ pages is enough to worry about. Having started the book (barely) I am impressed by the density of his writing - DFW does not waste a single word. And I keep thinking, what the heck is he doing?? with all his characters.

That's a lot of feelings for being on page 37 of a book I am kind of worried is going to ruin my summer.

The Gathering by Anne Enright

Sara Coe recommended this book to me, so I put it on my library queue. It was the story of an Irish family who come together when one of the 12 adult children dies. I expected it to be an easy read with familiar themes. Instead, it was an incredibly unusual book.

The writing reminded me of what happens in my head when I am alone in the car for several hours - the narrator meanders through several years and interactions and episodes in no discernible order. But by the end of the book a cohesive story had come together. Like with a few books lately, I was tricked into thinking the book was about one character (the dead brother) when actually the protagonist emerges as the narrator as the story unfolds. If pressed, I'd describe it as a coming-of-age novel about a middle-aged woman.

This book won the Man Booker Prize in 2007 - I liked it but didn't think it was the best thing I had read all year. I wonder if I could have identified it as a prizewinner if I hadn't known.

Weekend at the Vineyard

Web and I went to the Vineyard (that's Martha's for the benefit of those of you not from New England) this weekend to visit Jamie who is living there this summer. While cleaning out the boarding house that she is managing, she found piles and piles of old books. I love the variety & juxtaposition. Also the colors of the pages - check out these pics.






I also checked out two bookstores in Vineyard Haven, one of the small downtown areas on the island. Unfortunately, I don't remember the name of the first store we wandered into - it was a stationary store with books in about the first third of the area. The most notable thing was that the books all had current event and political themes, even most of the fiction. Webster and I chuckled at how much the bookshelves looked like the ones at our house! From Michael Lewis to Ascent of Money, Descartes' Bones, Krugman's latest book, and for fiction, Edgar Sawtelle, both of Khaled Hosseini's books, Wally Lamb, and plenty of other favorites of ours. It was kind of uncanny!

Next we went to Vineyard Haven's more well-known bookstore, Bunch of Grapes. This bookstore burned down last year and just re-opened last week, so I was fortunate to get a chance to visit.

I'm not sure I would have known that there was a fire had I not been told, but knowing it I am pretty sure I could smell both paint and smoke. The selection was great - and a wonderful selection of new trade fiction that grew my reading list by about a mile. The upstairs had expansive ceilings with exposed wooden beams, ceiling fans, and a huge stained glass window. I exercised extreme willpower and did not purchase anything, but that would not be scalable were I to spend a summer on the island.

In the spirit of books this weekend, I also finished two more I had been in the middle of that I'll review shortly - The Gathering and Omnivore's Dilemma. Jamie also lent me Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society which I'll get to later this summer. Starting tomorrow night I crack into Infinite Jest. And I'm not afraid to admit that I am scared.

The Gardner Heist by Ulrich Boser

This book is subtitled, "The True Story of the World's Largest Unsolved Art Theft" and is about the robbery of millions of dollars worth of art from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The robbery took place on St. Patrick's Day in 1990, and the author was interviewed on NPR around the anniversary of the heist.

Boser does a fine job of describing many of the facets of the robbery. He covers all the facts from the night it happened and profiles many of the suspects and law enforcement officials involved in the case. He also discusses other significant art heists and provides a detailed personal history of Gardner herself and the origins and guiding principles of the museum. Many of these sections read like good spy or mafia novels - it was hard to remember this was nonfiction.

Later in the book, Boser becomes a central character, as his reporting on the heist turns into a consuming quest to solve the crime. We see the author's life put on hold as he travels around the world and meets with less-than-savory characters to try and solve the case. While his book claims to have made a major breakthrough in uncovering the identities of the art theives, what is more interesting is his obsession with the story and ultimate ability to walk away from the investigation.

Someone in the book comments that if (when) the art is finally returned, there will be a line from "here to downtown" to see the pieces. I will surely be on that line.

Random Acts of Heroic Love by Danny Scheinmann

I enjoyed reading this book although I also had some major problems with it. There are two stories - one of a young man traveling in South America whose girlfriend gets killed in the early 2000s, and the other of a young soldier during WWI. Each of the narratives is interesting enough and the characters were well-written.

The stories alternate and ultimately tie together in a familiar, almost formulaic way. I don't think I've grown tired of every book written in this way (see A Brief History of the Dead and The Blind Assassin) but I think Scheinmann's execution was unimpressive. It was like he had two books in him and decided to find a way to tie them together.

Two factors, however, soften my opinion of the book. One is that this is a first novel and the other is that the WWI story is based on his own grandfather's story. It was kind of cool to find that out in the end and realize that this was a way for him to be closer to family history.

The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester

This was a fascinating book about the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary. While that might sound dull, the story wasn't - one of the main contributors to the OED was an American imprisoned in an insane asylum in England.

I learned a lot reading this book. First of course was the realization that there was a point in history when there were words but no dictionaries. I was also interested to find out that the OED was compiled in a very collaborative way that reminded me of Wikipedia. The general public was solicited to read different works and submit examples of words used in different ways. I also hadn't known that the OED was unique in that it always sought examples from literature, rather than relying on sentences purpose-built for the dictionary.

The writing was enjoyable to read, with each chapter beginning with an entry from the OED about some relevant subject matter. The only criticism I have of the book is that the climax is incredibly weird. However, as someone who ready as much as I do and still lugs out the dictionary to look things up (Webster's, not OED), it was a treat to find out how the most famous one was conceived and delivered.

The Appeal by John Grisham

After fighting with a book of Carlos Fuentes' (and its winning), I needed something easy to read. John Grisham to the rescue. This book was about a chemical company who loses a major personal injury case and decides to fund the campaign of a supreme court judge who will guarantee their winning on appeal. The concept was fun to follow and I enjoyed reading the back-room machinations that were necessary to craft his campaign.

However, I became disintereted in the story about 2/3 of the way and did not even really care who won the case in the end. Grisham let his desire to make a political statement come at the cost of the storytelling.

Infinte Jest Online Book Club

So someone is proposing an online book club for David Foster Wallace's Infinte Jest: http://www.infinitesummer.org/. I've meant to read the book for a long time, and the book club starts on my birthday....hmmm.....

The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly

This book was great fun to read.

It was about a young boy who stumbles into an enchanted forest after trying to escape the reality of his unhappy life. In the forest he meets many characters who are familiar to him (and us) from common fairy tales. However, their versions of the stories we know are not the same. And the little boy's search for a way home from the forest forms the narrative of the story.

I really enjoyed the book - it was a book that was full of wolves and castles and rickety bridges. The good guys were good and the villains were bad. It was perfect for staying up late and reading under the covers with a flashlight...err...grown-up booklight.

There were definitely themes of adulthood and voice of a child, etc., etc., in this book that I suppose you could appreciate. Also parallels between his life in the real world and that of the enchanted forest. I tried not to overthink it and just devoured the story.

Flash Forward a TV show

Flash Forward, a good read by Robert Sawyer, is being made into a TV show: http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/102316.

Dracula

Check this out - Stoker's Dracula was never copyright-ed and even so it'd be in the public domain by now. Since it's written in letters and articles, this blogger is putting the book up on the actual days that correspond to the story. Cool.

http://dracula-feed.blogspot.com/2009/05/dracula-begins.html

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John Le Carre

Some organization named this book the best spy novel of all time and so I bought it a couple years ago. Picked it up recently and read it in a few short days. You'll notice there's no photo of the book - that's because the edition I have is from 1965 and I couldn't find an image of the cover - in fact, pieces of the cover were flaking off and pages falling out of my edition. It made it easier to remember that when the book was written it was during the Cold War era and the Berlin Wall, which plays prominently in the story, was a reality of the times.

The story is about a spy who is disgraced when the post he covers is compromised. He goes to meet his boss ostensibly to be fired, but he is asked to complete one more mission and then retire. This book is about his last mission - a mission to ruin the cover of a double agent.

The writing is simple but kept me at the end of my seat. I thought the first half of the book was good but not too complex then I came to a point in the book when I realized I had no idea what as going and I had to flip back about 10 pages. The climax is a worthwhile payoff and the denouement not a disappointment.

The Space Between Us by Thrity Umrigar

Sara recommended this book to me and I really enjoyed it.

I held off on reading it for a while because I felt like I had read a lot about India lately. Turns out I had only read two books on India last year: Groom to Have Been and Inheritance of Loss. Over the past few years, I've read In Between World of Vikram Lall, Interpreter of Maladies, Namesake, God of Small Things, and A Fine Balance. Which, for me, is not a disproportionate number of books on a certain topic - but I guess I find these pieces about India have strong descriptions that stick in my head so I don't like to confuse the books by reading them too close together.

In any case, this one was great too. It was about two women with a long history together - one of them (Bhima) is the other one's (Sera) servant. While by our standards, Bhima is treated poorly by Sera - forced to sit on the floor and use separate drinking cups - within the culture depicted in the book Sera treats her well. Secrets in both Sera and Bhima's lives are slowly revealed throughout the book, which continually changed my perceptions of the characters. The story also follows parts of the lives of Sera's daughter and her husband, and Bhima's granddaughter.

The plot held my attention, the characters were well-developed and multi-dimensional, and the culture is described almost in a detached journalistic way, devoid of the typical Western judgement found in some foreign-set stories. I have very little criticism of this book.

Blogger's Dilemma

I've been slow in blogging lately because I am reading Omnivore's Dilemma with Laura as the sole members of an email book club we've started. It means that some of my 'reading time' is spent on that book so less is spent on whatever else I'm reading.

So far it's been a good experience. It's not as good as an in-person book club, but I'm getting far more out of the book than if I read it alone. Coincedentally, Webster is reading In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan's other book, so we have been talking about his themes at home lately as well.

I'll review the book and the experience once we're done.

Reading multiple books at a time is something I used to do a lot when I was younger. I like it because it makes the length of time it takes to read each book longer and I think that makes them stay with me more. It also means I am not ever picking up a book I'm not in the mood for.

The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World by Lucette Lagnado

I had been out of touch with Deena for a while, but we emailed recently and she recommended this book, which she had liked because of her interest in genealogy. Having just finished a fictional account of a Jewish family's escape from post-revolutionary Iran, I thought it would be a good contrast to read some non-fiction on a Jewish family's leaving Egypt. Coincidentally, I found myself reading this just weeks before Passover, which added to my interest in the story.

This book follows a family who lives in Cairo as upper-class Jews. Narrated by the family's youngest child, a daughter, the first half of the book is about their family history and the early years of the parents' marriage, not particularly happy. The political situation in Egypt in the 1960's forces many Jews to consider leaving the country, and the Lagnados eventually flee to France and then ultimately Brooklyn. The family's story is not a particularly happy one, and the 'man in the white sharkskin suit', Lucette's father, deteriorates from debonair regular on the Cairo club circuit to infirm old man forever mourning his home country.

I enjoyed reading the book, though, because it was a crisp depiction of what it is like to leave a home country under duress. I had never really understood the dimensions of that choice as well as I did after reading this book. While Lucette is young enough to eventually adjust to that change, her father never really recovers. I had to glance at the title several times during reading this book to remind myself that the story is really about him, not her.

PS - Turns out that my mother has an unusual connection to this book that I only learned about half way through - her mother was treated by the same doctor at Sloan-Kettering as Lucette was, back in the 1960's. It is a small, small, small world.