Off to Portugal!

We leave for Portugal tonight - I am so excited.

I have four books with me, Olive Kittredge, Saramago's Blindness, The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon, and Power of One. A nice mix of selections I've wanted to read for a while and those associated with Portugal.

Web's bringing Ludlum's Bourne Trilogy which he has already started and is impressed by.

We also have a Lisbon guidebook, a Portuguese phrasebook, and two guidebooks for the Azores. So that totals 11 books which is far more than the number of shirts I'll have with me ;)

The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff

This is a book that I saw on enough lists and enough displays that I decided it must be in my genre. It is an ambitious novel, telling two stories: the first story is that of Brigham Young's 19th wife, Ann Eliza, who leaves Young and seeks to convince the government to outlaw polygamy; the second story is set in modern times, where a boy who has run away from a fundamentalist latter-day saint group (long ago splintered off from Mormonism) discovers that his mother has been accused of murdering his father and needs to decide how he can help her.

The contrast between the beginnings of Mormonism and fundamentalist latter-day group is well-done, however I couldn't stop envisioning scenes from HBO's Big Love - my fault not Eberhoff's, since he draws on narrative, letters, Wikipedia entries, and other literary devices to tell a colorful and detailed story. I found myself rooting for both Ann Eliza and her modern-day counterpart accused of murder, although the modern story kept my attention slightly more than the older one.

I definitely enjoyed this book - it was an ambitious undertaking, each half on its own a complete story. I wouldn't go so far as to say I enjoyed it as much as Middlesex or A Fine Balance, but it had that same 'saga' quality to it and was definitely a good read.

The Monty Hall Problem by Jason Rosenhouse

Since I saw this book was mentioned on Jason Kottke's blog I anxiously awaited its release. Having majored in math in college, I always enjoy books that are for the general public with mathematical themes. This one is about one of the most contentious math problems in recent history.

The problem goes like this: you are on a game show faced with three doors, one of which contains a car. You choose a door, the host (Monty Hall) opens one of the other doors to reveal that it is empty. At this point in the game, should you stick with your original choice or should you switch to the other closed door? The answer (you should switch) is not intuitive, and as Parade Magazine's Marilyn vos Savant found out after writing a column on the topic in 1990, has caused many heated arguments among the top mathematicians.

Rosenhouse's book traces the history of this problem, covering the earliest known mention of it, several variations on it whose solutions are equally non-intuitive, and including various mathematical proofs for how to solve it. While the reviews claim that it has very little math in it, I think that's misleading - I enjoyed the math, but it was hardcore. Having just attended a reunion for a math-oriented summer program I attended 20+ years ago, I was jonesing for some math, but for the average reader this might be too much.

However, there was plenty of reading that was not focused on math - Rosenhouse also spends several chapters surveying the literature on cognitive and philosophical ideas around the problem. Cognitive scientists seek to figure out why it is so unintuitive - after seeing the Bayesian proof for the answer I was struck by the same question. Studies have been done that indicate that this lack of intuition crosses cultural and linguistic borders. Rosenhouse even spends a few pages on quantum mechanics, suggesting how this problem might help us understand those concepts better.

My only disappointment with this book was that there was some lackadaisical editing - a few of the math sections had inconsistencies that I found distracting though they didn't impact the math. That aside, I really enjoyed reading it and hope Rosenhouse chooses to address some other math problems with similar books in the future.

Happens Every Day by Isabel Gillies

I read about this book in a quick blurb and picked it up mostly because I am a big fan of Law & Order: SVU and the author plays one of the detective's wives on the show. I admit - I was curious.

This book is a true story, chronicling Gillies' marriage as it disintegrates unexpectedly. Seemingly happily married, she and her husband move to Ohio with their two sons, and within a year of their settling in, her husband has an affair and decides to leave her. She tells the story with equal parts regret, sadness, hindsight, and triumph, making it a very compelling read. It often felt like I was reading a long email from a close friend who was catching me up on her life. Gillies is very accessible and many of the comments she made about herself both big (she was always trying to make everyone around her feel comfortable) and small (she was going to say yes every time she was offered a glass of water) reminded me of myself.

There were aspects of this book that were hard to read, since she seemed so familiar and her marriage seemed similar to mine in some ways - she and her husband were not afraid to argue with each other, for example. And she never expected this to happen in her life - it came at her irreparably with scarce warning. I vacillated between feeling superior, enumerating the ways this could never happen to me, and feeling slightly terrified.

I read this in one big gulp and it definitely impacted my mood for the two days while I read it - not since Prozac Nation had I felt so connected to a book emotionally. Bravo to Gillies for courageously opening up to provide an extremely compelling narrative.

The Condition by Jennifer Haigh

I received this book by agreeing to attend a dial-in book club discussion with the author. I like to think that this is the beginning of my semi-professional career in book reviews!

The Condition is about a family whose youngest child Gwen has a condition called Turner Syndrome; this condition means she does not physically age past early adolescence though mentally she keeps maturing. One section of the book takes place just before the family notices that Gwen has this condition, and the rest takes place twenty years later. There are several flashbacks as well, filling in much of the interim time.

I was not immediately drawn in by this book. I thought the first section contained several trite characters that were not well-developed and that relied on well-known stereotypes to establish their personalities. As the book progressed, however, I became more impressed by the writing and the character development. The book is really a series of vignettes about each of the characters, many of them unrelated, that loosely intertwine around a current crisis to form a narrative story. However, I was most swept up in the book during the back-history around each character, rather than during the current story.

At first I thought of Hamilton's When Madeline Was Young would be a good book to compare this one to, WMWY's addressing a family's coping with an adult who doesn't age mentally, but they turned out to have little in common. I did find some recent reads to compare it to though: lately I have come upon several books where I was fooled by who the protagonist is. If I remember my 7th grade literary terms correctly, the protagonist is the character who changes. In both The Gathering and The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit, the protagonist was not who I expected it to be. What I liked most about this book was that, uniquely, the protagonist was the family unit, not any single individual character. While individual characters did change through the book, it was how the entire family operated that really transformed through the narrative.

I ended up really enjoying the book and I am looking forward to the discussion with Jennifer Haigh. My only regret is that I read it a week before a visit to Martha's Vineyard, not realizing ahead of time that its Cape Cod setting would have been a good choice while on the Island.

Castle by J. Robert Lennon

This book was mentioned in The Millions' post on books to keep an eye out for in 2009. They quote from Lennon's website: "A man buys a large plot of wooded land in upstate New York, only to find that someone has built a castle in the middle of it--and the castle is inhabited." Always looking for books that get me out of Oprah's trade fiction, I decided to try it.

What a weird and frustrating read. Lennon is a great writer - his ability to describe a situation or location or create a character's persona was excellent. However, his writing style did not carry the book past its challenges with plot and theme. Eric Loesch, the main character, returns to the town he grew up in after some set of not-known-to-the-reader circumstances, and immediately purchases a large plot of land. The first half of the book, in which Loesch is fixing up the house he bought and exploring the area, reminded me of Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go - detached, deliberate, and frustratingly hinting at dark secrets to be revealed later in the book. While Ishiguro delivers on the buildup, Lennon's payoff is just plain weird and unmotivated.

In the second half of the book, Loesch reveals a huge chunk of history about his past that explains much of his distant and anti-social behaviour. The mystery of the castle is resolved, then more recent events in Loesch's life are revealed as well. While there are some themes common to all these points in his life - compliance with authority for one - the second half of the book was pretty disconnected and choppy for me.

Obviously Lennon had some ideas he wanted to convey and a thematic way he wanted to tie them together but it did not work for me. I guess part of it is that Loesch is not very likable and delving into his past to find out why isn't something I cared about. I'd suggest that Hannibal Lechter is the only character I've ever disliked but become invested in finding out his personal history.

I would probably try something else by Lennon because he is well-regarded but this was not the book for me.

The Addict by Michael Stein

I first heard about this book in my June issue of Brown Alumni Monthly. Dr. Michael Stein is a professor at Brown and this book chronicles the relationship he has with a patient who is trying to correct her all-consuming addiction to painkillers.

Stein runs a program that provides buprenorphine as an alternative to Vicodin; while there are differences between this type of program and one that replaces heroin with methadone, the parallel is valid for the purposes of understanding the story. He seems to be compassionate but not soft, and was definitely likable as a narrator. Lucy, the title character, is likable too, despite her low self-image and erratically sad behavior relating to drug abuse.

The cover of the book include the subtitle "One Patient One Doctor One Year" but this is an oversimplification. Stein's book covers several patients' stories, which not only provides some context for Lucy's story but also for Stein's. A leading expert on addiction, Stein easily covers research on drug abuse, clinical trials he has run, as well as several intimate portraits of patients in a very readable format.

What most held my attention about this book is that it was the first one I had read from the doctor's point of view. I have read several books on mental health and addiction, including Appetites, My Name is Bill, Parched, Drinking: A Love Story, Prozac Nation, Holy Hunger, and More Now Again, but they are all from the point of view of the patient. There are glimpses of the doctor's point of view in many of these books, but always through the patient - in fact one of the most memorable parts of Prozac Nation occurred when Wurtzel had just attempted suicide and she hears her (excellent) Dr. Sterling on the phone commenting to another doctor, "Well, you know how it is, me and all my suicidal patients." Wurtzel grants her some "gallows humor" and the book quickly moves on...but I always wondered about the doctor's side.

And Stein provides a great view into that - his most striking characteristic is his measured competence, appropriately interspersed with concern and worry. We see Lucy as he does - weekly or monthly, with no additional information as to what the time is like in between other than her depictions of it. She is a sympathetic character, and clearly a favorite patient of Stein's (if they have favorites), but she is imperfect and he is appropriately distanced and clinical in his description of their interactions.

Lucy seems to be really invested in changing her life. My view into addiction, heavily influenced by the books listed above, is obviously slanted towards high-functioning addicts who can write and publish a book (or collaborate with an author). It was interesting in contrast to read about a recovery journey that was 'in-progress' with a patient who was motivated but not so much so that she was writing a book.

While I liked Stein as a (true-life) character and came to trust him as a doctor, I did wonder if Lucy would have benefited from seeing a psychiatrist too - Stein is an internist who provides talk therapy along with the buprenorphine. I didn't notice anything about their interactions that made me think he was not providing great health care but I also don't know how a psychiatrist would have changed her chances of recovery.

I appreciated reading this book and look forward to picking up Stein's other memoir, The Lonely Patient, sometime in the future.

Rising from the Rails by Larry Tye

I heard Larry Tye interviewed on NPR and was strangely interested in reading his book about the impact the Pullman Porters had on the making of the Black middle class. This isn't the type of book I usually choose but something about it struck me. I have shamefully decided not to read Infinite Jest this summer after trying for 34 pages, so this book became a kind of penance.

The book reminded me of the serious nonfiction I used to have to read for classes in college. Tye had obviously researched the book impeccably, interviewing porters and family members to gather a complete collection of anecdotes which he used generously throughout the book.

I had known very little about the Pullman Porters - but Tye gave some good background to get even the casual reader up to speed. After emancipation, ex-slaves had very few choices for careers. George Pullman had started a sleeping car business and needed attendants who wanted job opportunities so badly that they would accept sub-par conditions and expectations. He also wanted attendants for his cars that would blend into the background as "invisible" and ex-slaves fit both of those bills - thus an industry and labor force was born.

Pullman porters were treated horribly, scarcely sleeping, ridiculed by some passengers and co-workers, and underpaid with no chance of promotion. But they were also given an opportunity to travel and get exposure to the country that was not afforded to most ex-slaves or to their offspring. This job, Tye argues, enabled Blacks in America to create a middle class that previously had not existed for them.

Tye does a wonderful job covering the breadth of the story, including topics such as the porters' depiction in media, their training program, their family life, and a large section on their creation of a workers' union, which was one of the lengthiest processes in history for this type of union. He provides significant background on George Pullman, whose company employed the porters, and A. Philip Randolph, the founder of the union. Tye even takes a slightly long detour into Martin Luther King's draft into the civil rights movement.

This book opened my eyes to an era and a particular set of lives that I hadn't considered before.

Larry's Kidney by Daniel Asa Rose

I was really excited about reading this book that I heard about on a blog a few months ago. It is subtitled "Being the True Story of How I Found Myself in China with My Black Sheep Cousin and His Mail-Order Bride, Skirting the Law to Get Him a Transplant--and Save His Life" which basically summarizes the book for you.

Given the flippant charm of the subtitle, I expected the book to be funny, but it wasn't. I thought that Daniel's cousin Larry was a pathetic character - socially awkward in a way that presented like Asperger's. This book seemed to exploit his story rather than chronicle it. Rose also began the book with some notes on his decision to write the Chinese character's speech in the pidgin English he perceived they spoke in. While his intention may have been authenticity, the execution was tasteless.

Rose has another book about his visit to Eastern Europe with his children to trace the route his relatives took in an effort to escape the Nazis. While that subject seems interesting, I'm not likely to try it any time soon given the tone of this book.

The Other by David Guterson

I tried to read Snow Falling on Cedars (also by Guterson) when it was popular, but I had a hard time getting into it and gave up. When the description of this one caught my attention I decided to give it a try.

The story is about two friends who meet in high school. One (Neil) is from a working class family, the other (John Williams) from a rich family. After a formative trip where they get lost in the mountains for several days, Neil goes on to lead a traditional life and John William decides to live in the woods alone. The book is told from Neil's point of view, looking back on their relationship over thirty years later.

The majority of the book held my attention. The writing was superb - very dense and descriptive but I did very little skimming because I was interested in what I was reading. Neil was the narrator, and his style of telling the story was reasonably detached - looking back and describing the feelings he had at different times, but with a slightly clinical voice. This was when he was talking about both his own history (e.g. how he met his wife), and John Williams'. I kept changing my opinion on whether the book was about Neil or John Williams, but that was a satisfying challenge to grapple with while I was reading.

My only disappointment was with the last 10% of the book. After a tightly written narrative about the relationship between the two men and their choices, Guterson reveals some of John Williams' background through a long rambling monologue delivered by his father and a misplaced set of anecdotes revolving around his mother. The information revealed did not tie the entire book together well enough to justify the mediocre writing. That aside, I enjoyed the book overall, but I don't appreciate the book now that I am done with it as much as I did while I was reading it.

Middlesex being made into a series

Nice - Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides, is being made into a TV series on HBO. Wow! I loved that book and the Pulitzers aggreed. I am dying to know how HBO is going to cast it and how they plan to tell the story.

Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog by Kitty Burns Florey

I think I first noticed this book, subtitled, "The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences" on my favorite book blog: The Millions. The book is delightful - it's 8x6, thin, and cleanly formatted and illustrated. I don't usually notice the design of the books I read but this was hard to miss. It's worth a trip over to Google Books to see a sample page.

Florey's book reads like a long essay - I could imagine this being in the New Yorker in a few segments. It was a mix of literary history, her personal story, details about diagramming sentences, and a little social commentary thrown in. I had always enjoyed diagramming sentences in school (it was like math during English) and it was interesting to read the history of how and why it was invented.

I encountered a few laugh-out-loud moments (which reminded me to put Bill Bryson's books on my reading list - I was once on a flight with someone reading Bryson's A Walk in the Woods and she laughed uproariously for the entire flight) but mostly just enjoyed the writing. She spent a long chapter discussing what famous writers may have covered in school vis a vis diagramming and how it may have impacted their style - James, Stein, Twain, Cooper, Proust, and Oates to name a few. I was surprised how shockingly out-of-date her irreverent references to George W. Bush seemed.

The penultimate chapter was the only one that seemed out of place to me. As a copy editor, Florey encounters many grammatical errors. In this chapter, she enumerates her least favorite ("ain't", double negatives, and "youse"), weakly connecting this to the rest of the book by considering whether diagramming these errors would make it obvious they were wrong. While I appreciate a discussion of grammatical errors as much as the next logophile, I didn't think it fit with the rest of the book.

That criticism aside, this was a quick, likable, and memorable read.

Daemon by Daniel Suarez

Gregg mentioned this book on his blog and it was a great break from the serious reading I'd been doing. Since reading Cuckoo's Egg as a teenager, I have enjoyed technology-based thrillers, and this was a great one. I had some trouble finding it at first since it was initially pulished under the psudo-psuedonym 'Leinad Suarez'.

This book is about a world-famous techie who dies and appears to be controlling events from the grave. The characters quickly find out that it is a set of computer programs (known as daemons) that he's written that begin a set of events upon his death. A World of Warcraft-type online game plays a central role in the execution of his plan.

I read this book quickly, and enjoyed the combination of action, technology, and philosophy. Unlike the drivel about technology we often see on television (what's that Lassie? someone's hacked the blowfish algorithm and the router is launching an attack on the firewall?), this was well-researched and imaginable. While some reviewers see it as a cautionary tale about the dangerous future of a world run by machines, I just found it to be a fun read. Hopefully I won't regret that sentiment in 2060!

Lost Paradise by Kathy Marks

I heard the author of this book interviewed on NPR and was so interested that I decided to take it out of the library. The book is about the Pitcairn Island, where the Mutiny on the Bounty crew settled. In the past ten years, a storm of sexual abuse accusations by adolescent and pre-adolescent girls on the island have erupted, and Marks' book covers the ensuing trials and fallout. Over time, the truth emerges - sexual abuse of young women by older men is a multi-generation problem within Pitcairn, tacitly accepted by men and women alike, hidden behind false morays of Polynesian promiscuity.

The first several chapters of the book relay Marks' experience as one of the six journalists credentialed to cover the trials on this island of just 50 people. In a community that small, journalists can hardly remain the outsiders who do not impact the story, so Marks does her best to report on her experiences as a visitor, describing both the efforts to reach the remote island as well as the lukewarm reception she and her coworkers received. Over the course of the book, she covers a history of the island, the events leading up to the trials, and the impact the trials have had on this tight-knit community.

It would be interesting to read a trained sociologist's view of the same events, although Marks' book was delightfully readable. She discusses themes of control and power - not just as they relate to sexual assault but in how they are used in the community. She also keeps revisiting the idea of "the myth of Pitcairn Island", thought to be an Polynesian idyll without any of the negative aspects that exist. Her openness to report on the critiques of her own coverage was commendable but didn't tone down her obvious (and seemingly justified) disgust with the treatment of the case: the accused men were charged and sentenced leniently, then returned back to society early, easily returning to their positions of power. Meanwhile, the accused women were ostracized by the community, including their families, and pressured into recanting.
Towards the end of the book, she explores all the categories of people in the community who let down generations of women by letting sexual abuse go unchecked. She also addresses several potential theories for the abuse, as well as other similar communities without this problem. I think she tries too hard to draw conclusions and make recommendations rather than just tell a story that speaks for itself. That said, I liked the book overall and continue to reflect on the story.

Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan

In preparation for starting Infinite Jest, I was committed to finishing Omnivore's Dilemma ("OD"). Laura and I had decided to have a long-distance book group on this book so we had been trading emails about different sections for the past several months. This was a good way for me to read a book - always get more out of discussing my reading with other people and Laura is an excellent corresponder with a smart point of view. I also enjoy reading more than one thing at a time and this became a good background process.

OD, like Pollan's In Defense of Food, exposes some of the unhealthy and illogical parts of our food production system. This book is structured in three main sections - the first covers the 'military-industrial complex" of food, following a single cow through the mass beef industry to a meal that ends at a McDonald's. The second section explores organic and sustainable eating. And the final section covers Pollan's experiences hunting and gathering all the ingredients for a single dinner he prepares.

I liked that Pollan went and experienced each of the types of food production first-hand, reporting and not just researching. While it did not have the same impact on me that IDOF did, OD was a good read.

In the first section, he covered the science and economics around corn production, including, I kid you not, a large section on 'corn sex'. He also covered a history of fertilizer and general efficiency in our food chain. The sections on the beef industry immediately reminded me of The Jungle.

Pollan fascinated me with his examination of the organic food industry. He drew a distinct line between organic and local, which really made me think about where my food comes from. He also presented a different model of running a farm that varies the vegetation and animals in different locations year to year, providing a long-term sustainable model that generates far more yield and far less waste than how we farm now.

I was a little more disappointed with the last section, where he hunts and gathers, finding it to be more condescending and self-aggrandizing than the rest of the book. That said, there were some good points about how hunting one's food can change one's relationship with eating. He also gave an extensive and weirdly fascinating background on mushrooms. But overall by the time I got to the meal he prepared I really found the premise to be kitchy and more about making his point than anything. His anecdotes were fun to read but I had kind of stopped learning by the end.

The two points he made in the (too-short) denouement was that there should be "transparency" in our food and he recognized that both McDonald's and his homegrown meal are outliers in how we can really eat. I agree with both of those and see them as reasonable conclusions to his book. I think that if I had not read IDOF first, this book would have had even more impact on me. That said, I'd recommend it to both readers of IDOF and those who have never read Michael Pollan.