still going strong...

Still reading:
The Rape of Europa, by Lynn Nicholas

Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace

Actually finished:
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Schaffer
Diplomatic Baggage, by Brigid Keenan
Him Her Him Again The End of Him, by Patricia Marx
Resistance, by Owen someone or other

Unaccustomed Earth, by Jhumpa Lahiri

Map of the Harbor Islands, by J.G. Hayes

Still languishing next to my bed and starting to collect a good layer of dust:
The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai

Lots read in the last two weeks, mostly because I had a few days up in Seattle, which means access to my parents' bookshelves (why are other people's books that you haven't read so much more appealing than your own unread books? it's like we get eye-fatigue from looking at the same book jackets, and thinking, nah, still not quite in the mood to read that.)

I'm not going to write about The Rape of Europa yet except to say that WOW THE NAZIS WERE MEAN EVIL PEOPLE. It feels sort of trivial to be reading a book about the fate of art in Europe during World War II, when the horrific fate of millions of people is more important.... but then a tiny little part of me, the part that might dither over saving a drowning stranger versus the last extant copy of the complete works of Shakespeare (or Nick Hornby :)), says, but hang on, what's so great about humans except for the bit of us that _produces_ sublime art, so maybe the fate of all those beautiful Vermeers and Rembrandts _is_ just as important and relevant as that of all those people who were murdered, because, let's face it, as a species we are overall fairly crap. The thing that gets me most I think is the vicious hypocrisy in the policies: "degenerate art" should be destroyed because it's bad for humanity & artists/dealers should be severely punished for creating it/dealing it, BUT "degenerate art" basically meant whatever Hitler didn't like (Van Gogh, Picasso, the impressionists) which was difficult to predict until you actually stuck the artwork in question in front of him, and then although the official word was "destroy all degenerate art" half the Nazi war effort was funded with the millions they made on the black market selling other people's stolen art. I think the paintings I'm saddest about are the disappeared Vermeers. There was a bit in one of the early chapters that almost made me cry: during the Spanish Civil War, the Escorial near Madrid was bombed, and so the curators of the Prado realized that they needed to get their artwork out of the museum posthaste, as it was only a matter of time before a bomb hit the Prado. They arranged a caravan of high security trucks to transport the most valuable of the Prado's collection through the night to some underground vault in Valencia, and (this is part that got me), all through the night, regular citizens stood by the road along the route as these enormous trucks carrying the rolled up Velazquezes and Goyas, and as soon as the trucks had passed, they would go home and telephone the curators at the Prado (who were presumably biting their nails the whole night long) to say that so far the trucks were safe.

I'm realizing I've been on a little bit of a Second World War binge this last couple of weeks: Resistance was a fairly crapulent (I thought) overly pathetique imagining of a German occupation of a small Welsh valley in 1940 something - the general framework of the story is solid (seven small farms in a valley, German soldiers are coming, women wake up one morning to find all their menfolk have disappeared in the night to join the underground Welsh resistance, Germans arrive, women have to cooperate but can't give any information about their husbands away, German soldiers get snowed into the valley with them over the winter and truthfully are quite glad that their commanders seem to have forgotten about them because they're tired of being soldiers and just want to go back to being regular guys again, German soldiers plus abandoned farmwives end up leaning on each other to survive the winter, winter's over and valley opens again - dilemma of what to do.) but the prose is dreadful dreadful. No one in the book has even a glimmering of dimensionality to them, and I got very fed up with them all by the end the snow melted, and it was quite hard to care about what happened in the end.

THAT said, I loved loved loved the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (despite the retarded chick-lit title). Such a sweet book. It was a perfect antidote to all the macho misanthrope of Martin Amis, John Updike et al: intelligent, but warm and kind, and everyone in the book is a good person! that you would enjoy spending an evening with! possibly more! funny and yet with depth! Also about the (this time real) German occupation of the Channel Islands, it starts off very fluffy, and then slowly gets into more stern stuff, but the principal characters are so charming that there is almost a pleasantness to the ache of the sterner stuff. I think I have said before too that I do have a weakness for epistolary novels - it's the voyeurism of getting to read something that doesn't belong to you, maybe.

Diplomatic Baggage and Him Her Him Again The End of Him were both unabashed fluff. You don't need to read either of them. Diplomatic Baggage is a slightly self-serving string of anecdotes as told by a woman who has spent the last two decades trailing around after her husband on his various diplomatic missions - she expresses exactly the same amount of angst over Rwandan genocide as she does over having to organize a dinner party for six, and it could come off as cute and Bridget-Jones-like, but at least Bridget doesn't include both in the same _book_. The Patricia Marx book was funny (and she is a better writer than Brigid Keenan as well) but it also felt a bit too trivial - books that are entirely about women completely obsessed with men who are bad for them feel tedious to me now, which is either a sign that I am growing up or that I am an unsympathetic cow, not sure which.

The last book I am going to write about before I crap out and go to bed is The Map of the Harbor Islands which has been sitting in my brain ever since I finished it (late last night, one a.m., definitely past my bed time), and refusing to go away, saying thinkaboutmethinkaboutmethinkaboutme. The recommendation came from a source I was a little unsure about, book-taste-wise, but I was assured it was the Best Book EVER, and I have to admit, it's definitely got something. There's a lot in it, to start off with; there are a lot of words in this book and it might even qualify for quasi-saga-hood. The gist is as follows: two boyhood friends (the narrator, Danny, and his best friend Petey) are enjoying their rough-and-tumble South Boston Irish-Catholic semi-squalid but basically happy normal childhood until Petey gets bonked on the head by a baseball and emerges from his head injury a different person: he becomes totally unselfconscious, a truth-speaking angel full of poetry and love for the universe and the earth, (and an unrealistically literate and abstract thinker, for a twelve-year-old, I will also throw in) and, to the major freakout of Danny, Petey also announces that he is gay. Danny is a much more ordinary kid destined for ordinary join-marines-get-crap-job-settle-down-with-highschool-girlfriend life, and the rest of the book is about Danny's growing up and coming to terms with his love for his friend and thinking about stretching his own boundaries and making the most of his own life beyond the ordinary crap that's in the cards for him, and it definitely got its hooks into me, this book, even despite a few passages which stretched credulity, and another few which talked about God (as in the Irish Catholic version of God) in a way that seemed to imply that organized religion and homosexuality in America were PERFECTLY COMPATIBLE, no PROBLEM, you just have to think about it the right way and hang out only with the twinkly-eyed smart nuns rather than the evil spiritually-limited ruler-wielding ones... hmm, yeah, I have my doubts about that. But J.G.Hayes is definitely a smart and thougtful cookie, and kudos to him for writing a book that is going to keep me thinking about the exact nature of love for a while to come.

HA! i'm reading again!

Read (or at least started):
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
At the Same Time, Susan Sontag
Magical Changes, Graham Oakley (does this count? it's all pictures. my kind of book, man)
The Rape of Europa,
Unaccustomed Earth, Jhumpa Lahiri
random book titled something like "Character Analysis in the work of Enid Blyton" that I picked up in Powells because I could NOT believe that someone would write a serious book about this, but hey, they did.

Stuff I want to read:
fictionalized biography of Artmesia Gentileschi, by Anna Banti
Biography of Arthur Ransome, by Roland someone
Swallowdale, by Arthur Ransome, and THEN all the other Swallows and Amazons books
Twilight series, by Stephanie whosit

I haven't actually, you know, FINISHED, anything to speak of, but at least I have rolled eyeballs over print enough to qualify as reading the last week or so, which is better than I was doing before.
I did end up starting Infinite Jest; obviously I'm nowhere near finished with it because it's like five million very dense pages, but so far thumbs up. I'm skipping the footnotes, I've decided; the flow thing is more important, and while I do sympathize to a certain extent with the common criticism of his work that it is too self-consciously show-offy, it's FUN how much he knows about everything, and has this extensive and very precisely applied vocabulary (i.e., not just gratuitous big words, but perfectly placed accurate vocabulary that gives you a little tickle of pleasure of OHHHHH how nice that he put that word _there_ exactly where it belongs, and it's a word you only hear once every ten years so it makes you happy that it is still not just getting used but getting used in the right place to mean its right thing.) On a slightly unrelated note, it has occurred to me before that in English-foreign language translation dictionaries, especially ones that include slang or very idiomatic terms, they should also include an appropriate frequency for each phrase. "cool" can be used once every five minutes, easily, without being egregious, for example; "all that and a bag of chips" should be limited to once a year, at most; I have restricted my mother to "getting up at the butt-crack [of dawn]" to once every ten years, not that she respects that boundary. I think it would be really useful when learning a foreign language to give you a sense of how often you can use a given word or phrase without sounding weird. Anyway. So so far I heart Infinite Jest, and I do feel happy to be getting in on the tail end of the whole grassroots thing of 'Infinite Summer' (the project of reading Infinite Jest this summer, which may be just a Bay Area? thing or a U.S. thing? I don't know - as a tribute to DFW's life and horrific early death. So tremendously sad when smart funny people can't find enough to be worth living for.)
The other book which I am going to claim I finished (even though I skipped one of the longer middle essays) was a book of Susan Sontag essays, "At the Same Time," which was compiled posthumously. I will admit to having Trouble with a capital T with some of them: she nearly lost me with the first one, which is sort of a weird abstract pseudophilosophical meandering about the meaning of Beauty, and what beauty means and how it's defined and how it relates to ethical/moral issues and cultural standards and I found myself losing patience just a wee wee bit with it because a) her attempt to define beauty isn't really going to change what anyone else finds beautiful (I don't think) and b) I am the world's least abstract thinker. I do think that beauty is not as visceral a decision as we might like to think: I have grown out of liking a lot of pieces of art that I really liked 10-20 years ago, and come to really like several other things that I hated as a teenager, in large part because of extra stuff I have learned about the cultural context/artist's intention/etc, but I don't think Susan Sontag (or Oscar Wilde, or Plato, or anyone else) philosophizing about the meaning of beauty is going to do much to change what is ultimately a fairly visceral reaction to a piece of art/music; you love it, or you don't love it. Ennyway. She also does this thing of referring to herself obliquely as this ultra-highbrow persecuted intellectual character, and it just seems a little bit snotty to refer to yourself as one of the last remaining smart people in the world, the last guardian of the True Culture and the Intelligentsia. meh, get over yourself.

The essay that most most grabbed me in the Susan Sontag book was a review of a fictionalized biography by Anna Banti about the Renaissance painter Artemisia Gentileschi. First off, wow, what a great name, to be called Artemisia is pretty fantastic, and secondly wow, fantastic to be a successful (and apparently good) painter in Florence in the 1600's, in a world completely totally utterly dominated by men made me feel so vicariously proud and woohoo, you go sister! The part of the essay that was a little bit disheartening was where she talked about the decision that women (still) have to make about basically being hyperproductive in their life's work or having a family, and how that is not a choice that men really have to make. "For a woman to be free, free as a man, means choices - sacrifices - sufferings that a man may choose but is not obliged to incur... Feminism has meant many things... about justice and dignity and liberty - to which almost all independent women would adhere if they did not fear the retaliation that accompanies a word with such a sulfurous reputation... that feminism suggests an avowal of strength - and a denial of the difficulty and the cost for women in being strong (above all, the cost in masculine support and affection)." I don't know how Susan Sontag felt about masculine support and affection, but I for one am grateful for what I got in that arena, and would be loath to give it up, although I think I am as guilty as the next woman in terms of not infrequently deferring to men without really thinking about it too hard, which I am sure has cost me in productivity points. Anyway, I am undecided about Susan Sontag, but I'm definitely going to read Anna Banti's book about Artemisia at some point.

I finally started the Jhumpa Lahiri, although haven't gotten far enough into it to be able to decide yet whether I like it; I don't think I'm ever going to be able to get over how much I liked her first book, Interpreter of Maladies. I also yesterday went on a pilgrimage to Powell's bookstore in Portland - my first time ever; next time I go I am bringing a sleeping bag and a campstove and just staying there for a week or two, or until they kick me out, whichever is longer - and I bought a nonfiction account of the Nazi pillage of so-called "degenerate" art from Jewish collectors which I am twenty pages into and which I can tell is going to be just whoppingly depressing, with lots of destroyed paintings and murdered artists and the whole bit) as well as a Graham Oakley children's picture book called Magical Changes, which is AWESOME. that dude is a genius. I am not surprised his books are going for $200 a pop on ebay. (I looked for the Church Mice books, in vain, but I did find a hilarious 'Guide To Enid Blyton's Characters' which offered a semi-serious brief psychoanalysis of all the major players (George/Julian/Dick/Anne/Timmy the dog/Silky/Moonface etc etc) as well as books 3-8 of the Swallows and Amazons series, which I recently re-read book one of, and decided it was excellent. I didn't BUY books 3-8 because I need to read book TWO (Swallowdale) first, and of course they didn't HAVE book two... I also looked for the new biography of Arthur Ransome (author of the Swallows and Amazons series) which my sister sent me a link about which sounds FASCINATING - he apparently (in order to escape a tedious marriage) got himself sent as a journalist/spy to Bolshevik Russia and was there for the revolution, had a long term affair with Trotsky's personal secretary (whom he later married), worked in China for a bit as a journalist/British Foreign Office having all sorts of hairy adventures, and it wasn't until he was in his forties that he came back to the UK and settled down in the Lake District to write these gorgeously appealing kids' books about sailing and pirates.

I also might have to read the vampire Twilight series, as I have now heard it's fun from several people. hmm. we'll see. I might have to read it in secret when nobody's watching. We have to at least pretend to maintain some pretense at High Cultcha.