okay, so i'm a better reader than i am blogger...

Read since last post:
The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai
The Man Who Loved Books Too Much, Alison Hoover Bartlett
The Rape of Europa, Lynn Nichols
Neither Here Nor There, Bill Bryson
The Understudy, David Nicholls (how weird is that that I read two books this month by authors with nearly identical surnames...)
The Piano Shop on the Left Bank, Thad Carhart

Seven Days in the Art World, Sarah Thornton

Started reading:
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

Trailed off but still with the best of intentions of one finishing:
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace

The theme of this last month's reading, in retrospect, has to do with theft and taking what doesn't belong to you. Hopefully this is not an indicator of any kleptomaniac proclivities on my part (or a foreshadowing of a major burglary. I'm just going to go and check that the doors are locked...)

My reading was a little fragmented recently due to a two week trip away from home, during which I decided to be extra-macho about how little luggage I took with me; I brought only The Inheritance of Loss, which had come with such an enthusiastic recommendation from a colleague that I was suspicious, and thus I let it languish next to my bed for ages and in fact was getting perilously close to just putting it away on a high shelf (which for me is basically admitting that I will never read it). But! having only one book while travelling is a great motivator for getting that one book read, as it turns out, and I'm REALLY glad I did, because it's really good in a phenomenally depressing kind of way. It's a family saga set in north India, and without being overly ambitious about it, Desai writes about the fortunes of a family as a miniature version of the fortunes of India as a whole in the years during and after Independence, which is to say that one horrible thing after another happens and things get more and more complicated and you begin to feel (like with so many situations involving long and violent armed conflict) that the only way to solve the problem is to go back and time and start from the very beginning. As with Rape of Europa, one of the huge huge questions that it presented (without a proper answer) is to what extent one generation must make reparations for the sins of the previous generation; in the case of Inheritance of Loss, the repercussions of the British occupation of India for 200 odd years is squeamishly painfully clear - and it begs the question that, um, even though technically India has been independent since 1946, shouldn't Britain still be making up for everything that was taken from the Indians during the occupation, because part of India's current chaos is the fault of the British administration during the Raj. Likewise in The Rape of Europa, at what point do you say, OK, enough reparation has been done for the families from whom the Nazis stole/destroyed phenomenally valuable art treasures that in many cases were irreplaceable? is there/should there be a statute of limitations? are there squatters' rights for art treasures acquired in dubious circumstances during the war?

Continuing the theme of taking what doesn't belong to you, I LOVED Allison Bartlett Hoover's book, The Man Who Loved Books Too Much, which is a book nerd's crime thriller true story about the rare book thief John Gilkey. From her portrayal of him, he seems to be a completely pathological conscience-free little git without any remorse for the consequences of his actions (and you end up really sympathizing with the book dealers who, even when the evidence of his thievery is proven, have an incredibly difficult time getting the legal system to prosecute him, mainly because (despite the fact that he stole more than $100,000 worth of books) stealing books is not a crime that's taken particularly seriously by the police). She does make the very good point, though, that there's not _that_ much that separates Gilkey from the rest of the book-lovers in the world - she herself ends up "borrowing long term" a beautiful early Renaissance German manuscript that a friend had asked her to return for him, and describes a Christie's auctioneer who found a first edition of William Blake poetry in a bureau that was up for sale, that no-one but him was aware of: "Ninety percent of me wanted to slip it into my pocket and leave for lunch, but my conscience wouldn't let me..." and the thing is, I would totally feel tempted if I saw a beautiful old book that I really wanted, lying out on some bookstall for the taking. I haven't stolen anything for years (I think the last thing was a screw from Home Depot when the line was really, really long and I had to go to the loo and didn't want to wait, and before that gummy fish from the local convenience store when I was five) but if anything was going to push me over the edge into stealing valuable objects, I think a beautiful old book would be it. Something medieval and illuminated, most likely, or one of the few Graham Oakley Church Mice books that I couldn't find on e-bay... I don't really get the appeal of the whole first edition thing, I have to admit. A handwritten manuscript would be exciting.

Neither Here Nor There doesn't have anything to do with stealing, unless you count the highway robbery of getting charged $12 for a used paperback just because I was desperate and only had three minutes to shop for something to read at the only English-language bookshop in Chiang Mai before getting on 16 hours' worth of airplanes. Bill Bryson is a frustrating writer for me, in that he occasionally makes me actually weak with laughter, and I start attracting annoyed glances from people around me because I am trying and failing to suppress all sorts of undignified snorts and giggles and whoops, and yet his attention span is distressingly short and his books (the travel ones at least) are so devoid of point. He spends about five minutes in each place he travels to, and half of the book is about checking in and out of hotels and mishaps with travellers' checks and whatever else, and you think, well, why not just stay at home, save yourself some money, think up an actual narrative, and then put the same quantity of jokes in that you would otherwise.

I don't think Sarah Thornton intended Seven Days in the Art World to be about stealing, but I certainly came away with the impression that the modern art market is one massive con. She's an anthropologist who spends a day each at a major auction house, at an art school critique, at the studio of a major production artist, at an art fair, at a gallery, etc., and just records what goes on without really imposing any judgement on any of the proceedings. The domination of 'conceptual art' in the modern art world, and the flip side of that, the dismissal of art that requires technical skill, is an interesting philosophical quandary: if Damien Hirst, for example, buys a medicine cabinet from a furniture shop, fills it with medicine bottles purchased from a pharmacy, and then calls it Art, is it worth millions? what about if he doesn't do it himself, but has one of his many employees do it, is it still Art? is it still worth millions? If people are only buying art for its value as a financial investment, and not because it is intrinsically interesting/beautiful/useful in and of itself, doesn't that mean that sooner or later the bubble will pop and it will, in fact, be a shitty financial investment? I think I was most horrified at how much the artists depended on their descriptions of their work to give it meaning - i.e. if Damien Hirst has to tell you that his medicine cabinet is art, and that it is intended to be a powerful political statement about sexual aggression and repressed despair in the search for meaning in the universe (or something), then surely it's not really art. Art should speak for itself with a minimum of explanation, shouldn't it? Then I started wondering, well, how much does knowing the story contribute to one's appreciation of, I don't know, a painting depicting a scene from classical Greek mythology? or knowing what all the objects symbolize in a Dutch Old Master? I don't think it's the same, but I can't quite articulate to myself what the difference is.

Anyway. It's freezing in here. Time to go put two jerseys on and turn the heat up.