Strathern

oh my god, I nearly forgot:

the other book I read over Christmas was The Artist, the Philosopher, and the Warrior, a sort of triple biography of Leonardo da Vinci, Niccolo Machiavelli, and Cesare Borgia by Paul Strathern. He gets a bit loopy and repetitive in bits, mostly when he is trying to take up space to fill in gaps in the historical knowledge banks, and is guilty of some slightly wonky oversimplifications (Leonardo was 'trying to create a comprehensive scientific description of the natural world,' and Machiavelli was 'trying to create a comprehensive logical description of human behavior'... therefore they were philosophically in terrific alignment and had loads to say to each other (?) hm. It seems more likely that they had loads to say to each other (if in fact they did) because they were both super sparky bright talented compatriots who lived much of their working lives away from Florence and did a lot of thinking about stuff, but what do I know.)

The overriding impressions of the three that I came away from the book with were

1) Leonardo: wow, what a colossal case of what my friend Tabby has self-diagnosed as Executive Function Disorder (inability to get stuff done) combined with eerily prescient total fucking genius level smarts (designing things in his notebooks that wouldn't actually be invented until 400 years later)

2) Machiavelli: sounds like he was actually a very impressively clever interesting person to hang out with as well, despite his reputation for raging cynicism, which (at least to judge by everything he wrote other than The Prince) was unfounded, and

3) Borgia: oh. my. god. what a raving, loony, total scary nutjob that guy was. He had absolutely zero compunction about murdering anyone that disagreed with him, basically. I was interested to learn that Borgia, and his father, Pope Alexander VI, were actually Catalan transplants, and used to annoy the Vatican courtiers by speaking in Catalan on purpose so that no one could understand them.

So, in summary, I liked the plotty bits of the book, but I lost patience with the attempt to find deep underlying similarities in the characters of the three men. Sixteenth century Florence must have been one hell of a place to hang out, anyway, what with all the seventy-year-old Popes with teenage mistresses; people getting burnt at the stake, garrotted, or poisoned all over the shop; Michelangelo and Leonardo getting in pissing contests over their duelling frescoes... it makes today's political and art world scandals look positively tame by comparison.

Barnes, Hornby, Grafton, Wallace (continued)

Books read:

Julian Barnes, The Pedant in the Kitchen

Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked

Sue Grafton, O is for Outlaw (at least that's the one I think it was)

Books reread:

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

Ann Bramson, Soap

Books acquired:

Julian Barnes and Nick Hornby (above), plus

Javier Marias, Tu rostro manana

Alastair Reid, Ounce, Dice, Trice

Bill Gaston, Sointula

Vicky Harris & John Newton, The Food of Spain: A Journey for Food Lovers

The unabashed deliciousness of the first three I think are counterbalanced by some of the struggles implied in the rereading of the fourth and fifth. I still haven't quite finished Infinite Jest; what happened was that I got about 80% of the way through, and I realized that a lot of the stuff I had skimmed between pages about 200-400 might have been, er, relevant. I hadn't read them properly because I was dubious about my ability to actually follow everything that was going on in the book because it's so bloody convoluted, but as it turns out there is a plot, there is, really, it's just not enacted by actual characters. Here's what I figured out about Infinite Jest: the characters are either walking talking clever jokes (as in the undercover spy whose alias character that he has been assigned to impersonate not only is a different gender than he is, but is also not an amputee, so he has to go through all sorts of bizarre contortions to pretend that he is in fact an able bodied female, or the guy who (it took me a while to figure this out) speaks in a literal word-by-word French to English translation), or they are vehicles for absolutely transcendant and brutal descriptions of experiences (what it feels like to play high level tennis/be addicted to various substances/whatever). None of which is meant to downplay the impressiveness of the novel, it just makes it harder to keep track of who's who and what they're doing and why they're doing it, since no-one talks in any straightforward sort of a way. So anyway, I got to 80%, realized I did actually want to try and keep straight who everyone was and what they were doing, and... oh bugger, that means going back to the beginning and possibly even taking notes this time round. I might keep a dictionary handy as well. I'm sure it's all putting hair on my chest.

Soap wasn't a hard read, I'm just putting it in because a) my reading of it was under duress, so I want credit and b) it is actually a lovely book and very evocative of a simpler time. It's a soap-making recipe book, for anyone who might be mistakenly looking for a retrospective history of daytime TV programs, and I read it (and reread it, obsessively, desperately searching for clues) while trying to troubleshoot my last batch of orange almond soap. Rendering the beef fat was a revolting nightmare and then the bloody mixture went and curdled on me (I think) and the final product is still curing in bars on top of the fridge, so I won't know for another week or so how it actually turned out, but it was a very boring evening of endless, endless, endless stirring. But my favourite bits are her descriptions of working with lye, and how you should be careful, because it can sting if you get a bit on your skin, but how she's never really been burnt except for once working barefoot (!). so cute. I'm sure any modern-day soap-making instruction books are packed with strict edicts about no children and splash guards and safety goggles and rubber gloves and whathaveyou. For the record, I burnt myself several times, none remotely seriously, and did not use any safety equipment at all. I also plan to be making soap for years to come, since lye is not readily available for sale in small quantities anymore: I have a fifty pound bag that I had to order from an agricultural supply company, and it is squatting menacingly in the corner of my kitchen until I feel brave enough to attempt the next batch. I should probably seal it closed just in case the cat gets into it, hmm.

Anyway, enough about reading under duress: Sue Grafton's book was pure cheeseburger, consumed in one indulgent session over the Christmas holiday when everyone else was too fluey, too asleep, too working, or too busy sorting their thousand digital snapshots of birds-on-cliffs to provide other entertainment. The combination of funny, smart, and moderately trashy is an appealing one, and the alphabet series is all of those. Hooray for Sue Grafton. Yum.

The Nick Hornby and the Julian Barnes were a Christmas present to myself, and I have just finished inhaling both of them in one sitting (I did get up half way through Juliet, Naked to make myself a bowl of pasta, and I interrupted Julian just long enough to cut myself a slice of fruitcake, but apart from that, I have been wedged in between the same cat-hairy sofa cushions for the last, oh, good lord, four or five hours. (More, now that I got up for thirty seconds to fetch my laptop). I am starting to recognize Themes in Nick Hornby's work, and it gives you a little frisson of, I don't know, vicarious embarrassment, or something. You assume that the novelist is all-wise, all-seeing, all-comprehensive of all different characters, and that he is free, in his wise witty way, of all the hang-ups and stupidities that you yourself are prone to, and then you think, hang on, I've heard this before, this must be something that he thinks about a lot, and the personality, or more accurately, the interior monologue of the writer himself begins to reveal itself, and you think, eek, I shouldn't be allowed to see this, this is private. Such as: the feeling of having wasted one's life, the feeling that family and loved ones are (only just) enough to stop the average person from putting their head into a gas oven, the contaminating pernicious stigma of loneliness despite the fact that we all suffer from it to some degree (actually this is something that Douglas Coupland also writes about as well. Why is it so touching when funny and well-spoken men in particular talk about this? I don't know). I feel embarrassed to read those bits, because I think, oh crap, I don't know this guy from Adam, I've only read his books, and yet I know that he has in all seriousness at some point in his life contemplated putting his head in an oven, because it's come up in his books too many times for it to be a coincidence, fiction or not. I am less interested by his writing about music and obsessive male fan behavior about music, but there's another example of a recurrent theme that it doesn't take too much thinking about to realize, OK, the dude's a little funny about his music collection. How did I get off on this? I can't remember. I liked Juliet, Naked a lot, although my favourites are still I think About a Boy, How to Be Good, and the Polysyllabic Spree reviews. Don't worry, Nick, I'll still read everything you publish, as long as you don't convert to earnest Mormonism or something and lose your sense of humour.

I'm saving the Julian Barnes until the end as a treat - it had me nearly peeing myself laughing. I had to go back and reread I think three or four times his description of the beetroot sandwiches his dad once made him, painfully and hilariously reminiscent of the peanut-butter-and-ricotta boluses inside the sandwiches that my dad used to put in our packed lunches before my sister and I took over the lunch-making ourselves. It also made me want to go and raid my mother's bookshelf for all the Jane Grigson books so that I can read and/or try and cook from those. SO FUNNY. I am also totally jealous of his wife - he might be horrible, loutish, and abusive at home for all I know, but how irresistible to be immortalized in published prose as "She For Whom The Pedant Cooks," ("She For Whom" for short.) His writing is both warm and lovely and inclusive (describing his various humiliating messes and disasters) and the same time makes you feel slightly anxious that you will never have such a brilliant life, cooking up fabulous cozy suppers for all your literary and interesting friends and your spouse whom you call/who calls you "She For Whom." The other bit in the book that just cracked me up was a metaphor of cooking from a cookery book as being like the first time you sleep with someone, in that a) there is always the more experienced person (the cookery book author) and the less experienced person (the home cook), and the less experienced person always has the right to say, 'Eurgh, I'm not going to do that' (whether it be deboning a chicken or halving 300 cherry tomatoes to scrape the seeds out). At a couple of points I came dangerously close to actual urinary incontinence, and I did a lot of antisocial laugh-snort-cackles of the sort that would have earned me disapproving frowns had there been anyone attempting to share my sofa. But alas, there is no-one currently to call me 'She For Whom,' so I can snort with impunity, at least until it is time to have a bath and go to bed with David Foster Wallace (attempt the second...)

Tolstoy, Sharp

Read this month:

Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

The Rescuers, Margery Sharp

something else that was actually really good but which is totally escaping me right now and I am sure the title will come back to me but in the meantime I am going to worry about presenile dementia - HA! just remembered, Generation A, Douglas Coupland

Started this month and couldn't finish because its true owner took it away:

The Monster of Florence, Douglas something else

So, yuh, Anna Karenina. Where to begin. I should say that I went into this book with some preconceived notions, courtesy of my mother: she read it for a book-club when I was a teenager, and I have a very clear memory of picking it up and leafing through it in a "Huh, this is famous and I should probably have a clue what it's about" kind of a way, and she SNATCHED it away from me, and said, "No! You must _save_ this book for when you're older, because it will MEAN so much MORE to you then! You can't read Anna Karenina until your fortieth birthday!" and somehow, along with you-can't-drive-until-you're-sixteen or vote-until-you're-eighteen or drink until-you're twentyone became cemented into my head in a very permanent way. And then recently I saw an attractive-looking edition of AK (buxom beauty on the front, with bosoms and dark curls spilling out everywhere) in a used bookshop and I thought, what the hell, I'm thirtyfive now, I'm allowed to read WHATEVER I WANT. so I bought it.

I was surprised by two things, mainly: how easy a read it was, for the most part - Tolstoy has this very gossipy style and I found even his philosophizing bits to be so adolescently silly in tone that it was hard to really dig into them and try and take them seriously, so I sped through 1000+ pages in about a week, which was a surprise. The other thing that surprised me was how little _sense_ the whole thing made.

For example: Anna is described at the beginning as a wise, witty, sensible, attractive, worldly-in-a-good-way sort of person, who negotiates a domestic truce between her good-natured but sexually incontinent brother and his exasperated wife, and is an inspirational older-sister-type figure to sweet young Kitty Scherbatskaya. Count Vronksy - young, good-looking, supposedly intelligent and worldly as well, although you wouldn't know it from ANYTHING AT ALL THAT HE SAYS OR DOES THROUGHOUT THE BOOK develops a mega-crush on her with very little provocation, declaring his Eternal Love for her based on one little flirtyflirty encounter at the train station where they meet and a second one at a ball later on. Anna, in a move completely out of synch with her character as described thus far in the book, becomes his lover, and proceeds to make herself and absolutely everyone else around her miserable, especially after she runs off with him to Italy/St Petersberg, leaving her little boy behind, whom she supposedly adores, but yet she still just ups and goes to Italy knowing full well that this means she will likely never get to have any legal rights to her kid ever again.

If I were writing Anna Karenina over again, here's what I would try and do differently:

- have Vronsky be a much more interesting sympathetic character. As it is, he's just kind of a cardboard cutout of a Dashing Young Thing

- have Vronsky and Anna's relationship be actually believable and real, and not start until after they have known each other for a very long time, and have the reader witness several conversations between them that really establish that they are a match for each other in interests and intellect and sympathy and zinginess, so that when they finally do get together, you want to root for it to work out

- have Anna's feelings and behavior towards her kids be more believable. I am perfectly willing to believe that an aristocratic woman in nineteenth century Russia might have committed adultery, and might even have defiantly told her husband about it, but I CANNOT believe that even once her husband said, fine, do whatever you want so long as you're discreet, that she would have decided to publicly abandon son, house, social position, everything. me, i would have said ta, thanks very much, to my cuckolded husband, and smuggled my lover in at night when the butler and the footmen etc weren't looking, and had the best of both worlds; i wouldn't have even minded if my husband did the same. the book club meeting i went to to discuss this all agreed that 'it was perfectly normal for mothers to abandon their children vis a vis nannies and boarding schools etc.' but it's one thing for a mother to seldom see her child because the child is being raised by hired help and quite another for a mother to NEVER see her child because she was having a not-particularly-credible affair with a Dashing Young Thing and wanted to be able to spend the whole night instead of just part of the night with him?? i don't buy it.

Anyway, by the end of the book, Anna is a whining horrible clingy person, and I don't know whether Tolstoy intended to represent her as a tragic victim of her own circumstances or whether he intended her to be massively annoying, or what, but if, as the jacket copy suggested, the point of the book was to be a searing indictment of the hypocrisy of Russian society of the time, it was lost on me. Most of her problems she seemed to bring on herself and didn't actually have much to do with the hypocrisy of society.

- the whole Levin/Kitty thing was also very peculiar. Levin is the only character in the book who seems to be attempting to do something useful, running his farm and thinking about the best way to improve the lives of the peasants who work for him, but every time I started getting interested in what Levin had to say, he would go off into pastoral fantasies about how happy the simple creatures were, working all the day God gave them, and then going home whistling to their families to eat potatoes over the home hearth, and wasn't peasant life actually just idyllic, and it all got a bit too much like Marie Antoinette dressing up in "shepherdess" outfits. and why, oh why, was he so obsessed with Kitty, who was an emptyheaded cute little teenager, the female equivalent of Vronsky? Urgh! Silly!

anyway, so perhaps one of these days I will sit down and rewrite Anna Karenina. not.

The Douglas Coupland book was fun - he is a smart dude, even if all his books start to sound the same after a while, I will still keep reading them. I just wish I had discovered him when I was a teenager, because I would have REALLY loved them then. this one is about the post-apocalyptic world after the bees disappear completely and the human race is almost completely addicted to a new medication that erases any anxiety you might have about the future. we could all use some of that, hunh.

okay time to go to bed because my eyes are closing on me....