Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, by Claire Tomalin

Just for the record, I will read pretty much any biography written by Claire Tomalin; she has got to be one of the most thorough researchers on the planet. You definitely get the sense with this book that she spent a LOT of time tracking down 450-year-old pieces of paper, some of the details of which get only the briefest most casual of mentions, but if it was relevant/entertaining/interesting, dammit, she was going to make sure she tracked down that 450-year-old bit of paper for you. I read her Jane Austen biography a few years ago as well and really enjoyed it. I kind of want to write to her and suggest other interesting people that I think she needs to write a biography of for me.

So, wow, Samuel Pepys, so so so interesting. The most obvious thing that is wildly unusual about him was the social mobility aspect of his life: he was born, dirt poor, to a tailor and a laundry maid, and by the time he died, had risen to become head honcho of the English navy, regularly hobnobbing with kings and getting asked for advice by all kinds of important Personages, which speaks to a combination of tremendous luck and ferocious ambition that probably didn't come along very often in seventeenth century England. And while the political machinations that are the backdrop of the story, the reason why he is such a fascinating character is of course his diary and the record of his personal life, which (at least in Claire Tomalin's telling of it) reveal to him to be by turns clever/self-deluding, arrogant/curious, sympathetic good company with a love of music and books/a narcissistic corrupt abusive bastard, etc. Claire Tomalin I think likes him, which is good; I couldn't decide. The thing that's hardest, of course, for modern readers (by which I guess I mean me) to get over is his relationship to women; it's hard to remember that it was completely normal then to beat your wife and regularly molest any/all of your female servants, as anyone who did that today would automatically fall into the Major Creep category. (He also had, apparently, no problem describing other people's mistresses as "poxy whores" while enjoying frequent episodes of R&R with a bevy of his own "very agreeable" lady friends.) The family relationships are also very weird by our standards: at one point he hired his sister as a servant and insisted on treating her as such; she wasn't allowed to sit down at the table with them, for instance, and he beat her regularly, and it's quite difficult to wrap your head around how that might possibly have been considered a reasonable thing to do not that long ago.

I read a bit of the Diary as a teenager; this biography made me want to go back and reread it, if only because the Tendency of Mr. Pepys to Capitalization, according to the particular Fashion in Language of the time is so Quaint and Appealing, &c. and also because he discusses all his sexual exploits in this hilarious naughty-schoolboy-hodgepodge of French, Spanish, and Italian.

Ooh, speaking of naughty schoolboys, I also recently reread Stephen Fry's memoir, Moab is My Washpot, and also his novel, The Hippopotamus, which I had accurately remembered as sort of a raunchy version of P.G. Wodehouse. Which made me want to reread some P.G.Wodehouse; you can't pretend that P.G.W. books are in any way consequential, but he has a delicious loopy perfection all his own, and the English language would be the poorer for it without him.

Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World

WOW, I am totally pathetic - I can't believe it's been nearly four months since my last blog entry. I promise I have actually been reading quite a lot in that time - notable faves that stick out in my mind were

1) _Olive Kitteredge_ by Elizabeth Strout (interconnected short stories are totally brilliant: you feel completely not guilty if you can't remember what was going on the last time you picked the book up, and you get a little zing of delicious smugness when a seemingly peripheral character pops up in a story and YOU KNOW ALL ABOUT THAT PERSON and their deepest darkest inner thoughts from a previous story)

2) I did like the Khaled Hosseini, _A Thousand Splendid Suns_ - it's a good story and I also liked the fact that a male writer recognizes the importance of feminism enough to write a whole book about how completely shitty life is for most women in Afghanistan. I did think that the book suffered very slightly from Western preachiness, if that's the right term - there are a few bits in which the women express opinions about their situation in very modern-American-psychotherapeutic terms, which didn't quite ring true (of course I can't remember specific examples, but words like "self-esteem" or "self-sabotaging" - terms that I would bet (even if there is an accurate translation into Afghan) would be outside the literal/conceptual vocabulary of the average uneducated Afghani peasant woman).

3) _Cutting for Stone_ by Abraham Verghese, another story about how indiscriminately rotten life is in other parts of the world (this time in northeast Africa.) I am always wary of books about/by doctors, since I spend enough time in conversations that start, "OMG, I had this crazy/interesting/horrible/brilliant patient who...." and doctor-centric books often feel a bit like that, with a bit of "wow, look at what a wise compassionate healer I am" thrown in, but the story definitely took front seat to all that, so, you know, good for him. (Ironically it was recommended to me by a woman in a landscape painting class I took who inspired neither wisdom nor compassion in me but instead irritated/bemused me by talking the entire time about how she ran a failing maple-cookie mail order business out of her house and how amazingly difficult it was for her to lose weight.)

BUT this blog post is supposed to be about the Fareed Zakaria book, which I am reading for an unofficial one-off book club to which I was invited about a month ago. I accepted the invitation on the grounds that it would be Good For Me (this is exactly the kind of book that I never, never read. Well, maybe that's not quite true. I am more likely to read popular economic/political analysis books than I am self-help books for business managers, but I think that might be the only genre that clocks in lower on my appeal list. Which is not to knock popular economic/political analysis books at ALL - it's more a comment on what an uneducated big-picture ignoramus I am, so signing up to read this book (along with _Against the Dead Hand: The Uncertain Struggle For Global Capitalism_ by Brink Lindsey) was an effort to become a better person. We'll see if it works.)

On the plus side, you get the sense that Fareed Zakaria is probably a very nice, good guy with ideals who might be quite fun/interesting to chat to in person (I have never seen him on CNN, so for all I know he might be an arrogant berk with a distracting facial tic and a scrapey voice, but based on his prose, you get the sense that he's generally a good dude.) The book is for the most part very readable, and he makes a (much-appreciated) effort to stick to the big picture and not be too jargony (although he did lose me a bit during one section where he was talking about how the US stock market is stronger than everyone else's in derivatives and hedges and something else that I forget, and I was like, OK, wait, what is a derivative? and how exactly do hedge funds work again? isn't it a bet that things will go badly? and if so, why is it good that we're strong in that?)

However, I got to the end of the book, and realized that despite the readability that I didn't actually have a clear sense of what the big picture _was_. On the one hand, China is poised to take over the world and kick everyone's ass and specifically they already hold gajillions of dollars of IOUs signed by the US (oops). On the other hand, the US is still way the biggest game in the world, and China is a long way off from even coming close to posing any real economic threat to our wellbeing. On the one hand, the US is uniquely positioned for success because we have done such a good job of forging close ties and becoming every developing country's best friend and we are such an open civil society that has a huge diverse hodgepodge of immigrants. On the other hand, we are on the brink of disaster because we don't spend enough time/energy/money on diplomacy and we are close minded and don't pay any attention to other cultures. On the one hand, our problems stem from arrogance; on the other hand, the solution is to become more confident in our actions on the global stage. And so on. I did like the fact that he sums up what he thinks we should do about our situation at the end of the book in clear bullet points (love bullet points!) and in his list was 1) reduce our nuclear arms and 2) work on practicing what we preach in terms of foreign policy. Yessss! It's totally clear and I agree with it! Three cheers for me and Fareed Zakaria!

I still haven't been able to get more than a few pages into the Brink Lindsey book because he contradicts himself massively within the first two pages and it drives me crazy: my thesis, he says, is that globalization is not some thing that was forced on us, but a carefully chosen response to the failure of the collectivist mentality that drove politics for most of the 20th century. On the VERY NEXT PAGE (we're still in the preface, here) he says that we didn't have a _choice_ about globalization because it was the only option available to us blah blah blah... in other words, it was a carefully chosen response that we didn't have a choice about. Hunh. Anyway.

I think I am going to go back to reading novels now, since I don't have conclusive proof that reading anything, really, will make me a better person...