I am thinking of signing up for

... National Novel Writing Month again. arghghghghgghgh. OK, mostly I just wanted to put that in writing and see how it felt. But the thing is, I came up with a totally genius idea for a plot. Are you ready? here it is: STEAL SOMEONE ELSE'S. Brilliant, isn't it? I just started rereading Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey, which my mother rejected as "too plot-driven," by which she means "you can tell it was written by a guy," which I don't think is necessarily a reason for rejecting a book out of hand, especially when it's as gorgeously written and kooky as that one is. BUT here's the point: he basically just rewrote bits of someone else's book!! I could do that! My friend Sam has been working on a retelling of Chaucer for as long as I've known him, for instance; Alicia Silverstone became famous for Clueless, Leonard Bernstein and West Side Story... the list goes on. So all I have to do is pick my classic (Le Morte d'Arthur, perhaps - lots of juicy material in that) and then pick my gimmick (rewritten as a 1950's Soviet phone directory! or a rock opera libretto set in Gaugin's Fiji!). It can't fail.

While I dither about that, I also have to spend a minute gushing about Hilary Mantel, who is my new author BFF. I just finished reading Wolf Hall, and wowee zowee! girlfriend can tell a good story. I actually got a little obsessive and weird about this book, to the point of nearly not quite actually neglecting my child's basic needs in favour of reading it, especially towards the end when I was racking up 10 cents a day in library late fees, but I didn't care because it was worth 10 cents a day just to be reading it because it was so good. And totally heartbreaking that the book stops at what feels like a good ending point to Cromwell, but the reader knows that all kinds of shit is just about to hit the fan... now, there is a plot device. See, I am overusing italics because I am so excited about how much fun this book was to read. Please excuse me, I need to go get on the library website and request everything else Hilary Mantel has ever written.

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

I am sorry to say that I didn't find Gilead to be mindblowingly good; perhaps it had just been too built up by too many people, or perhaps I am just too queasy about Christianity, or ?? I don't know, but I didn't love it. Briefly, the novel purports to be a letter that a dying minister writes to his seven-year-old son reflecting on his life, his thoughts about fatherhood, and his coming to terms with his godson (who is a bit of a rotten apple, but the beloved son of his best friend, so not someone that you can just blow off). It's slow slow slow and meandery and (as you would expect) there's a lot of talking about God, which usually makes me a bit uncomfortable, because you can never be quite sure what other people mean by that.

However, I did have to write down two quotes that stuck with me:

"I began my remarks [he is working on a sermon] by pointing out... that Abraham is in effect called upon to sacrifice both his sons, and that the Lord in both stories sends angels to intervene at the critical moment to save the child. Abraham's extreme old age is an important element... not only because the children of old age are unspeakably precious, but also, I think, because any father, particularly an old father, must finally give his child up to the wilderness and trust to the providence of God. It seems almost a cruelty for one generation to beget another when parents can secure so little for their children, so little safety, even in the best circumstances. Great faith is required to give the child up, trusting God to honor the parents' love for him by assuring that there will indeed be angels in the wilderness."

and also:

"...your mother could not love you more or take greater pride in you. She has watched every moment of your life, almost, and she loves you as God does, to the marrow of your bones... You see how it is godlike to love the being of someone. Your existence is a delight to us. I hope you never have to long for a child as I did, but oh, what a splendid thing it has been that you came finally..."

Mostly I just love the phrase 'to love someone to the marrow of their bones.' I think it gives a good sense of the visceralness of love for a child. I kind of freaked babydaddy out the other day when I read these quotes out to him, and added that if I could, I might actually tunnel inside my baby, roll around inside her hugging and kissing her sweet little internal organs, curling up with her intestines and going to sleep right next to her warm little beating heart. Gross but true.

And on the subject of religion: I wonder how it would change the world if you had to have read, start to finish, the holy book of any religion that you claimed to be a member of. Believing in a higher power is all very well, but I think to actually have to confront the violence/inconsistency/weirdness/downright creepiness of some bits of the Bible (for instance) (which is the only holy-book-of-a-major-religion I have ever read, and I only made it through about half each of the Old and New Testaments if that) might make a lot of people think twice about whether they could endorse it wholeheartedly.

Next up: Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, and a whole stack of lovely lovely art books on the early Flemish Renaissance...

I don't want to love Dave Eggers. But I do.

... because I just finished Best American Non-Required Reading 2008, what he edited, with an introduction by Matt Groening, which right there is enough to make you suspect that ALL THE COOL PEOPLE IN THE WORLD KNOW EACH OTHER! wtf!!, and so so so good. a couple of stories that were a little bit more detached-ironic-cool than they really needed to be, but also some really heartfelt articulate attempts at trying to mend some of our fences with the Islamic world, for which, hey, kudos to you, dudes.

The three pieces which I think will stay with me the longest were (1) some excerpts from a blog written by an American soldier in occupied Iraq about what it was doing to his soul to be shooting people every day 2) a wry essay by the Canadian David Rakoff about his decision to become a U.S. citizen which reminded me oh-so-painfully of my own naturalization process ten-ish years or so ago and 3) a commencement address given by David Foster Wallace, in which he encourages the listeners in his ultra-accessible-yet-super-smartypants prose to attempt to live in what I (not he) would describe for brevity's sake as a state of grace, allowing yourself to imagine kindness and love and goodness in all sorts of places in order to not let the grind of daily tedious adult life get you down. all of which, of course, made infinitely more poignant by the fact that he was ultimately unable to keep himself from falling into total despair (he talks about contemplation of suicide in the address, but in such a way that you feel reassured, aha, he has managed to figure out the secret that really makes life Worth Living, and it just tears you to pieces to think that such a fantastically nice brainy inspirational guy as that (and he must have been nice, he must have) should have been unable to get himself out of the depression hole. as in, what hope is there for the rest of us if he can't do it?

but i digress. like i said, i don't _want_ to like dave eggers, because there is sort of a too-cool-f0r-school ironic hipster thing about his prose, but i really, really do like the fact that he devoted so much of this book to bridging the gap between the u.s. reader and the average muslim joe-on-the-street (one of the chapters, for instance, is the new iraqi constitution, and there's another essay which is a piece of american propaganda which was published in an iraqi newspaper purporting to be written by an iraqi. etc.). I tend to switch off a little bit with serious news sources re: Iraq at this point, and will be the first to admit I still am fuzzy on the differences between Sunnis and Shiites (for instance), and I wouldn't be able to find Fallujah on the map without a little bit of hunting, but little glimpses of regular life in Iraq are nothing short of totally engaging, and it's clear that his purpose, while obliquely arrived at, is dead serious. Respeck, as Ali G would say. i'm definitely going to check the other books in the series out: respeck for the SF public library as well, comrades. I heart the SFPL.

flemish art! conspiracy theories! an unbeatable combination...

Jonathan Lopez, The Man Who Made Vermeers

Terence Morgan, The Master of Bruges

in the middle of Stealing the Mystic Lamb, by Noah Charney

unrelated but recently finished and AWESOME:

Drown, by Junot Diaz (book of lacerating short stories that make you want to curl up and die because we are an evil selfish species who do each other no good and whenever there is the teeniest little flicker of hope that maybe the world is not a terrible terrible place and kindness does exist then SQUASH flicker is gone. but wow boy can write.)

The Magician's Assistant, by Ann Patchett (a very good antidote to the Junot Diaz book, since it is about people managing to forge connections in unlikely places and manages to be both sweet and intelligent without compromising either the sweetness or the intelligence.)

But! we are here to discuss fifteenth century Flanders and all the spicy juicy shit that was going down in the art world. This episode of Nick Hornby Will You Be Our Friend is dedicated to Alexia R., whose book recommendations turned out to be spot on...

The fluffiest of the three books is the Terence Morgan; it purports to be narrated by the Flemish painter Hans Memling, and it weaves a deliciously plausible solution to the English princes-in-the-tower mystery into the known facts (according to my brief review of the Wikipedia article about him...) of Memling's life and all the bigwigs of fifteenth century Burgundy, Flanders, and England. Love. It. I could identify only two problems with this book: 1) the back copy is SO STUPID (it makes it sound like an extraordinarily sloppy historical romance bodice ripper eeeeuuuw) and 2) at least the paperback edition doesn't include a lovely glossy insert of all of Memling's paintings that are clues along the way, a la Da Vinci Code, as to what is going on, but otherwise it is great and fun and clever and totally addictive. When I went to the internet thinking, hunh, I'm SURE someone somewhere has remedied the lack of a companion picture guide, turns out il n'existe pas wtf (at least that I could find), so here, for all your conspiracy theory scratching pleasure, is my little Reader's Companion Guide to The Master Of Bruges. (I'm not going to write about the Jonathan Sanchez book because although juicy it was a re-read, or the Noah Charney book, because I am still eating it whole and it is DELICIOUS).

1. Semi-fact! Yes, Memling probably did apprentice with the master painter Rogier van der Weyden. Can't find anything about whether vdW really was as cantankerous an old bastard as the novel makes out.

2. here's the portrait that vdW (Memling, in the book) painted of Charles, duke of Charolais:

3. Unclear whether Memling actually did military service. I found one website which (sort of sweetly) states, "Contrary to popular belief, Memling did _not_ fight at the Battle of Nancy under Charles the Bold," as if Memling's presence at Nancy is the hot topic on Twitter & Facebook right now.

4. here's a teeny tiny pic of the lefthand side of the triptych which was commissioned by the Spanish ambassador, Francisco de Rojas (pictured). Couldn't find an image of the complete thingy, sadly:

5. Central panel of the "revolutionary" triptych commissioned by Portinari for Sint Jacobskerk:

6. Altarpiece painted for the hospital of St. John:

7. Fact! John Donne was an English diplomat in the court at Bruges for Edward VI, and he commissioned the Donne Triptych, now on display in the National Gallery in London:

7. This is the altarpiece painted for Jan Crabbe, with the image of the Virgin Mary modelled on Marie of Burgundy:

8. The printer William Caxton printed the first book ever printed in English in Bruges. I couldn't find anything on Google re: whether he and Memling ever met, but fifteenth century Bruges can't have been _that_ big a place.

9. Various paintings supposedly featuring Princess Marie as the Virgin Mary:

10. The "Last Judgement" triptych stolen by pirates of the Hanseatic League:

11. the portraits of Lorenzo Nero Palmieri & the Portinaris:

12. I couldn't find any portraits of Edward IV, Richard III, or Elizabeth Woodville by Memling (or any mention of Memling's ever having actually gone to England) but fun! I found a post (on the website of the "Richard III Society," of all places), re: the lack of historical evidence for these portraits, to which Terence Morgan had himself replied, explaining, "I took my information from “Memling’s Portraits” by Till-Holger Borchert (Ludion Press, 2005), where he suggests (pp.55-6) that both Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville were painted by Memling (I added Richard in myself!)." So there.

13. the central panel of the Lubeck altarpiece:

14. and just for fun, last but not least, a link to the Wikipedia rundown on Perkin Warbeck, which I needed to, ahem, refresh my memory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perkin_Warbeck

OK, now back to Noah Charney and dastardly evil Nazi art thieves...

Lanchester, Carlisle, Bakewell

John Lanchester, Fragrant Harbour

Greg Carlisle, Elegant Complexity

Sarah Bakewell, How to Live, or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

Sorry sorry sorry have been backlogged for a bit now. Have got terrible case of baby brain: my brain has both shrunk and what little remains of it is now mainly occupied with floppy slushy thoughts about how delicious my baby is, which makes it hard to marshal coherent opinions about books. (I am also suffering from a revival of my addiction to The Office, which is eating into my reading time. but! excuses, excuses).

I did read John Lanchester's Fragrant Harbor, which truth be told was a more than a little bit of a disappointment - I have fetishized his book Debt To Pleasure for so long that I think my expectations are just too high to be able to relax and enjoy anything else he writes (although because of DtP I will forever and ever be bound to read everything he writes just in case he writes another book as good). Fragrant Harbor was a bit pointless - one of those books in which random things keep happening to characters you don't really care about, and before you know about it, the book is over, and you're like, hunh, now which of those characters was I _supposed_ to care about?? Poor, dear John Lanchester.

Also I read half of Greg Carlisle's Elegant Complexity, thanks to my sister's introducing me to the SF public library's Link+ system whereby libraries ALL OVER THE COUNTRY will send you their books for free which just blows my mind. Every time I despair about the inadequacy of public institutions (lack of universal health care, long queues at the post office, the fact that the bus from Santa Rosa takes nearly three hours to get to San Francisco) I will think about the Link+ system and it will make me so so heppy. Elegant Complexity is supposed to be sort of a Cliff Notes for Infinite Jest WHICH I WILL FINISH ONE DAY YES I WILL and I read it up to the point that i had gotten into in Infinite Jest, and thought, you know, I'd enjoy it much more if I just read the damn book already rather than the stylishly unlovely and lumpy boring Cliff Notes version. so there.

But this blog entry will end on a happy note: I finished reading just now Sarah Bakewell's biography, How To Live, or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer which was lots and lots of fun, even though it did take me a while to get through it, since I tend to read in bed at night and have been particularly prone to falling asleep with my face mashed into the page recently (see above comments re: baby). The chapter organizations (i.e. the twenty attempts at an answer to the question of How To Live) are a bit precious: "Be born," "Pay attention," "Live temperately," "Reflect on everything," etc) but she makes a very compelling case for Montaigne as a proto-humanist, and I think I am going to try and read Montaigne's Essays (as soon as I am done with Infinite Jest haha). He sounds a bit like Samuel Pepys - a voracious chronicler of every random thing that happens to him, a blogger ahead of his time.

Martha Cooley

Martha Cooley, The Archivist

OK, so I can't tell whether I am getting smarter or the opposite, but when I read this a very very very long time ago, I was like, WOW THIS BOOK IS REALLY DEEP (and yet somehow I completely failed to pick up on the parallel between the life of the main character, a librarian in charge of a stash of T.S. Eliot's letters to a long-lost love, and the life of T.S. Eliot himself (both kept their crazy wives locked up in psychiatric facilities for long periods of time until the respective wives committed suicide)). And when I re-read it this week, I thought, WOW THIS BOOK IS CLONKING ME OVER THE HEAD WITH ITS OVERLY OBVIOUS PARALLEL BETWEEN T.S. ELIOT AND THE MAIN DUDE. Also I found her prose precious and stilted and overloaded with novelly details (people adjusting their scarves in between chunks of academic discourses, just to remind you that they are People rather than just Literary Points of View. And speaking of tedious academic discourse, I swear there are some passages that are indistinguishable from a junior high school paper on T.S. Eliot: a few too many biographical details copied directly from the Encyclopedia Britannica (I'm only saying that because I used to do it, so I recognize the style...). So, meh. Not my fave.

Currently working on John Mortimer's Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders (whee! lowbrow(ish)!), and Matt Ridley, The Red Queen (having some trouble following a couple of his arguments, but I suspect it has to do with the fact that I am zombie-like from sleep deprivation these days. Perhaps I should be sleeping instead of reading. Hm.

Orhan Pamuk

Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red

OH DEAR I didn't realize I never posted this entry... I finished this two months ago now. oops. I took it over from babydaddy, in a fit of exasperation, as he had been reading it for literally two years now, and I couldn't stand watching him read it any more. And besides, the cover is right up my alley - Persian miniature paintings with horses and embracing lovers and sneaky looking men with daggers. love. it.

Didn't love love love the book, however - it's got a lot in common with The Name of the Rose, come to think of it - arty booky monkish murder mystery in which the contents of a book they're all working on are so explosive that someone is willing to kill to prevent it coming out, with lots of historical fictiony showyoffy detail (this book did have a bit more of the "look at ME and what a lot of research I did for this book!!" feel to it than was strictly necessary) so perhaps it was that i'd just read a book with a very similar structure. so, problems:

1. none of the the four illuminators working on the book really distinguished themselves in any way (a problem when they are supposed to be the main murder suspects). when you find out who the murderer was, you're supposed to think, "OMG it was that person!??!? TOTALLY didn't see that! WOW!" whereas i was a bit nonplussed by the answer here, as in, wait, who was that again? (although i did like the little twist of the very last paragraph).

2. the love interest hottie chickie that they all wanted to marry was very wishy-washy about what she wanted, ("i was happily in love with X, but I was also miserable because really i was in love with Y, and i only loved Y because i didn't know when Z, the only man I ever TRULY loved, was coming back," by which time it's hard not to think a) hunh?? and b) not sure i care who you TRULY love if even you can't make up your mind and

3. the translation felt very very very very weird and clunky, as if the translator couldn't make up his mind between slightly quaint old-fashioned English in keeping with the setting of the book (seventeenth century Turkey) or twentieth century slangy English, which led to some very awkward sounding sentences (may or may not be Pamuk's fault). the worst offense I think was when one of the characters retires for the evening having just seen the girl he's been dreaming about for the last twelve years, and the sentence is translated something along the lines of, "I retired in the evening to my bed chamber, as was my wont, but was so distracted by dreams of my beloved that I was unable to jack off." ouch! horrible horrible. Incidentally I read an article recently about the mess with Stieg Larsson's books and their translation into English, and was pleased to see that the consensus in publishing circles confirmed my sense that the translations of those books was just abysmal, and it wasn't just the case of the translator faithfully rendering Larsson's peculiar Swedish prose. anyway.

Moffat, Forster, Dunnett

Wendy Moffat, A Great Unrecorded History: A Life of E.M. Forster

Dorothy Dunnett, Queen’s Play

E.M. Forster, Maurice

E.M. Forster, A Room With A View

can't remember author's name off top of head and book is in other room, Savage Beauty: A Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay

This latest biography of E.M. Forster had been recommended to me several months ago when it first came out, but buying it new in hardback seemed too decadent even for a devotee like me ($35! Eek!), so I denied myself, in a fit of bibliophilic chastity, and told myself I would just have to buy the paperback. Virtue was rewarded when I saw it just sitting there, ripe for the plucking, on the library shelf when I went to return my last round of library books (in brand new hardback, no less, which just tells you that someone with pull is paying attention to my moral accounting. And once I’d read the biography, of course, I had to go back and re-read Maurice, as I hadn’t realized _quite_ how autobiographical Maurice really was, and then the library's edition of Maurice turned out to be actually a Holy Trinity of Maurice, Howard’s End, and A Room With A View, and here at Nick Hornby, Will You Be Our Friend we have had a persistent Room w/ a View fetish for many many years, so we reread that just for good measure because we love Rupert Graves and Simon Callow in particular.

I actually found Maurice much more interesting as a re-read than I was expecting, and ultimately the biography was a bit depressing. Wendy Moffat did an OK job, I thought, going through source material and culling for interesting bits, but ultimately the biography felt like not much more than a list of Forster’s various amorous laisons throughout his life, and gave very little sense of what Forster was like to talk to, to be with, to know. I was also a little dismayed to learn that he had such a penchant for working class, dark-skinned, sloe-eyed lithe young things - could you get much more cliché than that? I mean, who _doesn’t_ thrill to a little jungle fever, right? (that‘s a joke, just in case you can‘t tell) - as I would wish for a Great Man of English Letters to be able to rise to the occasion and pick on someone of his own intellectual size, knowing that Posterity with a capital P is watching. Posterity and I both do love a passionate long-lasting love affair between two epic personalities etc etc. (see Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes, Frida Kahlo & Diego Rivera from earlier blog entry…) But then I started thinking about it a bit more, and it became an exercise in exorcising my own previously unquestioned prejudices. As in, I think I can truthfully say that I am not a remotely homophobic person; I couldn’t care less what gender of person you might choose to sleep with. But I have an instinctive eeeuuuuww to the combination of older/younger, or to someone who has hundreds of partners as opposed to following a more modest serial-monogamy model, or - most snobbish of all - highly educated smart person getting it on with someone thick and not educated. So it’s hard not to roll my eyes at the stolid upperclass stockbrocker having what we are supposed to believe is a lasting relationship of real meaning with the gamekeeper - it just sounds too much like the beginning of a porno film. (I think Maurice predates Lady Chatterley, no?) But, really, who’s to say that sex is only respectable when it occurs between age- and class-matched intellectual equals, and only when it’s monogamous? (Forster and his various consorts seem always to be sending each other packets of powder to treat pubic lice with; morality aside, I definitely would have had more of a care for Posterity had it been me, and burnt any letters making reference to crab treatments.) So I struggled a bit with my own prejudices on that score, as I really _can’t_ think of a good reason, if you’re not going to have kids and you don’t care how many times you have to treat your crabs, as to why you shouldn’t sleep with hundreds of uneducated nineteen year olds as long as they want to sleep with you. (NB: last I checked, no nineteen-year-olds, educated or otherwise, had any interest in sleeping with me).

But! while as a story Maurice definitely has credibility issues, the interior description of what it felt like to come to terms with your own sexuality and to celebrate it even while society at large is doing its very best to sit on you and squash you flat I found very touching this time round. A better book than I had remembered, and particularly poignant in light of the hurt that Forster suffered throughout his life for being gay, and how pessimistic he was about homosexuality ever being acceptable to mainstream society.

Queen’s Play - more seventeenth century court intrigue; spies and scandal, about five plot twists every chapter; totally lost by the end, but I think the good guys won. Good stuff.

I’m currently half way through Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay and wowee zowee she was a heartbreaking little vixen. I’ve lost track of the numbers of men - and some women - who wrote her letters along the lines of “I must see you! I shall die if I don’t hold you in my arms again before you leave for Paris! Enclosed is a sonnet I wrote about how much I adore you, my darling!” Clearly I have been conducting my love life ALL WRONG. More on her later…

Murakami, Dunnett, Chua, Eco

oh the irony, that lactation gives you all this time to read, and yet your intelligence is (literally??) getting sucked out of you...

this week i read:

Haruku Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Dorothy Dunnett, The Game of Kings

Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

so. lessee. I think I actually _hated_ the Murakami, which is weird because a) he's all famous and shit, so you think I would find something to like and b) he does two things that I also like to do (run and write), so ditto you would think i'd find something to like in his book which is about running and writing. but no, alas. I found it affected, pointless, and humorless. eek. I said it. Sample annoying quote:

"But is it ever possible for a professional writer to be liked by people? [Clearly you want the answer to be no, even though there are reams of famous writers who have friends, and in fact you yourself mention friends in your book]. I have no idea. [OK, so why pose the question in the first place?] Maybe somewhere in the world it is. [Huh? Likeability is geographically determined?]... But that's another story. Let's get back to running. I've gotten back into a running lifestyle again. [Duh. You're writing a book about how you like to run.] I started seriously running and now rigorously running. [Again, huh?] What this might mean for me, now that I'm in my late fifties, I don't know yet. [So... you don't know the meaning of the previous pointless statement... funny, neither do I.] But I think it's got to mean something. Maybe not anything profound, but there must be significance to it. Anyway, right now I'm running hard. I'll wait till later to think about what it all means. [So basically what you're saying is that you are trying to make your editor's word count with an ENTIRELY MEANINGLESS PARAGRAPH IN WHICH YOU DON'T ACTUALLY IMPART ANY ACTUAL IDEAS.] Grrr. Anyway. He continues in this vein for the entire book. 'nuf said. can't recommend it. Perversely, it did make me want to read one of his novels to see if I can figure out why he is Mr. Famous Literary Best-Seller.

I'm going to lump the Dorothy Dunnett and the Umberto Eco together, mostly because really I'm only a few chapters into The Name of the Rose (which is a re-read - I read it when I was seventeen, and remembered it being very dense and difficult and brainy, but sort of sexy at the same time, so wanted to confirm my impression). The thing that I luuuuurve about both authors is that, while they are essentially writing beach books (mystery/thriller historical fiction) they are completely unapologetic about throwing in snippets of old French/German/Spanish/Latin without any translation or footnotes or even sly context-entwined explanation as if duh, any reader worth his salt should be able to sail right through it no problem (I will admit to resorting to the Internet a couple of times, but appreciate the challenge). They both have big fat juicy vocabularies, too: I don't have the Dunnett on me to be able to look at, but a random description of a carved stone column from the Eco contains the following list: sirens, hippocentaurs, gorgons, harpies, incubi, dragopods, minotaurs, lynxes, pards, chimeras, cynophales who darted fire from their nostrils, crocodiles, polycaudate, hairy serpents... leucrota, manticores, paranders, weasels, dragons, hoopoes, owls, basilisks, hypnales, presters, spectafici, scorpions, saurians, whales, scitales, amphisbenae, iaculi, dispsases, green lizards, pilot fish, octopi, morays, and sea turtles. Got that? I got maybe half of them.

The Amy Chua book I feel like I don't really need to discuss because EVERYBODY is discussing it right now, to the point where you don't need to have read the book to have an opinion about it. Briefly: I agree with her general philosophy that children's (indeed, anyone's) self-esteem comes from acquiring actual skills, which requires spending actual time and effort, and that it's up to the parents to get that to happen, but I think the extremes to which she carries that philosophy in practice are kind of psycho.

Anyway. Time to go implement some parenting philosophy of my own: sleep when you can, eat when you can, and try to have a shower every day. So far, two out of three...

Simon Singh, The Big Bang

WOW, that was weird - I must at some point have accidentally selected "Enable transliteration to Hindi" (not an button on one's computer that you'd think would be easy to hit accidentally, but stranger things have happened...) and as I started to type "Simon Singh, The Big Bang" it came out in Hindi, and for a brief moment I thought that my laptop was somehow asserting cultural/linguistic superiority over me, and showing off that it could not only recognize Singh as an Indian name, but also knew how to spell it in Hindi, and it was a tiny glimpse into a dystopic future controlled by machines. and then I realized that that was dumb/I was dumb and that I just needed to dink around in the settings tab until I fixed it. Anyway.
I promise I have read other things in the intervening months, but I will plead pregnancy brain and post-partum brain as my excuse (some of the reading has been things like "The Contended Little Baby Book" and "The Nursing Mother's Companion" which if anything tend to increase the postpartum stupor, so I refuse to discuss those on principle). However. Simon Singh! Simon Singh is fantastic. I love him. I will admit to reading his acknowledgement section at the end to find out whether he has a girlfriend or wife (ha! don't think so!) because if he ever moves to San Francisco, he is so mine.
The Big Bang is a concise-ish review of astronomy from the very beginning of the science (Aristotle, Ptolemy, etc.) through to the development and consolidation of the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe. I read it several years ago, but a) I had forgotten enough of it (i.e. most of it) and b) it's a really good read so I decided it was worth reading again, and this time I read it reeeeaaalallllllyyy sloooooowwwwly in an effort to actually retain as much of the information as I could, especially of the more basic early astronomy (e.g. how the size of the earth/sun/moon were figured out, the development of the heliocentric model of the galaxy, etc., all of which to my chagrin I have learned multiple times over, starting in sixth grade science lessons, but of which I had retained hold of only a few unconnected snippets (Tycho Brahe and his metal nose! Galileo muttering "And yet it moves" under his breath after his recanting at the Vatican! Ernest Rutherford and the thing about firing a cannon at a piece of tissue paper!) No guarantees that I will retain any of it this time around, but at least I have a few more random snippets which are colourful enough they they will stick in the cannon (Tycho Brahe also had a pet moose which died in a drunken revel at Christmastime! the Syrene well, the bottom of which was mysteriously illuminated every solstice!). I get lost (predictably) right around Einstein and relative space/time and space itself bending in funny directions, but since he also includes plenty of comforting quotes from people like Niels Bohr and Richard Feynman saying "If you can understand relativity and quantum physics, than you haven't understood it," I feel OK about it. I just went on Wikipedia to find out if SS has written anything else that I need to read, and he has! so exciting! an expose of the alternative/chiropractic medicine for which he was unsuccessfully sued for libel. yippee. stay tuned once I have read that.
The other thing I read recently which I just have to at least mention is Elizabeth Crane's book of short stories, You Must Be This Happy to Enter which is seriously goofy and very smart. My favourite was the story about Betty the zombie who goes on a reality TV show in which she competes with an anorexic, a shopaholic, a chronically shy person, etc. to see who can most successfully confront their various problems.