Audiobooks!

Listened to:
The Bone Clocks, David Mitchell
Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney
The Rosie Project, Graeme Simsion
The BFG, Roald Dahl
Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, Michael Moss
Little Failure, Gary Shteyngart

Read in old fashioned print media, barely moving my lips at all:
Super Sad True Love Story, Gary Shteyngart
The Hermit of Eyton Forest, Ellis Peters

Read out loud:
Just So Stories, Rudyard Kipling

...and here's the sad thing: likely many more that I have already forgotten having read. But! we don't believe in dwelling on past failures (especially not when there are so many present and future failures to be obsessed over) so, onward.

I spend squoodles of time commuting, sadly along a route which is peculiarly unamenable to public transportation (I once calculated it would take me five hours to get to work if I went via public transport, and I would have to arrive either two hours early or 45 minutes late). And while there's some enjoyment to be extracted from pushing/twiddling all the various knobs and buttons in my zippy new little Honda Fit (functional air conditioning! so exciting!) the radio reception isn't great for large stretches of the 101 and NPR is annoying anyway now that they have embarked on endless pre-pre-pre-election campaign speculation, so audiobooks are my new best friend.

Everyone everywhere no matter what should read David Mitchell's completely brilliant amazing fantastic book The Bone Clocks, including those friends and members of my immediate family who disapprove violently of fiction in all forms. I am willing to consider a possible exemption for under-twelves and non-English speakers, but only if the former commit to reading it as soon as they are old enough and the latter commit to learning English in order to be able to read it and/or read it translated into a language they do understand. Like his also brilliant Cloud Atlas, there a zillion little moving pieces and interlocking stories and you spend probably 90% of the book thinking, hunh? this is weird? I have no idea what's going on, but his prose sure is great! and then the last 10% of the book is like that Welsh Youtube video of the sheep with LED lights on their back getting shepherded around a dark soggy field when the camera zooms out and holy shit, they have recreated the Mona Lisa in wet sheep and it all makes sense. While probably the underlying theme of most of the books of this month (possibly all fiction everywhere?) is that the writer is going to die and that's terrifying and there is nothing heshe can do about it, David Mitchell clearly is writing with the more generous meta-point that we are _all_ going to die and he is afraid for humanity in general as well as just for himself, and he is going to use his fiction to try and point out the stupid things we are doing to hasten that end in the almost certainly vain hope that someone somewhere might do something about it. So bravo to you, David Mitchell, wherever you are (London, I think).

Beowulf I read when it first came out, and remembered nothing but the delicious alliteration in the description of one of Hrothgar's daughters (sisters?) who married a Swedish king, and that the "queen... was a balm in bed for the battle-scarred Swede," which years later listening to it in the car produced a little grunt of joy at (a) remembering the phrase and (b) how evocative it is. It's an odd story, in that it leaves _out_ a lot that you want to know: why exactly did Beowulf take off across the sea to fight a seriously dangerous demon that was terrorizing a nation he had no allegiance to, why was he undervalued at home, what did Grendel look like, why did Grendel want to terrorize the Danes in the first place. Etc. I also, once we figure out how to solve the mortality problem (see above) and I have centuries worth of time to kill, want to sit down with the original and Heaney's translation side by side and try and get a sense for how literal vs poetic his translation is. (A sexist quote I like that I always thought came from Flaubert, but which I just looked up and is actually (apparently) from Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who from his Wikipedia article is no stranger to either translation or romantic difficulties, given his transatlantic career and multiple marriages, "A translation is like a mistress: if it is beautiful, it is not faithful, and if it is faithful, it is not beautiful.")

Salt Sugar Fat and The Rosie Project are pretty much polar opposites in terms of audiobook experiences: SSF was read by a guy with a really, really, really annoying voice and a breathy overdramatization, but had some good data in it w/r/t the specific ways (again see above) we are killing ourselves with food-substitute. Short version: don't eat processed food, because it has a LOT of salt, sugar, and fat in it, and those things are bad for you. As The Rosie Project's main character, Don Tillman, could/would tell you: this book had an ending you saw coming a mile away, and the ultimate tying up of romantic loose ends was irritatingly facile but the actor who read it  had a flawlessly deadpan delivery, plus entertaining antipodean accent, and I was giggling helplessly over all the Aspergersy resemblances of the main character to previously mentioned members-of-immediate-family-who-do-not-approve-of-fiction. (ha! I just remembered something else I read this month: Bella DePaolo's Singled Out: How Singles are Stigmatized, Stereotyped and Ignored and Still Live Happily Ever After, which does a very reassuring analysis re: how the studies "proving" that marriage makes people happier are a load of codswallop. If you include data on people who get married and then divorced/widowed along with the currently-married data, staying single starts to look pretty bloody good. So hooray for us.)

BFG: Ostensibly for the four-year-old. She thought it was too scary and fell asleep. I thought it was great. It would be great to be the Queen and to read it to William, Harry, etc. when they were little, although maybe Diana wouldn't have let her or maybe they only let the nannies do bedtime stories. Funny to be a real person yet there be so many books in which you play a fictional part.

I am on kind of a Gary Shteyngart roll recently - the Russian Debutante's Handbook is so deeply mired in the sludge of my memory (reference words: kooky - immigrant - clever) that I wasn't sure what to expect with the autobiography/peri-apocalyptic novels, but they are both very funny and perceptive. Especially interesting to see how much of his autobiography made its way into the periapocalypse. He wrote both books when he was younger than I am now. arghghh. Would I be able to write that well if I had done nothing but write fiction from the age of 6 onwards and attended a whole slew of creative writing workshops? Hm. Seriously doubt it. I think I would be very afraid of that kind of extremely personal writing - I wouldn't want zillions of readers to know that much about me, although look, here I am, blathering to my eight? nine? followers about exactly what's been on my bedside table the last few weeks. :p

Boards done, taxes filed: and now for something completely different

Books read: 
Life After Life, by Kate Atkinson
Nothing to be Frightened Of, by Julian Barnes
The Ode Less Travelled, by Stephen Fry
Winter Holiday, by Arthur Ransome
Rhyme's Reason, by John Hollander
The Invention of Love, by Tom Stoppard
A Shropshire Lad, by A.E. Housman
English Verse, Early Lyrics to Shakespeare, various

So I really, really, really enjoyed the Stephen Fry book, up until the very last page: he's chatty and funny and passionate about his subject, and his examples are beautifully clear, and although I didn't quite feel moved to follow all his instructions to the letter (going to get a pencil and attempting actual poetry myself) I really did do as he asked and read a lot of the poems aloud and then on the very last page he BLEW IT. A book like this works because the author constructs, along with the how-to manual aspect of things, the cozy illusion that you (the reader) are (a) as competent/literate as he is and that (b) it's just the two of you, BFF's all the way, chatting about poetry. And then on the very last page, he says a bit pompously that he hopes you had fun, but whatever you do, do NOT send him any of your pathetic attempts at poetry because he's crazy busy and important, with all his squillions of fans and it's just too overwhelming (well, he doesn't quite say it like that, but that's the underlying message). What a snot! So I returned my copy to the library, bought a used copy (because one day when I have oodles of spare time haha I really am going to go through and do it properly, doing all the exercises), and as soon as it arrived, I tore out the last page. (Not that I would ever send Stephen Fry anything I'd ever written, but really. I should note that I have now, courtesy of my lovely sister, actually met Nick Hornby after a reading/interview in SF recently, and I was an extremely restrained well-behaved sort of fan. Mostly because he looked as if he was dying to go back to his hotel room and have a smoke and not have to talk to anyone, which is fair enough). So there you go, Stephen Fry, you have incited me to wanton vandalism of literature. I hope you're happy.
April is, it turns out, National Poetry Month, and I have been on a little mini-binge of poetry reading and semi-memorizing, as an antidote to all that studying for my boards exam, getting my taxes done, etc. It's distressingly easy to get through an entire day without thinking once about beauty and pleasure and the very particular joys of the English language, so I have been shopping around with me an elegant little leatherbound English Verse as well as a paperback of A.E. Housman in an effort to combat that. I know that words are the important part of all this, and physical books per se aren't supposed (?) to matter, but sitting down on the train and pulling out my ancient leatherbound English Verse with its funny indented type and little ribbon placeholder and age-spotted tissue-paper-thin pages to try and hash through the prologue of the Canterbury Tales made me HAPPY. (Wow, two paragraphs in a row ending with the word 'happy.')'
Julian Barnes: love/hate. Deliciously aquiline and clever the once I heard him speak (reading, SF) (and there I was _not_ a good well behaved fan: I gushed, and I recommended someone else's book to him, which I think is probably tacky), some of his books meh, some of them love love love. I really enjoyed Nothing To Be Frightened Of, because, well, I think about death a lot and how much longer I have and how I am going to die and whether I will feel ready to die when the time comes or whether I will be in a frantic panic suddenly realizing all the time I've wasted doing stupid things like writing blogs that no one reads, and knowing that other people, who seem to have things more or less together, are also terrified of death, somehow does make it a tiny bit easier. Here's a confession: when I have attended patients' deaths, I always say to family members that I don't think the person is in any pain, but the truth is I DON'T KNOW AND NOBODY DOES. Also, wtf, even if you're not in pain, what if you're absolutely terrified of ceasing to exist - I don't know that morphine does much for that. Anyway. This is not a paragraph that can easily be made to end in the word 'happy.'
Ha.
Anyway. Kate Atkinson: good, time-travelly, some nice strong images but I didn't ever feel that I knew the people. Rhyme's Reason - more concise less chatty/funny version of Stephen Fry's book. Winter Holiday - Arthur Ransome has definitively replaced my Harry Potter guilty secret anti-insomnia aid. The Invention of Love - I think I'd need to see it staged. I enjoyed the Wikipedia article about A.E. Housman better...

Quick March!

Books read March 2015
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot
The Pun Also Rises, by John Pollack
Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn
About ten Rumpole anthologies in quick succession, by John Mortimer
Specialty Board Review for Family Practice, by some committee in Iowa somewhere.
The Ode Less Travelled, by Stephen Fry
Shitty Mom: The Parenting Guide for the Rest of Us, by Kilmartin et al
Old Peter's Russian Tales, Arthur Ransome

Gotten from the library on my daughter's brand new library card (!) and much looking forward to: 
Life after life, by Kate Atkinson

Not a book, but deserves a mention since it has given me nightmares about falling off cliff faces every night for the last week since watching it: 
Reel Rock, a documentary about rock climbing in Yosemite

Usual excuses re: not having written anything between September of last year and now: blah blah blah. Have been reading normal amounts but have stepped it up a bit this month (and I am bothering to write a blogpost about it) because I am engaged in the seductive game of productive procrastination. You may or may not have noticed, buried subtly in the 'Books Read' list, that innocuous-looking Specialty Board Review for Family Practice - it is actually a giant telephone directory-sized memento mori of my impending recertification exam that I have been carting around everywhere with me for the last month, in the hopes that it will impart knowledge through my bag into me. Unlike everything else on the list, I haven't actually finished it. Hm. Yes. Well.

Continuing where I left off in September: race relations in this country and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. I went on a blind date recently with a very nice (black) West African guy (well-educated, definitely upper middle class, living the fabulous single techie lifestyle in SF, lattes, windsurfing, etc.). (Yes, this will ultimately be about Henrietta Lacks.) During our conversation, I was continually distracted by his 'otherness' - not so much specifically the colour of his skin so much as the whole package - the dreadlocks, the accent, my acute awareness that, despite the high-thread-count dress shirt and ordering of organic low-carb entrees, he comes from a place where people share living quarters with their chickens if they are lucky enough to be able to afford chickens, a place which is poor and corrupt as a direct result of what my great great great grandparents did to his great great great grandparents. While the positive effects of biculturalism on intelligence and personality are well-documented (and as I said, he was a fun guy), I think it would be actually quite difficult to have a relationship with someone who lives with that level of schism in their brain (a dirt-poor country of origin suffering all the effects of postcolonial fallout vs current first-world existence, sitting in a coffee shop in the SF Ferry Building, debating the relative merits of different Tahoe ski resorts) and when there is the larger cultural elephant in the room of centuries of history of white perpetrators/brown victims. Which all circuitously confirms, in a way, my own racism, despite myself: it's difficult to have a relationship with someone with a vastly different life experience, and if most brown people have suffered and white people have not so much, we're going to have some pretty whopping chasms in our life experiences.
To paraphrase Nick Hornby (hello, Nick, if you ever read this :)), there's a bit I like in one of his Believer essays where he takes issue with novelists writing books from the perspective of characters who are already articulate, well-educated, and clear thinking, because "they don't need the help," and that actually it's a more interesting and more worthwhile challenge to help give a voice to a character without those advantages. Which is what Rebecca Skloot does, beautifully, in the Henrietta Lacks book: it's a history of some cells taken from a poor black woman dying of cervical cancer in the 1950's which became HeLa cells, which are the standard line of tissue culture cells used all over the world today (and on which I spent two years in my twenties, running experiments on their interleukin activity, without any knowledge of their provenance), and in addition to a nice concise rundown of the basic science and a clearsighted presentation of the moral quagmire involved in taking unwanted cells from another human being and disseminating them widely for research purposes, she also really loves and provides a voice for the bewildered/angry/poor/sick/uneducated descendants of this woman (who rightfully fail to understand how their mother's cells could have provided the basis of a squillion dollar medical-research industrial complex and yet they don't have health insurance).
Anyway.

Gone Girl is really good and I wish I could write like Gillian Flynn. She's VERY SMART. and funny. Also I wish that I could write like John Mortimer. I spent the weekend recently with a group of women I didn't know particularly well, and everyone was just tremendously nice and earnest and wholesome; all the under-40's said 'like' every other word (also there was unironic discussion of astrology), and by the end of the weekend, I was kind of climbing the walls for a little viciously articulate wit. Gillian Flynn and John Mortimer between them scratched the itch perfectly.

The Ode Less Travelled is only half read at this point - it's a how-to guide for writing poetry, which I'm not 100% convinced I want to do, but I can't resist Stephen Fry, so for now I'm just skimming it rather than actually going through and doing it properly,

But you'll know if in April's post appear
A rhyme or two in beauteous iambs here
That I have read the book on writing verse.
Hmm. Compared to Shakespeare, definitely worse.