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.

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...