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.
Sunday, 22 March 2015
Friday, 26 September 2014
Race relations
Books read since, oh, lord, I have no idea. Recently:
House of Splendid Isolation, Edna O'Brien
The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides
Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
plus a whole lot which (this is tragic) I can't recall even titles of, let alone major plot points.
Mainly I wanted to do some thinking out loud about the two books set in Nigeria. I was given the second, Americanah, for a birthday present (plus gift receipt - such a discreetly sensible but somehow uncomfortable innovation, don't you think?) and the back cover was all blurbs for her first book, Half of a Yellow Sun (which won a prize), which (the very next day) got lent to me by someone else, in a spooky coincidencey sort of way. So I thought, OK, well, on the grounds that first novels are bound to have the author's juiciest semi-autobiographical stuff in them, plus this one won a prize, plus she wrote it first, I'll give Half of a Yellow Sun a go first, and then if I like it I'll read the other one, and if I don't like it, then I'll use my gift receipt to go and buy myself a Prancersize DVD (thank you to my sister for finding Prancercize. A gem.)
Anyway, (a) WOW am I glad I read them in the order I did (b) people are terrible, especially white people and (c) I had no idea there was such a wide wide world of black hairstyling out there.
Half of a Yellow Sun is not the best book ever in strictly literary terms (prose a bit leaden in many places, characters unmemorable, plot consists mainly of white people being awful to black people alternating with black people being awful to other black people), but is very good as a piece of meta-journalism (fiction, but fiction set in an episode of painfully real recent history). It is a usefully lacerating reminder of the injustice in the world, just in case the more complacent among us had gotten too distracted by our teeny tiny first world problems to remember that. The whole way through the book, I was cowering in embarrassment at my own ignorance: just over a generation ago, a genocide happened that I had never even heard of as part of the Biafran War, which I had also never heard of, in a country that I would not have been able to confidently identify on a blank map of Africa (northish westish biggish would have been as good as I could have done). Many many people died in terrible horrible ways, arguably as a direct consequence of British (my people!) incompetence, arrogance, and greed, and I have spent more time watching Tim Minchin videos on YouTube than I have learning about Nigeria.
After Half of a Yellow Sun, I plowed straight into Americanah, at that point urgently needing to know the worst about what the U.S. had done to the Nigerians, prepared for another holocaust (my only faint hope was that at least one of my nationalities would turn out to have behaved reasonably well. O Canada, My Home and Native Land, At Least You Don't Drop Bombs on Developing Countries, well, not very often, anyway.) but Americanah is thankfully a much kinder, gentler, and less memorable book: no one dies of starvation or torture, they just make wry poignant/funny observations about racism and culture shock that reinforce the message that white people are infuriatingly clueless, but black people can be pretty mean to each other as well.
The reference above to black hairstyling is not entirely trivial: at the beginning of the book, the main character goes to a salon to have her braided hair extensions done, a process that is supposed to happen monthly and which costs a bomb, and which takes 6-8 hours to do. (I can't imagine devoting 6-8 hours of my lifetime to hair maintenance, let alone monthly, but it did go a long way to explaining to me what I had always thought was the bizarre prevalence of hair salons in Oakland and the Central District in Seattle.) The main character subsequently decides to go natural, with a short Afro, which provokes a generally negative reaction from the chemical-hair-relaxing/straightening majority of her girlfriends but which is a liberating moment for her. While I have noticed (who hasn't?) that black women (in this country, at least- what Adichie refers to as NAB's, or Non-African Blacks) do frequently have seriously fancy hair compared to white women, the irony hadn't really struck me that the more 'white'-looking (straightened & styled as if it were naturally straight) a black woman's hair is, the less likely I am to assume that she is 'like me' (white, upper middle class), since the more educated upper-middle class black women I have met generally tend to favour more natural hair (i.e. Afro, braids, dreads, twists etc).
So while it would be stupid and disingenuous to claim to be indifferent to race (no one who has lived in the US can be colour-blind unless they're in a coma), here's my working hypothesis: common accent/educational level is a pretty instant leveler (for me) of racial differences, but if significant linguistic/educational differences exist, I am probably more likely to be guilty of racial stereotyping. The definitive experiment would be to hook me up to a polygraph machine, and measure my physiologic stress responses to having an argument with a black vs white university professor of medieval English literature over a grade, and then an argument late at night with a black vs white yahoo at a gas station over whose turn it was to use the pump. I _think_ there'd be no difference between stress responses induced by the black and white professors, but that there probably would be a difference in the stress responses induced by yahoos of different races.
Would be very interested in thoughts from others, especially black others, if anyone outside my immediately family is reading this ;)
House of Splendid Isolation, Edna O'Brien
The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides
Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
plus a whole lot which (this is tragic) I can't recall even titles of, let alone major plot points.
Mainly I wanted to do some thinking out loud about the two books set in Nigeria. I was given the second, Americanah, for a birthday present (plus gift receipt - such a discreetly sensible but somehow uncomfortable innovation, don't you think?) and the back cover was all blurbs for her first book, Half of a Yellow Sun (which won a prize), which (the very next day) got lent to me by someone else, in a spooky coincidencey sort of way. So I thought, OK, well, on the grounds that first novels are bound to have the author's juiciest semi-autobiographical stuff in them, plus this one won a prize, plus she wrote it first, I'll give Half of a Yellow Sun a go first, and then if I like it I'll read the other one, and if I don't like it, then I'll use my gift receipt to go and buy myself a Prancersize DVD (thank you to my sister for finding Prancercize. A gem.)
Anyway, (a) WOW am I glad I read them in the order I did (b) people are terrible, especially white people and (c) I had no idea there was such a wide wide world of black hairstyling out there.
Half of a Yellow Sun is not the best book ever in strictly literary terms (prose a bit leaden in many places, characters unmemorable, plot consists mainly of white people being awful to black people alternating with black people being awful to other black people), but is very good as a piece of meta-journalism (fiction, but fiction set in an episode of painfully real recent history). It is a usefully lacerating reminder of the injustice in the world, just in case the more complacent among us had gotten too distracted by our teeny tiny first world problems to remember that. The whole way through the book, I was cowering in embarrassment at my own ignorance: just over a generation ago, a genocide happened that I had never even heard of as part of the Biafran War, which I had also never heard of, in a country that I would not have been able to confidently identify on a blank map of Africa (northish westish biggish would have been as good as I could have done). Many many people died in terrible horrible ways, arguably as a direct consequence of British (my people!) incompetence, arrogance, and greed, and I have spent more time watching Tim Minchin videos on YouTube than I have learning about Nigeria.
After Half of a Yellow Sun, I plowed straight into Americanah, at that point urgently needing to know the worst about what the U.S. had done to the Nigerians, prepared for another holocaust (my only faint hope was that at least one of my nationalities would turn out to have behaved reasonably well. O Canada, My Home and Native Land, At Least You Don't Drop Bombs on Developing Countries, well, not very often, anyway.) but Americanah is thankfully a much kinder, gentler, and less memorable book: no one dies of starvation or torture, they just make wry poignant/funny observations about racism and culture shock that reinforce the message that white people are infuriatingly clueless, but black people can be pretty mean to each other as well.
The reference above to black hairstyling is not entirely trivial: at the beginning of the book, the main character goes to a salon to have her braided hair extensions done, a process that is supposed to happen monthly and which costs a bomb, and which takes 6-8 hours to do. (I can't imagine devoting 6-8 hours of my lifetime to hair maintenance, let alone monthly, but it did go a long way to explaining to me what I had always thought was the bizarre prevalence of hair salons in Oakland and the Central District in Seattle.) The main character subsequently decides to go natural, with a short Afro, which provokes a generally negative reaction from the chemical-hair-relaxing/straightening majority of her girlfriends but which is a liberating moment for her. While I have noticed (who hasn't?) that black women (in this country, at least- what Adichie refers to as NAB's, or Non-African Blacks) do frequently have seriously fancy hair compared to white women, the irony hadn't really struck me that the more 'white'-looking (straightened & styled as if it were naturally straight) a black woman's hair is, the less likely I am to assume that she is 'like me' (white, upper middle class), since the more educated upper-middle class black women I have met generally tend to favour more natural hair (i.e. Afro, braids, dreads, twists etc).
So while it would be stupid and disingenuous to claim to be indifferent to race (no one who has lived in the US can be colour-blind unless they're in a coma), here's my working hypothesis: common accent/educational level is a pretty instant leveler (for me) of racial differences, but if significant linguistic/educational differences exist, I am probably more likely to be guilty of racial stereotyping. The definitive experiment would be to hook me up to a polygraph machine, and measure my physiologic stress responses to having an argument with a black vs white university professor of medieval English literature over a grade, and then an argument late at night with a black vs white yahoo at a gas station over whose turn it was to use the pump. I _think_ there'd be no difference between stress responses induced by the black and white professors, but that there probably would be a difference in the stress responses induced by yahoos of different races.
Would be very interested in thoughts from others, especially black others, if anyone outside my immediately family is reading this ;)
Thursday, 29 May 2014
After a long hiatus...
Pathetic, pathetic - no entry since 2012?? and yet, I have been reading, I have, I have.
In the last two weeks I can claim:
Books read:
The Church Mice series, Graham Oakley
Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, D.T. Max
Leonardo's Lost Princess, Peter Silverman
Beautiful Ruins, Jess Walter
Books part way through:
The Iliad, Homer (translated by Stanley Lombardo)
Books gotten out of the library but not yet read despite best of intentions:
Edible Landscaping, Rosalind Creasy
Bunny-themed books gotten out of the library and read approximately three zillion times
This Little Bunny Can Bake (ceremonial burning to be held after the four zillionth reading)
Peter Rabbit, Beatrix Potter (why did we have to get it out of the library when we already have a copy at home? who the hell knows. Ask the three-year-old).
Bunny-themed books gotten out of the library and mysteriously lost between library and home:
Lucille Camps In
Starting with David Foster Wallace - death, I think, changes the conversation about a person more than any other fact about them. You can talk/think about someone without any need to reference to their hair colour or their day job or whether they had children, but their deadness or aliveness is ingrained in the discussion, if only through verb tenses. Suicide is sort of death squared: it's impossible to not think, every time you read something written by or about DFW, "Oh my God, and to think he killed himself," and that central tragic fact adds weight and pathos to every other more peripheral fact you might learn about him. The whole way through this (quite good) biography, I was bracing myself for the awful thing he was going to do to himself, thinking ahead of time, "HOW COULD YOU BE SO SELFISH/STUPID?!" but in fact, he did many selfish/stupid things, most of them involving women/drugs; suicide was just one of them. But he also obviously had a lot figured out as well, which is the weird part: that the abandonment of his hipster postmodern ultraironic persona in favour of an open-hearted desire to forge real connections should have ultimately driven him to suicide speaks maybe to the fact that we'd all survive to the next generation a little bit better if we did more posing and pretending.
A word in praise of the Church Mice books, and Graham Oakley generally: I more or less had a baby on purpose so that I would one day have someone to whom to read these books, and I cracked them out for the first time last week, a little uncertain whether they were still a bit too advanced, and I am so happy to report that they are getting read 2-3 times a day, pictures pored over, uncontrollable giggles at favourite pages, etc. Makes all those reiterations of This Little Bunny Can Bake and Peter Rabbit worth it (am I allowed to say I do not love Beatrix Potter? The illustrations are beautiful, but the stories themselves don't do it for me. A.A. Milne can write circles around her.)
Beautiful Ruins was unusual because it was the first book that has prompted me to ever _write_ to an author. I think about doing so periodically when I've read something I really like, but I haven't ever actually going around to doing it until now. I think I am possibly biased in favour of Jess Walters because of his first name, and the fact that he looks nice on his back cover photo, and the fact that Nick Hornby said nice things about Citizen Vince, which I have requested from the library, but Beautiful Ruins was enough of a juicy soap opera (set in 1960's Cinque Terre. With movie stars.) that I actually had it propped up on my steering wheel while stopped in traffic on the Bay Bridge. (Not recommended to try this at home. Or in front of the California Highway Patrol.) I thought that any writer who can get me to read while in traffic deserves at least a thank you email, so I found his website and I wrote to him and he WROTE BACK. Perhaps I overestimate the glamorous whirlwind life that authors of moderately successful books who live in Spokane, WA lead, but it was exciting.
I am finding this translation of the Iliad alarmingly Hemingwayesque. Not my cup of tea so far, but it's definitely easier to follow than the translation I had to read for school back in the day. Stay tuned.
In the last two weeks I can claim:
Books read:
The Church Mice series, Graham Oakley
Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, D.T. Max
Leonardo's Lost Princess, Peter Silverman
Beautiful Ruins, Jess Walter
Books part way through:
The Iliad, Homer (translated by Stanley Lombardo)
Books gotten out of the library but not yet read despite best of intentions:
Edible Landscaping, Rosalind Creasy
Bunny-themed books gotten out of the library and read approximately three zillion times
This Little Bunny Can Bake (ceremonial burning to be held after the four zillionth reading)
Peter Rabbit, Beatrix Potter (why did we have to get it out of the library when we already have a copy at home? who the hell knows. Ask the three-year-old).
Bunny-themed books gotten out of the library and mysteriously lost between library and home:
Lucille Camps In
Starting with David Foster Wallace - death, I think, changes the conversation about a person more than any other fact about them. You can talk/think about someone without any need to reference to their hair colour or their day job or whether they had children, but their deadness or aliveness is ingrained in the discussion, if only through verb tenses. Suicide is sort of death squared: it's impossible to not think, every time you read something written by or about DFW, "Oh my God, and to think he killed himself," and that central tragic fact adds weight and pathos to every other more peripheral fact you might learn about him. The whole way through this (quite good) biography, I was bracing myself for the awful thing he was going to do to himself, thinking ahead of time, "HOW COULD YOU BE SO SELFISH/STUPID?!" but in fact, he did many selfish/stupid things, most of them involving women/drugs; suicide was just one of them. But he also obviously had a lot figured out as well, which is the weird part: that the abandonment of his hipster postmodern ultraironic persona in favour of an open-hearted desire to forge real connections should have ultimately driven him to suicide speaks maybe to the fact that we'd all survive to the next generation a little bit better if we did more posing and pretending.
A word in praise of the Church Mice books, and Graham Oakley generally: I more or less had a baby on purpose so that I would one day have someone to whom to read these books, and I cracked them out for the first time last week, a little uncertain whether they were still a bit too advanced, and I am so happy to report that they are getting read 2-3 times a day, pictures pored over, uncontrollable giggles at favourite pages, etc. Makes all those reiterations of This Little Bunny Can Bake and Peter Rabbit worth it (am I allowed to say I do not love Beatrix Potter? The illustrations are beautiful, but the stories themselves don't do it for me. A.A. Milne can write circles around her.)
Beautiful Ruins was unusual because it was the first book that has prompted me to ever _write_ to an author. I think about doing so periodically when I've read something I really like, but I haven't ever actually going around to doing it until now. I think I am possibly biased in favour of Jess Walters because of his first name, and the fact that he looks nice on his back cover photo, and the fact that Nick Hornby said nice things about Citizen Vince, which I have requested from the library, but Beautiful Ruins was enough of a juicy soap opera (set in 1960's Cinque Terre. With movie stars.) that I actually had it propped up on my steering wheel while stopped in traffic on the Bay Bridge. (Not recommended to try this at home. Or in front of the California Highway Patrol.) I thought that any writer who can get me to read while in traffic deserves at least a thank you email, so I found his website and I wrote to him and he WROTE BACK. Perhaps I overestimate the glamorous whirlwind life that authors of moderately successful books who live in Spokane, WA lead, but it was exciting.
I am finding this translation of the Iliad alarmingly Hemingwayesque. Not my cup of tea so far, but it's definitely easier to follow than the translation I had to read for school back in the day. Stay tuned.
Wednesday, 28 November 2012
Zafon, George, rubbish, LROB
La Sombra del Viento, Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Vanity Fair article about Marriage Scientology Style: What Katie Holmes Didn't Know
My 403b plan fine print
Last two issues of London Review of Books
I, Richard, Elizabeth George
OK, there is some fairly desperate padding of the list, I will admit, there, but if one is going to be a blogger, one must be prepared to bare the gory details of one's innermost reading list to the harsh critical light of day.
The middle two (Vanity Fair article, 403b plan details) were both monstrously depressing, to the point that we don't really need to go into them; suffice to say that both made me feel completely inadequate, financially speaking. Tom Cruise has, turns out, just scads of cash.
However! La Sombra del Viento.... omg so much fun. I have a feeling that had I read it in English, I would have made myself slightly ill reading it way too quickly all in one sitting, whereas in Spanish, I am a bit like a whale swimming through molasses and I have to surface periodically for metaphorical air (air in this case being English, with the help of the internet. I remember when I had an actual collection of actual Spanish/English dictionaries - as in reference books, that sweetly quaint and inefficiently space-consuming habit we used to have, before the inefficiently time-consuming internets arrived.) Sludgy and slow though reading in Spanish, was, however,
(a) it was more confidence inducing than my 403b financial statements: there was initial depression at how many words I didn't even recognize per page, and then as I started looking them up, I got quite perky at how incredibly obscure they were ("slag-heap," "a lime blossom infusion," or, best of all, "spanishdict.com did not recognize your word; please try again" HA! not even in the DICTIONARY! boo-YAH!)
(b) it prolonged the pleasure of the juicy plotty gothic deliciousness of the book, of which I will not give away any details except to say waaaaaahahhh! the epilogue!!!!!! did ____ die, or ??? and if so, how?? and wtf?!?! Not unlike _The Master of Bruges_ which I also devoured whole a while ago, which had me all hot to look up pics of the all the various paintings it mentions, this book had me constantly running to Google maps to look at Barcelona streetview - extra points for that - and
(c) it reminded me that it is always, always, always worth reading things in the language they were written it if at all possible. A translation distances you, there is no question about it. I heard a very nice interview with Javier Bardem on I think Fresh Air last year in which he was describing the sensation, when acting in English, of having an office full of very busy people in his head, bustling around and working frantically to do the simultaneous interpretation from Spanish, and when he went back to speaking in Spanish, all the office workers could go home for the weekend and lock up. The thing is, all the office workers have their own agenda. I think I used to think that anything I read in translation was definitive, perfect; it never occurred to me that not only could there be multiple imperfect (and imperfectible) versions, but that there IS no perfect translation, no perfect 1:1 pre-ordained word correspondences, and there are, especially in fiction, cultural references that either have to be annoyingly explained, breaking up the narrative, or left out.
On that earth-shaking profundity, I will call it quits for the night and fall into the arms of Morpheus, in the hopes that baby will also stay tightly in said arms until at least 6 am. Dedos cruzados...
Vanity Fair article about Marriage Scientology Style: What Katie Holmes Didn't Know
My 403b plan fine print
Last two issues of London Review of Books
I, Richard, Elizabeth George
OK, there is some fairly desperate padding of the list, I will admit, there, but if one is going to be a blogger, one must be prepared to bare the gory details of one's innermost reading list to the harsh critical light of day.
The middle two (Vanity Fair article, 403b plan details) were both monstrously depressing, to the point that we don't really need to go into them; suffice to say that both made me feel completely inadequate, financially speaking. Tom Cruise has, turns out, just scads of cash.
However! La Sombra del Viento.... omg so much fun. I have a feeling that had I read it in English, I would have made myself slightly ill reading it way too quickly all in one sitting, whereas in Spanish, I am a bit like a whale swimming through molasses and I have to surface periodically for metaphorical air (air in this case being English, with the help of the internet. I remember when I had an actual collection of actual Spanish/English dictionaries - as in reference books, that sweetly quaint and inefficiently space-consuming habit we used to have, before the inefficiently time-consuming internets arrived.) Sludgy and slow though reading in Spanish, was, however,
(a) it was more confidence inducing than my 403b financial statements: there was initial depression at how many words I didn't even recognize per page, and then as I started looking them up, I got quite perky at how incredibly obscure they were ("slag-heap," "a lime blossom infusion," or, best of all, "spanishdict.com did not recognize your word; please try again" HA! not even in the DICTIONARY! boo-YAH!)
(b) it prolonged the pleasure of the juicy plotty gothic deliciousness of the book, of which I will not give away any details except to say waaaaaahahhh! the epilogue!!!!!! did ____ die, or ??? and if so, how?? and wtf?!?! Not unlike _The Master of Bruges_ which I also devoured whole a while ago, which had me all hot to look up pics of the all the various paintings it mentions, this book had me constantly running to Google maps to look at Barcelona streetview - extra points for that - and
(c) it reminded me that it is always, always, always worth reading things in the language they were written it if at all possible. A translation distances you, there is no question about it. I heard a very nice interview with Javier Bardem on I think Fresh Air last year in which he was describing the sensation, when acting in English, of having an office full of very busy people in his head, bustling around and working frantically to do the simultaneous interpretation from Spanish, and when he went back to speaking in Spanish, all the office workers could go home for the weekend and lock up. The thing is, all the office workers have their own agenda. I think I used to think that anything I read in translation was definitive, perfect; it never occurred to me that not only could there be multiple imperfect (and imperfectible) versions, but that there IS no perfect translation, no perfect 1:1 pre-ordained word correspondences, and there are, especially in fiction, cultural references that either have to be annoyingly explained, breaking up the narrative, or left out.
On that earth-shaking profundity, I will call it quits for the night and fall into the arms of Morpheus, in the hopes that baby will also stay tightly in said arms until at least 6 am. Dedos cruzados...
Saturday, 3 November 2012
EAT YOUR VEGETABLES. I MEAN IT.
Books read:
Peter Carey, His Illegal Self
Marion Nestle, Food Politics (about two thirds of the way through, but I've got the gist)
Roger Hargreaves, Mr. Men series
Martin Amis, Lionel Asbo, State of England
Tim Kasser, The High Price of Materialism
Carlois Ruiz Zafran, La Sombra del Viento (first few pages of)
Hello, great reading public of about five people! How are you? I am feeling particularly smug because I have a sleeping child AND did not myself become exhausted in the process of achieving said asleep child. In fact, here I am propped in my bed with my laptop preparing to send my blather out into the blogosphere and still have time to read a few more pages of Food Politics before I conk out.
First off, Peter Carey - this book came to me via a fairly dubious route. Newish friend (who is very nice, but who is sufficiently new that I don't have a good sense of his book taste yet) picked it up off the street in San Francisco (as in, it had been actively discarded/rejected by someone else) and took it home and never read it. He then had a party in which he gave/loaned away all his books (because he was moving) - rejection number two for this book - and it was taken home by my sister, who decided she didn't want to read it herself - rejection number three - so she passed it on to me. hmmmm...... but I did read it, and it was sweet, if a little farfetched. It's about a boy who was the child of crazy bomb-setting sixties radical parents who is inadvertently kidnapped by a woman who used to work with said radical parents, and they wind up in a hippie commune in the Australian outback where initially all the inhabitants are stoned/sinister/passive-aggressive (or some combination of the above) but magically at the end turn out to be radiantly helpful and good, which, I dunno, just seemed a bit improbable. For half the book, the boy doesn't know properly where he came from and what happened to him, and for most of the book I will confess I was equally if not more confused - there are a few crucial plot points that are only alluded to fairly cryptically - but the prose is nice in bits, and I'm glad I read it. (I was a bit surprised that it got a Man Booker prize nomination, but that probably just means that one of the judges for the Man Booker prize used to live on a hippie commune in the Australian outback and was feeling nostalgic.)
The Martin Amis book also found its way to me with no effort on my part - it was a gift from babydaddy which he had heard reviewed on NPR and thought I would like, (presumably because it has the word 'England' in the title...?) I am a little skittish about Mr. Amis, because he is reliably such a downer (see previous entries) but this one again was an enjoyable read while at the same time feeling just a little improbably optimistic. What are the chances that a young man who lives in a poverty & crime-ridden neighbourhood, whose teenage mother died when he was 12 and who was raised by a completely, but COMPLETELY delinquent and derangedly narcissistic violent uncle, would somehow be consistently sweet, educated, polite, mostly law-abiding, faithful, honest and reliable. (And the one illegal thing he does do - have sex with his grandmother at the beginning of the book, feels totally, um, unrealistic). And the one genuinely bad thing that psychotic uncle does to nice young man (when he finds out about the granny-banging) isn't even a bad thing!! it's a 'wow that COULD have been really bad!!! but it wasn't actually!!!!' so hmmm. Perhaps Martin Amis has discovered Prozac. Dunno.
Speaking of antidepressants, I might be in need by the time I finish _Food Politics_, Marion Nestle's devastating, immaculately researched, horrifically readable deconstruction of the food-industrial-complex. To save you the pain of the gory details (and they are gory), here's the summary: the junk food industry is more gigantic and powerful than you can possibly imagine. The government is helplessly corrupt and can do nothing to stop it, and in many cases has simply been purchased outright by the junk food industry. The junk food industry is knowingly out to make every single person on the planet sick, fat, and unhappy. Eek! WTF. I am going to buy a copy of that Jane Smiley book, "Ordinary Love and Good Will" in which a family goes completely off the grid and take notes on how they do it, and then declare myself a rogue nation. While we were eating dinner tonight, I made a point of giving the baby a kiss every time she had a bite of vegetables, to reinforce the message. If you eat your veggies, I'll send you a virtual kiss as well. And vote yes on Prop 37 if you're a California voter.
The Tim Kasser book is decidedly more 'lite' - it was recommended by a friend as being the best book they'd read all decade, which is stretching it a bit, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. He takes some 200 pages to say the same thing over and over (and over) again: studies apparently consistently show that materialistic people are more miserable and more anxious than non materialistic people, and once you have your basic needs taken care of (food/shelter/warm/clothing) then more possessions just make you unhappier. So eat your vegetables and get rid of your stuff.
I mention the Roger Hargreaves Mr. Men books just as a reminder to myself that I really did love them when I was little, because I really, really, really hate them now, having had to read each one of them about five thousand times. There are a few that I particularly particularly hate (Mr. Greedy, Mr. Small, Mr. Jelly) that I find myself accidentally on purpose kicking under the sofa where they please GOD will not be discovered for a bit, and we might have a few days respite from them.
La Sombra del Viento I ordered off the internets because it was recommended by the same friend as the Tim Kasser book - I was nervous about it because I am veerrrrrryyyyy slow reading in Spanish, and I wasn't sure how highbrow it was going to be, but I cracked it open a few nights ago and laughed out loud at the ginormous font size, so I think I'll be OK.
Back to Food Politics, which I can't put down - it's like a really detailed, calm description of Armageddon. If the baby's not dead of diabetes related complications by the time she's five, I'll consider it a victory.
Peter Carey, His Illegal Self
Marion Nestle, Food Politics (about two thirds of the way through, but I've got the gist)
Roger Hargreaves, Mr. Men series
Martin Amis, Lionel Asbo, State of England
Tim Kasser, The High Price of Materialism
Carlois Ruiz Zafran, La Sombra del Viento (first few pages of)
Hello, great reading public of about five people! How are you? I am feeling particularly smug because I have a sleeping child AND did not myself become exhausted in the process of achieving said asleep child. In fact, here I am propped in my bed with my laptop preparing to send my blather out into the blogosphere and still have time to read a few more pages of Food Politics before I conk out.
First off, Peter Carey - this book came to me via a fairly dubious route. Newish friend (who is very nice, but who is sufficiently new that I don't have a good sense of his book taste yet) picked it up off the street in San Francisco (as in, it had been actively discarded/rejected by someone else) and took it home and never read it. He then had a party in which he gave/loaned away all his books (because he was moving) - rejection number two for this book - and it was taken home by my sister, who decided she didn't want to read it herself - rejection number three - so she passed it on to me. hmmmm...... but I did read it, and it was sweet, if a little farfetched. It's about a boy who was the child of crazy bomb-setting sixties radical parents who is inadvertently kidnapped by a woman who used to work with said radical parents, and they wind up in a hippie commune in the Australian outback where initially all the inhabitants are stoned/sinister/passive-aggressive (or some combination of the above) but magically at the end turn out to be radiantly helpful and good, which, I dunno, just seemed a bit improbable. For half the book, the boy doesn't know properly where he came from and what happened to him, and for most of the book I will confess I was equally if not more confused - there are a few crucial plot points that are only alluded to fairly cryptically - but the prose is nice in bits, and I'm glad I read it. (I was a bit surprised that it got a Man Booker prize nomination, but that probably just means that one of the judges for the Man Booker prize used to live on a hippie commune in the Australian outback and was feeling nostalgic.)
The Martin Amis book also found its way to me with no effort on my part - it was a gift from babydaddy which he had heard reviewed on NPR and thought I would like, (presumably because it has the word 'England' in the title...?) I am a little skittish about Mr. Amis, because he is reliably such a downer (see previous entries) but this one again was an enjoyable read while at the same time feeling just a little improbably optimistic. What are the chances that a young man who lives in a poverty & crime-ridden neighbourhood, whose teenage mother died when he was 12 and who was raised by a completely, but COMPLETELY delinquent and derangedly narcissistic violent uncle, would somehow be consistently sweet, educated, polite, mostly law-abiding, faithful, honest and reliable. (And the one illegal thing he does do - have sex with his grandmother at the beginning of the book, feels totally, um, unrealistic). And the one genuinely bad thing that psychotic uncle does to nice young man (when he finds out about the granny-banging) isn't even a bad thing!! it's a 'wow that COULD have been really bad!!! but it wasn't actually!!!!' so hmmm. Perhaps Martin Amis has discovered Prozac. Dunno.
Speaking of antidepressants, I might be in need by the time I finish _Food Politics_, Marion Nestle's devastating, immaculately researched, horrifically readable deconstruction of the food-industrial-complex. To save you the pain of the gory details (and they are gory), here's the summary: the junk food industry is more gigantic and powerful than you can possibly imagine. The government is helplessly corrupt and can do nothing to stop it, and in many cases has simply been purchased outright by the junk food industry. The junk food industry is knowingly out to make every single person on the planet sick, fat, and unhappy. Eek! WTF. I am going to buy a copy of that Jane Smiley book, "Ordinary Love and Good Will" in which a family goes completely off the grid and take notes on how they do it, and then declare myself a rogue nation. While we were eating dinner tonight, I made a point of giving the baby a kiss every time she had a bite of vegetables, to reinforce the message. If you eat your veggies, I'll send you a virtual kiss as well. And vote yes on Prop 37 if you're a California voter.
The Tim Kasser book is decidedly more 'lite' - it was recommended by a friend as being the best book they'd read all decade, which is stretching it a bit, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. He takes some 200 pages to say the same thing over and over (and over) again: studies apparently consistently show that materialistic people are more miserable and more anxious than non materialistic people, and once you have your basic needs taken care of (food/shelter/warm/clothing) then more possessions just make you unhappier. So eat your vegetables and get rid of your stuff.
I mention the Roger Hargreaves Mr. Men books just as a reminder to myself that I really did love them when I was little, because I really, really, really hate them now, having had to read each one of them about five thousand times. There are a few that I particularly particularly hate (Mr. Greedy, Mr. Small, Mr. Jelly) that I find myself accidentally on purpose kicking under the sofa where they please GOD will not be discovered for a bit, and we might have a few days respite from them.
La Sombra del Viento I ordered off the internets because it was recommended by the same friend as the Tim Kasser book - I was nervous about it because I am veerrrrrryyyyy slow reading in Spanish, and I wasn't sure how highbrow it was going to be, but I cracked it open a few nights ago and laughed out loud at the ginormous font size, so I think I'll be OK.
Back to Food Politics, which I can't put down - it's like a really detailed, calm description of Armageddon. If the baby's not dead of diabetes related complications by the time she's five, I'll consider it a victory.
Monday, 10 September 2012
Books read:
Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies (along w London Review of Books review of same)
Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture
Roger Hargreaves, The Mister Men series (approximarely 3546 times each)
Juan Orozco, Latin American Folksongs for Children (approximaely 7853 times)
Alan Bradley, A Red Herring without Mustard
Edward St. Aubyn, The Patrick Melrose Novels
Alice LaPlante, Turn of Mind
Colum McCann, Let The Great World Spin
Books reading:
Infinite Jest (I am NEVER GOING to finish this book. Is that why he called it that? I don't think that's funny)
The Beatles: The Biography, Bob Spitz
Pillars of the Earth, Ken Follett
I have read more than this since I last posted, I absolutely promise, I'm just lying on the dark sandy metaphorical ocean floor with a gigantic Pacific-sized layer of tiredness and overwhelmedness sloshing around on top of me these days. However! that is a pathetic excuse, as everyone in the entire universe is tired and busy, except for my nearly two-year-old, who is inexhaustible and busy, so here is the latest (OK, very late) and greatest update from Nick Hornby, Will You Be Our Friend. (On a side note, I should say that this blog has done absolutely nothing with regards to its original stated purpose; Nick (Mr. Hornby?) so far as I know is completely unaware of its existence. Oh well. Tant pis. At least it helps me realize it sooner if I accidentally pick up the same book twice.)
We all know about my crush on Hilary Mantel, so I will keep my raving about BUTB brief: it is so so so so juicy good, but much, much sadder and a bit darker than Wolf Hall, because you can feel the very beginning of the ultimate squeeze that will get Thomas Cromwell, and it's agonizing. I don't think I will be able to bear the last of the trilogy unless I'm assured something resembling a happy ending, which seems deeply unlikely. I was shamed by the London Review critique of the book, because it made me realize how way more erudite both Hilary Mantel and the London Review people are: where the phrase "bring up the bodies" comes from (anyone accused of treason was considered already dead until proven otherwise), quotes from Henry VIII's poetry repeatedly alluded to in the text, a subplot regarding Thomas Cromwell's helping along Katherine of Aragon's death with a flagon of poisoned ale from a Welsh innkeeper, and said innkeeper subsequently also dying in dodgy circumstances - TOTALLY MISSED ALL OF THAT. wtf. I blame Hilary for spinning such a good yarn that I was racing through the pages. She wants people to pay attention to the details, she needs to slow down and be a bit more boring. (Like the Ken Follett, for example: not totally dissimilar settings/scope but what (ten pages in) what a dumb, dumb book. I used to read Ken Follett thrillers when I was a teenager because the naughty bits were secretly thrilling, and I picked this one up in the library in a fit of nostalgia, but I don't think I'm going to get more than the ten pages into it, naughty bits or no naughty bits.)
Sebastian Barry lovely and mostly serious and very poetic and even though I saw the twist at the end coming a mile away, it didn't detract from the book at all. Five stars for you, Mr. Barry. You have earned yourself the dubious honor that I am now and for ever after willing to read anything you write; Nicholson Baker funny, not life-changing/earth-shattering (protagonist totally forgettable, for instance) but I really, really liked the points he made about 4 vs 5 vs 6 beat lines in poetry (sorry this sounds really academic and snotty, but his point is actually very pro-popular music and old fashioned rhyming/scanning poetry, that iambic pentameter is a misnomer because for it to scan properly, you need a silent 6th musical beat at the end of the line).
Edward St Aubyn - completely didn't get the point of the Patrick Melrose novels, which as far as I could tell were about very rich and unpleasant people doing unpleasant things to each other and to themselves. There were a few descriptions of crack-induced hallucinations which were cool on strictly aesthetic grounds, but I felt absolutely zippo in terms of credibility or emotional connection to any of the characters.
Oh dear and on that note, before I've even gotten half way through my list, the only credible thing I can imagine feeling emotionally connected to right now is my bed, so thither I go.
Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies (along w London Review of Books review of same)
Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture
Roger Hargreaves, The Mister Men series (approximarely 3546 times each)
Juan Orozco, Latin American Folksongs for Children (approximaely 7853 times)
Alan Bradley, A Red Herring without Mustard
Edward St. Aubyn, The Patrick Melrose Novels
Alice LaPlante, Turn of Mind
Colum McCann, Let The Great World Spin
Books reading:
Infinite Jest (I am NEVER GOING to finish this book. Is that why he called it that? I don't think that's funny)
The Beatles: The Biography, Bob Spitz
Pillars of the Earth, Ken Follett
I have read more than this since I last posted, I absolutely promise, I'm just lying on the dark sandy metaphorical ocean floor with a gigantic Pacific-sized layer of tiredness and overwhelmedness sloshing around on top of me these days. However! that is a pathetic excuse, as everyone in the entire universe is tired and busy, except for my nearly two-year-old, who is inexhaustible and busy, so here is the latest (OK, very late) and greatest update from Nick Hornby, Will You Be Our Friend. (On a side note, I should say that this blog has done absolutely nothing with regards to its original stated purpose; Nick (Mr. Hornby?) so far as I know is completely unaware of its existence. Oh well. Tant pis. At least it helps me realize it sooner if I accidentally pick up the same book twice.)
We all know about my crush on Hilary Mantel, so I will keep my raving about BUTB brief: it is so so so so juicy good, but much, much sadder and a bit darker than Wolf Hall, because you can feel the very beginning of the ultimate squeeze that will get Thomas Cromwell, and it's agonizing. I don't think I will be able to bear the last of the trilogy unless I'm assured something resembling a happy ending, which seems deeply unlikely. I was shamed by the London Review critique of the book, because it made me realize how way more erudite both Hilary Mantel and the London Review people are: where the phrase "bring up the bodies" comes from (anyone accused of treason was considered already dead until proven otherwise), quotes from Henry VIII's poetry repeatedly alluded to in the text, a subplot regarding Thomas Cromwell's helping along Katherine of Aragon's death with a flagon of poisoned ale from a Welsh innkeeper, and said innkeeper subsequently also dying in dodgy circumstances - TOTALLY MISSED ALL OF THAT. wtf. I blame Hilary for spinning such a good yarn that I was racing through the pages. She wants people to pay attention to the details, she needs to slow down and be a bit more boring. (Like the Ken Follett, for example: not totally dissimilar settings/scope but what (ten pages in) what a dumb, dumb book. I used to read Ken Follett thrillers when I was a teenager because the naughty bits were secretly thrilling, and I picked this one up in the library in a fit of nostalgia, but I don't think I'm going to get more than the ten pages into it, naughty bits or no naughty bits.)
Sebastian Barry lovely and mostly serious and very poetic and even though I saw the twist at the end coming a mile away, it didn't detract from the book at all. Five stars for you, Mr. Barry. You have earned yourself the dubious honor that I am now and for ever after willing to read anything you write; Nicholson Baker funny, not life-changing/earth-shattering (protagonist totally forgettable, for instance) but I really, really liked the points he made about 4 vs 5 vs 6 beat lines in poetry (sorry this sounds really academic and snotty, but his point is actually very pro-popular music and old fashioned rhyming/scanning poetry, that iambic pentameter is a misnomer because for it to scan properly, you need a silent 6th musical beat at the end of the line).
Edward St Aubyn - completely didn't get the point of the Patrick Melrose novels, which as far as I could tell were about very rich and unpleasant people doing unpleasant things to each other and to themselves. There were a few descriptions of crack-induced hallucinations which were cool on strictly aesthetic grounds, but I felt absolutely zippo in terms of credibility or emotional connection to any of the characters.
Oh dear and on that note, before I've even gotten half way through my list, the only credible thing I can imagine feeling emotionally connected to right now is my bed, so thither I go.
Sunday, 17 June 2012
June 2012
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