Martin Amis, The Information

Book I just finished reading: Martin Amis, The Information

Book this blog entry will be about: Martin Amis, The Information

Book that was the bane of my existence for the last two weeks: Martin Amis, The Information

Book that I can't decide whether I liked or hated: Martin Amis, The Information.

My sister suggested that I restrict each post to just one or two books so that she doesn't have to wade through pages and pages of rambling (or rather she still does, but if it's only one book at a time she doesn't have to lose her place in the rambling) so, here goes, What I Thought of Martin Amis' The Information.

First off, sorry, but this is a mean boy book, and I don't mean this in the John Grisham sense of the term - I can deal with evil corporate lawyers and their scheming, since you know the good guys will win in the end - more in the Saul Bellow/John Updike sense, where everyone is mired in their lives of quiet desperation and unhappy tense marriages that are seething with horrific untold secrets and bad behavior but everyone keeps playing bridge and drinking cocktails anyway. It's the combination of hyperarticulateness combined with a teensy bit of arrogance about said hyperarticulateness that results in a misanthropic miasma over the whole book, and the poor reader (me) feeling alternately too stupid to be an adequate audience for all the literary gymnastics and irritated at him for thinking he's that much cleverer than the entire rest of the world. Minor revelation: the act of reading (I am thinking of this for the first time, so this thought might not come out right, but bear with me) puts the reader in the same situation as the _characters_: i.e. none of you really know what's going to happen next, you're all quite invested in finding _out_ what's going to happen next, and you're all at the whim of the author, so when the author creates mostly despicable characters you feel depressed yourself, lumped in with all these people who cheat on their spouses and spend their child support money on drugs and sabotage their friends' careers out of jealousy (just to pluck a few random examples out of the air), even if you yourself are a decent-ish person who doesn't do any of those things. Yes, I think that's it.

He (Martin Amis) is indubitably a fantastic writer on a sentence-by-sentence basis: there were some really, really, really nice phrases that just stopped me in my tracks (although if the writing stops you from continuing to read is that good writing? hmm. to ponder), and a few metaphors that had me giving little out-loud grunts of pleasure. I didn't, of course, bring the book with me to the coffee-shop where I am sitting now - in fact, it was a loaner copy, so it is out of my hands forever - so I can't flip through and look for particularly juicy ones, but I do remember "the eye-hurting metallic colour of the sky" in Miami mmmmm yes eye-hurting perfect adjective.

HOWEVER, big-picture beef with this book (I won't say Martin Amis, since I haven't read any of his other novels, but I am definitely wary) is the lack of any even remotely sympathetic character anywhere in the book - they really are all either stupid, mean, petty, grasping, unreliable, psychotic, or a combination of the above - and the stops and starts in the plot. It was a bit like an opera, in that the action happens in brief flurries of slightly wacky recitative (which if you haven't read the plot synopsis in the program might not make a whole lot of sense), and then everyone stands around and sings for ten minutes about how they feel about what just happened. Sort of the same with this except it doesn't come with a handy plot synopsis, so when on the third to last page there was an apparent child-abduction followed by random release of unharmed same, another character getting assaulted (vs. murdered, I couldn't tell), and either a spontaneous or purposely-staged episode of cheating spouse caught in flagrante with vengeful backstabbing friend, after pages and pages and pages and pages and pages and pages and pages of nothing happening, I was totally thrown for a loop.

I will sneak in a brief mention of The Piano Teacher, by Janice Lee, which I am probably not going to finish. I was hoping a dumb novel about glamorous 1930's Hong Kong would be full of spicy sex and political intrigue, but the spice/intrigue/glamour factor is, I think, too far outweighed by the dumbness. I'll give it another chapter before I pack it in...

Heller, Townsend, Undset

Book I am reading right now (or at least I would be if I weren't blogging):

Martin Amis, The Information

Zoe Heller, The Believers

Books on my to-read list recently recommended:

The Birth of Plenty, William Bernstein
Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
Divisadero, Michael Ondaatje
Independent People, Haldor Laxness

Re-reads for comfort:

The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul, Douglas Adams

one of the Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael medieval murder mysteries, can't remember the title

The Water Babies, Charles whosiwhatsit

Boy & Going Solo, Roald Dahl

New books actually read:
Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction, Sue Townsend
Kristin Lavransdatter, Sigrid Undset

Notes on a Scandal, Zoe Heller

lots of New Yorkers (finally caught up!)

Books bought:
The Piano Teacher, Janice Lee
When Will There Be Good News?, Kate Atkinson

the Zoe Hellers

I am finding it more and more difficult to be scrupulously honest about what I am reading, because setting myself the project of writing about it publicly makes me realize a) how much brain candy I read b) how much comfort re-reading of old books I do and c) how disorganized I am about having multiple books going simultaneously, depending on what happens to be next to the bed when bedtime rolls around. Oh, well. Luckily I don't think anyone's actually _reading_ this :).

Several of the books this month were picked up in an airport bookshop, so they come with the extra adrenaline-soaked frisson of having nearly missed a plane in order to purchase them (I got myself into a state of metaphysical crisis over the 4-books-for-the-price-of-3 deal: really I could only justify buying two for the plane ride, but then three is so _close_ to two, and once you have bought three then you get the fourth one _anyway_... oh GOD. I bought four, and just barely made it onto the flight in time.

The Martin Amis and the first Zoe Heller I am going to leave for another time, BUT I loved loved loved Notes on a Scandal. I definitely have a weakness for novels narrated by a character who is delusional about their own role in what is going on around them (viz: Kashuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day; John Lanchester's The Debt to Pleasure oh god, and of course, Lolita, favourite book of all time) and Notes on a Scandal is quite delicious on this score. (I had already seen the film, yay Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench, and liked it, and so was very pleased that the book-being-better-than-the-film rule also held true in this case.) Brief summary: young posh arty bohemian new teacher in enormous rough-and-tumble London comprehensive school befriends slightly creepy (as we discover) older female teacher, has affair with fifteen year old student, confides in older teacher, things go pear-shaped from there. I also love books with an edge of moral ambiguity: on the face of things, you think, "Teacher having affair with fifteen year old student? that's disgraceful/immoral/terrible; she should know better!" and then you read the story, and you start thinking, hm, well, I kind of see how she could have gotten into it... There is an interesting bit where the older teacher (who narrates the story) is trying to justify to herself the younger teacher's actions, and she asks how many of us can say that we have never had sexual thoughts about someone inappropriate (presumably meaning a minor, a relative, the partner of a close friend, etc. etc.), and extrapolating from there, if that person then suddenly took the initiative with you, are you sure you'd be so well-behaved...? and you think, oh my god, could I be the next Mary Kay LeTourneau? do I have that in me? I haven't seduced any underage patients yet, but I'll be sure and post it if I do, in the interests of science.

Speaking of unreliable narrators, Adrian Mole was the guilty pleasure of the month, although a mixed pleasure at this point. The self-absorbed cluelessness that made his adolescent diaries so hilarious and endearing becomes nearly excruciating to witness in an adult (in this last installment he is now in his mid-thirties, divorced with two kids) and the possibility of a genuinely happy ending for him seems infinitesimally small (is it possible to strip yourself of all your dearly held fantasies about yourself and do a total realignment with reality in order to trade in your insecurities after your teenage years? I am skeptical), although Sue Townsend does very gamely keep trying to provide him with true love and reality in equal doses, despite his gigantic, horrific character flaws. (In this installment, he becomes accidentally engaged to a terrifyingly neurotic Georgian dollhouse enthusiast named Marigold, extricates himself at the very last minute, and semi-inexplicably ends up with Marigold's sexy, rich, cosmopolitan, beautiful sister Daisy. We don't ever really get given an adequate Daisy's-eye view of him, particularly, but by the end of the book I was so desperate for him to get himself out of all his various disasters that I was more than willing to accept last-minute salvation by an attractive sane new girlfriend.

Last but not least on the new-books read: the long awaited Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy (I read The Wreath and The Wife; The Cross is going to have to wait until my next trip to the UK,where the book got left.) I had been saving it for this trip, and it turned out to be a nice concordance of length/heft of book to free reading time. It is an odd, odd book in several ways: it was written I think in the 1920's (in Norwegian), and Sigrid Undset won the Nobel Prize for Literature for it, which seems pretty avant garde, no? that a 1000+ page rambling proto-feminist family saga in Norwegian would be the pick of that year? The other thing that was odd was how _modern_ it felt - it's set in the fourteenth century, and I have always thought of historical fiction as being a relatively new genre: most 18th, 19th, and early 20th century novels are just set when they're written, as far as I know. I was a bit nervous starting it, as I had premonitions of tedium (understandable, given the length) and of too many characters (I was flipping back to the family tree thing in the front constantly when I read A Hundred Years of Solitude and it got frankly old) but actually it was fine on both counts.

The story follows Kristin from happy childhood on farm to dramatic elopement with and subsequent marriage to a difficult (for lack of a more unifying descriptor) man to motherhood. According to the introduction, it also goes through to her death at age __ of ___: I couldn't BELIEVE the guy who wrote the preface would drop that bomb on the second page of the introduction!! boo on him. but I didn't read the third book on purpose; I am hoping that by the time I get around to it I will have forgotten about the spoiler in the introduction and thus can jump into the third part of the trilogy with a clean slate). I was impressed by how earthy, overall, the writing was: there are descriptions of childbirth and breastfeeding and sex that, while they're not gratuitously gross or anything, leave you in absolutely no doubt that the author has experienced all those things firsthand and is not going to bother being coy about it (which again, feels very modern for the 1920's.). I did get a bit irritated with old Kristin towards the middle, I have to admit; she is touted on the back cover as a Strong Independent-Minded Woman, and yet she lets herself be seduced by a guy who is actually a bit of a drip, and not only sticks around to have about a million kids with him, she also does the irritating thing of continually misreporting her emotions, by which I mean: 'Kristin lay in Erlend's arms; although it was great to finally be in bed with him, she felt totally miserable because she knew how badly she was betraying her family and how incredibly disappointed her parents would be in her for letting herself be seduced by such a drip because even though she loved him w/ all her heart blah blah she realized he was a bit of a drip.' Then later on, 'Kristin was really pissed off with Erlend for being such a drip but she stayed with him because of the memory of how happy she had been that first time when she lay in his arms..." and you think, hunh? wait, she wasn't happy then either! wtf! why is this supposedly Strong Independent Woman making such drippy decisions for herself? anyway. I'll get over it.

I'm not going to write about my comfort re-reading this month, except to say that re-reading Boy and Going Solo was a bittersweet experience: I loved both those books when I was younger, and now, as with other previously intense childhood loves (the Narnia series, The Sound of Music), they are starting to look embarrassingly dated. Boy not so much, because his life is limited to family and school, which are fairly transcendent experiences that we can all relate to (and he does a brilliant job of bringing his childhood voice to immediate and vivid life) but for the first time I noticed uncomfortable patriotic/colonialist overtones in Going Solo, and a few bits had me wanting to stick my fingers in my ears and sing la la la while I read.

OH and one more very, very important set of books on the to-read list: I recently discovered there are MORE THAN THREE of Graham Oakley's fantastic Church Mice books. I got on Amazon and ebay, and they are out of print and selling used for up to several hundred dollars a pop, which is terrifying but understandable, given just how TOTALLY AND UTTERLY FANTASTIC they are. I bid on two that were in Australia, going for thirty dollars each, but I lost the auction. So put the word out: if anyone, anywhere, sees any Graham Oakley Church Mice books (other than the three I already have, which are The Church Mouse, The Church Mice Spread Their Wings, and The Church Mice Go to the Moon) buy 'em and either make a fortune re-selling them on ebay or, better yet, give them to me as a Christmas present...

Fitzhugh, Newman, Troost, Barbery, Tyler, Auster

Books read:

Louise Fitzhugh, Harriet the Spy

Robert Newman, The Case of the Murdered Players
J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals
Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Anne Tyler, The Accidental Tourist
Paul Auster, Mr. Vertigo

Sort of an odd list this month; I think Amazon might have a hard time making recommendations (other than Nick) for me as a customer based on that, and admittedly all but the Paul Auster and Muriel Barbery were re-reads, but there is no point in blogging about what I'm reading if I'm not prepared to be truthful about the peculiarities of my reading habits, so here goes.

Harriet the Spy was part of last month's late night children's book nostalgia spree; the only part of it I had actually remembered was the bit where the kids run the purple socks up the flagpole and where Harriet gets caught in the dumbwaiter of the house of the rich lady she has decided to spy on. It's a really odd book to have become a classic in many ways: Harriet is not at all an appealing kid, and I think most kids reading that book would recognize her as kind of an unpleasant brat, and the book also violates one of the fundamental tenets of school-age kid books in that she has an intact reasonably intact family life (i.e. unlike the Lemony Snicket books, Harry Potter, pretty much all of Roald Dahl, etc. etc. she hasn't taken the basic precaution of getting rid of one or both parents in order to better be able to embark on dangerous and exciting adventures). The thing that most struck me (re)reading it was that, as in the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, having live-in maids is written about as being completely normal, which makes me want to do some research into how many American families actually had live-in maids in the fifties and sixties. (Harriet's family has a cook and a nanny; Harriet's an only child and as far as I can tell her mother doesn't have a job.) I mean, if you read Emily Post (as a theoretical example. not that I have a 1956 edition next to the loo that I occasionally dip into to find out what you would serve at an afternoon bridge party as opposed to an ordinary ladies' tea 'at home') she definitely discusses which member of your staff should perform which function at a formal dinner (butler announces, oversees drinks, footman/valet takes coats, parlour maid parlours, chamber maid chambers, cook cooks, undercook undercooks, etc. etc.) which all seems just ferociously high society victorian and unrealistic, but these kids' books written in the 60's all seem to take it as a matter of course, and the kids seem pretty normal in other ways (taking the schoolbus to their public schools, saving their allowance, liking macaroni cheese, etc.). Perhaps it was assumed that only upperclass kids _read_ these books? or maybe way more people really did have live-in maid service. Add to the to-be-looked-up list.

More Robert Newman, as well (the Sherlock Holmes spin-off, to borrow a useful TV word): this time what struck me was all the stuff that is left out that adults would want to know about. There's a bit at the beginning of the Case of the Murdered Players, for instance, when Andrew (age 14) comes home from his posh boarding school and greets Sarah (age 13, best friend, fellow mystery-solver, Cockney street-rat-turned-accomplished-young-lady since being rescued from the gutter by Andrew's famous actress mother) after not having seen her for several months while he's been away at school, and Robert Newman tells you that Andrew shakes hands with his stepfather (appropriate), gives his mother a hug (appropriate), and "greets" Sarah. Maybe not everyone is as prurient as me, but given all the sexual tension inherent in the 14 y/o boy & 13 y/o girl best friend dynamic (an unlikely enough scenario as it is), don't you TOTALLY WANT TO KNOW??? like do they hug? what? okay, I am being prurient. I'll let it drop. There's also a delightful scene in which Andrew's mother successfully identifies a kidnapping suspect out of a possible three gajillion women in England with two questions: "Did she smell familiar to you, Andrew?" ("Yes, funnily enough, mother, her smell reminded me of you, but I couldn't place why!") "I bet it was theatre greasepaint. She's an actress!" ("Yes! that's it!") "Tell me, was she wearing any jewelry?" ("Um, yes, an orange necklace and earrings") "Her name is Coral Lumley - she always wears that set; it was given to her by an admirer!" Fastest criminal ID in police history.

The Sex Lives of Cannibals (a misnomer, btw; there's no sex and no cannibalism) is fun if a little self serving: J. Maarten (first initials always make me wonder much more than middle initials, like, wow, if they choose to go by their middle name even in the book publishing world, their first name must be something REALLY AWFUL) is funny, but he knows he's funny, so it takes a little bit of the joy out of his funniness. The book is sort of a loose travelogue of the year or so he spent living on a shit-infested island in Kiribati in the South Pacific while his girlfriend worked for some sort of noble NGO garden-planting sanitation public-healthy type organization. My favourite thing in the book are the chapter headings: he does them like an 19th century serialized novel, as in "Chapter 17: In Which the Author Meets the Poet Laureate of Kiribati, Who Has Never Written Any Poetry As Such, And Also An Account of the Great Beer Crisis," (this is a made up example. Not an actual quote, as I don't have the actual book to actual hand. but you get the gist). 'sfunny.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog (lent to me by my mother) was disquieting; it and the Paul Auster book are the only things with pretentions to Quality Books, I think, this month, but overall I found that there was a misanthropic streak through the hedgehog book that was hard to forgive. The main character (the concierge in a Paris apartment building) makes a point of constructing an elaborate and detailed (figurative) mask of herself to present to the world, and then despises the world for not being able to see who she truly is, and you think, hunh?? but then... that whole business with the mask...? hunh? which would make sense if the author was making a point about how foolish that is or something, but instead she seems to be on the narrator's side in despising all the people who are unable to appreciate the narrator for her true self. There were moments of intellectual name droppiness as well, which felt a little bit like Adrian Mole desperately trying to sound Intellectual and Educated - like a bit where she's "almost" caught quoting Marx or Hegel or someone under her breath as she takes out the garbage - how do you quote Marx or Hegel in front of someone else without a large part of you intending to be heard rather than "accidentally" overheard? - which feels very, very contrived. I am also less and less a believer in the canon of Great Books (having been completely unable to get through many Great Books in my time) and the importance of having read all of them: I would rather talk to someone who feels really excited about ten books that they've read that I haven't than someone who feels snooty about having read five Great Books only four of which I've read, even if we might have more of a common basis for discussion in the latter scenario. Luckily the narrator does meet someone at the end who a) meets her criteria for intellectual superiority b) recognizes her as an equal and c) also keeps himself somewhat aloof from the riffraff so she gets something approaching a happy ending. Although not quite. No spoiling here.
The Paul Auster I think was my favourite book of the month: I read it because it seemed to be following me; my old roommate left a copy when she moved out, and then I noticed it on my sister's bookshelf, so I decided if two people had read it whose taste I trusted, I probably should as well, and I really really liked it. It's a little plotless and random and there are a lot of things that go unexplained (it seems if there's copy on the dustjacket describing your book as "in the classic picaresque tradition" you can get away with an awful lot when it comes to plotlessness) but he writes so nicely and you really want the main character guy to succeed in his efforts to fly (premise of story: young guttersnipe boy abandoned by biological family picked up by mysterious guru-type person who puts him through horrendous trials to teach him to fly and then takes him on the road to show off his abilities, which become ever more wondrous but fraught with difficulty) and I was quite devastated at several points in the book when scary/bad things happened and quite gleeful when really cool things happened. I am going to read some more Paul Auster soon.
Eek - have to go catch a bus. Anne Tyler maybe next time.

Russo - Orringer - Newman - Austen - Parks - Konisberg - Bianchini

Books read:
Richard Russo, Empire Falls
Julie Orringer, How to Breathe Underwater
Robert Newman, The Case of the Threatened King and The Case of the Somerville Secret
Jane Austen, Persuasion
Tim Parks, Juggle the Stars
E.L. Konigsberg, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
Bianchini et al, The Paper Architect

Still on the list:
Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy
Anne Fadiman, Rereading

Not a particularly literary last couple of weeks, I confess, but I have been reading A LOT. Quantity over, hm, if not quality, then at least quantity over density.
To start with: the Richard Russo (Empire Falls). Totally not at all not at all what I was expecting. I didn't read the dust-jacket blurb before I started it, as a good faith gesture, so I was going entirely on the picture on the cover and the author's name, so my expectations were a little woolly, but I was definitely anticipating a hyperliterate thriller-type book (Richard being sort of a professorial hyperliterate name, combined with the fact that once a long time ago I saw the thriller heistykidnappy film in which Renee Russo's son gets abducted by creepy Gary Sinise and a girl with a tattoo on her neck. Superlative logic, hmm.) But instead it turned out to be a very peaceful book about a small town in Maine and a gentle nice peaceful man who lives in the small town and his small unhappinesses (depressed unfulfilled mother, unmanageable drunk father, bolshy soon-to-be-ex-wife, sensitive teenage daughter, miserable job) which he overcomes with small happinesses and ultimately everything works out OK. The most unexpected thing about this book was how profoundly alienated and un-American I wound up feeling while reading it: the characters (who for the most part are reasonable, relatively smart, articulate people) do things like attend football games and believe in God and say "Golly, I'm plumb tuckered out" as if those are all completely normal things to do (they're not, sorry) and I found myself doubting that Richard Russo and I would get along, although I have no doubt that he too is a really nice man. I think also I still slightly resent Maine, as a place; when I was small my friend Bug would disappear for the entire summer there with her family, and every year I would spend the month of August getting excited every time I saw an orange VW camper bus, thinking it was them, back from Maine, and then disappointed every time they weren't.
Julie Orringer's book, How To Breathe Underwater, was a holdover from my Polysyllabic Spree Amazon ordering binge that I hadn't gotten to right away - her stories are all unmistakeably about American characters, too, and you would think they would get monotonous because they're almost all about adolescent suffering in one way or another, but in fact they are quite a) different from one another and b) very interesting, and her prose is totally unaffected and translucent. I read it really fast in one sitting, so I might have to go back and read it again at some point.
The excellent Robert Newman series (not recommended for general adult consumption, unless you are like me and have an unexplainable fetish for re-reading (and re-re-reading) British preteen books) was given to me when I was eight or nine by my fairy bookmother, a sixty-ish literary-magazine editor with a hairy chin, an ability to talk uninterrupted for hours about the London theatre scene, and a fetish for British pre-teen literature that matched (possibly exceeded) mine. She had no kids of her own, and lavished (the only adequate word) literally hundreds of books on my sister and me over the course of about a decade before she died of ovarian cancer in the mid-1990's. The Robert Newman books started with a book called The Baker Street Irregulars, in which a motley gang of scruffy neighbourhood kids helps Sherlock Holmes solve a mystery (all set in dank, dirty, Dickensian London). Holmes doesn't turn up for the subequent books, but the kids are pretty much set by then, having made friends with one of the Scotland Yard inspectors and acquired a famous actress as long-lost parent in the first book, and they go on to solve lots more mysteries. I got them because I had a dream about them the other night and couldn't go back to sleep until I had gone online and ordered them (tragically, tragically, they are all out of print! how can this be?!) but luckily several grotty used library copies were still floating around out there looking for a good home and one by one they are arriving on my doorstep from all over the country. I heart the internet. What did we do before it? Don't know and don't care.
I feel a little silly listing the Jane Austen - how many gajillions of words have been written about her novels and life already? does anyone really need to know what I think? - but my two burning unanswered Jane Austen questions are:
#1. How can her characters be so black and white (the women are all either weak/silly/vain/ foolish or sensible/undervalued/quiet/witty/perceptive, and the men all either funloving blackguards or upright honourable stuffed shirts) and yet still be so appealing? and convince you that the most engaging of her love stories (Elizabeth & Darcy, Anne & Frederick) are between fully rounded adults?
#2. How does she manage to present a picture of a society in which women's scope of interest is so limited (and she is so obviously aware of the limits) and yet she doesn't get stroppy about it?
I don't think I'm ever going to get satisfactory answers to these, but enlightment is always welcome.
The Tim Parks book was recommended by my sister, whose taste in books is so fearsomely dense (she reads physics textbooks for fun. I am not making that up) that I was a bit nervous about it. She doesn't believe in fiction on principle (why read things that aren't real when you could be reading about quantum theory, after all?) so I was very surprised when she recommended a work of fiction. Once again, I didn't read the dust jacket blurb before I started it (this time out of fear that it might say something like "This fictionalized description of the work of some of the most obscure and difficult-to-understand quantum physics theorists of our time really brings home how dense and difficult this material really is...") and thus was extra bowled over to discover that not only was it proper fiction, it was arguably proper trashy fiction, covering the necessary basics of kidnapping and crime and sexy Italian people and dastardly deeds happening in beautiful exotic settings and a creepy narrator and everything. It was great.
The Mixed-Up Files is like the Jane Austen: why bother trying to come up with something new to say about it, as everyone's read it, everyone loves it, blah blah blah I love it too. It was another self-indulgent pre-teen late-night Amazon purchase that I couldn't resist. It's hard to believe that book is over 35 years old, yikes, older than me. The Paper Architect isn't really a reading book but OH BOY IS IT COOL OR WHAT. It caught my eye in, of all places, the most recent issue of Entertainment Weekly (which I started receiving mysteriously a year ago; someone out there clearly felt I needed more pop culture in my life), and I had to have it! had to. It's a book of do-it-yourself pop-up cutouts of famous buildings; last Christmas I was obsessed with Paul Jackson's The Pop-Up Book, which goes over basic techniques for different sorts of pop-ups, and had copied from his book a pop-up version of the Venetian Bridge of Sighs which was pretty much the coolest thing I did all year. The Paper Architect doesn't require you to do any figuring out yourself, as they have drawn out the patterns for you - I think the first one I am going to do is the Taj Mahal (see photo. beautiful, no?) and then perhaps I will get back to reading...

O'Reilly - Fadiman - Barnes

Books read:

Judith O'Reilly, Wife in the North

Anne Fadiman, At Large and At Small

Julian Barnes, Before She Met Me

Real Simple magazine

Books to be read:

Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy

Several more back issues of the New Yorker

Sarah Vowell, The Partly Cloudy Patriot (ordered, hasn't arrived yet)

I will not, I will not, I will not start reading books that I know are going to be crappy, and if I do find myself reading such a book, I will PUT IT DOWN and not spend any more time reading it than is strictly necessary to discover it is crappy. If I do read a crappy book all the way to the end, however, I will spend time blogging about it... I don't like to speak ill of a fellow blogger, but grrrrrrr. I should have known better. Unlike my Semi-Famous-Person Spirit Guide, I can't reliably resist things that I know are going to be crap (I have seen dozens of episodes of Sex and the City, for example, despite the fact that it makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up in cringing embarrassment at the puerility and crass consumerism and bad writing of that show). Brief summary of Wife in the North: Judith O'Reilly has fashionable London life, job as journalist; husband convinces her to move to Northumberland with their kids; she moans on and on and on and on and on and on about how miserable she is - in between ironic wry stories about motherhood and city mouse/country mouse misadventures that serve to convince the reader that she can't be THAT miserable (I have a lot, but a lot, of trouble feeling sorry for women who use the word "despair" about not being able to buy brand name high-heeled shoes). Then right near the end when she has whined you out of any vestige of sympathy for her, she drops the bomb that *spoiler alert* she delivered a stillborn baby several years prior. I felt totally betrayed. You can't say you're in despair about the lack of high heeled shoes or brand name olive oil in the shops as if you're in a normal stupid chick lit book and then right at the end try to turn it into a life tragedy. I will admit that there were several points in the book when I laughed out loud (there is a particularly nice line about sitting with her arms pinned to her sides by two small children reading a book together on the sofa and feeling like she's in the back of a car trapped between two Mafia hitmen) and I did tear up a bit during the bit about the dead baby, but my main emotion on finishing the book was annoyance. I also worry about what her kids will think, when they grow up and read about how totally miserable/trapped their mother felt taking care of them. I attended a delivery recently where the grandmother-to-be was filming the birth, and saying into the camera microphone the whole time, "oh, I hope it's a boy! I hope it's a boy!" and I thought, you silly cow, how's the baby going to feel watching this several years down the line if it is a girl? (It was a boy).

The Anne Fadiman book was good; not quite as good as Ex Libris, which is one of my all-time favourites ever, but still good. I can't remember much of it; I read it at desperate high speed, and worried the entire time about getting it dirty, because I had a day to read it before giving it to a friend as a birthday present, but I love how obsessed she is with polar exploration and vocabulary words. She lost me a little bit with the flag essay; patriotism is not a dominant emotion in me even during times of stress, and during and after 9/11 I felt horrified, sad, and helpless, but not patriotic.

Next up: Julian Barnes. Oh, Julian Barnes. What a weird cat that guy must be, despite his British Intellectual Man of Letters appearance (I have actually met the Man Himself once, at a book publicity interview he gave in San Francisco a couple of years ago; I had only read Flaubert's Parrot at that point, I think, and I was quite overcome and flustered with how deliciously tall and lean and long-nosed and floppy-haired and laconically witty and English he was - I live in a perpetual state of mild Englishness-deprivation - and I am mortified to report that in my discombobulation I ended up actually recommending a book to him. In my defense, I recommended a really good book (John Lanchester's Debt to Pleasure) but, yeesh, still, I don't think it's the Done Thing to recommend books to visiting Men of Letters. He's almost certainly read more books than I ever have. He's probably written more books than I've ever read). Anyway. Julian Barnes is wicked smaht and can put words together in the yummiest way: my favourite passage (at least that I can find at the moment) is a bit when crass bad-boy Jack is giving advice to nerdy angst-ridden friend Graham:

'Been reading this tome of Koestler's. Well, started it, anyway.' (Jack could speak with authority about books glimpsed over a stranger's shoulder in a crowded tube train.) 'He says, or at any rate he says other boffins say, that the old brainbox isn't at all like we imagine. We all believe it's a big deal, our brain. We all think it's the shit-hot part of us - I mean, it stands to reason, doesn't it, that's why we aren't monkeys or foreigners. Computer technology, latest IBM equipment in there. Not so?'

Graham nodded. That's what he'd always believed, if ever he'd thought about it.

'Not so. No way. The boffin cunts, apparently, or some of them anyway, say bits of it are like that. Trouble is, there are a couple of other layers [...] One lot of these little cell buggers have been developing away like hell all these years, working on fuel-injection and zips and publishers' contracts and stuff. They're all right, they're quite socially acceptable. But the other lot [...] they've got to face up to the fact that they're really pretty dim. [And] that lot, the second eleven, they're the ones that control our emotions, make us kill people, fuck other people's wives, vote Tory, kick the dog. [...] You think of your skull in a different way: one layer of Four-Eyes, two layers of Sawn-Offs. Now why don't they get together, you ask; why don't they sit down at the conference table with some cerebral U Thant and just thrash out their difficulties? [...] I mean, you'd think the Sawn-Offs would see it was in their interests to keep their tiny heads down, not rock the boat [...] Might be true for a few - I mean, don't they think criminals have a defective gene; something gives a little pop in their skull and suddenly they're under the stairs again digging out the striped sweater and the sack marked SWAG.'

Anyway. LOVE it. You can tell he enjoyed writing that bit. The most worrisome bits of Julian Barnes inevitably for me have to do with the sex; there never seems to be any happy warm cozy lovely uncomplicated sex in his books; it's always repressed and unsatisfying and slightly sinister, and I worry about his wife in much the same way I worry about Judith O'Reilly's kids.

I'm still not ready to tackle the New Yorkers. Maybe next post.

An explanation - Tomalin - Woolf/Sackville-West

So my friend Alice and I decided that we needed more friends, and that these new yet-to-be-acquired friends should be funny, smart, articulate, and generally fun to hang out with. To this end, we have elected novelist Nick Hornby as our Semi-Famous-Person Spirit Guide, on the premise that the road to Nick (or Mr. Hornby, whichever he would prefer; we're very polite and respectful, both of us) would be likely to be paved with similarly funny, smart, articulate people. We picked Nick in particular because we both really like his books, and at the time that we were trying to decide on a Spirit-Guide-worthy Semi-Famous-Person I had also just finished re-reading one of his excellent and hilarious collections of book reviews, The Polysyllabic Spree, and had been vaguely thinking of starting a blog anyway to track what I was reading, mostly because I otherwise forget and years later will pick up a book only to realize halfway through that I've already read it. Alice (a terrifyingly brave extrovert) is probably standing on San Francisco street corners as I write this, randomly quizzing passersby if they have any connections that might help us get to our goal; I (introverted, good typist) am going about what is basically an exercise in communication and social networking the most twentyfirst century way possible, sitting at home alone at my computer. We'll see who gets there first. A fabulous prize (free blog subscription? your weight in rubber bands? TBA) to anyone who can get me there faster than Alice. Nick Hornby, here we come.

Recently read:

Claire Tomalin, The Invisible Woman

The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf, edited by Mitchell Leaska and Louise DeSalvo

On the list to read:

Tim Parks, Under the Stars

J.G. Hayes, Map of the Harbor Islands

Books transported across state lines:

Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Currently squashed under my pillow with the spine grievously split open:

Richard Russo, Empire Falls

More New Yorker back issues

My intention (ha! we'll see if that works out....) is to write at least a post a month; I think I can get through a respectable number (i.e. more than one) book in a month and also have time to write about it, in between my very busy schedule of trying to keep my house clean, turning up at work once in a while, etc. I read more books than usual during January, however, and will split my blather into two blogposts, so you can consider this one my post for January, and the next one will be for February. We'll see if I make it to March. My memory may be dire enough that I have to write a post after I finish each book.

Most of the books on the recently read list this month were started over a long weekend at my parents' house, the walls of which have been definitively proved to emit soporific brain-scrambling radiowaves that make it seem like a very good idea to begin several books at once and then have to lug them back in my carryon bag on the airplane, along with the (I am not kidding) four-inch stack of New Yorker back issues that I have yet to get through. (I can't talk about the New Yorkers, yet; I am still in the era of when-will-Sarah-Palin-be-unleashed-for-her-first-press-interview, and although I am... relieved is inadequate, here... that it's a moot point, I still feel honour-bound to read all of them. I will, one day. Perhaps McCain/Palin will run again in 2012 and I can just save them up to read then.) My mother is mainly responsible; she leaves books in stacks next to the spare-room bed, and when I wake up in the middle of the night at my parents' house, I can't go downstairs to do what any self-respecting chronic insomniac would usually do (raid the fridge, watch TV) because they keep changing the burglar alarm code and I'd set all the bells ringing so instead I read.

The first one was Claire Tomalin's biography of Nelly Ternan, Charles Dicken's mistress; that one I actually bought myself specifically because I read about in the Polysyllabic Spree and think Claire Tomalin's great. (She's married to someone famousish as well, I can't remember who, but I remember the little frisson of "whoa, crazy, man" when I found out. I should Google it. My favourite literary-couple-that-I-didn't-know-was-a-couple-until-recently is Anthony Lane, film critic for the New Yorker, and Alison Pearson, author of I Don't Know How She Does It, a witty and unabashedly feminist rant.) Anyway, I had read Claire Tomalin's biographies of Jane Austen and Samuel Pepys previously, and even though I can't claim to have trekked around the UK checking all her facts, she definitely gives the impression of not being someone who makes shit up, and yet her books aren't at all horrifically footnotey or anything, they're very readable. My main problem with biography is that I get really attached to the person, and the whole way along you know the inevitable is coming (that they're going to die) but it feels like a story anyway, so you keep hoping for a happy ending, and when you lose them at the end in whatever grotty circumstances they die (because everyone dies in grotty circumstances, that being sort of the nature of death) it's just really depressing. That was particularly true for me of the Jane Austen biography. I kept hoping Jane would achieve fame and fortune in her own lifetime, recognition, true love, whatever, and... no, she didn't. Anyway, the moral of the Nelly Ternan's story was basically that Charles Dickens was a two-faced adulterous hypocrite. I knew there was a reason I didn't like him. (My previous poor opinion of him was based, somewhat unfairly, on A Christmas Carol (puke), A Tale of Two Cities (enforced reading for school - meh, uninspiring, what is WITH his total lack of convincing female characters?!?!), an abridged-for-children version of Great Expectations when I was eight, a copy of Bleak House which someone gave me as a birthday present ages ago and which I never read because it had such a depressing picture of a 19th century workhouse on the cover, and a medley of songs from Oliver! that we sang in choir when I was little. So, sorry, Nick, if an enjoyment of Dickens is on your list of must-haves in a friend, this might not work out. At some point, I promise to try David Copperfield for you, because I know you liked it, but I am going to have to let the Nelly Ternan story recede a bit for me first. Claire Tomalin 1, Dickens 0.)

Speaking of fame, fortune, true love, and death in grotty circumstances, I also plowed through the letters of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West in two longish evenings. With the exception, I think, of T.S. Eliot, I find the whole pretentious/romantic ambience of the Bloomsbury crew (and attendant diaries/letters) so much more addictive than any of their actual published-in-their-lifetime writing. Reading the letters between Virginia and Vita is like reading the notes being passed between class periods in some bizarre Edwardian hyperliterate junior high school; the importance that they give their own emotions seems so over-the-top, somehow, and lacking in humour. Virginia's suicide is a puzzle as well; did she have to do it so publicly because she couldn't find anywhere more private to do it? or was it part of the over-romanticising of her own emotions? did she call what she felt "descending into madness" rather than "I'm really depressed" because it sounded sexier? and yet it feels so ungenerous to suspect the motives of someone who was miserable enough to kill herself. Vita apparently wrote in her diary years later that if she had only seen Virginia in the days before her suicide that she feels sure she could have turned her around and made her feel better. I dunno. And yet, and yet. I do love reading about them. I want to reread Nigel Nicolson's terrific book Portrait of a Marriage; I remember being very, very, impressed with Harold Nicolson. Not at all what I would have expected (a weedy passive guy who put up with his crazy wife); he seemed like a genuinely kind, funny, wise person with a lot to say for himself.

I mentioned the Junot Diaz book (which I read ages ago and was only returning it to its rightful owner) just because it was amazing and original and great. I haven't read enough of the Richard Russo yet, but it should be good - Alice recommended it, after all....