Mason, Martinez, Batuman, Ransome

Books read:

Zachary Mason, The Lost Books of the Odyssey

Nick Hornby, Slam

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures in Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

Arthur Ransome, Swallowdale

Eduardo Martinez, Memoirs of a Medico

Rudyard Kipling, Stalky & Co and Puck of Pook's Hill

Books attempted and failed:

Javier Marias, Tu rostro manana

D.F. Wallace, Infinite Jest

yes yes yes i'm behind, whatever, get over it. I'm still reading, it's just that it gets too painful to admit to the rest of the world that a) I spend so much time rereading children's books when things aren't going well (it helps me to sleep, what can I say) and b) when I do read adult books, I can't for the life of me think of anything intelligent to say about them. I am reminded of Sarah Vowell's frustration trying to write a music review at one point: she listened to the album she was supposed to be reviewing, decided she 'quite liked the ballads,' wrote down that she quite liked the ballads, and then thought, crap, I have to come up with another five hundred words worth of stuff to say.

I'm disguising Infinite Jest as being by "D.F." Wallace, rather than "David Foster" just so you think it's a whole new book that I got stuck on. Hopefully it'll fool you.

Javier Marias was a recommendation from my sister's boyfriend, and I made the cocky mistake of thinking that I could read just fine in Spanish, thanks very much, and it turns out his prose is just slow moving enough that the addition of my slow reading, (combined with trips to the dictionary, or more usually, skipping over of words I don't know) makes the project look, well, doomed. It's still next to my bed, but I'm not holding my breath.

The first childhood-regression, insomnia-battling books were the Kipling (which I'm not going to talk about except to say that they hold a completely peculiar hold over me, like nostalgia for something I never experienced - is that possible? somehow I feel it was simply an oversight on the part of Fate that I didn't actually attend a boy's boarding school in Devon around the turn of the century. I should have. I would have been fine. Cigar smoking and pantomimes and evil games masters and all. I would have ate it up. (Totally coincidentally, I was given an actual cigar the other day by a proud new father, which left me quite nonplussed. Are there any female family medicine doctors who smoke cigars? If so, I would like to meet them. I gave it to a male family medicine doctor who apparently does smoke cigars.) Next the J.K. Rowling, which I am also not going to talk about, except to say that I now class Harry Potter in the same category as the Beatles, in that I can't even think about whether objectively like them or not, they are just sort of absorbed into my consciousness because I have used them as insomnia-battlers so many times. It's a little embarrassing, so we'll move on.

Much less squeamish talking about the Arthur Ransome books - so, so, so lovely. I didn't like them particularly when I was little, and I can't remember quite why - did I not get all the references? did my father fall asleep half way through sentences while reading them to us? (yes)

were they insufficiently dangerous? (probably). The thing that's nice about them is that they consist of plausible adventures that normal kids could have that do not involve losing parents in tragic accidents/smugglers/spies/saving the planet at the end of the day. They go camping, they accidentally hit a rock and sink their boat and all their stuff gets wet, their mum lets them continue to camp in a cave they find nearby, their uncle helps them repair the boat, they have tea. You feel as if it wouldn't be all that difficult to pull off, and yet it's all just adventure enough that you think, yeah, that would be fun to do that! I'd like to go sailing and then have tea and crumpets!

The Elif Batuman book is quite fun, although I will say that a) the cover is misleading, and makes it looks like a laff riot, which it is not and b) you have to cross over to the dark side and Believe, as all literature majors seem to, that Obscure Literary Topics have real meaning and weight in the world today, and that the symbolism of garden spades in Chekhov's writing during the time period January 1891 to April 1892 is a Totally Reasonable thing to write a 300+ page Ph.D. about. That said, she's appealingly goofy and seldom takes herself too seriously, and the book zooms around between her disastrous love life, her disastrous academic career, and her disastrous dayjobs that she does to support numbers one and two.

Most recently, I read my great-uncle's memoir of his career during the Civil War in Spain with bits of WWII thrown in for good measure. It was interesting, up to a point: his daughter had recently published a biography of him, touting him as the latest unsung WWII hero for having helped establish an escape route through Spain for war refugees escaping from France, as part of his work as a secret service agent for the British M6, (and the snippets of her book which I read were so painfully badly written I couldn't get beyond halfway through chapter 1, so I'm not counting that), but the story itself sounded interesting enough to be worth reading a (slightly) more literary and hopefully less biased account of it, so I found his book online and ordered it. At least as a young man, he seems to have been quite open to different grubby experiences (at one point he volunteers in the coalmines, helping keep the fires or something going in support of the striking miners so that they won't have too much work to do when they go back to work), and mucking about in boats in his native Galicia, but a tremendous portion of the book is dedicated to how incredibly important he is, and what a famous surgeon he is, and how many people are so tremendously grateful to him, and how buddy buddy he is with the Spanish royalty, etc., which gets seriously icky after a while. The part that takes place during the Spanish civil war is also massively uncomfortable to read; his sympathies are quite clearly with Franco's government (representing order and civilization) and against the Republic (wild-eyed communists who rape/pillage/burn/destroy everything they come across) and it was uncomfortable on two counts: one, that someone I am related to could be so right-wing and two, that there must have been at least a small amount of truth in some of the incidents that he describes, because he was, after all, there: the republicans probably _did_ do their fair share of raping/pillaging/burning/destroying, and just because history has chosen to remember them as the virtuous losers and Franco as an evil git, doesn't mean that the republicans didn't behave badly at the time. If nothing else, the book is a lesson in how not to write a memoir, anyway: if you tell anything but horrible stories about yourself, you come off sounding completely conceited, and if you tell horrible stories about yourself, you come off sounding completely conceited anyway because chances are it's probably false modesty. I mostly ended up feeling sorry for my great-aunt and my mother's cousin, who somehow bought in to the whole facade of what a Great Man he was, and you just think, oh dude, get over yourself. We're none of us that special. And even if the queen of Spain did think you were the cat's meow (which she probably didn't, she was probably just being polite), guess what? She's not actually that special, either.

Anyway. Enough ranting and raving from the proletariat. It's time for this pleb to have a bath and go to bed.

Strathern

oh my god, I nearly forgot:

the other book I read over Christmas was The Artist, the Philosopher, and the Warrior, a sort of triple biography of Leonardo da Vinci, Niccolo Machiavelli, and Cesare Borgia by Paul Strathern. He gets a bit loopy and repetitive in bits, mostly when he is trying to take up space to fill in gaps in the historical knowledge banks, and is guilty of some slightly wonky oversimplifications (Leonardo was 'trying to create a comprehensive scientific description of the natural world,' and Machiavelli was 'trying to create a comprehensive logical description of human behavior'... therefore they were philosophically in terrific alignment and had loads to say to each other (?) hm. It seems more likely that they had loads to say to each other (if in fact they did) because they were both super sparky bright talented compatriots who lived much of their working lives away from Florence and did a lot of thinking about stuff, but what do I know.)

The overriding impressions of the three that I came away from the book with were

1) Leonardo: wow, what a colossal case of what my friend Tabby has self-diagnosed as Executive Function Disorder (inability to get stuff done) combined with eerily prescient total fucking genius level smarts (designing things in his notebooks that wouldn't actually be invented until 400 years later)

2) Machiavelli: sounds like he was actually a very impressively clever interesting person to hang out with as well, despite his reputation for raging cynicism, which (at least to judge by everything he wrote other than The Prince) was unfounded, and

3) Borgia: oh. my. god. what a raving, loony, total scary nutjob that guy was. He had absolutely zero compunction about murdering anyone that disagreed with him, basically. I was interested to learn that Borgia, and his father, Pope Alexander VI, were actually Catalan transplants, and used to annoy the Vatican courtiers by speaking in Catalan on purpose so that no one could understand them.

So, in summary, I liked the plotty bits of the book, but I lost patience with the attempt to find deep underlying similarities in the characters of the three men. Sixteenth century Florence must have been one hell of a place to hang out, anyway, what with all the seventy-year-old Popes with teenage mistresses; people getting burnt at the stake, garrotted, or poisoned all over the shop; Michelangelo and Leonardo getting in pissing contests over their duelling frescoes... it makes today's political and art world scandals look positively tame by comparison.

Barnes, Hornby, Grafton, Wallace (continued)

Books read:

Julian Barnes, The Pedant in the Kitchen

Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked

Sue Grafton, O is for Outlaw (at least that's the one I think it was)

Books reread:

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

Ann Bramson, Soap

Books acquired:

Julian Barnes and Nick Hornby (above), plus

Javier Marias, Tu rostro manana

Alastair Reid, Ounce, Dice, Trice

Bill Gaston, Sointula

Vicky Harris & John Newton, The Food of Spain: A Journey for Food Lovers

The unabashed deliciousness of the first three I think are counterbalanced by some of the struggles implied in the rereading of the fourth and fifth. I still haven't quite finished Infinite Jest; what happened was that I got about 80% of the way through, and I realized that a lot of the stuff I had skimmed between pages about 200-400 might have been, er, relevant. I hadn't read them properly because I was dubious about my ability to actually follow everything that was going on in the book because it's so bloody convoluted, but as it turns out there is a plot, there is, really, it's just not enacted by actual characters. Here's what I figured out about Infinite Jest: the characters are either walking talking clever jokes (as in the undercover spy whose alias character that he has been assigned to impersonate not only is a different gender than he is, but is also not an amputee, so he has to go through all sorts of bizarre contortions to pretend that he is in fact an able bodied female, or the guy who (it took me a while to figure this out) speaks in a literal word-by-word French to English translation), or they are vehicles for absolutely transcendant and brutal descriptions of experiences (what it feels like to play high level tennis/be addicted to various substances/whatever). None of which is meant to downplay the impressiveness of the novel, it just makes it harder to keep track of who's who and what they're doing and why they're doing it, since no-one talks in any straightforward sort of a way. So anyway, I got to 80%, realized I did actually want to try and keep straight who everyone was and what they were doing, and... oh bugger, that means going back to the beginning and possibly even taking notes this time round. I might keep a dictionary handy as well. I'm sure it's all putting hair on my chest.

Soap wasn't a hard read, I'm just putting it in because a) my reading of it was under duress, so I want credit and b) it is actually a lovely book and very evocative of a simpler time. It's a soap-making recipe book, for anyone who might be mistakenly looking for a retrospective history of daytime TV programs, and I read it (and reread it, obsessively, desperately searching for clues) while trying to troubleshoot my last batch of orange almond soap. Rendering the beef fat was a revolting nightmare and then the bloody mixture went and curdled on me (I think) and the final product is still curing in bars on top of the fridge, so I won't know for another week or so how it actually turned out, but it was a very boring evening of endless, endless, endless stirring. But my favourite bits are her descriptions of working with lye, and how you should be careful, because it can sting if you get a bit on your skin, but how she's never really been burnt except for once working barefoot (!). so cute. I'm sure any modern-day soap-making instruction books are packed with strict edicts about no children and splash guards and safety goggles and rubber gloves and whathaveyou. For the record, I burnt myself several times, none remotely seriously, and did not use any safety equipment at all. I also plan to be making soap for years to come, since lye is not readily available for sale in small quantities anymore: I have a fifty pound bag that I had to order from an agricultural supply company, and it is squatting menacingly in the corner of my kitchen until I feel brave enough to attempt the next batch. I should probably seal it closed just in case the cat gets into it, hmm.

Anyway, enough about reading under duress: Sue Grafton's book was pure cheeseburger, consumed in one indulgent session over the Christmas holiday when everyone else was too fluey, too asleep, too working, or too busy sorting their thousand digital snapshots of birds-on-cliffs to provide other entertainment. The combination of funny, smart, and moderately trashy is an appealing one, and the alphabet series is all of those. Hooray for Sue Grafton. Yum.

The Nick Hornby and the Julian Barnes were a Christmas present to myself, and I have just finished inhaling both of them in one sitting (I did get up half way through Juliet, Naked to make myself a bowl of pasta, and I interrupted Julian just long enough to cut myself a slice of fruitcake, but apart from that, I have been wedged in between the same cat-hairy sofa cushions for the last, oh, good lord, four or five hours. (More, now that I got up for thirty seconds to fetch my laptop). I am starting to recognize Themes in Nick Hornby's work, and it gives you a little frisson of, I don't know, vicarious embarrassment, or something. You assume that the novelist is all-wise, all-seeing, all-comprehensive of all different characters, and that he is free, in his wise witty way, of all the hang-ups and stupidities that you yourself are prone to, and then you think, hang on, I've heard this before, this must be something that he thinks about a lot, and the personality, or more accurately, the interior monologue of the writer himself begins to reveal itself, and you think, eek, I shouldn't be allowed to see this, this is private. Such as: the feeling of having wasted one's life, the feeling that family and loved ones are (only just) enough to stop the average person from putting their head into a gas oven, the contaminating pernicious stigma of loneliness despite the fact that we all suffer from it to some degree (actually this is something that Douglas Coupland also writes about as well. Why is it so touching when funny and well-spoken men in particular talk about this? I don't know). I feel embarrassed to read those bits, because I think, oh crap, I don't know this guy from Adam, I've only read his books, and yet I know that he has in all seriousness at some point in his life contemplated putting his head in an oven, because it's come up in his books too many times for it to be a coincidence, fiction or not. I am less interested by his writing about music and obsessive male fan behavior about music, but there's another example of a recurrent theme that it doesn't take too much thinking about to realize, OK, the dude's a little funny about his music collection. How did I get off on this? I can't remember. I liked Juliet, Naked a lot, although my favourites are still I think About a Boy, How to Be Good, and the Polysyllabic Spree reviews. Don't worry, Nick, I'll still read everything you publish, as long as you don't convert to earnest Mormonism or something and lose your sense of humour.

I'm saving the Julian Barnes until the end as a treat - it had me nearly peeing myself laughing. I had to go back and reread I think three or four times his description of the beetroot sandwiches his dad once made him, painfully and hilariously reminiscent of the peanut-butter-and-ricotta boluses inside the sandwiches that my dad used to put in our packed lunches before my sister and I took over the lunch-making ourselves. It also made me want to go and raid my mother's bookshelf for all the Jane Grigson books so that I can read and/or try and cook from those. SO FUNNY. I am also totally jealous of his wife - he might be horrible, loutish, and abusive at home for all I know, but how irresistible to be immortalized in published prose as "She For Whom The Pedant Cooks," ("She For Whom" for short.) His writing is both warm and lovely and inclusive (describing his various humiliating messes and disasters) and the same time makes you feel slightly anxious that you will never have such a brilliant life, cooking up fabulous cozy suppers for all your literary and interesting friends and your spouse whom you call/who calls you "She For Whom." The other bit in the book that just cracked me up was a metaphor of cooking from a cookery book as being like the first time you sleep with someone, in that a) there is always the more experienced person (the cookery book author) and the less experienced person (the home cook), and the less experienced person always has the right to say, 'Eurgh, I'm not going to do that' (whether it be deboning a chicken or halving 300 cherry tomatoes to scrape the seeds out). At a couple of points I came dangerously close to actual urinary incontinence, and I did a lot of antisocial laugh-snort-cackles of the sort that would have earned me disapproving frowns had there been anyone attempting to share my sofa. But alas, there is no-one currently to call me 'She For Whom,' so I can snort with impunity, at least until it is time to have a bath and go to bed with David Foster Wallace (attempt the second...)

Tolstoy, Sharp

Read this month:

Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

The Rescuers, Margery Sharp

something else that was actually really good but which is totally escaping me right now and I am sure the title will come back to me but in the meantime I am going to worry about presenile dementia - HA! just remembered, Generation A, Douglas Coupland

Started this month and couldn't finish because its true owner took it away:

The Monster of Florence, Douglas something else

So, yuh, Anna Karenina. Where to begin. I should say that I went into this book with some preconceived notions, courtesy of my mother: she read it for a book-club when I was a teenager, and I have a very clear memory of picking it up and leafing through it in a "Huh, this is famous and I should probably have a clue what it's about" kind of a way, and she SNATCHED it away from me, and said, "No! You must _save_ this book for when you're older, because it will MEAN so much MORE to you then! You can't read Anna Karenina until your fortieth birthday!" and somehow, along with you-can't-drive-until-you're-sixteen or vote-until-you're-eighteen or drink until-you're twentyone became cemented into my head in a very permanent way. And then recently I saw an attractive-looking edition of AK (buxom beauty on the front, with bosoms and dark curls spilling out everywhere) in a used bookshop and I thought, what the hell, I'm thirtyfive now, I'm allowed to read WHATEVER I WANT. so I bought it.

I was surprised by two things, mainly: how easy a read it was, for the most part - Tolstoy has this very gossipy style and I found even his philosophizing bits to be so adolescently silly in tone that it was hard to really dig into them and try and take them seriously, so I sped through 1000+ pages in about a week, which was a surprise. The other thing that surprised me was how little _sense_ the whole thing made.

For example: Anna is described at the beginning as a wise, witty, sensible, attractive, worldly-in-a-good-way sort of person, who negotiates a domestic truce between her good-natured but sexually incontinent brother and his exasperated wife, and is an inspirational older-sister-type figure to sweet young Kitty Scherbatskaya. Count Vronksy - young, good-looking, supposedly intelligent and worldly as well, although you wouldn't know it from ANYTHING AT ALL THAT HE SAYS OR DOES THROUGHOUT THE BOOK develops a mega-crush on her with very little provocation, declaring his Eternal Love for her based on one little flirtyflirty encounter at the train station where they meet and a second one at a ball later on. Anna, in a move completely out of synch with her character as described thus far in the book, becomes his lover, and proceeds to make herself and absolutely everyone else around her miserable, especially after she runs off with him to Italy/St Petersberg, leaving her little boy behind, whom she supposedly adores, but yet she still just ups and goes to Italy knowing full well that this means she will likely never get to have any legal rights to her kid ever again.

If I were writing Anna Karenina over again, here's what I would try and do differently:

- have Vronsky be a much more interesting sympathetic character. As it is, he's just kind of a cardboard cutout of a Dashing Young Thing

- have Vronsky and Anna's relationship be actually believable and real, and not start until after they have known each other for a very long time, and have the reader witness several conversations between them that really establish that they are a match for each other in interests and intellect and sympathy and zinginess, so that when they finally do get together, you want to root for it to work out

- have Anna's feelings and behavior towards her kids be more believable. I am perfectly willing to believe that an aristocratic woman in nineteenth century Russia might have committed adultery, and might even have defiantly told her husband about it, but I CANNOT believe that even once her husband said, fine, do whatever you want so long as you're discreet, that she would have decided to publicly abandon son, house, social position, everything. me, i would have said ta, thanks very much, to my cuckolded husband, and smuggled my lover in at night when the butler and the footmen etc weren't looking, and had the best of both worlds; i wouldn't have even minded if my husband did the same. the book club meeting i went to to discuss this all agreed that 'it was perfectly normal for mothers to abandon their children vis a vis nannies and boarding schools etc.' but it's one thing for a mother to seldom see her child because the child is being raised by hired help and quite another for a mother to NEVER see her child because she was having a not-particularly-credible affair with a Dashing Young Thing and wanted to be able to spend the whole night instead of just part of the night with him?? i don't buy it.

Anyway, by the end of the book, Anna is a whining horrible clingy person, and I don't know whether Tolstoy intended to represent her as a tragic victim of her own circumstances or whether he intended her to be massively annoying, or what, but if, as the jacket copy suggested, the point of the book was to be a searing indictment of the hypocrisy of Russian society of the time, it was lost on me. Most of her problems she seemed to bring on herself and didn't actually have much to do with the hypocrisy of society.

- the whole Levin/Kitty thing was also very peculiar. Levin is the only character in the book who seems to be attempting to do something useful, running his farm and thinking about the best way to improve the lives of the peasants who work for him, but every time I started getting interested in what Levin had to say, he would go off into pastoral fantasies about how happy the simple creatures were, working all the day God gave them, and then going home whistling to their families to eat potatoes over the home hearth, and wasn't peasant life actually just idyllic, and it all got a bit too much like Marie Antoinette dressing up in "shepherdess" outfits. and why, oh why, was he so obsessed with Kitty, who was an emptyheaded cute little teenager, the female equivalent of Vronsky? Urgh! Silly!

anyway, so perhaps one of these days I will sit down and rewrite Anna Karenina. not.

The Douglas Coupland book was fun - he is a smart dude, even if all his books start to sound the same after a while, I will still keep reading them. I just wish I had discovered him when I was a teenager, because I would have REALLY loved them then. this one is about the post-apocalyptic world after the bees disappear completely and the human race is almost completely addicted to a new medication that erases any anxiety you might have about the future. we could all use some of that, hunh.

okay time to go to bed because my eyes are closing on me....

okay, so i'm a better reader than i am blogger...

Read since last post:
The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai
The Man Who Loved Books Too Much, Alison Hoover Bartlett
The Rape of Europa, Lynn Nichols
Neither Here Nor There, Bill Bryson
The Understudy, David Nicholls (how weird is that that I read two books this month by authors with nearly identical surnames...)
The Piano Shop on the Left Bank, Thad Carhart

Seven Days in the Art World, Sarah Thornton

Started reading:
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

Trailed off but still with the best of intentions of one finishing:
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace

The theme of this last month's reading, in retrospect, has to do with theft and taking what doesn't belong to you. Hopefully this is not an indicator of any kleptomaniac proclivities on my part (or a foreshadowing of a major burglary. I'm just going to go and check that the doors are locked...)

My reading was a little fragmented recently due to a two week trip away from home, during which I decided to be extra-macho about how little luggage I took with me; I brought only The Inheritance of Loss, which had come with such an enthusiastic recommendation from a colleague that I was suspicious, and thus I let it languish next to my bed for ages and in fact was getting perilously close to just putting it away on a high shelf (which for me is basically admitting that I will never read it). But! having only one book while travelling is a great motivator for getting that one book read, as it turns out, and I'm REALLY glad I did, because it's really good in a phenomenally depressing kind of way. It's a family saga set in north India, and without being overly ambitious about it, Desai writes about the fortunes of a family as a miniature version of the fortunes of India as a whole in the years during and after Independence, which is to say that one horrible thing after another happens and things get more and more complicated and you begin to feel (like with so many situations involving long and violent armed conflict) that the only way to solve the problem is to go back and time and start from the very beginning. As with Rape of Europa, one of the huge huge questions that it presented (without a proper answer) is to what extent one generation must make reparations for the sins of the previous generation; in the case of Inheritance of Loss, the repercussions of the British occupation of India for 200 odd years is squeamishly painfully clear - and it begs the question that, um, even though technically India has been independent since 1946, shouldn't Britain still be making up for everything that was taken from the Indians during the occupation, because part of India's current chaos is the fault of the British administration during the Raj. Likewise in The Rape of Europa, at what point do you say, OK, enough reparation has been done for the families from whom the Nazis stole/destroyed phenomenally valuable art treasures that in many cases were irreplaceable? is there/should there be a statute of limitations? are there squatters' rights for art treasures acquired in dubious circumstances during the war?

Continuing the theme of taking what doesn't belong to you, I LOVED Allison Bartlett Hoover's book, The Man Who Loved Books Too Much, which is a book nerd's crime thriller true story about the rare book thief John Gilkey. From her portrayal of him, he seems to be a completely pathological conscience-free little git without any remorse for the consequences of his actions (and you end up really sympathizing with the book dealers who, even when the evidence of his thievery is proven, have an incredibly difficult time getting the legal system to prosecute him, mainly because (despite the fact that he stole more than $100,000 worth of books) stealing books is not a crime that's taken particularly seriously by the police). She does make the very good point, though, that there's not _that_ much that separates Gilkey from the rest of the book-lovers in the world - she herself ends up "borrowing long term" a beautiful early Renaissance German manuscript that a friend had asked her to return for him, and describes a Christie's auctioneer who found a first edition of William Blake poetry in a bureau that was up for sale, that no-one but him was aware of: "Ninety percent of me wanted to slip it into my pocket and leave for lunch, but my conscience wouldn't let me..." and the thing is, I would totally feel tempted if I saw a beautiful old book that I really wanted, lying out on some bookstall for the taking. I haven't stolen anything for years (I think the last thing was a screw from Home Depot when the line was really, really long and I had to go to the loo and didn't want to wait, and before that gummy fish from the local convenience store when I was five) but if anything was going to push me over the edge into stealing valuable objects, I think a beautiful old book would be it. Something medieval and illuminated, most likely, or one of the few Graham Oakley Church Mice books that I couldn't find on e-bay... I don't really get the appeal of the whole first edition thing, I have to admit. A handwritten manuscript would be exciting.

Neither Here Nor There doesn't have anything to do with stealing, unless you count the highway robbery of getting charged $12 for a used paperback just because I was desperate and only had three minutes to shop for something to read at the only English-language bookshop in Chiang Mai before getting on 16 hours' worth of airplanes. Bill Bryson is a frustrating writer for me, in that he occasionally makes me actually weak with laughter, and I start attracting annoyed glances from people around me because I am trying and failing to suppress all sorts of undignified snorts and giggles and whoops, and yet his attention span is distressingly short and his books (the travel ones at least) are so devoid of point. He spends about five minutes in each place he travels to, and half of the book is about checking in and out of hotels and mishaps with travellers' checks and whatever else, and you think, well, why not just stay at home, save yourself some money, think up an actual narrative, and then put the same quantity of jokes in that you would otherwise.

I don't think Sarah Thornton intended Seven Days in the Art World to be about stealing, but I certainly came away with the impression that the modern art market is one massive con. She's an anthropologist who spends a day each at a major auction house, at an art school critique, at the studio of a major production artist, at an art fair, at a gallery, etc., and just records what goes on without really imposing any judgement on any of the proceedings. The domination of 'conceptual art' in the modern art world, and the flip side of that, the dismissal of art that requires technical skill, is an interesting philosophical quandary: if Damien Hirst, for example, buys a medicine cabinet from a furniture shop, fills it with medicine bottles purchased from a pharmacy, and then calls it Art, is it worth millions? what about if he doesn't do it himself, but has one of his many employees do it, is it still Art? is it still worth millions? If people are only buying art for its value as a financial investment, and not because it is intrinsically interesting/beautiful/useful in and of itself, doesn't that mean that sooner or later the bubble will pop and it will, in fact, be a shitty financial investment? I think I was most horrified at how much the artists depended on their descriptions of their work to give it meaning - i.e. if Damien Hirst has to tell you that his medicine cabinet is art, and that it is intended to be a powerful political statement about sexual aggression and repressed despair in the search for meaning in the universe (or something), then surely it's not really art. Art should speak for itself with a minimum of explanation, shouldn't it? Then I started wondering, well, how much does knowing the story contribute to one's appreciation of, I don't know, a painting depicting a scene from classical Greek mythology? or knowing what all the objects symbolize in a Dutch Old Master? I don't think it's the same, but I can't quite articulate to myself what the difference is.

Anyway. It's freezing in here. Time to go put two jerseys on and turn the heat up.

still going strong...

Still reading:
The Rape of Europa, by Lynn Nicholas

Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace

Actually finished:
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Schaffer
Diplomatic Baggage, by Brigid Keenan
Him Her Him Again The End of Him, by Patricia Marx
Resistance, by Owen someone or other

Unaccustomed Earth, by Jhumpa Lahiri

Map of the Harbor Islands, by J.G. Hayes

Still languishing next to my bed and starting to collect a good layer of dust:
The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai

Lots read in the last two weeks, mostly because I had a few days up in Seattle, which means access to my parents' bookshelves (why are other people's books that you haven't read so much more appealing than your own unread books? it's like we get eye-fatigue from looking at the same book jackets, and thinking, nah, still not quite in the mood to read that.)

I'm not going to write about The Rape of Europa yet except to say that WOW THE NAZIS WERE MEAN EVIL PEOPLE. It feels sort of trivial to be reading a book about the fate of art in Europe during World War II, when the horrific fate of millions of people is more important.... but then a tiny little part of me, the part that might dither over saving a drowning stranger versus the last extant copy of the complete works of Shakespeare (or Nick Hornby :)), says, but hang on, what's so great about humans except for the bit of us that _produces_ sublime art, so maybe the fate of all those beautiful Vermeers and Rembrandts _is_ just as important and relevant as that of all those people who were murdered, because, let's face it, as a species we are overall fairly crap. The thing that gets me most I think is the vicious hypocrisy in the policies: "degenerate art" should be destroyed because it's bad for humanity & artists/dealers should be severely punished for creating it/dealing it, BUT "degenerate art" basically meant whatever Hitler didn't like (Van Gogh, Picasso, the impressionists) which was difficult to predict until you actually stuck the artwork in question in front of him, and then although the official word was "destroy all degenerate art" half the Nazi war effort was funded with the millions they made on the black market selling other people's stolen art. I think the paintings I'm saddest about are the disappeared Vermeers. There was a bit in one of the early chapters that almost made me cry: during the Spanish Civil War, the Escorial near Madrid was bombed, and so the curators of the Prado realized that they needed to get their artwork out of the museum posthaste, as it was only a matter of time before a bomb hit the Prado. They arranged a caravan of high security trucks to transport the most valuable of the Prado's collection through the night to some underground vault in Valencia, and (this is part that got me), all through the night, regular citizens stood by the road along the route as these enormous trucks carrying the rolled up Velazquezes and Goyas, and as soon as the trucks had passed, they would go home and telephone the curators at the Prado (who were presumably biting their nails the whole night long) to say that so far the trucks were safe.

I'm realizing I've been on a little bit of a Second World War binge this last couple of weeks: Resistance was a fairly crapulent (I thought) overly pathetique imagining of a German occupation of a small Welsh valley in 1940 something - the general framework of the story is solid (seven small farms in a valley, German soldiers are coming, women wake up one morning to find all their menfolk have disappeared in the night to join the underground Welsh resistance, Germans arrive, women have to cooperate but can't give any information about their husbands away, German soldiers get snowed into the valley with them over the winter and truthfully are quite glad that their commanders seem to have forgotten about them because they're tired of being soldiers and just want to go back to being regular guys again, German soldiers plus abandoned farmwives end up leaning on each other to survive the winter, winter's over and valley opens again - dilemma of what to do.) but the prose is dreadful dreadful. No one in the book has even a glimmering of dimensionality to them, and I got very fed up with them all by the end the snow melted, and it was quite hard to care about what happened in the end.

THAT said, I loved loved loved the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (despite the retarded chick-lit title). Such a sweet book. It was a perfect antidote to all the macho misanthrope of Martin Amis, John Updike et al: intelligent, but warm and kind, and everyone in the book is a good person! that you would enjoy spending an evening with! possibly more! funny and yet with depth! Also about the (this time real) German occupation of the Channel Islands, it starts off very fluffy, and then slowly gets into more stern stuff, but the principal characters are so charming that there is almost a pleasantness to the ache of the sterner stuff. I think I have said before too that I do have a weakness for epistolary novels - it's the voyeurism of getting to read something that doesn't belong to you, maybe.

Diplomatic Baggage and Him Her Him Again The End of Him were both unabashed fluff. You don't need to read either of them. Diplomatic Baggage is a slightly self-serving string of anecdotes as told by a woman who has spent the last two decades trailing around after her husband on his various diplomatic missions - she expresses exactly the same amount of angst over Rwandan genocide as she does over having to organize a dinner party for six, and it could come off as cute and Bridget-Jones-like, but at least Bridget doesn't include both in the same _book_. The Patricia Marx book was funny (and she is a better writer than Brigid Keenan as well) but it also felt a bit too trivial - books that are entirely about women completely obsessed with men who are bad for them feel tedious to me now, which is either a sign that I am growing up or that I am an unsympathetic cow, not sure which.

The last book I am going to write about before I crap out and go to bed is The Map of the Harbor Islands which has been sitting in my brain ever since I finished it (late last night, one a.m., definitely past my bed time), and refusing to go away, saying thinkaboutmethinkaboutmethinkaboutme. The recommendation came from a source I was a little unsure about, book-taste-wise, but I was assured it was the Best Book EVER, and I have to admit, it's definitely got something. There's a lot in it, to start off with; there are a lot of words in this book and it might even qualify for quasi-saga-hood. The gist is as follows: two boyhood friends (the narrator, Danny, and his best friend Petey) are enjoying their rough-and-tumble South Boston Irish-Catholic semi-squalid but basically happy normal childhood until Petey gets bonked on the head by a baseball and emerges from his head injury a different person: he becomes totally unselfconscious, a truth-speaking angel full of poetry and love for the universe and the earth, (and an unrealistically literate and abstract thinker, for a twelve-year-old, I will also throw in) and, to the major freakout of Danny, Petey also announces that he is gay. Danny is a much more ordinary kid destined for ordinary join-marines-get-crap-job-settle-down-with-highschool-girlfriend life, and the rest of the book is about Danny's growing up and coming to terms with his love for his friend and thinking about stretching his own boundaries and making the most of his own life beyond the ordinary crap that's in the cards for him, and it definitely got its hooks into me, this book, even despite a few passages which stretched credulity, and another few which talked about God (as in the Irish Catholic version of God) in a way that seemed to imply that organized religion and homosexuality in America were PERFECTLY COMPATIBLE, no PROBLEM, you just have to think about it the right way and hang out only with the twinkly-eyed smart nuns rather than the evil spiritually-limited ruler-wielding ones... hmm, yeah, I have my doubts about that. But J.G.Hayes is definitely a smart and thougtful cookie, and kudos to him for writing a book that is going to keep me thinking about the exact nature of love for a while to come.

HA! i'm reading again!

Read (or at least started):
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
At the Same Time, Susan Sontag
Magical Changes, Graham Oakley (does this count? it's all pictures. my kind of book, man)
The Rape of Europa,
Unaccustomed Earth, Jhumpa Lahiri
random book titled something like "Character Analysis in the work of Enid Blyton" that I picked up in Powells because I could NOT believe that someone would write a serious book about this, but hey, they did.

Stuff I want to read:
fictionalized biography of Artmesia Gentileschi, by Anna Banti
Biography of Arthur Ransome, by Roland someone
Swallowdale, by Arthur Ransome, and THEN all the other Swallows and Amazons books
Twilight series, by Stephanie whosit

I haven't actually, you know, FINISHED, anything to speak of, but at least I have rolled eyeballs over print enough to qualify as reading the last week or so, which is better than I was doing before.
I did end up starting Infinite Jest; obviously I'm nowhere near finished with it because it's like five million very dense pages, but so far thumbs up. I'm skipping the footnotes, I've decided; the flow thing is more important, and while I do sympathize to a certain extent with the common criticism of his work that it is too self-consciously show-offy, it's FUN how much he knows about everything, and has this extensive and very precisely applied vocabulary (i.e., not just gratuitous big words, but perfectly placed accurate vocabulary that gives you a little tickle of pleasure of OHHHHH how nice that he put that word _there_ exactly where it belongs, and it's a word you only hear once every ten years so it makes you happy that it is still not just getting used but getting used in the right place to mean its right thing.) On a slightly unrelated note, it has occurred to me before that in English-foreign language translation dictionaries, especially ones that include slang or very idiomatic terms, they should also include an appropriate frequency for each phrase. "cool" can be used once every five minutes, easily, without being egregious, for example; "all that and a bag of chips" should be limited to once a year, at most; I have restricted my mother to "getting up at the butt-crack [of dawn]" to once every ten years, not that she respects that boundary. I think it would be really useful when learning a foreign language to give you a sense of how often you can use a given word or phrase without sounding weird. Anyway. So so far I heart Infinite Jest, and I do feel happy to be getting in on the tail end of the whole grassroots thing of 'Infinite Summer' (the project of reading Infinite Jest this summer, which may be just a Bay Area? thing or a U.S. thing? I don't know - as a tribute to DFW's life and horrific early death. So tremendously sad when smart funny people can't find enough to be worth living for.)
The other book which I am going to claim I finished (even though I skipped one of the longer middle essays) was a book of Susan Sontag essays, "At the Same Time," which was compiled posthumously. I will admit to having Trouble with a capital T with some of them: she nearly lost me with the first one, which is sort of a weird abstract pseudophilosophical meandering about the meaning of Beauty, and what beauty means and how it's defined and how it relates to ethical/moral issues and cultural standards and I found myself losing patience just a wee wee bit with it because a) her attempt to define beauty isn't really going to change what anyone else finds beautiful (I don't think) and b) I am the world's least abstract thinker. I do think that beauty is not as visceral a decision as we might like to think: I have grown out of liking a lot of pieces of art that I really liked 10-20 years ago, and come to really like several other things that I hated as a teenager, in large part because of extra stuff I have learned about the cultural context/artist's intention/etc, but I don't think Susan Sontag (or Oscar Wilde, or Plato, or anyone else) philosophizing about the meaning of beauty is going to do much to change what is ultimately a fairly visceral reaction to a piece of art/music; you love it, or you don't love it. Ennyway. She also does this thing of referring to herself obliquely as this ultra-highbrow persecuted intellectual character, and it just seems a little bit snotty to refer to yourself as one of the last remaining smart people in the world, the last guardian of the True Culture and the Intelligentsia. meh, get over yourself.

The essay that most most grabbed me in the Susan Sontag book was a review of a fictionalized biography by Anna Banti about the Renaissance painter Artemisia Gentileschi. First off, wow, what a great name, to be called Artemisia is pretty fantastic, and secondly wow, fantastic to be a successful (and apparently good) painter in Florence in the 1600's, in a world completely totally utterly dominated by men made me feel so vicariously proud and woohoo, you go sister! The part of the essay that was a little bit disheartening was where she talked about the decision that women (still) have to make about basically being hyperproductive in their life's work or having a family, and how that is not a choice that men really have to make. "For a woman to be free, free as a man, means choices - sacrifices - sufferings that a man may choose but is not obliged to incur... Feminism has meant many things... about justice and dignity and liberty - to which almost all independent women would adhere if they did not fear the retaliation that accompanies a word with such a sulfurous reputation... that feminism suggests an avowal of strength - and a denial of the difficulty and the cost for women in being strong (above all, the cost in masculine support and affection)." I don't know how Susan Sontag felt about masculine support and affection, but I for one am grateful for what I got in that arena, and would be loath to give it up, although I think I am as guilty as the next woman in terms of not infrequently deferring to men without really thinking about it too hard, which I am sure has cost me in productivity points. Anyway, I am undecided about Susan Sontag, but I'm definitely going to read Anna Banti's book about Artemisia at some point.

I finally started the Jhumpa Lahiri, although haven't gotten far enough into it to be able to decide yet whether I like it; I don't think I'm ever going to be able to get over how much I liked her first book, Interpreter of Maladies. I also yesterday went on a pilgrimage to Powell's bookstore in Portland - my first time ever; next time I go I am bringing a sleeping bag and a campstove and just staying there for a week or two, or until they kick me out, whichever is longer - and I bought a nonfiction account of the Nazi pillage of so-called "degenerate" art from Jewish collectors which I am twenty pages into and which I can tell is going to be just whoppingly depressing, with lots of destroyed paintings and murdered artists and the whole bit) as well as a Graham Oakley children's picture book called Magical Changes, which is AWESOME. that dude is a genius. I am not surprised his books are going for $200 a pop on ebay. (I looked for the Church Mice books, in vain, but I did find a hilarious 'Guide To Enid Blyton's Characters' which offered a semi-serious brief psychoanalysis of all the major players (George/Julian/Dick/Anne/Timmy the dog/Silky/Moonface etc etc) as well as books 3-8 of the Swallows and Amazons series, which I recently re-read book one of, and decided it was excellent. I didn't BUY books 3-8 because I need to read book TWO (Swallowdale) first, and of course they didn't HAVE book two... I also looked for the new biography of Arthur Ransome (author of the Swallows and Amazons series) which my sister sent me a link about which sounds FASCINATING - he apparently (in order to escape a tedious marriage) got himself sent as a journalist/spy to Bolshevik Russia and was there for the revolution, had a long term affair with Trotsky's personal secretary (whom he later married), worked in China for a bit as a journalist/British Foreign Office having all sorts of hairy adventures, and it wasn't until he was in his forties that he came back to the UK and settled down in the Lake District to write these gorgeously appealing kids' books about sailing and pirates.

I also might have to read the vampire Twilight series, as I have now heard it's fun from several people. hmm. we'll see. I might have to read it in secret when nobody's watching. We have to at least pretend to maintain some pretense at High Cultcha.