Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, by Claire Tomalin

Just for the record, I will read pretty much any biography written by Claire Tomalin; she has got to be one of the most thorough researchers on the planet. You definitely get the sense with this book that she spent a LOT of time tracking down 450-year-old pieces of paper, some of the details of which get only the briefest most casual of mentions, but if it was relevant/entertaining/interesting, dammit, she was going to make sure she tracked down that 450-year-old bit of paper for you. I read her Jane Austen biography a few years ago as well and really enjoyed it. I kind of want to write to her and suggest other interesting people that I think she needs to write a biography of for me.

So, wow, Samuel Pepys, so so so interesting. The most obvious thing that is wildly unusual about him was the social mobility aspect of his life: he was born, dirt poor, to a tailor and a laundry maid, and by the time he died, had risen to become head honcho of the English navy, regularly hobnobbing with kings and getting asked for advice by all kinds of important Personages, which speaks to a combination of tremendous luck and ferocious ambition that probably didn't come along very often in seventeenth century England. And while the political machinations that are the backdrop of the story, the reason why he is such a fascinating character is of course his diary and the record of his personal life, which (at least in Claire Tomalin's telling of it) reveal to him to be by turns clever/self-deluding, arrogant/curious, sympathetic good company with a love of music and books/a narcissistic corrupt abusive bastard, etc. Claire Tomalin I think likes him, which is good; I couldn't decide. The thing that's hardest, of course, for modern readers (by which I guess I mean me) to get over is his relationship to women; it's hard to remember that it was completely normal then to beat your wife and regularly molest any/all of your female servants, as anyone who did that today would automatically fall into the Major Creep category. (He also had, apparently, no problem describing other people's mistresses as "poxy whores" while enjoying frequent episodes of R&R with a bevy of his own "very agreeable" lady friends.) The family relationships are also very weird by our standards: at one point he hired his sister as a servant and insisted on treating her as such; she wasn't allowed to sit down at the table with them, for instance, and he beat her regularly, and it's quite difficult to wrap your head around how that might possibly have been considered a reasonable thing to do not that long ago.

I read a bit of the Diary as a teenager; this biography made me want to go back and reread it, if only because the Tendency of Mr. Pepys to Capitalization, according to the particular Fashion in Language of the time is so Quaint and Appealing, &c. and also because he discusses all his sexual exploits in this hilarious naughty-schoolboy-hodgepodge of French, Spanish, and Italian.

Ooh, speaking of naughty schoolboys, I also recently reread Stephen Fry's memoir, Moab is My Washpot, and also his novel, The Hippopotamus, which I had accurately remembered as sort of a raunchy version of P.G. Wodehouse. Which made me want to reread some P.G.Wodehouse; you can't pretend that P.G.W. books are in any way consequential, but he has a delicious loopy perfection all his own, and the English language would be the poorer for it without him.

Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World

WOW, I am totally pathetic - I can't believe it's been nearly four months since my last blog entry. I promise I have actually been reading quite a lot in that time - notable faves that stick out in my mind were

1) _Olive Kitteredge_ by Elizabeth Strout (interconnected short stories are totally brilliant: you feel completely not guilty if you can't remember what was going on the last time you picked the book up, and you get a little zing of delicious smugness when a seemingly peripheral character pops up in a story and YOU KNOW ALL ABOUT THAT PERSON and their deepest darkest inner thoughts from a previous story)

2) I did like the Khaled Hosseini, _A Thousand Splendid Suns_ - it's a good story and I also liked the fact that a male writer recognizes the importance of feminism enough to write a whole book about how completely shitty life is for most women in Afghanistan. I did think that the book suffered very slightly from Western preachiness, if that's the right term - there are a few bits in which the women express opinions about their situation in very modern-American-psychotherapeutic terms, which didn't quite ring true (of course I can't remember specific examples, but words like "self-esteem" or "self-sabotaging" - terms that I would bet (even if there is an accurate translation into Afghan) would be outside the literal/conceptual vocabulary of the average uneducated Afghani peasant woman).

3) _Cutting for Stone_ by Abraham Verghese, another story about how indiscriminately rotten life is in other parts of the world (this time in northeast Africa.) I am always wary of books about/by doctors, since I spend enough time in conversations that start, "OMG, I had this crazy/interesting/horrible/brilliant patient who...." and doctor-centric books often feel a bit like that, with a bit of "wow, look at what a wise compassionate healer I am" thrown in, but the story definitely took front seat to all that, so, you know, good for him. (Ironically it was recommended to me by a woman in a landscape painting class I took who inspired neither wisdom nor compassion in me but instead irritated/bemused me by talking the entire time about how she ran a failing maple-cookie mail order business out of her house and how amazingly difficult it was for her to lose weight.)

BUT this blog post is supposed to be about the Fareed Zakaria book, which I am reading for an unofficial one-off book club to which I was invited about a month ago. I accepted the invitation on the grounds that it would be Good For Me (this is exactly the kind of book that I never, never read. Well, maybe that's not quite true. I am more likely to read popular economic/political analysis books than I am self-help books for business managers, but I think that might be the only genre that clocks in lower on my appeal list. Which is not to knock popular economic/political analysis books at ALL - it's more a comment on what an uneducated big-picture ignoramus I am, so signing up to read this book (along with _Against the Dead Hand: The Uncertain Struggle For Global Capitalism_ by Brink Lindsey) was an effort to become a better person. We'll see if it works.)

On the plus side, you get the sense that Fareed Zakaria is probably a very nice, good guy with ideals who might be quite fun/interesting to chat to in person (I have never seen him on CNN, so for all I know he might be an arrogant berk with a distracting facial tic and a scrapey voice, but based on his prose, you get the sense that he's generally a good dude.) The book is for the most part very readable, and he makes a (much-appreciated) effort to stick to the big picture and not be too jargony (although he did lose me a bit during one section where he was talking about how the US stock market is stronger than everyone else's in derivatives and hedges and something else that I forget, and I was like, OK, wait, what is a derivative? and how exactly do hedge funds work again? isn't it a bet that things will go badly? and if so, why is it good that we're strong in that?)

However, I got to the end of the book, and realized that despite the readability that I didn't actually have a clear sense of what the big picture _was_. On the one hand, China is poised to take over the world and kick everyone's ass and specifically they already hold gajillions of dollars of IOUs signed by the US (oops). On the other hand, the US is still way the biggest game in the world, and China is a long way off from even coming close to posing any real economic threat to our wellbeing. On the one hand, the US is uniquely positioned for success because we have done such a good job of forging close ties and becoming every developing country's best friend and we are such an open civil society that has a huge diverse hodgepodge of immigrants. On the other hand, we are on the brink of disaster because we don't spend enough time/energy/money on diplomacy and we are close minded and don't pay any attention to other cultures. On the one hand, our problems stem from arrogance; on the other hand, the solution is to become more confident in our actions on the global stage. And so on. I did like the fact that he sums up what he thinks we should do about our situation at the end of the book in clear bullet points (love bullet points!) and in his list was 1) reduce our nuclear arms and 2) work on practicing what we preach in terms of foreign policy. Yessss! It's totally clear and I agree with it! Three cheers for me and Fareed Zakaria!

I still haven't been able to get more than a few pages into the Brink Lindsey book because he contradicts himself massively within the first two pages and it drives me crazy: my thesis, he says, is that globalization is not some thing that was forced on us, but a carefully chosen response to the failure of the collectivist mentality that drove politics for most of the 20th century. On the VERY NEXT PAGE (we're still in the preface, here) he says that we didn't have a _choice_ about globalization because it was the only option available to us blah blah blah... in other words, it was a carefully chosen response that we didn't have a choice about. Hunh. Anyway.

I think I am going to go back to reading novels now, since I don't have conclusive proof that reading anything, really, will make me a better person...

muriel sparks, the prime of miss jean brodie

So I had a miniature revelation with this book, which is this: a lot of books written around the early to middle part of the century seem, despite the almost entirely modern use of language, very dated, specifically because, despite some very lyrical and/or precise and/or witty descriptions of _scenarios_, the characters themselves remain shadowy and imprecise, and you never get a sense of any of them as real people, and the words spoken by any one of them (no matter how ironic/clever) could have been spoken by any of them. In some of them, I think this is definitely a purposeful narrative trick, for instance the character of Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby is sort of unknowable because it's not him that's important, it's Gatsby. Likewise in the Good Soldier, I never really felt that the narrator was a real person, and the whole thing consisted of these four interchangeable cardboard cutout rich disaffected people hanging out making comments about the weather to each other into which you were meant to read all sorts of hidden meaning about the unhappiness and pointlessness of modern life. (This may not be fair, since I read both Gatsby and the Good Soldier a long time ago, and I do remember quite liking bits of the Good Soldier in terms of the prose style; it's just specifically a lack of clarity when it comes to characterization; none seem to have a consistent individual _voice_ about which you can confidently say, aha, that's so-and-so's sense of humour/pessimism/obsession/whatever, I recognize that character by what they have to say, not just because the author has told me that that person just walked in the room.

I liked The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - there are some funny and perceptive bits in it, but it was like Muriel Sparks couldn't decide what she wanted Jean Brodie to be and I never felt clear about who this person was. In some bits, she is a slightly fruity but actually quite wise teacher who absolutely deserves the loyalty of her 'girls' (e.g. teaching them about Italian art history and taking them to the theatre on her own dime against the disapproval of the narrowminded headmistress) and who doesn't deserve the tragedy of not being able to be with the unsuitable man she loves; in the next scene she is a caricature of a harmless and slightly vain woman who plays favourites from pique; in the next she is a self-deluded monster who endorses fascism and naziism out of (you hope) total ignorance, and the headmistress is quite right to be trying to oust her from the school. It wasn't that these different inconsistent pictures of Jean Brodie presented an evolution of the character, either, which might have explained the girls' gradual shift from loyalty to her to disinterest to actively despising her; Miss Brodie alternated seemingly at random between fruity/wise/vain/self-deluded/ahead of her time/politically appalling throughout the entire book. The girls, likewise, were more or less interchangeable, and the one character trait that each was assigned (and that was insisted upon throughout the book) seemed totally artificial. Rose was 'famous for sex,' Monica was good at maths, Mary was lumpish and blamed for everything... etc. but at no point did any of the girls say anything that could not have been said by any of the others, and none of them was ever given any character traits above and beyond their one officially assigned one, which felt unconvincing and gimmicky anyway. What kind of character trait is 'being good at maths' if it doesn't actually make a difference to the story? Hm. Which is not to say that I didn't _like_ the book; there were some phrases that made me giggle out loud, and others that seemed peculiarly perceptive (especially in relation to the cruelty that adolescents use to mask insecurity about adult love affairs); some of Miss Brodie's battinesses were disarmingly sweet; and the plot took me by surprise in places; but the characters never properly solidified for me.

Next up... Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, and Rebecca Goldstein, The Dark Sister. Also, I reread (ha!) Anne Fadiman's Rereading, but I was jetlagged while I read it and I think some of that "reading" actually consisted of my lying with the left side of my face squashed up against the page drooling into the binding, so I can't count it. (Can I count Time Out Tokyo and Tokyo: A Bilingual Street Atlas?)

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....