descensus Averno facilis est
Wednesday, February 6, 2013
reading Wednesday 2/06
Reading Wednesday! Aww yeah.
What are you reading now?
Just started The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which.....isn't great, but is at least about one topic and the life of one person, which makes it a lot easier to read compared to....
What did you just finish reading?
.... Andrew Solomon's Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, which, OY, can be best described as a Piping Hot Mess. Remember how I said there's one book every season that everyone else loves which I am baffled by? Yeah, I was wrong, it's this one. Everyone else I know (especially people of the parental persuasion) is writing sniffly teary-eyed reviews about how this book is about Hope and Acceptance and Love, and I'm stuck going "....but this is bad. Well, I guess its.....heart....may be in the right place?" (DOUBTFUL) " -- but it's so bad." This is what gains me the reputation of Heartless Bitch. But, seriously: while usually I complain that most modern nonfiction books are clearly expanded magazine pieces, this book's topic bites off not only more than Solomon himself can chew, but more than that guy who's won the Nathan's Famous Forth of July hotdog-eating contest for the past six years running could chew, in all six years. Solomon's approach works okay with more limited topics such as "Deaf," "Dwarf," and "Down Syndrome," especially since he's written, well, magazine pieces about them before, but -- to take just one example -- with "Rape" he veers wildly from women raped by strangers to sexual abuse in families to (oh no, he's not going to go there....oh yes he is) rape as part of genocide and extreme torture in Rwanda.
And this points up a huge problem with his entire project: there are experiences that just aren't comparable. He makes all sorts of interesting points about disability identity and whether conditions like dwarfism or deafness should be viewed as disabilities (and what happens to people with those conditions if they aren't), and his personal hook into the topic is that his own parents thought his homosexuality meant he would be cut off from having children, or any family at all, and homosexuality itself was not removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the famed DSM) until 1973 (that always amazes me. I was three years old then). But the sudden introduction of the horrific rapes in Rwanda -- which topic could fill a book, or several books, just in itself, and which also is taken as a kind of shorthand to stand for similar horrors from the Sabine women to "the former Yugoslavia" -- reveals the shakiness of the entire scaffolding. To a lesser extent, his interview with Dylan Klebold's parents at the end of his "Crime" chapter does the same thing. There's something grotesque about summarizing such huge, terrible, almost cripplingly tragic topics into soundbites to support a thesis, and this problem underlines another, greater flaw with the book.
Essentially Solomon's book is about what happens when you're a hit-and-run victim of the Wheel of Fortune. Some people collapse under the terrible crushing weight of tragedy. Some people are deformed by it to such an extent that they lash out themselves, and help ruin someone else's life. Some people can find the inner strength and grace -- usually enabled by things like familial support, social status, and money -- to not only integrate the tragedy into their own lives but somehow transcend it, and while Door Number Three is the one we all, including Solomon, like to focus on and what Oprah specials are made of, there is a particularly modern American viewpoint I've talked about before which views this kind of extreme spiritual grace as an expected duty. One reason Americans ate up that terrible novel The Lovely Bones a while back was the philosophy contained in its title -- that in the absence of someone dearly loved who was taken away by extreme horror, love itself can create something almost beautiful. This can be true, but the limitations of this viewpoint are shown most clearly in his treatment of Susan Klebold, whom he compares to Cordelia, which....makes no sense. (Again, we're back to the Heartless Bitch thing: "Hers was a love as dark and true, as embracing and self-abnegating, as Cordelia's." This makes no sense. Dark love? And why is it admirable for a mother's love to be self-abnegating? And isn't parental love so blind that said parent entirely misses out on any danger signals that can lead to violence not a good thing?)
"Privilege" is a very loaded word nowadays, but I was struck, over and over again, reading this book, by how many parents Solomon spoke to were very affluent -- they could afford to have one parent (usually the mother) stop working in order to become a full-time caretaker, or retrofit an entire house for the benefit of a disabled child, or even better, build an entirely new one. Solomon does interview some poor families, but the way he treats them veers between a kind of weird exoticising and extremely patronizing -- this is shown to greatest effect when he goes to Rwanda and makes judgements based on the personal appearances of rape survivors: one is "mousy" and beaten-down while another, described much more approvingly, is stereotypically tall and elegant and spotlessly groomed despite extreme poverty. Solomon never appears to think how these women might feel about talking to a man about their brutal experiences, much less a well-off inquiring white male visitor -- in short, a tourist. The book is filled with such unfortunate sentences as "To understand how children of wartime rape differ from children conceived in less systematic rapes, I traveled to Rwanda" (there are equally unfortunate and self-revealing moments in the "Crime" chapter, including one truly stereotypical moment where the Repressed White Man visits a Swingin' Black Church).
This kind of misery tourism inevitably brings to mind the spectre of celebrities visiting "war-torn areas" and dutifully reporting back that for the extent of their visit, their bubble of privilege and good fortune was heartbreakingly pierced, as was ours, sitting at home and listening to them in the five minutes before the commercials for luxury goods air. It is the equivalent of a television reporter flying in to a place they would never visit otherwise to do a "stand-up" in order to give the illusion of authenticity. It is the opposite of such true immersive journalism like Wiseman's documentaries or the amazing Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, where the focus is not on how the reporter feels but the people themselves, in all the glory and misery of their daily lives.
This privilege is most unfortunately -- and probably unconsciously -- flaunted in the triumphant end to Solomon's book -- in the end, through the rather labyrinthine modern methods that lead to such phenomena as "twiblings," he and his husband have their own baby boy who is part of an extended, happy family, and one cannot help but be happy for him, especially after his poignant descriptions of lifelong yearning for children of his own. But there is a terrible moment just after his son's birth when a concerned doctor orders a CAT scan and it seems Solomon himself will have to face the "difficult love" a parent can have for a challenged child, which he has been praising for the past seven hundred pages -- that in Woolf's inimitable phrase, "tragedy had once more put down his paw, after letting us run a few paces." But, as in the occasion Woolf was describing, the wheel of tragedy swerved away; Solomon's son was perfectly healthy. Again, one cannot help but be happy for him, especially given the wrenching details so many families supply in his book, and yet at the same time the author celebrating his own good fortune after chronicling the disasters so many others have endured cannot seem anything other than exquisitely tasteless.
WELL THEN. I also read Learning to Drive by Katha Pollitt and In Praise of Messy Lives by Katie Roiphe (yes, that Katie Roiphe), both collections of well-written essays with intriguing insights by totally different women into the same self-mythologized kingdom of New York. I finished the "Rivers of London" series by Ben Aaronovitch, which is up to three books so far: Rivers of London (badly titled Midnight Riot in the US), Moon over Soho, and Whispers Under Ground. The first book is fantastic, tightly plotted and almost wholly lacking in the awkward "infodumping" of so many genre novels; the second and third installments are less impressive, but still very enjoyable, especially in their treatment of multicultural London and female characters. The first-person narration by a mixed-race constable who also finds himself apprenticed to magic is vivid, witty, sharp, and utterly real. I'd recommend this series highly, except I do hope some dangling series plot threads get wrapped up, or at least embroidered a bit, in the next few novels. The next one, Broken Homes, is scheduled to come out June of this year, I think.
What do you expect to read next?
After Henrietta, I'm still hoping to get to Seven Gothic Tales. Or possibly the shorter fantastic fiction of A.S. Byatt; I have the series of those small black-covered hardbacks and they look sort of like delightful candies for the mind, or something.
ETA HOLD UP THE NEW BIOGRAPHIES OF AUSTEN AND PLATH JUST ARRIVED. //dives in
Skeptical acquaintances -- or even friends -- have often expressed disbelief at how much and how fast I read, implying that I lie about it or something (I mean.....why? Why would you lie about being a book nerd? It would be like lying about your USCF rating, like, the opposite of cool) or, worse, that I don't retain anything from reading so quickly. First, that "reading is my superpower" tag is not a joke: it's one of the few things I am good at. Very, very good at. You know that theory that talent doesn't count (haha; Solomon actually writes about this), it's more the ten thousand hours of practice? I have logged a lot more than ten thousand hours of reading books. I can't tell you how many impromptu pop quizzes I have had to endure from friends or even family members -- "You did not read that whole book in one day!" "Yes, I did." "What did you think when so-and-so DIED, then?" "He didn't die, and you're being rude." It takes me longer to read some books than others -- about two days each for The Looming Tower and Far from the Tree, I think. Also, because of agoraphobia, I rarely leave my apartment. I can't work. But this is the main thing:
I don't have a television set.
Sure, I have DVDs of movies and TV shows, I waste way too much time on the internet, and I don't read half as many challenging books as I'd like. (Let's not even talk about my awesome ability to procrastinate.) This means I am tragically out of step with most modern pop culture, but, well, that's been the case since I was about eight, so it's a little too late for me to try catching up now.
Reading: it's what I do.
What are you reading now?
Just started The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which.....isn't great, but is at least about one topic and the life of one person, which makes it a lot easier to read compared to....
What did you just finish reading?
.... Andrew Solomon's Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, which, OY, can be best described as a Piping Hot Mess. Remember how I said there's one book every season that everyone else loves which I am baffled by? Yeah, I was wrong, it's this one. Everyone else I know (especially people of the parental persuasion) is writing sniffly teary-eyed reviews about how this book is about Hope and Acceptance and Love, and I'm stuck going "....but this is bad. Well, I guess its.....heart....may be in the right place?" (DOUBTFUL) " -- but it's so bad." This is what gains me the reputation of Heartless Bitch. But, seriously: while usually I complain that most modern nonfiction books are clearly expanded magazine pieces, this book's topic bites off not only more than Solomon himself can chew, but more than that guy who's won the Nathan's Famous Forth of July hotdog-eating contest for the past six years running could chew, in all six years. Solomon's approach works okay with more limited topics such as "Deaf," "Dwarf," and "Down Syndrome," especially since he's written, well, magazine pieces about them before, but -- to take just one example -- with "Rape" he veers wildly from women raped by strangers to sexual abuse in families to (oh no, he's not going to go there....oh yes he is) rape as part of genocide and extreme torture in Rwanda.
And this points up a huge problem with his entire project: there are experiences that just aren't comparable. He makes all sorts of interesting points about disability identity and whether conditions like dwarfism or deafness should be viewed as disabilities (and what happens to people with those conditions if they aren't), and his personal hook into the topic is that his own parents thought his homosexuality meant he would be cut off from having children, or any family at all, and homosexuality itself was not removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the famed DSM) until 1973 (that always amazes me. I was three years old then). But the sudden introduction of the horrific rapes in Rwanda -- which topic could fill a book, or several books, just in itself, and which also is taken as a kind of shorthand to stand for similar horrors from the Sabine women to "the former Yugoslavia" -- reveals the shakiness of the entire scaffolding. To a lesser extent, his interview with Dylan Klebold's parents at the end of his "Crime" chapter does the same thing. There's something grotesque about summarizing such huge, terrible, almost cripplingly tragic topics into soundbites to support a thesis, and this problem underlines another, greater flaw with the book.
Essentially Solomon's book is about what happens when you're a hit-and-run victim of the Wheel of Fortune. Some people collapse under the terrible crushing weight of tragedy. Some people are deformed by it to such an extent that they lash out themselves, and help ruin someone else's life. Some people can find the inner strength and grace -- usually enabled by things like familial support, social status, and money -- to not only integrate the tragedy into their own lives but somehow transcend it, and while Door Number Three is the one we all, including Solomon, like to focus on and what Oprah specials are made of, there is a particularly modern American viewpoint I've talked about before which views this kind of extreme spiritual grace as an expected duty. One reason Americans ate up that terrible novel The Lovely Bones a while back was the philosophy contained in its title -- that in the absence of someone dearly loved who was taken away by extreme horror, love itself can create something almost beautiful. This can be true, but the limitations of this viewpoint are shown most clearly in his treatment of Susan Klebold, whom he compares to Cordelia, which....makes no sense. (Again, we're back to the Heartless Bitch thing: "Hers was a love as dark and true, as embracing and self-abnegating, as Cordelia's." This makes no sense. Dark love? And why is it admirable for a mother's love to be self-abnegating? And isn't parental love so blind that said parent entirely misses out on any danger signals that can lead to violence not a good thing?)
"Privilege" is a very loaded word nowadays, but I was struck, over and over again, reading this book, by how many parents Solomon spoke to were very affluent -- they could afford to have one parent (usually the mother) stop working in order to become a full-time caretaker, or retrofit an entire house for the benefit of a disabled child, or even better, build an entirely new one. Solomon does interview some poor families, but the way he treats them veers between a kind of weird exoticising and extremely patronizing -- this is shown to greatest effect when he goes to Rwanda and makes judgements based on the personal appearances of rape survivors: one is "mousy" and beaten-down while another, described much more approvingly, is stereotypically tall and elegant and spotlessly groomed despite extreme poverty. Solomon never appears to think how these women might feel about talking to a man about their brutal experiences, much less a well-off inquiring white male visitor -- in short, a tourist. The book is filled with such unfortunate sentences as "To understand how children of wartime rape differ from children conceived in less systematic rapes, I traveled to Rwanda" (there are equally unfortunate and self-revealing moments in the "Crime" chapter, including one truly stereotypical moment where the Repressed White Man visits a Swingin' Black Church).
This kind of misery tourism inevitably brings to mind the spectre of celebrities visiting "war-torn areas" and dutifully reporting back that for the extent of their visit, their bubble of privilege and good fortune was heartbreakingly pierced, as was ours, sitting at home and listening to them in the five minutes before the commercials for luxury goods air. It is the equivalent of a television reporter flying in to a place they would never visit otherwise to do a "stand-up" in order to give the illusion of authenticity. It is the opposite of such true immersive journalism like Wiseman's documentaries or the amazing Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, where the focus is not on how the reporter feels but the people themselves, in all the glory and misery of their daily lives.
This privilege is most unfortunately -- and probably unconsciously -- flaunted in the triumphant end to Solomon's book -- in the end, through the rather labyrinthine modern methods that lead to such phenomena as "twiblings," he and his husband have their own baby boy who is part of an extended, happy family, and one cannot help but be happy for him, especially after his poignant descriptions of lifelong yearning for children of his own. But there is a terrible moment just after his son's birth when a concerned doctor orders a CAT scan and it seems Solomon himself will have to face the "difficult love" a parent can have for a challenged child, which he has been praising for the past seven hundred pages -- that in Woolf's inimitable phrase, "tragedy had once more put down his paw, after letting us run a few paces." But, as in the occasion Woolf was describing, the wheel of tragedy swerved away; Solomon's son was perfectly healthy. Again, one cannot help but be happy for him, especially given the wrenching details so many families supply in his book, and yet at the same time the author celebrating his own good fortune after chronicling the disasters so many others have endured cannot seem anything other than exquisitely tasteless.
WELL THEN. I also read Learning to Drive by Katha Pollitt and In Praise of Messy Lives by Katie Roiphe (yes, that Katie Roiphe), both collections of well-written essays with intriguing insights by totally different women into the same self-mythologized kingdom of New York. I finished the "Rivers of London" series by Ben Aaronovitch, which is up to three books so far: Rivers of London (badly titled Midnight Riot in the US), Moon over Soho, and Whispers Under Ground. The first book is fantastic, tightly plotted and almost wholly lacking in the awkward "infodumping" of so many genre novels; the second and third installments are less impressive, but still very enjoyable, especially in their treatment of multicultural London and female characters. The first-person narration by a mixed-race constable who also finds himself apprenticed to magic is vivid, witty, sharp, and utterly real. I'd recommend this series highly, except I do hope some dangling series plot threads get wrapped up, or at least embroidered a bit, in the next few novels. The next one, Broken Homes, is scheduled to come out June of this year, I think.
What do you expect to read next?
After Henrietta, I'm still hoping to get to Seven Gothic Tales. Or possibly the shorter fantastic fiction of A.S. Byatt; I have the series of those small black-covered hardbacks and they look sort of like delightful candies for the mind, or something.
ETA HOLD UP THE NEW BIOGRAPHIES OF AUSTEN AND PLATH JUST ARRIVED. //dives in
Skeptical acquaintances -- or even friends -- have often expressed disbelief at how much and how fast I read, implying that I lie about it or something (I mean.....why? Why would you lie about being a book nerd? It would be like lying about your USCF rating, like, the opposite of cool) or, worse, that I don't retain anything from reading so quickly. First, that "reading is my superpower" tag is not a joke: it's one of the few things I am good at. Very, very good at. You know that theory that talent doesn't count (haha; Solomon actually writes about this), it's more the ten thousand hours of practice? I have logged a lot more than ten thousand hours of reading books. I can't tell you how many impromptu pop quizzes I have had to endure from friends or even family members -- "You did not read that whole book in one day!" "Yes, I did." "What did you think when so-and-so DIED, then?" "He didn't die, and you're being rude." It takes me longer to read some books than others -- about two days each for The Looming Tower and Far from the Tree, I think. Also, because of agoraphobia, I rarely leave my apartment. I can't work. But this is the main thing:
I don't have a television set.
Sure, I have DVDs of movies and TV shows, I waste way too much time on the internet, and I don't read half as many challenging books as I'd like. (Let's not even talk about my awesome ability to procrastinate.) This means I am tragically out of step with most modern pop culture, but, well, that's been the case since I was about eight, so it's a little too late for me to try catching up now.
Reading: it's what I do.
Sunday, February 3, 2013
books read in February 2013
Fiction is in red.
17. Elegy for a Soprano, Kay Nolte Smith
18. Rivers of London, Ben Aaronovitch (I am enjoying these A LOT. I am also picturing Peter as a young Colin Salmon)
19. Moon over Soho, Ben Aaronovitch
20. Whispers Under Ground, Ben Aaronovitch
21. Far from the Tree, Andrew Solomon
22. In Praise of Messy Lives: Essays, Katie Roiphe
23. Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories, Katha Pollitt
24. American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath, Carl Rollyson
25. Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted, Andrew Wilson
26. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot
27. Notes on a Scandal, Zoe Heller
28. To Die For, Joyce Maynard
29. Finding Henrietta Lacks, Michael Rogers (another Kindle Single thing. Kingle? How do I count these? I have no idea. I don't care about how long they are, I just want to keep track of when I read them)
30. Shakespeare's Tremor and Orwell's Cough, John J. Ross
31. Winter's Tales, Isak Dinesen
32. A Card from Angela Carter, Susannah Clapp (beautifully written, only there should have been plates, not smudgy b&w reproductions -- and not of the banal postcards, but of Carter's writing on the "back." Still, lovely)
33. The Horned Man, James Lasdun
34. Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, Lawrence Wright
35. Inside Scientology, Janet Reitman
36. A Great and Terrible Beauty, Libba Bray
37. Rebel Angels, Libba Bray
38. The Sweet Far Thing, Libba Bray
2013 booklist
17. Elegy for a Soprano, Kay Nolte Smith
18. Rivers of London, Ben Aaronovitch (I am enjoying these A LOT. I am also picturing Peter as a young Colin Salmon)
19. Moon over Soho, Ben Aaronovitch
20. Whispers Under Ground, Ben Aaronovitch
21. Far from the Tree, Andrew Solomon
22. In Praise of Messy Lives: Essays, Katie Roiphe
23. Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories, Katha Pollitt
24. American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath, Carl Rollyson
25. Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted, Andrew Wilson
26. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot
27. Notes on a Scandal, Zoe Heller
28. To Die For, Joyce Maynard
29. Finding Henrietta Lacks, Michael Rogers (another Kindle Single thing. Kingle? How do I count these? I have no idea. I don't care about how long they are, I just want to keep track of when I read them)
30. Shakespeare's Tremor and Orwell's Cough, John J. Ross
31. Winter's Tales, Isak Dinesen
32. A Card from Angela Carter, Susannah Clapp (beautifully written, only there should have been plates, not smudgy b&w reproductions -- and not of the banal postcards, but of Carter's writing on the "back." Still, lovely)
33. The Horned Man, James Lasdun
34. Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, Lawrence Wright
35. Inside Scientology, Janet Reitman
36. A Great and Terrible Beauty, Libba Bray
37. Rebel Angels, Libba Bray
38. The Sweet Far Thing, Libba Bray
2013 booklist
Thursday, January 31, 2013
Parade's End
For those interested in Ford Madox Ford after the BBC miniseries, the Wordsworth edition of Parade's End for the Kindle is available for $2.49 -- now that's a bargain. (I got it because shockingly I only had The Good Soldier, and Mizener's biography -- and shamefully haven't read either.)
Speaking of bargains, the Kindle store also has some Dorothy Sayers (Whose Body?, Lord Peter Views the Body, The Clouds of Unknowing, &c) on sale (from $.099 to $2.99) but reviews seem to indicate there might be problems with formatting. ALWAYS PREVIEW BEFORE YOU BUY ON KINDLE. I cannot stress this strongly enough.
Speaking of bargains, the Kindle store also has some Dorothy Sayers (Whose Body?, Lord Peter Views the Body, The Clouds of Unknowing, &c) on sale (from $.099 to $2.99) but reviews seem to indicate there might be problems with formatting. ALWAYS PREVIEW BEFORE YOU BUY ON KINDLE. I cannot stress this strongly enough.
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
reading Wednesday
What are you reading now?
The Panic Virus, Seth Mnookin, and boy, is it terrible. I first got into his writing a looong time ago when he wrote about his addiction for Salon, and while I wasn't that impressed with Hard News, I still thought it was pretty good. This book -- altho I sympathize mightily with the subject and don't mind having bought it because that supported actual science reporting/writing -- is just BAD, really. Something I already made fun of on G+: "Instead of thinking as F=ma as being wrong, think of E=mc2 as being more right." Footnote to this immortal sentence: "Don't worry if you're having a hard time following this oversimplified explanation of physics' most challenging problem. For most of us, understanding special relativity is a little like true love: We should consider ourselves lucky if we can grasp hold of it for even one fleeting moment." Special relativity! A little like slippery soap in the bath: We should consider ourselves lucky if we can grasp hold of it for even one fleeting moment. OR: A little like trying not to drop an ice cube: We should consider ourselves lucky if we can grasp hold of it for even one fleeting moment. OR: A little like -- MAKE UP YOUR OWN, IT'S FUN.....
....yeah yeah, I know the audience he's writing for, and he's trying to emphasize how science really isn't dogmatic and no scientist will ever come out and say "there is no possible way this vaccine could harm a child" (although....anyone who's spent about fifteen minutes around doctors when a loved one is having a major health crisis will know that already, really). But, my GOD. It's also too short and just too shallow -- for example, why the fuck did the Lancet originally publish that study that arguably kicked off the whole crisis? I don't care about all the supposed disclaimers "slapped" on it, why PRINT it in the first place? What do you mean, the editor was young and inexperienced? The book is like 400 fucking pages long, couldn't there have been 2 pages on why the editor made this horrible, world-changing decision? (Or was the space needed for fulminating about Twoo Wuv and extra-special relativity?)
Then again, I'm glad he wrote the book, because my God, these people are batshit. "'He had the MMR and he's autistic,' one mother said (on the BBC's Panorama)....'Overnight he had the fever, the high temperature. Literally overnight. He was never the same again. He stopped talking and his behaviour was bizarre.'" OVERNIGHT your kid went autistic? What the actual fuck?
What did you just finish reading?
Mostly comfort reading -- some Pratchetts (I always go for the first three Witches books when I fall ill), two mysteries by B.J. Oliphant (mildly disappointing), Dead Souls by Ian Rankin (rather meh -- the strands just didn't come together). I really want to read something JUST A LITTLE MORE intellectually challenging, or at least stimulating, but that's not happening when I don't feel well. -- Oh, and I did read Pat Barker's Border Crossing, in which everyone was so unpleasant I was longing for the grown-up juvenile killer to throttle the smug divorcing shrink who'd put him away, but basically nothing happened. It was very very well-written, as is everything I've read by her so far, but seriously, Nothing Happened.
What do you expect to read next?
This always stymies me. NOT NONFICTION. Probably not another mystery. Not more rereads dear God. Maybe Seven Gothic Tales -- I think the last time I read that was about ten? years ago -- maybe some Christina Stead, maybe Dorothy Sayers....possibly....
The Panic Virus, Seth Mnookin, and boy, is it terrible. I first got into his writing a looong time ago when he wrote about his addiction for Salon, and while I wasn't that impressed with Hard News, I still thought it was pretty good. This book -- altho I sympathize mightily with the subject and don't mind having bought it because that supported actual science reporting/writing -- is just BAD, really. Something I already made fun of on G+: "Instead of thinking as F=ma as being wrong, think of E=mc2 as being more right." Footnote to this immortal sentence: "Don't worry if you're having a hard time following this oversimplified explanation of physics' most challenging problem. For most of us, understanding special relativity is a little like true love: We should consider ourselves lucky if we can grasp hold of it for even one fleeting moment." Special relativity! A little like slippery soap in the bath: We should consider ourselves lucky if we can grasp hold of it for even one fleeting moment. OR: A little like trying not to drop an ice cube: We should consider ourselves lucky if we can grasp hold of it for even one fleeting moment. OR: A little like -- MAKE UP YOUR OWN, IT'S FUN.....
....yeah yeah, I know the audience he's writing for, and he's trying to emphasize how science really isn't dogmatic and no scientist will ever come out and say "there is no possible way this vaccine could harm a child" (although....anyone who's spent about fifteen minutes around doctors when a loved one is having a major health crisis will know that already, really). But, my GOD. It's also too short and just too shallow -- for example, why the fuck did the Lancet originally publish that study that arguably kicked off the whole crisis? I don't care about all the supposed disclaimers "slapped" on it, why PRINT it in the first place? What do you mean, the editor was young and inexperienced? The book is like 400 fucking pages long, couldn't there have been 2 pages on why the editor made this horrible, world-changing decision? (Or was the space needed for fulminating about Twoo Wuv and extra-special relativity?)
Then again, I'm glad he wrote the book, because my God, these people are batshit. "'He had the MMR and he's autistic,' one mother said (on the BBC's Panorama)....'Overnight he had the fever, the high temperature. Literally overnight. He was never the same again. He stopped talking and his behaviour was bizarre.'" OVERNIGHT your kid went autistic? What the actual fuck?
What did you just finish reading?
Mostly comfort reading -- some Pratchetts (I always go for the first three Witches books when I fall ill), two mysteries by B.J. Oliphant (mildly disappointing), Dead Souls by Ian Rankin (rather meh -- the strands just didn't come together). I really want to read something JUST A LITTLE MORE intellectually challenging, or at least stimulating, but that's not happening when I don't feel well. -- Oh, and I did read Pat Barker's Border Crossing, in which everyone was so unpleasant I was longing for the grown-up juvenile killer to throttle the smug divorcing shrink who'd put him away, but basically nothing happened. It was very very well-written, as is everything I've read by her so far, but seriously, Nothing Happened.
What do you expect to read next?
This always stymies me. NOT NONFICTION. Probably not another mystery. Not more rereads dear God. Maybe Seven Gothic Tales -- I think the last time I read that was about ten? years ago -- maybe some Christina Stead, maybe Dorothy Sayers....possibly....
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
list of books read in January 2013
From my Librarything 75 books in 2013 thread (which, for me, overlaps with the Read The Books You Already Have, Dammit thread).
Fiction is in red, so I can track it more easily.
1. The Man in the Empty Boat, Mark Salzman (Kindle Single)
2. The Last Novel, David Markson
3. 43, Jeff Greenfield (Kindle Single. Do these count as one book? .5 of a book?)
4. Final Vision, Joe McGinnis (Kindle Single)
5. Battleborn, Claire Vaye Watkins
6. The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton, Joe Klein
7. Oh, Waiter! One Order of Crow!: Inside the Strangest Presidential Election Finish in American History, Jeff Greenfield
8. Then Everything Changed: Stunning Alternate Histories of American Politics: JFK, RFK, Carter, Ford, Reagan, Jeff Greenfield
9. Libriomancer, Jim C. Hines
10. The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright
11. People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished from the Streets of Tokyo--and the Evil That Swallowed Her Up, Richard Lloyd Parry
12. Death Served Up Cold, B.J. Oliphant
13. Here's to the Newly Dead, B.J. Oliphant
14. Dead Souls, Ian Rankin
15. Border Crossing, Pat Barker
16. The Panic Virus, Seth Mnookin
VIDA count: Twelve books by men, four by women (year-end goal is 50% or better)
ROOT count: a big whopping FIVE (year-end goal is fifty books I didn't buy in 2013)
Fiction vs. non: Ten to six, a bit better. This isn't as big a goal, it just bugs me that I wound up over the years somehow reading much less fiction -- I think that's mainly because so little mainstream big names (Franzen, et al) don't appeal to me. It also means I read wayy too many memoirs, mainly for research, but still.
2013 booklist
Fiction is in red, so I can track it more easily.
1. The Man in the Empty Boat, Mark Salzman (Kindle Single)
2. The Last Novel, David Markson
3. 43, Jeff Greenfield (Kindle Single. Do these count as one book? .5 of a book?)
4. Final Vision, Joe McGinnis (Kindle Single)
5. Battleborn, Claire Vaye Watkins
6. The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton, Joe Klein
7. Oh, Waiter! One Order of Crow!: Inside the Strangest Presidential Election Finish in American History, Jeff Greenfield
8. Then Everything Changed: Stunning Alternate Histories of American Politics: JFK, RFK, Carter, Ford, Reagan, Jeff Greenfield
9. Libriomancer, Jim C. Hines
10. The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright
11. People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished from the Streets of Tokyo--and the Evil That Swallowed Her Up, Richard Lloyd Parry
12. Death Served Up Cold, B.J. Oliphant
13. Here's to the Newly Dead, B.J. Oliphant
14. Dead Souls, Ian Rankin
15. Border Crossing, Pat Barker
16. The Panic Virus, Seth Mnookin
VIDA count: Twelve books by men, four by women (year-end goal is 50% or better)
ROOT count: a big whopping FIVE (year-end goal is fifty books I didn't buy in 2013)
Fiction vs. non: Ten to six, a bit better. This isn't as big a goal, it just bugs me that I wound up over the years somehow reading much less fiction -- I think that's mainly because so little mainstream big names (Franzen, et al) don't appeal to me. It also means I read wayy too many memoirs, mainly for research, but still.
2013 booklist
Sunday, January 27, 2013
Friday, January 25, 2013
the read and the unread
I am so serious about this (my thread is here) I spent actual HOURS organizing my Kindle and from one folder called "books" creating two new ones, "new books" and "read." This took for-fucking-ever and drove me BATSHIT because there are over 1000 books on my Kindle, and it's one of those old keyboard ones, and it was a lemon out of the box because it's always been very halting. Maybe it knew how hard it was going to be driven. Anyway, the total damage is about 300 books read, and 750 books unread.
....yeah. That's a worse percentage of read/unread than my paper library. //cries
-- Some people on LibraryThing seem bent on downsizing their libraries, tho. I find that horrifying. (After about three giant culls of my own library -- just before I went to college, when I had to sell books in bulk in grad school because I was so broke and when my parents sold everything we owned when I was ten because we were Moving To Europe Forever ((i.e. Nine Months)) -- I got so absolutely sick of not being able to find books, or not remembering what a book I'd had was called and being unable to replace it, I determined to NEVER GET RID OF A BOOK AGAIN. Yeah. Basically I don't get rid of books unless they become unreadably damaged somehow, and even then I might keep them for sentimental reasons, like the Smollett-translated Don Quixote I had at St John's which my tiny adorable evil kitten peed all over before she got fixed. It lives in a vacuum-sealed bag wrapped in a series of bags in a taped-up box sunk deep in a closet. But anyway.)
WILL I MAKE IT? STAY TUNED THROUGH 2013 TO FIND OUT. Lord.
I just figured out it would probably take me over ten years just to read all the paper books in my house I haven't gotten to so far, which was so depressing I had to spend a quarter of an hour updating my Amazon wishlist to cheer myself up.
TRUE STORY.
I think I also probably "won." Especially if you count the unread books on the Kindle. //facedesk
....yeah. That's a worse percentage of read/unread than my paper library. //cries
-- Some people on LibraryThing seem bent on downsizing their libraries, tho. I find that horrifying. (After about three giant culls of my own library -- just before I went to college, when I had to sell books in bulk in grad school because I was so broke and when my parents sold everything we owned when I was ten because we were Moving To Europe Forever ((i.e. Nine Months)) -- I got so absolutely sick of not being able to find books, or not remembering what a book I'd had was called and being unable to replace it, I determined to NEVER GET RID OF A BOOK AGAIN. Yeah. Basically I don't get rid of books unless they become unreadably damaged somehow, and even then I might keep them for sentimental reasons, like the Smollett-translated Don Quixote I had at St John's which my tiny adorable evil kitten peed all over before she got fixed. It lives in a vacuum-sealed bag wrapped in a series of bags in a taped-up box sunk deep in a closet. But anyway.)
WILL I MAKE IT? STAY TUNED THROUGH 2013 TO FIND OUT. Lord.
I just figured out it would probably take me over ten years just to read all the paper books in my house I haven't gotten to so far, which was so depressing I had to spend a quarter of an hour updating my Amazon wishlist to cheer myself up.
TRUE STORY.
I think I also probably "won." Especially if you count the unread books on the Kindle. //facedesk
Thursday, January 24, 2013
75 books in 2013 - LibraryThing
Blog redesign! Still not happy with the link colour, or the font, or oh my God the header, but it was fun to do anyway. You'll notice this looks more like a page in a book now (hopefully, anyway) than one of your typical blog designs with the columns and widgets everywhere. Yes. (Okay, there are still some widgets.)
I'm doing the "75 books in 2013" challenge on LibraryThing -- my thread's here. This is unofficially my "SUCK IT, GOODREADS" project for the year. Heh. I'm just so sick of being bullied and hassled in other ways by men over there (not to mention the really horrific bullying -- stalking and harassment, to put it plain -- by would-be "authors" of some reviewers, and the utter inability of GoodReads to respond in anything like a timely and appropriate manner, but let's not even go there). LibraryThing is a lot quieter, and a lot less slickly designed, but it's -- well, yes, quieter. Like a, you know, library.
Quiet is not bad. Obscurity is not bad. Not having 500 "friends" on your social network is not bad. I am almost completely out of step with these our times, I know.
I'm doing the "75 books in 2013" challenge on LibraryThing -- my thread's here. This is unofficially my "SUCK IT, GOODREADS" project for the year. Heh. I'm just so sick of being bullied and hassled in other ways by men over there (not to mention the really horrific bullying -- stalking and harassment, to put it plain -- by would-be "authors" of some reviewers, and the utter inability of GoodReads to respond in anything like a timely and appropriate manner, but let's not even go there). LibraryThing is a lot quieter, and a lot less slickly designed, but it's -- well, yes, quieter. Like a, you know, library.
Quiet is not bad. Obscurity is not bad. Not having 500 "friends" on your social network is not bad. I am almost completely out of step with these our times, I know.
The word “howdy” should probably never appear in a poem
A-fucking-men.
(For the record, I think Blanco's poem sucked. I also thought the poem from Obama's first inauguration sucked. I don't like that Frost poem, either -- "this land was ours"? Nice one, white man -- and I fucking hated that "drone poem" everyone too hip for the room is raving about. I don't know if there can be such a thing as a good inaugural -- Establishment, if you will -- poem. Think of Ted Hughes writing that awful slop for the Queen. Poetry doesn't go well with official capacities. You'd never catch Emily Dickinson at an inauguration.)
Judge: And what is your profession?
Brodsky: Poet. Poet and translator.
Judge: And who told you you were a poet? Who assigned you the rank of poet?
Brodsky: No one. Who assigned me the rank of a human being?
Judge: Did you study for this?
Brodsky: For what?
Judge: To become a poet. Did you attend a school where they teach poets? Where they train you how to be a poet?
Brodsky: I don't think it comes from school.
Judge: From where, then?
Brodsky: I think that it....comes from God.
(source)
(For the record, I think Blanco's poem sucked. I also thought the poem from Obama's first inauguration sucked. I don't like that Frost poem, either -- "this land was ours"? Nice one, white man -- and I fucking hated that "drone poem" everyone too hip for the room is raving about. I don't know if there can be such a thing as a good inaugural -- Establishment, if you will -- poem. Think of Ted Hughes writing that awful slop for the Queen. Poetry doesn't go well with official capacities. You'd never catch Emily Dickinson at an inauguration.)
Judge: And what is your profession?
Brodsky: Poet. Poet and translator.
Judge: And who told you you were a poet? Who assigned you the rank of poet?
Brodsky: No one. Who assigned me the rank of a human being?
Judge: Did you study for this?
Brodsky: For what?
Judge: To become a poet. Did you attend a school where they teach poets? Where they train you how to be a poet?
Brodsky: I don't think it comes from school.
Judge: From where, then?
Brodsky: I think that it....comes from God.
(source)
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
waste of breath
Speaking of that (fucking TERRIBLE) book, there's a really odd little moment in it -- when her family buries Lucie's ashes, her sister has two little silver plaques with the first lines of "Lucie's favourite poem" on them - Yeats's "An Irish Airman foresees his Death," which seems a strange choice for a twenty-one-year-old girl without much education whose parents were interested in, respectively, woowoo and yachting. Absolutely nothing is said about what this might mean, which is also odd because it's a very haunting poem -- it speaks of exile, passivity, suspension in limbo, and that seemingly goes with the odd rootless freedom so many Westerners in Japan describe in the book (and which is fetishized in pop culture like, say, Lost in Translation).
reading Wednesday 1/23/2013
FINALLY I catch up and post on the actual Wednesday! It only took about....three and a half weeks, go Moi!
What are you reading now?
Well, nothing currently. I may update that in the next five minutes!
What did you just finish reading?
People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished from the Streets of Tokyo--and the Evil That Swallowed Her Up -- yeah, that's some title, isn't it. Yes, this is the fairly typical story of the beautiful-missing-blonde-girl-in-a-foreign-land, except the author gets inside her personality enough you feel the actual loss of her life (which is, well, depressing) and he does interrogate the Missing Blonde Girl stereotype/trope/whateveritis, somewhat. HOWEVER, the book goes completely to hell when he tries to defend the indefensible actions of Lucie's father, who not only accepted a giant payoff from the man who killed her and then cut her into little pieces, but also signed a statement prepared by either the nutcase or his lawyers about how bad the evidence against him was. (The author says "This didn't affect the guy's being acquited of those charges at all, because the judges said so!" WELL THEN.) What did he do with the money? Glad you asked. He bought a yacht. A second yacht. The author also then natters pointlessly on about how you can't call the murderer a sociopath (despite his raping hundreds of unconscious women and killing at least two), you can't judge the father for accepting the money, and you can't judge Japan by what happened to Lucie (despite detailing dozens of rapes that went unreported out of fear, and rapes that did get reported which were then ignored). Despite that, the first two-thirds or so really is fairly well-written, but I would not recommend this at all. If it sounds interesting, either buy a used copy or go to the library. You need to go to the library, anyway.
What do you expect to read next?
Such a good question. I am afraid, unless I'm researching something (my school days are loooooong behind me....altho my student loan debt sure isn't) this is governed pretty much by whim. I have so many good books I should be reading -- Hermione Lee's biography of Virginia Woolf, Bad Blood, Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, Angelica Lost and Found, Seven Gothic Tales....I might go for fiction, short fiction at that; I'm a little burned out on long nonfiction books since that's mostly all I've read this month, I think.
What are you reading now?
Well, nothing currently. I may update that in the next five minutes!
What did you just finish reading?
People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished from the Streets of Tokyo--and the Evil That Swallowed Her Up -- yeah, that's some title, isn't it. Yes, this is the fairly typical story of the beautiful-missing-blonde-girl-in-a-foreign-land, except the author gets inside her personality enough you feel the actual loss of her life (which is, well, depressing) and he does interrogate the Missing Blonde Girl stereotype/trope/whateveritis, somewhat. HOWEVER, the book goes completely to hell when he tries to defend the indefensible actions of Lucie's father, who not only accepted a giant payoff from the man who killed her and then cut her into little pieces, but also signed a statement prepared by either the nutcase or his lawyers about how bad the evidence against him was. (The author says "This didn't affect the guy's being acquited of those charges at all, because the judges said so!" WELL THEN.) What did he do with the money? Glad you asked. He bought a yacht. A second yacht. The author also then natters pointlessly on about how you can't call the murderer a sociopath (despite his raping hundreds of unconscious women and killing at least two), you can't judge the father for accepting the money, and you can't judge Japan by what happened to Lucie (despite detailing dozens of rapes that went unreported out of fear, and rapes that did get reported which were then ignored). Despite that, the first two-thirds or so really is fairly well-written, but I would not recommend this at all. If it sounds interesting, either buy a used copy or go to the library. You need to go to the library, anyway.
What do you expect to read next?
Such a good question. I am afraid, unless I'm researching something (my school days are loooooong behind me....altho my student loan debt sure isn't) this is governed pretty much by whim. I have so many good books I should be reading -- Hermione Lee's biography of Virginia Woolf, Bad Blood, Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, Angelica Lost and Found, Seven Gothic Tales....I might go for fiction, short fiction at that; I'm a little burned out on long nonfiction books since that's mostly all I've read this month, I think.
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
books read in 2013 - January
Nothing too elaborate for right now; I'm just going to split the record out by month like I did wayy back when I first had a blog, because it's harder to remember what I read when otherwise. And I'm just a little sick of fucking Goodreads at the moment.
The Man in the Empty Boat, Mark Salzman. Really not as good as the talk it was based on; also has the weird abbreviated quality peculiar to "Kindle singles," which sound like they'd be great for novella-length fiction or longer nonfiction features (I am not using that fucking fake word "longreads" and you can't make me), but somehow wind up oddly....hollow.
The Last Novel, David Markson. I read this out of sequence -- it's the last of the four "index card books" -- but I couldn't help gobbling, and in the end I'm almost glad I did so, despite its being so disappointing....I would've hated to have read it as the very last one in the series. A very bitter aftertaste. People joked about Markson writing "The Posthumous Novel," but this really felt like that title. It's prickly, sad, and self-pitying, obsessively concerned with posterity, critical judgements, and the impossible subjectivity of same. (Bookslut managed to miss the point impressively.) The reader is gone -- it's all critics, all about criticism, not reading, not writing; it's not play, anymore. Suicide is constantly hinted at, but Markson also jabs at "the casual reader" (or, more likely, the skimming for-pay book critic) so the emotional impact is diluted. If Wittgenstein's Mistress was about creating, the world well lost for works of art -- literally -- this one is about what happens when the world fights back and does its best to seemingly destroy the artist. Markson/the author keeps talking about how high the building is and it seems like a long, long suicide note, but then he also keeps undercutting it elsewhere: Schrödinger's Author? (Open the book/box, is he dead/not dead?) It's a sad end.
Two more Kindle Singles: 43* by Jeff Greenfield, which was like a missing or extra chapter of his book on the same topic. Greenfield's a funny and slick nonfiction writer, but his fiction is sort of thuddingly traditional, and when he tries to write fancy, the result is wince-worthy. The original setup (Gore doesn't lose Florida partly because Elian Gonzales' mother didn't die in the crossing) was interesting, but then it went OFF THE RAILS, which is just about what happened in the bigger (actual book-sized) book of his alternate histories, which I got after reading this, which I suppose I was supposed to do. So basically this is sort of like a fictional ad for his not-a-novel.
And then Final Vision by Joe McGinnis, which was mainly about Jeffrey MacDonalds' appeals and included some snotty remarks about A Wilderness of Error, which I read last year. (Shameful true-crime addict here.) Basically a ripoff - large chunks of Fatal Vision are cut and pasted without any revision at all, and while he does answer Errol "Thin Blue Line" Morris, it's not done very well at all.
Battleborn, Claire Vaye Watkins. Every year there's a book everyone loves but me, and this one is probably going to be 2013's. (Others: the first Harry Potter book, The Time Traveller's Wife, Jonathan Strange, you get the picture.) This is the kind of book that knocks you out if you've never read any MFA-produced, self-consciously "gritty," this-is-my-territory-let-me-stake-it-out first short story collections. I have GOT to stop getting books based on glowing NYTBR reviews. The author gets a bit of notoriety because her father was Paul Watkins, and I'll wait here while everyone under thirty has to go Google that name. She wrote a much better memoir about him in Granta. She does describe the Southwest, especially the charred isolation of the high desert, very well, but her plots are cardboard and her characters are worse. Probably we'll see either a novel or memoir (or the oh-so-modern combination of those genres) from her about her childhood in the next few years.
The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton, Joe Klein. I actually remember reading Primary Colours when it first came out anonymously (yes, I am THAT OLD), and the big flap about figuring out who the author was, &c &c. I didn't realize Klein was this....conservative. Sort of interesting in a historical sense, in terms of how Clinton's personality and two terms badly affected Gore, and how he fits into the phenomenon of New Conservative Democrats, but not that good, really. If anything's interesting in the book it's the topic, not the prose style, or the narrative choices, or the longer perspective afforded by writing books after the fact rather than newspapers. This is typical of nearly all 21st-century nonfiction I've read lately.
Oh, Waiter! One Order of Crow!: Inside the Strangest Presidential Election Finish in American History, Jeff Greenfield. Despite the goofy and hellishly long title, a valuable inside look at the 2000 US election, which I just couldn't read anything about for a good long while (I still can't read even news articles about the one in 2004). Greenfield's a real smartass and this book basically is all the thoughts he couldn't say on the air or even out loud off-camera at the time. He gets a bit defensive now and then but it's hard to blame him. It was particularly sweet to read this right after Karl Rove made a huge deal out of the networks "not prematurely calling Florida for Obama like they did in 2000" in 2012.
Then Everything Changed: Stunning Alternate Histories of American Politics: JFK, RFK, Carter, Ford, Reagan, Jeff Greenfield. (Yes, I tend to focus on one author or topic at a stretch, sue me.) I've read a lot of genre "Speck Fic" (as Ursula Le Guin terms it) alternate histories, and the ones gathered in this book -- JFK's assassinated before he becomes president, RFK isn't, and so on -- just aren't that good. The tone is a very weird mix of detailed reporting, wild speculation, pulpy fictional plotting and at least one terrible shaggy dog punchline involving President Gary Hart, Governor Clinton and Secretary of State Rodham (don't ask). I might check out Greenfield's entirely fictional account of a contested Presidency, The People's Choice, but if it's written in the same style as his rather stuffy fiction, I'll take a pass. (Primary Colours, way back when, had the same problem: everyone knew they were reading real details about real people, so the fictional "waking dream" never took over, but the story was shaped as if it were fiction, complete with artistic license here and there, so it also felt very inauthentic. The whole question of pop nonfiction -- ghosted celebrity "books," rushed ebook or paperback true crime tie-ins, memoirs written two or three decades after unverifiable events, histories more poorly sourced than freshman term papers -- is a vexed one.)
Libriomancer, Jim C. Hines. I really wanted to like this, because it was supposedly urban fantasy done "right" without a passive heroine trapped in a limp love triangle, because the author writes great posts about feminism, rape, patriarchy and the like on his blog, and he's behind the entirely delightful Striking a Pose series where he tries to copy those terrible urban fantasy covers. Unfortunately the description everyone's quoting, a "cross between Dresden and Thursday Next," is accurate, and I....don't like either of those series. I actually had a similar reaction to reading the Next books: I thought there would be a lot more literary in-jokes, and instead it was sort of focused on geeky cleverness. There was a fairly lengthy discussion of the book's flaws (including especially its female lead) here.
(Yeah, I also hate Jasper Fforde, along with J.K. Rowling, Audrey Niffenegger, Susanna Clarke, and so on. Neil Gaiman gets a bye, but not really. In my spare time Ikick puppies cultivate my exquisite taste.)
Finally, I did just finish The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright, which took about two and a half days of sustained reading -- I wanted to really understand it (I read fast, but I'm also one of those people who reads all the endnotes....the acknowledgements....the list of sources....the index. You can tell a lot about a book from its index). I'm not sure what to say about it -- it was gripping, even riveting, altho the places where he tried to write fancy (what is it with reporters suddenly wanting to turn out embroidered prose in books? Does it just become a pent-up urge after so many years of Just the Facts and strict wordcount limits?) were pretty bad. I was really surprised at how much I didn't know (which I am not going to reveal here because it would be very embarrassing) (this included: what Osama's father did to earn all that money, who Sayyid Qutb was, the Grand Mosque Seizure, the Luxor Massacre, you get the picture). I wonder, inevitably, what the author's thoughts were on bin Laden's finally being killed, by a Democrat administration no less. The book seems to stop a little abruptly, because he goes into the causes of 9/11 so thoroughly and then very briefly (but harrowingly) describes the Twin Towers dying, but I could understand it. We've all seen those final moments endlessly on film, the hijackings have been filmed over and over again too in very sketchy "docudramas," and this is about what we didn't know, what we didn't see -- and what the people in the book didn't see, either. Like all good books this one made me want to read more books: Through Our Enemies' Eyes, The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda, The Man Who Warned America....This book does lean very heavily on the testimony of those authors -- Michael Scheuer, Ali Soufan, memories of John O'Neill -- but that's not a bad thing.
That's it so far -- I want to read some more serious stuff before the end of the month (this was what I was saying for nearly all of 2012. sigh). I also reread some -- the Sherlock Holmes canon, The Taste of Sorrow, Wintering, Tweak -- but I try not to do that because well, the stacks just go piling on up and up in here, and rereading is really not the best use of my time unless it's for research, or I need comfort when I'm sick.
The Man in the Empty Boat, Mark Salzman. Really not as good as the talk it was based on; also has the weird abbreviated quality peculiar to "Kindle singles," which sound like they'd be great for novella-length fiction or longer nonfiction features (I am not using that fucking fake word "longreads" and you can't make me), but somehow wind up oddly....hollow.
The Last Novel, David Markson. I read this out of sequence -- it's the last of the four "index card books" -- but I couldn't help gobbling, and in the end I'm almost glad I did so, despite its being so disappointing....I would've hated to have read it as the very last one in the series. A very bitter aftertaste. People joked about Markson writing "The Posthumous Novel," but this really felt like that title. It's prickly, sad, and self-pitying, obsessively concerned with posterity, critical judgements, and the impossible subjectivity of same. (Bookslut managed to miss the point impressively.) The reader is gone -- it's all critics, all about criticism, not reading, not writing; it's not play, anymore. Suicide is constantly hinted at, but Markson also jabs at "the casual reader" (or, more likely, the skimming for-pay book critic) so the emotional impact is diluted. If Wittgenstein's Mistress was about creating, the world well lost for works of art -- literally -- this one is about what happens when the world fights back and does its best to seemingly destroy the artist. Markson/the author keeps talking about how high the building is and it seems like a long, long suicide note, but then he also keeps undercutting it elsewhere: Schrödinger's Author? (Open the book/box, is he dead/not dead?) It's a sad end.
Two more Kindle Singles: 43* by Jeff Greenfield, which was like a missing or extra chapter of his book on the same topic. Greenfield's a funny and slick nonfiction writer, but his fiction is sort of thuddingly traditional, and when he tries to write fancy, the result is wince-worthy. The original setup (Gore doesn't lose Florida partly because Elian Gonzales' mother didn't die in the crossing) was interesting, but then it went OFF THE RAILS, which is just about what happened in the bigger (actual book-sized) book of his alternate histories, which I got after reading this, which I suppose I was supposed to do. So basically this is sort of like a fictional ad for his not-a-novel.
And then Final Vision by Joe McGinnis, which was mainly about Jeffrey MacDonalds' appeals and included some snotty remarks about A Wilderness of Error, which I read last year. (Shameful true-crime addict here.) Basically a ripoff - large chunks of Fatal Vision are cut and pasted without any revision at all, and while he does answer Errol "Thin Blue Line" Morris, it's not done very well at all.
Battleborn, Claire Vaye Watkins. Every year there's a book everyone loves but me, and this one is probably going to be 2013's. (Others: the first Harry Potter book, The Time Traveller's Wife, Jonathan Strange, you get the picture.) This is the kind of book that knocks you out if you've never read any MFA-produced, self-consciously "gritty," this-is-my-territory-let-me-stake-it-out first short story collections. I have GOT to stop getting books based on glowing NYTBR reviews. The author gets a bit of notoriety because her father was Paul Watkins, and I'll wait here while everyone under thirty has to go Google that name. She wrote a much better memoir about him in Granta. She does describe the Southwest, especially the charred isolation of the high desert, very well, but her plots are cardboard and her characters are worse. Probably we'll see either a novel or memoir (or the oh-so-modern combination of those genres) from her about her childhood in the next few years.
The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton, Joe Klein. I actually remember reading Primary Colours when it first came out anonymously (yes, I am THAT OLD), and the big flap about figuring out who the author was, &c &c. I didn't realize Klein was this....conservative. Sort of interesting in a historical sense, in terms of how Clinton's personality and two terms badly affected Gore, and how he fits into the phenomenon of New Conservative Democrats, but not that good, really. If anything's interesting in the book it's the topic, not the prose style, or the narrative choices, or the longer perspective afforded by writing books after the fact rather than newspapers. This is typical of nearly all 21st-century nonfiction I've read lately.
Oh, Waiter! One Order of Crow!: Inside the Strangest Presidential Election Finish in American History, Jeff Greenfield. Despite the goofy and hellishly long title, a valuable inside look at the 2000 US election, which I just couldn't read anything about for a good long while (I still can't read even news articles about the one in 2004). Greenfield's a real smartass and this book basically is all the thoughts he couldn't say on the air or even out loud off-camera at the time. He gets a bit defensive now and then but it's hard to blame him. It was particularly sweet to read this right after Karl Rove made a huge deal out of the networks "not prematurely calling Florida for Obama like they did in 2000" in 2012.
Then Everything Changed: Stunning Alternate Histories of American Politics: JFK, RFK, Carter, Ford, Reagan, Jeff Greenfield. (Yes, I tend to focus on one author or topic at a stretch, sue me.) I've read a lot of genre "Speck Fic" (as Ursula Le Guin terms it) alternate histories, and the ones gathered in this book -- JFK's assassinated before he becomes president, RFK isn't, and so on -- just aren't that good. The tone is a very weird mix of detailed reporting, wild speculation, pulpy fictional plotting and at least one terrible shaggy dog punchline involving President Gary Hart, Governor Clinton and Secretary of State Rodham (don't ask). I might check out Greenfield's entirely fictional account of a contested Presidency, The People's Choice, but if it's written in the same style as his rather stuffy fiction, I'll take a pass. (Primary Colours, way back when, had the same problem: everyone knew they were reading real details about real people, so the fictional "waking dream" never took over, but the story was shaped as if it were fiction, complete with artistic license here and there, so it also felt very inauthentic. The whole question of pop nonfiction -- ghosted celebrity "books," rushed ebook or paperback true crime tie-ins, memoirs written two or three decades after unverifiable events, histories more poorly sourced than freshman term papers -- is a vexed one.)
Libriomancer, Jim C. Hines. I really wanted to like this, because it was supposedly urban fantasy done "right" without a passive heroine trapped in a limp love triangle, because the author writes great posts about feminism, rape, patriarchy and the like on his blog, and he's behind the entirely delightful Striking a Pose series where he tries to copy those terrible urban fantasy covers. Unfortunately the description everyone's quoting, a "cross between Dresden and Thursday Next," is accurate, and I....don't like either of those series. I actually had a similar reaction to reading the Next books: I thought there would be a lot more literary in-jokes, and instead it was sort of focused on geeky cleverness. There was a fairly lengthy discussion of the book's flaws (including especially its female lead) here.
(Yeah, I also hate Jasper Fforde, along with J.K. Rowling, Audrey Niffenegger, Susanna Clarke, and so on. Neil Gaiman gets a bye, but not really. In my spare time I
Finally, I did just finish The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright, which took about two and a half days of sustained reading -- I wanted to really understand it (I read fast, but I'm also one of those people who reads all the endnotes....the acknowledgements....the list of sources....the index. You can tell a lot about a book from its index). I'm not sure what to say about it -- it was gripping, even riveting, altho the places where he tried to write fancy (what is it with reporters suddenly wanting to turn out embroidered prose in books? Does it just become a pent-up urge after so many years of Just the Facts and strict wordcount limits?) were pretty bad. I was really surprised at how much I didn't know (which I am not going to reveal here because it would be very embarrassing) (this included: what Osama's father did to earn all that money, who Sayyid Qutb was, the Grand Mosque Seizure, the Luxor Massacre, you get the picture). I wonder, inevitably, what the author's thoughts were on bin Laden's finally being killed, by a Democrat administration no less. The book seems to stop a little abruptly, because he goes into the causes of 9/11 so thoroughly and then very briefly (but harrowingly) describes the Twin Towers dying, but I could understand it. We've all seen those final moments endlessly on film, the hijackings have been filmed over and over again too in very sketchy "docudramas," and this is about what we didn't know, what we didn't see -- and what the people in the book didn't see, either. Like all good books this one made me want to read more books: Through Our Enemies' Eyes, The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda, The Man Who Warned America....This book does lean very heavily on the testimony of those authors -- Michael Scheuer, Ali Soufan, memories of John O'Neill -- but that's not a bad thing.
That's it so far -- I want to read some more serious stuff before the end of the month (this was what I was saying for nearly all of 2012. sigh). I also reread some -- the Sherlock Holmes canon, The Taste of Sorrow, Wintering, Tweak -- but I try not to do that because well, the stacks just go piling on up and up in here, and rereading is really not the best use of my time unless it's for research, or I need comfort when I'm sick.
Sunday, January 20, 2013
reading, uh, SUNDAY, whoops
DAMN I keep forgetting to do this "WWW reading" thing. It's a cool idea, and that's a shame, so....
What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?
(I'm recovered from the sinusitis, THANK GOD. For now. Judicious use of Sudafed and Afrin, plus Flonase, plus it's been really really foggy around here. Cold, but foggy. ((Husband asked the other day: "How are you enjoying the particulars?" Geek.)) )
Currently reading - My signed, PERSONALLY INSCRIBED copy of Hanne Blank's The Unapologetic Fat Girl's Guide to Exercise and Other Incendiary Acts, which is awesome: hilarious, wonderfully written, wry, and incendiary indeed. As one review puts it:
Recently finished - A reread of Hound of the Baskervilles, a perpetual comfort book (altho that bit about "We chatted about the skulls of the Hottentots and Bushmen" - oy), and What Fresh Hell is This?, a terrible biography of Dorothy Parker (also a reread), sparked off by reading a Nora Ephron column on Dorothy Parker, altho that references a different terrible Dorothy Parker biography. Note to self: write biography of Dorothy Parker that isn't terrible, for sake of own sanity if nothing else. Altho I understand this book is neat, so of course I don't have it. SIGH.
What I might read next - Either The Looming Tower or the new Scientology book, both by Lawrence Wright -- I started reading his stuff when he was writing about ritual Satanic abuse for the New Yorker, so it's nice to see him get a lot of recognition. Maybe the People Who Eat Darkness, even if that sounds fucking terrifying. I seem to have a nonfiction jones right now.
***
INTERVIEWER: What, then, would you say is the source of most of your work?
DOROTHY PARKER: Need of money, dear.
- Paris Review interview
What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?
(I'm recovered from the sinusitis, THANK GOD. For now. Judicious use of Sudafed and Afrin, plus Flonase, plus it's been really really foggy around here. Cold, but foggy. ((Husband asked the other day: "How are you enjoying the particulars?" Geek.)) )
Currently reading - My signed, PERSONALLY INSCRIBED copy of Hanne Blank's The Unapologetic Fat Girl's Guide to Exercise and Other Incendiary Acts, which is awesome: hilarious, wonderfully written, wry, and incendiary indeed. As one review puts it:
Redefining exercise as "body practice", and treating it as affirming self-care rather than a chore, and acknowledging that it encompasses everything from intense training in a sport to simply moving around and lifting and carrying and bending to get things that have fallen under the entertainment center, and that it's the sort of care every body deserves, is both a radical and a comforting thing.
Recently finished - A reread of Hound of the Baskervilles, a perpetual comfort book (altho that bit about "We chatted about the skulls of the Hottentots and Bushmen" - oy), and What Fresh Hell is This?, a terrible biography of Dorothy Parker (also a reread), sparked off by reading a Nora Ephron column on Dorothy Parker, altho that references a different terrible Dorothy Parker biography. Note to self: write biography of Dorothy Parker that isn't terrible, for sake of own sanity if nothing else. Altho I understand this book is neat, so of course I don't have it. SIGH.
What I might read next - Either The Looming Tower or the new Scientology book, both by Lawrence Wright -- I started reading his stuff when he was writing about ritual Satanic abuse for the New Yorker, so it's nice to see him get a lot of recognition. Maybe the People Who Eat Darkness, even if that sounds fucking terrifying. I seem to have a nonfiction jones right now.
***
INTERVIEWER: What, then, would you say is the source of most of your work?
DOROTHY PARKER: Need of money, dear.
- Paris Review interview
Tuesday, January 1, 2013
Sunday, December 30, 2012
tiny beautiful things
This came up in a conversation about Captain Awkward - I still think it’s one of the better reviews I’ve ever done.
a review of Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
a review of Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
a heaven where some screams have gone
Love. Children. Earning a living. Friends. Drinking. Pushed too far, to do too much. Silent years....
- Elizabeth Smart, journal entry on February 13, 1976
(quoted in Between the Sheets: Nine 20th Century Women Writers and their Famous Literary Partnerships)
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
reading Wednesday 12/12/2012
Well, Tumblr's working again, so nobody's going to be reading anything else, but I like this idea anyway, and I want to write about BOOKS more on the internet, altho I feel sort of like a small doughty pebble getting swept up in the loud immense 48 fps tide powering down upon us from the vast edges drear and naked shingles of the world. Hah.
To play along, just answer the following three (3) questions…
• What are you currently reading?
• What did you recently finish reading?
• What do you think you’ll read next?
I am Sick as Fucking Hell (it's a technical medical term) with chronic acute sinusitis (which one, you lucky dog? They're both cute, those Sinusitis girls) which has plagued me all my life and ONLY NOW have I found a doctor even remotely sympathetic to the idea that no really, I need long-term antibiotics when this happens and I'm not some kind of Augmentin junkie (that word always throws me off because it makes me think of Le Guin's "Augmentor".....anyway) -- so I've been reading and rereading comfort books. I've been sick since about the end of October (FUCK), so I reread the Holmes canon. All the Holmes canon, even Valley of Fear and The Sign of the Four, which I really truly don't like. I always put off "His Final Problem" until after I've reread all my favourites and then immediately have to fix it with "The Adventure of the Empty House" afterwards, because I am a sap. (It always amazes me Watson doesn't just fucking sucker punch Holmes at the end of "The Dying Detective," but ANYWAY.) I reread Hound of the Baskervilles twice because that was my first Holmes ever and it's my perpetual favourite.
Then I was all out of Holmes. And I was still sick and couldn't focus on anything longer than a shortish novella that didn't have dropped clues all over it and wasn't neatly explained at the end. My eyes were returning to the little morocco case with the seven per cent solution and the syringes (EVERY detail points to Holmes knocking himself out with morphine, can you imagine him on crack?). I was jonesing.
"I think of slaying Holmes... and winding him up for good and all. He takes my mind from better things."
-- Arthur Conan Doyle to his mother, 1891
"You won't! You can't! You mustn't!"
-- Arthur Conan Doyle's mother
So I went looking for methadone. Years and years ago when you wanted this sort of thing you had to hunt around in shadowy corners and sometimes even suffer hectographitis of the digits or "Xerox lung," but in these digital times you can just order authorized sequels and pastiches downloaded right onto your registered corneas, uh, I mean e-reader. So far have piled up: The Italian Secretary by Caleb Carr, The West End Horror (already read Seven Per Cent Solution a while back) by Nicholas Meyer, Dust and Shadow by Lyndsay Faye, A Slight Trick of the Mind (with grave misgivings) and The House of Silk (with slightly less grave misgivings. Call them coffin misgivings? No?).
Sadly I found Meyer really arch and unreadable -- that's probably a bad side effect of either the sinusitis or the Augmentin, because the day I don't love culture vulture literary references is the day I'm really fucking sick. Also bought Dirda's On Conan Doyle: Or, The Whole Art of Storytelling, which was 90% about books other than Holmes, and also really glossed over the imperialism and, yes, racism as completely as the latest shiny "steampunk century" website. That was dreadfully disappointing.
Dust and Shadow was really surprisingly good -- there was a great working-class original female character who wasn't a dreadful Mary Sue, Watson's narrative voice was just right, and although it was a Holmes v Ripper book, it wasn't horrendously graphic. (Number of Holmes v Ripper pastiche novels I now own: five. Number of Holmes v Ripper pastiche novels I owned last week: zero. I amused myself by wittily -- so I thought -- tagging them "Alien v Predator" on LibraryThing, only to get solemnly lectured by someone on Twitter, but then again Twitter seems to drop peoples' IQ numbers right along with that 140-character limit.) I would highly recommend it.
I just couldn't face Trick of the Mind, with droopy older Holmes apparently going all Late-Roth-and-Updike about his past affairs (what?), and oh, my God, House of Silk was bad, just bad. He fluffed Watson's voice, everyone else sounded like fake-Watson as well, the author committed phonetic fake Cockney upon the defenseless characters and reader and never stood in the dock for it, and if Dirda skated right over all the 19th-century prejudices, Anthony Horowitz was apologizing for them every other page. Holmes had never thought of the danger he sent the Irregulars into! Watson had never thought of the people they put away as anything more than just criminals! It was done in the most heavy-handed anachronistic way. I don't think there's anything wrong at all with pointing out the glaring social injustices of other eras -- in fact I think it's necessary -- but when it's done so poorly, the intended criticism is itself undercut and the author just looks hypocritical and patronizing.
Now I'm eyeing Caleb Carr. I really didn't like The Alienist and I tried The Angel of Darkness but just couldn't get through it, so I am not hopeful. What I really want is for Lyndsay Faye to write another Holmes novel, but apparently she's spun off her own series about a former Irish bartender who's now a Yank private dick in the 19th century "in the manner of The Alienist" (groan), so no joy there.
Or I could just reread Hound of the Baskervilles again -- its kick never dulls.
And so, reader, farewell to Sherlock Holmes! I thank you for your past constancy, and can but hope that some return has been made in the shape of that distraction from the worries of life and stimulating change of thought which can only be found in the fairy kingdom of romance.
-- Arthur Conan Doyle, Preface to The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes
To play along, just answer the following three (3) questions…
• What are you currently reading?
• What did you recently finish reading?
• What do you think you’ll read next?
I am Sick as Fucking Hell (it's a technical medical term) with chronic acute sinusitis (which one, you lucky dog? They're both cute, those Sinusitis girls) which has plagued me all my life and ONLY NOW have I found a doctor even remotely sympathetic to the idea that no really, I need long-term antibiotics when this happens and I'm not some kind of Augmentin junkie (that word always throws me off because it makes me think of Le Guin's "Augmentor".....anyway) -- so I've been reading and rereading comfort books. I've been sick since about the end of October (FUCK), so I reread the Holmes canon. All the Holmes canon, even Valley of Fear and The Sign of the Four, which I really truly don't like. I always put off "His Final Problem" until after I've reread all my favourites and then immediately have to fix it with "The Adventure of the Empty House" afterwards, because I am a sap. (It always amazes me Watson doesn't just fucking sucker punch Holmes at the end of "The Dying Detective," but ANYWAY.) I reread Hound of the Baskervilles twice because that was my first Holmes ever and it's my perpetual favourite.
Then I was all out of Holmes. And I was still sick and couldn't focus on anything longer than a shortish novella that didn't have dropped clues all over it and wasn't neatly explained at the end. My eyes were returning to the little morocco case with the seven per cent solution and the syringes (EVERY detail points to Holmes knocking himself out with morphine, can you imagine him on crack?). I was jonesing.
"I think of slaying Holmes... and winding him up for good and all. He takes my mind from better things."
-- Arthur Conan Doyle to his mother, 1891
"You won't! You can't! You mustn't!"
-- Arthur Conan Doyle's mother
So I went looking for methadone. Years and years ago when you wanted this sort of thing you had to hunt around in shadowy corners and sometimes even suffer hectographitis of the digits or "Xerox lung," but in these digital times you can just order authorized sequels and pastiches downloaded right onto your registered corneas, uh, I mean e-reader. So far have piled up: The Italian Secretary by Caleb Carr, The West End Horror (already read Seven Per Cent Solution a while back) by Nicholas Meyer, Dust and Shadow by Lyndsay Faye, A Slight Trick of the Mind (with grave misgivings) and The House of Silk (with slightly less grave misgivings. Call them coffin misgivings? No?).
Sadly I found Meyer really arch and unreadable -- that's probably a bad side effect of either the sinusitis or the Augmentin, because the day I don't love culture vulture literary references is the day I'm really fucking sick. Also bought Dirda's On Conan Doyle: Or, The Whole Art of Storytelling, which was 90% about books other than Holmes, and also really glossed over the imperialism and, yes, racism as completely as the latest shiny "steampunk century" website. That was dreadfully disappointing.
Dust and Shadow was really surprisingly good -- there was a great working-class original female character who wasn't a dreadful Mary Sue, Watson's narrative voice was just right, and although it was a Holmes v Ripper book, it wasn't horrendously graphic. (Number of Holmes v Ripper pastiche novels I now own: five. Number of Holmes v Ripper pastiche novels I owned last week: zero. I amused myself by wittily -- so I thought -- tagging them "Alien v Predator" on LibraryThing, only to get solemnly lectured by someone on Twitter, but then again Twitter seems to drop peoples' IQ numbers right along with that 140-character limit.) I would highly recommend it.
I just couldn't face Trick of the Mind, with droopy older Holmes apparently going all Late-Roth-and-Updike about his past affairs (what?), and oh, my God, House of Silk was bad, just bad. He fluffed Watson's voice, everyone else sounded like fake-Watson as well, the author committed phonetic fake Cockney upon the defenseless characters and reader and never stood in the dock for it, and if Dirda skated right over all the 19th-century prejudices, Anthony Horowitz was apologizing for them every other page. Holmes had never thought of the danger he sent the Irregulars into! Watson had never thought of the people they put away as anything more than just criminals! It was done in the most heavy-handed anachronistic way. I don't think there's anything wrong at all with pointing out the glaring social injustices of other eras -- in fact I think it's necessary -- but when it's done so poorly, the intended criticism is itself undercut and the author just looks hypocritical and patronizing.
Now I'm eyeing Caleb Carr. I really didn't like The Alienist and I tried The Angel of Darkness but just couldn't get through it, so I am not hopeful. What I really want is for Lyndsay Faye to write another Holmes novel, but apparently she's spun off her own series about a former Irish bartender who's now a Yank private dick in the 19th century "in the manner of The Alienist" (groan), so no joy there.
Or I could just reread Hound of the Baskervilles again -- its kick never dulls.
And so, reader, farewell to Sherlock Holmes! I thank you for your past constancy, and can but hope that some return has been made in the shape of that distraction from the worries of life and stimulating change of thought which can only be found in the fairy kingdom of romance.
-- Arthur Conan Doyle, Preface to The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes
Monday, July 9, 2012
new yorked
Well, actually, I unsubscribed from the New Yorker when not only could I not access the digital archives, despite subscribing to it on my Kindle, I also couldn't get one answer to about ten (plaintive, not rude!) emails directed to various customer service departments asking how to get access (I did get one canned response: "You need to subscribe!" Uh, thanks). At least I won't have to sit through any more John McPhee articles (I had to read Oranges in grad school, and detested it).
Saturday, July 7, 2012
Dead Souls
"You should have seen the catch we had! What a great big sturgeon got into the net! What big crucian carp, what enormous mirror carp!"
"It's annoying just listening to you. Why are you always so cheerful?"
"And why should I be depressed, for heaven's sake!" said his host.
"Why be depressed? Because things are depressing."
"You don't eat enough, that's all. Why don't you try to have a good dinner. Depression's only been invented recently: nobody used to be depressed before."
"Oh stop boasting. Are you saying you've never been depressed?"
"Never! I don't know what it is and I don't have the time for it. You wake up in the morning and the chef is already there and you have to order dinner. Then there's tea, then the farm manager, then you go fishing, and then it's dinnertime. You hardly have time for a snooze after dinner and the chef is back, you have to order supper. How do you find the time for depression?"
...."Believe me....that sometimes I'd like to have something to worry about just for a change, but I don't even have anyone who annoys me. I'm depressed, that's all."
- Gogol, Dead Souls (tr. Donald Rayfield)
Friday, July 6, 2012
'What price Chillingborough now?'
- Wanted to check I had the Paul Scott quote below right and Googled it - I don't quite know where my huge copy of the Raj Quartet is, the thick thin-paged closely-printed anthology I dragged with me in my suitcase from New Mexico to Washington State in 1999 - and got sucked RIGHT back in to Guy Perron's narration, nearly all of it on Google Books, Rowan describing his interrogation of Hari Kumar/Harry Coomer....feeling again the kind of inner shudder you do with greatness. All you can do is marvel.
'however disagreeable'
No: I intend no introspection. I mark Henry James's sentence: Observe perpetually. Observe the oncome of age. Observe greed. Observe my own despondency. By that means it becomes serviceable. Or so I hope. I insist upon spending this time to the best advantage. I will go down with my colours flying. This I see verges on introspection; but doesn't quite fall in.
- Virginia Woolf, last full entry in her diary, Saturday 8 March 1941
Footnote: "Cf. 'Henry James' in Desmond MacCarthy's Portraits (1931), p. 155: 'He had been describing to me the spiral of depression which a recent nervous illness had compelled him....to descend...."But it has been good....for my genius." Then he added, "Never cease to watch whatever happens to you."'"
(cf. also Paul Scott, in the Raj Quartet: "And no experience, however disagreeable, is ever wasted.")
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