Enchantment

Enchantment
by Orson Scott Card
c. 1999
Ballentine Books: New York
415 pages

First of all, it's been a long time. I admit that its been a long time. There are several reasons for this, the main being the depressing enormous looming threat of MCAT (121 days), and the start of my classes, and other crazy business. But I'm back now, and all it took was reading a little to remind me of why it is that I really really like reading, so I am back in the saddle, although the looming MCAT and classes and such should keep me at something of a more moderate level for the coming monthes.

Now for the book. I've read this one before, but I love Orson Scott Card (who is the wonderful man responsible for the glory that is Ender's Game, my all time favorite book.) I picked this copy up at the Strand (which, for those not fortunate enough to have been there, is an enormous, exciting used book store in New York city, which Andrew took me to over Christmas last year. It was an amazing experience that resulted in me finding, for crazy low prices, a number of books that I had been looking for for a while. It's a glorious place, but I suppose that it is fortunate that they keep it far away from me, becuase if I was close, I would have neither money, nor room to move between the books in my bedroom.)

Anyway, this one of those modern fairy tale type things. Ivan finds Sleeping Beauty, whose name is Katerina in the woods of Russia, and after he fights the bear to wake her, he has to go with her into the past to save her kingdom from the evil witch, Baba Yaga. Fortunately, Ivan is equiped to do this, because he is a scholar of ancient Russian literature and fairy tales, so he speaks the language (what a conincidence!).

It's not high art, but I wasn't feeling well when I read it, and it was a nice escape sort a book, a pleasant story with good characters, a bad bad guy, and a nice little love story. Fairy tales have a place, even though I often forget them now that the bedtime story is not really part of the schedule these days, at least not in the traditional sense. It was relaxing and fun when what I needed was relaxing and fun, and that's a good thing.

Table of Contents: The Booklist

Here's the running list of the books that I have read, along with relavent information should you want to find them. Click on the title to read the entry about that book, or just scroll down till you find something that interests you. If it's not linked, I haven't finished writing about it. Sometimes I read faster than I write. Books are listed in reverse chronological order by the date that I finished reading them. It is safe to assume that I started the next book on the same day or the morning after I finished the last. Here's the Introduction if you want to read it. Suggestions are always welcome.

Eventually:
The Name of the Rose
by Umberto Eco
Translated from the Italian by William Weaver
c.1980, 1984
Harcourt, Inc.: San Diego
535 pages

October 28, 2006
Devil in the Details:
Scenes From An Obsessive Girlhood
by Jennifer Traig
c. 2004
Little, Brown and Company: New York
246 pages

September 30,2006 (ish)
Mountains Beyond Mountains:
The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World
by Tracy Kidder
c. 2003
Random House: New York
304 pages

September 15, 2006
Enchantment
by Orson Scott Card
c. 1999
Ballentine Books: New York
415 pages

August 1, 2006
Naked
by David Sedaris
c. 1997
Little Brown and Company: New York
291 pages

July 26, 2006
Me Talk Pretty One Day
by David Sedaris
c. 2000
Little Brown and Company: Boston
272 pages

July 18, 2006:
We Need To Talk About Kevin
by Lionel Shriver
c. 2003
Counterpoint: New York
400 pages

July 16, 2006:
An Unquiet Mind
by Kay Redfield Jamison
c. 1995
Vintage Books: New York
219 pages

July 12, 2006:
Running With Scissors
by Augusten Burroughs
c. 2002
Picador: New York
304 pages

July 11, 2006:
Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs
by Chuck Klosterman
c. 2003
Scribner: New York
246 pages

July 10, 2006:
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
by Edmund Morris
c.1979
The Modern Library: New York
780 pages

June 25, 2006:
A Long Way Down
by Nick Hornby
c. 2005
Riverhead Books: New York
333 pages

June 21, 2006:
The Life of Pi
by Yann Martel
c. 2001
Harcourt, Inc.: Orlando
319 pages

June 13, 2006
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
by Stephen Chbosky
c. 1999
Pocket Books: New York
213 pages

June 12, 2006
A Prayer For Owen Meaney
by John Irving
c. 1989
Random House: New York
617 pages

June 9, 2006
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
by Italo Colvino
Translated from the Italian by William Weaver
c. 1979, 1981
Harcourt, Inc.: San Diego
260 pages

June 2, 2006
Walking a Literary Labyrinth:
A Spirituality of Reading
by Nancy M. Malone
c. 2003
Riverhead Books: New York
208 pages

June 1, 2006
Peter and the Starcatchers
by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson
c.2004
Hyperion Books For Children: New York
451 pages

May 31, 2006
Kill as Few Patients as Possible
Oscar Landon, M.D.
c. 1987, 1997
Ten Speed Press: Berkley, CA
109 pages

May 29, 2006
Something Borrowed
by Emily Griffin
c. 2004
St. Martin's Griffin, New York
322 pages

Naked

Naked
by David Sedaris
c. 1997
Little, Brown and Company: New York
291 pages

So as stated in the last entry (for Sedaris' Me Talk Pretty One Day) this book came from paperbackswap.com. My life has been kind of crazy this last week, and this seemed the right kind of book for the sort of disjointed reality, so I picked it up immediately after the last one.

I enjoyed this book as much as the other, but in a very different way. I felt that Sedaris did less well in this book of leaving his extraordinary characters with their humanity (here the absurdity level reminded me more of Running With Scissors on occasion, the jade carving Jesus freak and the penis collecting union man come to mind) but perhaps a better job creating the mood and the reality of the situations that he faced.

I am a planner, a worker, a student, a person with goals and a vision for the next step. Sedaris was a hitchhiker, a dropout, a migrant worker living out of a trailer. It is not a life that I can relate to, and really, I know, not a life that I want, although sometimes I wish that I could convince myself to just pack it up and go. (Maybe this is what I am doing with the upcoming trip to Europe, but it seems that spending two years saving money and planning it out will take some of the mystery out of the whole thing, and obviously there is no hitchhiking or migrant apple picking in my future.) I did find myself intrigued by his wanderings, and by the stories, both good and bad that came from them, and that's what sucked me in. This book had a decent amount of continuity, at least the essays were presented chronologically, and that pulled me in a little more than Me Talk Pretty One Day, because there was some sense of "what happens next?" that I felt less in the other book.

And it did make me think more about the way that I lead my life, as a planner, unlike Sedaris, as someone who is mostly the same around everyone, unlike one of his coworkers, as someone who would probably not really enjoy a week at a nudist colony, but who might need it anyway (like Sedaris I suppose).

So all in all, a good book, although another that I will be passing on without a sense of attachment. This is the kind of book that I for one can mostly read and be done with, I would suggest that if you want it, swap for it, so that if it makes a different impression on you (I can see where it might, depending on where you are coming from) you can keep it, and if not, you can send it along until it finds someone who will want to keep it.

Another ringing endorsement for the wonder that is paperbackswap.com.

Me Talk Pretty One Day

Me Talk Pretty One Day
by David Sedaris
c. 2000
Little Brown and Company: Boston
272 pages

This is one of those books that I saw so many times on tables and display shelves in bookstores everywhere that I went that curiosity got the better of me, and when I saw it at the bookstore a couple of weeks ago, I made a note and searched for it on paperbackswap.com, and had it sent to me be someone in California or Texas or something. (I take a moment here to say that if you are not a member of paperbackswap.com, you should go and join now, its a wonderful thing that gets you free books and allows you to share books that you don't need anymore with people who are going to read them.)

Anyway, the book got to me on Monday, and Tuesday was the day that I had set aside for a full night desperate, this time I really will do this, cleaning of my bedroom (usually an unimaginable disaster area.) I am not a good cleaner, and so I give myself incentives to keep working, and in this case, reading was this incentive. This was a good book for that purpose, because it is a collection of autobiographical essays that are not necessarily connected to one another. That means that each has a definitive end (good for the, "one essay and then back to cleaning" mentality.) Also, because they're disjointed in some ways, there was no feeling of being interrupted by short spurts of reading, something that bothers me sometimes when I just want to know what happens.

I didn't realize when I got this book that it was a memoir of sorts. I suppose that I am on something of a memoir kick right now. The reviews on the back and in the inside cover of this book seemed to suggest that I would be rolling on the floor in sidesplitting laughter and happy to be alone in the house for the night. It wasn't quite that entertaining, but there is very little that I read that pulls that kind of laugh out loud reaction from me (only Douglas Adams and Dave Barry come to mind.) The essays were amusing, some a little absurd, but all around entertaining. It seems that Sedaris has led the kind of life in which he is surrounded by people of extremes (although not as extreme as those that are hanging out with young Augusten Burroughs) and he is able to see and communicate the humor in these situations while still leaving these people with their humanity, something that I think Burroughs occasionally failed to do.

I enjoyed this book for the purpose that it served, but I will be paperback swapping my copy away this evening, as it didn't make any kid of enormous impression on me. However, I had already ordered another of Sedaris' books with this one, and so you get that next (or before this, since I am posting both tonight) because it seemed more like the right kind of book to be reading when I am in kind of a start and stop sort of place, so I can say that I enjoyed it enough to want to read more right away, not too great an endorsement from someone who always wants to [read. more. now.] but an endorsement nonetheless.

We Need To Talk About Kevin

We Need To Talk About Kevin
by Lionel Shriver
c. 2003
Counterpoint: New York
400 pages

So this book was a Good Morning America book choice back when the cool thing was for TV shows to have a book of the month. The whole "Oprah's book club makes a relative unknown into a bestselling author" trend.

I'm not sure if Good Morning America worked out for Ms. Shriver as well as Oprah might have, I got this book for $1.99 on the Barnes and Noble super clearance shelf, but that doesn't really mean anything.

Anyway, I knew what the book was about to start. It's the story of a kid who ends up going on one of those school shooting rampages a la Columbine. That's not a spoiler, you know that the little boy grows up to be a killer from the beginning. It's a given.

Still the title and the vague remembrance of the discussion on GMA suggested to me that this was going to be a book about the more immediate signs, about the people trying to intervene and failing to prevent the absolute worst, about the hints that an unsuspecting mother should have seen, about the dangers of failing to heed the warning of putting off that "we need to talk about Kevin" conversation with a well meaning and concerned teacher.

And while, in some ways, I suppose it is about that, overall, it's not. This is a book about temperament. This is a book about psychopathy. This is a book about the fact that some of these kids are just born that way, or at least they might be. In this case it certainly seems that way.

Of course, I found that perspective very interesting from an academic standpoint. These are the kinds of kids that we are trying to figure out at work. It's these kids whose brains we're scanning with the hope of finding a way to identify them, and eventually finding a way to understand them enough to be able to help them before they kill 11 people with a crossbow. At least, that's the long term goal.

The book takes the form of letters, written by the mother of Kevin, our mass murderer, to his father. You are meant to think that mom and dad have just separated, I think, but you would have to be dense not to know that Dad is dead. I suppose that is a spoiler, but if you don't smell something wrong when she visits the depressed in-laws alone in the second chapter, then you might not figure it out when she finds him pocurpined with arrows in the back yard either. (It seems I'm feeling a little cynical this evening. Sorry.)

Anyway, in the letters, she describes Kevin's entire development, from birth and a constantly crying infancy though a malicious toddlerhood and so on. And the point, clear from the beginning, is that Kevin was just born this way. She talks about the way that he sees the world, suggesting that he was bored, that he just doesn't see the point of the whole life thing, but of course to me, this screams "neurological! This woman would be interested in our research!"

And maybe she would be, or maybe not, maybe it says something about me that in reading of the polarly opposite personalities that Kevin manages to present to his two parents from a very young age (dad thinks he's a saint, mom senses something much more sinister) I can't help but think what a wonderfully high score the kid would get on impression management.

But it's interesting to watch him develop. I admit that I was very involved in the book, that I enjoyed reading it and found myself not at all upset about time spent waiting for things while it was in my bag. There's something about the reflectiveness of the narrative, the back and forth between her accounts of her current visits with Kevin in prison and the story of his development. You want to understand him, you want to know what's going to happen, even though you already know.

I talked earlier about those books where you know how it ends, but you still need to see how they take it from here to there. This there is distant, particularly horrible, and even though he's a brat, a manipulative little twit from the very beginning, it still seems a long way from start to finish. You need a lot of story to get from crying baby and ruining handmade presents as a toddler, to collecting computer viruses and torturing your younger sister to a killing spree, there's steps in there that somehow I wanted to understand.

But really, there's nothing to understand, nothing that clearly drives him to it, no abuse or horror that causes Kevin to lash out at the world. I think that if I didn't have the perspective of someone who's working on research trying to understand and eventually to help kids that just don't have empathy, kids that don't feel bad when they do something wrong and will manipulate you until they get what they want I would have found this book singularly depression. If we can't figure out their brain chemistry, connectivity, activity and anatomy to maybe hopefully help them, then what's the point of all this. Kevin is not deprived. His parents are wealthy, and though his mother is not totally thrilled with this idea, she stays home with him full time, and his father dotes on him to a level that's almost inexplicable. I'm not saying that everything was perfect, Mom admits that she wasn't sure that she wanted him, admits that she didn't feel that instant connection that mothers are supposed to feel when they hold their children for the first time, and sure, maybe he felt that detachment and it contributed to his development, but this is not the victim of a horrible tortured childhood, at least not an outwardly tortured childhood.

And this is not a book about the failure of parents to recognize signs or the cruelty of children turning children into killers. This is a book about a bad kid. A kid that's destructive and manipulative from his toddler years. It's not like the help came a moment too late and the appointments for the conference that might have saved him were scheduled for that afternoon, until he shot the school up that morning. It seems, reading this account that Kevin was hopeless from the start. Sure, maybe he feels some regret at the thought of his upcoming transfer to adult prison, and yes, in the end maybe his mother still loves him in spite of it all, but this is not a story of hope, not a story of help, not a story in which you feel that if only someone had heeded the advice "we need to talk about Kevin" then maybe this all could have been prevented. It seems like maybe it couldn't have been prevented, that maybe he was too manipulative, too good at the divide and conquer between his parents, too good at getting away with it. It seems reading this that his desire to get away with it is innate. His desire to hurt and punish is something he felt from birth.

And if you believe that he was just born that way, that his temperament was a major, if not the major contributor to the events of Thursday, as it's repeatedly referred to, if you believe that maybe he was just born that way, then what does that say about the world? About humanity? About children?

If we can't prevent this, if this violence is just a part of some of us, and it's out of our control... It's not a pretty picture.

And with that, I'm going to get back to scheduling some target kids for scans... Because again, even here, I choose hope.

An Unquiet Mind

An Unquiet Mind

by Kay Redfield Jamison

c. 1995

Vintage Books: New York

219 pages

Kay Redfield Jamison is a psychologist (Ph.D. in Clinical) on the Psychiatry faculty of John’s Hopkins Medical School. She also suffers from bipolar disorder. (She insists on calling in “manic-depressive illness” which is no longer the official psychiatric diagnosis, and I like the term “bipolar disorder” better, and since she uses what she wants in her book, I am going to use what I want in my blog.)

This book is her memoir, recording her experience with her illness and with trying to live with it and through it. It’s a brutally honest piece that doesn’t dance around the issue, and at parts is a little severe in its descriptions of the problems that come with being bipolar. While I was reading it on the beach this weekend, Ben asked me to read some aloud. After I finished a paragraph about the violence and extremes of her manic periods, he said something along the lines of “Wow. Is the whole book like that?” It was not a cheerful section that he had stumbled upon.

I really do admire Jamison for writing this book, for facing her illness head-on in this manner. She talks about the risks that she is taking in the writing it, including issues of professional anonymity (she worries that anything she says on the topic at a conference, any question she asks another researcher will be colored by the idea that she is taking it personally) and maintaining clinical privileges despite her illness and the safeguards that she has to put in place to make sure that she never puts any of her patients in danger.

But as she says herself, we will never get over the stigmas that are associated with mental illness in our society if we don’t accept that it is possible to be a functioning and successful adult member of society even if you suffer from one of these diseases. And I think that this memoir is a beautiful example of that. Jamison does not candy coat how severe her illness has been, but anyone familiar at all with the field knows that she has managed a successful career in academic medicine, (not easy, no matter what your mental state) and written several successful books, two of which are currently on the “to read” list. (Including Exuberance, one of the books that led me to Teddy Roosevelt.)

And while at times the suffering she experienced is hard to read about, especially for those of us who have specific associations with this illness, the book itself is never hard to read. The prose is lucid and poetic, even when talking about the times when her life was anything but. And while Jamison does spend rather more time on the romances in her life, and how those men interacted with her illness, than I might have liked, she also discusses with shocking frankness topics that I found fascinating.

Her challenges with medication, (which for her is lithium) were particularly interesting to me. Bipolar disorder is known for having a low rate of medication compliance, and her descriptions of the reasons behind her own decisions to discontinue medication (all disastrous) were enlightening to me, especially since finding effective ways to treat this illness and increase medication compliance is probably going to remain as one of my long term research interests. She describes the crippling side effects of the medications (one of these: the inability to read and comprehend books and journal articles, would certainly push me to stop taking a medication, no matter how convinced I was of its efficacy) and the positive feelings and productivity of hypomania that are given up for the sake of avoiding the psychosis of extreme mania and the crippling pain of severe depression. I can understand her hesitance to give these things up, and that is something that I think I have always needed to try to understand.

The stigma that she faces is sometimes shocking. In one instance, a physician tells her that he doesn’t think that she should ever have children (she never did, although not because of that idiot’s opinion) because she has bipolar disorder, which is thought to be genetic. I was appalled, as she was, that someone in the medical field could be so prejudiced, so horrible. (If we stopped bipolar people from reproducing, I wouldn’t be here to write this damnit!)

But when she talks about the implications of the modern genetic research in the field, these points become more poignant. It is clear that bipolar disorder runs in families, and the children and siblings of bipolar patients are also far more likely than the rest of the population to suffer from unipolar major depression, but the genes associated with either of these illnesses have not been isolated. What will happen when they are? Would parents choose to abort a fetus that carried those genes if a prenatal test were available? While she cites research in which the majority bipolar patients say that they wouldn’t, I wonder what someone who did not have the disease might choose after they had watched it kill someone else in their family.

She mentions here too that weeding out the bad in bipolar disorder might also weed out the good. This is a topic that I think will be a big part of the research that I want to make my career in: these intersections between the advantages and disadvantages of certain mental illnesses. She argues that the illness “can confer advantages on both the individual and society,” and she claims that she herself would choose to have manic-depressive illness if given the choice (this is with the assumption that medication is available and that it works. She is very clear that without effective treatment, the disease would be unbearable, and that she probably would not have survived.) She realizes that claiming as her own something that has clearly caused her so much pain is shocking, but she explains her position with stunning clarity,

“So why would I want anything to do with this illness? Because I honestly believe that as a result of it, I have felt more things, more deeply; had more experiences, more intensely; loved more and been more loved; laughed more often for having cried more often; appreciated more the springs for all the winters; worn death ‘as close as dungarees,’ appreciated it – and life – more; seen the finest and the most terrible in people, and slowly learned the values of caring, loyalty, and seeing things through. I have seen the breadth and depth and width of my mind and heart and seen how frail they both are, and how ultimately unknowable they both are. Depressed, I have crawled on my hands and knees in order to get across a room and have done it for month after month. But, normal or manic, I have run faster, thought faster and loved faster than most I know. And I think much of this is related to my illness – the intensity it gives things and the perspective it forces on me. I think that it has made me test the limits of my mind (which, while wanting, is holding) and the limits of my upbringing, family, education and friends.” (page 218)

It’s interesting to me that anyone would choose to have such a debilitating and often fatal illness. (Suicide rates are very high among people with bipolar disorder, Jamison herself attempted suicide once.) And I’m not sure where I stand, because these ideas are tricky. Where does personality intersect with illness? Where is the line between health and illness lie? Do we run the risk of taking from people some element of their humanity when we treat their mental anguish as a physical ailment, even if that’s what it is? What Jamison makes clear here is that patients suffering from one of these disorders experience their illness as very intimately linked with the person they are. And I do think that a true understanding of that perspective, or at least as true as someone can get without actually having the experience, is very important for me, as someone who wants to work with this patient population for the rest of my life.

Speaking of work… She talks about the current areas of research (admittedly from a perspective ten years old, but one that is still relevant) in a way that made me really glad to have a future (and a present) as a part of it. This quote seemed particularly beautiful when read in the control room of a 1.5 Tesla fMRI scanner, (taking pretty pictures of people’s brains)

“There is a wonderful kind of excitement in modern neuroscience, a romantic, moon-walk sense of exploration and setting out for new frontiers. The science is elegant, the scientists dismayingly young, and the pace of discovery absolutely staggering. Like the molecular biologists, the brain-scanners are generally well aware of the extraordinary frontiers they are crossing, and it would take a mind that is on empty, or a heart made out of stone, to be unmoved by their collective ventures and enthusiasm.” (page 197)


I’ll close with a quote from the very beginning of the book. People who know me know that understanding Bipolar Disorder has a personal meaning for me beyond my research, and I found this passage particularly beautiful both from the perspective of someone that wants to spend a career in part learning about this disease, and from the perspective of someone who has seen it in action.

"The Chinese believe that before you can conquer a beast, you must first make it beautiful. In some strange way, I have tried to do that with manic-depressive illness. It has been a fascinating, albeit deadly, enemy and companion; I have found it to be seductively complicated, a distillation both of what is finest in our natures, and of what is most dangerous. In order to contend with it, I first had to know it in all of its moods and infinite disguises, understand its real and imagined powers.” (page 5)

If nothing else, here Jamison has succeeded in making the beast, if not beautiful, as least a little more so. It becomes something human and understandable as opposed to something foreign and exciting, and that is quite an accomplishment.

Running With Scissors

Running With Scissors

by Augusten Burroughs

c. 2002

Picador: New York

304 pages

One afternoon, when the three of us from work took a side trip to Barnes & Noble, Krystal picked up this book from one of those little display tables (which will eventually be the death of both me and my savings) and told me that I would really like it, but that it was very bizarre.

And it was, and I did like it, but in a strange way. Reading this I got the same feeling that I sometimes get reading Chuck Palahniuk books: that feeling like you are doing something vaguely wrong and voyeuristic. Like you're rubbernecking at a really bad accident on the highway or something. Palahniuk frequently creates characters that are so messed up that just reading about their thoughts and actions makes you think "If those people sitting at the next table knew exactly what I was reading at this moment, they might be weirded out." At least I know I felt that way reading Haunted at Summer Institute last year.

This book has characters that behave in that same extreme socially unacceptable, shocking, horrifyingly strange kind of way. Only according to Burroughs, this is a memoir. He's not making this stuff up. Which only makes it feel more strange and vaguely dirty.

But kind of in a good way. Or at least in a way that made it so I literally could not put this book down (as in, I read one chapter at a particularly long traffic light.)

And so, like Krystal,I recommend it, with the "You'll like it, but it's rather messed up," kind of recommendation. If you think that you can handle (and this is the incident that Krystal described to me before I read the book) the family hovering over the toilet because they believe that God has chosen to speak to them through the shape and consistency of thier shit, (and I'm not even kidding) then this is the book for you.

Although I warn you, it's not for the faint of heart, or the easily angered, for there were certainly moments in which I wanted to slap several major characters upside the head and then lock them up for the remainder of their natural days. The psychiatrist that suggests that his thirteen year old patient could get himself out of school by staging a suicide attempt, and then provides him with the Valium and Jack Daniels to do just that comes to mind.

So yeah, it might be a little too bizarre for some people, and a lot too bizarre for others. But it is still a very good book. Even in the moments were I was repulsed, I was intrigued, and certainly involved. I suppose that anything that creates the kind of visceral reaction that I had to this book deserves a good amount of credit. Even when appalled, I had no intention of putting it down. And I now have every intention of reading Burroughs second memoir Dry once I get my hands on it.

So yeah, if you really like Palahniuk, I suspect that you will also enjoy this real life version, but if you read Invisible Monsters or Lullaby and were shocked by the strangeness of his fictional characters, I suspect that they reality of this book will be more than a little bit too much for you.

Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs

Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs

by Chuck Klosterman

c. 2003

Scribner: New York

246 pages

Another Andrew contribution to Maggie's incessant reading. This is a book of essays written from the perspective of a pop culture buff and talking about everything from how Lloyd Dobler has left him unable to ever satisfy a woman to how the Lakers vs. Celtics rivalry in the 80's represents not just the racial tension in America, but everything.

Important note: Andrew bought me this book, but he also had the audio book, and we listened to the first few essays in the car driving around this past weekend. I highly recommend listening to at least part of the audio book for this particular selection, and I am usually not an advocate of audio books. Klosterman reads the book himself, and clearly many of these essays were written with that 'read aloud' mentality. (I would bet that he edits by reading aloud almost performance style to make sure that things flow.) His voice and his delivery really drive home his points, and are rather funny. Even if you don't have the patience to listen to the whole thing (I didn't.) Listening to the first two will give you a good idea of the way in which the others are meant to be read. This really increased my enjoyment of this book, which is already really entertaining.

As I said before, this is a series of essays. All are amusing and entertaining as is, although I feel like I would have found them even more so if I was five or six years older. Klosterman is writing from the perspective of someone who watched his two straight hours of Saved By The Bell every afternoon (USA and TBS) in his college dorm room, and while I pretty devotedly watched that same programming, it was sitting in my kitchen afternoons after elementary and middle school. As he says "temporality is part of the truth," and our different perspectives made that experience very different in some ways.

I believe that I read a spin off of this first essay, which in the book is titled "This is Emo." (If other people read the Lloyd Dobler article, I think that it was in a newspaper, and it definitely had a large picture of the boom box moment that we all know and love, I would be very happy to find it because I want to know if it really is the same author.) The essay here discusses the fact that the musical and cinematic representation of love is fake and too perfect, and that the tendency of people in our culture to embrace that and allow it to shape how they imagine love to be has left us unable to be satisfied with real relationships.

The essay that I read before was focused on the Lloyd Dobler complex. This is the point that every woman (Klosterman says born between '65 and '78, but here I think that he is not giving us youngings credit) is in love with John Cusack. Of course, not really him, the character he played in Say Anything, Lloyd Dobler. And it's funny, and vaguely true. (Although I saw the intrinsic fabulousness of Johnny before I saw Say Anything, I still have to admit that some idea of this fabulousness comes from the fact that he comes off like the kind of person that Lloyd Dobler seems to be in that movie.) Klosterman's point in this essay is that we all aspire to something that's not real, and so we'll never be happy.

I don't see it quite as hopelessly as that, but then again, I have a happy, though long distance, relationship with someone who keeps buying me good books. But I can see his point, most particularly when he talks about silences. It seems that we as people feel that silence has two forms: profound and awkward. And while I think that there is a place somewhere in there for the idea of "comfortable silence" in the "I like having you here and don't really feel like I need to fill every one of these moments with worthless drivel" sort of way, I do find myself sometimes wondering if I should SAY SOMETHING whenever things get quiet on a long car ride with Andrew. Reading the essay kind of made me see how freaking silly that is, as Klosterman puts it,

"There's not a lot to say during breakfast. I mean, you just woke up, you know? Nothing has happened. If neither person had an especially weird dream and nobody burned the toast, breakfast is just the time for chewing Cocoa Puffs and/or wishing you were still asleep. But we've been convinced not to think like that." page 7

Good news Chuck, I think that you might have just convinced me to think exactly like that sometimes. Good work.

Some of the other essays didn't ring as true for me. I still don't feel like I understand cover bands or internet porn, but maybe I never will, but I still enjoyed his essays about them. And in spite of his assertions, I do still believe that the probability of events is frequently something other that 50/50.

But other essays had shining moments of "oh how true!" His comparison of Pamela Anderson to Marilyn Monroe to America was interestingly reminiscent of the passage that I talked about in my entry about A Prayer For Own Meaney. And his commentary on how it became cool to be depressed sometime in the 80s seemed to connect to my thesis (but I'm obsessed, so those connections happen a lot.) I enjoyed his analysis of why country music is so damn catchy, and I found his explanation of the Tori paradox from the final season of Saved By The Bell outright enlightening ("So THAT'S where she came from!")

And I would be interested to hear what other people came up with as answers to "The 23 questions I ask everybody I meet in order to decide if I can ever really love them" on pages 126-134. (Andrew and I have decided that we can make it, even thought I think that Einstein is interesting...)

I'll close with the quote that popped up in Jack's facebook profile, thus further proving that he and I will, at least sometimes, focus in on the same exact sets of 15 or so words out of all the words in a 200 page book. This one pretty much sums up the point that seems central to Klosterman, everything is connected, even the most random things, the trivialities of pop culture, are really examples of more complex ideas.

"In and of itself, nothing really matters. What matters is that nothing is ever really 'in and of itself.'"

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

c.1979

The Modern Library: New York

780 pages

Why would Maggie spend two weeks and almost 800 pages on Teddy? I'll tell you.

Theodore Roosevelt is a character in Caleb Carr's The Alienist and The Angel of Darkness (both of which are amazing books that you probably should read if you like mysteries, or psychology, or crime solver stories: think CSI when fingerprinting and ballistics were revolutionary techniques.) He is also one of the very first examples of an exuberant person in Kay Redfield Jamison's Exuberance: The Passion for Life (which I haven't finished reading, because I got distracted, but made T.R. seem that much more interesting.)

Both of this representations made me intrigued by T.R.'s legendary energy, productivity and diversity of interests, so I asked Andrew, because he seems to know such things, if he could suggest a good biography. He suggested Morris, which I (of course) promptly forgot until the next time that he brought me to a bookstore. Turns out there are two volumes of Morris on Teddy, (with a third apparently "planned" but not existing now or listed as forthcoming anywhere. Anyone know what happened on that point?). I picked up the first one, and Andrew bought it for me (because he is amazing like that) and here we are.

And now Teddy and I have bonded. To the extent that despite the fact that I spent two weeks on this one (unheard of!) I am fully ready to dive into volume two at some point in the not too distant future. Anyway.

Two reasons: 1.) Theodore Roosevelt is fascinating. Totally and completely fascinating. It seems that he never lived a dull moment, or stopped moving or doing for a single instant, at least not in the first 40 years of his life. (That is all that are covered in this book, which goes up to the moment that he becomes president when McKinley is assassinated.) This was something that I suspected before reading the book, but something that was driven home even further by this account of his life. It seems that almost everyone that met T.R. felt the need to comment on his dynamic presence. More than anything, reading this book made me want to meet him, just so I could experience that presence and see what sort of impression he would make on me, since it seems that just meeting him was memorable for a good number of those that had the priviledge. 2.) Edmund Morris is a really great writer, who allows Theodore Roosevelt to be fascinating in a dynamic and flowing sort of way that makes you feel more like you a reading a story and less like you are reading history to the point that you really don't want to put the book down for the sake of doing other things. The book shockingly easy to read. This is something that I was worried about before I started reading, a fear that was totally unfounded.

So Theodore Roosevelt is now, in some ways, my hero. Here is a man that managed a level of productivity and action that nobody else I know or have read about could even dream of. He's a prolific writer and a reader to a level that puts me to shame. He takes jobs and attacks them with a ferocious energy that makes him easy to respect and impossible to ignore. He's amazing. As Jamison pointed out, he is the pinnacle of exuberance. Someone that approached life with a sincere and truly amazing energy and love of the new experiences, work, play and exploration that life is made of. You can't help but like him, and the descriptions written by people that knew him make it so you can't help but want not just to meet him, but also to be friends with him. It's abundantly clear how Teddy managed to become a nationally known personality, even before the creation of the television. His personality and presence are just that huge.

On top of this, the book is absurdly well researched. The 780 pages listed are the 780 pages that I read, they are followed by more than 100 more of references and notes, none of which I read. I'm sure that if you are interested in the history of Theodore Roosevelt more than the personality of Theodore Roosevelt than all of that might be interested, but really, I just wanted to know more about someone that managed to get so much done and do it with such energy, drive and good humor, and if that's what you want to know about, the book does just fine without bothering to read the notes on every little factiod. But if you live for that sort of thing, they're there.

In short: Theodore Roosevelt is really interesting, and if you're going to read about him, it would seem that this is the way to go (the book did win the Pulitzer). I don't care if it's long and involved or if it took even me a while to read it. (We can be sure that T.R. would have taken only one day. He once said, "Reading with me is a disease" and was known to read two or three books in their entirety in a single evening, so no more calling me a super speedy reader, I have NOTHING on this guy. ) This book is good enough to make 800 pages of history go quickly and leave you wanting more, and to me, that's pretty impressive.

Just wait until I get my hands on Theodore Rex.

A Long Way Down

A Long Way Down
by Nick Hornby
c. 2005
Riverhead Books: New York
333 pages

So I liked Nick Hornby's other books, especially High Fidelity, so when I saw this one on the "New in Paperback" table at Barnes and Noble, I decided to pick it up as a good bit of summer reading. In the end, it's not as good as High Fidelity, but this was an entertaining read.

A Long Way Down is about four people: Martin, JJ, Jess and Maureen. The story is told in sections with the narration switching between all four perspectives. They meet on the top of a building on New Years Eve. All of them have come there to jump, but none of them do. The book follows them for the next three months or so, documenting how their lives and relationships change after they choose to keep on living.

But it's not a warm fuzzy book, and these are truly flawed characters. In particular, Jess is NUTS, and highly annoying. She's abrasive, she attacks people verbally, with clear intent to harm. You hate her, and at the same time, you feel for her, and feel bad for her, because sometimes, life sucks. (As an aside, in the sections that are written from her perspective, there are no quotation marks, or as she calls them "speech marks" because she supposedly doesn't know how to use them. While not knowing how to use quotation marks was a cute little character point, and I can see where it helped the author to distinguish her style from the other characters, something that must have been part of the challenge of writing the novel from four different perspectives, it only made any dialogue in her sections difficult to read to the point where I think that something was lost in the absence of flow, but that might be just me.)

If you've read Hornby in the past, and you enjoyed his stuff, then by all means, pick this one up, although you can probably live with a library copy, because there's not so much meat to this one that you'll want to read it again, or passages so quotable that you'll want them around for reference when you are having that sort of day. This book is readable, it was a loverly poolside companion this past weekend, and I was compelled to stay up later to finish it off, but it will not be cracking any of my top fives.

If you haven't read Hornby, stop reading my gibberish and go read High Fidelity because that one is most definitely worth it.

One other little thing that I found highly amusing...

At some point in the novel, they start something of a book club, deciding to read books by authors that have killed themselves, in this section Jess said something that I just loved,

"We started with Virginia Woolf, and I only read like two pages of this book about a lighthouse, but I read enough to know why she killed herself: She killed herself because she couldn't make herself understood. You only have to read one sentence to see that." (page 189).

Now I'm not saying that I think that Virginia Wolfe was not a brilliant writer, but I can say that I did find the beginning of To The Lighthouse more than a tad bit dense the first time that I read it, and therefore, I found this reference amusing.

Also, randomly but amusingly, Jess starts this chapter with a reference to a poem that her character has never read, which also amused me. She says, "Someone should write a song or something called 'They Fuck You Up, Your Mom and Dad." Which of course is the first line of a highly amusing poem, which I will include here, because if you have not read it, you should have, and it's in moments like this that I can contribute the to education of the masses.

This Be The Verse
by Phillip Larkin

They fuck you up, your mom and dad
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-stylen hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can
And don't have any kids yourself.

The Life of Pi

The Life of Pi

by Yann Martel

c. 2001

Harcourt, Inc.: Orlando

319 pages

Ryan Pipkie gets credit for leading me to this one, even though it has been on my list of things needing reading for quite some time. Sitting in my room on the Wednesday evening when he and Heather randomly came to visit, he said that this was one of the books that made him get lost, made him sit down and read for hours on end. And then, like so many other good books, it was on the Summer Reading table at Barnes and Noble... which made it even easier to keep it in mind when I was looking for things to keep me reading.

This book has three parts, and all three of them are beautiful. In the first, Piscine Patel tells of growing up in India as the son of a zookeeper. Along the way, he learns to fear tigers, changes his name to Pi (as in 3.14...) and discovers the wonders of religions, simultaneously practicing Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam.

The most powerful parts of this first section are Pi's comments on faith and doubt. One of my favorites.

"I'll be honest about it, it's not atheists who get stuck in my craw, but agnostics. Doubt is useful for a while. We all must pass through the garden of Gethsemane. If Christ played with doubt, so must we... But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation." (page 28).

The conflict between Pi's three religions makes an appearance when the leaders of all three groups simultaneously converge on Pi and his family as they are out in the city. They all begin by complimenting Pi on his piety, but quickly switch to demanding that he "pick one."

I found these passages particularly interesting, because of my own view on God and religion, my belief that in many ways, all religions are true as long as you are using them as a means of striving for a truth based on love and compassion. Pi takes this idea, and allows it to and his faith to lead him to the practice of multiple religions, whereas I have taken it to allow me to talk to God and try to find reasons and faith on my own... the politics that come with organization can be so daunting when all that really matters is faith.

In the second section, Pi and his family depart for a new life in Canada aboard a ship with many of the animals from their zoo. Tragically the ship sinks, leaving Pi the sole human survivor aboard a lifeboat with a zebra with a broken leg, an orangutan, a hyena and a tiger named Richard Parker. Soon only he and Richard Parker remain, and Pi must survive a long and challenging period at sea with only the tiger as a companion. He decides to tame the tiger, to assert himself as the alpha male. At the point of this decision, there is a particularly wonderful passage about the nature of fear, which I'll quote in part, just because I like it.

"I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. ... It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerring ease. It begins in your mind, always. One moment you are feeling calm, self-possessed, happy. Then fear, disguised in the garb of mild-mannered doubt, slips into your mind like a spy... You become anxious. Reason comes to do battle for you. You are reassured. Reason is fully equipped with the latest weapons and technology. But to your amazement, despite superior tactics and a number of undeniable victories, reason is laid low. You feel yourself weakening, wavering. Your anxiety becomes dread.... Quickly you make rash decisions. You dismiss your last allies: hope and trust. There, you've defeated yourself. Fear, which is but an impression, has triumphed over you." (page 161-162).

They survive and land in Mexico. (That's not a spoiler, the story is told from the perspective of an author who writes during a series of interviews with an adult Pi.) This second section of the book is the longest, and beautifully written. It's the reason that you should read the book yourself, because it is a wonderful story, and nothing that I can say here will do it justice.

The third section of the book consists of interviews with employees of the shipping company that owned the ship that sank and left Pi to his ocean adventure. In this section, Pi tells his story and is met with disbelief. And the reader is left to choose between two options, faith and doubt. Because in the end, this is a book about faith, and not only the faith of Pi and the moments of doubt that go through his ordeal, but also the faith of the reader. The reader is left to struggle with their own willingness to suspend doubt and accept things that seem totally absurd and impossible. They are left to choose between faith and doubt, between a greater and a lesser story.

The choice of the reader is the same as the deathbed choice that is presented in Chapter 22.

"I can well imagine an atheist's last words: 'White, white! L-L-Love! My God!' - and the deathbed leap of faith. Whereas the agnostic, if he stays true to his reasonable self, if he stays beholden to dry, yeastless factuality, might try to explain the warm light bathing him by saying, 'Possibly f-f-falling oxygenation of the b-b-brain,' and to the very end, lack imagination and miss the better story." (page 64).

In the beginning, it is claimed that this is "a story that will make you believe in God" (page x). But I still don't think that any story can really do that in an unwilling heart. There are stories that can for many people, but we have all heard these stories, and two are among the first that the author supposes when he asks if the story he is about to hear takes place "two thousand years ago in a remote corner of the Roman Empire" or "in seventh century Arabia." If those stories, and all of the smaller stories that we're all faced with every day, the stories where we find ourselves surrounded by love, aren't going to do it for you, I doubt that this one will either.

But here, as with everywhere else, if you choose doubt, you are left with something much much less: with death, with darkness, human weakness and evil, with falling oxygenation of the brain.

As for me, I choose the better story.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

by Stephen Chbosky

c. 1999

Pocket Books: New York

213 pages

"So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I'm still trying to figure out how that could be." (page 2)

Jack had that quote in his profile for a while, it might still be there. I loved it when I read it there, out of context and away from the wonderful character that writes it, but I love it much more here embedded in the beginning of this wonderful book. And I love Jack for telling me to read it. I am going to steal that quote from Jack now, or at least make him share it. But now at least, I know where it comes from, so it's OK that at least a part of it is mine.

Jack was online talking to me when I started this blog, and he asked me that always dreaded question, "What are your top five favorite books of all time?" I hate this question because I am so moody when it comes to books. Some books are perfect in one moment, but unrelateable the next. I can be comfortable saying that Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game is my all time favorite, but that is mostly because I have read it so many times to be sure that I find it universally powerful. Other than that, I am always sure that I would be leaving something out. Books are like friends sometimes, or songs, there is a right friend to call on in every situation, a right song to make every mood bearable, but it is not always the same friend or the same song. Books are the same for me. To ask me to pick my five best friends or my five favorite songs would be equally cruel. I have enough love to go around.

But Jack said this was one of his favorites, and since I have very much enjoyed many of the other books on his list, and because he is Jack and I trust him, I went to the bookstore and bought it; thinking that if he was right in saying, "you can read it in a day," it would be a good airplane companion. (He was, it was.)

In this book, Charlie, throughout his freshman year in high school, writes beautiful, striking, naked, honest letters to someone he doesn't know. A journal with an audience that expects no reply, just understanding. He opens his first letter with,

"I am writing to you because she said you listen and understand and didn't try to sleep with that person at that party even though you could have. Please don't try to figure out who she is because then you might figure out who I am, and I really don't want you to do that... I mean nothing bad by this. Honest. I just need to know that someone out there listens and understands and doesn't try to sleep with people even if they could have. I need to know that these people exist." (page 2)

And I think that we all need that, that we all sometimes want that, to have an ear to listen and still be anonymous. To have someone try to understand without needing to know who you are. This is the essence of the blog in some ways. The explosion of blogs makes it clear that this is something of a cultural need.

Watching Charlie figure high school out is beautiful. He forms amazing friendships with an interesting group of seniors and gets special attention from a very involved English teacher. (It says he's TFA! Clearly someone read their curriculum about individualized instruction for advanced students...) This book is brutally honest about the development of these relationships, of Charlie's way of thinking about people, events, himself. Beautifully, painfully, relateably honest about the confusion that others cause in our lives when we just don't understand them, or when we don't know ourselves well enough to see what we want. A wonderful perspective on how sometimes, it really is easy to take advice too literally, to be too cautious, to stand on the sidelines and watch.

And that's sort of what you do reading this book. Stand on the sidelines and watch Charlie stand on the sidelines, (although most of the time he seems to imagine himself more guilty of this sin than his actions call for.) There are times when you want to outright cheer for him, times when you want to whack him upside the head, and times when you just want to hug him. The honesty of his letters have you seeing him as a friend by page 15. It's amazing.

Now for my one rant and one super specific but personally relateable moment.

Rant:

This book is "An original publication of MTV books." Now that in itself is not so bad. (If you can manage to put aside for a moment the "how the hell does the same group of people somehow behind both this beautiful novel and Jackass?!") What's bad is that I think that this deserves SO MUCH better than to be advertised as such. This novel is stunning, independent of the author's youth and apparent hipness. (His first film premiered at Sundance! He MUST be cool!) It should be grouped with, as it has been by reviewers, other acknowledged greats in the world of "coming of age literature" A Seperate Peace especially, it reminded me of Knowles in some ways from the very beginning.

Instead, it is included on a page advertisement at the back of the book with the huge boldfaced title Don't even pretend you won't read more. Other advertised titles include: Generation S.L.U.T. "A brutal feel up session with today's sex crazed teens" and A Hip-Hop Story "Words become powerful weapons as two MCs fight to be #1."

The one liner offered for this work of unguarded honesty is " Standing on the fringes offers a unique perspective on life. But sometimes you've got to see what it looks like from the dance floor." (Sounds like the tag line from a horrible teen movie, or even a bad action flick where the "dance floor" is a battleground to save the city. Enter Neal's movie announcer voice here: "One teen. One way. One de-sire!")

The facing page is headlined Your attitude. Your style. MTV Books: Totally your type. And includes Cruel Summer, the first in the Fast Girls, Hot Boys series!

I am offended for Charlie's sake. I feel that his dignity as a near perfect character has been reduced. That his struggle has been rendered mainstream and hip. His honesty has been commercialized. I am insulted for him, and for the author, who forgiving his "hipness" has produced something here deserving of something more genuine than this. It makes me angry, and I had to say something about it.

Super Specific Relateable Moment:

OR

This blog has become a blog about reading books about reading books:

Charlie says that his favorite book is always the one that he just read. I feel like I have something of the same mentality. While I don't love every book equally, or allow each thing that I read to eclipse those that came before it, I am not what you might call a discerning critic. I just love to read, and I just love books. Even books with things that really bother me, I enjoy the act of reading them, the world that they create, the way that they make me think. Even books that I can see have little to no redeeming value in terms of culture of literature or knowledge, or books with vapid and annoying characters. (Something Borrowed comes to mind.) I like them. I find something in them to enjoy, to make the time worthwhile. Often I can see the criticisms that others present, but that's not enough to make me say that a book is out and out bad.

For example: who liked Franzen's The Corrections anyway? It's EVERYWHERE or at least it was, but I don't know anyone that has anything all that wonderful to say about it. When Karen and Dan, who are the two harshest critics of that one, come up with all the reasons that they did not enjoy it, I can see their points. And while I did not think that it was worthy of all the praise that it apparently got from somewhere (was that somewhere Oprah?) I enjoyed it as I was reading it. While the whole was lacking, I found parts of it charming. Had I read it while keeping this blog, I would have found at least some nice things to say about it.

This is why I couldn't be a book reviewer, despite my reading speed and love of books and bookstores. People have frequently suggested that I could make a career out of reading that way, but I think that becomes more difficult when you honestly like the majority of what you read, and when you read fast enough, and obsessively enough to not resent time spent on less than perfect books.

Charlie's teacher tells him, when giving him The Fountainhead, "Be skeptical about this one. It's a great book. But try to be a filter, not a sponge." (page 165). Charlie ends his next letter with "The Fountainhead is a very good book. I hope I am being a filter." (page 167) That's me.

That being said, please remember that the only bad thing I even maybe had to say about this book is that MTV is marketing it in a way that is beneath it's worth. This is one that you really should read. Really.

"And all the books that you've read have been read by other people. And all the songs that you've loved have been heard by other people. And that girl that's pretty to you is pretty to other people. And you know that if you looked at these facts when you were happy, you would feel great because you are describing 'unity'" (page 96)

I'll finish this by saying a clear and loving thank you to the wonderful Jack for taking the time to recommend a good one. Sorry it took so long for me to blog it. I hope that the commentary is up to the standards of a book you hold so dear. I suppose that it probably can't be, but at least I tried. I loved it more than I can say here too I think.

And because there's no better way to end it,

"So if this does end up being my last letter, please believe that things are good with me, and even when they're not, they will be soon enough.

And I will believe the same about you." (page 213)

A Prayer For Owen Meaney

A Prayer For Owen Meaney
by John Irving
c. 1989
Random House: New York
617 pages

I picked this one up Barnes & Noble about a week ago. It was on the "Summer Reading" table. Someone, I don't remember who or when, told me that I would like John Irving, and I am seriously susceptible to the impulse book buy, so I picked it up. You have to love it when an impulse buy works out this well.

This is a beautiful, powerful, wonderful novel. It's tragic, but parts of it are extraordinarily funny. The characters are real, beautifully developed, flawed, lovable. They, more than anything, are what makes this book. I couldn't put it down, which means that it was a very good thing that I was left in the Oklahoma City airport for about seven hours on Sunday, because this took much longer to read that I imagined when I started. But it's wonderful and well worth it.

So now, added to that already lifetime long list of books that I want to read, is more Irving. If someone (maybe even the person that recommended him in the first place) would like to direct me to one that they think I would particularly enjoy, that would be ideal. It seems that there are a fair number of options. The Cider House Rules and The World According to Garp being the ones that I recognize, which doesn't really make them more or less likely to be next. (Unless they happen to be on a display table at Barnes & Noble.)

Basic overview of the story, John Wheelwright, our narrator, is a New Hampshire native, the illegitimate son of a woman who can trace her lineage back further than the founding fathers of their small town, all the way to the Mayflower. (Or at least his grandmother can, his mother doesn't seem to care overmuch.) John's best friend is Owen Meaney, the only child of a couple that owns a granite quarry, something like the family from "the wrong side of the tracks." Owen is an extraordinarily bright boy, with an even more extraordinarily strange voice, and his own unique set of ideas about the world around him, particularly religion. The book follows the two of them from around age 10 through their twenties, from the 50s to the early 60s. We hear about their exploits in the form of flashbacks, from John, now living in Canada in the late 80s.

This book deserves better than spoilers, so I'm not going to give you any, even things that happen in the beginning. But if somebody would please read it, or direct me to somebody who has, that would be great, because I would love to talk about it.

A couple of things that this book made me think about:

The one thing that pissed me off at the beginning of the novel was the author's tendency to tell you something about a character related to an event that is yet to happen in the narration, and follow it with some form of the phrase "as you shall see..." I suppose that the fact that this bothered me so, (I remember thinking, "I hope that he doesn't do THAT for the entire novel.") reveals my general attitude about foreshadowing as a literary device, which is basically that about 80% of the time, it sucks.

My thought on foreshadowing is this: there is a difference between foreshadowing and a self inflicted spoiler, but in my experience, few authors seem to know it. I don't want to know what's going to happen 100 pages too early, and if I do, I don't always see the point in continuing to read. I mean really, leave something to be discovered. (This is different than books where you know the ending, but you want the backstory. The "how did we get from THERE to HERE?!" kind of novel. Those are occasionally wonderful. This book has some elements of that in it as well, and that aspect is well done. You have to know what's coming, but you just don't see how.)

I think that well done foreshadowing should be transparent only after the event that it was suggesting takes place. The kind of writing that makes you look back at the earlier text and think, "My GOD! I totally should have seen that coming!" not, "Yeah, I totally saw THAT coming."

This book is not really guilty of that. There are a couple of things that I saw coming a mile away, and some things that I didn't see coming at all. Either way, the "as you shall see" bothered me, and got me thinking about that, so you get to read it since I'm not giving up any plot.

Another thing that annoyed me at first, to represent Owen's very odd voice, everything he every says is written in caps. I mean really, is that necessary?

Turns out, yes it is. It stopped pissing me off pretty quickly because I found myself able to hear him in a way that I never could have otherwise. Able to imagine how much the things he said must have stood out, how startled people would have been the first time they heard his voice. So annoying at first, but turns out perfect. Another reason, when reading and writing, to give something a try, even if it seems wrong initially.

I'm going to wrap up here with a passage. The point is that there are some really beautiful passages in this book. Thoughts on faith and God and America and a number of other topics that made me stop and think: just beautiful and elegant collections of words. Here's one of them, Owen Meaney (in his caps) on the death of Marilyn Monroe,

"'SHE WAS JUST LIKE OUR WHOLE COUNTRY - NOT QUITE YOUNG ANYMORE, BUT NOT OLD EITHER; A LITTLE BREATHLESS, VERY BEAUTIFUL, MAYBE A LITTLE STUPID, MAYBE A LOT SMARTER THAN SHE SEEMED. AND SHE WAS LOOKING FOR SOMETHING - I THINK SHE WANTED TO BE GOOD. LOOK AT THE MEN IN HER LIFE - JOE DIMAGGIO, ARTHUR MILLER, MAYBE THE KENNEDYS. LOOK HOW GOOD THEY SEEM! LOOK HOW DESIRABLE SHE WAS! THAT'S WHAT SHE WAS: SHE WAS DESIRABLE. SHE WAS FUNNY AND SEXY - AND SHE WAS VULNERABLE, TOO. SHE WAS NEVER QUITE HAPPY, SHE WAS ALWAYS A LITTLE OVERWEIGHT. SHE WAS JUST LIKE OUR WHOLE COUNTRY... MARILYN MONROE WAS ALWAYS LOOKING FOR THE BEST MAN - MAYBE SHE WANTED THE MAN WITH THE MOST INTEGRITY, MAYBE SHE WANTED THE MAN WITH THE MOST ABILITY TO DO GOOD. AND SHE WAS SEDUCED, OVER AND OVER AGAIN - SHE GOT FOOLED, SHE WAS TRICKED, SHE GOT USED, SHE WAS USED UP. JUST LIKE THE COUNTRY- THE COUNTRY WANTS A SAVIOR. THE COUNTRY IS A SUCKER FOR POWERFUL MEN WHO LOOK GOOD. WE THINK THEY'RE MORALISTS AND THEN THEY JUST USE US. THAT'S WHAT'S GOING TO HAPPEN TO YOU AND ME,' said Owen Meaney. 'WE'RE GOING TO BE USED.'" (page 431)

There are others, some maybe even better, although that one particularly struck me. Anyway, it's a beautiful book, and if you've read it, let's talk about it. If not, it's worth the time to read it, even if it takes longer than you think, even if you don't have a whole day to spend reading in the sunny OKC ariport. Right.

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
by Italo Colvino
Translated from the Italian by William Weaver
c. 1979, 1981
Harcourt, Inc.: San Diego
260 pages

First of all, I have to apologize for the length of time taken to read this one. A whole week is way too long for me both as a reader and a new blogger. Alas, I was distracted this week by several events. An unexpected and glorious visit from some friends took up Wednesday, a night that I had set aside for reading. (And I wouldn't change that for the world.) On top of that, the research that I am doing at work seems to have found the beginnings of something that might be exciting (I say this with thinly guarded optimism). Therefore, I have been reading, but reading journal articles that hopefully help me frame what we have found in the context of the other research that exists on the topic (and in all the other slightly related areas that I got sidetracked to, because I am like that, and I can get pretty much anything right here at my desk. I love the National Library of Medicine.)

Anyway, assuming that most people don't care to read all the details of my thoughts on various articles from medical journals, we'll leave that out until I actually write a book about it.

To the book. I love this book. It is a book for readers. It is a book about the art of reading, the experience of reading and how greatly it can vary. It is about attitudes that people bring to reading and the essential purity and impurity of books. Loverly.

"The book should be the written counterpart of the unwritten world; it's subject should be what does not exist and cannot exist except when written, but whose absence is obscurely felt by that which exists in its own incompleteness." (page 171-172) Beautiful.

Chapter One of this novel (if it can really be called a novel) includes a passage that sucks me in each and every time; it is so perfect. A trip to the bookstore in which you (for the book is written in the second person, addressed to a "Reader") are assaulted by the army of books there waiting there. As a reader and a lover of bookstores, I find myself facing this challenge each time I walk into Barnes and Noble carrying both my extensive curiosity and my meager finances and time. I think that here, the challenge of leaving the bookstore with any of the money I came in with is beautifully captured. An excerpt:

"...but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First... Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too. Eluding these assaults, you come up to the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out: the Books You've Been Planning to Read For Ages, the Books You've Been Hunting For Years Without Success, the Books Dealing With Something You're Working On At The Moment, the Books You Want To Own So They'll Be Handy Just In Case, the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer... the Books that Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified. Now you have been able to reduce the countless embattled troops to an array that is, to be sure, very large, but still calculable in a finite number; but this relative relief is then undermined by the ambush of the Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time To Reread and the Books You've Always Pretended To Have Read And Now It's Time To Sit Down and Really Read Them... and so on. (pages 5-6)

Really, sometimes I wonder how I ever make it out of there alive.

The structure of this novel is fascinating. In it, the "Reader" starts, and is interrupted in the reading of, 10 other novels, which are reproduced as he reads them. Alternating chapters include the narration of events between these reading, the finding and losing of the books, and his relationship with the "Other Reader" a young woman named Ludmilla. (He meets her in the bookstore, is there anyone else out there that is always hoping to meet someone new in a bookstore, it seems such a great place to meet people, and yet I never talk to anyone. blah.) The story is rounded out with an extremely complicated cast of other readers, writers and manipulators of books.

Each of the ten novels is interrupted at a moment of suspense. This creates an interesting effect, because like the character of the reader, I find myself wanting to hunt down these books and read the rest of them, just to find out what happens next. Of course, they don't exist, and the stories here are, alas, perpetually unfinished. (If you are someone who needs endings, this is not the book for you.)

More powerful however, is the commentary in the narrative chapters that talks about the nature of reading. Here I found many moments that resonated with me, explanations for why one is a reader, what one hopes to find, and does find, in books. The contrast of the hope embodied by some readers with the resignation of others, the escapeism of some readers contrasted with others who use reading as a way of being more intimately connected to the world. It really is a commentary on the diversity and humanity of the experience of reading. And also on the nature of novels as existing in some intersection between what is and what's not. I could quote passages for pages and pages here, but I think you should all just go and read the book. Because the point is made therein that reading is necessarily, in some ways at least, a solitary process, and me telling you about it will just not be equivalent.

Speaking of reading alone, this afternoon as I read the final chapters, I found myself very sincerely wishing that I was fluent in Italian so that I could read the original. This book is, among other wonderful things, filled with a variety of complex words and sentence structures. I am sure that the translator has put very real effort into finding the closest equivalents, but I am also sure that a book written by the word lover that Calvino certainly is loses more in the translation than other works might, simply because the complexity of the language suggests, at least to me, that much of the word choice was very deliberate, and therefore, impossible to really translate, since languages often provide only the most approximate or cumbersome equivalents for words that are beautiful in the original. But alas, I am not sure when I will have time to learn the Italian (or any of the other languages that would open worlds of great books in the original language...) But reading through a translator is like reading with someone else. I'm not sure I like it. Alas

Still, if you are a lover of books and the potential embodied in the act of reading, and not a lover of neat endings, go out and get this one. It's involved and fascinating, parts of it sensual somehow almost to the point of physicality. In the moments in which I was reading it, it totally owned me.

"What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space." (page 156)

Perfect.

Walking a Literary Labyrinth

Walking a Literary Labyrinth:
A Spirituality of Reading
by Nancy M. Malone
c. 2003
Riverhead Books: New York
208 pages

This is another bargain book buy. I found this on the shelf at Barnes and Noble shortly after I got the Barnes and Noble membership card: a little plastic enabler that lives in my wallet, crying out with an innocent sounding voice, "If you don't spend at least $250 dollars at Barnes and Noble this year, you got ripped off!" (Is there anyone out there worried about my ability to spend $250 at Barnes and Noble?)

Anyway, I digress. I picked this up because I was at the time shopping for something to inform my thinking about asking God for some help in changing some of my less empowering habits (still asking). My mother frequently tells me that I need to meditate, that I move too fast and do too much. (Actually, this is not only my mother, but she is the most insistent, although Andrew is catching up.) The jacket of the book promised a discussion of how reading is like mediation, like praying, and how reading can inform us on our quest to selfhood.

As a good reader, and a very bad meditator, I decided to give it a shot.

The book was written by a Catholic nun and an avid reader, who clearly sees that both her religious and internal life have been greatly informed by the books that she has read over the course of her life. While some parts seemed to drag more than a little bit, and some of the recommended reading is probably a little too focused on the theological for my current taste, the book as a whole spoke to me at a clear and personal level. She clearly has an understanding of the reading experience that is similar to my own.

Reading is for me, as well as for the author, a deeply personal, emotional and seeking practice. The books that I have read inform my thinking about other things in life, even when the connections are far from clear. Being a reader is very much part of my humanity, and of the way that I strive to become increasingly human. Perhaps the way that I most powerfully and successfully strive for a greater understanding of the world around me.

It was reading this book today that made me think of turning this summer's reading into a conversation with whomever wanted to take part, or at least a conversation with myself. The idea is presented in the book that reading is like a conversation, and I hope that for myself, writing this continues to be like a conversation, even if there are no other participants beside myself and the texts that I encounter. I have found, over the years, that writing and reading a journal is one of the clearest ways to converse with yourself. Especially given the fact that the constant and gradual change we undergo can be hard to see from the inside and in any single moment, but the contrast in our thinking at far separated moments can be stunning. Right.

Anyway. The book talks about reading in a couple of ways that I found moving and true in a very personal way. From the beginning, the author speaks of reading as a questioning and seeking process, and not just reading non-fiction as a questing for knowledge, but also reading fiction as a questing for understanding human nature and ourselves. She speaks of reading as a method for seeking our best selves, what we are meant to be. She speaks in one chapter of the quest for authenticity and the way in which reading informs that. The endless cycle of questioning, and therefore reading, and therefore questioning, and therefore reading, that pushes me forward as someone that really, truly, deeply loves books.

"We have questions about what we should do, how we should act. And we can make decisions that are right, based on objective value, on the truly good. But we make erroneous and bad ones too. Following the powerful impulses of passion, laziness, selfishness, weakness, prejudice, we choose what we want even when it is not good for us, regardless of the good of others. In all these ways, we and the characters we read about achieve, fail at, or refuse the self-transcendence implicit in our questioning. We zigzag between the authenticity that is achieved in self-transcendence and the inauthenticity of choosing or settling for less than we can be. . . But our questioning - our questing - is unending, unrestricted. There is always more to know and more to understand, more that we can become. And so we keep on reading. And so each book, no matter how fine, impels us to yet another." (33-34)

I love this, and were the rest of the book to have been unreadable, that passage alone would have justified the trip to the bookstore. But she also claims points that I find relate very centrally to my vision of reading and my vision of God. Claiming that you find both the books and the readers that you are meant to commune with at the time that you need them (something that I have always believed about more than reading, for my life is nothing if not charmed.)

One of the things that I found interesting, is that the author, as someone who is in tune enough with the spirituality of reading, is not someone who can read anywhere. She claims to be jealous of other people who can find some measure of peace in any environment by reading. "the stillness, silence, solitude and focused attention that reading offers is to be prized; it may be the closest some of us get to a spirit of contemplation in the hurried, noisy, scattered lives we lead. A good book can create a little hermitage for some people anywhere..." (73)

And I am one of those people. Someone who can find peace in a good book in the most dire of circumstances, the most tired of days, the most beaten of emotions. Reading for me is deeper and more relaxing than any meditation. And that is why I do it with such enthusiasm. Reading is a powerful, spiritual, sensual experience. One that compels me forward to more and more. One that makes me feel more aware, more connected, and more alive. I am not sure what more I could hope for from meditation, what more my mother hopes I might find.

Sister Malone ends the book with another passage that I found particularly touching.

"Now when an author puts the first word on paper or screen, she commits an act of hope. And every time we open a book, so do we. We hope for all kinds of things from a book - pleasure, knowledge, insight, intimacy, greater understanding of others and ourselves, beauty. But reading can also, in a deeper and more inchoate fashion, give us hope." (175-176)


It is with that hope in mind that I will read my summer away. Each book I open, I hope to find something there that I have never seen before, even in those that I have already read (as my next selection If On a Winter's Night a traveler is). That's the wonderful thing about books, there is something new in them each time, because they are, each one, a conversation. A conversation between the words on the page and the person that you as the reader are at that single moment. Anyone that has a favorite book that they have read countless times, recognizes this. For me it is poignent both in the experience of rereading and finding newness in the most familiar stories written by others and in rereading and finding new perspective on my own story through my journals. The words themselves may be the same, but the context and the emotion and the background can be so different as to give the same words new meaning, new clarity, new hope.

And that, I suppose, is why I am such a reader. It is as Malone says with the closing words of her epilogue.

"You do what you were made to do. Some of us were made to read and write. Thanks be to God." (181)