bookworming

Buzz: A Year of Paying Attention

2010-10-16T14:34:00.004-04:00

Buzz: A Year of Paying Attention

By Katherine Ellison

2010

Voice

282 pages

In Buzz: A Year of Paying Attention, investigative reporter Katherine Ellison commits a year of her life to learning more about ADHD and to figuring out how to best help her son, who suffers from the disorder and whom she has given the pseudonym "Buzz" for the purposes of the book.

Now I have to say here that I am completely over the gimmick "a year of _______" as a device for getting oneself a book deal. It was creative, perhaps, at one point in the past, but now it is done. (Unless I can come up with something to do for a year and get a nice book deal. Other Years: A Year of Reading "A Year of" Books by Maggie Reid Schneider.)

That being said, Ellison's project here is somewhat less gimmicky than the rest. She's not plowing through a cookbook or randomly adopting ancient customs. Instead, she appears to be making a commitment to do something that is completely NECESSARY for the life of her family. And good for her for being able to recognize that and put some other things aside to be able to do it. Of course, I do believe that when one makes a decision to become a parent, one make a commitment to spending a lifetime paying attention to what your child needs from you, or at least a couple of decades. In part, what distinguishes Ellison from some other parents taking on this mighty struggle is a more flexible career path and a well padded checkbook. Still, her work here might be a particularly good resource for other parents struggling with some of these issues.

I think that this book might be particularly helpful, because Buzz seems a good example of a child that is severely affected by ADD. He is not an ambiguous case. Buzz is suffering; Buzz's whole family is suffering. In creating an honest portrayal of her challenges with her son, Ellison paints a picture that I think will be both convincing to some that question the validity of ADD as a real diagnosis, and helpful to some parents that are unsure if their child really fits the bill. ADD is, unfortunately, both under and over treated. There are some children that get slapped with the label that probably just need more recess time and a smaller classroom but instead get stimulants, and there are others that are clearly mightily struggling, and though they need help desperately, they get only detentions. In this book we see a clear picture of a child with a real and crippling problem, and thankfully, learn about some of the ways to help him.

Ellison also does well to turn her eye as an investigative reporter on the treatments, tests and organizations that she encounters on her journey. Her writing about their decisions about which tests and treatments to try and which to forgo is particularly compelling because is able to come at these encounters from both ways: as a parent desperate for answers and as a reporter looking to paint a balanced and accurate picture. In doing so, she skips some thing that have been suggested as miracle treatments, and chooses to do some that are not entirely proven. Her honest reflection on the challenges facing a parent in a world where few of the tests and treatments are validated and almost all are very expensive is an interesting read.

I did struggle with Ellison's waffling about her own diagnosis. She has also been diagnosed with ADD, and while perhaps that is part of her problem, I agree with the later assessments that anxiety seems to be her central issue. She is a worrier, and while her concerns about the fate of her children are central to the theme of the book, her concerns about global warming and plastic pollution and the end of the world are reiterated a little too often for my taste.

Overall, Buzz is an interesting read, if not for everyone. It's certainly worthwhile for parents that are struggling with attention issues in their own children, and probably for adults that have been lead to wonder if they might have "adult ADD" themselves. It's probably also worthwhile for educators and those of us, myself included, with an academic interest in attention. It would likely be useful for some people who are unsure if they "believe in ADD," although I suppose those that need it for that purpose are unlikely to pick it up. Overall though, I'm not sure that this is a story that would be compelling to the general reader, so unless you have a specific interest, you could likely give it a pass.

Full Disclosure: I received my copy of this book for free through the Early Reviewers program at LibraryThing.

Catching Fire

2010-09-22T21:04:00.004-04:00

Catching Fire
by Suzanne Collins
2009
Scholastic Press, New York
391 pages
ISBN: 978-0-439-02349

So last Friday, I was feeling a little bit tired and not overly motivated when I got home at the end of the day. Andrew and I talked about going to a movie, but really, I just wasn't in the mood. We decided to save the money and go get a DVD from the library, but I couldn't find anything on the massive wall of library movies that seemed appealing either.

I was standing there, in a funk, when I realized that I had gotten an email to tell me that my requested copy of Her Fearful Symmetry had arrived. I went to grab it off the reserve shelf, and found next to it on the shelf, also with my name on the slip, Chasing Fire. And then I knew what I was in the mood for.

I checked it out and brought it home. I climbed in bed, my wonderful husband made me tea, and I read the whole thing, cover to cover, with breaks only to refill beverages and such. After that, I was decidedly no longer in a funk.

I do have to say that there are few pleasures in life as wonderous as a long stretch of time in bed with tea and a good book. Others include: a long stretch of time in a hammock with iced tea and a good book and cozy snow days when you can spend a long stretch of time curled up inside with hot chocolate and a good book. There are other non-beverage-and-good-book related great pleasures in life, but this is a book blog. Let's summarize by saying that I agree wholeheartedly with Carlos Ruiz Zafon, who said, "reading is up there with sex and chocolate in the list of the Top 10 ways to enjoy your time on this planet."

But about this book specifically. The wise and wonderful Jack O'Brien sent me after The Hunger Games Trilogy a few weeks ago, around when the third book came out. I read the first one, and headed to Barnes and Noble to buy the others. But both Chasing Fire and the third installment, Mockingjay, are currently only available in hardcover, and I have made a deal with myself that severely limits hardcover buying. So it's the library waiting list for me. I wish that I could say that I have been waiting patiently, for patience is a virtue. Alas, I am not blessed with it.

This is a wonderful, exciting, suspenseful book that won't disappoint anyone that loved The Hunger Games. It's thrilling. It's engrossing. The characters are powerful and dynamic. The plot is simply unputdownable. And while the language is not anything to call your literature professor over, especially when coming on the heels of The Book Thief, this is more than just a story. It's challenging. It forces you, while you are gripped in the tale, to ask yourself hard questions, like when rebellion against evil is noble and when it is foolhardy. Of course, you don't ask yourself for too long, because you are too anxious to know if there is a rebellion. But that question, and some others (what it means to be in love and what and who is worth dying for, for example) will stick with you. The deeply disturbing situations involved will likely stick with you as well. The Hunger Games is a decidedly dystopian series. I can say that I have deeply enjoyed these books... I can not say that they have left me with pleasant dreams.

If you like fiction and could use a good page turner, read this. Well, read The Hunger Games first, and then read this. And then you'll probably read Mockingjay... and if you buy it, once you're finished you should send it to me, because the library hasn't delivered yet, and I'm dying here.

I can promise that I'll return it quickly.

NOTE: I have not made a deliberate choice to read a ton of "Young Adult" fiction in the last couple of weeks. Really what's happened is that I've been told certain books are good, and been surprised to find that the little sticker on the side tells me that the library shelves them as "Teen." I'm still organizing my thoughts on what that category means.

The Book Thief

2010-09-13T22:56:00.006-04:00

The Book Thief
by Marcus Zusak
2005
Alfred A. Knopf, New York
550 pages
ISBN: 978-0-375-84220-7

I can't remember who told me that I should read The Book Thief. I wish that I did, so that I could thank them. It was a nameless, "Oh, I've been meaning to read that." That made me request it from the CPL.

Seriously, this book is beautiful. It is a powerful, poetic novel, written from the perspective of Death. Yes, that's "capital D" Death. He informs us that he doesn't carry a scythe, and only wears a long black cloak when it's cold. He is, in a myriad of other ways, not what you might expect. Gentle, careful, exhausted.

I've started this next paragraph four times. I can't seem to do it justice. What is this book about? I haven't been able to find words that don't seem oversimplistic and dull compared to what you'll find on these pages, and so I've decided not to try, I'm going to let the narrator tell you.

"It's the story of one of those perpetual survivors - an expert at being left behind.
It's just a small story really, about, among other things:
*A girl
*Some words
*An accordionist
*Some fanatical Germans
*A Jewish fist fighter
*And quite a lot of thievery" (page 5)

Zusak does a wonderful job of giving Death a voice: a language and grammar all his own. The language is delightful, musical; it swings effortlessly from subtle to cutting. Death is untethered to time, but attached to colors. While the story has a beginning, middle and end, you will not find pure linear narration here. We know parts of end from the very beginning. It's not subtle. Characters you love will die. This is Nazi Germany after all, and Death is your narrator. He knows this story because he was around a lot.

Yes, characters you love will die, and though you have been warned, by Death himself, you will be surprised. You might find yourself, as I did, trying to cry quietly so as not to wake your sleeping bed mate. It's crushingly sad, no matter how you are warned.

Really though, you should read this. There are hundreds of reviews, if you need more convincing. I am not alone in my praise. You can find the plot summary on the back of the book, or Amazon, or whatever book-summarizing and reviewing website you choose, but it won't tell you much. The book thief steals because she loves books, and gradually, because she comes to understand their power. And in the end, this book, both in form and in tale, is about the power of words over us silly humans.

NOTE: This book has been labeled/marketed/shelved in your local library and bookstore as "Young Adult/Teen/Children" I have thoughts on that. They're going to come up in a later blog entry. I will only say here that if you let that dissuade you, you are doing yourself a disservice.

On Writing

2010-07-29T00:55:00.003-04:00

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
by Stephen King
2000
291 pages
ISBN: 978-1-4391-5681-0

I had read most of this book before, at an earlier time when I was thinking about writing in kind of an abstract and distant sort of way, but coming back from last weekend's trip to the AMSA Writer's Institute, I decided that perhaps I should pick it up again. I remembered it containing some good stuff, so it seemed like not a terrible place to revisit.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I like Stephen King. I am not saying that everything that the man has ever written is brilliant (and what's clear in this book is that neither is he), but he can tell a darn good story. Perhaps interesting, (and perhaps not) is that I like him best at the extremes: his short fiction and The Dark Tower. Either way, if you feel the need to quarrel about the idea that the man has talent, I suppose we can, but that's not the point here. The point is that I think that he has enough talent to be willing to get some tips, and I find him charming enough to have actually enjoyed reading them.

This is a good book. Not for everyone to be sure, but good. He makes excellent points about the process of writing that I'm sure have helped more than a few other writers get their work off the ground, but he is also honest about the limitations of what you can get from a book. He can't make you good if you are bad (and neither can anything else), he can't give you the ideas or really tell you where they come from, and it's going to be a lot of work.

But I am fine with all of that. At a moment like this, in my life, On Writing carries with it some reminders that I needed. About the work part, and the time part, and the drafting freely first and then editing part, and the admitting that I am writing, at least in part, to Andrew, so I should let him read things some of the time.

A lot of what's here is only going to be valuable to writer's of fiction (and readers as well.) King is interesting in his approach to character development and plot. He says he doesn't plan the plot beforehand, and is sometimes surprised by what his characters do. I suppose there's nothing to do but believe him, since I am almost always surprised by what his characters do. Still, some of the ideas, especially about drafting and editing ("2nd Draft = 1st Draft -10%") will likely work across genres, and I think that his analogy of the toolbox is universal.

And his notes on commitment, on the process, on the worthwhile effort, and the joy it brings, it's enough to remind you all over again why you might want to.

Two observations, neither really about writing that I especially liked:
On purgatory, I couldn't agree more:
"If I have to spend time in purgatory before going on to one place or another, I guess I'll be all right as long as they have a lending library (if there is, it's probably stocked with nothing by novels by Danielle Steel and Chicken Soup books...)" p. 104

On really smart people, I see it all the damn time:
"No one can be as intellectually slothful as a really smart person." p. 143

But really, it is the writing about writing that shines here. The notes on the process, on the parts of his life that contributed to becoming a writer, on taking rejection with your head held high, and on really really working at it make this a worthwhile read for those of us that want to write.

"you can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up." p. 270

And so should you fellow writers. So should you.

World Without End

2010-07-04T22:27:00.003-04:00

World Without End
by Ken Follett
2007
1014 pages
ISBN: 978-0-451-22499-6
Purchased at Bookman/Bookwoman

The sequel to Follett's excellent The Pillars of the Earth lived up to expectations. This is an excellent historical epic that reads much quicker than its thousand pages would suggest. Follett again sets his tale primarily in Kingsbridge, England, but this time we see it in the 14th century. He succeeds in painting a vivid picture of the challenges of life in this distant past with well placed details. The novel follows the lives of multiple characters, but Follett is very successful in interweaving their stories and passing from one to another quickly enough to allow the reader to keep track of all of them but not so quickly that the story seems fragmented. Overall the book is a delightful read. Highly recommended.

July 2010 Reads

2010-07-04T22:18:00.004-04:00

So now I'm technically a graduate student. Which means way less class/study time than was required by medical school. Obviously, that time should be spent reading, reading, reading away. Here's the list for July:

July 1-4, 2010

World Without End
by Ken Follett
2007
1014 pages
ISBN: 978-0-451-22499-6
Purchased at Bookman/Bookwoman

Purge: Rehab Diaries

2010-01-12T22:06:00.004-05:00

Purge: Rehab Diaries
by Nicole Johns
2009
274 pages
ISBN: 978-1-58005-274-0
Cincinnati Public Library

I got this book out of the Cincinnati Public Library when I saw it on the "New Books" shelf. That particular library visit was during Brain and Behavior II (which included pretty much all of the psychiatry that we're going to see). I thought that this might be a useful read because while I think that I know a decent amount about most types of psychiatric treatment, I didn't feel like I really knew much of anything about the treatment of eating disorders.

For the purpose of learning more about inpatient eating disorder treatment, this book was certainly useful for me. I think that it was also useful for me in that it is forcing me to face the reality that I actually have somewhat limited sympathy for eating disordered patients. I find them frustrating. I feel this way even though I believe that their disease is a real one. There were points in this book, when Johns sneaks off to purge after a meal, and I literally wanted to reach into the book and slap her upside the head. This is a woman who has serious heart arrhythmia at the age of 22 due to her eating disorder. She really needs to stop vomiting. Really. Now.

Now as someone that is very seriously considering a career in child and adolescent psychiatry, this is obviously an issue that I am going to have to work on, so I have to admit that it is useful to be able to acknowledge it at this point in my life. I'm not sure really what I'm going to do about it, but I guess admitting that you have a problem is the first step, and I admit that I really have a problem here, and that deep down inside, I not-so-secretly want to feed those girls a cheeseburger. I think they'll feel better.

To be fair, I think that part of my struggle is that Johns expresses some of the stereotypes that so often go with eating disorders that I personally think undermine my ability to take them seriously as medical disease. She describes herself as a perfectionist and an overachiever that is looking for control in her life, over and over again. I know that perfectionism is linked to eating disorders and on and on, but I am an upper middle class, over-achieving, perfectionist, white woman from the east coast, notorious for putting unreal expectations on herself. And seriously, I love a good cookie. Too much really. I need to stop with the cookies.

There is a part of me that realizes that because I fit the demographic of this disease but find it so foreign, so unimaginable, that should make the idea that it is genetic/medical/biochemical all the more legit. Because it's not just being a perfectionist. Really. And it's not just always wanting more from yourself. There is something else going on there. But the patients and doctors and general public so often attribute this disease to women taking control of the an area of their life that they can control when they feel that other parts of their life have gotten out of hand. I think that's a VERY bad way to think about it. Because, really, that description includes the words "something they CAN control" with regards to the eating/exercising/purging habits of these women. And I have to believe, if I want to have sympathy for them, if I want to ever be able to develop into someone that hopes to be able to deal these patients in any sort of therapeutic way, that it is not something that they can truly control. I have to believe that they have lost control and that the goal of treatment is to help them find it. Because if starving themselves or throwing up after all their meals IS a choice, then I want to feed them a cheeseburger. With Bacon.

Johns does a good job of capturing that out of control feeling, and she does a decent job painting a picture of eating disorder treatment in a way that I think was useful for me to encounter. This is an adequate memoir for what she says in the prologue she is trying to accomplish, but as one of the recent crop of memoirs from people too young to be seriously writing memoirs, it's really middling.

That's not to say that reading this is not going to affect my thinking, because it has. It challenged me, but that is more because it made me realize something a little bit ugly in myself than because it is an outstanding piece of writing. Still, for what I got, I am grateful. The thought process that pops into my head listening to people describe their eating disordered behavior is different and downright mean when compared to that which is in my head during accounts of other psychiatric disorders. That's something that I am going to have to deal with, something that I am glad I can admit to myself now, while I have a long time to wrestle with it. Because if nothing else was clear in this book, these women need some help.

To Hellholes and Back

2010-01-10T22:41:00.003-05:00

To Hellholes and Back:
Bribes, Lies and the Art of Extreme Tourism
by Chuck Thompson
2009
321 pages
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8788-8

Chuck Thompson wants desperately to be the Chuck Klosterman of travel writing. He wants it so badly it hurts... to read.

Actually, that's maybe a bit harsh of an opening. Most of this book is readable in the "travel books are great for afternoons off when I don't want to make my brain tired" sort of way. Thompson travels to three places that are notorious for making travelers nervous: Democratic Republic of Congo, India and Mexico City. Those three sections are mostly a reasonably entertaining accounting of his adventures, with some heavy handed attempts at political and social commentary thrown in. Even when I agree with Thompson, and he makes some points here that I have been making for years, I wish that he would get back to the travel and stay away from the race relations. Such is life.

In the final section, Thompson takes it all to the last place he's afraid of, Disney World. Here he totally lost me, because at that point it's certainly not about travel anymore, and he doesn't have the skills to be a true culture writer. If you want to read this, you would likely do yourself a favor and skip that last section.

In the end, I suppose that I am not the world's greatest fan of travel writing. I tend to find it self-indulgent drivel in 99.9% of the cases. That's not to say that I don't enjoy it when I want to turn off my brain and think about being in exotic places, but it requires a specific mood and a specific time, and even then, I recognize that what I'm reading is just for funsies. This is a book that I would suggest you read if you feel an urgent need to be a tourist in the Congo (why?!), but otherwise, I'm sure there are better uses for your time.

Note: I received this book as an ARC for free from the publisher via the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. Apparently there's a law now that says I have to say that... You know, to prevent you from not realizing that my review is made all the more positive by the fact I didn't pay for the book. Imagine what it would say if I had ;-)

100 Books While I'm 27: January 2010

2010-01-09T19:48:00.009-05:00

Books Before this Point: (Doing Some Checking, Will be determined soon)

January 2010:

The Secret of Lost Things
by Sheridan Hay
2007
349 pages
ISBN: 978-0-385-51848-2

Match Day:
One Day and One Dramatic Year in the Lives of Three New Doctors
by Brian Eule
2009
272 pages
ISBN: 978-0-312-37784-7
Cincinnati Public Library

The Devil in the White City:
Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair That Changed America
by Erik Larson
2003
390 pages
ISBN: 978-0-375-72560-9

To Hellholes and Back:
Bribes, Lies and the Art of Extreme Tourism
by Chuck Thompson
2009
321 pages
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8788-8
ARC from LibraryThing Early Reviewers

Eternal on the Water
by Joseph Monninger
2010
344 pages
ISBN: 978-1-4391-6833-2
ARC from Barnes & Noble FirstLook
Anticipated Release: February 2010

Purge: Rehab Diaries
by Nicole Johns
2009
274 pages
ISBN: 978-1-58005-274-0
Cincinnati Public Library

The Pillars of the Earth
by Ken Follett
1989
973 pages
ISBN: 978-0-451-22524-5

Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story
by Chuck Klosterman
2005
237 pages
ISBN: 978-0-7432-6645-7

An Arsonist's Guide To Writers' Homes in New England

2009-12-12T23:51:00.006-05:00

An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England

by Brock Clarke

2007

303 pages

ISBN: 978-1-56512-551-3

So this book was recommended to me by Dan during my epic birthday recommend-a-thon. I admit that I had given it the once over a couple of times when it appeared in various bookstore displays, the title is clearly an eye-catcher, but I resisted the urge to purchase until I was gong wild with birthday money.

I want to say good things here about the Barnes and Noble manager that was working at the store I went to on my birthday. After getting recommendations from tons of friends, looking up a little more about the books that they had suggested, deciding which I was really dying to read, and making a list... I left said list on my desk. I went up to customer service and told him the title (or something close to the title) for 3 or 4 books that I was looking for and then, after we had walked around the store, hunting for and finding one of them on sale, 2 others that I managed to remember while we were looking. Not only did he find them all for me, but he told me NOT to buy his trade paperback copy of this book, because he was sure that I would be able to get the remaindered hardcover on the website for $5. Now I'm sure that it was obvious to him as we walked around and added to my enormous pile of books that I am the type of customer that Barnes and Noble wants to keep happy, but still, he didn't have to do that. And he certainly didn't have to come find me when I was browsing to give me a little slip of paper with the ISBN for the cheaper edition so that I would be able to find it right away when I went to the site. He was great. So thanks to him.

Anyway, I found some parts of this book extremely amusing, and others rather annoying. Overall, Clarke has succeeded in creating a cast of characters so wildly unlikable that they're interesting, headed by a protagonist who amazes you not in that he manages to mess up his own life so spectacularly, but more that he manages to do it so efficiently when he seems like such a "bumbler." Then Clarke takes these hapless, incapable, flawed people and places them a series of situations so insanely implausible, so absurd, that sometimes you can't help but shake your head in disbelief.

Yet most of it works. There are some things that don't, certainly; the dinner scene with Sams soon-to-be-ex-in-laws got past my last nerve for example, but most of it is really quite good. Perhaps a bit overplotted, and the turn towards tragedy at the end felt a little bit forced, but certainly worth it for the shiningly funny moments.

Apparently this is Clarke's 4th novel, at least according to the review that Dan sent with his recommendation. That reviewer thought that it seemed like a debut, and I have to agree... although for different reasons. For me this book was rough around the edges, but showed some real promise... the kind of thing that you expect from someone with raw talent who's just starting out. I'm not sure if Clarke, who apparently teaches just up the street, should take that as a compliment or an insult.

Coppola: A Periatric Surgeon In Iraq

2009-12-06T22:03:00.003-05:00

Coppola: A Pediatric Surgeon in Iraq
by Dr. Chris Coppola
2009
259 pages
ISBN: 978-0-9840531-1-7
ARC from LibraryThing Early Reviewers

For better or for worse, LibraryThing has pegged me as a reader of medical memoirs, and when one comes up in the Early Reviewers list, if I request it, you can bet that I'll get sent a copy. Since I joined a year an a half ago, I've gotten ARCs of Weekends at Bellevue, Brain Surgeon, and The Addict. I'm not complaining about this per say, especially since I would have wanted to read these books anyway, but I wish that they had also pegged me as the compulsive reader of fiction that I am, and sent me The Angel's Game and Last Night in Twisted River when those were on the list. I certainly will read and review every medical memoir they send my way for free, but there are other books that I want to read more and I hate to think that I don't get them because I've been pigeon-holed. Such is life.

That being said, Coppola: A Pediatric Surgeon in Iraq is one of the better medical memoirs I've read. In the book, Dr. Chris Coppola recounts his experiences during his two tours of duty in Iraq as a surgeon with the US Air Force. Coppola manages to achieve the perfect balance in his writing between the action of clinical cases and using his experiences to inform a discussion of the ethical and cultural issues he encountered and the challenges of military life.

Dr. Coppola's unique position as a specialist in pediatric surgery means he has a skill set sorely lacking in the current Iraqi medical system. Throughout both tours, he struggles to find balance between his compassion and sense of obligation to the young patients he encounters and the realities of his position, the position of the US military, and the medical treatment available in Iraqi hospitals outside of the American medical base. There are times when he fights hard for his patients when others disagree with his call, and times when he is forced to turn patients away. He makes a compelling argument for the role of pediatric specialists in war hospitals, especially given the rate of civilian casualties in the IED era. Dr. Coppola is not shy about calling the problems of military medicine to the forefront of our attention, while at the same time making it clear that he has found satisfaction in his service.

Overall, this is a strong memoir that calls to mind some important issues that come with our current presence in Iraq, many of which likely extend to our increasing presence in Afghanistan. It is a timely and important read, and one that I would certainly suggest to other people in the medical field and outside it.

Juliet, Naked

2009-11-29T22:14:00.004-05:00

Juliet, Naked
by Nick Hornby
2009
406 pages
ISBN: 978-1-59448-887-0
Cincinnati Public Library

I requested this from the library as soon as I got home from the bookstore where I saw it on the shelf. Thinking about it, that was a kind of blind optimism based on the fact that I liked Hornby's earliest books, the movies-made-them-famous High Fidelity and About a Boy. Since then, I have found my affection somewhat waning. How To Be Good was really only good. My thoughts on A Long Way Down are there for your perusal if you so choose, but can sum it up with the fact that I didn't like it enough to keep track of it. I either donated or lent it away to the big library in the sky, because that once owned copy is not on the shelf here now. As for his 2007 YAish novel Slam, it's so forgettable that I actually forgot that I read it. As in, when I saw it on the list of Hornby's books, I thought "Oh, I'll have to find a copy of that one," only to realize upon closer inspection that I had read it already. I know that I read a lot, but that is not a compliment.

Juliet, Naked bucks the trend. It is a true return to the Nick Hornby that I loved so long ago. This book is sweet and sarcastic with characters that are delightfully real and lovable for all their dramatic and obvious flaws. The characters are what this book is all about, and while you wonder what is going to happen, what you are really wondering is what is going to happen to them. The events here gain most of their significance from their effect on the people involved. The relationships between the characters are the real charm of this novel, especially the relationship between Tucker and his adorable son Jackson, which is a real highlight.

In Juliet, Naked Hornby does to the obsessive website creating song analyzing fan what he did to the obsessive record collector in High Fidelity, shows them all their warts and insanity, and leaves them human none the less. He does this well I suppose, although I found myself feeling bad for them (and perhaps a little scornful) in a distant sort of way as I read the book. Long after I finished I realized that I actually wrote my big term paper in high school on Adam Duritz of the Counting Crows as an American poet. Perhaps I should have related to them more (although I would certainly not spend my vacation on a tour of significant places in Duriz's life).

This is a charming and delightful read, and would be a pretty good introduction to Hornby for the uninitiated. It reminds us all that sometimes the people around us can see us far more clearly than we see ourselves, and maybe, sometimes we should listen to what they tell us.

The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil

2009-11-28T12:25:00.004-05:00

The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil
by George Saunders
2005
130 pages
ISBN: 978-1-59448-152-9

This book was suggested to me during my birthday recommendation blitz by Jack O'Brien. He gets credit for recommending several favorites, including The Perks of Being a Wallflower and The Gunslinger. (Which is the first book in Stephen King's Dark Tower series, I read the whole 7 books in like two and a half weeks. It might take you longer. I still recommend it)

Anyway, I knew the basic story of Phil, because Jack adapted it for the stage during his senior year in college, and I managed to make it down for a performance. That show was a lot of fun to watch, but I have to admit that some of the funniest parts of this book are the little details that don't translate well to the stage. For example, in the book, Phil's brain falls off its rack from time to time, while on the stage, Phil's brain seemed to remain contained within his cranium. Some actors just aren't willing to truly sacrifice for their craft.

I would say that this qualifies more as a novella than a novel. Easily read in a single day. That is probably the right format for Saunders hilariously irreverent and critical take on human nature. If this piece was much longer, the jokes might have gotten old or started to seem a little bit too absurd, but at 130 pages everything maintains the glow of clever and fun. I highly recommend a trip to Outer and Inner Horner for any fans of political satire, it'll be a short vacation for most readers, but one well worth the effort. You might just find yourself laughing out loud.

Nocturnes

2009-11-25T19:23:00.004-05:00

Nocturnes
by John Connolly
2006
471 pages
ISBN: 978-1-4165-3460-0

My previous experience with John Connolly's work has been nothing short of delightful. The Book of Lost Things is a wonderfully dark and chilling interpretation of the stories from our childhood. His recent offering, The Gates is a fresh and funny story about a young boy literally trying to stop all hell from breaking loose. While both of these books have been classified as "young adult," I imagine that is largely (solely) due to their pre-teen protagonists. (You would think that the idea that only children can enjoy books about children would have been blown out of the water by a certain wizard.) I think that neither of these is best suited to the younger set, and will continue to recommend both left and right to adult readers. In a recent review on LibraryThing, I compared the footnotes and humor in The Gates to the work of the late great Douglas Adams... and anyone who's read my notes on And Another Thing... knows that I consider that high praise indeed.

With that in mind, imagine my delight to find Nocturnes, Connolly's book of short stories, sitting all alone on the "Last Chance" super bargain table at Barnes and Noble when I walked in, on my birthday, gift cards blazing and on a mission to make up for months of serious book-buying restraint.

Nocturnes turned out not to be at all what I expected. It is as different from The Gates and The Book of Lost Things as the two are from each other, but also nearly as wonderful. The stories here are darker by far than I expected to encounter, but most are also quite gripping.

Many of the pieces here in this collection were originally written for BBC radio, and most are quite short. While some of these shorter pieces are particular gems, including "Mr. Pettinger's Daemon," "The New Daughter" and "Miss Froom, Vampire," others are less successful. Connolly shines most when he gives himself some room to work. The opening novella, "The Cancer Cowboy Rides" is one of the most deeply creepy pieces of writing I've read in some time. As in, I can't put it down even though it's 1:30am, better go check the locks, cuddle a little closer to the sleeping fiancee creepy. It's good stuff. "The Underbury Witches" was so much fun that I sat in the waiting room at the spa long long after my toenails were dry in order to finish it. "The Reflecting Eye" a novella featuring Charlie Parker (who apparently stars in many of Connolly's adult fiction), is entertaining enough that I found myself considering the idea of adding some of those to the ever growing TBR pile.

Overall, this collection is strong, if a little uneven. And it is not just the Maine setting of several of these stories that calls to mind the shorter works of Stephen King. I would say of Connolly's work here something very similar to what I've said about King's short fiction in the past (and I admit that I am an enthusiastic fan)... When he hits the nail on the head, it's glorious, creepy, you'll-be-thinking-about-it-for-days, eerie wonderfulness. And when he misses, he just misses, so it's still a good time. Overall, this is more fun than I've had off the bargain table in a while.

And Another Thing...

2009-11-18T22:37:00.005-05:00

November 13, 2009 - November 17, 2009
And Another Thing...
by Eoin Colfer
2009
275 pages
ISBN: 978-1-4013-2358-2

First, some background. Douglas Adams was an epically, uniquely talented and hilariously funny writer. Tragically, he died of a heart attack in 2001. I remember reading about his passing at the time and feeling a real sense of loss. I was a senior in high school at that point, and I loved his books (I still do.) For me it was the first time that I was aware of an author I truly adored passing away. I felt very sad and a little cheated. I think a lot of people did. Adams was only 49, and I am willing to bet that he had a lot more to say. We are all missing out on something there.

Adams is most famous for the five books of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy. (No, that is not a typo). These are among my favorite books of all time. I have a beautiful leather bound all in one volume that has occupied a position of pride on my bookshelf for many years. It's one of the few books in my library with an actual bookplate, as in I would be epically pissed if you stole it. I have hundreds of books, I can only think of 5 that I would be hesitant to lend, and this is one of them. The Hitchhiker's Guide holds a very special place in my heart. (The movie however, does not.)

Which is why I was simultaneously very excited and very nervous when I read that someone had taken it upon themselves to write part a six of the trilogy. I am not familiar with Colfer or his other work aside from the basic level of name recognition, so I was not at all confident that he was qualified to pick up where one of the greats left off. (I should note that I also wasn't at all confident that Adams "left off" at all, the fifth book ends pretty endily.) Still, the publication had the full support of his estate, so I let hope win, and requested it from the library. (Still not buying hardcovers.)

There are good things to be said about Colfer's work in this book, but Douglas Adams he is not. Especially at the beginning I was frustrated by some pretty serious flaws. In fact, not too far in I found myself thinking that the book was inadvertently describing itself with the Adams quote that it uses on the cover... "The storm had now definitely abated, and what thunder there was now grumbled over more distant hills, like a man saying 'And another thing' twenty minutes after admitting he's lost the argument."

Colfer does not do justice to the Hitchiker's Guide's most beloved characters. Zaphoid is duller, Arthur just doesn't sound like himself, Ford seems to have lost a good bit of his charm. He also doesn't seen to grasp the beauty of the randomness of Adams. In the other Hitchhiker's books, the Guide excerpts are delightfully disconnected asides that never seem to interfere with the flow of the tale at hand. They are the random and hilarious musings of a wonderful mind. Colfer's Guide excepts are set off from the text, seem more like interruptions, and are far too frequent and far less charming. Colfer also seems to grasp far too tightly to a few words and references from the other books ("froody" comes to mind) and beat them into the ground.

But it's not all bad. I suppose it's not surprising that the places where this book shines are the portions that Colfer has made his own, adding something of his own to the wacky Hitchhiker's Universe. The residents of the planet Nano are wonderfully absurd. Thor is a real winner both as a character, and it turns out, as a God. The second half of the book is far more readable than the first. There are times when you really do feel like you are back in Adams' zany world.

All in all, I think that fans of the series will find something to like here, but only if they can go into it with the right expectations. This is not a true sixth Hitchhiker's volume, but it is a loving and sincere tribute to Adams from a well intentioned admirer. It is also a foray back into a universe that I, for one, have really missed.

Of course, if you haven't read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy or the other four books in the original series, you really should stop spending their time reading my pathetic little blog and go pick it up. I promise you will find it far more entertaining than anything that I'll come up with in the next couple of days.

In that spirit, and with a nod to the fact that I am writing this instead of studying for a large and looming Brain and Behavior exam, I will close with one of my all time favorite Adams quotes:

" I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."

Oliver Twist

2009-11-16T21:48:00.005-05:00

November 5, 2009- November 13, 2009
Oliver Twist
by Charles Dickens
1838
Read on the Sony Digital Book
989 pages
ISBN: 978-1-4340-0061-3

I picked this up after reading Daniel Pearl's The Last Dickens. I wanted to read some actual Dickens because Pearl's book relies on his shocking popularity in his own day. Really, Charles Dickens was something like a rock star, sold out American tour and all that. So I figured I'd take an opportunity to actually read one of his books, to try to understand what inspired that kind of enthusiasm. Especially since my only prior experience was enforced skimming of Great Expectations in English class at Miss Porter's, which didn't really deliver the fun.

Anyway, Oliver Twist was a pretty good read, not life altering, but I certainly enjoyed it. I found that it picked up a lot in the last 1/3, and I read the last 250 pages or so all on one day. I admit that I feel like I might have gotten more out of it with a couple of clarifying footnotes, which is the disadvantage of reading the freeish digital book version over one that's pricier and annotated, but I'll live.

I'll give old Charles credit for keeping me involved for almost 1000 digital pages when I had a pile of recently requested library books actually turning up, and a bigger pile of birthday related book binge purchases, all calling my name. I never once thought of putting it down.

And for our next project... Andrew and I are going to read one of Dickens novels in the serial as if it's coming out for the first time. We've decided to go with one of the monthlies since that way there should be some actual waiting involved, but we haven't picked which one yet. This is a project for the new year, so there is time to voice your opinions if you so choose. Wikipedia tells me that the following options were published as monthly serials: The Pickwick Papers, The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend. Andrew's already read Pickwick, which almost completely eliminates it from contention (he wants to read it again, but I think that it defeats the point of the exercise).

I would rather read one that I have heard of before, although I've realized as I've looked into this that I really know NOTHING at all about most of these books. Really. A Christmas Carol: I know pretty well (and yes, from reading it, not just movies). Great Expectations: I know well enough to think that the South Park episode spoofing it is HILARIOUS. Beyond that: Oliver Twist = orphan, Tale of Two Cities = "best of times, worst of times" Edmond Drood = unfinished. And we're done. I don't have the slightest idea what made David Copperfield or Nicholas Nickleby worthy of title character status.

The thing is, I am not sure that I want to know anything about the stories before I read them in serial, because I don't think that dust jacket summaries and reviews were part of the genuine monthly serial experience. This, obviously, makes selection of the title for this project a bit of a challenge. Cryptic suggestions might be helpful. Right.

100 Books While I'm 27

2009-11-16T20:57:00.015-05:00

New Goal, New Tracking. Here we go.

1.) November 7, 2009 - November 13, 2009
Oliver Twist
by Charles Dickens
1838
989 pages
ISBN: 978-1-4340-0061-3
Read on the Sony Digital Book

2.) November 13, 2009 - November 17, 2009
And Another Thing...
by Eoin Colfer
2009
275 pages
ISBN: 978-1-4013-2358-2
Cincinnati Public Library

3.) November 17, 2009 - November 22, 2009
Nocturnes
by John Connolly
2006
471 pages
ISBN: 978-1-4165-3460-0

4.) November 22, 2009 - November 23, 2009
The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil
by George Saunders
2005
130 pages
ISBN: 978-1-59448-152-9

5.) November 23, 2009 - November 25, 2009
Juliet, Naked
by Nick Hornby
2009
406 pages
ISBN: 978-1-59448-887-0
Cincinnati Public Library

6.) November 25, 2009 - November 27, 2009
Coppola: A Pediatric Surgeon in Iraq
by Dr. Chris Coppola
2009
259 pages
ISBN: 978-0-9840531-1-7
ARC from LibraryThing Early Reviewers

7.) November 27, 2009 - November 30, 2009
An Arsonist's Guide to Writer's Homes in New England
by Brock Clarke
2007
303 pages
ISBN: 978-1-56512-551-3

8.) November 30, 2009 - December 3, 2009
The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse
by Robert Rankin
2002
342 pages
ISBN: 978-0-575-07401-9

9.) December 3, 2009 - December 6, 2009
The Man Who Loved Books Too Much
by Allison Hoover Bartlett
2009
274 pages
ISBN: 978-1-59448-891-7
Cincinnati Public Library

10.) December 6, 2009 - December 9, 2009
The Magicians
by Lev Grossman
2009
402 pages
ISBN: 978-0-670-02055-3
Cincinnati Public Library

11.) December 10, 2009- present
A Better Angel
by Chris Adrian
2008
227 pages
ISBN: 978-0-312-42853-7

Brave New World

2009-09-08T23:33:00.002-04:00

OK, so I read Brave New World. I can confidently say that it was VERY different than I remembered, and that I got it/enjoyed it/got more out of it as an adult than I did as a preteen. But I suppose that makes sense. More later, I just promised myself that I would at least record the reading as I finish it so that I wouldn't lose track again.

What I'm Reading Now 2.0

2009-09-05T20:22:00.003-04:00

A new start at the What I'm Reading Now List, with the following:

Fiction:
Brave New World
by Aldous Huxley
1932
268 pages

Non-Fiction:
Zeitoun
by Dave Eggers
2009
335 pages

What I'm Reading Now

2009-07-29T21:19:00.002-04:00

This summer has not been nearly as productive for reading as I hoped that it might be. As it draws to a close, I am determined to do at least a little bit better at keeping track of what I'm reading for the rest of this year when I imagine that the reading time will be a little bit scarcer than it has been. With that I give you the list of what I'm reading right at this moment, with promises to write at least brief comments on each once I'm done with them and on to the next. Because really, I want to do this for me.

Currently Reading:
Fiction:
The Children's Hospital
by Chris Adrian
2006
615 pages
Wednesday, July 29 -

Non-Fiction:
The Super-Organism:
The Beauty Elegance and Strangeness of Insect Societies
by Bert Holldobler and E.O. Wilson
2009
502 pages
Tuesday, July 28 -

Sarum

2009-04-19T12:06:00.003-04:00

So I've read several of Rutherfurd's books in the past, and they all seem to follow the basic format of picking a location (past examples, London (in, well, London) and Dublin (in The Princes of Ireland and The Rebels of Ireland)) and following several families through the history of the location from the earliest people to something like the present day. In Sarum this location is the area surrounding modern-day Salisbury, England. The book is enormous, over 1000 pages, but it's still an enjoyable read. Some of the sections are far more entertaining than others, there were certainly points when I wondered what the point of a particular scene was, but overall, the novel was fun to read. I was disappointed with the ending, but I suppose nobody's perfect.

One of the things that I really enjoy about these books are the history lessons that I get out of reading them. I've said it before I know, but I really do think that I know more history from reading historical fiction than I do from actually reading history... but perhaps it is just that I remember it better when it's plot points and not testable knowledge. Who knows. It's still good stuff.

Want more information on this book, or to see what else I've been reading?
Check out The 2009 booklist.

Lauren Groff ...and Writing

2009-02-24T18:33:00.004-05:00

So last night, I went to a reading and book-signing for Lauren Groff, author of The Monsters of Templeton. I went because I adored Monsters and because it was at the bookstore that is closest to my house, and because it popped up on Librarything, and I had earned a break. I went because I had never gone to one of those things and I was very very curious. Who is this person, who I know is fairly young, and who with her very first published novel created something that I find so spectacular?

The answer to that question is, of course, far more complicated than anything that I could have gotten from an hour long reading. But the parts of the answer I could see: she's much like a lot of my friends. She is young, and she comes off younger than she is, due in part to a face that seemed almost adolescent. She's enthusiastic and she talks with her hands. She loves what she's doing, and it seemed to me at times that she can't quite believe that she is actually getting to do it. I'm not sure if I was able to recognize that delighted disbelief in her because I so often feel it myself or if I projected that emotion onto her enthusiasm and slight self-effacement because it's how I would feel in her place, how I do feel in my own life sometimes.

She is not great, perhaps not even good, at reading her own work aloud. She rushes, and her tone is flat. I find this very surprising, not because I assume that all author's are actors, but because her prose reads for me with wonderful inflection, in particular the passage from The Monsters of Templeton that she read aloud. I imagine therefore, that the writing has a similar quality in her mind, and should from her mind to action, keep that quality when she presents it. I don't know if the reality of the situation is that she lacks talent for translating the words in her head to the "performance" of a reading (which seems a likely possibility) or if I, as someone who reads aloud often and dramatically during the editing process am again projecting my thinking patterns into the minds of others. Either way, charming as she is, I don't think that she did her own work justice reading it aloud.

An interesting moment for me during the reading: someone asked a question, I forget what it was, but it led Groff to ask if she was a writer, and then who in the audience was a writer. Now I was sitting in front, so I couldn't do a comprehensive survey, but it seemed like just about everybody raised their hand. I did not.

What does that mean? Are these book readings attended more by people who write as opposed to just enthusiastic readers? Certainly plausible. Maybe something about this particular author or signing brought those other people away from their writing desks and out to Joseph-Beth last night? I couldn't tell you.

And I wonder how much of a writer any one of those people are. I'm not trying to be a snob here, and I know it sounds that way, but I wonder if a single one of them makes a living with writing, or even wants to. What makes a person decide to call themselves "a writer"? Would these same people answer the question "What do you do?" with "I'm a writer." Or would they say first, "I'm a banker/teacher/student/real estate agent." Are they simply raising their hand to confirm some small part of their identity, as I would if someone asked, "Who here is a slob/lover of peanut butter/Red Sox fan?" Or do they think first, "I am a writer" the way I think first, "I am a student. I will be a doctor."?

I think I wonder this for entirely self-conscious reasons. Because I didn't raise my hand. Because I want to be a writer. I have always wanted to be a writer, I can't remember a moment in my life, even during those brief periods when I wavered on medicine, that I was not sure that publishing a book would remain a life goal. If I don't get that in before I die, I will have failed somehow.

And I recognize that there is something silly about wanting "to write a book" it's sort of like wanting "to be an inventor." You can't do it without an idea. I have had several ideas in the past, and I'm sure that I will have several ideas in the future. Non-fiction seems likely, I continue to hope that my work will present me with a shiny topic I simply can't resist, but who knows where it will come from in the end. Still, sitting here at 26, I am not ashamed to admit that I hope, one day, to be accurately described as "a physician, scientist and author."

I've been thinking about writing a lot lately, even before this moment last night when I did not raise my hand. Perhaps this is because I have also been reading a lot. Perhaps too much. (Possible? I'm still not sure.) When I got home last night, I started reading Stephen King's On Writing, which unlike the other library books I have out at the moment, I didn't just grab off the shelf. I requested it, from another library, because I was thinking about writing.

And I'm going to be writing more, not just here, maybe not even here. I have a couple of short stories that I want to get out of my head and down on paper (or onto hard drive as the case may be). So maybe I do have some fiction in me. I'm not sure what's going to come of it, but I am going to allow myself the little luxury of spending some time each day, because for me along with the reading sometimes comes the writing itch, and from childhood to today, these are two of the great joys in my life.

Maybe that does make me a writer. But if asked again this evening, I'm still pretty sure I wouldn't raise my hand. At least not yet. I feel I am a writer like I am a physician, like I am Andrew the Wonderful's wife. It's something I have decided to become, something I am on course to become, but something that I am not yet. This is funny to me, because lately the combination of loving medical school and being so very excited about my future with AtW has left me with the feeling that I have grown into my real life, that I am getting what I've always wanted. But really, I'm not there yet. The change in the last year is not that I have a become the adult that I hope to be, but rather that I am not waiting for others to make the decisions that give me the opportunity to become that adult. I'm not waiting for an admissions committee to decide that I am worth training, for Andrew to decide that he wants to keep me. It's happening now, I've been picked.

The writing though, it's something that I decide when it happens. Nobody has to accept me or ask me, at least not at this stage of the game. I suppose there will have to be some accepting once I get rolling, but first I must get rolling all on my own. And I guess, in the face of feeling like the other parts of my life are working out, I have to admit that I sort of adore the striving. My life, at the moment, is clearly charmed, so there's no time like the present.

Songs Without Words

2009-02-23T21:08:00.003-05:00

I remember reading Ann Packer's first novel, The Dive From Clausen’s Pier on my mother’s recommendation several years ago, and liking it very very much. In my mind I am reading it in Weathersfield, but it came out in 2002, so either it was a summer read or my mind in playing tricks on me. Couldn’t tell you which for the life of me. Anyway, I had glanced over and passed over Songs Without Words several times since it came out, and when I saw it at the library (free!), I decided to finally pick it up.

Before reading the book itself, I read the summary on the inside of the dust jacket, which starts with the following sentence: “Ann Packer’s debut novel, The Dive From Clausen’s Pier, was a nationwide best seller that established her as one of our most gifted chronicles of the interior lives of women.”

That kind of introduction not only made me slightly skeptical about this book, it made me wonder if I had really liked The Dive From Clausen’s Pier as much as I remembered. “Oh dear.” I thought. “I hope that doesn’t mean what I think it means… the dreaded CHICK LIT.”

But that was indeed what it meant, at least for this book. Song Without Words is a portrayal of the friendship between two women, Sarabeth and Liz, and how that friendship is tested by a challenging time for Liz’s family. The book just didn’t take off. Neither of these main characters were overly compelling or sympathetic, I found Liz’s husband annoying, and I was very unsure what Packer was trying to accomplish with the character of Liz’s son, which I suppose means she didn’t accomplish it. The only character I found even remotely interesting was Liz’s cripplingly depressed daughter, Lauren, but even she seemed one dimensional at times.

Overall, I was disappointed with the book. While I was emotionally invested in Lauren’s recovery, I didn’t care overmuch about the friendship between these women, and I suppose it only mattered that they were reunited in the end because it was obvious that they would have to be. For a book that seems intended to be more about that relationship than any particular plotline, that’s a pretty major failure. Not impressive.

Read something else. Maybe The Dive From Clausen’s Pier, if for no other reason than to tell me if it really is excellent, or if I was just in a chick lit mood when I read it. On that point, I am curious, but not near curious enough to even think about reading it again.

LT: 2 stars, modified excerpt from this.

Want more information on this book, or to see what else I've been reading?
Check out The 2009 booklist.

Island of Lost Girls

2009-02-22T22:53:00.003-05:00

I saw this book for the first time on one of those tables in Borders that will eventually be the end of me. On that day, I decided that half off or not, I was only allowed to buy one mystery story about a person trying to solve a modern abduction mystery that might in some way be related to the disappearance of one of their own childhood friends... and on that day, I picked Tana French's In The Woods (Which, by the way is very good. I sat down on a couch over Christmas break during a blizzard, and read the whole thing. It was a wonderful time. It's a good book.)

But then I saw this on the shelf in the library, and decided that if it was free, I didn't have to feel bad about reading it. And last night, when I finished One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest but still couldn't sleep. I picked it up out of the library pile.

It sure as hell didn't help me fall asleep. I started it sometime around 11pm, read about half of it before falling asleep (with it still open in my hand), and I finished the rest of it doing laundry and having my Sunday morning bagel. It's a bit of a page turner.

It's a great mystery. It's two mysteries really, and they're both intriguing. Some of it is predictable, but I still couldn't put the damn thing down.

Sure, when a compulsive reader like Maggie compulsively reads something, it's not news. And I'm not saying that this is the best book of 2008, but if you are looking for a quick read, and you like complex mysteries, it would make a fabulous companion for your next plane ride or beach trip.

Want more information on this book, or to see what else I've been reading?
Check out The 2009 booklist.

The Shadow of the Wind

2009-02-22T22:26:00.003-05:00

LT Review:
This is an excellent and thrilling tale with complex and likable characters and a Barcelona setting that becomes a character itself. I was engrossed from the beginning by the complexities of the connections between the characters and their beautifully developed relationships. The history behind the story is gradually fleshed out through a series of flashbacks, but rather than feeling fragmented, it is easy for the reader to remain connected to the emotions the characters must be feeling as they learn the same information. Full of twists, magic and coincidence, heroes and villains (both truly evil and just misunderstood), this is a book that will keep you engaged throughout. A delightful read. (4.5 Stars)

Maggie's thoughts:
So I initially picked this up as a book on tape to listen to driving back and fourth to visit Andrew the Wonderful. When I was buying it, I had apparently forgotten that I live MUCH closer to Andrew than I used to. This is a good thing for pretty much every aspect of my life, except that it means that the drive isn't long enough to finish most audiobooks.
I do have to say, while I only listened to the first half of this book, the recording is WONDERFUL, and if you are an audiobook person, I VERY highly recommend it. It had me sitting in my car outside the hotel and listening while Andrew the Wonderful was at work.
Anyway, I didn't really have time to listen to the rest of the book, but I found myself thinking about the story *all the damn time* so during finals, when I knew that I was going home for break, I went to the bookstore and picked up a copy. I decided that since it had been a couple of weeks and it's a pretty complex story, I would start again at the beginning. I spent part of my evenings at the Mountain View Grand in New Hampshire sitting either in front of the fire or in a wonderfully warm tub getting totally sucked into the story (again). (I should also note, the more important activity of my time in New Hampshire was getting engaged. This is the now the blog of the future Mrs. Andrew the Wonderful!)
I didn't finish the book in NH, and when we got back to my place in CT, where, after reading until I was about 30 pages from the end, I left the book on the bedside table in the basement bedroom.
It would seem that God didn't want me to know the end of the story.
But who cares, because I wanted to know the end of the story, so I got ANOTHER copy at the Cincinnati Public Library, and finally finished the damn thing.

The real point though, is that the book was worth all the effort. It's wonderful. Go read it. Now.

2009 Booklist

2009-02-02T20:44:00.019-05:00

I'm not even going to bother trying to keep track of exact dates this time, but here's the list of books for this year, with as much information as I have on hand or LibraryThing has attached to the description. I will do my bestest to actually put in all the books that I read this year. Here's hoping.

Note: If the title of a book is linked, that will take you to the entry in this blog that talks about it.

A * next to a book's title indicates that I wrote a review for LibraryThing as pursuitofsanity
A ** next to a book's title indicates that I wrote a review for LibraryThing as troubleactingnormal

January

The Shadow of the Wind*
by Carlos Ruiz Zafron
2005
487 pages

American Gods
by Neil Gaiman
2003
624 pages

Just After Sunset*
by Stephen King
2008
384 pages

New England White**
by Stephen L. Carter
2008
640 pages

The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death*
by Charlie Houston
2008
336 pages

The Addict:
One Patient, One Doctor, One Year*
by Michael Stein
2009 (Advance copy, not yet released)
288 pages

Drinking Coffee Elsewhere *
by ZZ Packer
2003
256 pages

January totals: 7 books, 3015 pages

February

The Path of Daggers
by Robert Jordan
1998
685 pages

Winter's Heart
by Robert Jordon
2000
780 pages

The Memory Keeper's Daughter **
by Kim Edwards
2006
432 pages

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest **
by Ken Kesey
1962
277 pages

Island of Lost Girls **
by Jennifer McMahon
2008
255 pages

Songs Without Words
by Ann Packer
2007
322 pages

Totals for February: 6 books, 2751 pages

Late February, March:
The books that I read between then and now:

Rise and Shine
by Anna Quindlen
2008
352 pages

Anne of Green Gables
by L.M. Montgomery
1908
425 pages

Anne of Avonlea
by L.M. Montgomery
1909
276 pages

Anne of the Island
by L.M. Montgomery
1915
243 pages

Anne of Windy Poplars
by L.M. Montgomery
1936
288 pages

Intern: A Doctor's Initiation
by Sandeep Jauhar
2008
299 pages

An Irish Country Doctor
by Patrick Taylor
2004
337 pages

Books from the time that I was doing a crappy time keeping track: 7 books, 2220 pages

April

Brain Surgeon:
A Doctor's Inspiring Encounters with Mortality and Miracles *
by Keith Black
2009
225 pages

The Book of Lost Things*
by John Connolly
2006
339 pages

Sarum: The Novel of England *
by Edward Rutherfurd
1987
1032 pages

Tell Me Where It Hurts
by Nick Trout
2008
304 pages

Outcasts United
by Warren St. John
2009
320 pages

Totals for April: 5 books, 2220 pages

May

Neuromancer
by William Gibson
1984
271 pages

Delicate Edible Birds
by Lauren Groff
2009
306 pages

Bright Shiny Morning
by James Frey
2008
501 pages

What is the What
by Dave Eggers
2006
538 pages

Fantastic Voyage
by Isaac Asimov
1966
186 pages

Between Late May and Late July (with Promises to Try Really Hard to Do Better!)

Cutting For Stone
by Abraham Verghese
2009
541 pages

The Count of Monte Cristo
by Alexandre Dumas
1844-1845
1243 pages

The Given Day
by Dennis Lehane
2008
720 pages

A Wolf At the Table:
A Memoir of My Father
by Augusten Burroughs
2008
256 pages

Full Circle:
One Man's Journey by Air, Train Boat and Occasionally Very Sore Feet Around 20,000 Miles of the Pacific Rim
by Michael Palin
1997
320 pages

Embracing the Wide Sky:
A Tour Across the Horizons of the Mind
by Daniel Tammet
2009
304 pages

A Study in Scarlet
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
1887
90 pages

Special Topics in Calamity Physics
by Marisha Pessl
2006
514 pages

The Angel's Game
by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
2009
531 pages

An Instance of the Fingerpost
by Iain Pears
1998
685 pages

My Stroke of Insight:
A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey
by Jill Bolte Taylor
2009
224 pages

Different Seasons
by Stephen King
1982
508 pages

What Patient's Taught Me:
A Medical Student's Journey
by Audrey Young
2004
228 pages

The Overacheivers:
The Secret Lives of Driven Kids
by Alexandra Robbins
2006
439 pages

The Children's Hospital
by Chris Adrian
2006
615 pages

Weekends at Bellvue
by Julie Holland, MD
2009
308 pages
ARC

The Elephant Keeper
by Christopher Nicholson
2009
298 pages
ARC

Strength in What Remains
by Tracy Kidder
2009
272 pages

Brave New World
by Aldous Huxley
1932
268 pages

Studying as my Reading Breaks

2009-01-27T23:35:00.003-05:00

In my last post, I said that I have been reading as my study breaks, but that is not exactly true. The truth is something more along the lines of studying during my reading breaks... and while I probably need to tone it down a little bit, I am having a grand old time.

The problem with reading being my vice is that unlike so many other vices, the recently cut out TV for example, it doesn't FEEL like a vice when I'm doing it. It's an intellectual activity, one with some level of educational and cultural value (depending on what you read I suppose). A love of books and reading is a trait that I would cultivate rather than squash in my children if ever I have any. (Imagine for a moment the financial disaster that could result form setting me loose in a bookstore with a little mini bibliophile with the same lust for full sets that I have... there are currently something well over 60 American Girl historical fiction books alone!)

The point being, I have trouble making myself feel guilty about reading, even when I am reading The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death when I should, instead, be reading my microanatomy syllabus. Blame my parents for all that relentless positive reinforcement, reading aloud to me and buying of books when I was a child. (You created a monster!) It still, as an adult, seems wrong to set a timer that beeps when I have to stop reading when the only beeping timers that I heard of as a child told my brother that he could. Not wanting to stop was not a problem for him, but I can assure you, it is a big problem for me.

Still, after overindulging a little, and knowing my personal tendency to binge read, I have pulled out the little purple timer bookmark that Andrew the Wonderful bought for me sometime ago, and started limiting myself to 1/2 hour or 45 minute stints...or at least trying to. I am trying to convince myself that while Saul Bellow's collected short stories will still be there for me to read when exams are over (although I may have to renew them from the library), I will not be able to reclaim the study time after the tests have passed.

And with that, I am off to study. After reading for half an hour, of course.

Seriously, How Did It Get to be 2009?!

2009-01-25T20:30:00.002-05:00

OK, Not only is it 2009, but it's damn near February 2009. And I haven't written in here since July. What happened?!

The answer, of course, is MEDICAL SCHOOL. But what are you going to do?

So it's January, time for my annual entry thinking about how I am going to read this year. And my annual promise to write more in the book blog. We all know how well those have turned out. Perhaps this one will be better. Either way, here's what I am thinking:

I gave up TV. The official reason being that this block of classes is important and I want to do well so that I can get good grades and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The actual reasons are a little more complicated. Certainly, I do want better grades, and spending more time studying is a good way to work towards that goal, but there's more to it than that. And if you asked me whether I would rather spend my Thursday evenings with Gross Anatomy or Gray's Anatomy the answer is easy and not the one that Dr. Giffin would like to hear, but there will be no more Dr. McDreamy in my life. Seriously.

Part of this comes from the fact that I am engaged now, and Andrew The Wonderful will be moving here in the spring/early summer. This means that I have to do some thinking about the way I spend my time, especially my "alone time," since there will be less of it. Now, I am not complaining about that. In fact, I couldn't be more excited to be trading my alone time for more Andrew time, but it does mean that I'm thinking about the way that I spend my evenings. Mostly what I've come up with is that I know that I will want to be spending time with him, and that he will not want to be spending that time watching One Tree Hill. The way that I live my day to day at the moment (odd hours, etc) is not overly conducive to sharing living space with another person, and probably also not overly conducive to my own health. It needs to be, at least, thought good and hard about, and nixing the TV seemed a good way to add some thinking time (and maybe some sleeping time as well). And of course, the good grades I want, not just for their own sake, or for the sake of the good feelings and pride that comes with them, but also because with being engaged comes the reality that all future life choices will be made as a pair, and I sure as hell am not going to be the one that limits our choices of future locations by having grades that prevent me from matching wherever I damn well choose. So there.

But there's more to it than those things too. I was sort of thinking about the kind of person that I want to be, in the grand scheme of things. Perhaps the way that an author would describe me were he to be introducing my character in a novel. This is not new patten, but I turned the lens toward the TV watching. Now, which would you rather: Maggie is a voracious and thoughtful reader OR Maggie is the type of person who can tell you, exactly, what happened on Desperate Housewives last night?

One of those things is better than the other, or at least, closer to the way that I see myself, closer to the way that I want to be.

So I'm reading as my study breaks, which makes them more flexible and more enjoyable and better for my brain and my ability to hold interesting conversations. And is certainly better for this blog. We'll see how it goes. I suppose that I could promise to write in here once a week, or something like that, but I am trying to make more reasonable resolutions this year. Ones that take into account all the little things in life that you can't predict. So no number based promises, just some thinking, and a promise that, at the very least, there will be more thinking.

Reading on the T

2009-01-25T19:30:00.000-05:00

Once or twice a year when I was in college in Boston, I would decide that I wanted to disappear for the day. Always on a Sunday, always in the winter, usually after a bit of dreary weather. I would decide the night before, and wake up earlier than usual for a Sunday, say 9 or 9:30. I always wore the same thing, a pair of worn out jeans with lots of holes and a dark grey form-fitting turtle neck sweater from J.Crew, fuzzy socks in comfy shoes, hair down or in a braid, no makeup, cute hat if I was feeling trendy, no gloves, coat only if the wind chill dictated that it would be foolish to go without one. I didn't have glasses at the time, but if I did I would have worn those, too. In this outfit I thought that I looked cute and comfortable, smart and Bostonian. I would pack my wallet, my journal, a pen and a novel of medium length that I had been meaning to read but hadn't really started, then grab breakfast, head for the BC stop at the end of the Green Line, and get on the train.

On these days there was no set plan, no errands, no real mission except to get away from everyone, enjoy Boston, and read whatever book I had brought along in its entirety. I would ride the T for hours, getting off and switching lines and directions whenever the mood struck me or I knew that I was going to have to pay more if I went any further, getting coffee at the in-station Dunkin' Donuts in the Government Center Station and reading my book. I would get off sometime in the early afternoon when I got hungry and grab food. I remember eating at a bagel place near Park Street, pizza in Harvard Square, at the little cafe in Trident on Newbury. Then I would spend some time in a nearby location that was unbothered by someone who wanted to just sit and read: a coffee shop, the Harvard bookstore, the Barnes & Noble in Brighton, the BPL. When I needed a break from the book I would people-watch or window-shop, just walk around or write in the journal. When I deemed myself near enough to the book's end, I would get back on the train and head to BC, always taking the B line, and always finishing the book at some point on the way back.

All the times that I did this, I think it was 6, I never once ran into anyone I knew. During the whole day, I would hardly talk to anyone, mostly just the people I ordered coffee from, bums asking for money, tourists asking what stop they should get off at for Harvard Square or Boston Common. Nothing that would qualify as a real conversation, say a couple hundred words all day long at the very most. Once I had a cell phone, I suppose that I brought it with me, but it was off or on silent. I spent those days, surrounded by people sure, but really, alone with my book.

This is simply not possible in Cincinnati. For one, obviously, there is no T, no train of any sort, and also, not really much of the same friendly downtown walk around areas, but that is not really the problem. The problem is that the fine people of the mid west are friendly. These people, whether they know you or not, see being in the same place at the same time as the ONLY prerequisite for conversation. They all want to chat.

In the past two weeks, I have not once managed to wait for a bus without a conversation, without learning at least some part of the life story of someone else waiting. I have met a graduate student from Sri Lanka who told me about the parts of America he wanted to visit and asked me to explain how Connecticut was different than Ohio, a pink-hatted woman from India who told me that global warming is making New Delhi both warmer in the summer and colder in the winter, and that homeless people there are freezing to death, a fourth year medical student infuriated with the irregularity of the shuttle, a man who complained that since Cincinnati was a smaller city there were no clubs open long enough to be worth going to when he got off work at midnight, and a woman taking her four year old son (in superhero pajamas just like the ones my brother used to wear) to the doctor to get his strep throat taken care of.

These people are interesting, and I am not saying that I don't enjoy the conversations, but it is nearly impossible to, without being rude, pull off the surrounded by people but still alone thing. People just start conversations. It's fascinating.

Today, my cell phone missing, a productive studying day yesterday, I decided to sort of try the reading in public thing. I did have a couple of errands to run too, and once I got my car from the garage at school, I drove, but I was thinking of those Boston days when I set out. I sat for a while in the bagel shop near my apartment. One of the guys that works there came by cleaning tables and sucked me into a 5 minute conversation about what the Sox should do about Tek. Then, waiting for the bus to go to campus, another woman waiting asked when the next bus was coming, and then chatted until it arrived. The woman waiting next to me for our food at Panera wanted to know what I had ordered, if I liked it, would she like it even if she didn't like spicy food? The checkout lady at Target was pregnant and due in two weeks, the customer in front of me in line started the conversation, and soon she was asking both of us what we thought of her baby names. The clerk in the bookstore noticed what I was reading, asked if I liked it, then if I had read something else slightly related, and talked about books for 10 minutes. These things just don't happen in Boston.

Now, this is something that I like about Cincinnati for the most part, I have enjoyed these little chats and the whole series of people that I have had long talks with but know none of their names. It's charming, most of the time. It sure makes waiting for the bus go faster.

But today... today I really really missed those days alone with my book and all those people providing an interesting, but not terribly interactive background. Today I missed those jeans and that sweater, thrown away because I wore them out a little too much. Today I really, really, really wished that I could have been reading on the T.

Everything's Eventual

2008-07-23T19:45:00.002-04:00

Everything's Eventual
Stephen King
7/18/2008-7/20/2008
LT Rating: 4 stars

LT Review:
I very much enjoyed this collection of short stories by Stephen King. While some of the stories fall clearly within the realm of his reputation as a king of things that go bump in the night, others are more literary, and there are pieces in both categories that really shine.

The best of the bunch: "The Road Virus Heads North" was deeply creepy, and kept me awake and a little antsy for a good bit after I finished it. "The Little Sisters of Eluria" is a great little slice from the life of Roland, of Dark Tower fame, and makes this collection worth picking up for DT series fans. 'Everything's Eventual" is dark, complex, and simply excellent. "Riding the Bullet" is compelling, honest, and somehow finds a balance between feeling driven by a sense of love and feeling driven by a sense of dread.

There really weren't any stories in this collection that I didn't enjoy, although I think that "Luckey Quarter" was the weakest of the set.

Overall, an excellent collection. King says in the introduction that he mourns the short story as a dying art form, (something that he will claim with greater passion in his introduction to The Best American Short Stories: 2007.) With this collection, he laid a powerful reminder in front of me that the genre is a rich a lovely one. I certainly hope that the prognosis is not so bad as it may seem.

Maggie specific thoughts:
My thoughts on my new Stephen King habit are all included in the post for Four Past Midnight. Go find them there

Four Past Midnight

2008-07-23T19:08:00.002-04:00

Four Past Midnight
Stephen King
7/20/2008 - 7/22/2008
LT Review: 3.5 stars

LT Review:
This is a collection of four short novels (although they are short only by King standards, each runs around 200 pages). Overall, it's quite entertaining.

The first, The Langoliers is the best of the bunch. The story of a group of passengers on an LA to Boston fight that manages to travel through time, it's suspenseful, exciting, and driven (as many of King's tales are) by fear of both supernatural and more human evils. It's 250 pages that readers like me will plow through in a single sitting.

Secret Window, Secret Garden is the basis for the recent Johnny Depp movie "Secret Window." And tells the tale of a writer accused by a stranger of stealing a story that he knows he wrote himself. While I suspected the twist ending well before I got there, I expect that at the time this was published (well before a more recent and absurdly popular tale with a similar twist) the thought would have occurred to few readers, and maybe it won't occur to you. Overall, it's good but not great.

The Library Policeman is a gripping read, and enough to make someone currently pretty deep into library fines (like yours truly) more than a little bit nervous. The characters are what makes the story work here, and they are all elegantly flawed. I have trouble when King gets too into the descriptions of his monsters, but perhaps this is because I am not much of a visual reader, but overall, I enjoyed this one very much.

The Sun Dog, the last in the collection is by far the weakest. Centered around a paranormal camera, the events of the story seem a little too random and confusing. While some of the moments and secondary characters have a wonderful textured existence, the story fell flat for me overall, and I found myself not nearly as wrapped up in the action as I was with the other three.

Overall, it's a satisfying bunch of stories, although I see no real reason why it has to be read or considered as a collection at all. All of the novellas stand independent of the others, and there is no real theme particularly connecting them. (Aside from their tendency to keep you up past midnight, by which standard we could combine a large percentage of King's work into a single monstrous volume.)

Unless you are a die hard fan, you can skip The Sun Dog. I would recommend reading The Langoliers and The Library Policeman, and Secret Window, Secret Garden is certainly worth the 150 pages for quick readers, but if plowing through it is going to take you more than an evening, your time could probably be better spent somewhere else.

Maggie Specific thoughts: **Complete with a SPOILER ALERT**
I stole this book from the basement of my house, I have no idea how long ago, but I've been lugging it around unread for quite a while now. The thing that I have finally really admitted to myself is that I very very very much enjoy reading Stephen King. Perhaps the collected works of the master of horror is a strange new pastime to pick up shortly after moving into an apartment all by myself for the first time (sounds like something that might end up in one of his stories) but I'm having fun. Thinking about it, my affection for these stories specifically, and the others that I have read and am reading more generally, goes to the base of what I want as a reader. I like to be told a story. I am reading not as some grand academic exercise (that's what the lab is for) but to be entertained, and while I see value in the literary greats, I also have started to come to terms with the fact that there is nothing wrong with loving an author because he tells stories that I can't help but get wrapped up in. I guess, in the end, I don't want reading to be hard, I want it to be powerful, and moving, and entertaining, but this is not work for me, this is pleasure. That attitude is something that I am just coming to terms with (as a perfectionist, I feel sometimes like perhaps it is a waste of my time to have read the complete works of say Dennis Lehane but not War and Peace, because I want to be "good" at all the things that I do), but if I really think about it, that is the thread that joins all the books and writers that I love most... plan old good story telling.

King is unashamed to admit that storytelling is basically his goal, that he's not trying to work great constructs of language, but rather to tell good tales. He accomplishes that, and I find that I like and respect him more for doing what he does, doing it well, and not trying to be something he's not. Thinking about it I think is helping me to let myself be the kind of reader that I am at my core, and I am having a most wonderful time with it.

I should note here that John Irving, who I also really love (to the point where I get a little excited thinking about all the John Irving books that I haven't read yet, like presents waiting to be opened) says something similar about his own writing in an interview included in my copy of A Widow for One Year. Irving claims that he is trying to persuade the reader emotionally, not intellectually, and that he writes "plot-driven" novels. Both Irving and King seem to think about the story in their work, think of themselves as someone setting out, by writing words on a page, to get their readers emotionally involved in the tale they are weaving. And sure, A Prayer for Owen Meaney is something very different from The Langoliers, but what they have in common is that they are both great stories with wonderful characters. Both stories that, as I read them, involved me so totally that I was most annoyed when anyone wanted me to pay attention to anything else.

So I'm going to read a bunch of Stephen King now, and then maybe some more John Irving, and I am sure a bunch of other things, with some non-fiction thrown in. And if I never get to Finnegan's Wake... well, I'm just not going to feel bad about that anymore.

As an aside, the "more recent and absurdly popular tale" that I am referring to in the review of Secret Window, Secret Garden is, of course, Fight Club. And knowing that should tell you how the whole thing ends. Right.

LibraryThing Wins

2008-07-23T18:53:00.002-04:00

So since I got started on Librarything, I have been more obsessed with books than ever. I'm not sure if that is really a good thing. (Does anyone ever really NEED to be more obsessed with books that I have been for as long as I can remember? Probably not.) Either way, I'm enjoying it. It's keeping me reading, but I feel compelled to write about the things that I read (at least a brief review) and keep track of them in my posting for that purpose, so it's keeping me on track with those habits that I was trying to solidify.

That being said, writing those reviews is not really the same as what I do when I blog about books, since the things that I post on the site are seen by users outside the context of "me." Therefore, the things that I post don't always touch on the ways that the things that I am reading hit me personally or connect with the little goings on in my head and my life, or how I ended up with that particular book in my hand or anything like that. I like the reviewing, and I hope that the things I contribute help people out, but it's not the same. I want to do both maybe, both to synthesize my thoughts into something useful for the general non-Maggie knowing reader in terms of a well-thought out opinion of a book and how good or bad it is, and to take the time to organize my thoughts for the Maggie-knowing reader, or perhaps more importantly, for the Maggie herself to better know what I was thinking when I read something, and how it plays out with the other things in my life. I think doing both is important, and I am not sure that I know how to find time for both, but what are you going to do?

Anyway, I guess that I am going to post my reviews here as well, for the three people that might occasionally read this thing, and when a book touches me, or I have thoughts that just don't fit with a review, I'll put them in after the review. We'll see how that works for now. Cool.

The Time Traveler's Wife

2008-07-12T22:10:00.003-04:00

The Time Traveler's Wife
by Audrey Niffenegger

So I have had this book sitting on my shelf ever since I stole it from my mother long long ago on one of my visits home. (I really do just pillage her library...sorry Mom.)

Anyway, I had heard good things about it, but had never gotten around to picking it up, but it was one of the books that jumped out at me as having been on the shelf too long without attention being paid to it when I was making my TBR Challenge 2008 list. Once on the list, it was clear, to me at least, that I would get it read. Today, I realized that I very much needed a break of a little bit from The Wheel of Time (5 volumes and thousands of pages in) so I started this book sitting in Panera this morning...

... and finished it about 10 hours later.

I loved it. I'm not even sure how to explain why I loved it as I did, but I simply could not put it down. I adored the two central characters from the very first page, and felt compelled to know their story, in it's entirety, before I did anything else. (Although I did spend some quality time in Borders this afternoon, because I am a addict, and I needed a book fix.)

This is a love story of the highest caliber. More than that, a story of longing, and the compromises that are part of living and loving with imperfect people. It's a beautiful tale, and I must give Niffenegger credit for her ability to create little phrases just perfect for the moment at hand, five or six words ideally placed together... it's a gift.

I suppose that perhaps part of the reason that I loved this book is how deeply I related to Claire's sense of longing, of missing the one that she loves when he has gone where she can't follow. I feel that way a lot these days, missing Andrew. Time travel and war are perhaps not the same, but the emotion that she describes on the very first page was certainly a part of what pulled me in.

"It's hard to be the one who stays. I keep myself busy. Time goes faster that way. I go to sleep alone, and wake up alone. I take walks. I work until I'm tired... Everything seems simple until you think about it. Why is love so intensified by absence?"

Overall, I can say nothing more than that it is a beautiful book, one that left me feeling transfixed and transported, a story that demanded to be read so strongly that I simply couldn't put it down.

The Dragon Reborn

2008-06-07T16:16:00.002-04:00

The Dragon Reborn
by Robert Jordan

The third book in The Wheel of Time series, and I was just as involved as I was in the first two. In this volume, the characters are on separate journeys, and Jordan does a good job staying with each story long enough to keep the action moving, while still switching back and forth often enough to allow you to keep track of where everyone is and stay involved in all of the separate story lines.

What else is there to say, if you like epic fantasy, The Wheel of Time seems a great series to tackle, at least from my perspective four books in. I suppose it would be foolish to start if you don't think that you want to read the whole series, since the story makes no pretense of ending at the close of each volume, and if you start in the middle, I think you'll miss far too much. It almost seems silly to try to review books in the middle (unless one turns out somehow shocking bad). The epic continues, and continues well and interestingly, but this book was never intended to stand on it's own.

TBR Challenge

2008-06-04T15:40:00.004-04:00

Librarything is a dangerous place. There I can easily locate the blogs of other book obsessed people, who have come up with nifty reading related ideas.

Today's discovery: The TBR ("To Be Read") Challenge.

Basically, you make a list of 12 books that have been on your to-be-read list for more than 6 months, than you read them. It's supposed to be an annual challenge, but I am starting late, and I'm still going to do 12, because I am determined like that.

After some time spend staring at my bookshelf, I have chosen the following 12 books:

1) A Passage to India
by E.M. Forster

2) Kim
by Rudyard Kipling

3) Nights at the Circus
by Angela Carter

4) Native Son
by Richard Wright

5) A Farewell to Arms
by Ernest Hemingway

6) American Psycho
by Easton Ellis

7) Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison

8) One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

9) Lord Jim
by Joseph Conrad

10) The Time Traveler's Wife
by Audrey Niffenegger
Read 7/12/08

11) Pale Fire
by Vladimir Nabokov

12) The Shipping News
by E. Annie Proulix

Now I promise not to edit this list, aside from linking the titles to the blog posts about those books once I actually read them and write about them. And we'll see how this goes.

Books are good. Decreasing the size of my to-be-read list is very good. Let's go!

Library Thing

2008-06-03T10:59:00.003-04:00

So joining LibraryThing.com has got me thinking. I am sort of in love with the site, and with reading the posts and thoughts of people who seem to be readers of the same obsessive sort that I am. Still, I have to ask myself how I want to use all the tools that they have there.

First of all, do I want my LibraryThing account to reflect books that I have read, or instead, the physical collection of books that I own? Sure, there is considerable overlap between the two, but there are also a tremendous number of books that I have read and do not own, books that I own but have not read yet. Since it would be fundamentally impossible to remember and list all the books that I have ever read (and I think not a useful exercise), I have decided, at least for now, that I want the list to reflect the books that I actually have in my possession as opposed to any sort of exhaustive reading list.

But this made me think about what it means to have a collection of books, as opposed to just having books. I own many many books, and I suppose, when I really think about it, I do consider myself a collector. But I realized that there are many books that I truly love that I do not have a copy of in my possession at the moment, either because I didn't bring them with me on some move, or because I lent them out and never saw them again, or because I read copies borrowed from the library or a friend and never got my own. Now, it doesn't make sense to me, as a collector, to have so many books that I haven't read (or even that I have read but don't really adore) when I don't have some that I really love. And the idea of logging all these books into my LibraryThing account and rating them and writing reviews, and not owning some that really matter to me, I find that distressing.

So, I'm going to try to think about this more, or at least, be more deliberate about choosing the books that I buy (as something distinct from the books that I read). For books that I just want to read, I have to remember that I have a wonderful library right around the corner from me, and I can get them there and save myself some money and space, if I am not sure that I will ever want to read a book again. Then I can focus on owning books that I love, or books from authors that I love, and having a collection that reflects my tastes and my personality more than the random whims that take me to the bookstore. I just need to keep track of all those books that I see and think "Oh! I want to read that!" and not allow that impulse to cause me to put out money. I need to learn how to separate wanting to read a book and wanting to own a book as distinct impulses. It might take some thinking, but I think that using LibraryThing in an act of cataloging might help me to do that.

So with deciding that I want to use it as a catalog for my collection, comes the question of choosing to pay for it. It's free to join, to use the message boards and communicate with other readers, and to list up to 200 books in your library. I have WELL over 200 books in my library, so I have to choose between having an incomplete catalog and paying a fee. ($10 a year or $25 for lifetime membership.) It seems to me that would be money well spent, but given my tendency towards fits of enthusiasm followed by an utter lack of attention, I think that I will spend a few weeks trying to get into a pattern of use, and answering the questions that the use brings up for me, before I put down the money for something and then just ignore it completely.

I’ve also got to ask myself questions about rating and commenting and reviewing, and how I want to go about blogging what I read and thinking about books that I really do want to own, but I have to let it be a process, or I’ll burn out too soon.

And with that, I’m going to stop writing for now.

The Great Hunt

2008-06-03T01:49:00.002-04:00

The Great Hunt
by Robert Jordan

The problem with the way I read is this: once I get started with a book (or series of books) that I find particularly interesting, it becomes all consuming. An epic fantasy series with 11 existing volumes all over 700 pages long might be a great summer project for me, but I also have to make sure that other things get done, like sleeping, which has suffered since I started reading The Wheel of Time. Such is life.

Anyway, this is the second book in the Wheel of Time series, an epic fantasy tale with all the usual features: a battle between good and evil for the fate of the world, magic, monsters and interesting creatures, a reluctant hero with a number of lovable sidekicks, and a tremendous number of strange names for people and places that will make you truly glad for the glossary at the end of each book (at least, if you are in any way like me, challenged in the remembering of these things). It's a very good book, good enough to suck me in and truly distract me, with a divinely detailed world that holds together and has a tangible realness to it providing the background for an adventure tale that makes 700 pages fly by. It is not The Lord of the Rings, but I can see where the comparison is made, and it is saying a bit that I don't think that Tolkien would roll in his grave at the thought.

But there's no point in recommending it unless you have already read The Eye of the World, and unless you believe that you are going to have the time to read at least The Dragon Reborn (the third book in the series). Jordan seems to make no accomodations for readers that decide to enter the series midstream, so I think that a reader would gain more confusion than enjoyment out of starting here. These are not so much separate books as volumes of one long story, there are no neat endings to make you feel like you completed something when you turn the last page. To be honest, I am grateful for that, I loathe spending my time reading catchup put in for people who didn't read the first book. So yes, I haven't read the whole series yet, so I can't promise that every book is as good as the first two, but I am going to dive right into volume 3, probably tonight, even though it's already 2:00am and I really (really, really) should be sleeping.

So if you have time for 11 volumes this summer (with a 12th forthcoming, and being finished by another author, since Robert Jordan passed away last year) dive right in and join me, if not, I should be getting to something that I could actually recommend to you in about a month.

Right. Obsessed.

Back to Blogging: Booklist and New Tool

2008-05-30T15:32:00.004-04:00

OK, so I live in Cincinnati now, and I have been thinking that I wanted to get back to blogging (since summer is PRIME TIME for basking in the sunshine and reading my afternoons away) but "the road outside my house, is paved with good intentions" as it were.

Anyway, today I was sitting at my desk in my new lab, feeling somewhat overwhelmed by the sheer volume of work related reading that I have to do, so I decided to take a break and find something else to read.

So I went to the blogger website. In blogs of note for the month, they have listed Women in Science, which seemed interesting... since I suppose I am one. From there, I checked out Neurosciencegirl... since I suppose I am one of those too. There I found the list below, which I thought was interesting.

This is the list of the 100 or so books most often listed as "unread" by LibraryThing users. You're supposed to bold the books you've read, underline the ones you read for school, and italicize the ones you started and didn't finish. Interestingly, blogger doesn't seem to have an underline feature, I assume because that implies that something is a link, so I'm just bolding what I've read, no matter what the reason. I'm also putting a (*) next to the ones that I own but haven't read, (**) for books that are in my digital book's library but not yet read. Here's my list:

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina**
Crime and Punishment**
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude*
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick**
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities**
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace**
Vanity Fair**
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books*
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex*
Quicksilver*
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man*
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch**
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo**
Dracula**
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility**
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist**
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune*
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere*
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners**
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed*
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame**
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield**

So a couple of things I think are slightly interesting: There are 102 books on this list, and I have read only 36 of them, (which doesn't seem like so very many). I traced the list back as many blogs as I could (turned out to be four) and 36 seems better than average. Also, I seem to be a lot less likely to start but not finish.

Of course, the other intriguing thing about this is : "Where does this list come from again? What exactly is Library Thing?" And it turns out that LibraryThing.com is a very cool little website where you can create a personal profile with all the books in your own library, rate and review them, and then connect with people that have similar taste in books or get recommendations for things to read. So I joined up, and while my library is not even sort of started yet, here it is.

So that makes this list make a little more sense to me, because it didn't seem like a real "Top 100" by any criteria I can think of, but it totally makes sense to me as the "100 books that people that really love books are most likely to have bought, be willing to admit that they own, but not gotten around to actually reading." If that's the criteria, then a list that combines classics (cult and literary) with a bunch of fairly recent popular fiction and some interesting but general non-fiction makes perfect sense. A list of books that would lead readers to think, "I really should read that..."

And by that standard, I am a pretty boring, normal reader. Because there are only about three books here that I have not at least picked up and considered at one point or another... such is life.

Anyway, I'll get internet access back on Monday, and then spend a couple of days playing with my LibraryThing bookshelf, and writing some reviews and figuring out what standards I am going to rate books by, and hopefully using this all as a reason to get back to blogging. We'll see how that goes.

Gone Baby, Gone

2008-01-23T14:07:00.000-05:00

Things that are dangerous for Maggie to decide:
"Oh, since I have this $100 bill that I need to break, I'll just let myself buy a book when I get to the airport at that Boarders in the terminal, and they'll give me change and I'll have something to read..."

Three books later, I dove into Gone Baby, Gone while sitting and waiting for the plane to Minneapolis to take off. Since I got there super early, and since the plane was delayed, and since I read rather quickly, and since this book is addictive to the point that I am not sure I so much as looked up more than once an hour or so while reading it, I was done with the whole thing with enough time to take a nap before the wheels touched down in Minnesota. Allow me to say that there is not better way to spend a snowy day trapped in an airport/on a plane than with a good thriller like this one.

And a good thriller it is. I have not seen the movie, although I will now be adding it to my netflix, but I can see how an amazing movie could come out of this book. (I should point out, that the bar's pretty high, since Lehane is also responsible for the book that is the basis for one of my favorite movies, Mystic River.)

Anyway, the plot is fast paced without being overwhelming or making the action hard to follow. The characters are reasonably complex and realistically, likably, flawed. There are true villians, and sort of villians, and people who do bad things for good reasons, and I truly didn't have it figured out before the end.

I'm not saying that I would classify this as a great acheivement in literature. It's not. I don't think that it aspires to be. What it does, though, it does well. And there is something to be said for airport the day before the interview ficton. This one makes you think just enough to keep you very busy, but not enough to make you very tired.

Want to see what else I've been reading, or track just how much a bookworm I am:
The 2008 Booklist and Tally

The 2008 Booklist

2008-01-10T11:13:00.009-05:00

Welcome to 2008. I'm going to do better this year. I know I've never said anything like that before. ;-)

This year, there will be a slight change in the nature of my reading. Andrew gave me a Sony Digital Book for Christmas (Best Present Ever!) so while I will be doing some of my reading in the traditional way, I will also be reading the classics (100 free books!) digitally. I'll be blogging those the same way as other books, but I will note which ones are digital and which are the more traditional page turning sort.

I'm also keeping a tally, because I think that it will be interesting, and because maybe if I have the motivation of keeping an accurate count it'll get me to do this blogging thing with slightly greater regularity.

With that:
2008 Paper Books Read: 16
2008 Digital Books Read: 3
2008 Total Books Read: 19

January 9, 2008
The Rebels of Ireland
By Edward Rutherfurd
863 pages

January 11, 2008
Pride and Prejudice
By Jane Austin
Sony Digital Book

January 13, 2007
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
By Stephen King
272 pages

January 16, 2008
Good Dog, Stay
By Anna Quindlen
82 pages

January 17, 2008
Gone Baby, Gone
By Dennis Lehane
443 pages.

January 22, 2008
The Green Mile:
The Complete Serial Novel
By Stephen King
544 pages

February 9, 2007
Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Perfection
by Atul Gawande
257 pages

February 17, 2007
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell
by Susanna Clarke
846 pages

February 18, 2007
Final Exam: A Surgeon's Reflections on Mortality
by Pauline Chen
222 pages

The Monsters of Templeton
by Lauren Groff
357 pages

Wuthering Heights
by Emily Bronte
Sony Digital Book

March 20, 2008
The House of God
by Samuel Shem
397 pages

March 23, 2008
A Drink Before the War
by Dennis Lehane
277 pages

March 25, 2008
Darkness, Take My Hand
by Dennis Lehane
355 pages

March 26, 2008

Shutter Island

by Dennis Lehane

369 pages

March 28, 2008

Sacred

by Dennis Lehane

358 pages

March 30, 2008

Prayers for Rain

by Dennis Lehane

375 pages

March 31, 2008

1st To Die

by James Patterson

462 pages

April 1, 2008

2nd Chance

by James Patterson (with Andrew Gross)

Sony eDigital Book

Go Ask Alice

2007-09-13T14:05:00.000-04:00

Go Ask Alice
Annoymous

So Andrew gave me this book. He picked it up for some reason, and when he was done he passed it on. Last night I was looking for something easy and distracting while I was cleaning my room (which for me is neither easy nor distracting) and I picked this up off my bookshelf. I know that some people will veiw it as some sort of blasphmey that even as a coompulsive reader in my tween and early teen years I'd never read it... but I hadn't. What are you going to do? Now I have.

Anyway. The point of this book is pretty clear. She's a pretty normal teenage girl who gets into drugs, has a hard time leaving them behind, finds herself in a number of regrettable situations, and ends up dead. Drugs are bad. I think that we can all understand this.

The thing is, I'm not sure that this girl is a particularly great example of the whole "drugs are bad" motif. Her story has a lot of things in it that are not quite typical of your teenage drug addict, and the message would be anything but encouraging for a kid who had tried drugs but was trying to stop.

First of all, she doesn't make a consious choice to take drugs the first time. Instead, she is given a coke laced with LSD at a party and that starts her down the path to destruction. Somehow, I'm not sure that the warning "don't take coke's from kids you only kind of know" is not the same kind of warning as "don't take drugs." And while I suppose that the message might be something along the lines of "just trying drugs can set you off in the wrong direction." And clearly she makes a number of (VERY) bad choices in the period that follows this first experience, that little bit of trickery made me feel bad for her.

Second, her descriptions of the experience of drug use are enough to make even a psychopharmacology nerd a little curious. Even though she clearly states about a million times toward the end of her diary that the experience isn't worth it, I'm not sure the descriptions of complete and utter bliss and drug induced euphoria would be particularly helpful in the hands of especially curious preteens. I suppose here the message that trying it once can mess you up is justified... since she makes being high sound pretty damn great. Too bad that one LSD trip leads inexorably to scratching your own face off and premature death.

Finally, at the end of the diary she seems to be well on the path to recovery. She's made new friends that aren't into drugs. She's got herself a responsible college boyfriend who is not into drugs and who has a relationship with her parents as well as with her. All of the last journal entries are those of a hopeful young woman who has left a dangerous and destructive past behind her.

And then in the epilogue, she's dead.

What happened? I mean really. I don't think that this is the message that you want to give to young people. "You'll be on the right track, you'll make new friends and make every effort to start a new life, but really there's no hope. Just when it seems that you are on the path to a full recovery and a useful life, your parents will find you dead when they get home from the movies!"

This is not helpful. Especially not helpful for any child that had tried drugs, as in "Well, now that I've tried drugs, I might as well not waste the effort to get off them, I'm screwed anyway, so I might as well enjoy myself!"

But I suppose the anti-drug message lives on. The way things turn out for her while she's on drugs is clearly not the life that people would wish for, her later resistance of some extraordinarily intense peer pressure is admirable, and her description of her "bad trip" and it's aftereffects are enough to scare the living daylights out of some of those previously discribed especially curious preteens. I suppose.

I think that the real problem with this book is that it seems too forced. Too constructed.

Young girl starts diary about how hard it is not to be accepted, and 20 pages in, she's a drug addict rolling her way straight towards death. Repeated use triggered by neatly spaced traumatic life events. Tries to clean up, fails, faces increadible peer pressure and has a bad trip, but parents always love her. Nice boy that she meets accepts her and even *kisses* her! Doesn't care that she's a former addict, or when she goes crazy, or when she's institutionalized. People that don't use drugs are good and loving. Drugs are bad.

It reads like not terribly well created propoganda. (Which according to the reviews on Amazon it just might be.) I even looked back at some of my journalling from around the same age that this girl is supposed to be. They read more like the journals of a 10 year old than a 16 year old. (And no, I am not just hyper-mature, I assure you.) To me that reeks of adult that has no recollection of what it was like to be 15 or 16. Maybe.

I suppose if I had read it in middle school it would be different. The reviews on Amazon are clearly clustered into jeers from jaded adults and raves from teen readers to whom it seemed honest and dramatic and real. Perhaps if I had read this in maddle school this would be one of those essays about returning to a childhood favorite and finding it lacking.

But I don't think that I would give this to my 13 year old to read, because it is a single minded message about destruction with the utter absence of hope, and if you believe, as I do, that addiction is an illness, than what we need is stories imbued with some element of hope.

***************************************************

Four other notes about reading, books and Barnes and Noble:

1.) On a re-reading childhood favorites note: Madeline L'Engle died this past weekend. I certainly hope that I don't have to write the "returning to a childhood favorite and finding it lacking" essay about any of those books, since I am certainly going to have to return to them once I finish my little ten book run... or maybe during the ten book run. Kids books make a great little distraction sometimes, and the library will have those. I do own them all, even if they are up in an attic somewhere, so I have no reason to visit Barnes and Noble for this rereading project.

2.) This book doesn't count towards the 10 that I have to read before I return to my wanton bookbuying ways. a.) Because it's not on the list that I made when I made the resolution and b.) because I read it so fast and it was so little that counting it would feel like cheating.

3.) Barnes and Nobel sent me an e-mail on Friday in which they explained that they are going to send me a book for *free.* Apparently, they have this book club thing, and because I signed up for one in the past they have me pegged as a reader type. They are clearly trying to create some buzz around a new author by sending out a bunch of advance reading copies of her book and getting us to talk about them. While this does mean that there is a new book on its way to me in the mail... it does not count as a trip to Barnes and Noble because I neither visited the store or gave them money in exchange for it.

and 4.) We stopped at a Barnes and Noble for coffee last week (since it was the nearest coffee selling place to where we were), and I didn't buy ANYTHING. (Well, execpt coffee, but that doesn't count.) GO ME!

The Great Mortality

2007-09-11T15:00:00.000-04:00

The Great Mortality
by John Kelly

I believe that this is the "free" book from the "Buy Two Get One Free" trap that sucked me in during that last fateful Barnes and Noble trip. What can you do? I blame it all on Andrew.

Anyway, this is a book about the Black Death. Not the most cheerful topic, but an interesting one. In case anyone hasn't noticed, I am literally and totally obsessed with medicine. It's a problem. It will hopefully be less of a problem when I get my happy self into medical school. Fingers crossed.

Anyway. The man that wrote this book has made his living writing about science and medicine, but it seems from his bio at the end of the book that he also has something of a history obsession. The combination makes for a pretty good book on a topic that falls somewhere along the intersection of medicine and history. He seems to understand more than enough about the science to talk about it (as much as anyone can, since the science of a epidemic so long ago is fuzzy at best anyway) but clearly the history is what excited him. More specifically, the detailed and horrific personal accounts written during the plague.

He says that he started this book "for a very modern reason. In an age of the avian flu, Ebola and AIDS, I wanted to take an anticipatory glance backward at the greatest pandemic in human history." In looking back, he has focused on the human story of the plague. He seems determined in the face of the destruction to see the strength of human character, and in that, I think that he's right. It truly is amazing that people kept writing wills, that they managed to bury bodies, that people got out of bed in the morning as the population was cut in half by something that they simply did not understand.

The destruction that the Black Death brought really is well outside the realm of comprehension. We're talking about a time in which, in most of Europe, one out of every two people died horribly. That's hard to wrap your head around. Even though Kelly makes every effort to keep the humanity of these residents of the Middle Ages intact by quoting their own words or focusing on the story of a single family or village to represent one area, I think that at some point, one has to become desensitized, at least I felt like I did. You can only read a sentence like "And in such and such a place in 1348 the Black Death claimed 40-50% of the city." so many times before it just starts to feel like "yep. That's what happens. Oh well." I know that sounds callus, but that's the way it is. Especially since as shocking as the level of devastation is, even with Kelly's great and admirable effort to keep the victims human, these are still people that died 800 years ago, and that helps to keep a certain distance.

Anyway, I do have to say that this is decidedly a book more for the history buff than the science buff, since the science is a little ambiguous. Kelly's writing is focused on the routes the plague travelled and how the character was slightly different in different places. (The English managed to bury everyone facing the same way in neat little rows, some other places failed to manage burials at all really.) He devotes a chapter to the anti-Semitic reactions as well as to the Flagellants, but the majority of the story is just following the plague from place to place.

At times it gets a little repetitive. The story may be slightly different in France than in England, but not too too much, and sometimes it seems as if the same little vignettes are repeated. Maybe that's meant to say something about how we're all really the same, but I could have done with a little less of it.

Of course, the history leaves the scientist in me staring at closed doors, because while Kelly is very clear on the PATH that the plague travelled around Europe, the actual METHOD of that travel is a little more ambiguous. The virulence and movement patterns of the plague of the great mortality are very different and much more frightening than those of the third pandemic of plague, which was in the late 1890s and studied with the technology of that day. Of course for me the question is "what is the difference?!" They have extracted plague DNA from these Black Death burial pits, but understandably I would assume that it's not enough to do an in depth analysis of virulence factors. Of course that is the stuff that I would be more interested in.

But what can you do when you're reading about something that happened about 800 years ago?

I'm not sure how much learning about the Black Death can inform us about the way that our world today would look in the face of a deadly pandemic. At least in today's world (or the part of today's world that anyone reading either this blog or this book lives in) people understand that disease is caused by microbes. This one belief I believe dramatically changes the way that we would experience illness even on a massive level. While there are certainly some ignorant bigots that will blame AIDS on gay people or other such foolishness, I like to believe that we are past the point of burning Jews because they must have poisoned the wells. I think that in the face of understanding what we are fighting, as we certainly would at least in part in the face of a pandemic would give people something to hold on to and something to hope for (a cure, a vaccine, etc.).

That's what's really amazing about the fact that the society in many places continued to function in the face of this pandemic. In their world there was no reason for it, there was no microbe to fight or protect against, no real way to treat symptoms or limit transmission. There was nothing to do but wait for death, and the fact that people held it together to the extent that they did in the face of something like that gives us a lot to hope for on down the road.

Three down, seven to go.

The Female Brain

2007-09-04T12:51:00.000-04:00

The Female Brain
By Louann Birzendine, M.D

Two down. Eight to go.

So Andrew picked this up and suggested it to me during the last Barnes and Noble trip. I've been sort of eyeing it for a while, unable to decide if I wanted to read it or not. These psychology books have the potential to make me frustrated and angry or happy and interested, and sometimes, it is very hard to predict which will happen before you open it up. I was skeptical of this one because of the cover image, which is one of those white curly phone cords made into the shape of a brain. This suggested to me that there might be a little too much perpetuation of female stereotypes going on. But ultimately, I decided to let the degrees of the author persuade me that she might be legit (Yale Medical School tends to put out some smart people) and give it a shot.

I enjoyed it for the most part, it was fairly interesting, and I think that the author did a very good job presenting sometimes very complicated information in a way that will be approachable to the average person, which is certainly something that I aspire to someday. In each of the chapters, (which were all titled for stages in a woman's life, things like "The Mommy Brain") she introduced a patient, and fit the neurochemical and hormonal changes she was talking about into the story of what was happening in that person's life. (I am guessing since there was no little note about how names were changed or patients agreed, they might have all been composites, making it easier to fit them to her points more exactly, but that's allowed, I suppose.)

I do feel like there were a couple of glaring problems. First of all, some things were made to seem like secrets that really are not. For example, in the very beginning she had a list of "Hormones your doctor might not know about." This list included oxytocin. Now I admit that might be a hormone that the average American isn't super-familiar with (i.e. any hormone other than estrogen and testosterone), but I am very skeptical of the assertion that anyone could make it through medical school anywhere without knowing all about it. It's silly (and maybe dangerous) to make people think that just because you are doing some interesting information synthesis you have some special knowledge that their doctors might not know about, especially when it's related to things you are about to assign importance to. Sure a specialist might know more, but there isn't an OB/GYN in practice (or there shouldn't be) that can't tell you at least a little bit about oxytocin.

There's a fine line between making things approachable to the average person and oversimplification. I think that she may have stepped on the wrong side of that line a couple of times. My real pet peeve I suppose is the way that she talked about MRI research. As if, we put people in the scanner when they're in love and see what they are feeling instantly, when really it's not quite that simple (or at all easily applied to real world situations.) The stuff we have people do in the scanner is carefully structured and in reality a little more artificial than "imaging love." But she makes it seem sometimes like the MRI scanners can be used to see emotions. (Ummmm. Not quite.) I am also put off by the language that she (and many other people) used taking about results of MRI scans. "We do this or ask the person to think about this and such and such part of the brain lights up."

I know that I have been guilty of describing it that way too, but I have tried to stop ever since a kid asked me if we would be able to see the lights through his skull. People tend to take doctors literally, and sometimes it's best to tell them literally what is happening. There are no little lights in your skull people, when they say "such and such part of the cortex lights up" what they mean is "more blood flows to such and such a part of the cortex."

If we told people that way, not only would it be more true and more helpful, but also perhaps the work that we're doing might seem less mystical and a little more like science. We're measuring the flow of blood in your brain, not the intensity of mystical in head chirstmas lights. I don't think that the other way of taking about it is helpful at all.

Sorry for that little vent.

Anyway, despite the oversimplifications. I did enjoy the book. I think that I am a little bit too close to the field to fit in as a member of her target audience, but that's not really her fault. She clearly didn't set out to write a book for the academic circle. I do think that I know a member of her real target audience thought, so I left the book with my mother. She'll enjoy it more than I did.

Woot. Eight more books until my next Barnes and Noble Trip.

The Queen's Fool

2007-08-28T13:53:00.000-04:00

The Queen's Fool
By Philippa Gregory

If you want Maggie to remember history. Just put it all into a nice story with some memorable characters and she'll have it all wrapped up.

For example. By reading The Queen's Fool, I am now clear on the succession of English royalty following Henry VIII (a character himself in The Other Boleyn Girl the book that made that little period of history clearer) all the way through to Elizabeth I.

This story starts after Henry is dead and his son Edward VI is on the throne (in name only, he's a child, so the country is being ruled by a regency council.) The narrator of the novel is Hannah Verde, a Jewish girl, who with her father has fled Spain to hide (and fake Christianity) in England after her mother was burned at the stake in the Spanish Inquisition. Hannah also happens to be able to occasionally see the future, a useful skill at a time like this.

She meets Robert Dudley (central character of The Virgin's Lover the other Gregory novel that taught Maggie history) and he takes Hannah to court to be a holy fool to the king, who is young and clearly ill. After a short while, she is sent, basically as a spy for the Dudleys, to the Princess Mary. Hannah spends the rest of the novel as friend and confidant to Mary both as princess and as Queen and later also to Princess Elizabeth.

What's great about this book is not only the history. (Edward VI to Jane Grey (8 days) to Mary I (aka Bloody Mary) to Elizabeth I... better than I knew it for AP European History.) But the complexity of the characters. Hannah is a brilliantly created, and genuine seeming person. A young woman who is forced to reconcile herself with conflicting feelings and web of complicated loyalties. The story takes her from a young girl who questions the value of her Jewish faith in the face of what it has already cost her, to a grown woman who agrees wholeheartedly to commit to a life as "One of the Children is Israel." She is loyal to Robert Dudley from the beginning, and for a time also in love with him. But she also has a deep and undying love for Mary, even in the face of the religious persecution that she inflicts upon England in a quest to return it to the Catholic Church. Hannah even shows affection, loyalty, a sense of duty and a deep admiration for the Princess Elizabeth, even as she plots to overthrow the Queen that she so loves.

But that fits. It's a complicated character for a complicated time. A character faced with a deep religious challenge at a time when nobody in England really knew what they were allowed to believe, or if they were safe in their practice. A character faced with conflicting loyalties in a time of political turmoil. It works. I loved it.

Gregory paints all the characters, even the royalty, as human, flawed but likable. Perhaps none more so than Mary. It's an interesting choice for a Queen who is known for executing large numbers of her own people. Yet, in this novel at least, Mary is sincere. She wishes nothing but happiness for England, and her devotion to the Church and returning England to her faith comes from a devout belief that her view of God is the true one. She is a woman tortured by the complications of court from her youngest days, when Henry VIII tossed her mother aside for Anne Boleyn. The story makes it clear how she has progressed from a girl forced to swear the oath calling herself a bastard to a woman who can rally the troops to her cause as Queen not once, but twice. But the novel also shows how her strength is tested, and how she is changed from someone so loved by her people that she can easily put down a rebellion to a queen that was so feared. How she moves from someone so merciful that she initially refused to execute Jane Grey, who was put on the throne before her, to someone who would so willingly bring down a brutal inquisition on her own people. The strength that she shows when she is ready to fight for her throne is contrasted sharply to the broken sobbing woman that we see before she dies. It's a compelling portrait.

The side plot to all the royal activity is the love story between Hannah and the young Jewish man that she is betrothed to. It's a nice story, and while it certainly serves to help us see how Hannah grows, to me it did not ring with the same intensity as her times at court. Still charming though.

In short, I liked this as much as the other two Gregory novels, both books that I could not put down. Reading this makes me want to go through and read all the books in this unofficial series in order, to see how the continuity flows. It seems now that Gregory has made the English royalty into complicated and beautiful characters spanning from young Catherine of Aragon to Elizabeth in what's now five books. We'll see when I get around to that, I'm certainly not allowed to buy the ones that I haven't read yet right now. ;-)

One book down, nine more to go before I can make my triumphant return to Barnes and Noble.

P.S. I'm going to try this label thing and see if it works. We'll sort by genre I think.

The First Step...

2007-08-27T21:55:00.000-04:00

They say that the first step is admitting that you have a problem.

I have a book problem. Really. I spend money that I really shouldn't on books, and I LOVE every single minute of it. Really.

I also love Andrew, but he is a bad influence on me. On Sunday, at the Barnes and Noble in Nashville, I bought SIX books (admittedly, one was free, but the plan had been not to buy ANY books, and instead, I bought SIX).

So now, no more, I have made a solemn oath to myself and my wallet, with Andrew and all my blog readers (all three of you) as my witness, that

I WILL NOT BUY ANOTHER BOOK UNTIL I HAVE READ AND BLOGGED TEN BOOKS.

I have even selected the ten, and they are (in no special order)

The Queen's Fool
By Philippa Gregory
500 pages

The Female Brian
By Louann Birzendine, M.D.
187 pages (excluding notes and references)

Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
By Suketu Mehta
542 pages

The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death
By John Kelly
303 pages (excluding notes and references)

The Third Chimpanzee
By Jared Diamond
368 pages (excluding notes and references)

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
By Robert A. Heinlein
382 pages

The Princes of Ireland
By Edward Rutherfurd
770 pages

The Rebels of Ireland
By Edward Rutherfurd
863 pages

Saving Fish From Drowning
By Amy Tan
474 pages

Quicksilver
By Neal Stephenson
916 pages

That's ten books. 5,305 pages. Ten complete blog entries before I am allowed to visit Barnes and Noble again. I swear to it. (Although, I do have to admit that I am almost done with The Queen's Fool, but I still have to blog it, and updating the blog is something that I have been rather bad at... so that's a start.)

Right.

I really really really love to read.

The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

2007-07-31T13:06:00.001-04:00

The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

By Douglas Adams

Another book whose story starts with something related to the great and wonderful Andrew Gustav Schneider. He gave this to me during our hours of sitting in JFK airport waiting for our flight to London to take off. A reading from my favorite British author for our trip to Britain.

Of course, I didn't get to read it in Britain because I picked up Edward Ruthorfurd's epic novel London at St. Paul's the second day we were there, and spent the rest of the time buried in that 1300 page wonder. (It's amazing, but not for the faint of heart.) So instead I had a book by my favorite British author to recover from my trip to Britain. Just as good really, maybe better.

Note: Anyone that has not yet read all four books in The Hitchhiker's Trilogy, stop reading this now and rush to your local library, you are missing out on great and wonderful things.

Now, when I first looked at the book, I was fairly sure that I hadn't read it. Then, at some point on the vacation, while Andrew was making fun of the lovely (10 feet of visibility) view that we'd enjoyed from the top of Mt. Snowdon in Wales, he made some joke about the clouds wanting to be close to me. He said that he remembered reading about a character like that, he thought in a Douglas Adams book, and all of a sudden I decided that I in fact HAD read this book and that it was the mystery about the Norse Gods... and that little antidote about the clouds wanting to be close to someone was in this book, something about the rain God...

I was about half right. I did read this at some point in the past, although long enough ago that I had pretty much forgotten it all. It is the mystery about the Norse Gods, but the thing with the guy who the clouds want to be near wasn't in here. Maybe it is somewhere in Hitchhikers. If you know where it is, it would be nice of you to share.

Anyway, this book does live up to the amusement that I expect from Adams on some levels. There is no shortage of one liners or cruel little observations about all the irony in the world to keep you amused. It doesn't have the same glory as Hitchhikers, but really, that would be quite a challenge.

If you are an Adams fan, you've probably already read this, and if not, I suppose you should. If not, I wouldn't start here, instead, read other things first, become an Adams fan, and then read this.

Sad to admit, but one of the coolest things was the fact that things kept happening in places where Andrew and I had been on our vacation (the main character's flat appears to be located on the same street as the car rental place, which was a longer than anticipated walk uphill from King's Cross, leaving me with a feel for the neighborhood.)

Well those places and Asgard, home of the wise and wonderful Gods of Norse mythology.

I do love the idea of Thor walking around frustrated that people don't believe in him anymore... I bet Zeus is pissed too...

Lipstick Jungle

2007-05-22T16:20:00.000-04:00

Lipstick Jungle
by Candace Bushnell

May 21- 22, 2007

This weekend, when I arrived at Andrew's place, he had a book for me. It was Candace Bushnell's Four Blonds. He had gotten it off one of those ever-present and super addictive bargain tables somewhere for me, mostly because he is wonderful. (At some point he and I had talked about me letting myself read more silly girly books, since I do find them rather relaxing. He always remembers these things and does something about them. It's really rather amazing to me.)

Anyway, I finished the entire thing this weekend, either in the car on our way to and from the Tennessee Renaissance Fair (more fun than you would imagine) or just hanging out around the apartment (more cozy than you would imagine). I liked it, but I couldn't really tell you why. I may or may not get to writing a whole entry about it, we'll see.

Anyway, when I was in the airport trying to kill some time before going through security so that I could finish my juice, I saw this book. It was one of those cheap, small paperbacks, and somehow, I justified the purchase. (Something along the lines of, "It's only eight dollars, and it's pretty late, so I'll be happy to have something mindless to read on the plane. Besides, I am sure that I can paperbackswap it away and get something good once I'm done.")

I swear, I am going to read 10 more books before I buy another one. TEN!

Anyway, from the moment I opened it waiting to board the plane, I couldn't put the damn thing down. It's over 500 pages long and I only started reading it last night at like 7:30... clearly today was not as productive as one might have hoped.

This book is the story of three women in their 40s in New York: a fashion designer, a movie producer, and a publishing exec. They all have tons of money and despite their already fabulous jobs, are headed for even bigger and better things. Sure, there's drama: corporate backstabbing, a failed business deal, a divorce even. But they live in a world where things turn out fabulous. That is what makes this relaxing girly fiction.

Yet I cared about them, in a way that I did not expect to. Perhaps that is why Bushnell has been so successful. I thought that perhaps they were going to piss me off (all four of the blonds certainly did that) but for some reason, I found myself rooting for these girls (women?), in sort of the same way that I liked the women on Sex in the City (and no, I haven't read that yet, but I think that I'll take a break from Bushnell.) Throughout the whole book, I was on their side. I wanted them to kick butt, to show all those silly men that were trying to get in their way who's boss.

This was, for sure, one of those female empowerment books where women show the men who's in charge. These characters have stay-at-home husbands or no husband at all. They take jobs away from men. They repeatedly say that nobody could understand their careers or talk about money like their girlfriends. It's almost overwhelming, all the empowerment. If they weren't somehow still likable characters, I think I would have put the book down. A girl only needs to be reminded so many times that she can do anything at all, (and without the help of men!). After reading something like this, I feel sure that I am supposed to believe that all a lady needs is some close female friends, some money, and a whole lot of power. We can do it gals!

I suppose that's a good thing... but it gets old.

It did make me think about something again though. The characters in this book start out pretty close to the top, end up pretty much actually at the top, and most of the book is about that striving: climbing the corporate ladder, making it in the fashion or movie industry. All making millions to start, and all ending up with more at the end.

And what does that mean? Is $250,000 a year not successful enough anymore? What about a million? As I plunge into the application process all over again, I have to wonder a little bit what it means that I was concerned that these women would "fail" and end up dead ended as the editor-and-chief or something of the sort. That wouldn't have been enough. I mean sure, that's not bad, but who can settle for not bad when they want to be the best, the top.

And we want that too. "We" being myself and many of my friends. As Charlene said while she was doing all her apps, "I wonder what would it be like to just want to be normal?"

But I don't know the answer to that question, because I, like the women in this book, want very much to be exceptional. There is something in me that has been trained, by a combination of personality, culture and education, to believe that nothing less than extraordinary will do. I want to pull this same sort of thing, to be at the top of my field, to work very hard and see very great rewards. And like these characters, despite all my doubts and fears, I believe that I will be able to do that. (And maybe even be able to have a family too.) Sure, I don't know how, but how much does that really matter at this point? As we learn in books like this one, the hows work themselves out.

And that's interesting to me, because reading this book, at first I felt like these women were extreme, with almost crazy hopes and goals, that people don't need that much money, that much power. And maybe I don't want to be the president of a movie studio or CEO of a magazine division. But really, when I think about it. I want to be successful like that, I want to be outstanding. And usually, I believe that I can be outstanding.

I guess all that empowerment worked after all.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

2007-03-20T20:39:00.000-04:00

March 10-12, 2007

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince
by J.K. Rowling

Sometimes you read a book just to escape the real world, and I must say, that for that purpose, the Harry Potter series has always been very effective for me. The stories are fast paced and interesting enough, complete with little doses of childlike wonder and "WOW, I wish I could do that!" moments. Especially when I am a little overwhelmed with other things, they tend to make me feel a little better about the world (and a little better at procrastination.) This book managed to pull me into and through 600 some odd pages in three days over a weekend where I worked Saturday and Sunday.

I put this on my paperbackswap.com wishlist when I first joined, because while I am a Potter fan, I'm not really the obsessive type that has already preordered the last book (although after reading this one, I am thinking about it.) And it turned up, as these things tend to do in my world, at just the right time.

I do think sometimes that the books rely a little bit too much on me having remembered little details from the past books, which I haven't read for years, so the details are fuzzy at best, but I suppose that the rehashing that would be necessary to bring those less-than-true fans like me up to speed might be really tedious for those who can keep track of all the members of the Order of the Phoenix.

SPOILER ALERT!!!!!

I was really convinced that Harry was wrong about Snape, I really just didn't think that he was going to end up as the bad guy. I don't know why, but I thought that in the way of children and teachers, they were wrong about him, and that while unlikeable certainly, he was really on the good side. I'm, not sure why I believed that, or why I wanted to believe that, but I did, and so, while I knew that Dumbledore died at the end thanks to the help of some other spoilers, I was totally shocked that Snape killed him. I am very interested to see how she wraps that one up in the end...

Cause the end is coming... and I'm not sure that I buy into Sean's prediction "He's going to die you know..." I suppose that it's possible, but at the same time, that idea seems a little too dark for the world of Hogwarts. I hope that he doesn't. I really like the idea of Harry Potter surviving. Of course, there is always the question: What does one do for a living after defeating the worst kind of evil at age 17? It kind of makes insurance sales seem a little anticlimactic ;-)

I suppose that I had forgotten how much I enjoyed these books in the time since I read the last one. When I think back, they have been very useful procrastination tools for me in the past. I do think that I will preorder the final book, (Barnes and Noble will sell it to me, a member with the credit card, for not so much at all). At this point, what I'm debating is reading the others again before the new one comes out, so that my memory is fresh, so that the whole story can come together as one complete tale, which I think is fitting. Probably not the most effective use of my time, but fitting the compulsive side of me, and I know that I will be able to get Jannine to do it with me, which might be fun. Plus, the book is coming out over the summer, so no classes, just work, disc, and God willing, some looming medical school secondaries. Sounds like a wonderful time for some quality escapism.

Want to know what else I've been reading lately? Check out The 2007 Booklist

A Perfect Mess

2007-03-15T15:32:00.000-04:00

March 12-14, 2007

A Perfect Mess
by Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman

My mother gave me this book for Christmas. I think in hope of communicating to me that she loves me in spite of my messy messy ways. I know she does, but it was still a nice gesture.

The premise of this book is that we, as a culture, have gone too far in our quest for organization, and that we now seek to be more organized simply for the sake of organization, rather than because we have a good idea of what the actual benefit of this organization might be. Basically, being organized has a cost in time and resources and such, but frequently people don't consider that, and instead just quest to keep everything NEAT without thinking if that time could have been used more productively for other things. (Anyone that has seen my bedroom or the back seat of my car knows that I suffer from no such illusion, and think that my time can be better used for just about anything rather than just making things neat.)

The authors are not advocating anarchy or complete and total sloppiness, but they argue that in each situation there is an optimal level of messiness that will result in a maximization of productivity/creativity etc. and that we should quest for that. They split the existence of messiness up into many levels and different types of messiness, and talk about how a slight mess can be an advantage in everything from our desks to our thinking.

The argument is a pretty common sense one once you think about it, but I did still find parts of the book enlightening, especially as I am one of those people constantly in a quest to go from chaos to totally perfect organization. I have, since reading this book tried to introduce a little of the productive kind of messiness into some areas of my life. (For example, my MCAT studying now includes more passages unrelated to the things that I have recently reviewed.) I'm pretty sure that I haven't yet found the optimal level of messiness (Read: agenda still compulsively color coded, floor of my bedroom, less easy to find.) But I hope that this thinking might help me get there.

It is a little redundant, and if you can accept the idea that neater is not ALWAYS better, than you can probably get by with only the first couple chapters, or reading the reviews, but if mess and organization is something that you struggle with (like me) than this might be a good one to get you to calm yourself down.

Maybe I should have bought it for my mother...

Want to know what else I've been reading lately? Check out The 2007 Booklist

A Little Catching Up to Do

2007-03-05T00:15:00.000-05:00

So, I haven't done so well with the updating thing, and only slightly better consistently writing in my pretty journal, but I figured an update might get me back on track. Here's (at least a partial) list of the books that I have read in the last two months or so, along with some thoughts on each. I have no idea of the dates for most, so I am not going to even attempt, but here goes...

Under the Banner of Heaven

This book really pulled me in, had me thinking quite a bit. For those of you who haven't heard of it/ don't know what it's about: it tells the story of some Mormon Fundamentalist brothers who (very brutally) murder their sister in law and her infant daughter because they believe that "God told them to do it." It frames this story with a lot of other details about the history of Mormonism in general and Mormon Fundamentalism in particular. The book is by Jon Krakauer, who you may know for his other books, Into Thin Air and Into the Wild.

Now the book is good, and certainly very interesting, but I did feel from the beginning that Krakauer might not have been the best person to write it. Not only is he not a Mormon, but he is clearly not religious, and much of what he says about Mormonism, or religious faith in general is loaded with not at all veiled disdain for the faithful. He claims to have respect for Mormons, but also calls says that religious violence is the result of "those murky sectors of the heart and the head that prompt most of us to believe in God - and compel the impassioned few, predictably to carry out that irrational belief to its logical end." I'm not sure that murder is the logical end to faith in Christ...

The book does really make you think, where is the line between faith and delusion? That question is legally part of the trail for these brothers. Were they insane? They thought that they were listening to the voice of God, following the will of God. But if they are insane, than are all people who attempt to live their lives according the to will of the God that they worship insane. Clearly that's taking it too far, but where's the line? It was interesting reading the thoughts of these murderers on the Islamic terrorists. One of the brothers says something about the motivations of Osama Bin Ladin that basically parallels my belief, and says that the 9/11 hijackers were following a false prophet... and its all just a belief in something that we can't prove. I mean clearly, I think that my view of God (really against murder, all murder, all the time) is much nicer than there's, and not just nicer, I believe that I am right, or at least, closer to right than they are. But I can't really prove that's what God wants either, although I can say it gives me a more plesant way to live. It just kind of scared me that if you stuck me and this guy in a room we would agree that the terrorists are wrong, but he would think of me as just as wrong as I think of him... creepy.

Anyway, I do recommend it, because there is a lot of information, and because the book really challenges you to deal with your thinking about God and faith with the challenge of these men's seemly sincere, but also evil, belief. It also has a lot of information about polygamy and Mormon education that I found frightening and challenging, so it's good for that too. If someone reads it, I would really love to talk about it. Yeah.

A Walk in the Woods
I thought that this book was really going to make me want to walk the whole Appalachian Trail, but really, it did not do that. It made me want to go out to the Blue Ridge Mountains for about a week, and then come home to my nice warm bed. I think that the history of the trail was interesting, and I obviously people thinking about doing the trail should read this one, and Bryson's commentary is quite amusing, but the book didn't really stick with me, so it wasn't a life changer or anything.

Magical Thinking
In reading this book, I found myself, for at least the first set of stories, seriously getting Burroughs and David Sedaris mixed up. Same story: gay man tells amusing stories about his childhood and young adulthood. But the later stories are much more powerful, unique and moving, in particular those about his life with his lover, Dennis, who he clearly cares for very deeply. In fact, some of the passages about Dennis rank among the sweetest things that I have ever read.

"What's painful and wonderful about somebody is loving their small things, like the way he is able to smile when he sips his wine, the way his hands fall down at his sides... The truth is Dennis has no bad qualities and no faults. When he's working late and I'm alone, or sometimes when we're in bed together, the lights off, I try to make even a small list of his faults: Things I Put Up With Out of Love. But I haven't been able to think of a single thing that I am not able to first overlook and then come to cherish." (page 222)

It probably didn't help that Andrew had driven all the way up here for the weekend, and was sleeping in the next room being generally wonderful and totally lacking in Things That I Put Up With Out of Love, because I am a lucky girl, and apparently still a hopeless romantic.

Dry

More Augusten Burroughs. This is his memoir about his alcoholism and recovery. I think that it is his most powerful book overall. While it still has the element of the absurd that was almost overwhelming in Running with Scissors it also has the honesty that so moved me in the passage that I quoted above, and throughout the whole book I felt involved. I wanted him to make it. I was rooting for him... it's good. Better than A Million Little Pieces and quite possibly more true, too.

The Orchid Thief
While I don't think that this was either the best or the most interesting book that I have ever read, it certainly got me interested in orchids, and that might be worth it, since they are pretty amazing flowers. I now look for them in places where there are flowers (some pretty ones in the Opryland Hotel) and notice them when they're around. I can sort of understand how people become obsessed, although perhaps not as obsessed as the people in this book are. Still good stuff. Jannine and I went to the Natural History Museum's annual orchid show right as I was starting this book, and now I really feel like I need to go back and look again with all the background. The book will make you appreciate a particularly interesting and complicated family of flowers. It also might make you want to see Adaptation (or see it again in my case.) I might have something to say about that when I get to it.

Attention. Deficit. Disorder.

I was hoping to really like this book, and while I do have to admit that I burned through it very quickly, I was not overly impressed. About halfway though I told Andrew that it reminded me of what would have happened if a lesser man tried to write You Shall Know Our Velocity! and while the end was better than the beginning, still, it was nothing overly special. However, I was intrigued by the trip to the Burning Man Festival, which sounds insane by certainly very interesting. Anyone want to go?

The City Of Falling Angels

This is the same man who wrote Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, and he has a powerful gift for making the location a character in the story. Although I'm sure that it helps that he chooses events in famously unique places. (MinGoGaE takes place in Savannah, GA and this is a story of Venice.) While it is supposed to be directly about the burning of a famous opera house, it is really a portrait of the city, its complexities and the people that choose to live there, and it is in that exploration that the book comes to life. I am ready to pack my bags and head to Venice to explore whenever someone wants to buy me a plane ticket. It's that kind of book. I recommend it most highly. Great Stuff.

OK. I know I am forgetting several things but I don't have the books in front of me, (including The Tao of Pooh which I read at Andrew's) but I am tried, so I think that I am going to leave it at that and go on from here. Cause I love books. Sweet.

In Praise of Slowness

2007-01-05T01:44:00.000-05:00

December 26, 2006-January 2, 2007
In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed
by Carl Honore

This book got read at the perfect time for me. I have owned this copy for well over a year, and had started reading it more than once in the past, but this time it stuck because the timing was right. It is a wonderful after vacation book, because the idea of the appeal of moving slower through life is clear when you have been doing just that, and it is a good New Years book because the idea of taking control of the way that you live your life is at the heart of pretty much all New Year's resolutions.

The basic idea of the book is that the human race has managed, with the help of technology, competition, and our own inner drives, to speed up our lives to pathological levels, and that we could all benefit from a bit of a slow down. Honore asserts in the introduction several times that he is not a Luddite, or really opposed to speed in all cases, but rather that he believes that unmitigated haste is not the right tempo for all of life's activities. That point is supported by some pretty sobering data and antidotes from modern living. The book then goes on to talk about ways that people are adding a little slowness to their lives in a number of different areas, from food and sex to exercise and the office. Honore is clearly attached to the idea that the desire to slow down, and the ways in which people do so, amounts to a global movement, and while I think that is perhaps taking it a bit too far, he makes a compelling case for moving through life a little more slowly and with a little more thought.

Now this is not the most well-written book that I have ever encountered. Honore is frequently repetitive, and relies far too heavily on the testimony of people converted in one way or another to the Slow (and yes, he uses the capital) way of living. After the general idea is introduced, we hear from people who started eating slower and now say their whole lives are better, then from people who started living in communities that allow for more walking and how their whole lives are better, then from people that exercise slowly and how their whole lives are better... and so on.

But for me, someone who recognizes, at least a little bit, the insanity of the frenzy that has crept into the way that I approach my life, the ideas, if not always the way that they were presented, were quite compelling. I saw so much of myself in the following quote from one of the introductory chapters that I was willing to hear some suggestions from the other end of the speed spectrum.

"In our hyped-up, faster-is-better culture, a turbocharged life is still the ultimate trophy on the mantelpiece. When people moan, 'Oh, I'm so busy, I'm run off my feet, my life is a blur, I haven't got time for anything,' what they often mean is, 'Look at me: I am hugely important, exciting and energetic.'"

Because I was coming off that cruise, and thinking about my upcoming New Year's resolutions, seeing so much of myself in that sentence was a little bit frightening, because I don't really believe that it is healthy for me to be that way. And when I really think about it, I know that I am not more energetic when I am pushed to the limits, and I am certainly not more exciting when my schedule is so rigid and packed that I don't have time for anything new or spontaneous.

So I was ready for some other ideas, and with that kind of open mind, it seemed as if many of the people that Honore meets with to write this book have the right idea. I do eat too fast, and it keeps me from getting the most enjoyment out of the food (while encouraging me to get the most calories.) I do drive in ways that are probably dangerous. I know from experience that a flexible work schedule can make life a thousand times more livable, and so on. This really allowed me to think about a bunch of areas that might provide room for a more regulated tempo in my life, and made me realize that I have, in some ways, managed to take even some of the things that he advocates as Slow leisure activities (knitting and pleasure reading) and turned them into a race.

And while I don't think that all of this is cultural, or that I can trace my stress directly back to the invention of the sundial, I am convinced, quite thoroughly, that pacing is something that I need to pay more attention to, and that there are areas where I want to make changes.

This book is not for everyone. Some people might find it a little bit too much. But if you're feeling like life is a little (or a lot) more frantic than it probably should be, you might want to look into it. It provides a bunch of suggestions and a pretty comprehensive study of some of the details of where we are as a culture, how we've gotten this far, and some options for taking that back. Some of the ideas are appealing and can be tried out right away (walking more, yoga, simply taking a time out when you need it) while other sections of the text discuss larger scale, and I think very flawed efforts. (The entirety of France being limited to a state mandated 35-hour work week is insanity). Different areas may work for different people. For example the chapter on city development spoke to my interests less personally than the one on slow medicine, which had me thinking for quite a while about the way that I want to practice someday, but I can think of people for whom the exact opposite would be true. If you want to slow your life down, or just find more balance in your pacing, this book may help you find a way to do just that.

Of course it may also force you, as it forced me, to face some cruel realities about the way that speed has crept into your life, and the level of the challenge that you face in getting rid of it. For example, the chapter on raising children is largely devoted to the structure of education and the idea that a less hurried one is better. That's all well and good if less parental pressure would really leave a legion of carefree kiddies, or if less emphasis on testing would produce a world in which all children could learn in a pressure free environment. But I'm not convinced that's true. Thinking back on my education, I think that the source of the pressure that pushed me into the speed that still dominates some areas of my life was a little closer to home, and Honore doesn't seem to have too many ideas for dealing with those of us that are intrinsically driven by something in the personality that pushes to more more more without the need for crazy teachers and overbearing parents. (I had neither.)

But this is not a self-help book either, so that's not Honore's job. I suppose that I would classify it as a work of social observation and commentary, and it can serve that purpose without trying to conquer all of my speeding demons. Besides, the belief that Honore puts at the core of his movement is not that everything should be done slowly, but rather that everything should be done at an appropriate pace for the action, something that he describes with the musical term tempo giusto.

"The secret is balance: instead of doing everything faster, do everything at the right speed. Sometimes fast. Sometimes slow. Sometimes somewhere in between. Being Slow means never rushing, never striving to save time just for the sake of it. I means remaining calm and unflustered even when circumstances force us to speed up."

I think, at the most basic levels, that this message is a good one, and one that a lot of us can really stand to hear.

Want to know what else I've been reading lately? Check out the 2007 Booklist
Want to read a little more about the process of this blog? Check out Bookworming in 2007

The 2007 Booklist

2007-01-05T01:40:00.000-05:00

December 26, 2006 - January 2, 2007
In Praise of Slowness:
Challenging the Cult of Speed
by Carl Honore
c. 2004
321 pages

January 3, 2007-
Under the Banner of Heaven:
A Story of Violent Faith
by Jon Krakauer
c. 2003
399 pages

Dates unknown in January and February and March
A Walk in the Woods
by Bill Bryson
c. 1997
350 pages

Magical Thinking:
True Stories
by Augusten Burroughs
c. 2004
268 pages

Dry: A Memoir
by Augusten Burroughs
c. 2003
309 pages

The Orchid Thief
by Susan Orlean
c. 1998
282 pages

Attention. Deficit. Disorder.
by Brad Listi
c. 2006
356 pages

The City Of Falling Angels
by John Berendt
c. 2005
398 pages

March 10-12, 2007
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince
by J.K. Rowling
c. 2005
652 pages

March 12-13, 2007
A Perfect Mess:
The Hidden Benefits of Disorder
by Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman
c. 2006
316 pages

March 14-15, 2007
Rosemary's Baby
by Ira Levin
c. 1967
308 pages

March 16-19, 2007
The World According to Garp
by John Irving
c. 1976
437 pages

March 19
How We Are Hungry
by Dave Eggers
c. 2004
218 pages

Dates Unknown in March, April and May

i, Robot
by Isaac Asimov
c. 1950
272 pages

Star
by Pamela Anderson
c. 2004
294 pages

No Touch Monkey!
And Other Travel Lessons Learned Too Late
by Ayun Halliday
c. 2003
273 pages

My Friend Leonard
by James Frey
c. 2005
357 pages

The Historian
by Elizabeth Kostova
c. 2005
642 pages

Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey
by Chuck Palahniuk
c. 2007
320 pages

Complications:
A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science
by Atul Gawande
c. 2002
252 pages

Four Blondes
by Candace Bushnell
c. 2000
245 pages

For Us, The Living
by Robert Heinlein
(lent to Andrew before I put it in here)

Lipstick Jungle
by Candace Bushnell
c. 2005
532 pages

Right Now:
The Poisonwood Bible
by Barbara Kingsolver
c. 1998
543 pages

Bookworming in 2007

2007-01-05T01:10:00.000-05:00

Thoughts on reading in 2007.

I have started 2007 with two things that are going to change at least a little bit the way that this blog works. The first is a beautiful journal that Andrew gave to me sometime in November and the second is the book that I just read that allowed me to start writing in that journal.

For all you non-Andrew readers, this journal is a thick volume bound in wonderfully soft leather. I adore it. It's the kind of journal that the journal-loving part of me has lusted after for years but wouldn't allow myself to buy. It's beautiful and it has nice paper and it smells nice and feels nice in your hands. It ties shut with soft leather laces, has a soft leather page marker sewn into the binding, and has beautiful script in what I think is Italian printed on the covers. It's awesome.

Andrew got me this journal to encourage me to write more about what I read. The hope is that this will force me to THINK more about what I read, and maybe allow me to see how my thinking changes. Besides, I suppose that you never know when you are going to come up with something good, or at least something that might be useful in later reading or writing, so this journal is a way to organize those thoughts.

And for about a month, I was afraid of it.

The perfectionist in me didn't want to write in the journal until I had something particularly coherent and perfect to say. I mean, this collection of blank paper is beautiful so it seemed important somehow that the things that I put in there be polished and beautiful too, which of course was the exact opposite of the point, but sometimes I have a very very hard time squashing that perfectionist in me... she's persistent.

However, after a loverly and relaxing cruise with Andrew, I was reading during the trip home, and I wanted to write something. Part of this, of course was the annual New Year's bravery that comes over all of us, (Next year, I can do ANYTHING!) but another part was that the book that I was reading, In Praise of Slowness, left me thinking about things that I wanted to say, or at least, thinking about things that I wanted to think about on paper.

So I said them and thought about them, and over the next week and a half of reading that book and writing about it as I went, I have kicked off the use of that journal with no less than 27 pages of my thoughts about In Praise of Slowness and thoughts about my life in general that were brought on by the ideas in the book.

And all this writing felt good, although sometimes I have had trouble making myself slow down the reading enough to actually do it. Still, I feel that I really learned something from the whole thing, both the writing, and the act of writing about this particular book (which actually has a section, which I read after starting the journal, that suggests reading more slowly and deliberately and writing about what you read as a way to slow down and lead a calmer life.)

I think that I enjoyed the reading more because I did it less frantically, and I certainly got more out of it because I allowed the writing to open my mind and let me make some connections to my own life that maybe weren't obvious from the beginning or needed some time to flesh out in my head.

So for 2007, I am going to keep this beautiful leather journal with me, and I am going to use it, and the first 27 pages of writing that it contains to remind me that my reading is not a race. I'll be writing in it as I read, and reading and thinking more slowly than in the past. (For an example of the past, see the start of this blog, when I was reading so fast that the idea of writing even a page about the books became overwhelming and the blog trailed off as quickly as it started.)

Here I am going to write something like a review or a summary of those thoughts and the way that they developed after I have finished the books and taken the time to look back over and think about what I have written. Not just a rehashing, but a closing of my conversation with the book that I just read.

Its going to be a lot more work, and take a lot more time on my part, but I think that the action of taking more time is going to allow me to go deeper into the books, and will allow the books to have more of an effect on me, and for that alone, I think that it will be worth it. We'll see as it comes...

Welcome to 2007.

Enchantment

2006-09-28T23:11:00.000-04:00

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

2006-08-01T23:35:00.000-04:00

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

2006-08-01T21:31:00.000-04:00

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

2006-08-01T21:10:00.000-04:00

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

2006-07-26T22:26:00.000-04:00

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

2006-07-19T17:13:00.000-04:00

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

2006-07-13T15:59:00.001-04:00

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

2006-07-13T15:04:00.000-04:00

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

2006-07-10T14:43:00.000-04:00

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

2006-06-28T18:44:00.000-04:00

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

2006-06-22T12:16:00.000-04:00

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

2006-06-15T14:15:00.000-04:00

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:

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

2006-06-13T22:00:00.000-04:00

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

2006-06-09T12:39:00.000-04:00

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

2006-06-02T23:59:00.000-04:00

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)

Peter and the Starcatchers

2006-06-02T21:53:00.000-04:00

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

Allow me to start off this entry by saying something very important.

Dave Barry is amazing.

If you don't think that Dave Barry is funny, then I don't know what to tell you. Clearly you have no sense of humor. That is sad for you, but really not my problem. (If you do not think that Dave Barry is funny because you *gasp* do not know who Dave Barry is, go here and you will feel better.)

I got this book off the bargain books rack at Borders a while ago, specifically because Dave Barry had something to do with it, and as we all know now; Dave Barry is amazing.

The book is the back story to Peter Pan, how he found Neverland, Captain Hook and Smee, eternal youth, Tinkerbell and the ability to fly. This kind of story almost always fascinates me. It's good stuff, taking a story that we already know and love and giving the characters a history, making them a little more complex.

Being written for children, Peter and the Starcatchers contained rather less of the patented Barry wit than I was hoping for. But it had shining moments: little lines that reminded me who was, at least partially, behind it all.

Parts of it were a bit choppy. The chapters are waaaaaaay too short, even for a children's' book, even in the culture of ADHD. There is no good reason for a book to have 79 chapters (literally), even when it jumps around between a rather large number of characters. (Especially since I keep telling myself that I am going to stop at the end of the chapter, but then the chapter ends so suddenly and so soon, and I am not satisfied, and decide to read just one more chapter, 77 times or so.)

All that being said. If you have a son/daughter/niece/nephew/cousin/camper/inner child that is in need of a book to read, this is a good one. It's got everything a good bedtime story needs: good and evil, Pirates and Indians, ships and storms, magic, giant flying crocodiles, mermaids, talking animals, and of course, an entirely chaste romance (although, Peter at one point, does start to think that maybe, just maybe, kissing wouldn't be totally gross). The kids are smart and resourceful, the pirates are gross and stupid, and the magic is mysterious and cool.

Plus, you'll be starting your child on the path to an appropriate affection for the work of Dave Barry at an early age, and that is VERY important. Also, it's just the kind of good fat book that a child who wants to be a reader will feel good about. (Come on, who doesn't remember the satisfaction of reading a good fat book? It still feels good once in a while. The Brothers Karamazov anyone?)

But seriously, the book made me wish I had some kid to read to. It's fun like that. Peter Pan is always a cool story, and the book works in introductions to all the good little aspects of Peter Pan's world seamlessly and creatively. Plus it has little bright details that just made me smile. For example: The same kind of magic that is responsible for Peter Pan was responsible for DaVinci, who aside from all this code nonsense was a very cool person. Also, the pirate ship catches up to the super fast British Navy ship using sails made from designs for womens clothing that look like a giant bra. (I'm not even kidding. See page 103 for an illustration.) Good stuff like that.

And of course, we must remember, Dave Barry is amazing.

Kill as Few Patients as Possible

2006-06-02T20:53:00.000-04:00

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

Andrew, in his infinite awesomeness, sent me this book as a random present. It's a collection of essays "on how to be the world's best doctor" written by a witty guy with a private internal medicine practice out in California.

There's 56 essays in all, each a page or two long, most of which are highly amusing. Each essay is titled with a simple word or phrase meant to be read as the rules for becoming, "the world's best doctor" (Landon claims you can't officially have that title until after his death, but by reading and following the rules, you can be next in line when he heads to the big waiting room in the sky.)

The tone of the book is interesting, and I recommend it (as a very quick read) to anyone that's interested in medicine. (I'm obsessed with doctors, which of course is how Andrew knew that I would like it.)

Some of the rules are clearly good advice that I hope I will be able to follow as a physician someday. "If You Can't Save Your Patient's Life, Find Someone Who Can," is about recognizing when you need to send someone to a specialist in another area, and knowing the best one to send them to. "Make a Housecall and Be a Legend In Your Own Time," is self explanatory. "Call in Death as a Consultant," is a great reminder that patients trust you, and that a mistake on your part could be *very* bad, so you should keep the worst in mind and try to catch everything. And of course, the title "Kill as Few Patients as Possible," a goal that all doctors should aspire to.

Others of the rules are clearly good advice that apply to my life (and maybe yours) right now. "When You Make a Mistake So Horrible It Is To Die Over, Don't," reminds you also not to drink or mope too much over it either. "Don't Be Late For Your Own Happy Hour," reminds that there is a time to stop working and that you should put that into your schedule as well (And also suggests reading every day, good stuff. ) "Execute Insurance Forms at Dawn," means get the unpleasantness out of the way right away rather than letting it build up and hang over your head (as I often do.) And of course "Since Death is Very Still, Keep Moving" (Most of the time I think that I have that one almost down.)

Still, there's some advice that I am suspect of. "If You Don't Believe in Prescribing Valium For Your Anxious Patients, Be Sure To Take One Yourself," I'm not sure that giving all anxious people highly addictive medication is a good idea. In fact, in general I think that Dr. Landon is a little too comfortable with "doctor's little helper." Of course, this in part comes from the perspective of someone that knows that she doesn't like the way she feels when taking that whole class of medications, so perhaps don't take me too seriously. Maybe he's right. I don't have anxious patients, yet. 'Take Up A Hobby and Become a Multifaceted Bore Instead of a Simple One" seems to come out against my nature as a person that likes to do a lot (too much). Again, maybe I will give up my sketchbook and ultimate and all that jazz once I too have patients to worry about, but for the love of God, I hope not. I do think that people need hobbies and interests, even people with big important time consuming jobs. An article in this month's issue of scientific American Mind on burnout actually suggests that people with those kinds of jobs need a way to relax that much more. But I digress. Dr. Landon also seems to have a more lax attitude about journal reading than I plan to have, but then again, we all know that I am an obsessive reader, so I suppose that we can't hold it against him. (Unless that is you want to be treated with the most up and coming treatment for your random disease, in which case, you might want a better journal reader doing the treating, but again, I digress.)

There is some advice I just can't follow: Rule #1 "Be Jewish"

And then there's some advice that, in my opinion, is just plain BAD. I won't go into the whole tirade on why I disagree with, "Don't Let A Shrink Take Credit For Giving Your Patient Prozac," but if you would like to read my 176 page thesis on the topic, I suppose I could send you a pdf.

But despite my occasional differences in opinion, this book is highly enjoyable. He's amusing, if sometimes a little off, and it's a quick read. Future doctors of America should pick it up. It has a couple doses of reality that are probably good for all of us as we study for the MCATs and beyond. (Patients die, its horrible, but true. I still, after all my years of wanting to be a doctor, have a lot of trouble with that idea. I hope that will help to make me better.)

And remember, the best advice in the book, "Praise Nurses," saved me about 45 minutes of work, just today.

In other words, just be nice to people.

Something Borrowed

2006-06-02T20:37:00.000-04:00

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

This is beach reading at its best (or maybe it’s worst). Something Borrowed is quick and relatable without much meat to it, and certainly no words that you don’t already know. This was vaguely satisfying in a voyeuristic sense. The characters are not overly complex, but you care about (two of) them enough to want to know what happens, and that gets you thorough it without much effort.

The main plotline of the book is this: Rachel (our heroine) sleeps with and falls in love with her long time best friend Darcy’s fiancée, Dex. The two hide their affair over the course of a summer in New York City. Rachel wrestles with the loyalty vs. following your heart question as she spends time planning the wedding as the maid of honor all the while sleeping with the groom.

(SPOILER ALERT!)

In the end, Dex calls off the wedding, doesn’t tell Darcy why, and tells Rachel he loves her. (Well I didn’t see THAT coming.) As they are stripping for some good old fashioned celebratory sex, Darcy shows up. Dex is hiding in the closet of Rachel’s apartment while Darcy confides in Rachel that she has been cheating on Dex and is (gasp!) pregnant with Dex’s best friend Marcus’s baby. She plans to marry Marcus and move forward with her life. (Oh, the plot twists!) Of course, after the confession is complete, she sees Dex’s watch on the nightstand, and all is found out. End of friendship, start of beautiful life for Rachel and Dex (and maybe Darcy and Marcus, but who really cares?) end of novel.

There were questions at the end of the book (for book club discussion) and the majority of them seemed mindless. I’m not sure that novels like these really have some deeper meaning, that the author even intends that. Isn’t it possible that the intent in simple entertainment, without really talking about the nature of friendship or the balance of relationships. Maybe? I don’t know. I feel like this was not so much a literary accomplishment as a successful diversion, the same way that Legally Blonde can be witty and entertaining without ever coming close to the realms of cinematic masterpiece. This book too is good at what it does without making you work for it. There is certainly a place for that.

If her intent was high art, the author has failed. But perhaps more realistically, I do think that the author intended for you to care about Darcy, to feel bad for her, at least a little bit. Sure she’s high maintenance, more than a little ditzy, and thinks the world revolves around her. Sure, her best friend is betraying her, and that’s rough. Still, I never liked her, never felt bad, always wondered why either Rachel or Dex put up with her crap for even five minutes, let alone long enough to become lifelong friends or an engaged couple. She’s annoying, and she agonizes over annoying things, like which is the right color of lipstick. Argh!

The end of the book included an excerpt from another book, one written from Darcy’s perspective and seeming starting off where this one left off. If the author intended for me to care enough about Darcy to buy another book, she has failed completely. Even here, where I was reading from inside her mind, at the point where she should have been most human (the story picks up her perspective at the moment she finds out just how badly she has been betrayed) I still found her unrelatable and one dimensional, selfish, self-centered, manipulative, and barely tolerable. I’m not neutral, I dislike her. I don’t care about her happiness, she deserves what she got. Interestingly enough, I do not dislike her enough that I want to read this next book in hopes that it contains the details of her downfall, as some good villains can make you feel. I just hate her. I want her to go away. Thankfully, the excerpt is short and she does.

Now maybe this comes from some measure of the distain I feel for the traditional "pretty girls" of which Darcy certainly is one. But even with that in mind, I can’t separate her from that type, in part because she has been so solidly written into it. She wants to be the center of attention even in her downfall. She’s manipulative to the last. It’s entirely obnoxious. (I suppose that the author might be able to claim credit for making me feel so strongly about a character, but again that is questionable when she’s written a book from a prospective that I find entirely loathsome and will certainly avoid.

The other thing that I found interesting was the gradual building of Rachel’s confidence. She seems through the book to sell herself short, especially in the presence of Darcy, (who again with the obnoxious apparently stole her first crush, and claimed to have gotten into Notre Dame where Rachel failed.) At the same time, Dex, who is clearly (aside from the whole infidelity thing) written to be every woman’s dream, (sexy, smart, successful, dark curly hair… that last one might just be me) sees Rachel as a sexy and obviously has since he first met her. I feel like, as the book develops, we as readers are meant to see that Rachel, while she is frequently hard in herself and sometimes has shockingly low self-esteem, is really rather fabulous, prettier than she thinks, sexier than she thinks, all around better than she thinks. There are times when you begin to think that despite the fact that she has spent her whole life living in Darcy’s shadow, that maybe, just maybe, she really is the "better girl" that maybe outsiders might she her as the pretty and unattainable one while Darcy is overcompensating by being obnoxiously outgoing and social.

To me, this characterization, this gradual development, feels like a fantasy. I think that this might be what makes this book sell, and what makes the author’s portrayal of Rachel so likable even as she betrays her best friend (which I suppose should not elicit too much compassion, even when the friend is so easy to dislike.)

What women doesn’t want that to be her reality? No matter how hard we are on ourselves, I think that a lot of us are hoping that people on the outside looking in think that we are lovely. Maybe, sometimes, on our most hopeful days, we think that’s the truth, the from the outside, all the faults are imagined, and in reality, it’s not a friend, but ourselves that is the "pretty one" at least in the eyes of the guy that you most want to think that way. This is the same strange thinking that keeps girls from killing themselves in volient ways. Even at the last, they want to be thought of as beautiful, they hope that they will be seen as pretty and tragic, as if they will get to enjoy that.

It’s like a Cinderella or an ugly ducking story. And that’s why those are so appealing. It’s a nice idea to have the dashing prince come up and sweep us off our feet. It’s a nice idea to have the underdog win, the nice girl turn out also to be the pretty one, the smart girl to get the guy over the dramatic party girl.

And so this book works, despite the predictability of the story line (of course he leaves Darcy, I mean really here people) and the forget-ability of the secondary characters (who are these people anyway? why do I care?). I did read the whole thing in only a couple of days. I did care about Rachel enough to want to read about her happiness when the inevitable left her with the sexy man by her side. It’s good stuff.

So, if you like girly romantic comedies where the right girl always gets the guy, and if you like the idea of the not-as-pretty girl turning out really be the pretty-girl, and if you don’t mind (or find satisfying) the downfall of the occasional shallow super-pretty girl, than this is the book for you. I maybe wouldn’t recommend it as reading for anyplace that isn’t sunny enough to get a tan, or to readers with Y chromosomes, but it’s fun in the dumb girly movie sort of way that can be very nice sometimes: brainless, but very nice.

Then again, I just wrote a whole lot on something brainless, so look who’s talking.

Introduction: Readaholic

2006-06-02T14:35:00.000-04:00

For some reason, every year, there is something about the beginning of summer that takes me, a normally avid reader, over some unclear threshold into the world of what can only be called obsessive reading. I don't know why it happens, but it has been a consistent occurrence for as long as I can remember. The trend is clear all the way back to the summer in grade school (between 3rd and 4th or 4th and 5th grades) when I reached my goal of reading 10,000 pages and earned myself some absurd number of free Subway Kids Meals from the Wethersfield Public Library's summer reading program.

More recently, the memories are more pleasant and vaguely sensual. I remember sitting in the coffee shop across from BC reading, how it was too cold in the shop and way too hot outside, and how distinctly different the act of reading there was from the work that I did that summer moving furniture. The summer before last, I read a book a day for the weeks before camp started, waking up early to read before work, eating quickly to read something at lunch, and spending full evenings in the basket chair that Nicole and I acquired mod shopping. Last summer I read for hours in my room at TFA institute, and sometimes when I could grab a free moment during the school day. My reading felt like a little island in that world of stress and insanity and transition, and I plowed through books even though I shouldn’t have had time for any of them.

This summer seems no different, and as Memorial Day passes and the weather gets hot, I find myself again turning pages compulsively, reading a book every day or at least close to it. I can't stop myself. While in the winter I sometimes fall asleep before my head even hits the pillow (or in some cases, before I even think about the pillow, while sitting up and doing something else.) In the summer, sleep escapes me until I have read for a while. Sometimes I will not sleep for hours and hundreds of pages and not notice what is happening, leaving me sluggish in the morning when I intend to run, but no more likely to make it to sleep without reading the next night.

And I love it. It’s delicious and relaxing and exciting. I get involved in the stories and the ideas and want to read more and more: more by the same author, more on the same topic, more on some tangentially related topic that is mentioned casually in a novel as a side interest of one of the characters. More, more, more.

In the past, I have tried to write journal entries about the things that I read. I want to be the kind of reader that can keep it together to write notes about all the books that pass through my hands. I had claimed the beautiful leather journal that my mother got for me in Turkey for this purpose, thinking that I would want to keep my reading notes far longer than the random thoughts that repeat in my other, personal, less enduring journals.
But writing is painfully slow, and typing is blissfully fast. The difference, especially for me, is astronomical. I wrote almost all of the entry up to this point during a single six minute task run for one of my subjects. I couldn’t come close to that writing by hand. That combined with my compulsive editing, and my tendency to be long winded, and therefore to get hand craps, leaves me thinking that despite my potential desire to have these ideas bound in lovely Turkish leather, the reality is that to get them down at all I may have to accept a more electronic medium: hence the blog.

That and part of the reason that I want to write about the books as I read them is the fact that I would like to talk about them. I would like to hear if other readers agree with me, and get suggestions as to other books that I would like. I want my reading this summer to be a less self-centric and more communal process, at least as much as reading really can be.
I don’t delude myself into thinking that I am going to have some sort of cult blog following as I write this. That would be insane, and I don’t think that I am ready for a large audience, but the act of writing about the things that I read with the intent of ANY audience will inspire me to think about them that way, and perhaps one or two of you will have something to say back, which is always cool. And even if not, and it’s all for me, so what, I do lots of writing all for me.
So here we have it. Maggie reading her summer yet again, but this time, at least keeping track of it. And we’re off.

The book list will be perpetually updated. And I do mean perpetually. Let’s see how much a girl can read when she has to work and play ultimate and study in addition to just devouring pages. I think that it will still be more than I imagine.