Currently reading: Copper Elephant, by Adam Rapp
Will not be discussing: The Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paolo Giordano (which I would recommend if you were interested in a book about the two most unhappy people in the world)
Will be discussing: Lucy by Laurence Gonzales
I will begin this post with a secret admission: I love Michael Crichton (almost as much as I love Stephen King). I love the bizarre scenarios and the pseudo-science and the fast pace and the ginormous length. So Lucy had "in the tradition of Mary Shelley and Michael Crichton" on the back and I said "yes, please.".
Bonobo researcher (Jenny), insurgents in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, daring escape through the forest, detours to alert the british researcher who was never very friendly, researcher found dead, but his 14 year old daughter (Lucy) on the floor of their home with her arms around dead bonobo. Jenny takes the daughter and returns to the US.....with Lucy, the 1/2 bonobo child. [Now is the time for a long tangent about how terrible jacket copy is -- this would be a far cooler book if you did not know that Lucy was part bonobo....the reader should find out when Jenny finds out -- but instead we know from the jacket. The long and tiring and yet really quite good David Grossman novel I dicussed earlier included a piece of information on the jacket that is not revealed until the halfway point of the book. Part of my narcolepsy with the first part of the book is waiting to figure out how what I already know can be true. Someone out there in the publishing world should do something about this. And while you are at it do something about ridiculous movie previews (really you had to give the world's biggest hint in the preview for Never Let me Go that they are clones??]
Ok, where were we....in Chicago with Lucy and Jenny. Lucy who has never lived anywhere but the jungle....the best parts of this book are the Mean Girls style high school scenes, minus the gossip, the plastics, and the mean girls. Eventually all sorts of things happen and while you are never on the edge of your seat, you do want all to work out in the end. And I am not sure that they do, because, sadly, the novel breaks down in the last 25 pages.
So if I was giving scores I guess I would give this a 6.5 * -- good for a plane ride, but if you leave it on the seat next to you with 25 pages to go -- don't bother rushing back to find it. (So a question to my reader(s): how do I put the little asterisk at my new rating system with a footnote to explain how it will work?)
Update -- answer from comments: do it manually!
So here is my scale (all books listed on my bookroll are either 9s or 10s):
* the scale coordinates with well-known authors clearly at each level (ha! so it is an entirely idiosyncratic scale! The primary rule about this scale is that: it is my blog and I get to be as judgmental as I wish [iimbaigtbajaiw]
1: offensive books that I hated, i.e. silly mommy war novels [it would be good to have an example, but I already said I hated it]
2: genres that annoy me -- fantasy (unless it doesn't), historical, steampunk
3: tedious boy books, i.e Philip Roth
4: entertaining books that other people push that I won't read: Swedish crime fiction
5: one step above entertaining books that other people push on me: Like Water for Elephants
6: books that are needlessly depressing, or confusing, or sleep inducing, that nevertheless I finish: I would put David Grossman's See Under Love here, but I never finished it....
7: The perfect airplane book sufficiently distracting to keep me from wondering how it is that a plane stays in flight: Ken Follett (thus violating rules 1 and 2! Remember -- idiosyncratic)
8: Excellent books that maybe go off track; or books I should like better, but am too shallow to love: Philip K. Dick and other sci fi written by males that does not fall into the offensive category, and yet this is a malleable category: Orson Scott Card -- love the books, yet so offensive....)
9: Books I want to teach and worry when students do not also love: Ursula Le Guin (minus the unreadable Always Coming Home) plus books I would not teach and yet re-read.
10: Books I love love, i.e.Octavia Butler (except for Kindred)
Monday, May 16, 2011
Saturday, May 7, 2011
Reading the people
So it seems to me that one of the items on the good parent list would be "reads the books your children are reading." Of course we all start out reading those books because we are the ones doing the reading! But once your people take off and read on their own then it is up to the parent to decide: am I in or out? Theoretically I think we should be in: by reading what our children read we can both keep tabs on potential pitfalls and get another clue about how our people think. On the pitfalls -- a few summers ago when Harriet the Spy was popular we did what any sensible family would do -- get all the other books written by Louise Fitzhugh and so the girl child started reading The Long Secret and the boy child started reading Sport. At this point we would read with the people maybe 1/3 of the time -- so some days they would read to themselves and other days we would read to them. So I was the one reading when a police officer in Sport used the n-word. But the girl child had to ask me what menstruation was from one of her reading alone nights. While the n-word made Sport unacceptable reading for a rising 2nd grader, the menstruation part was not problematic except that it was of no interest to my reader -- and so here the lesson was: read, or at least pay attention to, the books your people read just to keep tabs on the issues that come up (my uncle gave me a 'teen in the french revolution' novel when I turned 12 that included my first enounter with the "string of pearls" phenomenon -- I did not fully understand, except to know that I should not ask my mother).
The opportunity is that by reading what your people read you gain insight into their largely opaque heads. And yet....I dislike fantasy....one of my people loves the fanatsy: the dragons, the elves, the endless battles, the inexplicable places and spaces. And I don't wish to read these books. But to only read the books I am interested in that my people read may be a bad move. But this week I did just that -- avoiding the fantasy that I have promised I will read (The Looking Glass Wars) I instead read Betti on the High Wire by Lisa Railsbeck. Babo, who will be renamed Betti by her adoptive parents, is the child of circus performers killed in a nameless war in a nameless country. Babo has lived as the leader of a group of forgotten children, looked after by Auntie Moo and avoiding soldiers and the potential ministrations of a local missionary woman. But on occasion adoptive parents come and one day someone wants Babo. Most of the book is about her adjustment to life in the US. Written from Babo's perspective the book does a nice job of seeing American life from a radically different perspective. I disagree with the author's refusal to name Babo's country. Railsbeck notes in the afterword that she wants her readers to think that Babo's life could be happening in many countries around the world. I think, instead, that it makes Babo less real -- by being any child she becomes no real child and her home country seems to be little other than the circus that Babo remembers almost as a fantasy. Babo makes very clear that she does not want to leave her country or her parents (who she thinks are alive -- and my reader also thought the parents were alive, although I thought the text was fairly clear on their death in the war -- this meant my reader was certainly more critical of the idea of foreign adoption). The adoptive parents are portrayed with a nice mixture of humor and patience and interest in Babo's past (an interest it is hard to satisfy as her country of origin is not named). My reader described the book as funny and sad. On the other hand that same reader declared the thoughts in her own head as her own -- and so there went my great moment of insight into reading a book to read my people.
Perhaps the dragon book will work better. Shoot.
The opportunity is that by reading what your people read you gain insight into their largely opaque heads. And yet....I dislike fantasy....one of my people loves the fanatsy: the dragons, the elves, the endless battles, the inexplicable places and spaces. And I don't wish to read these books. But to only read the books I am interested in that my people read may be a bad move. But this week I did just that -- avoiding the fantasy that I have promised I will read (The Looking Glass Wars) I instead read Betti on the High Wire by Lisa Railsbeck. Babo, who will be renamed Betti by her adoptive parents, is the child of circus performers killed in a nameless war in a nameless country. Babo has lived as the leader of a group of forgotten children, looked after by Auntie Moo and avoiding soldiers and the potential ministrations of a local missionary woman. But on occasion adoptive parents come and one day someone wants Babo. Most of the book is about her adjustment to life in the US. Written from Babo's perspective the book does a nice job of seeing American life from a radically different perspective. I disagree with the author's refusal to name Babo's country. Railsbeck notes in the afterword that she wants her readers to think that Babo's life could be happening in many countries around the world. I think, instead, that it makes Babo less real -- by being any child she becomes no real child and her home country seems to be little other than the circus that Babo remembers almost as a fantasy. Babo makes very clear that she does not want to leave her country or her parents (who she thinks are alive -- and my reader also thought the parents were alive, although I thought the text was fairly clear on their death in the war -- this meant my reader was certainly more critical of the idea of foreign adoption). The adoptive parents are portrayed with a nice mixture of humor and patience and interest in Babo's past (an interest it is hard to satisfy as her country of origin is not named). My reader described the book as funny and sad. On the other hand that same reader declared the thoughts in her own head as her own -- and so there went my great moment of insight into reading a book to read my people.
Perhaps the dragon book will work better. Shoot.
Sunday, May 1, 2011
An actual book!
So I have finished a book not assigned for my classes and without incurring a library fine (well that is not really true, finishing the book did not magically return it to the library, so it will be returned late tomorrow). David Grossman's To the End of the Land (this is an excellent interview with Grossman), as this is my blog and not a review I will share with you a few thoughts, somewhat random and then perhaps come up with something to say about whether you should read it. The book tells the story of Ora, who escapes to hike in the Gallilee in order to avoid any notifiers who might come and tell her that her son, serving in the army, is dead. She hikes with an old friend and lover who was a POW in Egypt 30 years prior to to the novel's main time frame.
So actual book reviews are often filled with these stock phrases and this is a book that calls out for such phrases (the back of the book, which includes excerpts from seven reviews, favors words like "wrenching," "full of anguish" and "passionate" -- and one Israeli paper says this book is the "stamp of maturity upon Israeli literature," which I misread as the "swamp of maturity," which struck me as an intriguing thing to say....alas.). Ok, so my reviewy phrases will be paired with my actual thoughts in brackets. The book opens with an utterly captivating first chapter [why? because you could imagine it was the first chapter in a postapocalyptic plague novel -- three young people in an empty hospital and a nameless nurse]. Each chapter reminds the reader of the various forms of pain that humans are capable, and willing, to inflict on one another [to this I responded -- 7 days in a row -- by falling asleep with the book on my head. Some of this pain is inflicted on the reader: you will not know what is happening, you will not know when it is happening and you will never know why it is happening]. The descriptions of the Israeli landscape are lyrical [and compel me to find out what a terabinth tree looks like and to really find out what a wadi is]. The main character, Ora, is maddening [ok, that is me not my reviewer voice -- reviewers say she is Emma Bovary (pish) and Anna Karenina (posh) and that Grossman has created a "fully alive" character -- actually I found her to be not particulalry alive, she is always in her head, -- and that is what makes her maddening, and compelling].
So, in all seriousness -- two things I really liked about this book: first is the telling of a child's life. Ora describes her family life to Avram and in doing so brings her children to life in words. She is not just telling funny or not so funny anecdotes. She tells them into being for Avram and for the reader. As she tells she remembers more and more about the early years of both of her children (the years you don't remember unless you, unlike me, had the good sense to write things down). As the world knows, Grossman's son Uri was killed during his army service while Grossman was writing this book. The book reminds about the work that words can do to bring someone alive. Second is the sense of place -- the geography of Israel (and I have never been and know little about its geographic feel) is palpable and striking -- primarily in contrast to my own sense of the geography of the US. Most of the book takes place on a hike along the Israel trail -- a comparable hike along the Appalacian trail would not yield quite the same combination of army base, arab village, grocery store, creek, mountain, school group, sheep, shepherd, bedouins, wild dog and coffee. Nor would it include the multiple plaques dedicated to the memory of soldiers who died. I suspect some do hike the appalachian trail and make coffee three times a day (and if you are planning such a trip, invite me!) and I have seen cows on the Appalachian trail -- but this description of the Israel trail makes me think about two things: first of all the United States is just huge and its landscape is so incredibly variable and regional and specific. And second, I am not sure there are very many places (particulalry natural spaces) that I could describe in such detail: having lived in 6 states as an adult I am not sure there is any one landscape that feels particulalry like home. I could give a fair description of the inland woods of Beaver island, MI or a certain beach in Maine or even Tom, Dick and Harry trail in Oregon -- but I do not have spaces that I return to daily or weekly that I know so well. This book gives you the sense that Grossman is describing his home -- and it is a home that he knows so intimately in flower and stream and mountain and rock and sound and bird and lizard and flower and fruit trees and people.
And my last thought about the book? Its take away for me: remember that being right is rarely enough.
So actual book reviews are often filled with these stock phrases and this is a book that calls out for such phrases (the back of the book, which includes excerpts from seven reviews, favors words like "wrenching," "full of anguish" and "passionate" -- and one Israeli paper says this book is the "stamp of maturity upon Israeli literature," which I misread as the "swamp of maturity," which struck me as an intriguing thing to say....alas.). Ok, so my reviewy phrases will be paired with my actual thoughts in brackets. The book opens with an utterly captivating first chapter [why? because you could imagine it was the first chapter in a postapocalyptic plague novel -- three young people in an empty hospital and a nameless nurse]. Each chapter reminds the reader of the various forms of pain that humans are capable, and willing, to inflict on one another [to this I responded -- 7 days in a row -- by falling asleep with the book on my head. Some of this pain is inflicted on the reader: you will not know what is happening, you will not know when it is happening and you will never know why it is happening]. The descriptions of the Israeli landscape are lyrical [and compel me to find out what a terabinth tree looks like and to really find out what a wadi is]. The main character, Ora, is maddening [ok, that is me not my reviewer voice -- reviewers say she is Emma Bovary (pish) and Anna Karenina (posh) and that Grossman has created a "fully alive" character -- actually I found her to be not particulalry alive, she is always in her head, -- and that is what makes her maddening, and compelling].
So, in all seriousness -- two things I really liked about this book: first is the telling of a child's life. Ora describes her family life to Avram and in doing so brings her children to life in words. She is not just telling funny or not so funny anecdotes. She tells them into being for Avram and for the reader. As she tells she remembers more and more about the early years of both of her children (the years you don't remember unless you, unlike me, had the good sense to write things down). As the world knows, Grossman's son Uri was killed during his army service while Grossman was writing this book. The book reminds about the work that words can do to bring someone alive. Second is the sense of place -- the geography of Israel (and I have never been and know little about its geographic feel) is palpable and striking -- primarily in contrast to my own sense of the geography of the US. Most of the book takes place on a hike along the Israel trail -- a comparable hike along the Appalacian trail would not yield quite the same combination of army base, arab village, grocery store, creek, mountain, school group, sheep, shepherd, bedouins, wild dog and coffee. Nor would it include the multiple plaques dedicated to the memory of soldiers who died. I suspect some do hike the appalachian trail and make coffee three times a day (and if you are planning such a trip, invite me!) and I have seen cows on the Appalachian trail -- but this description of the Israel trail makes me think about two things: first of all the United States is just huge and its landscape is so incredibly variable and regional and specific. And second, I am not sure there are very many places (particulalry natural spaces) that I could describe in such detail: having lived in 6 states as an adult I am not sure there is any one landscape that feels particulalry like home. I could give a fair description of the inland woods of Beaver island, MI or a certain beach in Maine or even Tom, Dick and Harry trail in Oregon -- but I do not have spaces that I return to daily or weekly that I know so well. This book gives you the sense that Grossman is describing his home -- and it is a home that he knows so intimately in flower and stream and mountain and rock and sound and bird and lizard and flower and fruit trees and people.
And my last thought about the book? Its take away for me: remember that being right is rarely enough.
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Ha!
So, I finished a book that I did not assign for class (and no it is not the long, complicated David Grossman novel of which I have managed 15 pages a night before falling alseep, book on head). Alison was writing something about Ayelet Waldman and I asked to borrow the book Bad Mother (you should know, reader(s) that I never buy books at Amazon and yet I always link these books to Amazon, why is that?). In 18 chapters Waldman recounts her marriage, her life as a lawyer and a writer, and her children -- but more than all of this she recounts her experience of being a mother and her obsession with being a "bad" mother. A bad mother is a mother who is not perfect; and while I appreciate Waldman's argument that we are often inundated with images of maternal perfection as the only ideal, I also think that this theme gets old fast. Waldman clearly wants credit (amusing dinner party credit) for being a bad mom. And her writing is not sufficiently amusing to maintain that tone, but after chapter 10 or so she calms down. And what is clear from then on is not that she is a bad mother (although she, like all the rest of us is imperfect) but that she is an anxious mother. She is anxious about how her moods will impact her children, how her expectations will distort them, how her hopes will stifle them, how her desire to be her own person and continue loving her husband as the number 1 chosen person in her life will bring the whole family down. Waldman is, in part, in love with her own anxiety. But she is also honest about that anxiety.
Yet, she has strange perceptions about the universe and its role in her life, while she does recount in detail how she has worked through decisions about aborting a child with a genetic, trisomy related, pre-natal diagnosis, and dealing with a son's struggles in school and a daughter's delayed speaking and another son's palate issues (and yes, as those who know me will recognize, let me say here: she has one million children....i.e. more than 2). In all of these decisions (most notably about Rocketship, the name the family gave the child she aborted) Waldman speaks honestly about where she is coming from. But then there is an odd (to me) shift to the universe. She says in a later chapter, after the main Rocketship chapter (which is Ch11), "as blessed as we had always been, here now the universe had dealt us a shitty hand" (166). (And here I should link to Alison again for a blogpost on that very subject.) And this is the point where her often compelling focus on her own mental moment seemed off. In the Rocketship chapter, Rocketship is a potential person that Waldman (unlike her husband) does not think she can bring into the world. But now Waldman seems to be presenting a universe that doles out children like blessings and...curses? bits of shit? What I liked about the Rocketship chapter was that it was really honest and her self-asborption was palpable. But now (in the throes of CVS testing for child 4) the universe was saying something.
So if I ever wrote a book about parenting it would be titled: The Universe is Silent.
And the book was lent with a promise that she has a lot of sex with her husband. Which she may well have, but other than that bare assertion, there is little sex to be had here.
Yet, she has strange perceptions about the universe and its role in her life, while she does recount in detail how she has worked through decisions about aborting a child with a genetic, trisomy related, pre-natal diagnosis, and dealing with a son's struggles in school and a daughter's delayed speaking and another son's palate issues (and yes, as those who know me will recognize, let me say here: she has one million children....i.e. more than 2). In all of these decisions (most notably about Rocketship, the name the family gave the child she aborted) Waldman speaks honestly about where she is coming from. But then there is an odd (to me) shift to the universe. She says in a later chapter, after the main Rocketship chapter (which is Ch11), "as blessed as we had always been, here now the universe had dealt us a shitty hand" (166). (And here I should link to Alison again for a blogpost on that very subject.) And this is the point where her often compelling focus on her own mental moment seemed off. In the Rocketship chapter, Rocketship is a potential person that Waldman (unlike her husband) does not think she can bring into the world. But now Waldman seems to be presenting a universe that doles out children like blessings and...curses? bits of shit? What I liked about the Rocketship chapter was that it was really honest and her self-asborption was palpable. But now (in the throes of CVS testing for child 4) the universe was saying something.
So if I ever wrote a book about parenting it would be titled: The Universe is Silent.
And the book was lent with a promise that she has a lot of sex with her husband. Which she may well have, but other than that bare assertion, there is little sex to be had here.
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Litany of failures
Ok -- so I returned the Julia Franck book to the library 3/4 read (and overdue to boot -- a 3$ fine and I did not even like or finish the book). If someone knows what happens to the boy left in the train staion feel free to fill me in -- but since at p. 279 Helene was not even pregnant with him yet I had to give it the heave ho. Perhaps it would be a better book were I not so tired. I exchanged it for David Grossman's new book To the End of the Land. I suspect it will take more brainpower than I have in the last week of classes; we shall see.
And if you want to follow a funny/exasperating set of posts over the worst children's book in the world (The Giving Tree) then go to Andrew Sullivan's blog: http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/ It took a while for my view of this as a dangerous piece of blather about a child getting everything to the detriment of the poor tree comes out in the comments. And my few readers will, perhaps, be relieved that I shall stay silent about the Giving Tree and Jesus.
And tomorrow is Passover -- I can post on reading the Haggadah.....
And if you want to follow a funny/exasperating set of posts over the worst children's book in the world (The Giving Tree) then go to Andrew Sullivan's blog: http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/ It took a while for my view of this as a dangerous piece of blather about a child getting everything to the detriment of the poor tree comes out in the comments. And my few readers will, perhaps, be relieved that I shall stay silent about the Giving Tree and Jesus.
And tomorrow is Passover -- I can post on reading the Haggadah.....
Sunday, April 3, 2011
True Journey is Return
Or so says Odo, the founder of the principles on which the planet Anarres is organized in Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed. All I know is that there are three weeks left in the semester and time is flowing like Niagara Falls and I am Sam Patch in a barrel (Upstate NY reference -- will have to seek random [or not , wikipedia] internet link.....here!). I am currently reading Ursula Le Guin's The Telling, but it is not working for me and I just started the quite dark and grim The Blind Side of the Heart by Julia Franck. So far so good, not much to say yet. My class starts reading Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower this week. This is hardly even a blog post.....
Sunday, March 27, 2011
How did one week go by?
OK, let's see -- it has been quite a week in my world and while reading is happening thinking much beyond the reading I have been doing for my class is not happening (that is The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin, one of my favorite books, ever). But I also finished the truly dreadful Witch of Hebron by James Kunstler and am dipping in and out of the T.C. Boyle short story collection Wild Child (bought for the title story, which was disappointing -- on the other hand the stroy "1300 rats" was pretty much just what you would want out of a story with that title). So, Kunstler. He is the author of the beautifully titled World Made by Hand. Can a book be good if the only good thing about it is the title? (More below on the title.) Kunstler (peak oil man of The Long Emergency, nonfiction), imagines life post oil, post nameless war and post various diseases, in a small town along the Hudson river north of Albany, NY. Without oil, gasoline, electricity, communications systems and essentially every other means of modern comfort (which seems to include egalitarian gender relations) the people of Union Grove face many difficulties: the crazed and violent gang of thugs that scavenge, fail to apprecaite hard work, but allow Kunstler to offer up some pretty disgusting punishments; the disappearance of some men who went to trade in Albany; and the arrival of a quasi cult like christian group that has been moving north after facing worse difficulties in the southeastern US. Oh I can't even go on with its silly plot. So the Witch of Hebron continues the celebration of the simple life, of men who fish and hunt and treat their women well and women who...well, other than the witch, women who pretty much stay off the page unles their buxom boutnies are being discussed. Kunstler, I suspect, fanstasizes of being a medieval lord -- and it is as tiresome as it sounds.
But the title -- he captures simply in a title the important feature of life post-apocalypse: that it (like life post state of nature) must be made by hand -- not because we eat slow and love our goods handmade -- but because we understand that politics, organized living together, can only be made 'by hand.' Not by god, not by superiors, but by us. Sadly he has ruined a perfectly good title with two novels of nonsense.
But the title -- he captures simply in a title the important feature of life post-apocalypse: that it (like life post state of nature) must be made by hand -- not because we eat slow and love our goods handmade -- but because we understand that politics, organized living together, can only be made 'by hand.' Not by god, not by superiors, but by us. Sadly he has ruined a perfectly good title with two novels of nonsense.
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