A Dirty Job

by Christopher Moore

Listened to this as an audiobook (so no quotes). This was a really funny, surreal book. Definitely black humor. I guess a book about being a grim reaper and battling the forces of the underworld would be like that. Anyway, I liked it, except that it wrapped up way too quickly (can you really wrap up 11 hours of book in the last 20 minutes?) and the "Beta Male" motif got old about 8 hours in. I mean, it made a lot of sense, and made me laugh a lot, but it seemed a little overused as an explanation after a while. Or maybe I was just tired of hearing it as the explanation (not that it wasn't valid in all of the contexts it was used). Anyway, it's funny, and I've recommended it to a couple friends that have lots of time in vehicles and like Edward Gorey.

Quicksilver

by Neal Stephenson

So, I found this book on sale one Saturday night. I picked it up partly because I've been meaning to read one of this author's books (several friends of mine have raved about Snowcrash, and I'm way, way behind on my geek lit). And partly because of who had recommended the author most recently. Maybe I shouldn't feel silly for these things? It's another way of getting to know someone, anyone. Maybe more indirectly, I guess. Ah well...

Anyway, here I am, 927 pages later. And turns out, I've got 2 more books of this size (called "cycles", in this case) to go before the story is complete. But it's interesting - it's a historical novel involving the history of science, court intrigue in England and France, vagabonds and damsels in distress. It was a little frustrating when I finished the first section of it, and then had to read another 300 pages before it picked up the thread of those characters again. The hard part of the novel is keeping all of the geneaolgy straight, and the author provides handy family trees, but doesn't not what pages they're on (so it's hard to find them again once you pass them). Still, it's a great story, and it's kept my interest enough to commit to at least another 1000 or so... Some of the plot points are strange, but M. told me that when he heard the author speak about the book, the strangest parts are the ones most likely to be true. It's the mundane parts that are made up (not, say, the live vivisections, unfortunately). It's also neat to think of what people thought about as they were coming up with these things, and that these names in science books had to try a lot of things before they found things that worked. Stephenson tells it like it was a race, but without anyone knowing where the finish line would be, only that they were faster or slower than some other guys they knew and / or possibly respected. I've picked parts (probably not the best or funniest, but the ones that struck me) from all three books within this cycle.

"Why he was doing so, Daniel had no idea. It was just that by getting up and leaving so mysteriously, Isaac begged to be followed. Not that he was doing a good job of being sneaky. Isaac was accustomed to being so much brighter than everyone else that he really had no idea what others were or weren't capable of. So when he got it into his head to be tricky, he came up with tricks that would not deceive a dog. It was hard not to be insulted - but being around Isaac was never for the thin-skinned"

"'We need to find a fair where we can sell the ostrich plumes directly to a merchant of fine clothes - someone who'll take them home to, say, Paris, and sell them to rich ladies and gentlemen.'
'Oh, yes. Such merchants are always eager to deal with Vagabonds and slave-girls.'
'Oh, Jack - that's simply a matter of dressing up instead of down.'
'There are sensitive men - touchy blockes - who's find something disparaging in that remark. But I -'
'Haven't you wondered why, whenever I move, I make all of these rustling and swishing noises?' She demonstrated.
'I'm too much the gentleman to make inquiries about the construction of your undergarments - but since you mentioned it - '
'Silk. I've about a mile of silk wrapped around me, under this black thing. Stole it from the Vizier's camp.'
'Silk! I've heard of it.'
'A needle, some thread, and I'll be every inch a lady.'
'And what will I be? The imbecile fop?'
'My manservant and bodyguard.'
'Oh, no -'
'It's just play-acting! Only while we're in the fair! The rest of the time, I'm as ever your obedient slave, Jack.'"

"Daniel had finally convinced King James II that His Majesty's claims to support all religious dissidents would seem a lot more convincing if he would take Cromwell's skull down from the stick where it had been posted all through Charles II's quarter-century-long reign, and put it back in the Christian grave with the rest of Cromwell. To Daniel and certain others, a skull on a stick was a conspicuous object and the request to take it down was wholly reasonable. But His Majesty and every courtier within earshot had looked startled: they'd forgotten it was there! It was part of the London landscape, it was like the bird-shit on the windowpane you never notice. Daniel's request, James's ensuing decree, and the fetching down and re-interment of the skull had only drawn attention to it. Attention, in a modern Court, meant cruel witticisms, and so it had been a recent vogue to address wandering Puritan ministers as "Oliver," the joke being that many of them - being wigless, gaunt, and sparely dressed - looked like skulls on sticks. Exaltation Gather looked so much like a skull on a stick that Daniel almost had to physically restrain himself from knocking the man down and shoveling dirt on him."

Caramelo

by Sandra Cisneros

I found this book one evening with B., post-book binge weekend. And I've been meaning to read another book by the author, The House on Mango Street. It's a coming of age story, a generational story, and a story of migration. All fun things. I guess I was expecting a cross between A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Love in the Time of Cholera.

This is a great book. A great way with words, not too spare with them, like other books I've read. And a great story as well. The relationship with the grandmother was not like mine, but it did make me miss her. And wish that there were some way that we could hear all of the stories, the scandals and excuses, the things that are hard to explain and tell while there's still time for them to be told. The hard part about this book is that there is a sprinkling of Spanish words throughout the novel, and I don't speak a whole lot of Spanish. I did have the Internet resources handy, but some slang still escaped me. Ah well... I have lots of quotes, to make up for the books didn't pluck little strings inside me like violins.

"It was a shame that narciso had not read that illustrious and educational book of his great-great-grand-other Ibn Hazm and paid close attention to the chapter "On the Vileness of Sinning." Had he been fortunate enough to have been schooled by his early ancestor, then perhaps Narciso Reyes would have saved himself a lifetime of grief. But it is true we are but an extension of our ancestors, our several fathers and many mothers, so that if one thinks about it seriously and calculates, at one times hundreds of years ago, thousands of people were relatives-to-be walking across villages, passing each other unknowingly in and out of tavern doorways or over bridges where barges rolled quietly beneath, without knowing that in years to come their own lives and those of contemporary strangesr would merge several generations later to produce a single descendant and twine them all as a family. Thus, in the words of old, we are all brothers.
But who listens to what is said of old? It was youth, that amnesia, lke a wave sliding forward and then sliding back, that kept humanity tethered to eternal foolishness, as if a spell was cast on mankind and each generation was forced to disbelieve what the previous generation had learned a trancazos, as they say."

"-So that the woman who wears the crown of iguanas wil come back and love only you, no?
-How did you know?
-You want her to fall under your spell?
-With all my heart I desire it.
-Well, then, it's obvious what you have to do. Forget her.
-Forget her!
-Yes, forget her. Abandon her. The more you let someone go, the more they fly back to you. The more you cage them, them more they try to escape. The worse you treat them, the crazier in love they are with you. Isn't that so? That's all. That's my love medicine for you today."

"The talk in the night, that luxurious little talk about nothing, about everything before falling asleep: - And then what happened?
-And then I said to the butcher, this doesn't look like beef, this looks like dog cutlets if you ask me...
-You're kidding!
-No, that's what I said...
How sometimes he fell asleep with her talking. The heat of his body, furious little furnace. The softness of his belly, soft swirl of hair that began in the belly button and ended below in that vortex of his sex. All this was hard to put into language. It took a while for the mind to catch up with the body, which already and always remembered.
Everyone complains about marriage, but no one remembers to praise its wonderful extravagances, lik sleeping next to a warm body, like sandwiching one's feet with somebody else's feet. To talk at night and share what has happened in a day. To put some order to one's thoughts. How could she not help but think - happiness."

"'Normita, you're better off,' everyone said to me. 'You're young, you find yourself another to erase the pain of the last one; like the saying goes, one nail drives out another.' Sure, but unless you're Christ who wants to be pierced with nails, right?
For a lng time after, I'd just burst into tears if anyone even touched me. Sometimes it's like that when somebody touches you and you haven't been touched in a long time. Has that ever happened to you? No? Well, for me it was like that. Anybody touched me, by accident or on purpose, I cried. I was like a little piece of bread sopped with gravy. Wo whenever anything squeezed me, I started to cry and couldn't stop. Have you ever been that sad? Like a donut dunked in coffee. Like a book left in the rain. No, never? Well, that's because you're young. Your time will come."

Cold Blood

by Theresa Monsour

Another quick book. Serial killer, but one of the twists in this one is that his truck is his weapon of choice. And this is another case where the killer is a very f*$#ed up individual, to quote E., and just when you don't think he could get more messed up, more evil or more dumb, he does. And the story had a love triangle (rectangle?) with a protagonist too, so that was diverting. I enjoyed the book, though. Kept me busy.

High Crimes

by Joseph Finder

Quick book. My grandfather had read it in '03, noted it as a Really Good Book. So I read it, in the weekend of many books. It was interesting, but a little unsettling.

Waiting

by Ha Jin

Found this book at a sidewalk sale in my old neighborhood. It was hot, there was a lack of air-conditioning at my own house, and I remembered my friend T.'s fondness for National Book Award Winners while I was trying to spend as much time as possible outside of my house. I finally sat down and finished it over the last week, and it was a good distraction, even if it didn't particularly give me hope or peace.

The quote on the cover calls it "A suspenseful and bracingly tough-minded love story." It is tough love story. But it made me sad, in that no one ever really gets what they want. They want what they used to have, or what they think is possible in the future. Not what they have right now. Which, I guess, is fine in the short term, but for 18 years? It's hard, all the waiting. But it's an interesting story of patience, and hope, and relationships. It reminds you that everyone stumbles around, doing the best they can. Only in this book, they spend a lot of time hurting each other in the process.

"From that day on, an emotional tug-of-war was waged between them. Lin was accustomed to being alone, so he didn't go and look for Manna. He wanted pece of mind. Yet whenever she came into sight, he couldn't help looking at her. She seemed aware of his attention and always kept her face away from him. She laughed more than before, especially in the presence of other men, and her neck grew straighter. She wore shirts of bright colors and a pair of new leather shoes. Like some other young nurses, she began using Lily Lotion, the most expensive kind of vanishing cream. In the evening she often played badminton with others in front of the bathhouse, as though all of a sudden she had become a young girl again, full of energy and life.
Never had Lin thought she could be so headstrong. He felt miserable and often breathed with difficulty, as though a weight of lead were jammed into his chest."

"As Lin calmed down, a voice rose in his head and said, Do you really hate her?
He made no reply.
The voice continued, You asked for this mess. Why did you marry her?
I love her, he answered.
You married her for love? You really loved her?
He thought a while, then managed to answer, I think so. We waited eighteen years for each other, didn't we? Doesn't such a long time prove we love each other?
No, time may prove nothinng. Actually you never loved her. You just had a crush on her, which you dind't get a chance to outgrow or to develop into love... Let me tell you what really happened, the voice said. All those years you waited torpidly, like a sleepwalker, pulled and pushed about by others' opinions, by external pressure, by your illusions, by the official rules you internalized. You were misled by your own frustration and passivity, believing that what you were not allowed to have was what your heart was destined to embrace."

The Namesake

by Jhumpa Lahiri

So I found this the weekend school started. For everyone but me, that is. I've got free time now, and can read what I want. And Amazon kept pushing it, and I happened to see it in hardback at my favorite used bookstore. Then I needed something to keep my mind busy one weekend and pulled it off the shelf.

It's a generational story, and one about displacement. The book follows a newly married couple moves from India to Massachusetts, then continues with the lives of their children. It has a lot of interesting things to say about family and identity, about love and duty. There's parts that I relate to about building your own family community when yours is not near. It has a good lyrical style, and I really liked that the narrative thread and voice moved among family members. Each perspective came through - better, it was interesting to see how these perspectives were formed.

"She passes over two pages filled only with the addresses of her daughter, and then her son. She has given birth to vagabonds. She is the keeper of all of these names and numbers now, numbers she once knew by heart, numbers and addresses her children no longer remember. she thinks of all the dark hot apartments Gogol has inhabited over the years, beginning with his first dorm room in New Haven, and now the apartment in Manhattan with the peeling radiator and cracks in the walls. Sonia has done the same as her brother, a new room every year ever since she was eighteen, new roommates Ashima must keep track of when she calls. She thinks of her husband's apartment in Cleveland, which she had helped him settle into one weekend when she visited. She'd bought him inexpensive pots and plates, the kind she used back in Cambridge, as opposed to the gleaming ones from Williams-Sonoma her children buy for her these days as gifts. Sheets and towels, some sheer curtains for the windows, a big sack of rice. In her own life Ashima has lived in only five houses: her parents' flat in Calcutta, her in-laws house for one month, the house they rented in Cambridge, living below the Montgomerys, the faculty apatment on campus, and lastly, the one they own now. One hand, five homes. A lifetime in a fist."