Book Blog

A Widow For One Year

2007-09-17T00:07:00.000-04:00

by John Irving

Borrowed this book from A., who says he's one of her favorite authors. Somehow, in my mind, I think I'd confused John Updike with John Irving, and so this book was WAY different than I expected. It was fun to read, and interesting, and a lot of weird things that made me laugh. Of course, it also creeped me out in a lot of ways. Ah, the Modern American novel. It's also got this sense of novel-within-a-novel, and it's a book where the main character is also an author, which can make self-conscious (maybe self-indulgent, but it's conscious of being self-conscious in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way just about the time that it gets to be too much - to me, it didn't get stuck on the wrong side of the border). But there were a few points in there about the nature of writing that I particularly liked.

"Graham was the ring bearer, but he'd misheard the word. The boy expected to be the ring burier. Thus, when it came time for him to hand over the rings, Graham was outraged that an important part of the wedding had been forgotten. When was he supposed to bury the rings, and where? After the service, since Graham was in despair over what he believed was the botched symbolism of the rings, Ruth let the boy bury her and Harry's rings at the roots of the privet that towered over the swimming pool. Harry paid close attention to the burial site, so that after a certain solemn passage of time, Graham could be shown where to dig the rings up."

"Here she was, espousing the purity of imagination as opposed to memory, extolling the superiority of the invented detail as opposed to the merely autobiographical. Here she was, singing the virtues of creating wholly imagined characters as opposed to populating a novel with personal friends and family members - 'ex-lovers, and those other limited, disappointing people from our actual lives' ... The best fictional detail was the detail that should have defined the character or the episode or the atmosphere. Fictional truth was what should have happened in a story - not necessarily what did happen or what had happened...

Ruth hated herself for providing them with a theory of fiction about which she now had sizable doubts... Novels were not arguments; a story worked, or it didn't, on its own merits. What did it matter if a detail was real or imagined? What mattered was that the detail seemed real, and that it was absolutely the best detail for the circumstances."

"The fat girl was hitting the window with the big pink dildo that Ruth had earlier seen in the hospital tray on the table by Rooie's bed. Once the young prostitute had got Ruth's attention, she stuck the end of the dildo in her mouth and gave it an unfriendly tug with her teeth. Then she nodded indifferently to Ruth, and at last she shrugged, as if her remaining energy allowed her only this limited promise: that she would try to make Ruth as happy as Rooie could make her.

Ruth shook her head no, but she gave the prostitute a kindly smile. In return, the pathetic creature repeatedly slapped the dildo against the palm of her hand, as if marking time to music only she could hear."

The Wonder Spot

2007-07-22T20:56:00.000-04:00

by Melissa Bank

Found this at the GT bookstore while I was supposed to be shopping for a Father's Day present. Still haven't gotten the Father's Day present... Can I reset the goal to Labor-Day-Present-for-Dad?

Anyway, I think this book is my first foray into post-chick lit. It's what happens when chick lit grows up. Yes it's still fun and snarky, but not traditional chick lit, where the girl at least gets wiser, if not the man. For at least half the book the girl's already got perspective, it's just figuring what to do after that... When you realize that a breakup or job loss isn't the end of the world, or the end of the line, and that both dating and single life have their own precious horrors. It's past the ennui of "what do I want to do with my life?" and into "wow, I've been doing this for years, whether I really meant to or not".

I really liked the structure of this book - a bunch of short stories starring the main character. And I confess, I think I read one (or an excerpt of one) in a Cosmo or Glamour or something. But I like the idea of picking out bits of a person's life for a story, and not really having to wade through all the filler. Wait, do all lives have filler?

Anyway, what I didn't like about this book, or at least, what it's made me think about is the theme of the single life. The book follows her dating life through a series of men, and series of friends, and when you look at your life that way, as a series of men, it's a little strange. I mean, in traditional chick lit, the girl gets the guy or a guy, or friends or career or family, or there's a sense of culmination. The life proposed in the book is one of a string of really great boyfriends (and sometimes great family and friends, but ones who often let you down). Is that enough? I mean, I think what's been sold as this Sex in the City lifestyle is that in general, you'll get The Guy. A guy that you love and is perfect for you, even if it takes a damn long time. This book is about about dating forever, with no culmination, no real Aha! moment, or actually, a life with a whole lot of them that turn out not to be what you'd hoped after awhile. And maybe that's why my Sunday has been a little depressing... Don't get me wrong, the book was fun to read and made me think, but the end of the book seems to indicate more of the same kinda got me down.

"Up until that moment, I'd been at the earliest stage of love, when you feel it will turn you into the person you want to be. Now his gentle voice and sage advice took me to a later stage: I felt I needed to pretend to be a better person than I was so that he'd keep loving me. This was hard because it made me hate him."

"My mother was still describing the portrait's greatness when my grandmother returned with three tiny glasses of sherry on a silver tray.

As my mother and I took ours, my grandmother said, 'Pay attention,' and 'Be careful,' as though we'd already spilled a first glass of sherry and giving us a second was against her better judgement...

My grandmother said, 'I told Dan that you'd be here,' as though his call from Chicago had required special planning and hard-to-find equipment, as though his call was a special favor that we hadn't been gracious enough to receive.

I had a brainstorm: 'We could call him back.'

My grandmother seemed not to hear; her point was not that we talk to my uncle but that we'd missed talking to him."

"According to Jack, all of Rebecca's boyfriends were black, which seemed, if not racist, race-ish, and I wondered, Why the black guys, Becky? just as I wondered in the case of my friend Alex, Why the Asian women? Or in my own case, Why the pirates?"

Saving Fish From Drowning

2007-05-14T21:40:00.000-04:00

by Amy Tan

Found this awhile ago, probably before Arizona, but just lately got around to reading it. It's been a while since I've read one of Tan's books, but I enjoyed this one. I finished it a few weeks ago, but hadn't gotten around to saying anything about it yet.

It's an interesting structure, having a dead woman for a narrator. It's mostly omniscient (which, in this case includes most characters' points of view delivered through the filter of a narrator)... And it's a travelogue as well. The downside of that is that a significant amount of the book is of the "trip from hell" genre. But there's a lot of scenery and historical detail that makes me want to travel through southern China and Burma. I also like the omniscient part because you can see inside people's thoughts, which is particularly interesting if they're funny and in crisis mode. The only other downside, really, was a wrapping up type of coincidence at the end that kinda left a bad taste in my mouth. But there's a nice lyrical quality about the story, and several quirky funny bits, with some interesting points that kept me up thinking after the book was done, and it was fun to read, so I'd recommend it. Definitely a book that reminds you to throw yourself in, caution to the wind.

"But I ask myself now: Was there ever a true great love? Anyone who became the object of my obsession and not simply my affections? I honestly don't think so. In part, this was my fault. It was my nature, I suppose. I could not let myself become that unmindful. Isn't that what love is - losing your mind? You don't care what people think. You don't see your beloved's faults, the slight stinginess, the bit of carelessness, the occasional streak of meanness. You don't mind that he is beneath you socially, educationally, financially, and morally - that's the worst, I think, deficient morals."

"'If your doggie has your very expensive alligator purse in his mouth,' Harry would say in his seminars, 'offer to trade him for a piece of hot dog. Oh goodie, pant-pant, and he'll drop the purse at your feet. What's the lesson here? Put your overpriced purses and pumps where Pluto can't get to them! Then go and get him a smelly old tennis ball. The game is simple: Ball in your hand, treat in his mouth. Even if he's a basset hound, he'll turn into an impressive retriever if you do enough trades... Dogs are not people in fur coats. No, indeed. They don't speak in the future tense. They live in the moment. And unlike you and me, they'll drink from a toilet. Lucky for us, they are perfect specimens of how operant conditioning and positive reinforcement work, and beautifully so if onlhy we learn how to apply the principles properly. Their human handlers hae got to be absolutely objective about what motivates their poochies - so quash their tendancy to ascribe Muggum-wuggum's barking, growling, and counter-surfing to anthropomorphic motives such as pride, revenge, sneakiness, or betrayal... And if dogs resemble Homo erectus in any respect, it is in those traits of the poorly socialized male. Both do what pleases them: they scratch their balls, sleep on the sofa, and sniff any crotch that comes their way.' In the early days, he went so far as to believe his notions of dog behavior could be applied to anything, from toilet training to international politics. He said so in seminars: 'Which works faster: beating and humiliating a dictatorship, or luring it to follow a better and more rewarding model?: If we call upon the country only to pummel it for being bad, how likely is it ti come seeking our humanitarian advice? Isn't it utterly obvious?' And then Harry would dangle a hundred-dollar bill and bob it up and down so that the people in the front row would nod dutifully in agreement. He was rather cocky in those days."

"He saw that Marlena was staring at him, mesmerized, a look that said to him: You are so incredibly powerful and sexy. If there were a bed right here, I'd jump your bones. Actually, Marlena was wondering why he took so much pleasure in describing how fish die."

The Effects of Light

2007-03-28T23:05:00.000-04:00

by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

Found this book the day I went to Portland... It's a great book. It's about a two girls whose family friend happens to be a photographer. The girls end up in the middle of the debate about what's pornography and what's art. It's an interesting story about what happens when a philosophical debate leaves imprint, a scar, on a family's life. There's a parallel story in it, about one of the girls all grown up, and her later life and her return to the hometown...

The book talks a lot about the pictures, describes them and the circumstances, but never shows the pictures. There's an interesting note about how most of the people who concern themselves with the pictures (or at least, some of the key figures) never actually see them.

"The truth is, I may not have a mother who is more than a picture, but I know I have a family. David and Myla - they're related to me, they're what people ask about when they say, 'How's your sister?' or 'What time is your dad picking you up?' But one day David sits me down and tells me I'm lucky because I have more family than just the people I was born to...

We have dinner at Emma and Jane and Steve's every single Friday night, when it's raining, and when it's heat-wave hot, and when there's snow on the ground. You could say I look forward to it, but that's a dumb way to say it. The thing about family is that you aren't supposed to look forward to them; they aren't supposed to make you excited the way a big surprise would. That would mean you don't know them very well. When David and Myla and I go over there on Friday nights, we know we belong. We can take whatever we want out of the fridge and we can wash the dishes n the sink. Emma and Jane and Steve expect us there, and when we drive up, we don't even have to knock."

"'And when Jane looks at a picture of you, she sees a wonderful, beautiful, sweet, seven-year-old girl whom she loves. But she can also imagine the way a stranger might see the picture. And she tries to imagine what a stranger might think. So she doesn't hate the picture. She doesn't hate Ruth. She may not even hate the stranger. But she's scared.'

I ask him, 'Then why aren't we scared?'

'The answer is simple. The pictures are good and beautiful. They are pictures of you and Myla living your lives, growing up. And hte taking of the photographs has become an important part of who you are, of part of that growing up. I wouldn't take that away from you for a million dollars, unless you didn't want to be a part of them... Just having you be in the photographs has helped you learn that you're in charge of your own bodies. That you are in charge of your own minds. Jane loves you so much that she wans to protect you. I love you so much that I want to protect you, and I think letting yu form opinions from your own experience is the best way to do that. So we disagree. But to tell you the truth, I like that Jane loves you so much. I like that jane makes us think about all this. I bet you do too.'"

"'I don't understand, Mark. It's a perfectly reasonable desire: I want to hear why he did this. He broke my trust. I deserve an explanation.'

Mark sighed. 'I'm only going to say this once. But my God. Listen to yourself. Listen to how typical you sound. If I've learned anything about you in the last week, it's that you're truly an original. I mean, you're someone who's actually changed your identity. Twice. And yet you're whinking like every other thirty-something woman who's pissed at her boyfriend. I'm not saying you don't have a right to be pissed, but don't you see what's at stake here?... Rise above this pettiness. You're not someone who's going to let this man go just because of some stupid misunderstanding about a notebook. The only reason you'd let him leave is that you're afraid.'"

"the two girls are together on a tricklng streambed. Theolder wone is infront, and she stands with her feet a shoulder's width apart, her hands poised on her hips. She looks as if she's up for a challenge, her chin set in such a way that ther'es a trace of rebellion on her face. The muscles in her arms are flexed. Her legs are strong. She has breasts and the fierceness of someone who knows the world, but expects a fight.

The younger one is behind, softer, out of focus. She curls on a rock, a dollop of brightness behind her sister's sour stance. At first glance you think she's threatened by the older one's towering presence in the foreground, but then you see that's not the case. You look closer and realize she's content. A smile settles on her face, in the corners of her mouth, and her eyes look lovingly in the older one's direction.

The older girl is a mammal. You see that's she's guarding the younger one from something unnamed. Not the camera, for she's obviously comfortable in front to if, knows her way around its edges. Not the viewer. Or at least not you. If you're looking at this picture, and you're able to see the protection in her body, then you're not the person she's guarding against. It means you have an eye for the girls' well-being. It means you're not the one who ends it."

The Blind Side

2007-03-20T20:53:00.000-04:00

by Michael Lewis

Another Portland book. I read this book as a desperate cry for help - okay, maybe it was just withdrawl from college football (and disappointment with the results of the last season). Anyway, it's about college football, its relationship with high school football and the NFL, the evolution of the passing game/west coast offense, the left tackle position, and a kid named Michael Oher. I knew next to nothing about any of these before reading the book. Now I know more - enough to hold a conversation, but I suppose one book doesn't make an expert, even if it's a great book.

It's fun to read, though, since I didn't know much about most of the topics, it's hard to judge it. I'm trying to see what others who know more think about the book, but I think most of the people I know are just shocked that I read it in the first place. But what I liked most about it was the way it managed to tie all the stories and topics together. It's an interesting book, about an interesting kid, and it made me all the more interested in watching this guy, and perhaps maybe even some NFL.

"Inside football, the argument between brains and brawn never has been settled, and probably never will be. The argument less and less found its way into words off the field, but on the field, it reprised itself in action and strategy, over and over again. And on the chilly wet afternoon in Candlestick Park, it was about to play out in an extreme form, with Walsh as the brains and Bill Parcells as the brawn. Parcells was deeply suspicious of the overt use of intellect on a football sideline. He knew that Walsh claimed to script the first 25 plays of every game in advance, but later said 'that scripting was a bunch of bullshit. They never got past number eight.'... (By 2006, two thirds of the teams in the NFL had been run by a coaching descendant of Walsh or Parcells). After Parcells later won his first Super Bowl, in 1986, he said his style of football 'never had anything to prove. It's the fancy-pants stuff that needs to prove itself.' Walsh was the latest embodiment of fancy-pants. In 1981, people were starting to take notice of his new and improved little passing game, but Parcells had something new and improved, too: a passing destructomatic called Lawrence Taylor. Just as Walsh was lowering the risk of throwing the ball, Parcells was raising the risk to the men who threw it."

"The DMV was for some reason miles east, outside the Memphis beltway, on a road lined with anemic maples, porn shops, and churches. They passed a porn shop and then a church and then another porn shop and another church; it was as if the people of Memphis had chosen this place to fight the war between animal nature and the instinct to subdue it."

"The play was called Gap because each lineman was responsible for his own gap, defined as the space between his inside eye and the head of the defender inside of him (the eye and the defender closest to the center). The quarterback handed the ball to the running back. The running back ran at the right butt cheek of the left tackle, Michael's gap, and followed it as far as it would take him. Michael's job was simply to run straight down the field and destroy everything in front of him.

Michael had brought to Briarcrest an argument that ran straight through football on every level - high school, college, the NFL. It was the argument that Bill Walsh met when he first stressed the passing game as it had never before been stressed. It was the argument between the football fundamentalists and the football liberals. The fundamentalists reduce football to a game of brute force - and some of them do it so well that they appear to have found the secret to football success. The liberals minimize the importance of brute force and seek to overcome brute force with guile - and some of them do it so well that they, too, appear to have found the key to football success. That was Hugh: small, blond, looking nothing like a football coach but every once the crafty chess master, or the military strategist. Whatever his politics, Hugh was, by nature, a football liberal.

Sean Tuohy thought there was another reason, apart from his desire to win, why Hugh made everything so complicated: the pleasure of thinking up new things. 'Hugh thinks football is supposed to be fun,' said Sean. 'We've got a quarterback who is average at best. No running back. No speed at receiver. And Hugh wants to run the triple reverse.'

Hugh wanted to run a triple reverse because in his seven years as head coach of the Briarcrest Christian School Hugh had never had a player he could count on to physically overpower the bigger kids from the bigger schools. Now he had one of the most awesome forces ever to walk onto a Tennesseee football field; and he didn't at first grasp the implications of that. He thought he could keep coaching the way he had always coached, and win a state championship."

Blindness

2007-03-08T15:47:00.000-05:00

by Jose Saramago

This book has been on my list for awhile, but I finally gave in and bought it when I was in Portland. It's a book about blindness, as an epidemic, that strikes a whole city, a person or group at a time (maybe like the plague or the influenza). The people aren't ill in any way, their vision is just reduced to a bright white light that blots out everything else.

Of course, everything plunges into chaos. First, the government tries to create a policy of rounding up the blind and putting them somewhere (which I've added below, simply because of what I studied at Tech). The book is written like this, very few new paragraphs, and little in the way of punctuation for sentences. It kind of lends a dream-like, rushed quality to the story. And there are no names - they people feel them irrelevant, without their sight, or maybe it's just that the author did. These are hard to get used to, as a practical matter for reading, but then again, so was the sudden blindness for the characters.

Anyway, at the institution, things go from bad, to worse, to sub-human, or maybe it's human and I just don't like to think that we're capable of treating each other in this way. Some of the words, the descriptions turned my stomach and broke my heart. And though they're moving, they're not the parts of the book that I want to remember the details of, so I'm not going to include them here. At any rate, the book is amazing, and people talk about it being an allegory, but I don't know for what. Or at any rate, if it's a specific reference to something, than I've missed it. But if it's more of how to get at the meat, the whole of humanity (shining, grubby or terrible moments), then it's succeeded.

"According to the ancient practice, inherited from the time of cholera and yellow fever, when ships that were contaminated or suspected of carrying infection had to remain out at sea for forty days, and in words within the grasp of the general public, it was a matter of putting all these people into quarantine, until further notice. These very words, Until further notice, apparently deliberate, but in fact, enigmatic since he could not think of any others, were pronounced by the Minister, who later clarified his thinking, I meant that this could easily mean forty days as forty weeks, or forty months, or forty years, the important thing is that they should stay in quarantine. Now we have to decide where to put them, Minister, said the President of the Commission of Logistics and Security set up rapidly for the purpose and responsible for the transportation, isolation, and supervision of the patients, What immediate facilities are available, the Minister wanted to know, We have a mental hospital standing empty until we decide what to do with it, several military installations which are no longer being used because of the recent restructuring of the army, a building designed for a trade fair that is nearing completion, and there is even, although no one has been able to explain why, a supermarket about to go into liquidation, In your opinion, which of these buildings would best suit our purpose, The barracks offer the greatest security, Naturally, There is, however, one drawback, the size of the place is likely to make it both difficult and costly to keep an eye on those interned, Yes, I can see that, As for the supermarket, we would probably run up against various legal obstacles, legal matters that would have to be taken into account, Ant what about the building for the trade fair, That's the one site I think we should ignore, Minister, Why, Industry wouldn't like it, millions have been invested in the project, So that leaves the mental hospital, Yes, Minister, the mental hospital, Well then, let's opt for the mental hospital."

"Is she beautiful, she was more beautiful once, that's what happens to all of us, we were more beautiful once, You were never more beautiful said the wife of the first blind man. Words are like that, they deceive, they pile up, it seems they do not know where to go, and suddenly, because of two or three or four that suddenly come out, simple in themselves, a personal pronoun, an adverb, a verb, an adjective, we have the excitement of seeing them coming irresistibly to the surface through the skin and the eyes and upsetting the composure of our feelings, sometimes the nerves that cannot bear it any longer, they put up with a great deal, they put up with everything, it was as if they were wearing armour, we might say. The doctor's wife has nerves of steel, and yet the doctor's wife is reduced to tears because of a personal pronoun, an adverb, a verb, an adjective, mere grammatical categories, mere labels, just like the two women, the others, indefinite pronouns, they are crying they embrace the woman of the whole sentence, three graces beneath the falling rain. These are moments that cannot last for ever, these women have been here for more than an hour, it is time they felt cold, I'm cold, said the girl with the dark glasses."

Got the Look

2007-01-07T22:55:00.000-05:00

by James Grippando

Good airplane book. Not as much fun as the other ones I've read, but maybe it's because the plot went off on a wild goose chase that it never returned from. Twists and turns for their own sake, but not entirely believable.

Double Tap and The Arraignment

2007-01-07T15:41:00.000-05:00

by Steve Martini

Two books by the same author, read in the same weekend. The first one was one of two my mom loaned me to read on the plane. I got most of the way through it, then misplaced it while I was at my friend's wedding. My friend's aunt was kind enough to loan me another book by the same author as well.

The books are fun, lawyerly romps. Double Tap involves the theme of Total Information Awareness, and supercomputers invading every aspect of our lives (though not with the added benefit of finding us our soulmate along the way, as in Death Match). The Arraignment has to do with a the lawyer's dirty lawyer friend getting shot, and the lawyer trying to find the killer/reason why.

Very good airplane books, though I think I like The Arraignment better (even with the weird detour to Mexico and some convoluted details that seem irrelevant to the storyline). I think it's just 'cause I'm biased against Supercomputer As Villian books right now. But the writing is snappy, and I'll let a lot of things slide for that. I'm looking forward to reading more books by the author.

"She sits there wide-eyed, considering her options: door number one, carpet sweeping; door number two, some serious felonies for forgery and theft with some probable time, and some good points toward motivation on a double murder. Her response, which takes a nanosecond, tells me this is not a hard choice.

'We had been seeing each other,' she says, 'for some time. Nathan and I.'

'I am stunned.'

'I mean before Nick died.'

'You mean before he was shot, killed?' I say. 'There is a difference.'

'Yes. That's what I mean.' She corrects herself.

'If Nick died of pnemonia in a hospital with Metz in the bed next to him, the police wouldn't be looking under every rock for the people who shot them. They'd just figure God did it, and you'd be free to hold hands with Nathan as if nothing happened. You do see the difference?'

She looks at me with a bitter expression. 'We didn't tell the police about it. We didn't think they needed to know. It was private.'... Now that she wants something, my feckless acceptance of her denial, Dana's eyes go all soft again and teary. She is able to turn this on faster than most kids can shoot a squirt gun."

Death Match

2007-01-07T14:55:00.000-05:00

by Lincoln Child

Found this in an airport bookstore... Discovered a chain that has a read and return program, and bought it (and returned it, so I don't have any passages) because it sounded like eHarmony gone bad. Or if Hal from Space Odyssey ran a dating service. Or what would happen if your dating service cost $25,000 and had access to ALL of your information (credit card purchases, phone records, etc). It was entertaining and reasonably well written, but you see all the twists and turns coming a mile away. Ah well, it got me from Phoenix back home...

My Life

2007-01-07T14:39:00.000-05:00

by Bill Clinton

While I was home over Christmas, my dad passed along this audiobook to me. I was looking for something to pass the time on the drive to Baton Rouge, and he happens to be going through a phase of listening to presidential biographies.

It's an interesting book, especially for someone interested in policy. It's a lot of woulda, coulda, shoulda of what he wanted from his presidency. It's an interesting way of defining the New Democrats. It's also an interesting look at compromises, what policy options would be on the table, and which ones weren't. Of course, the book also has the benefit of hindsight.

It's also an interesting look at regret. When I asked my dad what the President had to say about Monica Lewinsky, he told me I'd have to listen for myself. And it's true, you kinda have to hear the way he talks about it.

But if I'd ever had any thoughts about running for office, this book makes me think twice. I kinda like having a private life.

The History of Love

2006-10-31T21:19:00.000-05:00

by Nicole Krauss

I heard about this book a long time ago. Great title, and it sounded like the type of story that would appeal to me. And then I learned that it's by the wife of the author of Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (which I read last summer, but apparently, forgot to write about Everything is Illuminated). And while I feel like a woman's work should stand on its own, without having to be compared to her husband's, it would also feel strange to ignore the context of the work and the environment in which it came about.

I've never read books by authors who were married before. I feel like it creates a window into their lives. It's like they've invited the world not only into their minds and hearts, but into their home as well. There's certain similarities in the writing styles (I don't know which order the books were written in, only the order I read them in), in subject matter and characters. There's this theme of absent mothers, or at least, mothers that are too wrapped up in themselves and/or their pain to see their children fully. There are eccentric children, too bright/curious for their own good, trying to fix their broken parents. And then there are the old, who suffer the indignities of age and regret.

I really liked the writing of the book. It's incredibly well written and it made my heart ache (too much sadness, too much hope). Unfortunately, I didn't like the ending. Or really, the last third of the book. I guess it got too much involved in the mechanics of bringing all the plot strands to convergence. Or maybe I didn't like the way that they were coming together. Or maybe it's just that it started to remind me too much in style, themes and plot of her husband's work (which maybe it would actually be him reminding me of her, but I happened to read him first). Anyway, the first 2/3 of the book are excellent, and the last third disappointed me. But even considering the let down, the book is great - even it's worst is still pretty damn good.

"When I got older I decided I wanted to be a real writer. I tried to write about real things. I wanted to describe the world, because to live in an undescribed world was too lonely. I wrote three books before I was twenty-one, who knows what happened to them. The first was about Slonim, the town where I lived which was sometimes Poland and sometimes Russia. I drew a map of it for the frontispiece, labeling the houses and shops, here was Kipnis the butcher, and here Grodzenski the tailor, and here lived Fishl Shapiro who was either a great tzaddik or an idiot, no one could decide, and here the square and the field where we played, and here was where the river got wide and here narrow, and here the forest began, and here stood the tree from which Beyla Asch hanged herself, and here and here. And yet. When I gave it to the only person in Slonim whose opinion I cared about, she just shrugged and said she liked it better when I made things up. So I wrote a second book, and I made up everything. I filled it with men who grew wings, and trees with their roots growing into the sky, people who forgot their own names and people who couldn't forget anything; I even made up words. When it was finished I ran all the way to her house. I raced through the door, up the stairs, and handit to the only person in Slonim whos opinion I cared about. I leaned against the wall and watched her face as she read. It grew dark out, but she kept reading. Hours went by. I slid to the floor. She read and read. When she finished she looked up. For a long time she didn't speak. Then she said I shouldn't make up everything, because that made it hard to believe anything.
Another person might have given up. I started again. This time I didn't write about real things and I didn't write about imaginary things. I wrote about the only thing I knew. The pages piled up. Even after the only person whose opinon I cared about left on a boat for America, I continued to fill the pages with her name."

"And if the man who once upon a time had been a boy who promised he'd never fall in love with another girl as long as he lived kept his promise, it wasn't because he was stubborn or even loyal. He couldn't help it. And having hidden for three and a half years, hiding his love for a son who didn't know he existed didn't seem unthinkable. Not if it was waht the only woman he would ever love needed him to do. After all, what does it mean for a man to hide one more thing when he has vanished completely?"

First Boy

2006-10-16T22:08:00.000-04:00

by Gary Schmidt.

Listened to this book on the way to E.'s party in NYC. The pacing in it is off, there is too much time spent on description, not enough on plot points, and certain things are implausible. For instance, the author wants us to believe that the main character (and thus the audience should be) fine with not resolving one of the major plot points in the book. I'm okay with ambiguity in general, but in this case, that fact that nobody's pursuing (at least privately) something that could easily be settled by an honest conversation or basic lab tests seems dishonest and insincere. Also, there's no real shading of characters in this novel - there golly shucks good and greedy violent evil. And a lot of talk about means justifying the ends (which we're Left to Ponder).

There's not a whole lot of subtlety in this book. But it did pass the time.

The Known World

2006-10-16T00:22:00.000-04:00

by Edward P. Jones

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize. It's a story about freed Black slaves, who, in time, owned their own slaves. It introduces the people around them, their dreams and expectations. Ideas about what was right or what was possible. On one hand I loved it, as it wanders into grey areas of right and wrong, of separation of heart and mind. It paints a picture of humanity in a certain place and time, and it's beautiful but mostly tragic.

The hard part of this book is how brutal people are to each other. It's hard to see so vividly how awful people can be. Maybe it was naive to expect something good to happen to people trying their best, in this sort of novel of this sort of setting.

"As the days dwindled down to the time Henry's parents would take him into freedom, Robbins was surprised to know that he would miss the boy. He had not been so surprised about his feelings for a black human being since realizing he loved Philomena. He had gotten used to seeing Henry standing in the lane, waiting as Robbins came back from some business or from visiting Philomena and their children. the boy had a calming way about him and stood with all the patience in the world as Robbins, often recovering from an episode of a storm in his head, made his slow way from the road to the lane and up to the house. Fathers waited that way for prodigal sons, Robbins once thought."

"The kiss went through the breast, through skin and bone, and came to the cage that protected the heart. Now the kiss, like so many kisses, had all manner of keys, but it, like so many kisses, was forgetful, and it could not find the right key to the cage. So in the end, frustrated, desperate, the kiss squeezed through the bars and kissed Mildred's heart. She woke immediately and she knew her husband was gone forever. All breath went and she was seized with such a pain that she had to come to her feet. But the room and the house were not big enough to contain her pain and she stumbled out of the room, out and down the stairs, out through the door that Augustus, as usual, had left open. The dog watched her from the hearth. Only in the yard could she begin to breathe again. And breath brought tears. She fell to her knees, out in the open yard, in her nightclothes, something Augustus would not have approved of.

Augustus died on Wednesday."

Swimming to Antarctica

2006-10-15T23:31:00.000-04:00

by Lynne Cox

I found this book one evening when I went to pick up the sequel to Quicksilver. It sounded inspirational, and exciting, and a like perfect escape. Something I'd never do (I only swim well enough not to drown), in places that I'd love to go (lakes in Iceland, across the English Channel, across the Bering Strait, around the Cape of Good Hope and Tierra del Fuego). And of course, to Antarctica. It's an amazing story of triumph over the elements. I was expecting it to be a bit like Into Thin Air but it's more of a story of athleticism than disaster.

The stories are great though the style is brisk (which isn't generally my favorite, but I guess it works for a sports narrative). I do wish there were a more personal side of the story available, like coping with family stresses, relationship ups and downs, or other non-swimming-related Grand Decisions and Events. It would make it a more well-rounded autobiography. Or maybe I'm just nosy.

"This time, it felt as if I were swimming through ice soup. Tiny blades of ice ricocheted off my body. With a quick sigh, I made it through that section. But a large berg was now directly beside us. There was no way I could swim over it, so I decided to stop for a moment and let it slide pass. That was a mistake. The icy cold water quickly seemed to pull the warmth from the marrow of my bones...
After the swim, Dena told me that I had swum in thirty-eight-degree water. It took me at least two hours of shivering to get my body temperature back to normal. We took it immediately after I got out of the water, and it was the same as when I'd started the swim. I'm sure it dropped once the swim was over, but I wasn't interested in trying to get a temperature by that point; all I wanted to do was get warm."

A Dirty Job

2006-09-24T23:47:00.000-04:00

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

2006-09-24T22:38:00.002-04:00

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

2006-09-19T15:35:00.000-04:00

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

2006-09-12T13:37:00.001-04:00

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

2006-09-12T13:33:00.000-04:00

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

2006-09-12T12:38:00.000-04:00

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

2006-09-11T22:52:00.001-04:00

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."

The Queen of the South

2006-07-24T18:15:00.000-04:00

by Arturo Perez-Reverte

Found this book at B&N while buying B. a birthday present - The Conscious Bride. That book was recommended to me by a friend, and another friend I gave it to pre-wedding found it useful as well. B. has since said that book has made her tear up, but that she's enjoying it... Maybe someday she'll get her own book blog.

This book is about a drug-runner's girlfriend, and her transformation to become a powerful, self-aware owner of a key transportation route and fashion icon. The South referred to in the title is the South of Spain, definitely not the south of Scarlett O'Hara. And it managed to add another list of places to my eventual destination list.

The book is told in a journalistic style, like News of a Kidnapping, cutting back and forth between the author-narrator's interviews with key figures from her life. These interviews are great, as they lend a lens of hindsight to the story, and also manages to weave the episodes of her life together nicely. The author does dig at Garcia-Marquez and One Hundred Years of Solitude in the book, but I can get past that ;) Other motifs in the novel include the Count of Monte Cristo (which I might have to pick up now) and narco corridas (songs about the drug runners and drug trade in Mexico). The book has also immensely improved my skill at swearing in Spanish, though when one learns Spanish from narcotics traffickers, the swearing might go a little overboard for what situations might require of me. Anyway, it's a great book that I both enjoyed while I read and enjoyed thinking about later.

"The door slammed. She held her breath. One, two, three. !Hijole! - shit. Three male silhouettes standing alongside the car, backlighted by the streetlamps. Choose. She'd thought she could be safe from this, on the sidelines, while somebody did it for her. 'You just take it easy, preitita' - that was at the beginning -'you just love me, and I'll take care of the rest.' It was sweet and dcomfortable. It was deceptively safe to wake up at night and her her man's - any man's? - peaceful breathing. There was not even any fear back then, because fear is the child of the imagination, and back then there were only happy hours that passed like a pretty love song, or a soft stream. And the trap was easy to fall into; his laughter when he held her, his lips traveling over her skin, his mouth whispering tender words, or dirty words down below, between her thighs, very close and very far inside, as though it were going to stay there forever - if she lived long enough to forget, that mough would be the last thing she forgot. But nobody stays forever. Because nobody is safe, and all sense of security is dangerous. Suddenly you wake up ith proof that it's impossible to just live - you realize that life is a road, and that traveling it entails constant choices. Who you live with, who you love, who you kill. Whether you want to or not, you have to walk down the road by yourself... The Situation... What it came down to was choosing."

"'In this business,' Guero had said, 'you've got to know how to recognize The Situation. Somebody can come over and say Buenos dias. Maybe you even know him, and he'll smile at you. Easy. Smooth as butter. But you'll notice something strange, a feeling you can't quite put your finger on, like something's this much out of place' - his fingers practically touching. 'And a second later, you're a dead man' - Guero would point his finger at Teresa like a revolver, as their friends laughed - 'or woman.'

'Althought that's always preferable to being carried alive out into the desert,' he'd added, ''cause out there, they'll take an acetylene torch and a lot of patience, and they'll ask you questions. And the bad thing about the questions is not that you know the answers - in that case, the relief will come fast. The problem is when you don't. It takes a lot to convince the guy with the torch that you don't know the things he thinks you know.'"

"You could perfectly imagine him so scared he was shitting bricks, or anything else Teresa Mendoza told him to shit."

The Tent

2006-05-21T23:16:00.001-04:00

by Margaret Atwood

This book of essays and poems is by one of my favorite authors. Until now, I'd only read her fiction (novels, novellas and short stories), but this book is different than the others. They're only about 2 pages long each... And yet, they still made me think differently, which I guess, is a goal for any book I read. Still made me laugh. It's got a nice, dark sense of humor. And now I don't want to return it to the library, but I guess that it just means that I'll have to go out and buy it. I suppose there could be worse fates :)

What I really want is to post the whole book here. But that violates a number of copyright laws, and you'd miss the fun of the illustrations that are sprinkled in here and there. Just pieces of one story, because it's so much fun, and they're all so full of wonderful things that it's hard to pick several small pieces... Instead, I just chose most of one of the essays, in L's honor.

"Our cat was raptured up to heaven. He'd never liked heights so he tried to sink his claws into whatever invisible snake, giant hand, or eagle was causing him to rise in this manner, but he had no luck.

When he got to heaven, it was a large field. There were a lot of little pink things running around that he thought at first were mice. Then he saw God sitting in a tree. Angels were flying here and there with their fluttering white wings; they were making sounds like doves. Every once in a while God would reach out with its large furry paw and snatch one of them out of the air and crunch it up. The ground under the tree was littered with bitten off angel wings.

Our cat went politely over to the tree. Meow, said our cat. Meow, said God. Actually, it was more like a roar.

I always thought you were a cat, said our cat, but I wasn't sure...

They aren't mice, said God. But catch as many of them as you like. Don't kill them right away. Make them suffer.

You mean, play with them? said our cat. I used to get in trouble for that.

It's a question of semantics, said God. You won't get in trouble for that here.

Our cat chose to ignore this remark, as he did not know what "semantics" was. He did not intend to make a fool of himself. If they aren't mice, what are they? he said. Already he'd pounced on one. He held it down under his paw. It was kicking, and uttering tiny shrieks.

They're the souls of human beings who have been bad on Earth, said God, half-closing its yellowy-green eyes. Now if you don't mind, it's time for my nap.

What are they doing in heaven? said our cat.

Our heaven is their hell, said God. I like a balanced universe."

Intuition

2006-05-18T00:31:00.000-04:00

by Allegra Goodman

Another library book, but I picked this one because Amazon and iTunes (the audio book section) were pushing this book. And at first, I wasn't interested in a novel about research ethics and academic integrity issues in a lab. Didn't seem like it would make a compelling plot.

And yet it did. I was up till 3:30 this morning reading this book, and then I finished it this evening (which may have also been possible because the television wasn't working, but anyway...). Turns out, having just finished my degree, and working in a lab environment, and to a lesser degree, having dated a co-worker, it was incredibly interesting. A girl is hurt, and lashes out at what turns out to be an easy target. What's interesting is all the fallout in the supporting cast. And the academic politics. And ultimately, the intersection of science and politics (which is, after all, what I just finished studying, in a broad sense). Though my situation was far, far different than hers, having been in an academic environment, and knowing people in these sorts of positions made me sympathetic. And apparently, unable to put this book down. I'm going to recommend it to C., if and when we talk about books again, because I think he could (should?) find it interesting, as a person who will be pursuing research and perhaps a post-doc someday. The book is a little preachy at points, unfortunately tipping it's hand in judging what the characters are about to do, but I really liked it. And would recommend it (more generally) as an interesting commentary about the roles of science, ethics and personality in academia and research. It's more of a page-turner than a book that has literary elegance, but it does get points for turning a dry subject into a quick read.

"Deliciously self-deprecating, he dismissed his own results as minor, or even accidental. "It's random luck," he's day whenever he published an article or research note, and this along with myriad other sayings of Feng's, had become a catch-phrase in the lab. "Fungi," the other postdocs called them. To Marion's secret amusement, the researches collected Fungi in their lab books. For the past six months or so the postdocs had been compiling a lexicon that included such classic definitions as:

Sucessful grant proposal (idiom): 'major disaster, long-term'
Analyze (verb): 'to flounder'
Hypothesis (noun): 'highly flawed thinking'
Conference (noun): 'cancer junket'
Government Appropriations for Cancer Research: GAC (acronym): 'sick tax'
Breakthrough (noun): 'artifact'"

"Jacob thought carefully before he spoke. He looked at Robin as she sat before him in her short-sleeved summer shirt; he considered her bare arms, her fine open face, the humility and baffled sdness in her confession. He thought abou the place the time, and Robin's state of mind. Quite deliberately, Jacob considered what his words might mean to her - hesitated a moment - then shot his arrow anyway. He said, 'The results seem almost too good to be true'."

Shalimar the Clown

2006-05-17T23:54:00.000-04:00

by Salman Rushdie

This is the first Salman Rushdie book I've read. My friend T. had recommended him years ago, but I got bogged down. But now it's summer again, and I'm back to hitting up the Georgia Tech Library (probably for the last few times!). And I'd read a great review of the book, and decided it was time.

The first 40 or so pages of the book are slow. The story is told in pieces by characters, and the first seems self-indulgent, but unfortunately, not in an interesting way. However, the book moves on and picks up after that. It's a beautiful story, about how tiny pieces of peoples emotions create a perfect storm of events. It's about Kashmir, WWII France, India, and Hollywood. There's this idea in there that people are a function of their place, which I find particularly interesting as I try to decide on a place to live. It's a wonderful story about how people's flaws knit together into disaster, but in a way it also points out that their strengths could have knit together (had the stage been set as a comedy instead of a tragedy) to become their salvation. The book has a lot to say about the roots of terrorism, and the author does have a lovely turn of phrase. But I think that what will stay with me is how everyone thinks that they're doing the best that they can under the circumstance, and the reader can feel and understand how limited they think their options are. Lesser writers leave you unconvinced about a characters actions, you feel they should have known better, or surely they could have seen how this could go badly. But these poor people were doing what we all do, muddling through imperfect situations.

"The Indian army had poured military hardware of all kinds into the valley, and scrap metal junkyards sprang up everywhere, scarring the valley's pristine beauty, like small mountain ranges made up of malfuctioning truck exhausts, jammed weaponry and broken tank treads. Then one day by the grace of God the junk began to stir. It cme to life and took on human form. The men who were miraculously born from these rusting war metals, who went out intino the valley to preach resistance and revenge, were saints of an antirely new kind. They were the iron mullahs. It was said that if you dared to knock on their bodies you would here a hollow metallic ring. Because they were made of armor they could not be shot but they were too heavy to swim nd so if they fell into the water they would drown. Their breath was hot and smoky, like burning rubber tires, or the exhalations of dragons. They were to be honored, feared, and obeyed."

"As a result of Max's unexpected romantic infatuation - and also because Boonyi was every bit as attentive as promised - he failed to sense what she had silently been telling him from the beginning, what she assumed he knew to be a part of their hard-nosed agreement: Don't ask for my heart, because I am tearing it out and breaking it into little bits and thworing it away so I will be heartless but you will not know it because I will be the perfect counterfeit of a loving woman and you will receive from me a perfect forgery of love.

So there were two unspoken clauses in the Understanding, one regarding the giving of love and the other concerinin the withhoding of it, codicils that were sharply at odds with each other and impossible to reconcile. The result was, as Max had foreseen, trouble; the biggest Indo-American diplomatic rumpus in history. But for a time the master forger was deceived by the forgery he had bought, both deceived and satisfied, s content to possessit as an art collector who discovers a masterpiece concealed in a mound of garbage, as happy to keep it hidden from view as collector who can't resist buying what he knows to be stolen property. And that was how it came about that a faithless wife from the village of the bhand pather began to influence, to complicate and even to shape, American diplomatic activity regarding the vexed matter of Kashmir."

Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States

2006-05-03T11:47:00.000-04:00

by Albert O. Hirschman

I read this book for my professional paper, the day before the paper was due, on the recommendation of my advisor. I wish I'd read it before I wrote the paper. In fact, I wish I'd read it before I went to Ethiopia. Ah well. But it's a great book. It's not often that you read a book for school or work that's supposed to be on a technical matter and it ends up articulating a framework for thoughts that had always been disconnected. What remains to be seen is if it will find its way into the paper at this late date.

The book is about how when people are dissatisfied with a situation, they can leave the situation (switch to another group, product, etc.) or they can work to change the situation to become more to their liking. Economic thought talks a lot more about leaving the situation (exiting the market, pursuing a substitute, etc.). Political thought is based on how to change the situtation (as leaving it could be considered, in the most extreme form, secession or treason), and activating stakeholders voices. According to the author, loyalty is one of the key factors that makes someone decide to stay within a system and try to change it (like people have to churches, families that they view as disfunctional). Made me think about the "America, love it or leave it" arguement in a new light. It's also a very readable (and short) book. I'd recommend it to anyone trying to think about the "should I stay or should I go" idea in a new light, though the book itself primarily uses the public/private school debate and public sector failure examples.

"Two principal determinants of the readiness to resort to voice when exit is possible were shown to be:
(1) the extent to which the customer-members are willing to trade off the certainty of exit against the uncertainties of an improvement in the deteriorated product; and
(2) the estimate customer-members have of their ability to influence the organization."

"The short-run interest of management in organizations is to increase its own freedome of movement; management will therefore strain to strip the member-customers of the weapons which they can wield, be they exit or voice, and convert, as it were, what should be a feedback into a safety valve. Thus voice can become mere "blowing off steam" as it is being emasculated by the instituionalization and domestication of dissent... and exit can similarly be blunted."

"Once members have a slight preference for, say, voice over exit, a cumulative movement sets in which makes exit look ever less attractive and more inconceivable. As a result, voice will be increasingly relied on by members at a time when management is working hard to make itself less vulnerable to it."

The Red Tent

2006-04-03T00:14:00.000-04:00

by Anita Diamant

I'm writing this months later... I set up a draft to remind myself that I read it, but then it was left in my office and I didn't have a moment. And so, now I'm missing the fresh recollections that I had then. But better late than never, right?

Anyway, this was a great book. Inspired me to reread the story of Jacob, Isaac, Leah, Rachel, Esau and Dinah from the first place I heard it. It's a retelling of the biblical story from the women's perspective. Maybe it's a modern perspective that people today have some of the same needs and hopes and fears that they did 5,000 years ago, maybe it's something that we just forget from time to time. It's another book about families as a village, and about how even within families there are rips and tears and healing. Loving more and less, and loving differently as well. It's a story about devotion, to each other and ideas. There are more passages, probably better passages, and certainly more representative passages than the one below. But this is the one that I like right now.

"I can still feel how my mothers loved me. I have cherished their love always. It sustained me. It kept me alive. Even after I left them, and even now, so long after their deaths, I am comforted by their memory.
I carried my mothers' tales into the next generation, but the stories of my life were forbiddend to me, ad that silence nearly killed the heart in me... And now you come to me - woment with hands and feet as soft as a queen's, with more cooking pots than you need, so safe in childbed and free with your tongues. You come hungry for the story that was lost. You crave words to fill the great silence that swallowed me, and my mothers, and my grandmothers before them.
I wish I had more to tell of my grandmothers. It is terrible how much has been forgotten, which is why, I suppose, remembering seems a holy thing.
I am so grateful that you have come. I will pour out everything inside me so you may leave this table satisfied and fortified. Blessings on your eyes. Blessings on your children. Blessings on the ground beneath you. My heart is a ladle of sweet water, brimming over."

Strapless: John Singer Sargent and the Fall of Madame X

2005-11-21T00:12:00.000-05:00

by Deborah Davis

Read this instead of working on my paper today, which puts me unfortunately even more behind. But it was a rainy day, and it was a good book. Actually, I really have no excuse except that I am a procrastinator. To my detriment, unfortunately. And to put the icing on the cake, I'm even writing about this book now, instead of working on aforementioned paper, even now.

This book is the story of a painter, one of his subject and paintings. Non-fiction, sort of art history + biography. It's also about Paris in the last half of the 19th century. I like it because it's a very thorough book on a very small subject. Everything in its context.

"One typically southern gothic story that circulated about Julie was that, on her wedding day, having been forced to abandon the man she loved to marry an older French aristocrat, she committed suicide by hurling herself against a giant oak tree on the plantation. The legend further claimed that Julie's wedding-gowned ghost haunted the property mourning her lost love. With stories like this, Julie remained in the shadows of her family for so many years that most people believed she was dead."

"Artists were eager to paint or sculpt Amelie. They bombarded her with requests, which she refused time and again. She understood that she must choose the creator of her first major portrait with great care, for it would be examined closely by admirers and detractors. Selecting a painter for a portrait ws an important personal decision, as important as wearing flattering clothes or arriving with the proper escort. Paris's wealthy and bourgeois commonly commisioned portraits of themselves, and patronized a select group of artists. Among the many candidates to consider, Amelie would not entrust her image to anyone until she was sure he was capable of creating a masterpiece."

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

2005-11-20T23:55:00.000-05:00

by Dai Sijie

Read this book about a month ago and realized I hadn't put it up yet. It was a quick read, but somehow, it hadn't made it to anywhere I had an Internet connection until now. I found it at the used bookstore, and I liked it. But beware, the backcover talks about flirting with the little Chinese seamstress, and there was definitely more than flirting going on. Or maybe naked swimming counts as flirting now, and I was just unaware. Ah well, kids today.

Actually, it was kids in the Cultural Revolution in China. A love story, and a tale of coping with oppression. And not having anything to read (when the government bans Western Literature, and most of your national literature). It makes me sad to hear about love triangles from the third wheel perspective, though. But it was a good book, and I think I'd recommend it. Definitely an interesting perspective on what it means to be "re-educated".

Incidentally, don't at least half the population have second toes that are longer than their big toes?

'"Have you fallen in love with her?' I persisted.
'She's not civilised, at least not enough for me!'"

"'She said she had learnt one thing from Balzac: that a woman's beauty is a treasure beyond price.'"

A River Sutra

2005-11-04T18:04:00.000-05:00

by Gita Mehta

This book was great. Very vivid descriptions, interesting comments on culture, expectations, and the nature of the human heart. It was like a portal into rural India. I really enjoyed the book, and it was one of those where as you draw near the end of it, you wish that there were more to go. Incidentally, someone at work saw the book title and asked if it was like the Kama Sutra, and indeed, it is not. Actually, it's a real example of how those old posters that teachers have of how "Reading Can Transport You" (or something like that, making reading posters look like travel posters) actually do have a basis in literature, and how reading makes you feel. Maybe it's because so many people in the book are on journeys, it also somehow reminds me of Canterbury Tales (though this one is infinitely more readable).

C. was once talking about how books tend to find you, rather than you finding them, and about how important when you read them is to your understanding of them. At first, this jarred with my idea of me being ready for anything, whenever, but I think, in a larger sense, it's true. I probably would have gotten different things from this book a year ago, and had I not read certain books yet. I guess that goes toward the time honored tradition of re-reading one's favorite books, and the idea of balancing new input with enjoying expanding upon one's current resources. Only so much time in a day though.

"The monks enclose me in a circle until the crowd no longer knows which one of us has renounced the world today. In that closed circle I can hear the monks chanting:
'You will be free from doubt.
'You will be free from delusion.
'You will be free from extremes.
'You will promote stability.
'You will protect life...

And now, my friend, my brother monks are waiting for me in Mahadeo.
No, I cannot stay longer. You must find someone else to answer your questions.
If I am late, they will leave and I shall have to join a new sect of mendicants.
Don't ask me to do this, my friend.
I am too poor to renounce the world twice."

"I stared at him in astonishment, and Mr. Chagla's smooth face wrinkled with the effort of making me comprehend. 'It is not a woman who has taken possession of Mr. Bose's soul, sir. How can such a thing ever happen?'
'Then what is all this goddess business?'
'Sir, Really, sir.' Mr. Chagla sighed in frustration. 'The goddess is just the principle of life. She is every illusion that is inspiring love. That is why she is greater than all the gods combined. Call her what you will, but she is what a mother is feeling for a child. A man for a woman. A starving man for food. Human beings for God.'...'It is Mr. Bose who is making no sense, pretending desire is some kind of magic performed with black arts. But desire is the origin of life. For thousands of years our tribals have worshipped it as the goddess. you ahve heard the pilgrims praying ''Save us from the serpent's venom." Well, sir, the meaning of the prayer is as follows. The serpent in question is desire. Its venom is the harm a man does when he is ignoring the power of desire.'"

The First Man in Rome

2005-10-16T12:52:00.000-04:00

by Colleen McCullough

This was one of the last books I read this summer. I wanted an epic, something that I could get sucked into while I still had time available. And I remember The Grass Crown being on my mom's bookshelf, and her telling me a long-time back (when I was taking Latin) that I might enjoy it someday. I happened to find the first book of that trilogy, The First Man in Rome, at a used bookstore and decided that it was just what I was looking for.

I liked the book, and liked it enough to go out and buy the second book (The Grass Crown) so I can continue following the story. The characters act in ways that would be similar to the ways that people act today, which is either an interesting note on the timeless nature of humanity, or an interesting misapplication of the way people are motivated and interact today to the past. Either way, it's an interesting read (action, adventure, politics, love, lust, and of course, battles).

Drowning Ruth

2005-10-10T17:18:00.000-04:00

by Christina Schwarz

Picked out at the half price bookstore because I read the back of it once while browsing in our campus convenience store. And this book did fall into the trap of guilty pleasure, just because I always feel like I should be reading something for one of my classes during the semester instead of anything that's not assigned or, gasp, fun.

I liked the book. And I liked the idea of writing the story from 3 perspectives (two first-person and one third-person), though I feel that the third person blended too much into the aunt's version. It's also a neat cautionary tale about spillover effects from personality traits, as they trickle from generation to generation. And it's a wonderful example of why people should speak up, instead of suffering in silence for years and years (though what would we write about without the ensuing drama that comes from secrets and bottling things up). The book evokes the cold Midwestern winters well too, which I guess means that it will never be one of my favorite books. The downside was that I did feel a bit manipulated with respect to my thoughts on the characters. The author changes the way she talks about the characters throughout the novel - my changing perspective on them was not really due to character progression, I felt, but tonal shifts. I suppose that's on purpose, but it feels like an artificial way of generating suspense.

"'Was she wearing her skates, then? When they found her?'
An exasperated sound escaped Amanda's lips and she swept her hand through the air. 'She's dead, Carl. What does it matter?'
'But... I loved her,' was all he could think to say. 'Why can't I know?' He knew he sounded like a little boy, but he couldn't help himself.
'If you loved her, you should understand. Love makes you do things and afterward you wish...' Her face was so hard and bitter, it scared Carl and made him clench the blanket to his chest. 'But then it's too late. You can only be sorry.' Her mood changed, and she patted his feet, briskly, while he forced himself to hold them steady under her hand. 'I've got something I'll bet you'd like to see.'
She went out of the room, but before he could relax, she was back. 'Here,' she said, opening a scrapbook on his lap, where it pressed against his sore leg. 'Look. It was in the newspaper. This should tell you waht you want to know.'
She stopped at the door on her way out. 'Carl,' she said, 'I know you're sorry you left her.' And then she left him alone."

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

2005-09-16T15:31:00.000-04:00

by Mark Haddon

Amazon.com kept recommending this book to me. And I finally broke down and got it from the library. Read it on a plane home to Mom, and finished it before the plane touched down in my hot, humid hometown. Good book. Written from the perspective of a hyper-intelligent, autistic 10 year old boy. One of those books where you just want to give the main character a hug (though in this case, hugs aren't his thing). So now I've read the book, I like the book (It's sweet and funny and sad.), and Amazon.com can get off of my back.

"And I don't know why Mr. Shears left Mrs. Shears because nobody told me. But when you get married it because you want to live together and have children, and if you get married in a church you have to promise that you will stay together until death do us part. Ad if you don't want to live together you ahve to get divorced and this is because one of you has done sex with somebody else or because you are having arguments and you hate each other and you don't want to live in the same house anymore and have children. And Mr. Shears didn't want to live in the same house as Mrs. Shears anymore so he probably hated her and he might have come back and killed her dog to make her sad."

"This will not be a funny book. I cannot tell jokes because I do not understand them. Here is a joke, as an example. It is one of Father's.

His face was drawn but the curtains were real.

I know why this is meant to be funny. I asked. It is because drawn has three meanings, and they are (1) drawn with a pencil, (2) exhausted, and (3) pulled across a window, and meaning 1 refers to both the face and the curtains, meaning 2 refers only to the face, and meaning 3 refers only to the curtains.

If I try to say the joke to myself, making the word mean the three different things at the same time, it is like hearing three different pieces of music at the same time, which is uncomfortable and confusing and not like white noise. It is like three people trying to talk to you at the same time about different things.

And that is why there are no jokes in this book."

Candyfreak

2005-09-16T14:46:00.000-04:00

by Steve Almond

This book is great. It's the story of one man's obsession with candy (non-fiction, I believe). He's got a great writing style and it was a fun read, as it made me laugh out loud a whole lot (made the people on the bus a little nervous, though). I got this book from the library, but I think I'm going to have to go purchase a copy. It's that much fun. He talks about how the obsession with candy began, how national chains have taken over the business, and then goes on a quest to visit regional candy makers (and, of course, collect free samples). It's really the tone that makes the book work - a mix of true passion, dedication and self-deprication. He's trying to unleash the candyfreak in all of us.

"I doubt Saborin envisioned, back when he was getting his degree in mechanical engineering, that he would someday explain the technical intricacies of his job by biting into a malted milk egg. But he seemed perfectly happy asked me if I wanted to go downstairs and see the chocolate bunnies.

These were, in point of fact, marshmallow bunnies covered in chocolate. They rode the conveyor belt three astride, looking nonchalant in profile, as a curtain of milk chocolate washed down onto their white fleshy pelts and enveloped them and seeped off to reveal the dimensions of their bodies in a lustrous brown. Saborin was saying something or other, involving, I think, starch. I was watching the bunnies.

Simply: I could not stop watching the bunnies, the way the light struck the wet chocolate from above, the creamy falling away of the excess into a darkened pool below, the steel machinery flecked and streaked in brown. The workers overseeing the production line didn't seem to know what to do. I myself didn't know waht to do. I was obviously experiencing some kind of dramatic psychic event, one that bordered on the disassociative. I had fallen into what I would later come to recognize as a freaktrance, a state of involuntary rapture induced by watching candy production at close range. "

"I feel compelled to note the reaction of my friend Eve when I brought her a Goo Goo from Nashville: She launched into a story about how her father used to order Terry's chocolates from a sweets shop in his native Ireland. He kept these in his bedroom and dispersed them only reluctantly to his three children. Eve's mother later confirmed this account and added that she, herself, was kept on a strict candy ration. She even remembered finding a moldy box of Terry's on top of the armoire, where her husband had hidden them years earlier. Curiously, Eve is married to Evan, the Pop Rocks black marketeer who uses his spit to bore the center from Whoppers. They have two radioactively cute children, Milo and Theodora, both of whom were huge fans of the Goo Goo (or at least very much enjoyed rubing the melted chocolate on their cheeks) and both of whom will, I suspect, require years of therapy down the line."

Deception Point

2005-09-14T15:32:00.000-04:00

by Dan Brown

Okay, so I've been lax. August was a busy month, what with C. leaving town, me visiting home, and starting/shuffling classes. That, and I haven't really been reading crazy good books that I just HAD to write about. I've been busy reading things that I know I'll have no time to get sucked into once school starts. And thus, Dan Brown is on the list.

The book is formulaic. But I still like the formula. And as someone who thinks about science, politics and funding, it was interesting. But it doesn't contain the thrills and chills of the previous ones. If we're judging just by page-turner-ness, it's great. If we're judging by how it compares to books in the genre by other writers, it's great. It's only when we compare it to other books by Dan Brown that it starts to get a little tired.

Bel Canto

2005-08-03T16:54:00.000-04:00

by Ann Patchett

Another book about life in South America. Granted, this one's about people trapped in a hostage situation, but it manages to make even hostage life seem interesting. However, I will take out kidnapping insurance before any trip, just because this points out a vacation fate worse than a torn ACL. But it's a beautiful book, with beautiful language and engaging characters. Reminded me of Garcia Marquez and de Assis. Maybe it's all the little sidestories that make me like Southern and South American writings - they create a context for everything.

"'Why would he think I know how to cook?' she asked Gen.
Ruben, whose English was bad but not hopeless, pointed out that she was a woman. 'The two girls, I can't imagine they would know a thing except for native dishes that might not be to others' liking,' he said through Gen.
'This is some sort of Latin thing, don't you think?' she said to Gen. 'I can't even really be offended. It's important to bear the cultural differences in mind.' She gave Ruben a smile that was kind but relayed no information.
'I think that's wise,' Gen said, then he told Ruben, 'She doesn't cook.'
'She cooks a little,' Ruben said.
Gen shook his head. 'I would think not at all.'
'She wasn't born singing opera,' the Vice President said. 'She must have had a childhood.' Even his wife, who had grown up rich, who was a pampered girl with most available luxuries, was taught to cook.
'Possibly, but I imagine somoeone cooked her food for her.'
Roxane, now out of the conversational loop leaned back against the gold silk cushions of the sofa, held her hands up, and shrugged. It was a charming gesture. Such smooth hands that had never washed a dish or shelled a pea...
'I've heard Simaon Thibault complain a great deal about the food. He sounds like he knows what he's talking about. Anyway, he's French. The French know how to cook.'
'Two minutes ago I would have said the same thing about women,' Ruben said."

"Fyodorov shrugged. 'Perhaps you are right. In another setting it would be ridiculous, too grand. In another setting it would not happen because you are a famous woman and at best I would shake your famous hand for one second while you stepped into your car after a performance. But in this place I hear you sing every day. In this place I watch you eat your dinner, and what I feel in my hear is love. There is no point in not telling you that. These people who detain us so pleasantly may decide to shoot us after all. It is a possibility. And if that is the case, then why should I carry this love with me to the other world? Why not give to you what is yours?'

'And what if there is nothing for me to give you?' She seemed to be interested in Fyodorov's argument.

He shook his head. 'What a thing to say, after all that you have given to me. but it is never about who has given what. That is not the way to think of gifts. This is not business we are conducting. Would I be pleased if you were to say that you loved me as well? That what you wanted was to come to Russia and live with the [me], attend state dinners, drink your coffee in my bed? A beautiful thought, surely, but my wife would not be pleased. When you think of love you think as an American. You must think like a Russian. It is a more expansive view."

The F-Word: Feminism in Jeopardy

2005-08-03T16:32:00.000-04:00

by Kristen Rowe-Finkbeiner

A lot of women my age don't identify as feminists. They don't identify as much of anything, other than Independent. The political process suffers, and ignores their interests.

I read about this book on Salon.com. On one hand, it's tough because educated women generally demonstrate a liberal bias, and this book couldn't be described as non-partisan. It talks about alternative views (Republican, Pro-Life, etc.) but only half-heartedly asserts that a woman could be a feminist as well as either of these. One of the more interesting points of the book was that something like 80% of Americans are feminists, based on viewing domestic abuse as wrong and equal pay for equal work as right. But it's right that somehow feminism has gotten a bad rap. Somewhere along the way it got equated with anti-masculinity and unattractiveness. And some people have stopped fighting for it because they think that the battle is already won. The book does hop on the bandwagon sometimes of "if this happened to men, they wouldn't stand for it" - while it may be true, it's not news to anyone, and it feels kinda like someone walking around in Texas in July and saying "Hot enough for ya?". But I felt the book was well-written, persuasive, and helped me articulate some things that I hadn't been able to form into words. I wish it had talked more about where feminism will go instead of just where it has been, and misconceptions about where it is, though.

"The silence of young women in the political arena is not without consequence, since the climate of social freedom to push cultural change may not remain as open for tomorrow's generation. In addition, the relative quiet is often taken as an indicator that social and gender-inequity problems have been solved, leaving little impetus to work toward electoral and political solutions. The old adage about the squeaky wheel is nover more true than in politics."

"If the right man does not come along, there are many fates far worse. One is to have the wrong man come along." - Letitia Baldridge

"The exploration of parental roles within same-sex couples can be relevant to heterosexual couples in very compelling ways. 'One of the interesting reasons taht social scientists should study same-sex couples is to explore roles in the absence of pressure around "traditional" gender roles. As heterosexual couples become more equal, both economically and socially, it's logical to think their behaviors might start to look more like same-sex couples". To the extent that men and women become more equal, the choice for who would raise the children starts to become as much an economic choice as a choice based on cultural norms,' notes Gates."

Take Me, Take Me with You

2005-07-25T17:41:00.000-04:00

by Lauren Kelly

Found this on the paperback table at a Borders one rainy (hurricane) night. And then found it again through the GIL system...

A very strange sort of suspense novel. Another novel where the characters are more archetypes than actual people, but it was interesting. And not so much scary as disturbing. It's supposed to be about the cycle of love and hate, attraction and fear. And it acheives some of those metaphors, made me think some about "f%#*ed up individuals" and the people who make them that way. And the main character also bears a striking resemblance to Laura in Tennessee Williams' Glass Menagerie, but I wasn't sure if that was an allusion or a lack of originality on the author's part.

"Still, I liked it that men's eyes drifted onto me sometimes in public places, and snagged like fishhooks. It wasn't my fault, I was blameless. I encouraged no one. I deceived no one. If I seemed to promise something I was not, the misinterpretation was not my own"

The Meaning of Everything

2005-07-15T16:01:00.000-04:00

by Simon Winchester

A long time ago, I read a book about the volunteer method of collecting words for the Oxford English Dictionary (The Professor and the Madman). It took me a long time to get through, and my main memory of reading it is the time I went with D. to East Lansing, Mich. It was also on that trip that I first saw a copy of the OED (in the c ompact form) with its little magnifying glass and everything. I recently looked up the OED on Amazon.com and found out I could have my very own OED (compact version) for only $250. Someday... Anyway, this is another book, by the same author, on the OED, only this one focuses on the Dictionary as a whole, and not what two specific individuals did. So I read it. And, besides, who could resist a title like The Meaning of Everything.

It's an interesting book, for word-nerds. Makes me appreciate WordSpy even more and Eats, Shoots & Leaves even more. And the vocabulary in it challenged me at times, which was neat. It made me appreciate the English language more, and think about the different shades of meaning that our language allows us to indicate, in order to allow us to closer approximate what we mean. It's an ode to our toolkit for expression, and to taking on the impossible because it needs to be done. And to not settling for easier substitutes when it is clear what the Right Thing should be. I liked it because it's a story of idealism that wasn't compromised. And it even had a sense of humor about the whole thing.

"Obsolete words, for a start, were not fully registerd in any dictionary thus far published. Secondly, families or groups of words were only capriciously included in these same dictionaries - some members of families made it in, some did not. Then again, such histories of words as were included in dictionaries rarely looked back far enough - the cited earlies appearances of many words was all to frequently given as more recent than their actual inauguration, because the research had been performed too sloppily. Fourthly, important meanings and senses of words had all too often been passed over - once again, the research had too often been too perfunctory. Little heed had been paid to distinguishing between apparently synonymous words. sixth, there seemed to be a superabundance of redundancy in all previous dictionaries - too many of them were bloated with unnecessary material, at the expense of what was really wanting. And finally, much of the literature which ought to have been read and scanned for illustrative quotations had not been read at all: any serious and totally authoritative dictionary had perforce to be the result of the reading and scanning and schouring of all literature - all journals, magazines, papers, illuminated monastic treatises, and volumes of written and printed publicly accessible works great, small, and impossibly trivial."

"He was a keen huntsman and a good shot. [Footnote indicated.]

[Text of footnote:] Fairly good: he blew off his right hand in 1864, but remained keen on the sport."

"The circumferential ripples of new-formed English words will become ever larger, ever wider, and ever less well defined: that much is certain. And what is certain too is that humans, being humans, will be on hand as well, in some way or another, as they have been for so long, to catch all these words, to list them all, and to record and fix them for all in time, for always."

See Jane Date

2005-07-12T17:24:00.000-04:00

by Melissa Senate

This book is one of Red Dress Ink's publications - which is notable as a prolific chick lit publisher. They're usually pretty entertaining, if a little formulaic, but every once in awhile you end up with a really good one. Incidentally, I've also just discovered that they're a division of Harlequin books (which makes the tiny, trashy romance novel).

From that perspective, these books are far more liberated, a lot funnier, and a little more pricey than their counterparts in other divisions. A little formulaic, but that's okay, most chick lit is. In fact, most books are, I suppose. And not that following a recipe is a bad thing - I like my chocolate chip cookies exactly like the recipe on the chocolate chip bag. Like, within the first 10 pages I knew who she would end up with. And it's not any of the guys that appear in the other 300 pages. And I knew that she would befriend her enemy, and confront her insecurities while helping her friends confront theirs. And though she would finally get approval from certain parties, it wouldn't matter as much as the self-esteem that she gains. But the book is funny along the way, and was a quick fluffy read. Not the best of the chick lit I've read, but definitely not the worst.

Prep

2005-07-07T15:27:00.000-04:00

by Curtis Sittenfeld

High school is hard. The question is, is it any harder at boarding school than at regular high schools. Does the fact that you're paying for the privlige to be miserable make it worse? And do you have to surrender your right to be critical, just because you're lucky enough to pay for that opportunity? This book reminded me just how exhausting both self-doubt and high school can be.

I read this book because B. recommended it... She liked the senior year the best, I liked the previous years better. I was hoping she'd become less self-conscious as she got older, but no, just absorbed in different types of paranoia - a relationship with a boy.

It also bothers me when people don't own up to their ability to change things in their lives. That some people would rather bitch about a crappy situation than do what's necessary to, if not fix it, then at least make it less crappy. There's only so much "oh poor me" I can take without action, from real life or fictional characters.

"As I watched her hunched back grow smaller and smaller, I felt as happy for myself as I did for her. I had taught Conchita to ride a bike - it was incredible. And this was a feeling, perhaps the only one from our brief friendship, that never went sour."

"And there was something else, another reason I didn't want to go to the activities center with Nick. I believed that if you had a good encounter with a person, it was best not to see them again for as long as possible lest you taint the previous interaction. Say it was Wednesday and there was an after-dinner lecture and you and your roommate struck up some unexpectedly fun conversation with the boys sitting next to you. Say the lectur turned out to be boring and so throughout it you wispered and made faces at one another, and then it ended and you all left the schoolhouse. And then forty minutes later, you, alone now, without the buffer of a roommate, were by the card catalog in the library and passed one of these boys, also without his friend - then what were you to do? To acknowledge each other by nodding would be, probably, unfriendly, it woudl be confirmation of the anomaly of your having shared something during the lecture, and already you'd be receding into your usual roles. But it would probably be worse to stop and talk. You'd be compelled to try prolonging the earlier jollity, yet now there would be no lecturer to make fun of, it would just be the two of you, overly smiley, both wanting to provide the quip on which the conversation could sastisfactorily conclude. And then what if, in the stacks, you ran into each other again? It would be awful!

This anxiety meant that I spent a lot of time hiding, usually in my room, after any pleasant exchange with another person."

Blind Side

2005-07-07T15:22:00.000-04:00

by Catherine Coulter

Hopefully no relation to Ann Coulter. I started this book in audio version on a trip back from Charleston to Atlanta. Except it a dark, lonely road with a little bit of rain, and listening to this suspense novel was just a little too creepy. So I finally got it from a used book store, and finally got around to finishing it.

It's a fun, beach-type read. A little implausible at times, but hey, what can you do. It's about a kid who keeps getting kidnapped (by the same people) and the small town sheriff who falls in love with the kid's father while protecting him. There's also two other FBI agents hanging around too, and they're interesting characters. Not a great novel, but if you like mysteries and whodunits, it's all right.

What Was She Thinking?

2005-07-05T16:51:00.000-04:00

by Zoe Heller

Don't know where I heard about this book to request it from the library. But when they sent me the email saying that I should come pick up this book that I ordered, I went.

It's about a scandal. A teacher has an affair with one of her high-school students, and another friend of hers records the events surrounding the affair. By the end of the book, I was convinced that this other teacher, who also narrates the book, was far more "evil" than the teacher who started sleeping with a fifteen year old boy. Maybe it's that she acts with malice in her self-indulgence rather than simple thoughtlessness. It's as if because she's more aware and less naive, she's less good. Or maybe it's that her many small sins actually weigh more than one big one.

"There it was again - the perverse refusal to acknowledge my hostility. She seemed to me like some magical lake in a fairy tale: nothing could disturb the mirror-calm of her surface. My snide comments and bitter jokes disappeared soundlessly into her depths, leaving not so much as a ripple.
I would like to say that I was ashamed of myself. I am certainly ashamed now. But what I felt at the time was rage: the boiling rage of defeat."

Hanna's Daughters

2005-07-01T15:31:00.000-04:00

by Marianne Fredriksson

Saw it at the bookstore on campus. Couldn't tell if it was chick-lit (or women's lit, 'cause it's about older women) or a best-seller, but I went and ordered it from the library.

It was all right. Once you get into the sparse, Nordic way of talking (where elaborations are sparse, and life is hard, but no one complains) it's a really interesting book. More of a women's read though, as it spends a lot of time talking about troubles that it claims uniquely for women. And in the vein of "aren't women strong and put-upon" novels, it's good. It also had the message of that we never appreciate our mothers (and their strife) until we grow up and are mothers ourselves (or at least, these women didn't). I liked the book. I really liked the two oldest women in the generational saga, but by the end, I'd decided I'd liked the granddaughter as well. And, by coincidence, the IKEA here in Atlanta opened the same day that I finished this novel about Swedish women.

"For she knew good fortune was measured out and was costly if you were given too much. But then she straightened up, tossed back her head, and thought she'd already paid.
'Justice,' she said aloud. 'I wouldn't never have believed that God could be just.'"

We Need to Talk About Kevin

2005-07-01T15:00:00.000-04:00

by Lionel Shriver

Somewhere along the way, I learned that this book had won this years Orange Prize for fiction. I read the synopsis of it and decided to check it out from the library. And so it came all the way from the Perimeter :)

It's about a woman whose son commits a school shooting. About whether she's to blame for it, and where does she go from here. It's dark. And it's funny, because though I didn't expect it to be light and fluffy, I was surprised about how dark it could be. and it's funny too, in black humor moments. It's a really good book. I see why it won a prize.

It also made me think about motherhood. About what to do, if, say, you realized your son was a sociopath and sadist. What do you do when there's nothing to be done? I don't believe they know how to fix a lack of empathy right now, or teach someone "not to be like that". In this case, it certainly didn't help that the whole of the family couldn't acknowledge the problem, but as a mother, how do you fix the unfixable. What do you do if you find out your child is a trainwreck waiting to happen?

"I never, ever took you for granted. We met too late for that; I was nearly thirty-three by then, and my past without you was too stark and inconsistent for me to find the miracle of companionship ordinary. But after I'd survived for so long on th escraps from my own emotional table you spoiled me with a daily banquet of complicitous what-an-asshole looks at parties, surprise bouquets for not occasion, and fridge-magnet notes that always signed off 'XXXX, Franklin.' You made me greedy. Like any addict worth his salt, I wanted more. And I was curious. I wondered how it felt when it was a piping voice calling, 'Momm-MEE?' from around that same corner. You started it - like someon who gives you a gift of a single carved ebony elephant, and suddenly you get this idea that it might be fun to start a collection. "

"But in the same vein, when a car nearly sideswipes me in a crosswalk, I've noticed that the driver is frequently furious - shouting, gesticulating, cursing - at me, whom he nearly ran over and who had the undisputed right of way. This is a dynamic particular to encounters with male drivers, who seem to grow all the more indignant the more completely they are in the wrong. I think the emotional reasoning, if you can call it that, is transitive; you make me feel bad; feeling bad makes me mad; ergo, you make me mad. If I'd had the presence then to seize on the first part of that proof, I might have glimpsed in Kevin's instantaneous dudgeon a glimmer of hope. But at the time, his fury simply mystified me. It seemed so unfair. Women tend more toward chagrin, and not only in traffic. So I blamed me, and he blamed me. I felt ganged up on."

Never Let Me Go

2005-06-28T12:31:00.000-04:00

by Kazuo Ishiguro

What would you do if you knew what your whole purpose in life was from the very beginning of your life? What if it was just be spare parts for other people? Should you be treated differently than anyone else? Educated, taught to love? How would you go on, if you realized that you were a clone, and existed solely for other people's ends, and your own happiness was completely an incidental matter?

Ah, the life of a clone. A clone in high school. A clone in tragic love. It's well written, and somewhat engaging. But it didn't grab me the way I thought it would. I wanted someone in this book to get angry at the situation, or at the hand that life had dealt them, and no one did. Which kinda implies that if you can't get excited about it, why should I?

"I was holding something called Twenty Classic Dance Tunes. When I played it later, I discovered it was orchestra stuff for ballroom dancing. Of course, the moment she was giving it to me, I didn't knowwhat sort of music it was, but I did know it wasn't anything like Judy Bridgewater. Then again, almost immediately, I saw how Ruth wasn't to know that - how to Ruth, who didn't know the first thing about music, this tape might easily make up for the one I'd lost. And suddenly I felt the disappointment ebbing away and being replaced by a real happiness. We didn't do things like hug each other much at Hailsham. But I squeezed one of her hands in both mine when I thanked her. She said: 'I found it at the last Sale. I just thought it's the sort of thing you'd like.' And I said that, yes, it was exactly the sort of thing.

I still it now. I don't play it much because the music has nothing to do with anything. It's an object, like a brooch or a ring, and especially now that Ruth has gone, it's become one of my most precious posessions."

Angels and Demons

2005-06-21T14:57:00.000-04:00

by Dan Brown

Way fun. I liked it a whole lot. It was more preachy than The Da Vinci Code, but it was also a more interesting subject to preach about. But maybe that's because I'm more interested in the intersection of science and religion than hearing about theories on Christ's life as a man. The main character is starting to remind me of a cross between James Bond and Indiana Jones. I dig it. (I still don't dig Tom Hanks as him, but I suppose that's okay.) I wish I'd read the annotated edition of this one too, though. And I can see how people favor this one over the other, and others favor the second book more.

"'One more question.' Vittoria stopped short and looked at him like he was an alien. 'Are you serious?'

Langdon stopped. 'What do you mean?'

'I mean is this really your plan to save the day?'

Langdon wasn't sure wheter he saw amused pity or sheer terror in her eyes. 'You mean finding the Diagramma?'

'No, I mean finding the Diagramma, locating a four-hundred-year-old segno , decipering some mathematical code, and following an ancient trail of art that only the most brilliant scientists in history have ever been able to follow.... all in the next four hours.'

Langdon shrugged. 'I'm open to other suggestions.'"

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

2005-06-17T13:51:00.000-04:00

by Jonathan Safran Foer

I started reading this book because Amazon.com kept recommending it to me, and it was one of the few books at the library that I recognized and was pretty sure wouldn't be as disappointing as ones I'd previously gotten from there.

It's about a boy whose father died on September 11th. I wasn't sure I wanted to read about that. But then I thought maybe I should read about it, and that was enough to get me started on it. I just finished it, and just got off the phone with my mother, telling her to go out and buy this book and read it, because I don't know what to think of it by myself.

I really liked this book, once I got into the rhythm of it (which took about 50 pages, maybe 75). Really, really liked it. Another book I was sad to end, but it's a book that I'll keep thinking about for awhile.

It's about how you keep going on after a tragedy. It's about trying to understand what legacy you've been left, and even the one that you're leaving. It's about the ways that people cope with a mutual loss. And it pulls in all sorts of other man-made disasters. It made me think of a heart that has been broken and put back together many times, and never in the same way as before. Of that old thing about how if something is perfect than it could never change, because if it were perfect than changing could only make it less perfect, but then there are things like the ocean that are always changing but could be considered perfect. On the other hand, maybe they're not perfect, and that's why they can change, and what's so desirable about being perfect anyway. Sigh.

"Only a few months into our marriage, we started marking off areas in the apartment as "Nothing Places," in which one could be assured of complete privacy, we agreed that we never would look at the marked-off zones, that they would be nonexistent territories in the apartment inwhich one could temporarily cease to exist, the first was in the bedroom by the foot of the bed we marked it off with red tape on the carpet, and it was just large enough to stand in, it was a good place to disappear, we knew it was there but we never looked at it, it worked so well tha twe decided to create a Nothing Place in the living room, it seemed necessary, because there are times when one needs to disappear while in the living roome and sometimes one simply wants to disappear... It became difficult to navigate trom Something to Something without accidentally walking through Nothing, and when Something - a key, a pen, a pocketwatch - was accidentally left in a Nothing Place, it nevr could be retrieved, that was an unspoken rule, like nearly all of our rules have been. There came a point, a year or two ago, when our apartment was more Nothing than Something... The longer your mother and I lived together, the more we took each other's assumptions for granted, the less was said, the more misunderstood"

"All I wanted was to fall asleep that night, but all I could was invent.
What about frozen planes, which could be safe from heat-seeking missles?
What about subway turnstiles that were also radiation detectors?
What about incredibly long ambulances that connected every building to a hospital?
What about parachutes in fanny packs?
What a about cuns with sensors in the handles that could detect if you were really angry, and if you were, they wouldn't fire, even if you were a police officer?
What about Kevlar overalls?
Whata bout skyscrapers with moving parts, so they could rearrange themselves when they had to, and even open holes in their middles for planes to fly through?
What about...
What about...
What about...?

Disgrace

2005-06-15T12:23:00.000-04:00

by J. M. Coetzee

After the last book, I wanted to read something well-written and interesting. So I turned to the UT Summer Reading List and thought this one looked good AND it happened to be at the library.

It was great. Interesting thoughts, interesting characters. And the author had a way with words. It's about a professor who has an affair with one of his female students, and when found out, is forced to resign. Academic disgrace, which he's actually ambivalent about. Then he goes to live with his daughter, and after a traumatic event that he's unable to protect her from, the word becomes real to him. The ways that he interacts with his daughter are fascinating, and it's good to see a book where doing "what's best" means different things to different people.

"He continues to teach because it provides him with a livelihood; also because it teaches him humility, brings it home to him who he is in the world. The irony does not escape him: that the one who comes to teach learns the keenest of lessons, while those who come to learn learn nothing. It is a feature of his profession on which he does not remark to Soraya. He doubts there is an irony to match it in hers."

"In spite of which he feels at home with Petrus, is even prepared, however guardedly, to like him. Petrus is a man of his generation. Doubtless Petrus has been through a lot, doubtless he has a story to tell. He would not mind hearing Petrus's story one day. But preferably not reduced to English. More and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa. Stretches of English code whole sentences long have thickened, lost their articulations, their articulateness, their articulatedness. Like a dinosaur expiring and settling in the mud, the language has stiffened. Pressed into the mould of English, Petrus's story would come out arthritic, bygone."

"There is a pause. 'I think they have done it before,' she resumes, her voice steadier now. 'At least the two older ones have. I think they are rapists first and foremost. Stealing things is just incidental. A side-line. I think they do rape.'
' You think they will come back?'
'I think I am in their territory. They have marked me. They will come back for me.'
'Then you can't possibly stay.'
'Why not?'
'Because that would be an invitation for them to return.'
She broods a long while before she answeres. ' But isn't there another way of looking at it, David? What if... what if that is the price one has to pay for staying on? Perhaps that is how they look at it; perhaps that is how I should look at it too. They see me as owing something. They see themselves as debt collectors, tax collectors. Why should I be allowed to live here without paying? Perhaps that is what they tell themselves.'"

6/17/2005
Found a reading guide for this book that had some interesting questions.

My Daughter's Boyfriend

2005-06-13T12:51:00.000-04:00

by Cydney Rax

The Georgia Tech Library, with its pitifully small fiction section, chose to stock this. I figured it had to be decent, 'cause if you were a librarian and you could only choose ten fiction books, you'd make sure they were pretty good, right? If not particularly insightful, at least it should be fun. But I was wrong. This book was awful. The characters had as much depth as a wading pool, the prose was purple at best, and the plot was contrived. It was a bad episode of Ricki Lake. I've read books about characters that I couldn't sympathize with before, but this was a whole new level of wtf.

It's about a single mother who decides it's acceptable to have an affair with her daughter's boyfriend. And not make the boyfriend break up with the daughter first. And not be sympathetic to her daughter's pain about the loss of her boyfriend, or that her her mother is dating her ex. And the daughter is good and smart and surprisingly well-adjusted, and we're supposed to believe that this woman was capable of raising her to be this way. And that we would buy any message about female solidarity after she "learns her lesson". The worst part was that the author seemed to spend the whole time waiting to get to the next sex scene - that this whole book was an excuse to write about an older woman getting together with a younger man, but the "stella gets her groove back" plot was taken, so she had to come up with another vehicle.

I wish that I hadn't read this book. The line on the front called it "A fascinating, witty, and though-provoking novel full of memorable characters. My Daughter's Boyfriend is the perfect summer read." It was definitely not witty, but maybe fascinating or thought-provoking in the way of a train-wreck or "so that's how this book could get worse" sense. Definitely not the perfect summer read (see below for fun books that might make that list). I'm also ashamed to admit that I kept reading it, hoping it would get better when I should have known from the line below that it wouldn't. But now there's a new low for other books to be measured against. So, while I want those two and a half hours of my life back, maybe writing this down will help me to remember to steer others away, and to be more cautious about the fiction selection at this wonderful institution.

Only one line from the book, because I'm kind and merciful...

"Her legs opened automatically, like they were electronic doors inviting me to come inside her super-store."

The Da Vinci Code

2005-06-10T13:38:00.000-04:00

by Dan Brown

Okay, so I'm probably the last person in all of America to read this book. I figured, with all this hype, I should check it out. And so I ended up with the illustrated edition from the library. Illustrated Editions are now on my perpetually growing list of Best Things Ever. It showed all the artwork, symbols, buildings, etc. for the book and it made it wonderful. For example in the discussion of the painting of The Last Supper, you're actually able to see the elements that they're talking about on the same page. Made the book SO much better.

Anyway, I started the book on the way home from work and read it (with just a few interruptions) until I finished it at 2:30 in the morning. Around 1:15, it occurred to me that this was one of those books that I'd be sad about finishing, but curiousity got the better of me and I finished the book instead delaying gratification.

It was a great book. Way fun. Though I've heard they've cast Tom Hanks in the lead role, which is just wrong (maybe it's my particular aversion to Tom Hanks speaking, but I'm not alone in this). And I can see why it's controversial. Interesting things to think about though. I can see why some would think that The Devil had a hand in this book. But it was thought-provoking, and fun, which is a combination you don't see too often.

It's hard to quote without giving too much away, but I liked this part.

"Langdon paused. 'I'll tell you at Teabing's. He and I specialize in different areas of the legend, so between the two of us, you'll get the full story.' Langdon smiled. 'Besides, the Grail has been Teabing's life, and hearing the story of the Holy Grail from Leigh Teabing will be like hearing the theory of relativity from Einstein himself.'

'Let's hope Leigh doesn't mind late-night visitors.'

'For the record, it's Sir Leigh.' Langdon had made that mistake only once. 'Teabing is quite a character. He was knighted by the Queen several years back after composing and extensive history on the House of York.'

Sophie looked over. 'You're kidding, right? We're going to visit a knight?"

Langdon gave an awkward smile. 'We're on a Grail quest, Sophie. Who better to help us than a knight?'"

He's Just Not That Into You

2005-06-07T11:47:00.000-04:00

by Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo

Disclaimer: Not reading this for my own (immediate, at least) benefit. After reading this book, I still think that C. is, in fact, into me. I started reading this book while waiting for a friend at the airport, browsing the bookstore there because I was too much of a slacker to have actually brought a book with me for the wait. But I read the last half of it, because another friend of mine had raved about it. And so when I was cruising the GIL Express for summer reading, I decided to finish it.

It's great. It's quick. And unfortunately, useful. I don't know why women make excuses for guys. We do, though. And it's sad that telling women "You deserve more than that" would make a book a best-seller, that this is breaking news to anyone. The book dictates that instead of "wasting the pretty" on guys who aren't calling you, paying attention to you, or generally exhibiting ambivalent behavior about you, you should go out and find someone else. That if you put up with this, then a guys has no incentive to change, and won't (either for you or the next girl). Basically, it says that where there's a will, there's a way for guys, and if they aren't willing, then you don't want them anyway, so don't waste your time chasing them and trying to make them willing.

The tone is so much of an upper though (constantly telling us women readers that we're all smart, beautiful and witty and capable of getting soooo much more) that after awhile it starts to seem condescending, though. Or maybe that's just me being cynical.

Some of the chapter titles are great: "He's Just Not That into You if...

He's not Asking You Out
He's not Calling You
He's Having Sex with Someone Else
He Only Wants You When He's Drunk
He's Breaking Up With You
He's Disappeared on You
He's Married (and Other Insane Variations on
Being Unavailable)
He's a Selfish Jerk, a Bully, or a Really Big Freak"

Blink

2005-06-07T11:17:00.000-04:00

by Malcolm Gladwell

This is the first book for my new summer book club. I've fulfilled my nerdy dream and started one to keep in touch with people over the summer, and not let my brain turn to mush. I've also learned a very important lesson today about condensation from containers that I brought things for lunch and the things they do to the nice paper book jackets of hard-bound books (like Blink). Sigh. Ah well.

The subtitle of this book is "The Power of Thinking Without Thinking". Its message is that we should trust our gut, and stop overthinking things. He claims that overthinking not only wastes time, but in some cases, more thought and information makes our decisions worse. Sounds like a neat idea, right? That we know more than we think we know and we should seize the moment and trust ourselves? And he points out a lot of examples where this works. It's very tempting. And yet, it seems like this practice could also be responsible for some awful results too. It kinda feels like he's trying to make the exception into the rule. Or maybe as one who overthinks things, I'm reluctant to accept that it's all for naught. It's a really quick read, though (or at least the first 100 pages... After that, you get the point of where he's going with this.). And the "thin-slicing" approach to relationships (like the guy who can watch you talk with your spouse for 15 minutes and tell whether in 15 years or not you'll still be married) is fascinating.

"What Gottman is saying is that a relationship between two people has a fist as well: a distinctive signature that arises naturally and automatically. That is why a marriage can be read and decoded so easily, because some key part of human activity - whether it is something as simple as pounding out a Morse code message or as complex as being married to someone - has an identifiable and stable pattern. Predicting divorce, like tracking Morse Code operators, is pattern recognition.

' People are in one of two states in a relationship,' Gottman went on. 'The first is what I call positive sentiment override, where positive emotion overrrides irritability. It's like a buffer. Their spose will do something bad, and they'll say, "Oh, he's just in a crummy mood." Or they can be in negative sentiment override, so that even a relatively neutral thing that a partner says gets perceived as negative. In the negative sentiment override state, people draw lasting conclusions about each other. If their spouse does something positive, it's a selfish person doing a positive thing. It's really hard to change those states, and those states determine whether when one party tries to repair things, the other party sees that as repair or hostile manipulation. For example, I'm talking with my wife, and she says, "Will you shut up and let me finish?" In positive sentiment override, I say, "Sorry, go ahead." I'm not very happy but I recognize the repair. In negative sentiment override, I say, "To hell with you, I'm not getting a chance to finish either. You're such a bitch, you remind me of your mother."'"

Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood

2005-05-27T17:36:00.000-04:00

by Koren Zailckas

I don't know why I'm drawn to stories of troubled girls. I just am. Maybe it's the need to reassure myself that there's ALWAYS someone out there more f%$#ed up than I am (although this book aptly demonstrates that just because all your friends are messed up, and you're less so than they are, being comparatively less messed up does not make you more of a prize). Actually, I don't even think of myself as that f%$#ed up anymore, which I guess, is a good thing. Regardless, this book reminds me of Prozac Nation, which I liked, but disagreed with. And this one seems to frame the solution to the problem a little simply, but hey, I guess if it works for her.

The book is about being an "alcohol abuser", not an alcoholic. Specifically, what it does to a girl's emotional development (and her subsequent relationships) when she develops a habit of binge drinking. She claims that she was emotionally dependent, not physically dependent. And she uses a variety of ways to liken alcohol to a lover. It's an interesting comparison to think about. It made me sad, though, and scared me a little, 'cause I sympathized with her at several points in the book(as if by sympathizing with her, it meant that I was admitting a problem).

"That's the thing about social drinking: In the end, it's the drinking that creates the scene, not the other way around. Your grow to relish the buzz, regardless of the situation. Once you're there, really there inside that moment, with its neighborly wamth and conversation, it's hard to tell what's responsible for producing emotion. What's responsible for the light-headed feeling? Is it the Molson, or the boy who is running his fingers through the ends of your hair? Are you chatty because you're drunk, or because you're connecting with someone on a level that you have never before experienced? To an outsider, the distinction is an easy one to make. But when you're fifteen and female, when you experience these feelings first and later only when you are drinking, it becomes a question of which came first, the liquor or the Greg?"

"Elle is the ideal friend to have in moments of melodrama. She will dive into conflict with you so that you'll have company, instead of pulling you out. She will smack down her MasterCard on the bar and tell whoever is listening to "Keep 'em comin'." She happily play the decoy so you can maintain some semblance of self-respect, making the big distracting bang that prevents people from noticing while you drink until you're gone.

Elle is not the friend who puts one hand on your cheek and coos "It will be okay." Elle is the friend who stands on the bar stools and hurls bottles, the one who understands pain so completely, even when it's not directly her pain, that she doubles over and sobs. She reminds me that this is not okay, that 'This is bullshit.'"

Conversations at random: survey research as interviewers see it

2005-05-24T13:27:00.000-04:00

by Jean M. Converse and Howard Schuman.

So, my part-time summer job, (which I have in addition my regular one, which extended its summer hours for me to full time) involves interviewing people for a research study. It's studying how parents make decisions about their children's health (particularly with respect to the environment). It seems like an interesting project, and something that's important to know about. Something that might better the world, somehow. But I have no experience interviewing people - I've had classes where we talked about it, and how to avoid bias, but never really done it. I thought this might be my chance, and a chance to be inside (and not from a design perspective) a huge federal research project.

So the project director recommended a few books for me. One was a chapter from a book called "Asking Questions: A Ppractical Guide to Questionnaire Design" about how to ask threatening questions (or questions that people may feel uncomfortable answering). And another book she recommended was this one - she hadn't read it, she just picked it from our library's meager resources, thinking it looked interesting and relevant.

And it was. It talked more about the kind of social science research where you would go sit in people's homes for an hour or so and ask them questions than the type of interviewing I'll be doing, but it was fascinating. It discussed common mistakes that interviewers make (like getting too close to the respondent or trying to stay too distanced from), and injecting their own bias and expectations into their responses, or getting caught up in situations or disagreements of the respondents. I really liked the book, and I think it'll be helpful in my experience, and it made me even more excited about the job, about the peeks it will offer into other peoples' experiences and thoughts.

Man Walks into a Room

2005-05-24T12:47:00.000-04:00

by Nicole Krauss

This is an amnesiac novel - the main character loses 24 years of his memory to a brain tumor. He's found wandering in the desert, not knowing his name, not knowing his wife or what he does.

I don't really know how I found this novel. I think Amazon.com recommended another one of this author's books, and I could only find this one in the Georgia Library System, and so, in a fit of frustration, I requested that it make a journey to me from UGA. And it was there, so I read it. And I'm glad.

It's a really good book. The end tends to drag a bit (there's only so long that a person could reflect on their loneliness without starting to frustrate people.) And the characters at the end were well drawn, but seemed more like archetypes in terms of the plot line... It's like the author couldn't help fleshing them out, but didn't really know what to do with them once she got there. But it was beautifully written. Made me want to give everyone I know and love a hug, try to fix them in my mind against the possibility of this sort of thing happening.

"'You know, sometimes I get the feeling that we're just a bunch of habits,' she said. 'The guestures we repeat over and over, they're just our need to be recognized.' Her eyes fixed on the TV, as if she were reading subtitles. 'I mean that without them we would be unidentifiable. We'd have to reinvent ourselves every minute.'....

She exhaled and dropped the cigarette into a glass, where it fizzled, and as she got up to brush her teeth she leaned in close and breathy as a nightclub and kissed his neck....The kiss stayed there with no place to go, no sensory reserve tha could absorb it and file it a way as a common act of intimacy, a thousand times received. He knew what Anna was asking: whether you could love someone without habits."

"'The misery of other people is only an abstraction,' Ray insisted, 'something that can be sympathized with only by drawing from one's own experiences. But as it stands, true empathy remains impossible. And so long as it is, people will continue to suffer the pressure of their seemingly singular existence.'

'And mistreat each other, won't they?'

Ray nodded. 'Horrendously."

Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination

2005-05-17T18:42:00.000-04:00

by Helen Fielding

Fun book. Much more so than the last two. Kind of a chick-flick meets action/adventure. Made to be turned into a movie. I enjoyed it though, and had a hard time putting it down, even after bitching to Bettsie about how silly it was. Did like the Rules for Living though:

"1. Never Panic. Stop, breathe, think.
2. No one is thinking about you. They're thinking about themselves, just like you.
3. Never change haircut or color before an important event.
4. Nothing is either as bad or good as it seems.
5. Do as you would be done by, e.g., thou shalt not kill.
6. It is better to buy one expensive thing that you really like than several cheap ones that you only quite like.
7. Hardly anything really matters: if you get upset, ask yourself, 'Does it really matter?'
8. The key to success lie in how you pick yourself up from failure.
9. Be honest and kind.
10. Only buy clothes that make you feel like doing a small dance.
11. Trust your instincts, not your overactive imagination.
12. When overwhelmed by disaster, check if it's really a disaster by doing the following: (a) think, 'Oh, f#*@ it,' (b) look on the bright side and, if that doesn't work, look on the funny side. If neither of the above works then maybe it is a disaster so turn to items 1 and 4.
13. Don't expect the world to be safe or life to be fair.
14. Sometimes you have to go with the flow.
15. Don't regret anything. Remember there wasn't anything else that could have happened, given who you were and the state of the world at that moment. The only thing you can change is the present, so learn from the past." (p. 79-80)

Lucky

2005-05-16T15:46:00.000-04:00

by Alice Sebold

This is a book about a rape and its aftermath. About a college freshman and her struggles to get past being a victim.

It's a hard book to read. The first 50 pages made me feel physically ill. I had to put the book down and take a break from it. Remember that people aren't awful. But I wasn't able to put it down for long. There's a very developed sense of connection to the reader, as if by listening to her story, by hearing her out, I could lessen the pain for the young coed who reminded me so much of girls I knew. So I started the book on Friday and finished it on Sunday.

The Lovely Bones (her previous novel) made me cry. This one made me ill, and made me angry. I don't have any quotes from it because it's not so much that particular turns of phrase made me think, but the work as a whole. Not a fun book to read, and I don't really know who I would recommend it to, but as a work that absorbed the reader and conveyed an awful experience, it was amazing.

Identity

2005-05-13T14:36:00.000-04:00

by Milan Kundera

Same guy who wrote "The Unbearable Lightness of Being". A friend of mine went on a Kundera kick, and recommended a few of his books to me, and when I saw this one at the used bookstore, I hoped it was one of those.

It's an interesting book about people in love, about people growing older, and about how people view themselves in the light that others view them. Don't know that I liked the end of the book - seemed more symbolic than a real course of action that these people would take.

A couple good quotes from it:
"It is always that way: between the moment he meets her again and the moment he recognizes her for the woman he loves, he has some distance to go... If, before that one-on-one encounter, he had spent much time with her as she was among other people, would he have recognized her as the beloved being? If he had known her only with hte face she shows her colleagues, her bosses, her subordinates, would that face have moved and enchanted him? To these questions he has no answer."

"To ensure that the self doesn't shrink, to see tha t it holds on to its volume, memories have to be watered like potted plants, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of our past, that is to say, our friends. They are our mirror; our memory; we ask nothing of them but that they polish the mirror from time to time so that we can look at ourselves in it."

"Everything changed when I met you. Not because my little jobs became more exciting. But because everything that happens around me I turn into fodder for our conversations." "We could talk about other things!" "Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's very beautiful. But what would they nourish their intimate talk with? However contemptible the world may be, they still need it to be able to talk together." "They could be silent." "Like those two, at the next table?" Jean Marc laughed. "Oh, no, no love can survive muteness."

"Why are we living? To provide God with human flesh. Because the Bible, my dear lady, does not ask us to seek the meaning of life. It asks us to procreate. Love one another and procreate. Understand this: the meaning of that 'love one another' is determined by that 'procreate.' That 'love one another' carries absolutely no implication of charitable love, of compassionate, spiritual, or passionat love, it only means verys simply 'make love!' 'copulate' (he drops his void and leans to her) 'f[#%&]!'" (Like a devout disciple, docilely, the woman gazes nto his eyes.) "That, and that alone, constitutes the meaning of human life. All the rest is bulls[#%&]."

American Tabloid

2005-05-11T16:40:00.000-04:00

by James Ellroy

Be prepared - it's bloody. Maybe it's just because I finished it the same weekend I saw Kill Bill 2, but geez... I guess that's what you get for reading books about the Mafia, the Kennedys, J. Edgar Hoover, spooks, and Hollywood. I got sucked in, and I want to read another one of his books, but I feel like I'll have to put rubber gloves on and lay plastic sheeting down before I do.

You got to Dance with Them What Brung You

2005-05-11T16:37:00.000-04:00

by Molly Ivins

Great fun. Still on my way through it, but it's set up in nice little chunks that make for quick reading. Texas (liberal) political commentary, and hilarious.

"The impulse to make ourselves safer by making ourselves less free is an old one, even here. When we are badly frightened, we think we can make ourselves safer by sacrificing some of our liberties. We did it during the McCarthy era out of fear of communism. Less liberty is regularly proposed as as solution to crime, to pornography, to illegal immigration, to abortion, to all kinds of threats. But we shall not let evil cowards make us less free.

Fanatics have always said, 'Things have to get worse before they can get better.' Such evil nonsense. And mothers have always replied, 'Not with my child's life.'"

"Hate speech is fertilizer for bombs."

Code

2005-05-11T16:29:00.000-04:00

by Lawrence Lessig

Read for my Internet Policy class, Fall 2004.

This book argues that the libertarian origins of the Internet (anti-Big Brother and all) created a state where the private sector has more power in that arena than the government. Which wouldn't be too bad, except it's not as transparent (or at least, not required to be) as government entities are... So he argues that the code that programmers write is becoming as important as the laws that legislators write, in terms of defining options about what will exist for the future of technology.

It's an interesting arguement. Not sure that I buy it completely, but good food for thought. It's hard to think of code as an immutatble force (one protected by proprietary agreements), but it does frame the debate about who should control the Internet in a new way (at least for me).