A Widow For One Year

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.