The Book of Tea & others

The Book of Tea by Okakura Kakuzō

Written for a Western audience in 1906, The Book of Tea tries to explain the importance of tea in Japan, from a perspective of its history, philosophy, and ceremony. Kakuzo's writing is beautiful and clear and surprisingly political. His frustrations with the West are full-throated (if a little bit beside the point). He has interesting things to say about East/West cultural differences, about Taoism and Zen, about art and more particularly about living a life that is itself artful. I started this on a whim--while at an amazing tea shop near where I live where I buy loose leaf tea in bulk--but it's surprisingly absorbing. 

I'm far enough away from college that I'm starting to phase out some of my undergraduate habits. I almost never stay up past 10pm, even on weekends. I don't have time to play video games as much as I did as a student. 

And sometimes I'll have tea after work instead of a beer. It fills a lot of the same needs: it's a fussy, ancient ceremony meant to be enjoyed slowly; there are a range of flavors and styles to master and appreciate; I can be a big snob about it. 

Specialty drink-ware is a plus. 

Anyway, this book in very short and very good. There's a very nice-looking .pdf file available, if you're interested. Great for reading on your tablet.

The Leaf and the Cloud by Mary Oliver 

This is a book-length poem, organized into seven long sections. 

Good art, I think, is often able to come right up to the line of sentimentality without crossing over. Oliver's work is deeply concerned with nature, with the beauty of it. A lot of poetry is shares the subject, and a lot of it is very bad! But Oliver is as good as it gets for that genre. Of the seven sections, one spills over into sentimentality, two are ordinary, and two are absolutely breathtaking. Here's "Flare," and "Gravel," the poem's strongest sections. 

If you can't be bothered to click, here's a highlight:

It is our nature not only to see
that the world is beautiful
but to stand in the dark, under the stars,
or at noon, in the rainfall of light,
frenzied,wringing our hands,
half-mad, saying over and over:
what does it mean, that the world is beautiful—
what does it mean?

The Discomfort Zone by Jonathan Franzen

I like Franzen for the same reason that people seem to find him personally off-putting: his misanthropy, his pretension, his cocktail of arrogance and self-loathing. These personal essays are uneven, but the best ones are very good. "House for Sale," is about putting up the old family house after the death of his last parent, and it comes closest to the painful (but brilliant) familial intimacy of his fiction. "Two Ponies" (printed originally as "Comfort Zone" here), about Peanuts creator Charles Schultz, and "My Bird Problem," about Franzen's obsession with birding are the collection's other highlights. 

Joseph Smith and Goon Squad

For the second year in a row, I've somehow overwhelmingly read books written by men. I'm not sure why. My guess is that it's partly a function of the subtle ways in which our culture gets slightly more excited about male writers than female writers (the male "genius" archetype), and I am pretty deeply vulnerable to hype. Also, it may be that as an aspiring writer, when I read a book I look to identify with its creator, and so seek out fellow dudes. In any case, I'm going to try and keep things a little more even this year. So, here we go ladies!

No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith by Fawn M. Brodie

I've mentioned in an earlier post how much I love Mormonism, and I've been meaning to read a good book about Mormon history for awhile. Brodie's biography of Smith is considered a classic, and its easy to see why. The writing is florid (sometimes too florid), and the narrative is amazingly neutral. I really recommend this to anyone who's interested in the topic. Even just reading through a few random chapters would be worthwhile.

I had originally intended to use this opportunity to write a long-ish thingy about religious conviction and experience, and about modern day Mormon culture and the ways in which religions seem to change over time. But are you even kidding me? Do you know how long that would take? Its the weekend! Let's all just go outside and go for a walk. I know it's pretty cold right now, but it's a refreshing sort of cold, you know? Let's try that Greek restaurant you always walk by on the way home that you've heard is great even though it looks kind of run down.  Lets have a beer and catch up on our Netflix. Have you seen Breaking Bad yet? I'll watch it again from the beginning if you're down, I really will.

A Visit From the Good Squad by Jennifer Egan

Holy moly. Just wowza, this book! Amazing!

Okay, just... give me a second, because this is a hard one to describe. It's a novel written as a series of stories, but they're all deeply interconnected, involving the same large cast of characters over the course of several decades, non-chronologically. Some are in first person, some in third (one in second!). One chapter is written as a magazine profile--and pretty bald-faced parody of David Foster Wallace--one chapter is literally a PowerPoint presentation. One takes place in the near future and is populated by an omnipresent form of communicating called "T's" (essentially texts) like th blu nyt, th stRs u cant c, th hum tht nevr gOs awy.

Will Blythe's appropriately dizzying summary of the plot over at NYTimes can't be beat:

"The book starts with Sasha, a kleptomaniac, who works for Bennie, a record executive, who is a protégé of Lou who seduced Jocelyn who was loved by Scotty who played guitar for the Flaming Dildos, a San Francisco punk band for which Bennie once played bass guitar (none too well), before marrying Stephanie who is charged with trying to resurrect the career of the bloated rock legend Bosco who grants the sole rights for covering his farewell “suicide tour” to Stephanie’s brother, Jules Jones, a celebrity journalist who attempted to rape the starlet Kitty Jackson, who one day will be forced to take a job from Stephanie’s publicity mentor, La Doll, who is trying to soften the image of a genocidal tyrant because her career collapsed in spectacular fashion around the same time that Sasha in the years before going to work for Bennie was perhaps working as a prostitute in Naples where she was discovered by her Uncle Ted who was on holiday from a bad marriage, and while not much more will be heard from him, Sasha will come to New York and attend N.Y.U. and work for Bennie before disappearing into the desert to sculpture and raise a family with her college boyfriend, Drew, while Bennie, assisted by Alex, a former date of Sasha’s from whom she lifted a wallet, soldiers on in New York, producing musicians (including the rediscovered guitarist Scotty) as the artistic world changes around him with the vertiginous speed of Moore’s Law."

Egan's ability to make these desperate elements feel cohesive is pretty amazing. There was maybe only one occasion when I felt as though I were starting over. Her writing is exciting and poetic. The characters feel real; they're enormously flawed but written with real generosity and authority.

It's a book about success and failure, and about change and the effects of time on our lives. Read it!