tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-46706247736036302092024-02-19T02:40:27.380-08:00The Book I'm Looking ForSpencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02377417442732974125noreply@blogger.comBlogger47125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4670624773603630209.post-53045287415712668512014-12-31T10:53:00.000-08:002014-12-31T11:58:25.130-08:002014 - List of Top Best Mosts<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="color: red; font-family: inherit;">Top Best Books</span></b></div>
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<b><u>Most Book Actually Written This Year</u>: </b><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17402288-dept-of-speculation?from_search=true">Dept. of Speculation</a> by Jenny Offil</span><br />
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There's a special power that the small novel has. Like the mythical Big Novel, there's a sort of audacity related to it's size, in this case for a writer to wipe her hands together after fewer than 200 pages and say, All done!</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />For me, 2013 was dominated by one Big Book (<i>Infinite Jest</i>) and one meaty one (<i>Independence Day</i>). Looking back, 2014 was my year of the small novel. I read Renata Adler's <i>Speedboat</i> (interesting, but couldn't get my hooks in), Julian Barnes' <i>Sense of an Ending</i> (exciting, sad), Gabriel Garcia Marquez's <i>Chronicle of a Death Foretold</i> (too mythical), Justin Torres' <i>We the Animals</i> (beautiful, forgettable).</span><br />
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But the best of these was Jenny Offil's </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">Dept of Speculation</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">. It's written in small, paragraph- or sentence-long chunks, describing the dissolution and eventual reconciliation of a marriage. It's a great. And like many small books, it's highly poetic, by which I mean that it takes power from it's spareness, that the </span>individual<span style="font-family: inherit;"> pieces are given as much meaning as the whole, that it faces several directions at once, and that it invites its reader to do some work.</span><br />
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This is the other way in which small novels are like Big Books--the good ones ask us to do our homework. They leave things unsaid and aren't afraid to leave space for the reader to jam in the texture of her own life. </span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhy38eZAwKzOe5kKB9wCtxwJ_mYx0R-Cq98mVs2ra7WZwYGtRNhWamvlZcvIB4jtoUBEtpneZdk7-tQ4BuEr73DmvicSwI7cttHvJU8Cf1BU_j78XHLDQaa_34x8g20gzKsJTQfhTct84LS/s1600/Jeeves.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></a><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><u>Top Whimsical Class Warfare</u>: </b><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7963.P_G_Wodehouse">The Collected Works of P.G. Wodehouse</a></span><br />
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I've tried to read Wodehouse once or twice before, but it never stuck. But in 2014, I picked up one of his works on Audible for a road-trip, and within the next few months five novels and story collections had breezed by.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Wodehouse wrote 90 books in his life, but the most famous fall into two series: Jeeves and Wooster, about a silly, wealthy young man and his brilliant valet; and Blandings Castle, which revolve around the titular locale and the amiable elderly aristocrat who runs it. The stories all take place in a non-specific inter-war period. They concern the idle-rich of England, and although the jokes are often at the expense of the characters, it's clear that Wodehouse has nothing but affection for them. Bertie Wooster may be an idiot, but he's the most likable idiot in the world. He's the hero of his stories, not Jeeves. The series is gentle. The stakes are low (a missing pig; an accidental engagement). The solutions are neat.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Because I was simultaneously watching <i>Star Trek: The Next Generation</i>, I came to see these two canons as sort of political opposites to one another. Just as <i>TNG</i> creates a perfect universe out of liberal ideals--one forward-looking, anti-capitalist, meritocratic, government-sponsored, peace-loving, science-centered; one where a reoccurring storyline involves the characters flying to a new planet and literally trying to find the best way to respect the culture there--Wodhouse creates a thoroughly conservative utopia. Wodehouse's world is one that doesn't change, is patriotic, is domestic; one that values tradition; one where the aristocracy is gentle and well-meaning and harmless. </span><br />
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And just as TNG is a fantasy future that no one will ever see, Wodehouse represents (as Evelyn Waugh noted) a past that never quite existed. But both have value anyway, in their articulation of a utopia, the way that that is comforting <i>and</i> thoughtful. </span><br />
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<b><u>Most Non-Fiction</u>: </b><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notes_of_a_Native_Son">Notes of a Native Son</a> by James Baldwin and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/American-Prometheus-Triumph-Tragedy-Oppenheimer/dp/0375726268">American Prometheus</a> by Martin J. Sherwin and Kai Bird</span><br />
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I only read two non-fiction books this year, and they're both worth mentioning. I read Baldwin for the obvious reasons: that this was a year where we talked about race <i>a lot</i>, and where the experience of black people became a (deservedly) regular political subject. Notes of a Native Son <i>almost</i> lives up to its reputation. The title essay is one of the best I've ever read by miles and miles. Everyone should read it. Other highlights include "Harlem Ghetto" and "Equal in Paris." But some of the others are more forgettable, and the essays of Part One are particularly weak. And it's also hard sometimes to see the freshness of the work; today, Baldwin's influence reaches to just about every contemporary essayist or journalist. The best writers about race today (Ta Nehasi Coates) borrow in huge ways from his work, and sometimes improve on it. But that's the way of the essay, a form aimed at educating as much as creating beauty, and so inherently tied to the affectations and peculiarities of communication and persuasion in it's time. </span><br />
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<i>American Prometheus</i>, the definitive biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, took more than the length of the year to read. Actually, I'm not quite done yet. But I read the bulk of it in 2014. I kind of don't know what to say about a biography or about a history book. I don't read many. But this one lingers. Oppenheimer was a fascinating character--simultaneously strange and awkward and totally compelling and charismatic to everyone around him--and the story of the development and use of the bomb is captivating. </span><br />
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<b><span style="color: red; font-family: inherit;">Best Most Television That Isn't Mad Men</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><u>Most SadLaughs</u>: </b>Review, <a href="http://www.hulu.com/watch/618812">"Pancakes, Divorce, Pancakes"</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">For my money, the "best" TV of every year since 2007 has been Mad Men. Even in 2011, between seasons 4 and 5, when Mad Men was off the air for a whole year amid bitter contract disputes, Mad Men was <i>still </i>somehow the best television of the year. 2014 was no different. The show pulled no punches. It explored, in its slow, poignant way, the ways in which life doesn't just change or become unfamiliar, but actually finds replacements for us--new technology, new cities, fresh faces, new ways of living and thinking. We'll enter the final half season of the series reminded, appropriately, that there are no permanent fixtures in life and that our projected futures are not guaranteed. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">But lists should be surprising. So I want to give my Top Best to the single funniest <i>and</i> saddest episode of television this year: "Pancakes, Divorce, Pancakes," from the single-season Comedy Central show <i>Review</i>. </span><br />
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The show is mockumentary-style and revolves around a man--Forrest MacNeil--who is sent requests to review real-world experiences for his television show, <i>Review</i>. These requests begin as basically benign ("Stealing") but quickly escalate to activities that disrupt the stability of his outside life ("Addiction," "Racism," and, in this episode, "Divorce"). As you might guess from the title, this episode involves our hero eating "an upsetting number of pancakes" both before and after divorcing his wife. It's the third episode of the series, and the one that begins to set the tone for the insane, dark lengths that Forrest will go for the sake of the show's experiment. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Good comedy has teeth, and "Pancakes, Divorce, Pancakes" takes Forrest headlong through ordinary physical pain, and then devastating emotional pain. But it doesn't rescue him with the final request of the episode, or even use the set up to lavish in his misery. Instead, it uses another instance of physical pain to bring a kind of deliverance for Forrest, a petty victory in a series of substantial losses. And it's <i>really, really funny</i>. "These pancakes couldn't kill me, because I was already dead."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><u>Most Hours Spent Sitting on the Couch in the Only Life I'll Ever Have</u>: </b>Star Trek: The Next Generation and Gilmore Girls</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Each of us gets one life, and the only thing that waits for us at the end of it is the hungry wolf of oblivion. In 2014, a tiny sliver in my brief flash of awareness between two eternities of darkness, I came home from work each day, opened a beer, turned on Netflix, and slammed back every episode of <i>Star Trek: TNG</i> (133 hours) and the first four seasons of <i>Gilmore Girls</i> (74 hours). Meanwhile, I got older and older and inched closer and closer to the finish line on my one and only trip around this Earth. B+.</span></div>
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<span style="color: red; font-family: inherit;"><b>Top Most Songs I Listed to on Repeat Too Many Times</b></span></div>
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<b><u>Songs for which I Owe my Fiancee the Most Apologies for Playing Them Ad Nauseam </u></b></span><br />
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<b><span style="font-family: inherit;">Kendrick Lamar - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sop2V_MREEI">i (Live on SNL)</a></span></b><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIKKWwQ8oKzsTG24_rG5x4yuAE6zk5PgOLsd-jt6y7h-yd4edfnDNZpYcXsuq597O7qo-Yr92wVjceAz8KsQRR_cgAFaGScCn2muGI2bqJdsOPwSNkASZ1YA09KWp8EYXGqWokFXkc8PUj/s1600/kendrick-lamar-saturday-night-live-video-main1-715x403.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIKKWwQ8oKzsTG24_rG5x4yuAE6zk5PgOLsd-jt6y7h-yd4edfnDNZpYcXsuq597O7qo-Yr92wVjceAz8KsQRR_cgAFaGScCn2muGI2bqJdsOPwSNkASZ1YA09KWp8EYXGqWokFXkc8PUj/s1600/kendrick-lamar-saturday-night-live-video-main1-715x403.jpeg" height="180" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">2012 was Kendrick Lamar's year. His album that year, <i>Good Kidd m.A.A.d. City</i>, was enormously positively reviewed and cemented his place in the American musical cannon, for both critics and casual listeners. It was a serious, strange, and dark album, one which told a story about being a young man in Compton. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And the first song released off his as-yet-unreleased new album, "i," is a poppy, upbeat tune about finding positivity and overcoming hard times. It samples the jangling guitars from the Isley Brothers. I love the song. But there's no way around its seeming departure from his previous album: it's radio-friendly, with a simple, positive, and utterly universal message, whose hook repeats throughout the track, "I love myself."</span></div>
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<span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In November, he took to the SNL stage to perform the new single. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Although he's backed by a large band and several back-up singers, he's alone in the center of the stage, in a purple wash. His hair is set half-loose. His eyes are black, completely black, thanks to large scleral contacts. </span><span style="line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;">As the song begins, Lamar stamps his foot and spits, punctuated by percussion, "Dedicated to my homies in the penn--hit me!" and sets the tone for this performance, explicitly politicizing and racial-izing the song's otherwise milquetoast message. Here, between the chorus he chants, "When you're lookin' at me, tell me what do you see? / put a bullet in the back of head of the police?" </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;">He's reminding us that this song about finding self-love in depression is political, that </span><i style="line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;">his </i><span style="line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;">experiences of depression or loneliness or self-doubt are in part informed by a life in Compton--by poverty, racism.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 18.3999996185303px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">His voice strains, his dance is herky-jerky and shuffling. </span><span style="line-height: 17.25px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There's a barely-controlled energy in his twitching, and it gives the song much-needed teeth. </span></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: inherit;">La Roux - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEXSJTllYjI">Sexotheque</a></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: inherit;">Future Islands - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5Ae-LhMIG0">Seasons</a></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: inherit;">Ryn Weaver - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68wuJ2ACi5s">OctaHate</a></span></b></div>
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<span style="color: red; font-family: inherit;"><b>Best Podcast Shows (Not Serial) with Links to Mostly Random Episodes</b></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: inherit;">Slate Culture Gabfest </span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"> <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/culturegabfest/2014/04/slate_s_culture_gabfest_on_thomas_piketty_s_capital_in_the_twenty_first.html">Gild This</a> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"> <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/culturegabfest/2014/01/slate_s_culture_gabfest_on_the_wolf_of_wall_street_the_bbc_drama_call_the.html">Wolfie is My Safe Word</a></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: inherit;">Slate Political Gabfest</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"> <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/gabfest/2014/07/the_gabfest_on_hobby_lobby_failed_immigration_reform_and_facebook_s_emotional.html">You're a Facebook Lab Rat</a></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: inherit;">My Brother My Brother and Me</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://www.maximumfun.org/my-brother-my-brother-and-me/mbmbam-215-glass-shark">Glass Shark</a></span></div>
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<a href="http://www.maximumfun.org/shows/my-brother-my-brother-and-me?page=5">Yogi The Stareater</a></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: inherit;">Very Bad Wizards</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"> <a href="http://verybadwizards.com/episodes/57">Free Willie</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"> <a href="http://verybadwizards.com/episodes/44">Killer Robots</a></span></div>
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<span style="color: red; font-family: inherit;"><b>Most Video Games</b></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: inherit;">Donkey Kong Country Returns: Tropical Freeze</span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-family: inherit;">Assassins Creed IV: Black Flag</span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-family: inherit;">Gone Home</span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-family: inherit;">Fez</span></b><br />
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I read 34 books in 2013. They added up to 6989 pages of text and 129 hours and 3 minutes of audio. One book every 10.74 days. Nineteen pages and 21 minutes of book per day. Most of the books were written by women. Almost all were written within the last 20 years. I read slightly more fiction than non-fiction, and almost no poetry. I got an Audible account in 2013, so I also listened to big handful of audiobooks.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8RHgvtKNMZC5wsKklmZHR1fTdGVdKQ0WBIIILDIDhtxKRiU4yZnaGv4rie6iEUOaVfOtGUdifkBIBFQ9ZK_IptXvz9Wycup_AYacx-VQoZrDZ317rZNlp3VsFEa6c8PZ_MFPZ5yEXSuct/s1600/2013+books+01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8RHgvtKNMZC5wsKklmZHR1fTdGVdKQ0WBIIILDIDhtxKRiU4yZnaGv4rie6iEUOaVfOtGUdifkBIBFQ9ZK_IptXvz9Wycup_AYacx-VQoZrDZ317rZNlp3VsFEa6c8PZ_MFPZ5yEXSuct/s400/2013+books+01.jpg" height="223" width="400" /></a>In 2012, I read 36 books. But none of them was <i>Infinite Jest</i>, so I'll still chalk up this year as an improvement.<br />
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More importantly, of those 36 books from 2012, 29 (81%) were written by men. Noticing that, I promised myself I would be more mindful of the gender of the authors whose books I read. Success!<br />
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The best book I read this year was <i>Independence Day</i> by Richard Ford.<br />
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So long 2013.<br />
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<i>(Books by decade. Click to enlarge.)</i></div>
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<br />Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02377417442732974125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4670624773603630209.post-24272028261748384092013-11-29T11:50:00.002-08:002013-11-29T11:58:59.676-08:00Independence Day by Richard Ford<br />
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My guess is that Real Estate has some strong (if also mixed) significance to a lot of Americans, particularly those around my age, who grew up roughly concurrent with the housing bubble, or those from one of the parts of the country that was changed most by the <a href="http://cdn.theatlanticcities.com/img/upload/2012/07/25/20120725-4-lasvegas.gif">explosive development</a>.<br />
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Both of my parents' have worked at least tangential to the real estate industry. On Sundays, we used to visit model homes just for fun, critiquing the interior design choices and picking out rooms. (I would still enjoy it if my more urban and environmentally-minded partner didn't find tract housing sort of reprehensible.) I'm at a point in my life now where home ownership is, for the first time, a possibility.<br />
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So I'm well-poised to find a story about a real-estate agent pretty compelling.<br />
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<i>Independence Day</i> is the second in a series of three novels about Frank Bascombe, a one-time sportswriter, now real-estate agent in the fictional Haddam, New Jersey. Frank is divorced, with two children: a troubled teenage son and a younger daughter. Another son died long before the events of this novel. He's divorced, and his wife has remarried, though he lives alone. He's in the middle of what he calls The Existence Period, a sort of float-with-the-tide attitude characterized by a willful avoidance of his own emotional needs.<br />
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Over several days leading up to the fourth of July, Frank shows some homes to a couple from Vermont, checks in on a rental property of his own, visits his girlfriend, and then picks up his son for a road trip to the basketball and baseball halls of fame. And that is, basically, the plot.<br />
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Suburban middle class white life is a well worn subject of fiction, and it tends to follow a few predictable paths. The first and most obvious is to use the 'burbs as a subject for satire, an object with which to poke fun at our materialism, small-mindedness, cultural sterility, and conformity.<br />
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The second is some ways the first's opposite: to treat domesticity as deeply meaningful, and elevate the sorts of everyday activities of most of our lives (cf. Toni Morrison's directive to "<a href="http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/t/tonimorris133794.html">mystify the familiar</a>"). I'm sure you know what I'm talking about here--stories where backyard trees will glisten with dew and the wind will billow sheets on the clothesline. Much will be implied.<br />
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But <i>Independence Day</i> charts a middle path, and tries to paint everyday life neither larger nor smaller than it actually is. It doesn't denigrate our boring lives, but it also doesn't pretend as though they're more meaningful than they are. This is one of things I found most admirable and also impressive about the book. Frank's life is modest and a little alienated, and the book doesn't treat modesty as a either a sin or a virtue.<br />
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It does this on the sentence level. Where another writer might be ironic or poetic, Ford is chatty, almost rambling. Which isn't to say that the writing is plain. The sentences are fabulous. It's maybe overly aphoristic, but the advice and adages are particular to the character, and you get into the rhythm so that it doesn't matter much. Here's a representative sample taken more-or-less at random:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"My own view is that the realty dreads (which is what the Markhams have, pure and simple) originate not in actual house buying, which could just as easily be one of life's most hopeful optional experiences; or even in the fear of losing money, which is not unique to realty; but in the cold, unwelcome, built-in-America realization that we're just like the other shmo, wishing his wishes, lusting his stunted lusts, quaking over his idiot frights and fantasies, all of us popped out from the same unchinkable mold. And as we come nearer the moment of closing--when the deal's sealed and written down in a book in the courthouse--what we sense is that we're being tucked even deeper, more anonymously, into the weave of culture, and it's even less likely we'll make it to Kitzbuhel. What we all want, of course, is all out best options left open as long a possible; we want not to have taken any obvious turns, but also not to have misread the correct turn the way some other boy-o would."</blockquote>
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I should just let that stand on its own. But notice not only the content (which seems pretty solid to me), but also how long and careful those sentences are. In his <a href="http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1365/the-art-of-fiction-no-147-richard-ford">Paris Review interview</a> from around the time <i>Independence Day</i> was published, Ford described his writing like this,<br />
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"Sometimes I’ll write a sentence that sets up an opportunity for say, a direct object or predicate adjective and I won’t have a clue what the word is except that I know what I don’t want—the conventional word: the night grew dark. I don’t want dark. I might, though, want a word that has four syllables and a long a sound in it. Maybe it’ll mean dark, or maybe it’ll take a new direction. I’ll have some kind of inchoate metrical model in my mind." </blockquote>
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And I think you can see that approach in the quoted section above. It's careful but also casual and approachable. It stays interesting by introducing variation to the structural level, rather than the word-choice level.<br />
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I <i>really</i> like it.<br />
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This is an earnest book. It's only occasionally ironic. I can see a few things about Frank that he can't see about himself, but not many. The book and character are good-faith representations.<br />
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Towards the very end of the book, Frank begins to move towards permanence. He even predicts an upcoming "Permanence Period" to mirror his Existence Period. <br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"...that long, stretching-out time when my dreams would have mystery like any ordinary person's; when whatever I do or say, who I marry, how my kids turn out, becomes what the world -- if it makes note at all -- knows of me."</blockquote>
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But I don't know if I think he will change much. He's haunted by the death of his son. He still seems to love his ex-wife. His son (the living one), who has plans to come and stay with Frank in Haddam, may shake him out of his ego and funk, if only out of necessity, but who knows.<br />
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There is, at least, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lay_of_the_Land">a third book</a> where I could find out.<br />
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<br />Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02377417442732974125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4670624773603630209.post-63257465636449445422013-08-20T12:49:00.001-07:002013-08-20T12:49:52.498-07:00<br />
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<b style="text-align: left;">Winter Morning Walks by Ted Kooser</b><span style="text-align: left;"> - B+</span>
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<b>Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth by Reza Aslan</b> - C+ </div>
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Aslan's first book is one of my favorite non-fiction works. But the organizing insight here, that the two things we know about the historical Jesus are that he was Jewish and that he was crucified (and therefore executed for political reasons), can't sustain interest for a whole book, and is probably a little stale to a lot of interested readers anyway.</div>
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<b>One Thousand and One Nights: A Retelling by Hanan Al-Shaykh</b> - C+</div>
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Mythological / fairy-tale / oral-story type writing. Not my style.</div>
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<b>Thirst by Mary Oliver</b> - C</div>
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Honestly, sometimes I love Oliver to death, but this book was her at her worst, her most cloying and saccharine. Some of these poems were like bad parodies of an Oliver poem. </div>
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<b>Given Sugar, Given Salt by Jane Hirshfield</b> - A</div>
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<b>Come, Thief by Jane Hirshfield </b>- A</div>
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<b>Close Range: Wyoming Stories by Annie Proulx </b>- B</div>
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The more famous stories in this collection (Half Skinned Steer and The Mud Below) didn't impress me too much, and I was really disappointed by Brokeback Mountain, the movie version of which is probably in my top 15. But even those three were solid enough, and some of the others--A Lonely Coast, in particular--were great.</div>
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<b>Tampa by Alissa Nutting </b>- B-</div>
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Super gross, but very readable.</div>
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<b>Seating Arrangements by Maggie Shipstead</b> - A-</div>
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<b>Buddhism Without Beliefs by Stephen Bachelor</b> - B+</div>
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The content in this book is <i>too</i> life changing. He does an admirable job of translating the Eastern jargon and claptrap of Buddhism for a secular, Western audience, making a case for ejecting the supernatural elements of the religion and embracing the Dharma practice alone. But the practice is too real and scary and hard soooo...</div>
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<b>The Undertaking by Thomas Lynch</b> - A</div>
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Second time reading this. Still great! </div>
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Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02377417442732974125noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4670624773603630209.post-82955596782044023392013-07-08T16:48:00.002-07:002013-07-13T10:42:34.845-07:00Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b>Infinite Jest </b>by David Foster Wallace<br />
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It's not easy to separate a thing from its hype, from its physical and cultural packaging. Pour cheap wine into a fancy bottle and slap on a hefty price tag? Sommeliers swoon. Switch the labels on Pepsi and Coke? Even experts can't tell the difference. Tell an art critic that some scribbles by an orangutan are the work of an up-and-coming abstract painter? She'll praise the sophistication of the line work.<br />
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The above makes some people uneasy. They think it means that we're all shallow liars, eager to impress or fit in. But to me it only means that our sensory and aesthetic experiences are more broad than we imagine. We are actually tasting the label on a bottle of wine and the story of its cultivation as much as we are tasting its ingredients. When we drink a Coca-Cola, part of that taste--not just the experience of drinking it, but also the actual <i>taste</i>--comes from a hundred years of advertising and Americana. Our appreciation of a work of art is informed by the story of Art, and the story of particular artists.<br />
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Which is all to say that it's hard to know when this book, which is sometimes too long and occasionally kind of a mess, is genuinely great, and when as a reader I'm only sort of projecting greatness onto it through the filter of its (and its author's) cultural status.<br />
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Well, who cares? "Authenticity" is a red herring. There are no bad reasons for enjoying something. And I really, really enjoyed this book. As in, <i>really</i> really. As in, reference-to-the-title-of-this-blog enjoyed it.<br />
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The plot of the novel, so much as it has one, is made up of three largely separate threads:<br />
<ol>
<li>The Enfield Tennis Academy, an ultra-elite school/camp that prepares tennis prodigies for The Show (professional play). ETA was founded by James O. Incandenza, ex-optics-expert-and-avant-garde-filmmaker whose children, esp the middle child Hal, constitute the narrative focus of these sections. </li>
<li>The Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, a halfway house in Boston. The newly-recovering live-in staff-member Don Gately and the veiled Joelle van Dyne anchor these sections. </li>
<li>Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents, a wheel-chaired Quebecois separatist/terrorist group, who are searching for a copy of <i>Infinite Jest</i> (aka "The Entertainment," or <i>the samidzat</i>), a fatal art film by J.O. Incandenza which is so entertaining that it turns viewers brains to a kind of mush as they watch it repeatedly to the exclusion of other activities. </li>
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Chronology is divided into "Subsidized Time," which is exactly what it sounds like (e.g., The Year of the Whopper, The Year of the Trial-Sized Dove Bar, etc), and seems to me mostly a clever way for DFW to keep the story feeling both vaguely contemporary and a-historical.<br />
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The events take place in a combined superstate of America, Mexico and Canada called the Organization of North American Nations, or <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onan">O.N.A.N</a>. While reading, I wrote off the name as a gag, and a sort of childish one, but now I'm realizing that it may be more important than I had noticed from the weeds, that there is something masturbatory not just about the at-least-semi-self-indulgent book itself, but also about the characters, who are moved by strong emotional forces that simulate connection but who are ultimately isolated, and about the world too, which is built on a foundation of pleasure and rote style without substance.<br />
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The book is <b>big</b>. 1079 pages. Tall and extremely dense pages. Paragraphs and even sentences that go on for pages without break. Medical, mechanical, mathematical jargon. 92 pages of endnotes, some of which are as long as a serious short story.<br />
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And its difficult. Or difficult<i>-ish</i>, anyway.<br />
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Reading IJ is like training for a marathon; its a lifestyle choice. And some significant part of the experience is contained in its size and in its difficulty. While it would probably be fairly easy to curate the course of a marathon to include only the best and most beautiful and most interesting stretches, doing so kind of defeats the purpose. You want not only to run the marathon, you want to <i>have</i> run it, you want to be a person who is <i>capable</i> of running it. IJ is like that at least a little bit. Part of the reason people read this book is to prove to themselves that they could, and to become the kind of person who <i>has</i> read it.<br />
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But so, the content.<br />
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It's a book about addiction and recovery, as you would guess. It's a book about entertainment, and parents and their children, and greatness and mediocrity. It's about the things to which we devote ourselves. And in a big way it's about loneliness. Not just because so many characters are depressed, attempt or commit (or just imagine) suicide. There's something lonely about its zany structure, too. It's a book about existing in a busy, exciting, at times overwhelming sensory experience, surrounded by the sounds and images of people, and feeling alone. And though the stories are intertwined in lateral, out-of-the-corner-of-your-eye ways, and though they gain momentum in the final third and seem to be moving towards a convergence... they never actually meet in the middle. The book ends abruptly, a blank spot on the map where the roads ought to make an intersection.<br />
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Something else worth saying about its structure: for all its gimmicks and winking, the book is actually fairly friendly for long stretches at a time. Most of the times when I found myself frustrated and ready to skim, a new section would begin that I couldn't help but read. And the best sections of this book are some of the best literature I've ever read, full stop. Perfectly crafted on the sentence-level and dripping with charity and understanding towards others.<br />
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I'll read this again, 4 sure.<br />
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I don't know if it's worth saying anything about the Writer. The autobiographical elements of the novel are all over the place (drug addiction, tennis, etymology, genius, depression, suicide). But its hard to know where the appropriate or helpful line is there. So, let's do two things. First, it's worth mentioning the Writer if just in regards to the creation of the thing, how impressive it is, not just for its size but also for its power and vivacity and ambition. There's no understating the energy and time and obsession and love required to make a thing like this. It's humbling and inspiring and sort of gives you a good feeling about what humans can do in the way that only serious art and lit can.<br />
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Second, here's a line from <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/244452">a poem</a> Mary Karr,--memoirist, poet, and one-time-girlfriend of DFW--wrote a year after his suicide:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"I just wanted to say ha-ha, despite<br />
your best efforts you are every second<br />
alive in a hard-gnawing way for all who breathed you deeply in,<br />
each set of lungs, those rosy implanted wings, pink balloons.<br />
We sigh you out into air and watch you rise like rain."</blockquote>
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Also: I like making graphs, so here's a little behind-the-scenes magic for the superfans.<br />
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<br />Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02377417442732974125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4670624773603630209.post-21145794374263751382013-06-25T15:11:00.001-07:002013-06-25T15:11:07.937-07:00Non-Fiction AuiobooksSince I last updated, I've been making my way slowly through something big. I think I should be done in the next month or so, and will have a long update then.<br />
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In the meantime, I've been listening to some nonfiction audiobooks. All three are about, in some way, infiltrating private groups of passionate people. My thoughts:<br />
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<b>Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief</b> by Lawrence Wright<br />
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There's something inherently interesting about liminal belief systems, those groups in the fuzzy border between cultural status as a "cult" and as an established "religion." It's part of the reason for all my fascination with Mormonism. After all, even the mountains of our religious landscape today must have begun more modestly, and who's to say that some weird contemporary niche group won't take hold and resonate more broadly going forward? Most religious practices and histories can sounds strange to outsiders.<br />
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All that said, Scientology is <i>bonkers</i>.<br />
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I went into this without much knowledge about the organization outside of that South Park sketch, but basically expecting to leave with some sympathy for it. That's what usually happens when you get to know something better. Not so here, not even with Wright's even-handed approach. There's just no way out of the fact that Scientology as an organization is abusive, myopic, aggressive, and greedy, that L. Ron Hubbard was a conman and David Miscavage is borderline psychopath.<br />
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Very great book, though!<br />
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<b>The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court </b>by Jeffrey Toobin<br />
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The rarefied and secretive culture of Supreme Court, not to mention its proximity to and influence on our lives, makes for a good book subject. And Jeffrey Toobin is a perfect non-fiction writer: clear, entertaining, brief. I've gone to his New Yorker summaries every time the Supreme Court has done anything newsworthy over the last couple years.<br />
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This book is a history of the Court in very recent history, going back only 30 years or so. It chronicles the changes in the court, mostly making a case that its become increasingly partisan, and even more particularly increasingly conservative. He was, himself, more partisan than I had expected, and it took me a while to get used to it. But once you settle into his perspective, the book is incredibly readable.<br />
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The profiles of the individual judges alone are worth the effort.<br />
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I'm not sure how much of a better understanding I have of the political machinations behind the Court's appointments, but I have a better sense of the chronology. And I have a favorite Justice!<br />
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<b>The Orchid Thief </b>by Susan Orlean<br />
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What a beautiful little book, almost ruined by a terrible audio book narrator.The author follows one particular Orchid enthusiast in south Florida who is on trial for stealing plant material from protected swampland, and uses his story as a anchor onto which she ties chapters about the history of orchid cultivation and crime, the biology of the plants, the story of the region's ingenious peoples, etc etc. It's a story about passion and obsession, and the narrator commits the only cardinal sin in literature: she is arch and judgmental and condescends towards her subjects.<br />
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It's a real shame, because the words don't seem to really be written this way. They're great words! I remember in particular, Susan Orlean described the air around the swamp as thick and drapey like wet velvet curtains. What a baller metaphor! It's not a joke or a complaint, just a good sensory description. But the narrator hams up her delivery like a community theater actor describing having eaten a bug. "The air was THICK and DRAPEY like WET VELVET. BLEECH!" She didn't really say "bleech," but still.Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02377417442732974125noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4670624773603630209.post-76047473706244441962013-04-23T20:51:00.002-07:002013-04-23T20:53:48.208-07:00Annoyed But Still Pretty Positive Book Reviews<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The first half of this memoir about being cyber-harassed is terrifying and unputdownable. Then it gets boring. Lasdun is a professional fiction writer, and he writes like someone who knows his way around a sentence. Which... is just not super helpful for a tense thriller about feeling unsafe and helpless? And then at the end he takes a trip to Israel?<br />
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I love me some Agatha Christie. This is a good one. What is there to say? You know if you want to read this kind of book. I give it Four Agathas up out of five.<br />
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Super-great feminist sci-fi. If I hadn't gone to a very religious middle school I would've half-read it like ten years ago for class and never even appreciated how very good it is.<br />
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Strout wrote one of my all-time favorite books, <i>Olive Kitteridge</i>. This book is about two brothers who are lawyers from Maine, and their sad nephew accidentally commits a hate crime against Somali immigrants during Ramadan. It's not as good as <i>Kitteridge</i>, but that's just because it's a novel (whereas<i> Kitteridge</i> was a series of connected stories), and all novels are sloppy and imperfect compared to short stories. But it's still very, very good, and its pretty cool that Strout tackled subject matter that was probably outside her comfort zone.<br />
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What a weird book! A sort of morality tale slash coming of age story slash lives of the rich and famous episode. Some people like this better that The Great Gatsby, which is... I mean, who cares obviously, and this book is fine, but it's also kind of all over the place. It feels like an artifact to me, more than anything else. It feels like it's not for me.Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02377417442732974125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4670624773603630209.post-84333592293712334472013-04-01T11:19:00.001-07:002013-04-01T11:19:26.569-07:00Far From The Tree<br />
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<b>Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity</b> by Andrew Solomon</div>
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<i>"Having always imagined myself in a fairly slim minority, I suddenly saw that I was in a vast company. Difference unites us. While each of [the experiences described in the book] can isolate those who are affected, together they compose an aggregate of millions whose struggles connect them profoundly. The exceptional is ubiquitous; to be entirely typical is the rare and lonely state."</i></div>
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In <i>Far From The Tree</i>, Andrew Solomon introduces the concept of "horizontal" identities. These are differentiated from "vertical" identities, or those elements of your identity that you share with your parents, such as being black or having a propensity towards sports or music. A horizontal identity is one that you don't share with your parents, but which you do share with peers, such as being gay. Where vertical identities are encouraged and reinforced, horizontal identities are often resisted, and can cause pain, difficulty and shame for parents and children both.<br />
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Solomon is a gay man. In what began as an attempt to understand his parents' experience, he spent 10 years researching and interviewing for this book about the tough business of parenting children who are unlike you. His goal is general exploration, but he often also has a more particular agenda: to shift his and the readers' conversation around certain circumstances from disability or disadvantage to identity politics. He focuses on nine kinds of children: those who are deaf, those who have down's syndrome, autism, or other disabilities, those who are prodigies, schizophrenics, criminals, transgender, or are born of rape.<br />
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The YouTube videos embedded are of particular subjects of the book, or Solomon's own thoughts about its themes. I think they're worth watching.<br />
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Although he's currently a PhD Candidate in Psychology, Solomon admits early on: "I have relied primarily on anecdotes, because numbers imply trends, while stories acknowledge chaos." In this way, this is almost the inverse of a science book, in which trends and statistics tell a story flavored by occasional personal anecdotes. Solomon instead relies on personal stories to make up the bulk of his (very bulky!) book, and these are only peppered with the occasional statistic or explanatory study.<br />
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For this reason, I was afraid the book would be my nightmare: a long parade of cherry-picked stories and quotes meant to present a unified, celebratory experience of finding meaning in difficulty. But Solomon was obviously committed to representing the full breadth of experiences within each topic, and the result reveals the full humanity of his subjects.<br />
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That is, we see that deaf people are not just <i>one way</i>, are not a bloc or type. They don't have just<i> one </i>feeling about their deafness or about deaf culture. They are people. Their experience is as variable as any non-deaf person. This is obvious in the abstract, but I don't know how real it <i>feels</i> to us most of the time, and reading about that variability is illuminating.<br />
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The book is about so many things. It's a sad book, obviously. The chapters about schizophrenia and rape are almost unreadably sad. It's also--and also obviously--about the meaning and strength that can come from adversity and sadness. It's about parents generally, but mothers in particular, as caregivers and activists and amateur scientists. It’s a book about illness, stigma, and identity.<br />
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It’s a book about politics, but it’s not a political book exactly. It’s too personal for that kind of attribution. Abortion is a popular topic, as genetic testing allows parents to abort fetuses who would otherwise have down’s syndrome or dwarfism. Peter Singer’s work is referenced often. It just touches these kinds of things lightly.<br />
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Mostly it’s a book about empathy. It’s dense with the stuff. It challenges the reader to confront the boundaries of her empathy and then holds her hand as she moves forward from there.<br />
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On a personal note, the chapter that was most revelatory to me was the one that focused on transgender individuals. I've never known a transgender person. And although I'm a male with a pretty strong helping of traditionally feminine qualities that I really like about myself, it's hard for me to imagine the desire to actually, <i>physically</i> be another gender. Like any good liberal, I've fully supported the rights of people to do whatever they like without harming someone else, but the shameful truth is that I've found transgenderism as an idea... kind of icky and sort of indulgent. But the heart-breaking, human stories of young men and women struggling with their gender included in this book are a strong antidote for that kind of resistance.<br />
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One of the best non-fiction books I’ve read in a long time. <br />
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<i>"Children with horizontal identities alter your self painfully; they also illuminate it. They are receptacles for rage and joy — even for salvation. When we love them, we achieve above all else the rapture of privileging what exists over what we have merely imagined."</i></div>
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Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02377417442732974125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4670624773603630209.post-69279473188905519532013-03-24T09:36:00.000-07:002013-03-24T09:42:22.492-07:00Short Stories<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I'm not sure why short stories aren't more popular. Sometimes I think that the popularity of a book is a function of how easy it is to talk about that book. Non-fiction (esp. nonfiction about politics, pop-psychology, etc) is very easy to talk about. Novels can be easy too. You can summarize a novel plot-wise, without ever appealing to its themes or emotional content. It's like a movie. Just, The book was about this guy in a situation, and it was good! </div>
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But if a novel is like a movie, a short story collection is <i>not</i> like a television series. There isn't an overall plot or set of characters. A collection is made up of discrete elements, which makes them hard to talk about in aggregate. Unless you want to get into the awkward territory of emotional resonance (and don't do that)(Seriously. There is nothing more awkward than people talking IRL about the really individual and vague emotional responses they have to art), you're limited to, Did you like this story? How about this one? Yes, it was very good, wasn't it?</div>
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It may also be the (not totally unfair) sense that contemporary short fiction mostly trades in a narrow band of unhappy subjects borrowed from the tradition of Raymond Carver et al.: quietly desperate people having extramarital affairs or caring for sick loved ones or just sitting at kitchen tables becoming alcoholics. </div>
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Not all stories are actually like that, of course. Take Jim Shepard's <b>Like You'd Understand, Anyway</b>. Shepard is famous for his careful and thorough research. Most of his stories are historical in one way or another. The first story in this collection is about three brothers at the failure of Chernobyl. Another is about a sentry at Hadrian's Wall. They are stories deeply concerned with context and with <i>jobs</i> or <i>work</i>, and so on their surface miles away from small interpersonal dramas that might seem to typify the medium.</div>
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And they do have lots of energy! Each piece has a clear hook, and there's a certain fun in absorbing the context and trivia of each new setting. But the three stories that I think were best were those closest in history and space to here and now. One is about a man who has set up an appointment for a vasectomy without telling his wife. One is about a boy whose younger brother is suffering from mental health problems. One is about a fatherless high school football player. As much fun as it was to read the wilder pieces about Russian Cosmonauts or Nazi Yeti-Hunters (really), it was these three smaller-scale narratives that <i>floored</i> me. Shepard is--for me--at his strongest when he's at his most quotidian. </div>
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Because stories are more like poetry. Their value comes from moments, these little shinning diamonds of language and perception that just kind of jump out at you and elevate everyday experience. Or maybe that makes stories more like jokes. They take those secret, half-formed thoughts and experiences you have somewhere in the back of your mind and bring clarity to them in a way that just knocks you on your ass. </div>
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The reigning queen of the quotidian is Alice Munro. I had very nice things to say about <i>Runaway</i>, and <b>Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage</b> is similarly great. Her stories are very long, and all kind of meander, but she somehow manages to keep them feeling tight by the end. It may have something to do with the cleanness of her writing on the sentence level, or it may be how well she manipulates time. I'm honestly not sure how she does what she does. But finishing a 40 page Munro story often feels like finishing a short novel. </div>
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I've seen Robin Black, whose first collection is the awesomely-named <b>If I Loved You I Would Tell You This</b>, compared to Munro. And at Black's best, I can almost see it. But this collection was much more uneven than anything by Munro. For all Munro's meandering, her stories usually have a mysterious sort of gravity that keeps the elements fitting together cleanly. Black's little observations about everyday life seem sometimes like diversions rather than essential drivers of story. Black's stories are looser, <i>sloppier</i> if I were being a jerk about it. </div>
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Still, some of the pieces are <i>very</i> good, and nearly all have at least one moment of real emotional weight. I think about the first story, in which the protagonist--a father whose teen-aged daughter was blinded as a child by an exploding aerosol paint can (and who is having an affair)(of course)--reveals that he had found the boy with whom she had been playing when the accident happened, picked him up and started to shake him as hard as he could. "Shake it harder, Lila. Shake it harder. Is that what you told her? Is it?" </div>
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Short stories!</div>
Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02377417442732974125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4670624773603630209.post-63999450805655893142013-02-27T12:19:00.000-08:002013-02-27T12:31:19.126-08:00The Righteous Mind and A Thousand AcresMost of my short reviews start, in my head, as long ones. Thousand-plus-word things. I often take hundreds of words of notes on the books I read without ever turning them into anything resembling a coherent argument about the work... because good sentences are easy, but smart structure takes time and attention. And like most people with a full time job and a part time drinking problem, I only have so many hours in a day to devote to writing and reading, and sometimes (often times!) other books or writing projects take my attention before I can organize my thoughts about the book I've just finished.<br />
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Here are some sort reviews that deserve to be much, much longer!<br />
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<b>The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt</b><br />
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I've been a fan of Haidt's research for a while, and written about it <a href="http://boringconversation.tumblr.com/post/40701192830/guest-blog-the-free-will-myth">elsewhere</a>. The basic argument of the first two-thirds of this book is... 1.) Moral reasoning is a post-hoc process. Intuitions come first, reasoning second. We often circle around sacred, social values and then share post-hoc "reasons" why we are right. Haidt introduces the image of our minds <span style="white-space: pre;">as</span> a small rational rider on a large intuitional elephant.<br />
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2.) Morality can be described more broadly than in terms of Fairness and Harm. His research has suggested that those who identify as conservative tend to have a broader palate of morality than those who identify as Liberal, considering not only Harm and Fairness (which all Westerners think of as highly important, regardless of politics), but also Purity, Authority, and Loyalty as moral considerations.You can take Hiadt's surveys at <a href="http://yourmorals.org/">YourMorals.org</a>.<br />
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And 3.) Humans are really groupish and we tie our moral thinking to the groups in which we belong.<br />
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These ideas are basically valuable as a vehicle for appreciating the biases in your own moral stances, and trying to overcome the Manichean grossness of modern political discourse, or more broadly for just understanding people unlike yourself, which I think is one of the (the very?) highest aims a person can take.<br />
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The last section of the book talks about religion, and is sort of a response to who he calls "New Atheists," like my boy Sam Harris. I wish I had the energy to write down my thoughts about this. Basically: Haidt's talks about "beliefs" in a context of behaviors and social groups, where all of these elements influence one another. It seems much richer and more complete to me than the way thinkers like Harris usually choose to <b>talk</b> about beliefs (though I hope they wouldn't disagree with the conceptual model). But I like Harris because I think of him as more understanding of religious conviction than thinkers like Dawkins and Hitchens (boo!), and I think his work just focuses on a particular relationship within the kind of model Haidt describes rather than necessarily rejecting it. Both writers are either misunderstanding each other, or I'm misunderstanding both.<br />
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I <b>highly</b> recommend this book to anyone who is interested in politics, in science, in the differences between conservatives and progressives, in understanding people unlike themselves. The writing is good and the structure is so elegant. Just read it!<br />
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Here's <a href="http://reason.com/archives/2012/04/10/born-this-way">a highly-condensed version of Chapter 12</a>, on politics and polarization.<br />
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<b>A Thousand Acres</b> <b>by Jane Smiley</b><br />
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This novel is a retelling of <i>King Lear</i> in semi-contemporary, rural America. I don't know that I would've recognized that if it weren't written on the back cover.<br />
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It's a story about a farmer who turns over ownership and management of his farm to his three daughters and their husbands. He begins to go senile shortly thereafter, and as the family unwinds all sorts of secrets surface.<br />
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Some of the middle parts are occasionally clunky, particularly with some of the major "twists." But at its best the character writing is incredible. I started to mark the best lines, thinking I would lay a few of them down for you here, but if I included all of the exceptional sentences, there'd be more words in this single review than exist in total on my blog.<br />
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<b>Letter to a Christian Nation </b> <b>by Sam Harris</b><br />
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Somehow, this short book was available on Youtube. Nothing surprising! Same old Sam Harris--good stuff!Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02377417442732974125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4670624773603630209.post-84081499826373509242013-02-04T10:10:00.001-08:002013-02-04T10:13:57.174-08:00The Descendants by Kari Heart Hemmings<br />
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The Descendants is a book about a wealthy man in Hawaii--Matt King--who, after the hospitalization of his wife, must take care of his two semi-estranged daughters. As his wife takes a turn for the worse, they travel around the island, delivering the bad news to friends and family members. Later, he confronts his wife's lover. Alexander Payne made a movie out of the story starring George Clooney.<br />
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When I was in college (that's right--COLLEGE), I took a Post-Colonial Literature course. It was one of the best, and most difficult courses I took. In addition to several <a href="http://www.amazon.com/God-Small-Things-Novel/dp/0812979656">amazing</a> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Tropic-Orange-Karen-Tei-Yamashita/dp/1566890640/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1360001591&sr=1-4&keywords=yamashita">novels</a>, we read a fair amount of "Theory," like Edward Said and Hommi Babba, and (at least when I'm paying attention) it still effects the way I see media.<br />
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Tangential to the family drama, The Descendants is hiding a second story--a story about Matt King's looming decision regarding a large piece of land he's inherited. You see, he's the descendant (!!!) of a white missionary and Hawaiian princess, and as a result his family is one of the largest land-owners in the state. He describes his situation at one point like this: "We sit back and watch as the past unfurls millions into our laps." I picked up the book hoping that it would provide more depth to the identity and colonial conflicts of this second story than the movie did.<br />
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Matt and his daughters are phenotypically white. They don't speak the local pidgin. Although technically the descendant of Hawaiian royalty, he has no real love for its history, and admits that he likes the strip malls and condominiums more than the Hawaiian towns they are replacing.<br />
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But outside of a few sprinkled lines, Hemmings doesn't take this story as seriously as the first. There's no shame in that, necessarily; I'd prefer to read a perfectly crafted domestic drama (e.g., Revolutionary Road, The Corrections) over some abstract exploration of identity politics any day. Unfortunately, Hemming's insights into the minds of her characters didn't hit home for me. Her writing is sparse and good enough, but there were maybe only one or two occasions when I had that big, transcendental feeling of "Yes! That is how it feels to be a person!" that good interior writing can bring.<br />
<br />
It may be that I've been reading short stories so much that I'm a little impatient with the relative looseness of a novel, but.<br />
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So, anyway, the movie was better!Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02377417442732974125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4670624773603630209.post-24517758358216244762013-01-27T21:24:00.000-08:002013-01-28T08:19:25.500-08:00The Book of Tea & others<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLKTbKB4N-dj5FnuLKPCkMHgp_K_K3WQ_t4mHHvhkQgHjevp6iY-g7nrJwO0krqZ5QArALIvgxQBZ4-5xVUr2I6I2sqFo_Fc_ObxI5cqMWIo4Tqa5s5gtLH4Qr4fFEB0dSZjI8ZriMGWB3/s1600/the-book-of-tea.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLKTbKB4N-dj5FnuLKPCkMHgp_K_K3WQ_t4mHHvhkQgHjevp6iY-g7nrJwO0krqZ5QArALIvgxQBZ4-5xVUr2I6I2sqFo_Fc_ObxI5cqMWIo4Tqa5s5gtLH4Qr4fFEB0dSZjI8ZriMGWB3/s200/the-book-of-tea.jpg" width="129" /></a></div>
<b>The Book of Tea </b>by Okakura Kakuzō<br />
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Written for a Western audience in 1906, <i>The Book of Tea</i> 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 <a href="http://mirotea.blogspot.com/">an amazing tea shop</a> near where I live where I buy loose leaf tea in bulk--but it's surprisingly absorbing. </div>
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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. </div>
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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. </div>
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<a href="http://www.gearculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/fine-beer-glass-set.jpg">Specialty</a> <a href="http://dnok91peocsw3.cloudfront.net/inspiration/230833-612x612-1.png">drink-ware</a> is a plus. </div>
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Anyway, this book in <b>very</b> short and <b>very</b> good. There's a very nice-looking .pdf file <a href="http://mysite.verizon.net/william_franklin_adams/portfolio/typography/thebookoftea.pdf">available</a>, if you're interested. Great for reading on your tablet.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqoiBRjQgcLPCDQpd0joGmd6TmcO2Plny9tCmu8xt0bMDU0KeVhzmrCZWA2NYBidv6MsJxwbbJJ9HmrdOVtHwdZT4KUSLMesmbtn5D1bVjquUqqythkHDW0WIm_pM6J_GmYtWHn4nHivqp/s1600/leaf-cloud-poem-mary-oliver-paperback-cover-art.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqoiBRjQgcLPCDQpd0joGmd6TmcO2Plny9tCmu8xt0bMDU0KeVhzmrCZWA2NYBidv6MsJxwbbJJ9HmrdOVtHwdZT4KUSLMesmbtn5D1bVjquUqqythkHDW0WIm_pM6J_GmYtWHn4nHivqp/s200/leaf-cloud-poem-mary-oliver-paperback-cover-art.jpg" width="168" /></a><b>The Leaf and the Cloud</b> by Mary Oliver </div>
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This is a book-length poem, organized into seven long sections. </div>
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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 "<a href="http://plagiarist.com/poetry/3159/">Flare</a>," and "<a href="http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2000/spring/oliver-gravel/">Gravel</a>," the poem's strongest sections. </div>
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If you can't be bothered to click, here's a highlight:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>It is our nature not only to see</i><i><br /></i><i>that the world is beautiful</i><i><br /></i><i>but to stand in the dark, under the stars,</i><br />
<i>or at noon, in the rainfall of light,</i><i><br /></i><i>frenzied,</i><i>wringing our hands,</i><i><br /></i><i>half-mad, saying over and over:</i><i><br /></i><i>what does it mean, that the world is beautiful—</i><br />
<i>what does it mean?</i></blockquote>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVcZXNRN2ysp3VaTfrHaQl6-gP7oN5MnWL6qZKVgmn3B8_0-cXlxjFW6in3T-Vv1gdL0ZW1OngDyPQcnYF_SWAYNGStf1ARIqONC_piP8wdkgzw3FoicxgEX1zfJD-J_58DvVVvF2V2aoK/s1600/TheDiscomfortZone_CoverLarge.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVcZXNRN2ysp3VaTfrHaQl6-gP7oN5MnWL6qZKVgmn3B8_0-cXlxjFW6in3T-Vv1gdL0ZW1OngDyPQcnYF_SWAYNGStf1ARIqONC_piP8wdkgzw3FoicxgEX1zfJD-J_58DvVVvF2V2aoK/s200/TheDiscomfortZone_CoverLarge.jpg" width="133" /></a></div>
<b>The Discomfort Zone</b> by Jonathan Franzen<br />
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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" <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/11/29/041129fa_fact?currentPage=all">here</a>), about <i>Peanuts</i> creator Charles Schultz, and "<a href="http://www.oprah.com/oprahsbookclub/My-Bird-Problem-by-Jonathan-Franzen">My Bird Problem</a>," about Franzen's obsession with birding are the collection's other highlights. </div>
Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02377417442732974125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4670624773603630209.post-54610516752120203782013-01-19T21:28:00.002-08:002013-01-20T11:52:54.145-08:00Joseph Smith and Goon SquadFor the <a href="http://bookimlookingfor.blogspot.com/2012/12/blog-year-two.html">second year</a> in a <a href="http://bookimlookingfor.blogspot.com/2011/10/blog-year-one.html">row</a>, 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!<br />
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<b>No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith</b> by Fawn M. Brodie<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJCmKYheFaOb2H7UrVW4MkeJ2NCTOvJm7SUpzc1rH9KJwzoUZYMA4SYjkU1DzDOCh-zlhTM-knBlt88GWZXR0hoE6UqKFFzhnDGOr5Ik2s4KqVos1Nie5oZZ-w61EuJSmreGrWnlRamxdk/s1600/3054x_w185.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJCmKYheFaOb2H7UrVW4MkeJ2NCTOvJm7SUpzc1rH9KJwzoUZYMA4SYjkU1DzDOCh-zlhTM-knBlt88GWZXR0hoE6UqKFFzhnDGOr5Ik2s4KqVos1Nie5oZZ-w61EuJSmreGrWnlRamxdk/s200/3054x_w185.png" width="128" /></a></div>
I've mentioned in <a href="http://bookimlookingfor.blogspot.com/2012/04/lonely-polygamist-by-brady-udall.html">an earlier post</a> 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 <i>amazingly</i> neutral. I really recommend this to anyone who's interested in the topic. Even just reading through a few random chapters would be worthwhile.<br />
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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.<br />
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<b>A Visit From the Good Squad</b> by Jennifer Egan<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiw0Lij-njoesdWVOOG8Od-42LkNpd01mDEJnQC4bO1urirkrGdUl6yAsoKFhlJCf77wKIuVlmJME8OG0MAzGFC4WEfBnaOO1Cob43Bwo1c9gP6dtvMXWy41kqvfl8fobcEjpVppnE6b9tN/s1600/a-visit-from-the-goon-squad-cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiw0Lij-njoesdWVOOG8Od-42LkNpd01mDEJnQC4bO1urirkrGdUl6yAsoKFhlJCf77wKIuVlmJME8OG0MAzGFC4WEfBnaOO1Cob43Bwo1c9gP6dtvMXWy41kqvfl8fobcEjpVppnE6b9tN/s200/a-visit-from-the-goon-squad-cover.jpg" width="126" /></a>Holy moly. Just wowza, this book! Amazing!<br />
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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 <i>th blu nyt, th stRs u cant c, th hum tht nevr gOs awy</i>.<br />
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Will Blythe's appropriately dizzying summary of the plot <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/books/review/Blythe-t.html?pagewanted=all">over at NYTimes</a> can't be beat:<br />
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"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."</blockquote>
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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.<br />
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It's a book about success and failure, and about change and the effects of time on our lives. Read it!Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02377417442732974125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4670624773603630209.post-41298127555724235272012-12-27T17:21:00.000-08:002012-12-27T17:21:00.776-08:00Blog: Year TwoTwo years!<br />
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<b>Total Books</b>: 36 books (or 3 books every month or .69 books a week.)<br />
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<li><b>Fiction: 22 Books (61.1%)</b></li>
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<li>Classics - 3</li>
<li>Fantasy - 1</li>
<li>Literary (Novel) - 4</li>
<li>Mystery - 1</li>
<li>Science Fiction - 3</li>
<li>Short Stories (Non Classic) - 8 </li>
<li>Other - 1</li>
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<li><b>Non Fiction: 10 Books (27.8%)</b></li>
<ul>
<li>Essays - 1</li>
<li>General Non Fiction - 2</li>
<li>History - 2</li>
<li>Memoir - 2</li>
<li>Science - 3</li>
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<li><b>Other: 3 Books</b></li>
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<li>Poetry - 3</li>
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<b>Best Fiction:</b> Runaway by Alice Munro & Everything that Rises Must Converge by Flannery O'Connor<br />
<b>Best Genre Fiction:</b> Hyperion by Dan Simmons<br />
<b>Best Non Fiction:</b> The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt<br />
<b>Best Poetry:</b> Weather Systems by Ted Kooser<br />
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<b>Other Stats:</b></div>
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<li>77.8% (28) of the books were written by Americans</li>
<li>80.6% (29) of the books were written by men</li>
<li>2.7% (1) book was a translation</li>
<li>Physical Books made up 52.8% (19). The rest were audio books.</li>
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Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02377417442732974125noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4670624773603630209.post-11698345894936864932012-12-20T14:52:00.002-08:002012-12-21T10:42:46.878-08:00Consider the Writer<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6C6alxJC8nMRTbBUofUWOrLnkjPo-23WAQ84qLzsCS7AAJN06mZoAQ-qpaDr-t0M5g7gC_L5RjJYFMSs0lUVAXO-4vOC-72dvkojnrPKAswzFGqQAQFxKMs5koKnSh7XmHm539rwBmk5Y/s1600/lobster.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6C6alxJC8nMRTbBUofUWOrLnkjPo-23WAQ84qLzsCS7AAJN06mZoAQ-qpaDr-t0M5g7gC_L5RjJYFMSs0lUVAXO-4vOC-72dvkojnrPKAswzFGqQAQFxKMs5koKnSh7XmHm539rwBmk5Y/s320/lobster.jpg" width="206" /></a><b>Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace</b><br />
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Like everyone else on the internet, I have a big boy crush on David Foster Wallace. It's not hard to see why. He was essentially what all literary young men like to imagine they'll become sometime in the semi-near future: famous and talented, critical and cerebral, slightly-edgy-but-ultimately-generous. He knew in interviews how to walk the line between self-awareness and self-absorption, and knew when to measure it with doses of honest self-doubt. He wrote big, generational novels. He had very cool hair.<br />
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And underneath all the hype about his personality, that romanticized tragedy a la Lennon, Cobain, Van Gough et al, underneath that (to me, bizarrely famous) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vET9cvlGJQw">Kenyon College commencement speech</a>, underneath the discourse around his thoughts re: love and attention and the role of literature and loneliness... he was very, very good fiction writer.<br />
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But I'll be honest.<br />
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The first thing I ever read by DFW was the title essay in this book, and I hated not only the essay, but also immediately hated its writer. I hated it because he spent the first handful of his characteristically gluttoned pages describing in detail the ways in which the attendees at a Maine Lobster Festival were unsophisticated or uncool or otherwise unworthy of serious consideration.<br />
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DFW admits his disdain pretty directly in a footnote:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"I confess that I have never understood why so many people’s idea of a fun vacation is to don flip-flops and sunglasses and crawl through maddening traffic to loud hot crowded tourist venues in order to sample a “local flavor” that is by definition ruined by the presence of tourists. [...] To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit.[...] As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing."</blockquote>
Now, it turns out that the essay is actually mostly about ("mostly" in terms of volume, at least) trying to untangle the reality of eating animals, in particular of eating boiled-alive lobsters. But before I ever arrived at the subject, I had already spent an exhausting layover at Snooty Judgement International, and had spoiled my trip.<br />
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The attitude rubbed me the wrong way for several reasons. First, even only 20 or so years Wallace's junior, the criticisms of hyper-commercialized, suburban America (maybe edgy and important seeming to Wallace) were already to me tired and boring. I grew up in the suburbs, raised on television and commercials and soft-drink-sponsored little leagues... and I felt fine. The families around me seemed perfectly happy and actualized and satisfied, and more so, were abundantly sophisticated and aware when it came to parsing the intentions of corporate interests around them.<br />
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Second, the breezy judgement of his tone betrayed what I think of as one of the primary strengths and purposes of fiction in particular, and art in general: to provide empathy from a safer distance than real time interaction affords. His article was <b>not</b> an attempt to get underneath the skin of Lobster Festivalites, to understand what motivated the tourists at agricultural events, how they understood themselves in relation to the event, to the industry, to their food. I don't believe he quoted a single tourist in the piece. Instead, the essay was the hyperliterary equivalent of the snotty asides you might say to a friend while walking past such an event on your way to some hip brewery's tap room.<sup>1</sup><br />
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Last weekend--while on my own grossly unhip vacation to a touristy island in the Puget Sound--I revisited the book.<br />
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By then, I'd encountered most of the essays elsewhere. I had also by then read a solid amount of his fiction, and learned an unhealthy amount of his biography via interviews and third party articles.<br />
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The essays are well-written and funny and packed with vivid detail. It's easy to see why they're so well loved. The strongest are "The View from Mrs Thompson's" a description of 9/11 from Bloomington Illinois,and "Host," about conservative talk radio.<br />
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But my general opinion of the tone of several of his pieces--what he himself calls "that whole cynical, postmodern thing" in "Big Red Son"--hasn't changed. Even in that essay, about the Adult Entertainment Industry, where several of the characters encountered really are probably worthy of some significant disdain, I found myself wishing he would spend more time trying to describe the event from their own perspective. My own natural reaction to the AVN awards is to raise an eyebrow, give an arch smile, and judge. Why have someone do that for me?<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyMyA2Q-nfmXMDqPhpOXkUryFuqYmnzqeUAj_YFjxUxKdL56V4l5fFq3bJxq4DWTLevi1Ma_rXCZyqHQMCM_xdGNUX0dDXDAPHTHbaCTUa5QUARls0QQN_ByTyPtN2qOMxrNTOLl_mUj-c/s1600/who-was-dfw.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="260" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyMyA2Q-nfmXMDqPhpOXkUryFuqYmnzqeUAj_YFjxUxKdL56V4l5fFq3bJxq4DWTLevi1Ma_rXCZyqHQMCM_xdGNUX0dDXDAPHTHbaCTUa5QUARls0QQN_ByTyPtN2qOMxrNTOLl_mUj-c/s320/who-was-dfw.jpg" width="320" /></a>My favorite writers of magazine features tend to be those who have mined Wallace's style and strcuture the most deeply: <a href="http://longform.org/writers/john-jeremiah-sullivan">John Jeremiah Sullivan</a>, <a href="http://longform.org/writers/tom-bissell">Tom Bissell</a>. But these writers seem to have a stronger ear for empathy and a gentler voice. They can be nimble and playful with not only verbal content, but <i>also</i> with emotional content. Ultimately, they are better essayists than DFW ever was, their pieces more substantial (in terms of content) and generous (in terms of attitude).<br />
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But the more I know about Wallace, the less I feel compelled to hold his attitudes against him. I honestly don't believe he could help it. And I think he knew that, on some level, he was being unfair. Take another look at <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vET9cvlGJQw">that Kenyon commencement speech</a>, where he at one point describes in detail a thought processes:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
" I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic jam being angry and disgusted at all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUVs and Hummers and V12 pickup trucks burning their wasteful, selfish, 40-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers, who are usually talking on cell phones as they cut people off in order to get just 20 stupid feet ahead in a traffic jam, and I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and disgusting we all are, and how it all just sucks"</blockquote>
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That passage could be taken without irony or comment right from any of his earlier essays. And it strikes me as significant that the audience laughs and applauds Wallace mid-tirade, who has to explain that, no no no "this is an example of how <b><i>not</i></b> to think." He emphasizes, instead, the importance of an inner life that,<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day." </blockquote>
<br />
I can, of course, get behind that. And in small but important ways his fiction is saturated in the perspective. But the honest (petty, unsexy) truth, is that David Foster Wallace is probably somewhat over-esteemed as an essayist. There's value in these pieces, and its possible that I just don't appreciate how new they must have felt in 1996, but there are already writers who do his tricks better than he ever did.<br />
<br />
Read the essays if you like. But make sure to hit up the fiction. That's where you get the know the talent behind (and worthy of) the hype.<br />
<br />
<br />
<sup>1.</sup> <span style="font-size: x-small;">As a sub-point, here, I was upset not simply because he was predictably and unfairly judgmental, but also because he buried his judgement in the genre of "fly-on-the-wall" journalistic observation. He had excused himself of the requirement to make a specific argument, but communicated his conclusions anyway. </span><span style="font-size: x-small;">(Your blog correspondent just can't help but include at least one winking footnote.) </span><br />
<br />
<br />Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02377417442732974125noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4670624773603630209.post-57428836562478247162012-12-09T12:05:00.000-08:002012-12-09T13:11:44.334-08:00Ten Word Book Reviews <center>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNX8grKrIJ8YS-EHpiydvR1A5HKF1sK22QaQ31ZrDLsYukZDmfcLEVQOvcOhagytJiVALyv8qnTFJTZLFMI8nd7lsZYFaDp3bk1Wl2qSgf7AopinPDyf37RgjYVSt3wynA3XUTmHEu2dAv/s1600/9781555976057_custom-ad226577ac6a38ac3fad971fd59baedb6cacdda5-s15.jpg"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNX8grKrIJ8YS-EHpiydvR1A5HKF1sK22QaQ31ZrDLsYukZDmfcLEVQOvcOhagytJiVALyv8qnTFJTZLFMI8nd7lsZYFaDp3bk1Wl2qSgf7AopinPDyf37RgjYVSt3wynA3XUTmHEu2dAv/s200/9781555976057_custom-ad226577ac6a38ac3fad971fd59baedb6cacdda5-s15.jpg" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgr3dFDLozBLGRS_0VYKdsCEy8zFCJWeqK3Om2Rrhv2rIihKHQ7QUTT8Rl-_d2MTecPBRt9YpWSGXeCdCugrCJttk55KUlEJmCB93jUiplQ6LlNEY1JwRbCipEcL8UE8_c01obnQonRVzJo/s1600/The-Vintage-Book-of-Contemporary-American-Short-Stories-Wolff-Tobias-9780679745136.jpg"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgr3dFDLozBLGRS_0VYKdsCEy8zFCJWeqK3Om2Rrhv2rIihKHQ7QUTT8Rl-_d2MTecPBRt9YpWSGXeCdCugrCJttk55KUlEJmCB93jUiplQ6LlNEY1JwRbCipEcL8UE8_c01obnQonRVzJo/s200/The-Vintage-Book-of-Contemporary-American-Short-Stories-Wolff-Tobias-9780679745136.jpg" /></a> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRrn85wi-oxNo2hIgTDM3XAP6gUJbAQ3KroZGZIAbLPrVYE7ta9i-nIkW1wb2EsNgEdZyaX20pvLdr5SrDzN-YKDhYht0VmhVAvCQbgKVKhM9r7zSUgY87YBHzueYnaTlgiP0LGqMGxsRf/s1600/golden_spruce_L2.png"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRrn85wi-oxNo2hIgTDM3XAP6gUJbAQ3KroZGZIAbLPrVYE7ta9i-nIkW1wb2EsNgEdZyaX20pvLdr5SrDzN-YKDhYht0VmhVAvCQbgKVKhM9r7zSUgY87YBHzueYnaTlgiP0LGqMGxsRf/s200/golden_spruce_L2.png" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUms_IU40-j0LJ6ZyNkt5DebQcEPCHrpjGkmDU-iwS_AeJis3VYFOQaYfw-RBPDcQOsuYSmldAjxIAKGLByvd2veE41QgeQqQ45XudGwYrPwYvU6CUSFDBuRwQN1a7z-qG0k7pCS-a08QC/s1600/suddenly.jpg"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUms_IU40-j0LJ6ZyNkt5DebQcEPCHrpjGkmDU-iwS_AeJis3VYFOQaYfw-RBPDcQOsuYSmldAjxIAKGLByvd2veE41QgeQqQ45XudGwYrPwYvU6CUSFDBuRwQN1a7z-qG0k7pCS-a08QC/s200/suddenly.jpg" /></a> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoZM3A_LmjoxiaaPlr0EZFvnhlDWmPWCxYgfgj93hZORWScuxrgEGgucVSijZfAjFNritKbeRnkOroT6GPWPHn0YXGvMmsX43QcMmodA4vjPYp6Lz1g1eSlmRVLqviZPD8-G88DcWMbStL/s1600/wapshot+chronicle.jpg"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoZM3A_LmjoxiaaPlr0EZFvnhlDWmPWCxYgfgj93hZORWScuxrgEGgucVSijZfAjFNritKbeRnkOroT6GPWPHn0YXGvMmsX43QcMmodA4vjPYp6Lz1g1eSlmRVLqviZPD8-G88DcWMbStL/s200/wapshot+chronicle.jpg" /></a> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMtdKzlp0-mypwMxOfEPxxKKg-wMpROOnn2RTfG6lvQ1s2qWOW0Xb9b91YH50JQap12GuIfjCDhis8tAcb8nHTvtzsizG_vcASyhymt-VatfB6HDo-aezehsQXjvQSqfxLf3OWtBHNtNdb/s1600/250px-Pastoralia.jpg"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMtdKzlp0-mypwMxOfEPxxKKg-wMpROOnn2RTfG6lvQ1s2qWOW0Xb9b91YH50JQap12GuIfjCDhis8tAcb8nHTvtzsizG_vcASyhymt-VatfB6HDo-aezehsQXjvQSqfxLf3OWtBHNtNdb/s200/250px-Pastoralia.jpg" /></a><br />
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</center>
<b>Useless Landscape or A Guide for Boys: Poems</b> by D.A. Powell<br />
<br />
Well crafted, but distant. Surprisingly sexual, given the cover art!<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>The Vintage Collection of American Short Stories</b> Ed. Tobias Wolff<br />
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Predictable selections, but <a href="http://docs.exdat.com/docs/index-248766.html?page=2">these</a> <a href="https://www.texarkanacollege.edu/PDFFiles/Academics/Humanities/English/AshBowen/DenisJohnson.pdf">bad</a> <a href="http://nbu.bg/webs/amb/american/6/carver/cathedral.htm">boys</a> aint famous for nothin. <br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness and Greed</b> by John Vaillant<br />
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Logging history, island ecology, american Indians, and environmentalism. True story!<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Suddenly a Knock at the Door</b> by Etgar Keret<br />
<br />
Just listen to the <a href="http://www.thisamericanlife.org/contributors/etgar-keret">best ones</a> on This American Life.<br />
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<b>The Wapshot Chronicle</b> by John Cheever<br />
<br />
Chummy novel about WASPs of bygone days. Lots of boats!<br />
<br />
<b>Pastoralia</b> by George Saunders<br />
<br />
Off-kilter stories about looking for happiness in the wrong places.<br />
<br />Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02377417442732974125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4670624773603630209.post-44820269699077562302012-11-18T10:19:00.000-08:002012-11-18T10:33:33.728-08:00Hyperion by Dan Simmons<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjM5k9clYH6NXFxy1PiulzZv5fVoGq7OjQE56XrF-6zV6PYgfnel7ZLcKV6-vrnsmJBWRFmlK8Mooh2hNxWY9AkYWtvka2mIRRcwdtq9AQgEacOFPdiKIrG7zH1gvnTE4Ed98rk2C90UZ1e/s1600/Hyperion_cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjM5k9clYH6NXFxy1PiulzZv5fVoGq7OjQE56XrF-6zV6PYgfnel7ZLcKV6-vrnsmJBWRFmlK8Mooh2hNxWY9AkYWtvka2mIRRcwdtq9AQgEacOFPdiKIrG7zH1gvnTE4Ed98rk2C90UZ1e/s400/Hyperion_cover.jpg" width="228" /></a></div>
<i>Hyperion</i> is set thousands of years in the future. Humans have control of a large collection of planets under a single governmental entity, all connected by some sort of instantaneous travel system. But this Hegemony is under threat by some outside faction who are poised to gain access to this interstellar portal system with the invasion of a strange, backwoods planet called.... you guessed it, Hyperion.<br />
<br />
It is also a book with a <b>very </b>dumb cover.<br />
<br />
The book is structured around seven travelers--pilgrims--who must travel over Hyperion's surface to locations called The Time Tombs where they may meet a creature called The Shrike. On their journey, each traveler tells the group his or her story, explaining their connection to the Tombs or the Shrike. It's a "frame story" structure, a direct homage to Chaucer and the <i>Canterbury Tales</i>.<br />
<br />
The individual stories borrow from the conventions of stranded-island ethnographic adventures, hard-boiled detective novels, and romantic tragedies. And the world is thick with other touchstones, sometimes explicit and sometimes less so: Mystic Judiasm, John Muir, H.P. Lovecraft, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Jack Vance. One character participates in a literal recreation of The Battle of Agincourt, and the poet John Keats plays a surprisingly large role in the plot.<br />
<br />
All of this makes it sound like a silly Narnia-like hodgepodge, but it's actually quite cohesive. The universe is dark and strange, and its texture is reliable and rich (even if it doesn't always feel exactly like a plausible future).<br />
<br />
It reminds me a lot of Gene Wolfe: dark and dense and dreamlike. And deeply concerned with religion.<br />
<br />
The struggle for science fiction (or fantasy) books that deal with religion is that they often--out of some understandable necessity--use fictional belief systems as rough stand-ins for real world religious organizations. You know: Oh, the Whatever Cult of the BlahBlah System is isolated and zealous. As a result, the connections to actual life are often overly abstract. It's hard for truths or observations to really hit.<br />
<br />
I mean, this is true of science fiction generally, on political or social grounds (The Emperor won't allow Female Zarglings into his Galactic Cabinet!). But religions are such unique organizations and so tied to the cultural particulars of their history that, even when the abstract observations are full and sound and reasonable, they can feel too remote to connect with real world belief systems in a visceral way.<br />
<br />
There are exceptions: <i>Canticle for Lebowitz</i>, <i>Out of the Silent Planet</i>. It's maybe telling that both of these authors are themselves quite religious. And in <i>Canticle</i>, Miller projects the future of Catholicism, so the abstraction is blunted some.<br />
<br />
Simmons has it both ways. The primary narrative engine is the ritual of a made-up group on a made-up planet who worship a made-up monster. But the story is closely orbited by relics that a contemporary reader will recognize: Jesuit Priests, Jewish diaspora, organizations called "High Islam" and "Zen Gnosticism."These details give the thing an air of something like authenticity.<br />
<br />
The writing is... fine. Well, OK. More than "fine." It's good, at least on its own terms. It also reminded me of Gene Wolfe, with a dark and heavy and ultimately silly melodrama. And like a lot of genre books, it's bloated with the awkward sentence structures that result from trying to jam exposition into narrative motion, and it draws its characters with simple, sitcom strokes.<br />
<br />
Nevertheless, this is a very, very good book.<br />
<br />
It's been so long since I've read something like this. It reminds me how big the tent really is when it comes to good literature. Strange as it sounds, I found myself comparing Simmons to Alice Munro, because I've also fallen in love with her work recently, and she might be the most prefect executor of the type of hyper-realistic short stories I've mostly read in the last few years. Despite having ostensibly the same job, they have little in common. I don't know that they would even know what to talk about if you sat them down together. Where Munro's work is more like poetry, with its tiny electric observations and individual empathy, Simmons' is more like history or even mythology, with its broad abstract strokes and sense of time.<br />
<br />
Sometimes I'm tempted think that the things that prose is best at is limited to the beauty of language and the personal revelations of getting inside a character's head. Simmons' book excels at neither. But I forget that literature can also handle complexity and scale in a way that other mediums struggle with. In <b>these</b> ways, Hyperion is a book that necessitates its form.. Read it!Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02377417442732974125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4670624773603630209.post-63203255423374565802012-11-10T21:30:00.003-08:002012-11-10T21:30:42.136-08:00Stats and Poems<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmUVK7nln17dR5n5ILMJpYjBZZjUyXwRGtuZXpCEQG1sFVGHZYmoqrWs4eUrbhJ-johzWEWQUQ9I0HhYR1VIAtBeZ-E1VGgUvmDC54HBadZrmjRaIGDl9LLtLRXgjuULPyWy8jDVqydbtO/s1600/The-Drunkard-s-Walk-Mlodinow-Leonard-9780307275172.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmUVK7nln17dR5n5ILMJpYjBZZjUyXwRGtuZXpCEQG1sFVGHZYmoqrWs4eUrbhJ-johzWEWQUQ9I0HhYR1VIAtBeZ-E1VGgUvmDC54HBadZrmjRaIGDl9LLtLRXgjuULPyWy8jDVqydbtO/s200/The-Drunkard-s-Walk-Mlodinow-Leonard-9780307275172.jpg" width="130" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfVC_Bdq-JlKplkF_PG8YuQ5Uz51Sw4IFR1XApC3e5blitoi8ZfonZK2NqSPe0K8P0DK3F2F25Bt563nYRkz_YAHGW8hsfh7FZTAfLkbxlrSF9Ojyvzv-YSbq8mEJCrf-x5Zun0gO5qGbQ/s1600/239229.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfVC_Bdq-JlKplkF_PG8YuQ5Uz51Sw4IFR1XApC3e5blitoi8ZfonZK2NqSPe0K8P0DK3F2F25Bt563nYRkz_YAHGW8hsfh7FZTAfLkbxlrSF9Ojyvzv-YSbq8mEJCrf-x5Zun0gO5qGbQ/s200/239229.jpg" width="123" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg07e1qODOfx8CoyX4Axzm4aiphw0TKzfK_qsEyBXO0-7OC8R_xzwVdd2e6rF2BIjqYbnbvVjSrTZN9HxgDS9WLiOxs0t2y-jMYoBu_MpXh4uZNaJhCyn2aTJHeR4FMzaNjWnlP7uBWjZKG/s1600/life-on-mars.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg07e1qODOfx8CoyX4Axzm4aiphw0TKzfK_qsEyBXO0-7OC8R_xzwVdd2e6rF2BIjqYbnbvVjSrTZN9HxgDS9WLiOxs0t2y-jMYoBu_MpXh4uZNaJhCyn2aTJHeR4FMzaNjWnlP7uBWjZKG/s200/life-on-mars.jpg" width="133" /></a></div>
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<br />
<b>The Drunkards Walk</b> by Leonard Mlodinow<br />
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Very good book about the history and day-to-day importance of statistics. I tend to think that it's a good idea for most people to have some kind of foundation in probability and statistics, if only because it can help defend against some of the ways in which our brains want to misunderstand probability or randomness (not that I know that much myself). Reading this book is easier and less boring than taking a class. Go read it people!<br />
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<b>Delights and Shadows</b> by Ted Kooser<br />
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Kooser continues to be the best. Luv. It. Here, read this one:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Casting Reels"<br />You find them at flea markets<br />and yard sales, old South Bends<br />and Pfluegers, with fancy engraving,<br />knurled knobs and pearl handles,<br />spooled with the fraying line<br />of long stories snarled into<br />silence, not just exaggerated tales<br />of walleyes, bass, and catfish,<br />but of hardworking men<br />who on Saturdays sought out<br />the solace of lakes, who on weekdays<br />at desks, or standing on ladders,<br />or next to clattering machines<br />played out their youth and strength<br />waiting to set the hook, and then,<br />in their sixties, felt the line go slack<br />and reeled the years back empty.<br />They are the ones who got away.</blockquote>
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<b>Life on Mars</b> by Tracy K. Smith<br />
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I didn't love this as much as I thought I would. The collection won the Pulizter last year, and it has all sorts of references to science and science fiction. Sounds fun! If nothing else, I was just eager to get away from the standard poetic objects of nature (oh blah blah here's a fox drinking water from a shallow pool blah blah). But it didn't get to me. Maybe I'll try again later. There were some nice lines, though! "<i>Tina says what if dark matter is like the space between people/ when what holds them together isn't exactly love</i>"<br />
<br />
Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02377417442732974125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4670624773603630209.post-1479160078447202362012-09-19T18:44:00.001-07:002012-09-19T19:06:16.950-07:00Ultra Mini Reviews September 2012<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghXLbIhmAEeyb0KTqivEPYYiqDOtGkhvUUXrkFd1gBHIB_DEHSRfU9IjAXlfHGhlqE3mREp4c1P4Su3_B0SdINliEuMWeXSYjqzjR02bmN4KxaLR4_O1gX7En2Oj1CPZuqWPFoBKOD1kAc/s1600/Books.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="122" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghXLbIhmAEeyb0KTqivEPYYiqDOtGkhvUUXrkFd1gBHIB_DEHSRfU9IjAXlfHGhlqE3mREp4c1P4Su3_B0SdINliEuMWeXSYjqzjR02bmN4KxaLR4_O1gX7En2Oj1CPZuqWPFoBKOD1kAc/s400/Books.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<strong>Never Let Me Go</strong> by Kazuo Ishiguro<br />
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Very good book. It's hard to talk about too much without spoiling its secrets, but if you're in the mood for a literary, realist, understated dystopian set in England... read this!<br />
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<strong>Free Will</strong> by Sam Harris<br />
<br />
Like Harris' last book, the ideas here are probably served just as well by its related <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCofmZlC72g">YouTube video</a> as they are by the book itself. I agree that the idea of free will doesn't make much sense either as a function of what we know about the universe or even as a function of our subjective experience. The book is fine, but the idea(s) is(are) great, and will probably stick with me forever!<br />
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<strong>St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised By Wolves</strong> by Karen Russell<br />
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Russell's novel was a finalist for the Pulitzer last year, along with Denis Johnson and David Foster Wallace. This is her story collection, and it's solid. The stories are all quirky, fun things with eccentric characters and premises, but she tries hard to mine the situations for real heart (and is successful at least half of the time). Sometimes the unusual premises border on genre (e.g., the titular werewolf girls). This is the kind of book that I would write about more at length if I set aside the time, but since I'm just doing these mini reviews I'll leave it at, simply: "Very good book."<br />
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<strong>Weather Central</strong> by Ted Kooser<br />
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Kooser would later become a Poet Laureate. This book was fantastic. I am just <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BD57OrPaX0A">crazy in love</a> with this book. One of my favorite poetry collections I've read. I got this from the library, but I plan on buying several of his collections later on.<br />
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<strong>The Mysterious Affair st Styles</strong> by Agatha Christie<br />
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Christe's first novel. It's what you would expect, solid!Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02377417442732974125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4670624773603630209.post-23189757104125165082012-08-24T16:48:00.004-07:002012-08-24T16:48:45.097-07:00Alice Munro and Lucretius<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_2iKFJ2PEcpUhXMGieE_K2LwrXo9JMMRYNZJGWRenOnORR0ucsoQYfY8AgV4p_dRI_qoXMy-yzwnuEMfuJr5AUVV6SrfqG6PySZikcINEzCXEUOFNQHnGZyZeRlFGf71H82EukkO9_JcY/s1600/300_144705.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_2iKFJ2PEcpUhXMGieE_K2LwrXo9JMMRYNZJGWRenOnORR0ucsoQYfY8AgV4p_dRI_qoXMy-yzwnuEMfuJr5AUVV6SrfqG6PySZikcINEzCXEUOFNQHnGZyZeRlFGf71H82EukkO9_JcY/s320/300_144705.jpg" width="211" /></a></div>
<b>Runaway by Alice Munro [<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14280.Runaway">link</a>]</b><br />
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Munro writes very long, stylistically muted, hyper-realistic short stories about women in Canada.Stories about women on trains, or visiting their neighbors or going to see a lover.<br />
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There're no gimmicks, either thematically or structurally. I don't just mean there's no genre stuff like vampires and aliens and locked room mysteries. I also mean there are no tricks that get employed in more literary offerings: things like setting your story at the birth of the Manhattan Project or making your protagonist a world class bee keeper or switching between first and third person or using long, reflexive run-on sentences. <br />
<br />
Which is all to say that its really hard to turn it into a pitch. Her work is nothing but craft, and it's<b> really excellent</b>. <br />
<br />
Some of the stories are better than others, and the endings had kind of a weird habit of summing up the next several weeks/months for the character in a way that I'm not sure if I liked or not. But if you want to read something serious and insightful and super-realistic--read this book!<br />
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<b>The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Steven Greenblatt [<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10954979-the-swerve">link</a>]</b><br />
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I think that am too sleepy to write anything interesting about this! I also enjoyed this more when I wasn't constantly asking myself to summarize and critique it for a future blog post. That may be too much information about how the blog sausage is made, but there it is. <br />
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This is a history book about the Greek poem/essay <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_rerum_natura">"On the Nature of Things</a>" by Lucretius and its discovery by an Italian papal secretary named Poggio. That specific subject is a vehicle to explore much more general topics:the philosophical and cultural arguments that were going on during and prior to the Enlightenment, the history of books and scrolls, and the Greek foundations of naturalism. <br />
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I minored in History, but I am so so bad at it. I don't have a knack for the very detailed narratives of politics, and I think there's always been some secret part of me that isn't convinced that learning about History is important--at least not in the classic "doomed to repeat it" sense.<br />
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I always liked my history courses more for the ideas in them than for their brambled narratives. And this is the kind of history book for me--it reads like a Malcolm Gladwell take on History; you know "Hey! Here's an idea! Isn't it interesting???"<br />
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The prose is very accessible. This is the most readable history book I've ever read. What are you waiting for? Go read it!<br />
<br />Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02377417442732974125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4670624773603630209.post-80228107493650554792012-08-10T17:03:00.001-07:002012-08-10T18:11:22.538-07:00The Magicians by Lev Grossman<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<strong>The Magicians</strong> by Lev Grossman <br />
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Quick and dirty summary: This is a story about Quentin Coldwater, a dissatisfied young man semi-obsessed with a series of fictional children's fantasy novels. These made-up novels are set in a land called Fillory, a clear stand in for C.S. Lewis' Narnia (and we as readers are <strong>abundantly</strong> meant to catch the homage). Quentin foregoes an Ivy League education to attend Breakbills, a Hogwarts-like college for magicians. After graduation, he has the post-college experience that many talented and aimless graduates have: he wastes his time in Brooklynn with sex and drinking. Before long, he and his friends discover that Fillory is, in fact, a real place, and they embark on adventures there. Along the way there's some drinking, some discovery of sex, some animal transformation, some magic sporting events, some monster attacks, etc etc etc. <br />
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Grossman takes Fantasy seriously here. By which I mean he tries hard to get at what real young adults might <em>really</em> think of the Harry Potter and Narnia universes if they found themselves there. Quentin, for all his initial excitement at each new stage of his life, finds most of the journey unsatisfying or boring. He is petulant and spoiled and ungracious, which sometimes makes him a difficult character to read. But he is those things in a way that I think most people can find familiar, particularly if they've spent any time around (or been a member of! hi!) the 17-22 demographic recently. <br />
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Quentin does eventually realize that the emptiness he feels doesn't exist at Breakbills or in Brooklynn or in Fillory--it exists in himself. And the solution to that emptiness is similarly internal. And I won't take this too far, but I think there may be additional significance here, outside of the personal significance to the character. Grossman understands that the longing for places like Fillory and Narnia and Hogwarts is in a sense a <strong>spiritual</strong> longing, and to have Quentin conclude that there is little or nothing that Fillory can offer that he cannot offer himself seems telling--particularly in the case of a Narnia (rather than a Lord of the Rings) stand-in. <br />
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This is a good fantasy book! It was better written than most, at least to my taste. This is a serviceable book about what it’s like to be a semi-adult. And this is a very good book about what its like to carry your childhood interests with you through life. There's value but also cost to leaning on things like Fiction to support your identity, and Quentin discovers that you're bound to feel disillusionment alongside love as you age. <br />
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The pacing is quick, but the structure is episodic, which means the pages can sometimes fly by and sometimes be excruciating, depending on the particular adventure underway. One scene in particular--where an otherworldly demon freezes time and invades a classroom--is <em>just fantastic</em>. <br />
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If you're ever in the mood for a fantasy book, but want a new spin on it, pick this up.<br />
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Also: I started reading <b>The Man Who Loved Children</b> by Christina Stead but stopped part way through. The beginning is fantastic and I'll probably come back to it later. Read <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/books/review/Franzen-t.html?pagewanted=all">this essay by J-Franz</a> from 2010 if you want to hear more (you do!).Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02377417442732974125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4670624773603630209.post-16370599142370182842012-07-25T20:12:00.000-07:002012-07-26T06:45:32.103-07:00The Ecstasy of Influence by Jonathan Lethem<br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">Do you know who Jonathan Lethem is? He’s a writer of
contemporary literature, and a pretty “important” one. He wrote </span><i style="background-color: white;">Motherless Brooklyn
</i><span style="background-color: white;">and </span><i style="background-color: white;">The Fortress of Solitude</i><span style="background-color: white;">, which might be familiar titles to you. He’s what
he might call a “white elephant,” a supposed eminence of the medium, trotted
from one public radio interview to the next.</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span></div>
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He is a huge nerd.<o:p></o:p></div>
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And like all huge nerds (by definition!), he loves to talk
about, and takes very seriously, the media he consumes. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>The Ecstasy of Influence</i> is a collection of some of Lethem’s
nonfiction work, and it focuses on the extremely particular cannon of his
personal interest—Don Delillo, Thomas Pynchon, J.G. Ballard, Phillip K
Dick. It’s a series of love letters to
figures like Bob Dylan and Italo Calvino. And, look. I love those guys. I love
Bob Dylan so <i>so</i> much. I can’t even begin to tell you! And the goddamn name of
this blog comes from a very particular Italian short fiction writer.<o:p></o:p></div>
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And his essays are full of a random spattering of really
good stuff. His introductory essay is great, and it’s even courageous (insofar
as any kind of writing can be courageous in America in 2012) in the way it
recognizes and semi-rejects the social script of the good, humble, grateful
novelist. His piece about Calvino and
completeism is great. <o:p></o:p></div>
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But I can’t love Lethem. <o:p></o:p></div>
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This is a good opportunity to admit I’ve never read any of
his fiction. Ooops! I don’t know why. I bet he’s great. I think partly it’s
that his most famous book is called <i>Motherless Brooklyn</i>, and I don’t know
anything about New York or have much of an interest in it. <o:p></o:p></div>
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But there’s also the other thing. Lethem, in his essays, is a
fierce defender of Genre. Even more particularly, he’s a bulldog of tough,
urban genre, the kind I imagine to be soaked in substance abuse and self-sufficient
sub-cultures. I don’t like those kinds of people. <o:p></o:p></div>
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I mean, I’m sure he’s a great guy! And I like that kind of
literature just fine. But I don’t like people who take their defense of Genre
very seriously.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Oh boy. How do I even explain why? Is there even a real
reason? <o:p></o:p></div>
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Here’s the thing. There is a conversation that takes places
a thousand times a day between people who like to read. This conversation is
about the merits of things like science fiction and fantasy, detective stories
and westerns. “Why don’t people take such things seriously!” the readers of George R.R. Martin and Patrick Rothfuss cry. “It's the boring serious fiction that needs to go!” <o:p></o:p></div>
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And I’m very exhausted with the genre side of things. Here
is why: I read mostly contemporary Literature. Capital L, award winning stuffs.
But I also like a LOT of genre books. Ray Bradbury is my all-time favorite
author. <i>The Once is Future King</i> and <i>Watership Down</i> are, for my money, some of
the best and most accessible books ever written. Everyone should read them!<o:p></o:p></div>
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And everyone I know who likes “Literature” <b>also</b> likes good
genre stories. Literally, every single person I know with an interest in, say, William Gaddis, is also interested in--I don't know--Gene Wolfe. The only closed-minded readers I’ve ever met are those who are
particular to one genre: the engineers who only like sci-fi, the women who have
a series of particular mysteries they love. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Lethem understands that to a certain extent intellectualism
is a show, and he almost—almost!—admits in his essay “What I Learned at the
Science Fiction Convention” what I had wanted to say to him so badly since page
one: Alternative-ness is as much an affectation as is erudition!<o:p></o:p></div>
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Anyway, I’ve taken a side road here. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The title essay is the showpiece of the book. You can read
it<a href="http://harpers.org/archive/2007/02/0081387"> here</a>, and it’s all about plagiarism and influence and borrowing in creative
writing. This is as important and tricky an issue as I can imagine for people
interested in fiction. He does a great job, and that’s all there is to it. It's clever and smart and great.<br />
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Although in a weird way, I
prefer Malcolm Gladwell’s exploration of the topic in “<a href="http://www.gladwell.com/2004/2004_11_25_a_borrowed.html">Something Borrowed</a>,” because, while it lacks the
stylistic fireworks or rhetorical depth of Lethem’s piece, it’s just so crystal
clear and simple and personal and I think everyone interested in intellectual
property should read it. <o:p></o:p></div>
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That’s all I’ve got! Dinner time!<o:p></o:p></div>Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02377417442732974125noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4670624773603630209.post-21099817241139350912012-06-20T20:41:00.001-07:002012-06-20T20:51:21.261-07:00Jesus Christ, Flannery O'Connor!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b><span style="font-family: inherit;">Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O'Connor</span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></b><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Wow!</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">So, apparently, if you're a funny looking conservative woman in the 1960's and you want to become really famous and renowned prose writer (despite not fitting the profile of a solitary white male genius)... all you have to do is be way better than anyone else writing at the time!</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Flannery O'Connor wrote two novels and 31 stories and then she died of lupus at like 39 years old or something. <i>Everything That Rises</i> is a collection of some of those stories--nine of 'em--and was published after she died.</span><br />
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The stories are all actually kind of similar. We're introduced to some Southern characters, one of whom usually thinks poorly of another one, and these characters disagree with one another about X or Y for a while, and then something horrible and brutally violent happens at the very end of the story. Mix some racial tensions in there, some good ol' Southern religious flavor and shake well.<br />
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<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">In some ways, O'Connor is a weird writer for me to read. She was very religious, and her stories are all religious. She was very explicit about this while she was alive ("</span>
<span style="line-height: 20px;">All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it."). She did <b>not</b> think it was OK to see her characters through a purely psychological lens--she wrote them through a spiritual lens, and ideally her readers would see their struggle for salvation as central.</span> Some of the stories are super-clear in their religious connections, and some are pretty opaque.<br />
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As a non-believer (ex-believer no less), I can't think of people in a spiritual sense anymore. Not in the same way she wants me to. Not as anything more than an exercise. And those characters who come under her spiritual judgement often are the most sympathetic to me. She did not think highly of doubters and atheists. She described "liberals" like this to a friend in a letter:<br />
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The notion of the perfectibility of man came about at the time of the Enlightenment in the 18th century....The Liberal approach is that man has never fallen, never incurred guilt, and is ultimately perfectible by his own unaided efforts. Therefore, evil in this light is a problem of better housing, sanitation, health, etc. and all mysteries will eventually be cleared up. Judgement is out of place because man is not responsible."</blockquote>
It isn't phrased the way I would phrase it, but it seems pretty OK to me!<br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">But despite that--and this is where it gets confusing for me--she is a <b>really really good</b> psychological writer. Like, just... wow. The stories aren't what I generally think of as </span>didactic. They don't read like stories concerned with ideas or abstract concepts. They are stories about people and about the <b>chewy texture </b>of being alive.<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">And that's basically what prose does, as far as I'm concerned. I think now that we've got TV and movies and video games and YouTube webcomic Twitters and etc... short stories and novels' purpose is to capture that really personal feeling you get from places and people, from <i>going</i> places and <i>being </i>a person. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><br />
That's what I loved loved loved about this book. I know that means it isn't what O'Connor would've hoped for (she would be 80something today had Lupus not got her), but it is what it is.<br />
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<b>Oranges by John McPhee</b>: This book was fine. It was basically a really long magazine piece about oranges. If you're even semi-familiar with the longform article, you can basically guess the whole structure before you read the book: introduce an interesting person, give us some history, give us some science, introduce another person, etc etc.<br />
<br />
<b>Devil in the White City by Erik Larson:</b> I was actually a little disappointed by this. It was good enough, but it was one of the best selling books for the entire two year period that I worked at a bookstore, and people were constantly raving about it. It's about the Chicago World's Fair, the guys who designed it, and a serial killer who was in the city at the same time. Pretty interesting, for sure, but I was glad enough to move on to something else. Who knows why? I'm sure there have been/ will be times when I would love it.</div>Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02377417442732974125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4670624773603630209.post-67122816537249760992012-06-06T20:10:00.001-07:002012-06-07T08:24:46.453-07:00So Long, Ray!<br />
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Ray Bradbury was my favorite author. </div>
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Not the <i>best</i> author I’ve ever read, obviously. But really, honestly my favorite. He’s part of that weird cohort of writers that tend to usher young people into the world of serious reading--along with Kurt Vonnegut, George Orwell, J.D. Sallinger, Jack Kerouac.</div>
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All of those authors are special to me because I read them when I was younger, but I’ve also sort of outgrown them in my tastes, and I don’t ever feel a need to revisit their shtick. </div>
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But I’ve never got tired of Bradbury, and I can’t imagine that I ever will. I still re-read his stuff, and because he was so prolific, I’m always uncovering new stories. </div>
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No one wrote quite the way Bradbury did. He didn’t have deep insights into the way people work, he didn’t explore difficult truths about life. Frankly, with the exception of <i>Something Wicked This Way Comes</i>, he wasn’t very good at sustaining himself over a novel-length story. But he had this deep sense of magic and wonder about the world, and he could saturate his writing with it in a way that wasn’t overly sentimental or obvious. I’ve never seen anyone else pull it off like him.*</div>
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He’s best known as a Science Fiction writer, but I more closely associate him with his stories about small towns. <i>Dandelion Wine</i>... even in <i>Martian Chronicles</i> (his homage to Sherwood Aderson’s small town masterpiece <i>Winesburg, Ohio</i>) his best stories had a distinctive rural feel to them. </div>
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His style was poetic, but not showy or erudite or self-aware or even exactly impressive. It was electric and sharp. It was joyful. </div>
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I was trying to think of a good story to link to. I decided on “The April Witch”**. The only place I could find it online was <a href="http://lossofsoul.com/LIFE_IS/Story/Bradbury-en.htm">here, at an extremelyhilarious website</a>. Oh well!</div>
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"Tom," she said, faintly, far away, "in the Southern Seas there's a day in each man's life when he knows it's time to shake hands with all his friends and say goodbye and sail away, and he does, and it's natural-it's just his time. That's how it is today. I'm so like you sometimes, sitting through Saturday matinees until nine at night when we send your dad to bring you home. Tom, when the time comes that the same cowboys are shooting at the same Indians on the same mountaintop, then it's best to fold back the seat and head for the door, with no regrets and no walking backward up the aisle. So, I'm leaving while I'm still happy and entertained." </blockquote>
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- Dandelion Wine</blockquote>
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So long, Ray!</div>
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* (Actually, on second thought, <i>Calvin & Hobbes</i> has a similar feel to me, but.)</div>
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** (Bradbury loved to reference particular months. <i>October Country</i>, “West of October,” even the first line of <i>Something Wicked</i> is something like “August was a good month for boys.”)</div>Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02377417442732974125noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4670624773603630209.post-76175252825016367592012-05-27T22:59:00.002-07:002012-05-28T08:59:16.769-07:00Independent<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b>Love is Not Constantly Wondering If You are Making the Biggest Mistake of Your Life</b> by Anonymous<br />
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I'm kind of a books snob. Sorry! And so, even though the idea of independent books is pretty OK with me conceptually, I wasn't sure I'd ever really need to read one. I mean, I don't have enough time for all the regular books that already exist.<br />
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But I liked the concept for this book so much, that I read and am reviewing it anyway.<br />
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<i>Love is Not Constantly Wondering If You are Making the Biggest Mistake if Your Life</i> is structured like a "Choose Your Own Adventure" novel. At the bottom of each page or series of pages is a little choice: "If you help the cavemen fight against the ants, turn to page whatever. If you don't want to get involved and chose to flee back through the time vortex, turn to this other page." These are the only references to the B-movie adventure story plot about an alien planet of AntPeople. The actual text of the book is a straight up Realist story about a co-dependent, unhealthy relationship between you and an alcoholic named Anne. Instead of chapters, the book is separated into dates sort of like a journal. It covers four years.<br />
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Despite the options to flip between passages, a note at the beginning essentially admits that there's no advantage to this. The book isn't really written that way, and unlike the genre on which it is based, there is only one ending. You just read it start to finish.<br />
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And it's good! Not fantastic, not incredible, but good enough! I don't know that it has anything fantastically interesting to <i>say</i> about unhealthy relationships, but it captures the guilt and shame of their reality pretty well.<br />
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I tried to read it like a real "Choose Your Own Adventure" novel, where you jump from scene to scene--in this case, entirely out of order. There was some kind of sense to doing it this way. It reflects the idea that when you have something really difficult happen to you and you live in it in a really get-under-your-skin kind of way... time doesn't seem quite linear. It can be more like a bike wheel, events radiating out of that center hub like spokes, referring to and revolving around that one thing.<br />
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But I'm pretty sure that was more a half-realized, happy accident than anything else. If the book had really made use of the structure it could have been phenomenal.<br />
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I also read <b>Train Dreams</b> by Dennis Johnson, which is too good for me to say anything smart about it. I need to read it again. But it's beautiful. I read <b>A Walk in the Woods</b> by Bill Bryson, which is about walking the Appalachian Trail. It's funny and smart and really makes me want to get out and do a long-term hiking thing.And I read <b>The Moonstone</b> by Wilkie Collins, which is a 19th century proto-detective story. It's fine! I wasn't really paying attention while I read it.<br />
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<br />Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02377417442732974125noreply@blogger.com0