Books We Like!

Discovered this morning on alternet.org, this new way to order books online:

blue people,
fertilize media revolution every time you buy a book (or cd or dvd) online.

Books We Like is "activist e-commerce", a way for progressives to use their online book purchases to effect change, by collectivizing their online book purchases (Amazon, Powells, etc.). BWL facilitates that, maximizing the resulting sales commissions, and pooling them to fertilize progressive independent media.

Every book purchase captures about a dollar that would otherwise go uncollected; that's potentially millions per year! (includes all subsequent purchases during that session, so start here for CDs and DVDs too.)
100% of profits go to public-interest media efforts, of which BWL is a good example.

So, I went there immediately, registered and made some recommendations.  My name there is gypsymoth, but my recommendations are all pretty much things I've written about here.  Anyway, check it out.  A way to help progressive causes and get the books you want.  Also to connect with a bookish progressive community.  What a deal!

SOLSTICE WISHES

Here at the gateway of the year,
                          may we strive to make good cheer.
                         In our revels shall joy abound
                          and sorrow be cast underground.

In my other journal, I have been posting a few entries about the Winter Solstice, the midwinter celebration that predates Christmas, and showing how many of our traditions during this season are inherited from the days of the nature religions.  The choice of the 25th of December as the birthday of the Christ Child is complex and arbitrary, many other dates were used in earlier times.  Long before the appearance of  "an obscure wonder-worker in Palestine, the celebration of the Midwinter sun held a central place in civilizations throughout the ancient world." (The Winter Solstice, John Matthews, pg. 13) 

In the modern world we barely notice  that during this week we have passed the mid point of the dark season, the shortest day;  that from this point on the days grow longer, the sun brighter, that nature has stepped over the border of the year, that we move toward the season of planting and growth, the season of life. 

But we have - and I wish any readers of this journal good tidings, may you have a holiday filled with peace, joy, rest and comfort, love and merriment.  Wassail!

RECENT READING

Before I left for my Texas visit, I finished Perri Klass' novel The Mystery of Breathing.  Klass is herself a baby doctor, and her novels deal with the world of hospitals and sick children.  Which might sound depressing, but is not.  She is a fine writer, and I suspect she is also a fine doctor.  This novel takes place in the particularly scary world of neonatology intensive care, where the babies are very premature and the mystery of breathing is a daily struggle.  It is a mystery of sorts, as Maggie, the MD central character, has become the victim of a harrassment campaign, carried out by person or persons (and reasons) unknown.  She is a complicated character, arrogant and proud, but vulnerable and lonely at the same time.  I didn't like her very much at the beginning of the book, but as I lived with her through her professional and personal crises, we bonded.  I can't say much more without giving away critical elements of the story - I will say that this book brings us into a world seldom visited by any but the medical personnel and parents whose babies are fighting for their lives in an NICU.  The fear factors here are the life and death struggles of tiny infants and the doctors and nurses who take care of them.  I held my breath through many passages of medical procedures.  But I loved this book.

On the flights to and from Texas I read Augusten Burroughs' much touted book, Running with Scissors. It's been around for a while, so you've either read it or read about it.  Unlike most, I utterly disliked this purported memoir.  Though he's writing about extremely emotional events, I felt no emotion in the writing.  It all felt distanced, untrue, unreal, unfelt.  This may have been on purpose, perhaps it's the only way to write about such a disfunctional youth - but for me this book was words on paper only.  No matter how outrageous the events and characters, they remained cardboard cutouts, never flesh and blood.  I won't read any more Burroughs, that's for sure.  Too many other books, too little time.

MAKING YOUR LIST, CHECKING IT TWICE

Forwarded to me by one of my sisters this morning.  Since few people of any persuasion read this journal, I won't worry as much about offending anyone as if I put it in my windmills blog.  It's amusing and terrifying at the same time.  So much of it is absolutely true.

Some things to do before the Inauguration:

1. Get that abortion you've always wanted.
2. Drink a nice clean glass of water.
3. Cash your Social Security check.
4. See a doctor of your own choosing.
5. Spend quality time with your draft age child/grandchild.
6. Visit Syria, or any foreign country for that matter.
7. Get that gas mask you've been putting off buying.
8. Hoard gasoline.
9. Borrow books from library before they're banned - Constitutional law books, Catcher in the Rye, Harry Potter, Tropic of Cancer, etc.
10. If you have an idea for an art piece involving a crucifix,do it now.
11. Come out - then go back in - HURRY!
12. Jam in all the Alzheimer's stem cell research you can.
13. Stay out late before the curfews start.
14. Go see Bruce Springsteen before he has his "accident".
15. Go see Mount Rushmore before the Reagan addition.
16. Use the phrase - "you can't do that - this is America".
17. If you're white - marry a black person, if you're black-marry a white person.
18. Take a walk in Yosemite, without being hit by a snowmobile or a base-jumper.
19. Enroll your kid in an accelerated art or music class.
20. Start your school day without a prayer.
21. Pass on the secrets of evolution to future generations.
22. Learn French.
23. Attend a commitment ceremony with your gay friends.
24. Take a factory tour anywhere in the US.
25. Try to take photographs of animals on the endangered species list.
26. Visit Florida before the polar ice caps melt.
27. Visit Nevada before it becomes radioactive.28. Visit Alaska before "The Big Spill".
29. Visit Massachusetts while it is still a State.

WHERE HAS ALL THE FREE TIME GONE? LONG TIME PASSING, ETC.

Where did November go? It’s well into December now, and to end-of-semester tests, grades, workshops, working with my after-school kids, and trying to have clean underwear, has been added holiday shopping for distant children and other relatives. Next comes wrapping, packing and mailing.

Reading continues, always, but there is scant time for journaling about it. I finished Spectacular Happiness over T’giving in Massachusetts, am almost finished with Killing the Buddha, have read a Marcia Muller Sharon McCone mystery, The Dangerous Hour, and am now reading a book called Welcome to Lizard Motel, by Barbara Feinberg. This book is subtitled: Children, Stories, and the Mystery of Making Things Up, and I want to read it aloud to the world. Seldom do I find nonfiction this compelling – it’s an exploration about the place of stories in children’s lives, told in the form of a memoir.

In the previous post I talked a bit about Spectacular Happiness, written by Peter D. Kramer. This is the guy who wrote Listening to Prozac, and other nonfiction books on psychology. His first novel is more introspective and psychological than much fiction, and now I see why. Robbie (see her comment on previous post, in which I first discussed this book) wants me to go easy on the anarchy, as she must work in the insurance industry. An industry which itself comes in for some criticism in the book. The blowing up of monstrous beach houses built where no houses should ever be is perhaps a fantasy many of us entertain. It is not really the main theme of the book. It’s a long strange convoluted tale of love and parenting, as well as one man’s relationship to his Place. I loved this novel, though I will admit it got too slow and introspective from time to time.

P.S. on Dec. 7 - Well, perhaps it's not entirely a fantasy after all. Take a look at this article from the AOL News.  Ecoterrorism? just across the Chesapeake.  Again, houses being built where no house should ever be.  Nature preserves should be respected, nature itself should get a hell of a lot more respect than it does.  Do I condone this kind of thing?  My jury may still be out, to tell you the horrible truth.  I have already admitted it's a fantasy of mine.  So far, one I have never acted upon.

ANARCHY AND RELIGION, THE BEAT GOES ON

I can announce now with great pleasure that I AM still capable of reading a grown-up book.  And a very fine one it is, too.  Titled Spectacular Happiness, it is set in my former stomping grounds of Cape Cod, and is most wonderfully a tale of exactly a form of anarchy I have long practiced in my heart and mind:  the destruction of the monster houses built by people with more money than soul along the beachfront, or on narrow strips of dune. The author is Peter D. Kramer, and I'll have more to say when I've finished the book.  I'm not very far into it yet, but am entirely in love with this man's writing. 

I am actually reading another book as well, but I've been working on this one for some time:  Killing the Buddha, by Peter Manseau and Jeff Sharlett, the guys responsible for the website of the same name as the book.  Jacket copy says "...a many-colored, positively riveting look at the facets of true belief.  Together these curious minds tell the strange, funny, sad and true story of religion in America for the spiritual seeker in all of us:  A Heretic's Bible."  As I say, I began the book some time ago, and set it down to read some trashy fiction, I'm sure.  Now, however, I am most interested in becoming more acquainted with religion in America, the phenom that seems to be credited with winning the election for Bush.  This is a phenomenon that needs to be understood if we are to ever get this country back on any true moral footing.  I can't believe we have come to the place where people's private sexuality and decisions about their own bodies are the only manifestation of morality that the public cares about.  Religion, morality, spirituality, obsession, fanaticism, realms that seem to have interwoven in a strange and scary way. 

IF YOU ARE AMONG THE VERY YOUNG, AT HEART

Mmm hmm, another three week hiatus in book journaling.  I can tell you that the election knocked me for a big loop, and that I've been somewhat shellshocked ever since.  Although I knew, of course, there was a good chance the Junta would be reelected, there was always a fiercely burning spark of hope deep in my heart for this not to happen.  Hope, and even perhaps, belief.  It seemed so evident to me that the guy who told the worst lies really didn't deserve to win. 

Anyway, it's been hard to concentrate on reading fiction.  Though it's infinitely preferable to fact.  I've been trying to read The Red Queen, by Margaret Drabble, but think I'm going to give up.  Just somehow can't pay attention to it.  I have read two very good books for young people, and this may be my reading level for the present time.  One was Gregor the Overlander, by Suzanne Collins, the other Gifts, by Ursula K. LeGuin.  Both are fantasy novels - and yes, that's right, young people's fantasy fiction.  I'm there.  Only somewhat apologetically.  Gregor is the first of what promises to be a series, at any rate there is a second already published, though my library system doesn't yet have it.  Gregor is a boy who lives in NYC with his mom and baby sister, his father having disappeared without a trace two years previously.  One day, while taking care of Boots (baby sister), Gregory falls through a ventilation grate in the laundromat into what turns out to be a huge underground world.  This world is "peopled" by animals, insects and humans, all of whom interact, fight, speak the same language, love, die, win, lose.  The humans have an ancient prophecy inscribed in a stone, and all signs seem to point to Gregor being an inherent part of that prophecy.  More than this I cannot say, it's an adventure, and it's one I couldn't put down until I finished it.  Kids in the 9 to 12 age range will enjoy this book - it has a boy hero, but he's a New Man in many ways, a gentle soul who does laundry for his mom and loves his little sister.

I read anything and everything that LeGuin writes: adult or young people's fiction, essays, poetry.  She maybe my very absolute favorite writer.  Her heart and soul are much older and wiser than her chronological age, I'm sure she's been here before.  Or been somewhere before, maybe some place better than this planet.  This little book is about a land where strange "gifts" run in bloodlines, passed down through the generations through either the mother or the father.  The main characters are..."a blind boy and a grim girl, sixteen years old, stuck in the superstition and squalor of the desolate hill farms that we so grandly called our domains..."  These two, Orrec and Gry, have inherited (or perhaps not) gifts that terrify and/or distress them - and the tale lies in their growing, through deep pain and sad experience, to become who they were meant to be all along.  It is a growing-up fable, yes, but most of all it is a story.  Stories and story-telling play a large part in this book. In a society where only Orrec's mother could read and taught her son the ability to do so, where books are unknown, but stories cherished, Orrec's real gift in the end comes from his mother - a "Lowlander" who was no part of the Upland world of fearsome "gifts" that brought grief more often than not.  This is a lovely story for 12 to 15 year olds, and certainly for adults.  I may put it on my gift list for younger family members this winter.

MINDLESS LIT

Hmmm.  So, the last time I posted here was October 10th.  Almost three weeks ago.  Shows you what my life is like right now.  If you read my most recent entry in the windmills you'll have an even better idea.

I've read some truly awful books in those three weeks, gotta tell ya.  Not a pretty picture at all.  But after I finished The Tree Bride and realized I had absolutely no coherent idea of what it was all about (a complicated story of India when it was the British Raj, told in contemporary voices as well as historical ones; ranging from coastal California, to England, the high seas, and the sub-continent of India), I decided I was currently too stupid to read complicated literature. 

So, my diet of dreck has included two of the worst books ever:  Hawke's Harbor, by S.E. Hinton, a foray into supposedly adult literature by a young people's author of some note, and Playing with Boys, by Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez.  I read the Hinton book only because it was placed, give me a break, in Delaware.  The location is fictional, in more ways than one, it matches noplace I know in coastal DE.  And it includes a vampire.  And it has a happy ending, sort of.  Bad bad simplistic sappy writing, terrible story, implausible characters.  Don't bother. 

Valdes-Rodriguez wrote a silly but enjoyable book a year or two ago, The Dirty Girls Social Club, about a group of Latina women friends and their lives, loves and shopping.  It was a fun read, so of course I thought this one would be too.  It was probably the worst book I've ever read.  But, what about this, I read the whole damn thing!  I kept believing, hoping, that it would get better any minute.  It didn't.  If you enjoy reading mainly about brand-name clothes, shoes, handbags, cars, and how to wear and accessorize the former while riding in the latter - then, sure, go ahead, knock yourselves out, read Playing With Boys.  Otherwise, go have a partial lobotomy, it will feel just about the same.

And why am I so stupid right now?  It's the election, my friends, it's deep levels of worry and stress.  I've been reading lots of other stuff besides crappy novels (And I didn't even mention Robert Parker's Melancholy Baby, the latest, and the worst, in his female PI series starring Sunny Randall.  At this point I'm sure Parker's computer writes his books all by itself, he's put in some kind of program that just changes a few locales, a few wisecracks, a few names.), mainly having to do with Dubya's insane and insaner conviction that Jesus talks to him and he's the only one he's listening to.  Most people who believe this sort of thing are tightly wrapped in institutions, but this one is our president. 

So I'm off to the library for a new collection of crappy novels.  There's still a week of latenight reading to go.  After the ballgames are over. 

THE LOVE WIFE - A WORK IN PROGRESS

It's always my intention to post here at least once a week, but I see I haven't managed to keep that intention too well lately.  Another paver on the road to hell, I guess.  I have been managing to keep posting on my political/personal journal in these busy days.  And, amazingly enough, I am also continuing to read.  Just not able to write about what I read.  As I've said before, with a choice between reading and talking about what I read - reading wins, by a large margin. 

Last weekend I was held spellbound by Gish Jen's most recent novel, The Love Wife.  She wrote one of my all-time favorite novels, Mona in the Promised Land, some years ago, and this is the first thing I've read by her since then.  It's even better.  G (my partner) is this weekend captured in the same way by this story of a bi-cultural family in the Boston suburbs trying to deal with a major change in their busy lives.  Gish Jen is herself a Chinese American, and her books deal with families coping with cultural and generational problems.  As both G and I have multicultural or multiracial extended families, through marriage or adoption, we are always interested and involved in this family situation.  We have some faint connection with the problems and joys it brings.

The Love Wife is told in multiple voices, every member of the family tells his or her part of the story, the voices mingle, follow, pick up the thread from one another, pass it on to another view, another side, of the tale.  It took me a few pages to fall into the pattern, the rhythm, but once I did it seemed entirely natural.  It is an interesting story-telling device.  There are no descriptive or narrative passages, and the plot is not linearly revealed; it winds backward and forward, there are asides and footnotes, there is even a voice from the grave - Mama Wong, even dead, is never gone.  If this sounds difficult, hard to follow, believe me - it isn't. 

Don't have time to finish this review right now, I do hope to be back later this evening.  I'm off to Rehoboth Beach for the last voter reg weekend marathon.  Our forms have to be returned by 4:30 Tuesday, to Dover. 

A PostScript, a week and a half later:  No, I didn't get back to finish this review.  You can never step into the same river twice.  Not even on the same day.  The river has flowed on, extensively.  I've read three books since this one, though this one stays with me.  I'm going to give you links to some "real" reviews of this novel, and hope you find the time to read it soon. 

DANGEROUS LIT

Well, it's that time again, folks:  Banned Books Week.  Stand up for your First Amendment rights and read something by, oh maybe John Steinbeck.  Or...Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Margaret Atwood.  Or...here's a shocker:  Jean M. Auel (Earth's Children series...yep).  Read Maurice Sendak and J.K. Rowling to your kids. Get really radical and read To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, or A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle.  Those perennial winners (or should I say "losers" in this case?) The Catcher in the Rye and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are still out there upsetting parents.  And teachers are still putting them on reading lists.  Will we never learn?  Anyway, you can get the whole story, as it were, from that radical leftist organization, The American Library Association - or just go here and get the list of the 100 most challenged books from 1990 to 2000.  It was a very good decade.

WHEREVER YOU ARE, LEONARD, HERE'S TO YOU

From Garrison Keilor's wonderful site, The Writer's Almanac, this snippet about one of my favorite singer/poet/songwriters, Leonard Cohen:

      It's the birthday of poet, novelist and songwriter Leonard Cohen, born in Montreal, Canada (1934).  He's the author of many books of poetry, including Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956) and Death of a Ladies' Man (1978), and novels such as Beautiful Losers (1966). 

He learned to play guitar at a socialist summer camp when he was a teenager, but at the time he only used the guitar to get girls.  He was more interested in poetry, and by the early 1960's he was considered one of Canada's most promising young poets. Then in 1966, the folksinger Judy Collins heard some of his songs, which he had written and performed only for friends, and she persuaded him to perform in public and make a record. He's been recording music ever since.

His most famous song is "Suzanne" from Songs of Leonard Cohen (1968).  It goes, "Now Suzanne takes your hand / And she leads you to the river / She is wearing rags and feathers / From Salvation Army counters / And the sun pours down like honey / On our lady of the harbour / And she shows you where to look / Among the garbage and the flowers."  

Leonard Cohen wrote, "As our eyes grow accustomed to sight they armour themselves against wonder."

You young folk may not even know him, but was there ever anyone with so much sorrow in his voice?  Someone who made you feel a life of heartbreak and pain when he sang his often cynical, often depressing, always wonderful, songs?  He was one of the muses of my youth, perfectly able to express the depths of youthful despair and degradation, longing, beauty - it was all there, "among the garbage and the flowers."  I still have some old LP's of his.  Imagine that. I haven't listened to him in years, but he's got an album coming out next month - he's still going strong.  Check out the website link at the beginning of the quote from The Almanac.  Great stuff there, if you've been missing Leonard.

ANGELS AND SPIRITS, AND KINSEY MILHONE

I finished the Louise Erdrich (Four Souls), and actually read something else in between - whose name I don't exactly remember - and am now in the middle of Sue Grafton's latest alphabetical mystery:  R is for Ricochet.  This is not literature, but Kinsey Milhone (Grafton's detective) is like an old friend now, and I am compelled to keep up with her adventures.  And misadventures.  Four Souls more closely resembled literature; I do in fact think that all of Erdrich's work deserves to be called literature.  She, like Faulkner, has created a world in her novels.  Place is as important as plot or character in these books, and the place, plot and recurring characters all intertwine from book to book.  I do want to write more about Erdrich's world, but don't have the time right now.  This is the week I begin my second job, afternoons at La Casita doing homework help and ESL with Hispanic children from the local elementary and middle schools. I seem to have time to either read books, or write about reading books.  Pretty clear choice, eh?

(Isn't everyone in love with her?)

I do want to say a word about "Angels in America," however.  Not a book, but the HBO series made from Tony Kushner's play.  We have finished watching "Six Feet Under," the first two seasons on DVD and we're waiting for season #3 to come out.  I feel rather like a junkie who's had all drug sources suddenly and visciously removed.  So, jonesing for something to watch on the weekend, I spied "Angels in America" on the shelf.  We don't have HBO and there are times I truly regret it.  The screening of Kushner's opus was one of them.  So Part I (Milennium Approaches) of Angels came home with me on Friday.  G and I were pinned to the sofa for the entire 179 minutes of it, no bathroom breaks, no mixed nuts or diet Pepsi breaks, no answering the phone when it rang.  Rivetted.

I've never seen anything this good, certainly not on TV.  I read on AOL early this morning that it cleaned up on Emmy Awards - and how glad I am to know that this kind of genius is rightfully rewarded.  The screenplay is brilliant (Kushner wrote it, thank with great thanksgiving whatever gods may be), the acting as well (Meryl Streep as the old rabbi?  imagine that! and Emma, oh Emma, I'm so in love with you!), the direction - ! - Mike Nichols outdid himself. We are waiting til next weekend to bring home Part II (Perestroika), we won't have any time to watch it until then.  I may have to buy this pair of DVD's, it will need many more than one watching.  And I regret more than ever that I didn't get to see it on stage during its run.  I'd love to see how they managed many of those scenes, easy enough with special movie effects, on a stage.

 

A SHORT DIET OF FLUFFY JUNK

First, I would like to thank the other lost souls who watch "Six Feet Under" with avid enthusiasm.  I don't feel like such a freak any more. I have been paying attention to the writers and directors on the episodes, and find that those directed by Kathy Bates are my favorites.  G and I are working our way through the second season now - and can it be true that we'll have to wait a year for the third season to be out in DVD?  Oh, say it isn't so.  We'll have to slow our pace down somewhat.

The past four weeks have been crazy, hectic - back to school, voter registration, interviewing for a second job in the afternoons (how poor must we be for me to even THINK of doing this?), etc.  So my reading has been mainly fluffy junk.  Or, Junky fluff.  Either way.  Finished The Burglar on the Prowl, by Lawrence Block, then read Shoot the Moon, by Billie Letts.  If I'd gotten R is for Ricochet, I'd have read it too by now.  But I'm number 28 on the library waiting list.  So, I read a real book:  Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, by Dai Sijie.  This one has been a real book for so long that soon it will be a movie.  How I hope they can do it justice.  It's a fantastically visual book, the impulse to put it on film is irresistable.  I thought about many of the scenes filmically while I was reading it, there's no way not to.  I read the book in one afternoon over the holiday weekend just past - G and I were both wiped out, so we spent the weekend as lazily as possible:  reading, napping, going out to eat, avoiding all the tourists at the beaches.

Mara has a short piece on this book in her book journal, Ex Libris, that saves me the time of doing my own.  I think we both enjoyed this story for the same reasons - how it illustrates the power of reading, the influence of literature, on the lives touched by its magic.  Though Mao banishes intellectuals and literature from his China, sends young scholars to the countryside for "re-education" in an effort to rid their minds of all thoughts save how to survive their daily toil - contraband books surface, are read by lamplight, enjoyed, new worlds envisioned.  This is a dear little book that I wanted not to end - alas, it did, all too soon.  Give yourself a treat, meet these young men, and their friend, the little Chinese seamstress, as they make their way through an alien world, and a suitcase of banned books.

P.S. - Oh my, I just did some searching and discovered that the film WAS made, in 2002, but apparently never released in this country.  It came out in China and France (where Dai Sijie now lives), it seems.  I will have to see if it's available here somehow.  Does anyone know this?

 

SIX FEET UNDER

Which is, actually, where I feel like I am much of the time.  But that isn't what I meant to say.  We don't have cable, except in order to get the basic network stations and PBS, so I don't have access to HBO.  How very sad that is, too.  But what I do to compensate is rent the DVD's (yes, we actually got a DVD player!  when my nephew was here and could hook it up for us.) of HBO series when they appear on the shelves of my local Blockbuster.  So we have worked our way through a season of "Curb Your Enthusiasm," with mixed reviews, and now are working on the first season of "Six Feet Under."  I have grown totally addicted to this series.  I confess, yes, utterly hooked.  A junkie for the funeral home and its wacked-out inhabitants.  We're almost through the first season, only three more episodes to go and we can start on the second set!  How excited am I!  I understand on real TV it's now the fourth season, so I have lots more weirdness to look forward to.  Does anyone else out there in J-land watch this series?   Have favorite episodes, favorite characters?  Listen - I've even dreamed about these characters.  The whole thing is often rather like a dream, anyway, so I shouldn't be surprised.

Renting these episodes will keep me sane through the Rep convention, the new semester, the run-up to the elections, maybe even Christmas time.  Now you know how little depth there is to me.  It's out there, the truth at last.  And, just think, there's "Sex in the City" and "The Sopranos" on the shelves too.

And I'm reading in equally deep waters:  The Burglar on the Prowl, by Lawrence Block.  Sheer fluff.  But such well-written fluff.  I adore Lawrence Block, or at least two of his series:  The Matt Scudder mysteries, plumbing the dark, violent and grim depths of crime in New York City; and the Bernie Rhodenbarr Mysteries, the most recent of which I'm now reading.  Bernie is a used-book dealer in Greenwich Village, has a lesbian best-pal and sidekick, and dabbles in high-class burglary.  These books are as light and airy as the Matt Scudder series is dark and dirty.  I love them both in equal measure.

A GRACIOUS HELLO

I am NOT dead, nor have I given up on book-journaling.  I've just been too busy to get here and write about ANYthing.  I have posted a time or two in the windmills, trying to keep up.  I'm also trying to get around to other folks' journals and do some reading.  While doing that I found an entry in Paul's journal that other readers may enjoy.  Here's the link to it - I'm jealous of his job, not the administrative part  (heavens no!), but the teaching of books to AP seniors.  I teach "reading" to English as Second Language students, but it's a far cry from this sort of thing. 

A YEAR IN BOOKS

When I was in Dallas earlier this summer, I read this article in the local paper, The Dallas Morning News.  I found it so interesting that I stole that section of the paper from my brother-in-law and brought it back with me.  I have finally found it on the web, so I can insert it here in my book journal.  It's the fascinating reading log of a guy who was sick and couldn't work, so he decided to just read.  And keep track of what he had read.  It's an extremely eclectic list of books, I have to say.  And he begins with a former bosses (boss' ? how does one make that possessive?) strange speculation, similar to the Buddhist I referenced in an earlier entry, about the damage that books can do to the mind.  He reckons his own mind is gone by now, in that case.  But read on through the whole thing, past the list.  Dan Barber comes to his own conclusions on the effects of reading.

A year for the books

When ill health left a book lover with time on his hands, he made literary lemonade

07:43 PM CDT on Tuesday, July 6, 2004

By DAN R. BARBER / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News

He was something of a pocket Buddha, as I recall. Flat-footed, he stood just a couple inches above 5 feet. He had chubby cheeks, a potbelly and a rascal's smile, and his eyes twinkled with mischief when pleased.

I hadn't thought about him for some time, until one day last year when he – a former boss – abruptly came to mind. Something he said more than 20 years ago began to haunt me.

This outwardly jolly man, who once boasted that he was a millionaire, said books did strange things to a human brain. In the way a responsible parent would warn a wayward adolescent not to smoke, drink or take drugs, he cautioned that he thought it possible to read too much.

Books, he said, twisted a person.

Chronicle of addiction

My mind is gone for good now, I guess. Last year, I read 101 books. It's documented, too, my yearlong descent into literary dementia. Like Sir William Ewart Gladstone, a 19th-century English prime minister and avid reader, I kept a journal of every book I read; from The Orchid Thief , the year's first, to Cold Mountain, completed on a dark winter night with just two hours remaining in 2003. Why, some might reasonably ask, would anyone want to read so much? And how would they find the time?

For me, the answer is easy. Multiple sclerosis. I can't walk through a mall without sitting down, but I now have all the time in the world to read whatever I want, something of which I once only dreamed.

So last year, I decided to see how many books I could finish in 12 months.

I should say at the outset that my literary interests are all over the map. I am unfocused. From natural history to art history, fishing, hunting and biography, literary fiction to essays on book collecting, I am, I suppose, a peripatetic, Quixotic reader. I stagger a bit when I walk and my interests are here and there, too.

Unbounded pleasures

For example, after The Orchid Thief, an account of a flower felon's escapades, I read A Country Boy in Africa, a memoir of a professional hunter's life on the savanna. Ex-Libris, which is about book collecting and libraries, was next.

Originally, I thought I would finish one book a week. Because this seemed a daunting task, I would read two, sometimes three books at once while lounging in shorts and T-shirt. I finished A Garden of Demons (fantasy) and Exploring Lewis and Clark (historical essay) on the same day.

Not that I'm high-minded. Two days later I finished Rifles and Cartridges for Large Game, just in case I ever need to shoot an elephant in my pajamas. I have a confession. To ensure that I reached my goal, I began reading short books, novels with 200 pages or less, and coffee-table size histories with photographs, such as The Buffalo Hunters.

Sometimes I was diverted by an esoteric title, though. Color-blind as well as easily distracted, I finished Color: A Natural History of the Palette – an engaging book about the natural sources of color for paints and dyes.

What was, what is

I read At the Grave of the Unknown Fisherman and Traplines , both about anglers' escapades. And because I can spend more time with a book than a fishing rod these days, I also read Sixpence House, a memoir of two bibliophiles' time in an English town filled with used books.

On and on I read. By the end of June, I had finished book 50. I reached that goal in less than six months; 100 books in a year seemed attainable. In mid-August, I finished The Lunar Men, an account of the friendship of several English inventors and booklovers, and A Good Life Wasted, another angler-author's tale. Both titles suggest my former boss might have had a point.

By Oct. 31, I had read more than 80 books, including So Many Books, So Little Time, by journalist Sara Nelson, who set out to read a book a week for a year. When I finished book 99, A Splendor of Letters: The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World, I felt very impressed with myself. With time to spare, I walked the literary high road until I read that Gladstone, a prime minister of England in the 1800s, had read 250 books every year of his adult life.

Now THAT'S crazy.

Priority becomes passion

I don't really mean that, of course. Books were paramount to Sir William and if I may share his limelight, they mean volumes to me as well. Reading so many books, having the time and the desire, has sustained me when the only wandering I'm likely to do these days is through bookstores.

Just how significant books have become, for me at least, didn't become clear until I was about to complete my literary safari.

While on a weekend trip last fall, I bumped into my former boss's daughter and her family. We talked about the usual things after so much time. Where do you live now? What do you do?

How's your father?

With an enigmatic Mona Lisa smile and a quick glance to the other side of the room, she said he had died.

He lost his business and, in despair, had committed suicide.

And then I remembered what he had said about reading too many books. Could reading a book, one or 100, have restored his hope?Could reading a book have sustained him in frightening, uncertain times?

Who am I to say? Perhaps, but I can't honestly speak for him.

Of this I am sure: It IS possible to be too rich or too thin, despite what some people say.

But you can't read too many books.

Writer and bibliophile Dan R. Barber tends butterfly gardens and reads in Forney; today he is finishing his 40th book of 2004.

READING 101

The 101 books in the order read by Dan Barber in 2003:

The Orchid Thief, Susan Orlean

A Country Boy in Africa, George Hoffman

Ex-Libris, Ross King

A Garden of Demons, Edward Hower

Exploring Lewis and Clark, Thomas P. Slaughter

Rifles and Cartridges for Large Game, Layne Simpson

The Buffalo Hunters, Charles M. Robinson III

Color: A Natural History of the Palette, Victoria Finlay

The Passions of Andrew Jackson, Andrew Burstein

The Book of Illusions, Paul Auster

•

On Blondes, Joanna Pitman

Eyesores, Eric Shade

Rosemary and Bitter Oranges, Patrizia Chen

Danny Boy, Malachy McCourt

Colors of Africa, James Kilgo

The Afterword, Mike Bryan

At the Grave of the Unknown Fisherman, John Gierach

Sixpence House, Paul Collins

When the Emperor Was Divine, Julie Otsuka

The Life You Save May Be Your Own, Paul Elie

•

Take Joy, Jane Yolen

Our Father Who Art in a Tree, Judy Pascoe

Rifles for Africa, Gregory Woods.

Used and Rare, Lawrence and Mary Goldstone

Best Friends, Thomas Berger

Good Faith, Jane Smiley

Life on Cripple Creek, Dean Kramer

The Bellstone, Michael N. Kalafatas

Sleep Toward Heaven, Amanda Eyre Ward

Hunger, Elise Blackwell

•

Promiscuous Unbound, Bex Brian

Ghost Rider, Neil Peart

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Mary Roach

A Walk in Rome, City of the Soul, William Murray

The Fabulist, Stephen Glass

The Story of My Father, Sue Miller

Untangling My Chopsticks, Victoria Abbott Riccardi

How to Build a Tin Canoe, Robb White

Into Africa, Martin Dugard

Autobiography of a Geisha, Sayo Masuda

•

The Box Children, Sharon Wyse

The Great Wave, Christopher Benfey

The Wages of Genius, Gregory Mone

The Teammates, David Halberstam

Chasing Shakespeares, Sarah Smith

Feynman's Rainbow, Leonard Mlodinow

The Book of Dead Birds, Gayle Brandeis

Writers on Writing, Collected EssaysFrom The New York Times

The Commissariat of Enlightenment, Ken Kalfus

Traplines, John Rember

Creation, Katherine Govier

Walking a Literary Labyrinth, Nancy M. Malone

Our Own Devices, Edward Tenner

The Seashell on the Mountaintop, Alan Cutler

The Cruelest Miles, Gay Salisbury and Laney Salisbury

In the Shadow of Memory, Floyd Skloot

The Path, Chet Raymo

Reunion, Alan Lightman

The Gangster We Are All Looking For, le thi diem thuy

Come Closer, Sara Gran

Hell at the Breech, Tom Franklin

Gazelle, Rikki Ducornet

Liars and Saints, Maile Meloy

The Lunar Men, Jenny Uglow

A Good Life Wasted, Dave Ames

Born Twice, Giuseppe Pontiggia

After, Francine Prose

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Mark Haddon

Literary Occasions, V.S. Naipaul

Built for Speed, John A. Byers

Library, Matthew Battles

Swann's Way, Marcel Proust

Reading New York, John Tytell

Turning Bones, Lee Martin

On the Run, David DiBenedetto

An Open Book, Michael Dirda

So Many Books, So Little Time, Sara Nelson

Blindsided, Richard M. Cohen

Paradise, Larry McMurtry

Heart Shots, Mary Zeiss Stange

Elizabeth Costello, J.M Coetze

The Bookseller of Kabul, Asne Seierstad

Genesis, Jim Crace

Old School, Tobias Wolff

Siegfried, Harry Mulisch

A Gentle Madness, Nicholas A. Basbanes

City of Glass, Paul Auster

The Amulet of Samarkand, Jonathan Stroud

Ghosts, Paul Auster

Envy, Joseph Epstein

And Now You Can Go, Vendela Vida

Gluttony, Francine Prose

The Locked Room, Paul Auster

Shipwreck, Louis Begley

Orchard, Larry Watson

The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens, John Rechy

Cold Mountain: A Journey From Book to Film, introduction by Anthony Minghella

Timbuktu, Paul Auster

A Splendor of Letters, Nicholas A. Basbanes

The Great Fire, Shirley Hazzard

Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier

Online at: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/fea/texasliving/stories/070304dnlivbooks_barber.48da7.html

DEDICATED TO THE LIBRARIANS I ALSO LOVE

 

 

I LOVE YOU, MADAME LIBRARIAN

By Kurt Vonnegut

August 6, 2004

  I, like probably most of you, have seen Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. Its title is a parody of the title of Ray Bradbury’s great science fiction novel, Fahrenheit 451. This temperature 451° Fahrenheit, is the combustion point, incidentally, of paper, of which books are composed. The hero of Bradbury’s novel is a municipal worker whose job is burning books.

And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

And still on the subject of books: Our daily sources of news, papers and TV, are now so craven, so unvigilant on behalf of the American people, so uninformative, that only in books can we find out what is really going on. I will cite an example: House of Bush, House of Saud by Craig Unger, published near the start of this humiliating, shameful blood-soaked year.

In case you haven’t noticed, and as a result of a shamelessly rigged election in Florida, in which thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily disenfranchised, we now present ourselves to the rest of the world as proud, grinning, jut-jawed, pitiless war lovers, with appallingly powerful weaponry and unopposed.

In case you haven’t noticed, we are now almost as feared and hated all over the world as the Nazis were.

With good reason.

In case you haven’t noticed, our unelected leaders have dehumanized millions and millions of human beings simply because of their religion and race. We wound and kill ’em and torture ’em and imprison ’em all we want.

Piece of cake.

In case you haven’t noticed, we also dehumanize our own soldiers, not because of their religion or race, but because of their low social class.

Send ’em anywhere. Make ’em do anything.

Piece of cake.

The O’Reilly Factor.

So I am a man without a country, except for the librarians and the Chicago-based magazine you are reading, In These Times.

Before we attacked Iraq, the majestic New York Times guaranteed that there were weapons of mass destruction there.

Albert Einstein and Mark Twain gave up on the human race at the end of their lives, even though Twain hadn’t even seen World War I. War is now a form of TV entertainment. And what made WWI so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun. Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don’t you wish you could have something named after you?

Like my distinct betters Einstein and Twain, I now am tempted to give up on people too. And, as some of you may know, this is not the first time I have surrendered to a pitiless war machine.

My last words? "Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse."

Napalm came from Harvard. Veritas!

Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler.

What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without a sense of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations and made it all their own?

     ***********************************************

So, that was from In These Times, a little rant by Kurt Vonnegut.  He's an elder statesman of the literary variety.  He can rant any time he wants to.  About anything he wants to. I usually put them in my other journal, but I think this one is suitable for a book journal.  The day may come again whenI actually write about the books I'm reading.  And I am reading books.  Check the sidebar - lots of 'em.
 

 

THE KERRY HAMPSTER ALSO SPEAKS

In the spirit of this weekend's assignment (mine is in the entry previous to this one) a friend in Dallas sent me this short speech (more than a sentence, however) by Licorice, the Kerry hampster.  It's pretty funny too. 

Licorice Speaks
By COLIN McENROE


My name is Licorice, and I am a hamster.

I have never shared my story before because, frankly, sometimes all a hamster has is his privacy. Thursday night, however, Alexandra Kerry described the circumstances of my rescue by her father after I had fallen off a pier in Massachusetts.

I have come forward now to set the record straight.

I was the hamster of Alexandra's sister, Vanessa, and she, on balance, was a good person, although a bit of a tickler. On this occasion, as the family gathered on the pier to depart for a vacation, somebody - I'm not saying it was Alexandra; I'm not saying it was on purpose - "bumped" my cage, and the next thing I knew, I was in the water and sinking fast.

I saw my whole life pass before my eyes. My life has not been all that interesting, so it wasn't exactly like watching "The Godfather I and II." I mean, I'm a hamster. I could see a bright light, but I seemed to be on a wheel that rotated as I ran, so I never got any closer. But I was aware of a shining, all-loving divine rodent presence telling me: "It's not time yet. You have more to do on earth."

"Like what?" I asked, but I could already feel myself back in my body, could feel strong hands yanking open my cage and pulling me upward to safety.

Yes, it was John Kerry. Help was on the way. Yes, he did perform CPR. Yes, he did perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. There is no doubt that I owe him my life. On the other hand, the water went up to his chest, O.K.? I mean, this wasn't exactly PT-109.

It's also true that I wound up suing the family. I have continuing health problems, including a partial paralysis on my right side that makes it difficult for me to drink out of a regular water bottle. And let's just say there aren't going to be any Licorice Jr.'s. One of the small pleasures of hamster life denied.

There was a settlement. I can't talk about it. I got enough to pay for a daily home health aide.

How do I feel about John Kerry? Mainly, I'm grateful he wasn't married to that Heinz woman when this happened. You think she would have allowed him to jumpin the water in his J. Press poplin slacks? Food pellets wouldn't melt in her mouth. I'd have drowned and been eaten by lobsters.

And I'm glad I wasn't a Bush family pet. Their hamsters probably have to rescue them, from the looks of things.

I might wind up speaking at the Republican convention, though. I'm opposed to stem cell research. With any kind of research, hamsters always wind up taking it right on the chin. And we barely even have chins.

Colin McEnroe is a radio talk show host and writer.

IF ONLY THEY COULD TALK - WEEKEND ASSIGNMENT

Weekend Assignment #17: Through some unexplained miracle, your pet or pets gain the mental capacity for speech for exactly the length of a single sentence. What do you think that sentence would be and why? For those of you without pets, please use a former pet or the pet of someone you know. If you've never ever had a pet, well, first, you're kind of odd, but second, then just imagine what a generic dog or cat might say. Caveat: Don't say that they'd say "I love you." I mean, really. Of course they love you. You know. They know you know. You know they know you know. And so on.

Extra Credit: You get one question to ask your pet that (presumably) it would answer. What's the question?

This is our Only Cat at the moment.   Her name is Molly. We have had three at one time in earlier years.  When the last of those cats died, we were too heartbroken for quite some time to even imagine gettting another one.  Then one day....there was a notice on a board in the Ptown health food store.  With pictures. A guy was moving and needed homes for his cats.  We loved a cat who looked just like the picture of this cat. A friend of ours had her; her name was Madge and she was a darling cat.  So...we went to look at this one.  She was three years old, came purring to my lap. She was soft, had a black spot under her chin. She was round and sweet.  We said "we'll think about it."  And went on our way.  The next time we were at the grocery store one of us put a bag of catfood in the cart.  The other one of us came down the aisle with a bag of kitty litter.  We said:  "Okay, now let's go get the cat."  She's been with us ever since.  She rode up and down the Interstates with us during our long stretch of two-state living; she lived in a motor home with us for most of a year while we all slowly became psychotic; she moved to this big old house in Delaware, and has been very happy here.  She adapted to the ingress of a dog into our house and lives - letting him know with no nonsense, but also without violence, who was Queen of the House. She's almost sixteen now, and we already look at her with sorrow for the inevitable time when we will lose her.  She is the best, most loving, most expressive, most interesting cat we've ever had.  And between us we have had a raft of katzken. 

The sentence she would speak would be, I think, a question itself.  It would be something along the lines of:  "All I want in life is constant loving; why is it that you don't stay somewhere I can get on your laps ALL THE TIME?"  (That IS TOO one sentence; it's a compound sentence, or something, isn't it?)

And here is the answer to her every little furry prayer:  a darling little girl to brush her until she just goes berserk with the wonderfulness of it and bites her.  Which is what happens, she loves it so much it drives her crazy and ultimately she turns into Psycho Kitty and kicks with her back paws and bites.

IF I could ask her a question, and if she could answer me - it would be the same as one of justcherie's questions.  Because she is getting older, thinner, slower, and she limps going up the stairs, I would ask her is she is in pain, where is it, and how bad?  Is there anything I do that helps, and would she please let me know when it gets to be more than she can bear.  Because of past experiences with cats in inner agony, and because this is a cat that can make her needs known, I know she will let us know what she needs when she needs it.  And I hope the day is a long long time a-coming.

OTHER VOICES, OTHER ROOMS THIS WEEK

Just wanted to let folks who drop by this journal know that about all I'm doing this week is watching the convention in Boston, reading about it, writing about it, and working with my political group here on various projects and activities.  So, no literary postings for now - though I did finish Plainsong, Kent Haruf's first novel in the High Plains books - and adored it. 

So, come on over to the windmills and join in the political commentary.  I know you're watching too! 

POETRY IN WARTIME

I've never done this before, but I am here posting today's entry from my Other Journal, thewindmillsofmymind, because I feel it also belongs in a literary journal and there may be some of my BiblioPhiles readers who don't read the windmills.  This is an entry I want universally read:  

        In late winter/early spring of 2003 I found a site called Poets Against the War.  I've talked about it before, but it's time to bring it up again.  It was started by poet Sam Hamill, and was a place where anyone who wanted could publish poetry expressing their feelings about this war.  I had a poem published there, as did thousands of people, unknown, slightly known, famous - people who wanted a public forum for their pain, grief, horror.  Later, an anthology of some of the poems was published in book form. Now, a documentary film has been made as a result of that website, called Poetry in Wartime.  You can find out about the film itself here, but I want to put in a few quotes and some information from the site, to pique your interest and get you involved.

"The right sentiment, rightly declared, whichever way your loyalties blow in the gust of the smoke-filled air. A country burns. The death-dealers deserved to die, you say. Death is easy to pronounce. It’s the smell of burning children that’s hard."   Sampurna Chattarji

"We read our mail and counted up our missions – In bombers named for girls, we burned The cities we had learned about in school till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among the people we had killed and never seen.”  Randall Jarrell

"We have to stop speaking in codes. Collateral damage is code for thousands of people being killed who are powerless to change their rulers."  Arthur Miller

"Six lines by a hero of mine. His name is Cameron Penny and he is in the fourth grade. He said:  'If you are lucky in this life, a window will appear on a battlefield between two armies, and when the soldiers look into the window they don’t see their enemies, they see themselves as children...'"  Marie Howe

As you can see, the film will feature poets both living and dead, from many countries, all ages, ordinary people and people you've revered since elementary school.  Poetry moves people at a level that only music can equal, I have great hopes for this film. 

About the Movie

(Release Date: August, 2004)

Wilfred Owen's Last Photograph

POETRY IN WARTIME is a feature-length documentary that looks at war through images and the words of poets – unknown and world-famous – to bring the experience of war into sharp focus.

Soldiers, journalists, historians and experts on combat provide diverse perspectives on war’s effects on soldiers, civilians and society. POETRY IN WARTIME also brings to life how poetry and war have been intertwined since the beginning of recorded history – from ancient Babylonia and the Trojan War up through the great conflicts of the 20th century and the current war in Iraq. The stirring words of poets throughout the film - Homer, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, Walt Whitman and poets from Hiroshima and Nagasaki – sear the experience, emotions and sacrifices of war into our hearts and minds. POETRY IN WARTIME is a veritable chorus of poets from around the world, from the United States to Iraq as well as Colombia, Britain, India, Nigeria and Canada, whose view of war extends beyond the borders of countries to reach into the depths of our soul.

We will hear the first accounts of war, written down in verse.

The film will follow war and the poems it inspires from ancient Babylon and the Trojan War up through the great conflicts of the 20th century and into the 21st century invasion of Iraq. As war has changed, so has poetry. Once celebrating conflict, poets became increasingly disturbed by the growth of larger and larger armies and increasingly powerful weapons. By World War I, poetry had become a medium of revolt. Wilfred Owen, probably the greatest of war poets, led his men in desperate battle, scribbling his poems in the trenches whenever he could. From a haunting and personal perspective, his poems chronicle the human waste of war. Owen will be a central character in the film.

As will poets as diverse as Homer, Walt Whitman, and Langston Hughes. "Poetry in Wartime" will tell the story of the poets of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who used their writing to alert the world to the dangers of nuclear war. It will also follow the grassroots global movement of thousands of poets that came together in early 2003 to protest the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The tone of the documentary will be questioning. The commentary will come from people of varying perspectives. However, in the end, "Poetry in Wartime" will always come back to the words of the poets. And to the deeper truths they express. Poetry from the past as well as the present, and poetry from everyday people as well as the world famous – will raise pressing questions of war and power at the beginning of the 21st Century.

If history and literature have taught us anything, it is that in the midst of trauma, violence and death, it is the poets who help us make sense of the senseless. In a world turned suddenly upside down, "Poetry in Wartime" can help to bring us together and lead us to a better place.

For more information, contact Kathryn Linehan.

 

RUINED BY READING?

My remark yesterday about the sense of duty I often have towards finishing books compelled me to search my shelves for this book: Ruined by Reading, by Lynne Sharon Schwartz.  Schwartz is herself a novelist, her books are difficult complicated novels with a philosphical bent.  I have read three, don't know if there are more, but it occurs to me that I should check.  This little book is a memoir in reading, and I highly recommend it to other readers.  What I want to do here is share these paragraphs from the book's beginning with you:

     "...a recent New York Times piece quoted a Chinese scholar whole "belief in Buddhism...has curbed his appetite for books.'  Mr. Cha says 'To read more is a handicap.  It is better to keep your own mind free and to not let the thinking of others interfere with your own free thinking.'  I clipped his statement and placed it on the bedside table,next to a pile of books I was reading or planned to read or thought I ought to read.  The clipping is about two square inches and almost weightless, the pile of books some nine inches high, weighing a few pounds. Yet they face each other in perfect balance.  I am the scale on which they rest.
     Lying in the shadow of the books, I brook on my reading habit.  What is it all about?  What am I doing it for?  And the classic addict's question, What is it doing for me?  Mr. Cha's serenity and independence of mind are enviable.  I would like to be equally independent, but I'm not sure my mind could be free without reading, or that the action books have on it is properly termed 'interference.'  I suspect the interaction of the mind and the book is something more complex.  I can see it encompassing an intimate history and geography:  the evolution of character, the shifting map of personal taste.  And what about the uses of language itself, as well as the perennial lure of narrative?  But perhaps casting the issue in such large terms only shows how enslaved I am.  Buddhism aside, there is no Readers Anonymous, so far, to help curb this appetite.
     ...My addiction is to works of the imagination, and even if I became a Buddhist, I think I couldn't renounce them cold turkey.  Not after a lifetime, the better part of which was spent reading.  Was it actually the better part, though?  Did I choose or was I chosen, shepherded into it like those children caught out early on with a talent for the violin or ballet, baseball of gymnastics, and thethered forever to bows and barres, bats and mats?  We didn't know any alternatives; there was no chance to find them out.  
     ....What do I have, then, after years of indulgence?  A feel, a texture, an aura, the fragrance of Shakespeare, the crisp breeze of Tolstoy, the carnal stench of the great Euripides.  Are they worth the investment of a life?  Would my mind be more free without them?
      In truth I have made some tentative steps toward freedom.  Over the last ten years or so, I have managed not to finish certain books.  With barely a twinge of conscience, I hurl down what bores me or doesn't give what I crave:  ecstasy, transcendence, a thrill of mysterious connection. ...I had put aside books before, naturally, but with guilt, sneaking them back to the shelves in the dark.  It seemed a rudeness of the worst sort. A voice was attempting to speak to me and I refused to listen.  A spiritual rudeness. Since childhood I had thought of reading as holy, and like all sacraments, it had acquired a stiff halo of duty. My cavalier throwing over a book midway may arise from the same general desacralization as does the notable increase in divorce, marriage also being a sacrament and, once entered upon, a duty.
     So, like recidivist martyrs, I take up the new book in good faith, planning to accompany it, for better or for worse, till the last page us do part, but...it stops being fun."

Well, there you are. Clearly I could go on til I had typed in the whole book for you, but I won't.  Don't you like her?  I may from time to time drop in some of her thoughts from this delightful little book, especially when my own thoughts are running dry, as at the moment they seem to be.  I've just been on a library foraging trip, did get Plainsong, and will start it tonight.  One of my book journal friends has recommended Orson Scott Card as an author I would like, but I can't find the two books with which she suggests I begin my reading.  I'll have to put in a request, after I read what I gleaned today.

EVENTIDE, Kent Haruf

                          High Plains - Photo by David Nance

For longer than I care to think about I have been reading Eventide, by Kent Haruf.  It's not a long book, so I don't exactly know why it took me so long to read.  Maybe it's because I had a hard time with it for about half the book, thought I didn't even like it, kept reading out of that strange sense of duty I often feel to finish a book, and because G. liked it so much.  I read it without knowing that it is a sequel to Plainsong, but I don't think that mattered very much to this reading.  Now I am so glad that I persevered - this is a deeply human, lovely book. Here is a review from the Denver Post - I thought that the best understanding of this story might come from someone who lives close to its setting, which is the High Plains of eastern Colorado.  It's a glowing review, and I am in total agreement with its every word.  My next library trip will be to pick up a copy of Plainsong, and find out how Victoria Roubideaux came to stay with the McPheron brothers.

The novel roams over Holt, a small rural town,  the ranching country that surrounds it, and the lives of a group of people who live in these places,  much as a movie camera roams from shot to shot.  In fact, G and I both thought that it would make a wonderful movie, in much the same vein as The Last Picture Show, though it's told in a much kinder and gentler tone.  (There is much description of landscape, weather, details of life with cattle, including a dreadful scene of a bull gone out of control.)  It has the same feel of open, dry, bleak, but somehow beautiful (okay, yes, I find the dry open bleak spaces of West Texas beautiful, you wanna make something of it?) spaces, sky, the smallness of human life in this setting.  The smallness, but at the same time infinite preciousness.  The story weaves many characters' lives together, tells their stories in a slow rambling web that is much like life itself.   Somehow, when I was having trouble with the book, all I could see was the bleakness of many of their stories - the children in particular broke my heart, filled me with desolation.  There is kindness abounding however, and love, and goodness - and these elements reach out to fill much of the emptiness.

A little bit of what I mean about the landscape, in this passage from a chapter late in the book:

     "They drove on and passed through Holt and went west on US 34.  The highway stretched out before them, lined on both sides by the shallow barrow ditches.  Above the ditches the four-strand barbed-wire fences ran along beside the pastures in the flat sandy country, and above the fences the line of telephone poles rose up out of the ground like truncated trees strung together with black wire.  Hoyt rode with him through Norka and as far as Brush.  Then he got another ride and traveled on, headed west on a Monday morning in spring."

Another passage I love - with a little explication first:  DJ is a lonely 11 year old orphan, living with his grandfather.  He has finally made a deep friendship with another child, a girl named Dena.  Dena's mother is moving the family two hours distance away, and the children have just said their goodbyes.  DJ returns to the shack that he and Dena have made their own private clubhouse to make his real goodbye to what they have shared together:

     "The little wooden shed was dim and filled with shadows.  He lit one of the candles and sat down at the table, looking around at the dark back wall and the shelf.  The candlelight was flickering and dancing on the walls.  There was little to see.  The framed picture of the baby Jesus hanging on the wall.  Some of their board games.  Old plates and pieces of silverware in a box.  It didn't feel good in the shed without her.  Nothing there was the same.  He whistled through his teeth, softly, a tune he thought of.  Then he stopped.  He stood and blew out the candle and went outside and fastened the latch.  He stood looking for a long time at the old abandoned house across the backyard grown up in weeds, the old black Desoto rusting among the bushes.  Then he entered the alley once more.  His grandfather would be waiting.  It was already past the hour at which his grandfather wanted his supper."

DISJOINTED MUSINGS

Well, here's what may be my candidate for favorite stupid thing that's happened recently: Linda Ronstadt was boo'd off the stage in Vegas for championing Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 9/11.  She had just sung Desperados - appropriately enough, when she began to talk about Moore and his film and his political views.  Several questions come to mind here:  When did Linda become a Vegas personality?  Please, no.  She hasn't joined the ranks of Wayne Newton and Tom Jones (wait, is he still alive?), has she? 
Why is she still singing Desperados?  That's from waaayy back in her career.  Doesn't she have some new stuff?   Okay, I have loved Linda since the beginning, since the Stone Ponys even.  We're more or less the same age, I don't think I'm washed up - and I don't want to think she is, either.  So, anyway, good on you Linda, for speaking your mind in front of a bunch of yahoos.  Let me know if you need a place to stay or anything, we have a lot of extra room here.

Continuing in the vein of movies that raise one's blood pressure - I saw "Outfoxed" on Sunday night, in the living room of someone I didn't even know in Milton, DE.  MoveOn.org organized house parties for groups of interested people to watch together.  There were a lot of people there, there were also four TVs playing the film simultaneously in different rooms of the house.  Imagine that.  I've written a little about this over at thewindmills too.  It was a real wake-up experience for me, as I have never watched Fox News in my life.  Watching Bill O'Reilly in action aroused my every deep feral instinct, bad things rose up in me and wanted to come leaping out armed with sharp weapons.  So, I know this is my book journal and not my political one, but please check out the petition to get the FCC to stop Fox from using the slogan "fair and balanced" on their outrageous propaganda channel.  This outfit is taking unprecedented advantage of the gullibility and credulity of a huge number of our populace - we who can read need to pay more attention to those who don't, and those who use them for their own nefarious (I just wanted to use that word, you know? It's a propaganda kind of word, isn't it?) purposes.

ELLEN GOODMAN SUGGESTS

A nice little list from Ellen Goodman, books to get you through the rest of the summer.  Peruse the article, enjoy - I've actually read a fair number of the books she discusses, and agree with her on all but Little Children, which I very actively disliked. 

A midsummer night's read

Ellen Goodman - Washington Post Writers Group

07.16.04 - CASCO BAY, Maine -- And now we turn to our summer reading list. OK, our mid-summer reading list. We are, blush, late with our report.

Indeed, we were reminded of our tardiness last week, when the National Endowment for the Arts reported ominously on the decline and fall of reading. Barely over half of Americans read any book at all this year. Was it something we didn't say?

Actually, we suspect that too many of the "big books" these days are political screeds instead of good reads. So herewith, as a public service, is a list neither blue nor red, but black and white and read all over.

First of all -- this should please the NEA -- we not only read books this year, we read books about books. The habit began when "Reading Lolita in Tehran" was still something of a cult activity. Azar Nafisi's literary and political memoir is about a clandestine reading group in Iran. In the midst of a cultural revolution that "had wrecked our lives in the name of a dream," seven women found a sanctuary to talk about literature and life. And to pursue another freedom: the freedom to imagine.

"The Jane Austen Book Club" is not just any novel about novels. Karen Joy Fowler pays gentle homage to the sense and sensibility of Austen lovers everywhere with her story about the members of an all-Jane, all-the-time book club where everyone has "her own private Austen."

More Jane? A couple of years ago, Paula Marantz Cohen wrote "Jane Austen in Boca," a gentle and dead-on satire that played "Pride and Prejudice" in a Jewish retirement community in Florida. She followed it up this year with "Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan," a loving and mocking story about a suburban grandmother's growing conviction that she was the "Dark Lady" of the William Shakespeare sonnets in an earlier life.

The "Old School" in Tobias Wolff's novel is one of those Anglophile boarding schools where the central sport is a writing contest and the prize is a meeting with Robert Frost or Ernest Hemingway. Wolff turns to fiction -- or is it? -- in his elegant writing about deception, self-deception and a writer's coming of age.

Now a book about a bookseller. Asne Seierstad, a young Norwegian journalist, has written "The Bookseller of Kabul," an undercover look at the family life of a man who is a Westernized liberal, even a humanist by Afghan standards. But Seierstad, who lived with the family, portrays a world in which this "modern" man's word is law and "the belief in man's superiority was so ingrained that it was seldom questioned."

This year I was drawn again to a rash of novels about family life. First was Tom Perrotta's "Little Children," an unusual, authentic take on parenthood and the loneliness of a stay-at-home dad and a stay-at-home mom whose days of peanut butter and playgrounds "melt together like a bag of crayons left out in the sun." He writes about the dangers unleashed by "their refusal to accept unhappiness."

Next was Anne Tyler's latest novel, "The Amateur Marriage," about the family created by a profound mismatch. "By nature," she writes, "Pauline felt entitled to spill anything that came into her head while Michael measured out every word." Tyler is the perfect chronicler of dysfunction.

What happens when a good marriage is detonated? In Elizabeth Buchan's tale, a wife loses her job as well as her husband to the classic younger woman. But this "Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman" isn't exactly vengeful. Her survival and their regrets are the best revenge.

Elizabeth Berg writes less about family wreckage than restoration in "The Art of Mending," a novel about the power of family secrets. "If you're careful," she writes, "the repair can actually add to the beauty of the thing because it is testimony to its worth."

"The Grandmothers" may be a family story in name only, but I was delighted to see that Doris Lessing hasn't mellowed in her 80s, only ripened. The four short novels work the themes of men and women, war and race, class and family that have been her trademark since she left South Africa for Britain half a century ago.

Monica Ali is a new British novelist with a classic outsider's eye. In "Brick Lane," she guides us through a rich, unexplored territory --the interior life of a Bangladeshi woman living in London. Her turf isfate and free will, and the choices facing a woman who was raised to believe she didn't have choices.

All right, so I promised a politics-free reading room, but how about some books that have more policy than partisanship?

Want to know why your family is struggling on two incomes when your parents made it on one? Mother and daughter co-authors, Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi, have written a bleak, eye-opening explanation of "The Two-Income Trap." Hint: it's kids and the price of that house in a good school district.

"Moral Politics" has the P word in the title, but George Lakoff's way of linking politics to child-raising philosophies is still the best take on the family values debate. The conservative worldview, he writes, is based on "the strict father" model; the liberals use the "nurturant parent" model.

For that matter, "A History of God" by Karen Armstrong doesn't take political sides either. Her exploration of the idea of God over centuries and through religions is as useful today as it was in 1992 when she first wrote it.

Then again, how about a history of American secularism? Susan Jacoby's "Freethinkers" is a lively reminder that we're a "nation founded not on dreams of justice in heaven but on the best human hopes for a more just earth."

Having said that, I think I'll stick my nose back in a book.

(c) 2004, Washington Post Writers Group

ANOTHER LOOK AT "THE NAMESAKE"

While perusing the latest issue of Bookslut I came across this conversation about a book I read and briefly discussed in an entry here last winter, The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri.  Here four very literate South Asian women discuss the book and their reactions to it.  I didn't have time to do the book justice when I wrote about it in November, so if it's a book you've been thinking about reading you may find this discussion of interest.  As a total gringa my reactions are culturally different of course, and I found reading these women's thoughts to be an extension of the book.  I assure you, however, that you don't need to be from India or Pakistan to feel the universal appeal of family and coming-of-age situations that are the heart of this delightful book.

GOOD OMENS, Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman

In my other journal I'm posting about my recent trip to Texas, with possibly way too many photos.  The only book I took with me (though I acquired several more on my journey, of course) was Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.  Since I was occupied all day and most of the evening doing stuff with family and friends, I only had time to read a few pages every night before falling into a dazed coma.  I got about halfway through and finished it when I got back. 

Really though, I didn't WANT to finish it.  It was so deliciously, so -dare I say- fiendishly funny and arch, that I could have enjoyed it for many more pages.  It's the funniest book about Armageddon you'll ever hope to read.  Yes, those who are hoping for the End Time and the Rapture, etc, need to get a different view than Tim LaHaye's of this cataclysmic event.  One of the many things I love about Neil Gaiman is his view of humanity, in all its horrible nastiness, unprepossessing kindness, foolishness, stupidity, cupidity, openhearted love and goodness.  This book is populated by humans, both adult and child, witches, witch-hunters, angels, demons, and the Antichrist.  An angel and a demon are two of the main characters, both have lived on earth from the beginning, and have come to quite like living in human form, enjoying their own particular earthly pleasures - from rare books to vintage cars.  It has been their job to engineer the world's end, the Apocalypse, the Final Battle - by placing the infant Antichrist with a family, and when things are ready for it - precipitating the clash of angelic forces.  Even other-worldly beings can change their minds, disobey orders, follow their own wills, and it's what these guys just might decide to do.

The placing of infants goes awry and life events proceed in their own surprising way.  The Antichrist grows up loving his corner of this beautiful planet fiercely, and his place in it.  His name is Adam Young  (no symbolism there!), and I loved him and his gang of four - Who are mirrored in the Four Bikers of the Apocalypse late in the book, a wickedly delightful touch. 

Oh, just read it.  Gaiman and Pratchett know that the Mighty Powers of Heaven and Hell can't damage and distress us any more than we can one another and ourselves.  The demons are constantly surprised by how hateful humans can be; surprised and outdone, amazed.  And yet, this is a funny funny book about human love and earthly salvation.  Eat your hearts out, Left Behinders.

IF, I were still in school, and a Literature major, or even a Theology major (either of which I could be, just for fun), I would pull together the Phillip Pullman books in the trilogy, His Dark Materials, and all of Gaiman's books, and do a thesis on the theology/mythology/escatology contained therein.  There is so much, and there are so many parallels, though Pullman is serious in his fantasy, and Gaiman is....I don't quite have the right words for what I want to express here.  Not that he's not serious, but he's not the same kind of serious, no not at all.  Anyway, maybe someone somewhere is already working on this idea, for a thesis or a lit-crit scholarly magazine article, etc.  I just think it would be boatloads of fun.