Life of Pi, again

The spouse was asking me why I didn't recommend one of my favorite novels, Life of Pi, to the presidential candidates. Well, I said, "Life of Pi" is more about personal belief -- the decisions every human being has to make about what they will believe about things they can't see or prove. That includes religious belief, but it's also about what kinds of things are possible in the world, kind of metaphysical questions. I don't think a president in particular needs to consider those questions any more than anyone else. They're important questions for everyone.
Not that the question of faith can't be a political question. It clearly is, and lately you can see it in a round of quasi-political books advocating atheism: Christopher Hitchens' God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything or Sam Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation. Those books (which, to be clear, I have read only reviews of) remind me of what "Life of Pi" says about atheists. Our hero young Pi -- who is so religious he embraces Hinduism, Christianity and Islam equally -- encounters his science teacher, Mr. Kumar, at the zoo. Admiring the animals, Mr. Kumar tells Pi he is an atheist:

"When I was your age, I lived in bed, racked with polio. I asked myself every day, 'Where is God? Where is God? Where is God?' God never came. It wasn't God who saved me -- it was medicine. Reason is my prophet and it tells me that as a watch stops, so we die. It's the end. If the watch doesn't work properly, it must be fixed here and now by us. One day we will take hold of the means of production and there will be justice on earth."
This was all a bit much for me. The tone was right -- loving and brave -- but the details seemed bleak. I said nothing.

A bit later, Pi reflects:

It was my first clue that atheists are my brothers and sisters of a different faith, and every word they speak speaks of faith. Like me, they go as far as the legs of reason will carry them -- and then they leap.

Gnash, gnash

Oh the vexatious cull!
I got rid of my John McCain memoir. Gave it away or something.
What was I thinking?
I was thinking, "He's running for president, every library in the country will keep this book forever. I don't need to keep it."
Now I'm thinking, "I want to look at that book and I don't feel like dragging down to the library to get it."
Grrrr ... .

Sherman Alexie and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

I've read several reviews and news stories about the author Sherman Alexie. I first heard of him in the '90s when he was an up-and-coming young Native American writer who had published a book of stories with the truly fabulous title of "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven." He later wrote the screenplay to the film "Smoke Signals," a novel, and another collection of well-reviewed short stories. But Alexie was sadly on my list of Writers I Just Haven't Gotten Around to Reading Yet, Even Though I Would Like To. (I should formalize this list and post it.)
He has a young adult novel out now that is getting stellar reviews, and this week when I was at the university library, a copy was sitting on the new books table, so I snagged it.
What a great book! Hearkening back to my MLK post from last week, it's a living blend of sharply marked opposites. Funny and uplifting, sad and bleak and depressing. It's about Arnold Spirit, Jr., a teenager who decides to leave the reservation to attend the all-white high school, in hopes of improving his education and his fortunes. He also draws cartoons: "Who My Parents Would Have Been if Somebody Had Paid Attention to Their Dreams," for example, and "How to Pretend You're Not Poor."
Like many good YA (Young Adult) novels, "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian" dwells a lot on budding sexuality and the body. In the above video clip, you'll hear how Arnold and his new friend Gordy talk about boners, in the context of getting excited about books. (It's worth listening to Alexie's reading.)
But Alexie's above reading ends before my favorite part. The scene goes on:

"I don't think you should run through life with a real erect penis. But you should approach each book -- you should approach life -- with the real possibility that you might get a metaphorical boner at any point."
"A metaphorical boner!" I shouted. "What the heck is a metaphorical boner?"
Gordy laughed.
"When I say boner, I really mean joy," he said.
"Then why didn't you say joy? You didn't have to say boner. Whenever I think about boners, I get confused."
"Boner is funnier. And more joyful."
Gordy and I laughed.
He was an extremely weird dude. But he was the smartest person I'd ever known. He would always be the smartest person I'd ever known.

Happy Birthday James Joyce

Bust of James Joyce
Originally uploaded by spoonreader

Today is the 126th anniversary of James Joyce. Happy Birthday to the master! Yes, I say yes!

Mark and Angie at Sandycove
Originally uploaded by spoonreader

And here is a photo of me and my love at the James Joyce Museum and Tower at Sandycove, near Dublin. This is from back in August.

Books and the Presidential Campaign

Katie Couric asked the presidential candiates which single book they would take with them to the White House, aside from the Bible. Read about it here.
Barack Obama and Mitt Romney cited recent history books. Obama picked Team of Rivals, a biography of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Mitt Romney picked John Adams by David McCullough. I was pleased by their picks, because I suspect they chose books they actually had read and enjoyed.
I was less impressed by the old safetys. John McCain named Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton both wanted The Federalist Papers.
Mike Huckabee, on the other hand, picked a book I'd never heard of, called Whatever Happened to the Human Race. A little research on my part reveals that this is a serious philosophical book with a Christian orientation on life issues. Barnes and Noble says:

In this moving book, the renowned pediatric surgeon and Surgeon General of the United States, C. Everett Koop, M.D., joins with one of the leading Christian thinkers of our day, Francis A. Schaeffer, to analyze the widespread implications and frightening loss of human rights brought on by today's practices of abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia. They see the present as a crucial turning point. Choices are being made that undermine human rights at their most basic level. Practices once labeled "unthinkable" are now considered acceptable. The destruction of human life, young and old, is being sanctioned on an ever-increasing scale by the medical profession, by the courts, by parents, and by silent citizens.

Meanwhile, Bill Moyers asked his viewers which book they would recommend for the president to read. A lot of people submitted answers here. I don't see too many interesting suggestions though, and some of the answers are just silly.
What would I suggest? The first book that popped into my head was Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, which isn't about politics or history or anything like that. It's a short, lyrical novel about a country minister who is dying and writing a letter to leave to his young son. To me, the novel is about humility and the limits of knowledge, and how good-hearted people can disagree vehemently on the best way to solve problems. This was more of an intuitive choice; it's just the first thing I thought of. If I think of something more apropos, I'll post again.

When Teen Lit Geeks Grow Up

I had a wonderful couple of days visiting a dear old friend with whom I share a special love of reading. We go way back, back 20 years ago to the high school where we met. We were what I would now call Lit Geeks, using Geek in the tech sense of an astute, obsessive expert. There was nothing nerdish about us. We were COOL. Really. Our school was just that kind of place.
Anyway, she blogged so well about our old exploits that I'm going to let her post speak for itself, at least for the time being.
So if you want to read about the crashing of the faculty Christmas party, or guess which Romantic poet served as my alter ego, or even see a photo of one of our special T-shirts, check out her post here.

Martin Luther King Jr. and "Strength to Love"

Martin Luther King Jr. Day is tomorrow. I truly love a book of his sermons called "Strength to Love."

My favorite is the first one, "A Tough Mind and a Tender Heart." King talks about the need for us to combine disparate qualities, in this case using the Bible verse from Matthew where Jesus sends the Apostles out to preach, telling them, "Be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves." Whenever I turn back to this essay, I find it very difficult to put it down because the words flow along so well, building up to King's advocacy of nonviolence.

In this this passage, though, King talks about science and religion, a theme I've been thinking about this weekend. He says there may be conflicts between "softminded religionists and toughminded scientists, but not between science and religion." He goes on:

"Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power; religion gives man wisdom which is control. Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values. The two are not rivals. They are complementary. Science keeps religion from sinking into the valley of crippling irrationalism and paralyzing obscurantism. Religion prevents science from falling into the marsh of obsolete materialism and moral nihilism."

You can read the whole essay online here.

Bobby Fischer, R.I.P

Bobby Fischer died today (read the obit here), and it brought back a lot of memories about how much I love the game of chess. Not that I'm very good at it, but I used to spend a lot of time playing chess and particularly reading about the lives of the grandmasters. They were always these strange characters with interesting backgrounds, and I found something heroic about chess players who used their wits to triumph over those who would destroy them.

My favorite was Paul Morphy (1837-1884), the champion from my home state of Louisiana. Chess was his hobby; he was a lawyer by profession. He was supposed to have a formidable intellect; I read once that he could recite significant portions of the Louisiana civil code from memory. Apparently he became very eccentric toward the end, not unlike Bobby Fischer and Fischer's lamentable anti-Semitism.

Two books I want to read about chess:

• Searching for Bobby Fischer: The contemporary memoir of a father who discovers his son is a chess prodigy. Contains funny bits about parents who seem to take the competition more seriously than the kids do. The movie was good, too.
• The Kings of New York, subtitled A Year Among the Geeks, Oddballs, and Genuises Who Make Up America's Top High School Chess Team: Sports reporter Michael Weinreb looks at the world of competitive scholastic chess. Apparently it's about to be released in paperback under the new title "Game of Kings."

My Best Books of 2007

I've been sitting on this post for over a week now because I wanted to craft the most perfect words of praise for my favorite books of 2007. Well, it's Jan. 9, so it is what it is.

In previous years, I've done "Best Of" lists for the year. This year, there's only three books that reached the level of excellence to my way of thinking.

• The Best Fiction of 2007 goes to ...Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris. A comedic but serious novel of life-at-work: what happens when layoffs come to a Chicago advertising agency. The title is too hard to remember, but it's great. This book deserves a wider audience; I'm quite fond of it.
• Best Nonfiction of 2007 goes to ... The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders. Essays on life, politics, and the media, all keenly observed with a sharp sense of humor and an abiding spirit of compassion. Saunders is known for his off-beat short stories; this was his first work of nonfiction, published at a nice price in paperback.
• Special Commendation for a book I read in 2007 that published previously ...The Road by Cormac McCarthy. OK, nothing funny about this one. I was an emotionally spent wreck after reading it. One of the rare books that changed the way I see the world. It's about a father and son trying to survive a post-Apocolyptic dystopian landscape; they have to head south before winter hits. Many of us look at the world and wonder why evil exists; I suspect McCarthy looks at the world and wonders just as seriously why there's good. His book shows a world of evil with a tiny speck of luminescent good that somehow, miraculously endures.

Book Buying and the Budget

For a New Year's Resolution, the spouse and I have decided that we are going to strictly budget in 2008 -- that is, keep an record by month of what we plan to spend, and then record what we actually do spend. I'm interested to how this affects my book buying. I do buy a lot of books, but in all honesty, a significant percentage of them are impulse buys -- not really considered and planned choices. I was thinking of instituting a personal rule that I have to check books out of the library or at least see if the library has them before I buy them.
I buy most of my books at my local bookstore. They're not as cheap as Amazon, but I think it's valuable to support a local business, and I value the staff's recommendations and expertise.
Now -- oh joy, oh happy day -- it's my turn to pick the book for my book group this month. We rotate pics. There are two conditions: First, you can't get input from other people in the group. This is so we get a good variety of books without any picks "by committee." Second, no one can have read the book. We all come to the book fresh as new readers.
So with the budget in mind, I'm going to pick a book that I own but that I haven't read. Here are some of the possible contenders.:

• The Tin Roof Blowdown by James Lee Burke: Burke writes mystery novels set in Louisiana. This is his latest, set in post-Katrina New Orleans. It is supposed to be excellent with a literary bent, and I've never read him before.
  
• Mothers and Sons by Colm Toibin. Short stories set in contemporary Ireland; Toibin has superb reputation as a serious fiction writer. He recently wrote a fictional life of Henry James ("The Master") that got great reviews. The only thing holding me back from picking this one is that my last pick was a contemporary Irish novel -- The Sea by John Banville. I may pick Toibin anyway.
• The Ha Ha by Dave King. This is American fiction from 2005, about a brain-damaged Vietnam vet who befriends a little boy. The man doesn't speak, yet he narrates the novel. It's supposed to be a really good and has gotten great word of mouth.

I also have the following unread titles to consider:

• Generation X by Douglas Coupland: I've never read this novel released in 1991 that gave the name to my age cohort;
• Bayou Farewell by Mike Tidwell: Pre-Katrina nonfiction about Louisiana's vanishing coast line;
• A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia by Victor Pelevin: Short stories from one of Russia's best contemporary writers;
• New Stories from the South 2007 edited by Edward P. Jones: an anthology of last year's writing from Southerners.

So you can see I have quite a few choices. Feel free to comment and let me know what you think, excluding current book group members. I think I'm going to narrow it down to three books, then read the first chapters of all three, then pick one.
Update: This post has been amended. It originally said "The Ha Ha" was "about an autistic man who befriends a little boy." See comments for details.

John B. Kean and the spirit of Christmas

One of the places I visited in Ireland back in August was the Kerry Writers Museum. The county of Kerry is an amazing place: ocean views and verdant green lushness. Some people refer to it simply as "The Kingdom." One of Kerry's best known writers is John B. Keane; he has his own room at the writers' museum.
Keane wrote a collection of stories appropriately titled Irish Stories for Christmas. The first story just tickles me with the lovely spirit of Irish Catholicism. It seems a loyal housekeeper has just said goodnight to the hardworking country priest on Christmas when there's a knock at the door. It's two brothers who say their father is dying, and the priest must come immediately to hear the old man's confession. Grudgingly, the housekeeper wakes the priest, who goes out into the snowy night and hears the old man's sins. He returns and is back in bed when the housekeeper hears another knock. The brothers are back: Their Da forgot a sin; the priest needs to come back. And it's not just any sin, it's a serious sin -- fornication!
The housekeeper decides she cares more for the priest's rest than the old man going to hell. So she says to the brothers:

"Didn't I tell ye there was no fear of him," she drew herself upwards and re-folded her arms, "for don't it say in the Catechism that hell is closed for the twelve days of Christmas and anyone who dies during that period goes direct to heaven."
The brothers exchanged dubious glances.
"Tis there in black and white," the housekeeper assured them.
The brothers turned their backs on her and consulted in whispers. After several moments they faced her secondly.
"You're sure?" the smaller asked.
"Why would I say it if it was a lie?" she countered.

The story is titled "Twelve Days of Grace." PS The old man lives.
Merry Christmas!

Books and Music

I often get tempted to blog about music and movies, but then I remind myself that what little focus this blog has is about books, and I should stick to that. So with that disclaimer out of the way ...
The NYT had authors blog about music every so often, and this entry by Joshua Ferris caught my eye -- Joshua Ferris, author of the brilliant office novel Then We Came to the End.
Ferris likes Neutral Milk Hotel. I like Neutral Milk Hotel! (And you've maybe never heard of Neutral Milk Hotel.) They were a lovely '90s band, indie and somewhat experimental. Here's a very hazy YouTube video of lead singer Jeff Mangum singing my favorite NMH song "Naomi."

Except Alex from J-school still has my copy of Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Why don't you send that back to me, Alex? And send me my Glyn Styler live album back while your at it.
OK, music entry over. Read Joshua Ferris' whole playlist here. With reading suggestions.
(And I'm not kidding about those CDs, Alex!)

Round Up of Reading

We were talking at our book group the other night about how nothing we've been reading lately has really grabbed us -- as if there's some sort of malaise or boring spirit hanging out for the last few weeks. So here's a grab bag of what I hope will lead me out of the wilderness.

• Our next pick is White Teeth, by Zadie Smith. I really liked her more recent novel On Beauty, a comic but poignant novel about two families striving for success in Ivy League academia. So I have high hopes for her debut novel about families in multicultural contemporary London.
• I read the introduction to New Stories from the South: 2007 -- The Year's Best, edited by Edward P. Jones, who wrote the remarkable novel The Known World. As a native Louisianian living in Florida, I like to think there's still some special connection between the South and literature. My fear is the connection is tenuous and loosening; perhaps this collection will renew my hope.
  
• I picked up an annotated edition of Spoon River Anthology. The introduction is excellent, but the notes tend toward the mundane, i.e. "This poem is based on Joe B. Blow, who Master's knew when he lived in ..." . I hate reading literature as secret code to the author's biography, matching up characters to people the author knew. That's got to be the most mundane, trivial way to read literature.
  
• For Christmas, I want a copy of the photography book Atchafalaya. I grew up on the lower Atchafalaya, which we called the Bayou Teche (pronounced Tesh). Hear that, Santa?
  

What makes for a good audio book

A good audio book makes commuting significantly more pleasant. Before my trip to Ireland, I listened to the dark but funny Angela's Ashes, read by author Frank McCourt, and got a big kick out of it. Next I selected Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond. This is a sort of environmental social history, looking at how ancient and modern societies manage their limited resources and either flourish or self-destruct. But the narrator was kind of stuffy, and had this kind of Is-it-New-England-or-British-or-what? accent that made me sleepy. So I gave up on that.
Now I have the marvelous Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman. Gaiman is the master of updating ancient myth to contemporary times (see his comic book series Sandman). In Anansi Boys, we meet the two sons of the ancient god of storytelling, Anansi. There's Spider, who inherited his father's godlike powers, and then there's Fat Charlie, who didn't. Fat Charlie grows up thinking he's just an ordinary guy, until his father dies and he meets his mystical brother, who's trying to steal Fat Charlie's girlfriend. Adventure and hijinks ensue! I read that Gaiman called his book a "magical-horror-thriller-ghost-romantic-comedy-family-epic," and that seems about right.
And the audiobook is fabulous. Narrator Lenny Henry can do it all: men and women, young and old, mortal and immortal. And he really savors the language, he sounds like he's having as much fun reading it as I'm having listening.

A Good Newspaper Column on Baseball

The best written newspaper opinion columns are fine things to read -- compact, persuasive, poetic. Check out this column written by Thomas Boswell of The Washington Post about The Mitchell Report, a damning report on baseball's steroids problem that was released this week. It starts:

Now, Roger Clemens joins Barry Bonds in baseball's version of hell. It's a slow burn that lasts a lifetime, then, after death, lingers as long as the game is played and tongues can wag. In baseball, a man's triumphs and his sins are immortal. The pursuit of one often leads to the other. And those misdeeds are seldom as dark as their endless punishment.

Read the whole thing here.

House of Mirth MAJOR SPOILER

Don't read this if you want to avoid knowing the ending of House of Mirth by Edith Wharton!




A new letter by Wharton bolsters the case that Lily Bart actually did commit suicide at the end of the novel. Read about it here.
Well duh! We had this discussion at my book group.
Saying Lily Bart didn't commit suicide is like watching the movie Thelma & Louise and saying at the end, "Well, the car could have landed, and they could have just driven off. We don't really know what happens at the end."
Right!

The Unread List

Last night, I walked around the house with the laptop cataloging all my unread books into LibraryThing. I won't say I captured every book, but I got a lot of them, certainly the recent ones. You can check out my list of unread books via LibraryThing here.
There are 62 books on this list as of this writing. The oldest entry is Saint Augustine by Garry Wills, which I cataloged in July 2006 (and probably bought before that). The most recent book I bought a few weeks ago: The Gathering, a modern Irish novel by Anne Enright that won the Booker Prize that I'm about halfway through.
So I have 62 books of 392 that are unread. That means my non-read rate is about 15 percent. This is pretty good considering the number of already-read books I've given away, the already-read books still uncataloged, etc.
So I feel like I want to make some progress on this list, but it is quite long. Intuitively, I feel like I want to first read Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Sean Wilsey's Oh The Glory of It All.
I also get that very depressing but inevitable feeling of never being able to finish reading everything that I want to. I try to accept that I'll always feel that way and get over it. It's not easy.

This one is for Howellsreader!

I was at the gym on Wednesday and the woman who got on the machine next to me was reading William Dean Howells! The book in question was A Hazard of New Fortunes.
(Why I'm so excited about this is that my good pal R.E. aka Howellsreader wrote her dissertation on Howells.)
So I asked the woman, why Howells? She said it was her book group's pick, and she wasn't so excited about it at first, but now she's into it.
She also said she read the literary introduction and was totally turned off by the introduction, so she skipped to the book itself, and that was much better. (Take that, high-falutin' litscrits!)
She said she liked the book generally. But, she was frustrated by the book because people back in those days never said what they really meant. So the characters have to spend a lot of time figuring out what the other characters really mean and then communicating in code about what they mean. She concluded it was just a different era then.
But she also said it was very readable, and a nice break from "plucky woman overcomes adversity and finds true love."
What do you say, Howellsreader?

Reading for Fun -- not just a good time

The New York Times reports that student test scores have declined as reading for fun has declined.

The data also showed that students who read for fun nearly every day performed better on reading tests than those who reported reading never or hardly at all.

Read it and weep.

On Paradise Lost and Katha Pollitt

Picking up again on the Paradise Lost theme ... I've been meditating on the appeal of Milton's Satan, the ultimate rebel. I submit the literary and (film) offspring of Satan is Hannibal Lector of Silence of the Lambs fame (a great movie and a good book). It's not that we admire Hannibal or want to be his friend. I think it's that, on some dark level we don't like to think about, we want to be Hannibal. Hannibal is god-like in the way he creates his own moral universe -- a place of beauty and terror -- and lives in it. And I doubt I'm the first one to make this point.
I was thinking about these themes after hearing a Katha Pollit interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air about Pollit's book "Learning to Drive." That essay, which appeared in The New Yorker, is one of my all-time favorites. Pollit is a heterosexual feminist, and "Learning to Drive" is about her discovering that her longtime lover has been cheating on her. She dumps him and -- at long last, as a lifelong New Yorker -- has to learn to drive. The essay is funny and smart and bittersweet.
So Pollitt talked to Gross about how her lover had told her he wasn't the monogamous type, and she thought he was speaking in the abstract or whatever, certainly not about her. Terry asked her about how she reacted:

Terry Gross: That's such a staple of American popular culture, you know -- the rambler, the man who can't be tied down, who's heels are a-wandering, and so on. So how did you respond to it?

Katha Pollit: I said, `Oh, well, you know, fidelity is very important to me, and I can understand if that's not the way you want to live, but that's the way I have to live. And the person I live with will have to live like that, blah, blah, blah.' You know? And the fact is that if somebody ever says, you know, `Sometimes I feel I'm not cut out for monogamy,' you should believe them. You should believe them.
But, you know, women have this thing--I don't like to speak in generalizations about men and women, although I do it as we all do--but I do think women have this penchant for ramblers and rovers. A lot of women do. And I've thought a lot about this and I write about this in one of the stories, that part of it is you think you can tame them, and that would be so great. That would show how wonderful you are and also how intense the love must be that could conquer that, right? But I came to the conclusion that there's another reason, and that's that you want to be them. You want to be that person. You want to be that rambler and rover, but, for various reasons, you don't let yourself do that, you repress that part of yourself. But if you can be with a person who's like that, that's, in a way, a way of acquiring that characteristic. So I think that women who are attracted to men like that often have that side of themselves that they've suppressed.

Gross: Are you describing yourself?

Pollitt: Maybe. I don't know. I'll have to find out as life goes on. I'm married again, so I'd better not have that quality.

Listen to the whole interview here. A pal says it's a stretch to equate Satan and serial killers to philandering men. My point here, though, is the way we weirdly and often secretly identify with things that are totally unlike ourselves, things that we find intellectually and/or morally abhorrent. And how that identification creates a dramatic tension. I believe it's better to be aware of that phenomenon and examine it than to go along blithely pretending it doesn't exist.