spoonreader evolves ...

It's been a great run here at spoonreader, but all good things must come to an end. Or at any rate, what with graduating from library school and all, I'm feeling like it's time to close down spoonreader and start a fresh blogging endeavor.

After today, you'll find me on my new blog. Here is the address:

http://angieholan.tumblr.com

Thank you for all the reads, comments, etc.! Please join me at the new space ...

A long overdue update

I have finally graduated from library school! Yes, the long hiatus from this blog was as I finally finished my program.
I have some plans for a new blog experience, stay tuned!

Olive Kitteridge and The Housekeeper and the Professor

I read two excellent books recently, a collection of short stories and a novel.
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. This is very close to being a novel, it's related short stories about life in small-town Maine, most in the present day, and all connected by the irascible old woman Olive Kitteridge. The writing is wonderful, and Olive is a fascinating character: a school teacher and a mother, not quite likable, but admirable in her own way. Aspects of this book reminded me of my beloved Spoon River Anthology, because I couldn't help but start looking for all the little clues of connections between characters and stories. This book won the Pulitzer Prize earlier this year.
The Housekeeper and the Professor, by Yoko Ogawa. In this novel, translated from the Japanese, a young housekeeper goes to work for a retired math professor with a strange brain injury. Due to a car accident, his memory stopped and now he only retains memories for 80 minutes. So every 80 minutes, he meets the housekeeper for the first time. In spite of this limitation, the e housekeeper comes to understand the professor's deep love of math.

There was something profound in his love for math. And it helped that he forgot what he’d taught me before, so I was free to repeat the same question until I understood. Things that most people would get the first time around might take me five, or even ten times, but I could go on asking the Professor to explain until I finally got it.

When the professor learns that the housekeeper has a young son, he insists that she bring him with her to work -- he writes a note to himself so he won't forget. The relationship between the three is charming and touching, developing slowly through small outings and events. It's a sweet novel, and I'm going to check out Ogawa's other translated work, a collection of short stories called The Diving Pool.

A poem for the changes of history

The spouse and I talk a lot about newspapers, the economy, old and new business models, and the tide of history. In that vein, he recently sent me this poem, by Carl Sandburg.

HALSTED STREET CAR

COME you, cartoonists,
Hang on a strap with me here
At seven o'clock in the morning
On a Halsted street car.

Take your pencils
And draw these faces.

Try with your pencils for these crooked faces,
That pig-sticker in one corner--his mouth--
That overall factory girl--her loose cheeks.

Find for your pencils
A way to mark your memory
Of tired empty faces.

After their night's sleep,
In the moist dawn
And cool daybreak,
Faces
Tired of wishes,
Empty of dreams.

1916

American death rituals

My story of the week is about American death rituals, or lack thereof. Thomas G. Long, a professor at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University, writing an op-ed in The New York Times, begins with the latest fads in mortuary services,

"new baubles and gewgaws of the funeral business — coffins emblazoned with sports logos; cremation urns in the shape of bowling pins, golf bags and motorcycle gas tanks; 'virtual cemeteries' with video clips and eerie recorded messages from the dead; pendants, bracelets, lamps and table sculptures into which ashes of the deceased can be swirled and molded."

Yikes!

Long suggests that our phobia of dead bodies and our love of consumer culture have robbed our death rituals of their meaning:

"At upbeat, open-mike 'celebrations of life,' former coaches, neighbors and relatives amuse us with stories and naïvely declare that the dead, who are usually nowhere to be seen and have nowhere to go, will nevertheless live always in our memories. Funerals, which once made confident public pilgrimage through town to the graveyard, now tread lightly across the tiny tableau of our psyches."

After reading this story in full -- which I encourage you to do -- I turned to the spouse and said "Promise me that you will never, ever turn my cremated remains into a key chain or any other tacky knickknack." He promised me he wouldn't, and I promised the same.
One thing that bothered me: The story appeared on All Saints' Day, sometimes known as Dia de los Muertos ("day of the dead") in Hispanic cultures. There was no explicit mention of that in the paper, that I could see. I wonder how many people got that connection.

In honor of Halloween, a Yeats poem

In honor of Halloween, here is a poem from William Butler Yeats, my favorite poet:

The Cat and the Moon

THE CAT went here and there
And the moon spun round like a top,
And the nearest kin of the moon
The creeping cat looked up.
Black Minnaloushe stared at the moon,
For wander and wail as he would
The pure cold light in the sky
Troubled his animal blood.
Minnaloushe runs in the grass,
Lifting his delicate feet.
Do you dance, Minnaloushe, do you dance?
When two close kindred meet
What better than call a dance?
Maybe the moon may learn,
Tired of that courtly fashion,
A new dance turn.
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
From moonlit place to place,
The sacred moon overhead
Has taken a new phase.
Does Minnaloushe know that his pupils
Will pass from change to change,
And that from round to crescent,
From crescent to round they range?
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
Alone, important and wise,
And lifts to the changing moon
His changing eyes.

Toni Morrison's A Mercy and T.R. Reid's Healing of America

I read two really good books lately that have nothing in common.

First, Toni Morrison's A Mercy. She's Toni Morrison, Nobel Prize winner, author of the harrowing and well-respected Beloved. She's also very intimidating, because her recent novels have struck me as long, difficult and dense. So I found her recent novel, A Mercy, tempting, because it was fairly short -- 176 pages -- and the first few pages were intriguing. Read the excerpt; it begins:

Don't be afraid. My telling can't hurt you in spite of what I have done and I promise to lie quietly in the dark--weeping perhaps or occasionally seeing the blood once more--but I will never again unfold my limbs to rise up and bare teeth. I explain. You can think what I tell you a confession, if you like, but one full of curiosities familiar only in dreams and during those moments when a dog's profile plays in the steam of a kettle.

The setting is 1682, and the narrator above is Florens, a young enslaved woman, who tells her own story, interweaved with stories of others who live on a Maryland homestead. There are two other enslaved woman, a Dutch trader, his "mail order" wife (probably they didn't call it that back then), two indentured servants, and a free African blacksmith. I don't want to tell too much here, but I'll just emphasize I thought this was a fascinating, poignant gem of a novel, very thought-provoking and beautifully written. And it inspires me to go back and and read Beloved.

The other book I liked was The Healing of America, by T.R. Reid. This is nonfiction, a look at health care systems in other countries and what lessons they might hold for the U.S. Reid was in the unique position of working abroad for many years, and having a stiff, sore shoulder. So he took his shoulder to all the doctors and health systems of the world and wrote about it. (OK, maybe not all the health systems of the world, but the United States, France, England, Germany, Japan and India.) What he finds is pretty interesting. According to Reid's telling, the French seem to have the most hassle-free system for records and billing. In Japan, you don't really need an appointment, you just walk in and get seen. In England, you don't get whatever treatment you want, but whatever you do get is free. India's traditional medicine yielded surprisingly good results. And the United States loves its high-tech surgeries.
Another interesting point Reid makes is that in other countries, doctors get their med school tuition paid for by the state, and then they make more middle-class salaries. This is different from the States. Little insights like these made for a fascinating book, very thought-provoking.
One thing that made me chuckle mordantly is that Reid felt the need to put a brief justification in the book about why he was writing about the medical systems of other countries. Some Americans may feel that we shouldn't consider any information from other countries, because ... why? Because we're better than them? Because they couldn't possibly have anything to teach us? He rejects those ideas, and so do I. I just don't get not being curious about new ideas and ways of doing things. It's kind of an anti-learning mentality, and I can't stand that, as you well know.

Reader Advisory: New Jersey Politics

I'm instituting a new feature here at spoonreader: Reader advisory for news stories and features. I hope to highlight something interesting I read every week, with an emphasis on the periodical literature (librarian-speak for newspapers and magazines). My goal will be to post something on a Monday or Tuesday, or possibly as late as Wednesday.
This week's story is one I found very, very funny; it's about New Jersey politics; it's from the New York Times Magazine; and it's by Matt Bai.
It's told from the point of view of Jon Corzine, the incumbent Democratic governor of N.J., and it's about, well, why the state is so screwed up and Corzine's political fortunes are so troubled.. I'm picking this one because I love the writing, and because I think it has important insights into local government and why it can seem so dysfunctional.
Sample lines:

• "Even in the best of times, New Jersey’s highly taxed voters are a chronically cantankerous lot, and no one’s likely to confuse these with the best of times."
• "If California collapsed of its own weight and drifted off into the Pacific, New Jersey would instantly become the most dysfunctional state in the country."
• "New Jersey could raise up its own army and invade Pennsylvania, and all the state’s voters would want to talk about, still, would be their property taxes."
• "The question of why property taxes keep rising could keep a symposium of budget experts arguing for a week, but at its core, the property-tax problem hints at a deeper, structural flaw in the state, a defect that’s more cultural than it is fiscal. Basically, New Jersey is sliced into so many local fiefs — 21 counties, 566 municipalities, more than 600 school districts — that it’s just about falling apart."

I should say I don't know much about New Jersey. I don't have a reason to be interested in New Jersey. But I read this article from start to finish and was fascinated. That's a mark of a well-told story. So please do enjoy this little gem of political reporting and read the whole thing for yourself.

Books about the '08 campaign

I consider the 2008 election something of a subject specialty, so I've been trying to be strategic about reading new books about the election. I just read The Battle for America 2008 by Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson. Balz is with The Washington Post, so this is a fairly straightforward political account of the election, with a few minor new revelations. Interesting things that jumped out at me: They report that Democrat Ted Kennedy made a condition of his early endorsement that Obama address health care reform in his first year. And, they go into brutal and hilarious detail about Republican candidate Fred Thompson's reluctance to actually campaign for the presidency.
The other book I'm reading now is Renegade: The Making of a President, by Richard Wolfe, who covered the election for Newsweek. I'm just starting this one, but the book's selling point is that Wolfe got the most inside access to the Obama campaign.
Other campaign books I'd like to read:

• How Barack Obama won : a state-by-state guide to the historic 2008 presidential election, by Chuck Todd and Sheldon Gawiser: I expect this to be a very geeky (in a good way!) analysis of voting patterns in the 50 states.
• The audacity to win : the inside story and lessons of Barack Obama's historic victory, by David Plouffe. Written by Obama's campaign manager. Again, this one will probably be pretty much in the weeds for true politics junkies. I'm hoping to gain insight on Obama's caucus strategies from this one.
• An unnamed book (or at least I don't know the name) from Ryan Lizza, who covered the election for The New Yorker magazine. I really liked Lizza's reporting during the campaign; his article "Making It" was one of the best things I've read on Obama's years in the Illinois state senate.
• And no list would be complete without Going Rogue: An American Life, by Sarah Palin. I can't wait to see what she has to say about the campaign. I hope it's well-written and interesting. Sometimes books by elected officials can be really boring, but we'll see.

Eliot's Little Gidding

Yesterday was J. Alfred Prufrock Day, which is the way I think of the birthday of T.S. Eliot. I love that poem so much. Whenever I feel creaky, I say, "I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear my trousers rolled ..." And whenever I buy a peach, I say, "Do I dare to eat a peach?" and then, "In a minute there is time, for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse."

The spouse just heard me saying, "Do I dare to eat a peach?" He says from the other room: "Go ahead, J. Prufrock."

But lately, I have been much more enamored of Little Gidding. The passage below seems incredibly important and touching.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Reading skills and the 24-hour Day Theory

My friend K., a teacher, posted a note about her students and their difficulties reading Jane Austen. She quipped that Austen appears to be the new Shakespeare, and Shakespeare is the new Chaucer. This really tickled me, because I'm always a sucker for "X is the new Y" formulations. (Brown is the new black. 50 is the new 40. Salsa is the new ketchup. Etc, etc.) Such a succinct way of conveying change in tastes!
It also encapsulates the perceived decline in reading among young people. A book I loved called Reading Matters had a very sophisticated analysis: The idea is that standards for literacy have dramatically increased over the last 100 years or so, so perceived declines are not always actual declines. In other words, our expectations for student reading are high, and remain so.
I have a theory though. I think literacy skills may be in actual decline because of the proliferation of electronic media, especially gaming. There are more different types of media to fill up a day. Yet the 24-hour duration of a day remains stubbornly static. So the time spent on sustained reading declines. That's my theory, anyway.

A good primer on international issues

I recently finished The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power, by David E. Sanger. It was an excellent introduction to today's pressing foreign policy challenges: Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, North Korea and China. I feel much more comfortable reading daily news stories about these countries now that I've read a good overview of their historical situations and contexts.
In fact, I'm a bit amused by the fact that the book has "Obama," in the title, because the book's content is mostly about how the Bush administration (and to a lesser extent, other previous administrations) handled these areas for the past eight years. There's not much about Obama at all. But it is a clever way to spin older material forward.
In fact, the next time the Visa bill comes due, I'm going to tell the spouse, "That is not a bill for shoes. That is an investment in future opportunities for the display of fashionable feet."

Another crazy dispatch from the school reading front

In fairness, I wouldn't call letting kids pick their own books "crazy." Debatable, but not crazy. But this essay I ran across does seem to deserve the word. This system, called "Accelerated Reader," assigns point values to certain books. Kids rack up enough points, and they get a treat or a prize or whatever.
But look at the howling-sick points assignments, according to the New York Times story:

• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, by J.K. Rowling: 44 points
• Harry Pointer and the Deathly Hallows: 34 points
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: 32 points
• My Antonia, by Willa Cather: 14 points
• Go Tell it on the Mountain, by James Baldwin: 13 points
• Hamlet, by Shakespeare: 7 points

I like Harry Potter, but I have a big problem with this points system. The latter three works are much more sophisticated and thematically challenging. That they would be worth fewer points strikes me as bad and wrong, ESPECIALLY when school kids are motivated to read the Potter books anyway. What is the world coming to? The essay author, thankfully, is appalled as well.

For school kids: Pick your own books?

English teachers are starting to let their students pick their own books, according to a Sunday front page story in The New York Times. The story profiles a teacher who is using that method with her seventh and eighth graders. It's a fascinating piece of reporting, you should read it.
I have mixed feelings about it, though. I think the research pretty clearly suggests that readers get better by spending a lot more time reading (duh), and that struggling readers who pick their own materials are significantly more motivated. Still, I think there's so much to be gained from students sharing a common literary experience. (Right, my Romantic Poetry classmates?)
The story did note that some teachers mix methods, allowing students to pick their own books at times while also assigning everyone the same book at least once during the year. I like that.

Michael Chabon, David Foster Wallace and suicide

John Wilson reflects on author Michael Chabon's recent essay about suicide and the death of David Foster Wallace. I can't find Chabon's original piece, but Wilson writes that it's part of a new nonfiction book by Chabon to be released in October, titled Manhood for Amateurs.

Interesting point:

Mr. Chabon quotes Mr. Wallace himself saying that fiction gives the reader, who is "marooned in her own skull, . . . imaginative access to other selves." But there's a problem: "that gift of access, for all its marvelous power to console the lonely . . . , is a kind of trick, an act of Houdiniesque illusion."

Put another way, the desire for connection, for imaginative access to other selves, Mr. Chabon believes, is fundamentally a desire for escape. It drives writers and readers alike, he says, "to seek the high, small window leading out, to lower the makeshift ropes of knotted bedsheet that stories and literature afford, and make a break for it." And when "that window can't be found, or will no longer serve" -- here he returns to the question of suicide -- "small wonder if the longing seeks another, surer means of egress."

Read the whole thing via The Wall Street Journal, it's fascinating. Wilson is editor of Books & Culture: A Christian Review.

The Song is You

I'm always on the look-out for high-quality fiction written about the way we live now. Writing about right now, I imagine, is pretty tough: How can you know what will be tomorrow's important event versus a short-lived trend? A lot of successful fiction is set in the recent past, probably because it's easier for authors to get critical distance.
So I had high hopes for the recent novel The Song is You by Arthur Phillips. Julian, a music-loving an advertising photographer in New York City, is bereft after the collapse of his marriage and the loss of his family life. He's aimless until one night he wanders into a Brooklyn bar and hears a new band with an entrancing lead singer/songwriter. He writes her a series of notes on the back of bar coasters, and she finds his advice penetrating and perceptive for her climb up the rungs to pop-rock stardom. Other communications ensue, and so begins a funny, distant relationship between a fan and his muse.
I liked this novel a good bit, especially the parts where Julian remembers his father's love for the jazz singer Billie Holiday. (A charming setpiece on Billie Holiday opens the novel.) But I wanted to read a lot more about Julian and his relationship with his ex-wife, while the novel was pretty focused on his relationship with the singer. (Is this a guy thing?) Still, The Song is You is an interesting, readable novel of our current moment.
From a librarian perspective, I'd recommend The Song is You as a read-alike for Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, which I think is still the definitive contemporary novel on pop music. (Read-alike is librarian jargon for, "If you liked X, you might also like Y.")

Ways of organizing books

I realized recently that I haven't been very good about writing in a tiny brown leather notebook where I keep a list of all the books I've read. In fact, my last entry in the little notebook appears to be September 2007. Gulp! I've read lots of books since then. Now I'm going back and reconstructing my reading history so I can make accurate entries in the little notebook.
Thankfully, I have several other ways of organizing my reading habits to which I can refer.
There's this blog, for one! I don't notate everything I read here, but I do quite a bit, and certainly the high points and most of the fiction. One of the things I enjoy about this blog, after keeping in touch with my old friends, is perusing the books I've read over the years through the archived entries.
Next is my catalog on LibraryThing. I started with LibraryThing back in 2005, and though other online reading sites have entered the fray since then, I still like LibraryThing the best, mostly because of its robust cataloging function. GoodReads is more oriented toward sharing books, but I found its interface a little too cumbersome to be worth switching. This is the benefit to LibraryThing's first entry: For me to switch from LibraryThing, a new service would have to offer a substantially better service. A merely somewhat better service would not be able to overcome my inertia toward changing services.
I also have kind of mixed feelings about these online services for sharing books and thoughts on books. I don't really need new ideas for books to read. I have long, long, long lists of books I want to read but probably won't ever get to, so I don't need to actively search for new ones. And I go back and forth on making my LibraryThing catalog public. Right now, it's private. I can never decide on whether I want the outside world to view my library or not. Sometimes I think it's harmless. Other times I feel like a personal library is a highly, well, personal thing, and I'm not so anxious to share. This is one area where LibraryThing could improve: Making a catalog visible to friends but not the general public. Maybe you can even do that already, but I have not yet discovered how.
Finally, I keep a spreadsheet of every book I've read with my book group. It includes the book title, author, and which member of our group picked it. Yes, I am this organized! (Read: Obsessive-compulsive)
So with these tools I am now updating the little notebook, aka the analog database.

The new Dave Eggers book

I got a new book in the mail today. It's "Zeitoun," by Dave Eggers, and it's about a Syrian-American family that survived Katrina. I'm very excited to read it because I so loved his last book, What is the What. I'm also excited because I ordered it directly from McSweeney's, Mr. Eggers' book company. It will probably be published jointly with a major publishing house, but the editions from McSweeney's are always a little unique or special with their binding or their art work. I still love those kinds of details.

I feel like a bit of a slacker on blog posts recently. I'm still slowly reading Brothers Karamazov. I'm also trying to not spend so much time mindlessly clicking around the computer, surfing the Internet, so that leads to fewer blog posts. It's not a snooty intellectual thing; it's just a time management issue. I've been trying to go to bed early, slow down and de-stress, etc etc etc.
Still, I don't want to stop this blog for the (mainly) friends and family who read it. One day in the golden future I will post more regularly, with perfectly search-engine-optimized headlines, and make a name for spoonreader throughout the land. But not today.

Summer reading round-up

I've been trying to slow down and not get over-busy, so that slows my reading down a little. Mainly, right now I'm reading The Brothers Karamazov. I've always wanted to read it because so many writers I love -- Dorothy Day, David Foster Wallace -- love it. I'm about a third of the way through.
It's fascinating reading, for sure, especially Dostoyevsky's outlook on religion, which he clearly takes very seriously. Also I like his characterization the dissolute father, Fyodor Pavlovich, who reminds me of a few people I know. These are all superficial impressions, I should do some more rigorous thinking on the novel, but right now I'm just enjoying all the great characters and dialogue and not thinking too terribly deeply.
I think I've also found the perfect use for SparkNotes (online Cliff's Notes for you oldsters like me). I read the plot summaries on SparkNotes to help me remember which character is which, and keep track of all the nicknames, some of which are not obvious at all, e.g. Mitya=Dmitri. So you see, there is a use for SparkNotes besides shirking your college reading!
As a lark, I finished the Michael Lewis memoir on fatherhood, Home Game. I still like him a lot but this book was too light and flip for my taste. In the last section, he gets a vasectomy, which he plays for laughs, and which I really did not need to know about. Hey, but that's OK, nobody's perfect. He's still one of my favorite authors. I think this is definitely a book for guys and only certain guys.
While I'm being kind of trivial here, guess what I found! Another volume of Jane Austen paraliterature, this time yet another book masquerading as Mr. Darcy's diary. But the new twist here is that Mr. Darcy was friends with LORD BYRON. For those of you who don't know, I was obsessed with Lord Byron is high school. I checked the dates, it's not totally implausible, though I think Darcy would have been a little bit older than Byron, but it depends on when you date the events of Pride and Prejudice. After I finish Karamazov, I will get my own copy of this book and read it and give you a detailed critique. I read the first chapter at the book store: Mr. Darcy is not so upstanding as P&P would have you think, but he's also not fully embracing of all of Lord Byron's mad, bad and dangerous-to-know ways. This is really hilarious to me -- Mr. Darcy and Lord Byron!

Books I bought at Faulkner House in New Orleans

I was in New Orleans last weekend for a wedding and went to the wonderful book store Faulkner House. K. and J. introduced me to this place a long time ago, but I hadn't been back in years. I was delighted to find it still stuffed with new fiction and old classics -- most in lovely hardcover editions -- and of course an extensive selection on books about New Orleans and Louisiana.
I selected two books. The first was the new Michael Lewis book, Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood. Lewis is best known for writing about business and baseball, but he's also a native New Orleanian. (He attended the prep school Isidore Newman.) His new book is about navigating the rocky shoals of contemporary fatherhood. This normally would not be my cup of tea, but Lewis is one of the few living writers who makes me laugh out loud, so I picked it up. Gen Xers will appreciate that his wife is Tabitha Soren, formerly of MTV News. So far, it's a funny, light, sweet book. We'll see if it gets deeper as I approach the finish.
The other book was a bit more meaty: A lovely, small hardcover of Walt Whitman poetry from Everyman's Library. I picked it because it included the poem "I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing." Here is the full text for your reading enjoyment. I think he really captures the majestic beauty of the trees, which have a meditative effect on me as well:

I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,
All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches,
Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous of dark green,
And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself,
But I wonder'd how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there
without its friend near, for I knew I could not,
And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it and
twined around it a little moss,
And brought it away, and I have placed it in sight in my room,
It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends,
(For I believe lately I think of little else than of them,)
Yet it remains to me a curious token, it makes me think of manly love;
For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana
solitary in a wide in a wide flat space,
Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover near,
I know very well I could not.

Three excellent books about reading

The most excellent class of Adult Services, a.k.a. Reader Advisory, has come to an end. I loved everything about this class, which taught the art and craft of librarians recommending leisure reading to adults. Besides reading some great books for my book talks -- see my book talks on Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and The Book of Chameleons -- I also read some great books about reading. Here's a recap of three of my favorites.

Reading Matters: What the Research Reveals about Reading Libraries and Community, by Catherine Sheldrick Ross, Lynne (E.F.) McKechnie, and Paulette M. Rothbauer. I love the old saying, "In God we trust. All others must bring data." This book brings the data on reading research, providing empirical evidence gleaned from recent studies on why people read, how they become proficient readers, and how they select books. The key point for me is that people who are skilled readers "speed through stretches of text with apparent effortlessness." For children, "well-designed phonics instruction" is best, and being read to aloud is crucial. Adults should be encouraged to engage in sustained long-form reading in whatever genre or style they prefer, because reading begets more reading.

The Reader, the Text and the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work, by Louise Rosenblatt. If only I had heard of Louise Rosenblatt when I was in college, back in the early 1990s during the heyday of literary theory. Back then, you could read any old book you wanted and then say it was either reifying cultural hegemony or subversively troubling societal norms. In retrospect, these were interesting intellectual exercises, but it also seemed silly to argue that a reader could find any meaning she wanted in a given text. Rosenblatt, on the other hand, acknowledges that readers bring their own assumptions and beliefs to a text that they read, but she also says that the author has a particular meaning she or he is trying to convey. Two human beings are involved in the transaction between author and reader, and you can't theorize away the intentions and motivations of either party. This reminds me of author Zadie Smith's metaphor, that the relationship between author and reader is akin to the relationship between a composer of music and the musician who sits down to play the work.

Great Books for High School Students: A Teacher's Guide to Books that can Change Teen's Lives, edited by Rick Ayers and Amy Crawford. These are seven essays written by teachers who describe the particular experiences they've had teaching novels to high school students. The essays are personal and subjective, and fascinating reading. I thought the essay about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain, was particularly good, showing why it's such a challenging book. The teacher wrote about how her students had strong but very different reactions to the book's depictions of slavery and race. Then there were the efforts of other adults to stop her from teaching the book. I also thought the teacher revealed that she wasn't quite as emotionally prepared as she thought she was to teach a book that raises all the sensitive issues that Huckleberry raises. It was a good essay, very personal and honest and grounded in real-world circumstances. The other books teachers wrote about include Bastard Out of Carolina, by Dorothy Allison; Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison; Oresteia, by Aeschylus; Bless Me, Ultima, by Rudolfo Anaya; Reservation Blues, by Sherman Alexie; and The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien.

Reading vs. doing

One of my favorite blogs is Zen Habits. It's about living a simple life, being organized, and getting things done. So it's right up my alley.
The blog's author, Leo (hey, that's my dad's name!), has a great post last week on reading vs. doing. He says reading is great and can teach you things, but you actually have to put whatever it is you're reading about into practice.

So reading countless self-help articles and books are great — I’ve written a few myself — but remember that it’s only the first step.
You have to put the personal development posts away, get away from the computer or book, and start doing it. Today.
Only in doing it will you actually learn.

Read the whole post for yourself.
I think he's onto something really important. Reading is wonderful, but it's not the same as direct experience. Leo is talking about self-help and organizational books here, but I think it applies other emotional contexts as well. Good food for thought.

Dreams of DFW (DFW Memorial Part VI)

I dreamed of David Foster Wallace a few nights ago. He looked just like his photos, the ones where he has long hair and no bandana. He was smiling, and I was standing next to my spouse, and David was asking me how I was doing, and what was going on in my life. I started to cry. I was trying to tell him that I knew he had been sad and that I hoped he was OK now. In my dream, he had tried to kill himself but failed ...
He smiled and said, "I'm doing fine. I'm not sad anymore. But tell me about you. ..."
And that was it.
I know why I dreamed the dream. That day, I had finally got a look at the new, posthumous book of his.
It's a copy of a commencement speech he gave at Kenyon College, an essay I dearly love. It didn't have a title when he gave it. Now it's called, "This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life." Of course, the speech wasn't really long enough for a proper book. So the publisher decided to print one sentence per page, creating a book that comes in at 144 pages.
In theory, this could be a good idea, forcing the reader to slow down and savor the language.
But I thought it made the speech seem disjointed. Kind of like someone reading aloud at too slow a pace.
On a more positive note, I love the cover. It's white with a little tiny goldfish at the bottom.

The goldfish is part of the opening anecdote:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"
... If you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

The parable of the fish also figured prominently into his novel Infinite Jest, which is a personally totemic novel for me.
I will end up buying the book, even though you can read the essay for yourself on the Internet here. Some people might say it's dumb to buy a book of an essay that you can read on the Internet, but this doesn't account for the phenomenon of text-as-beloved-object. I love the permanence and tangibility and symbolism of words written on bound paper. Not the same as the computer, not to me.

Reader, I married him

Here's a selection from the conclusion of the 1847 novel Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte:

I have now been married ten years. I know what it is to live entirely for and with what I love best on earth. I hold myself supremely blest--blest beyond what language can express; because I am my husband's life as fully as he is mine. No woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am: ever more absolutely bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. I know no weariness of my Edward's society: he knows none of mine, any more than we each do of the pulsation of the heart that beats in our separate bosoms; consequently, we are ever together. To be together is for us to be at once as free as in solitude, as gay as in company. We talk, I believe, all day long: to talk to each other is but a more animated and an audible thinking. All my confidence is bestowed on him, all his confidence is devoted to me; we are precisely suited in character--perfect concord is the result.

Read the novel Jane Eyre via Project Gutenberg.
I identify a lot with bookish Jane, but I can also be the madwoman in the attic. Thanks to the spouse for putting up with both. Happy anniversary.

What I'm reading now

My library school class is coming to a fast close. I'm a little sad, because this has been one my favorite classes of library school. It's called "Adult Services," and it focused on what's known as "Reader Advisory," or recommending voluntary reading material to adults. This could be anything a person wants to read: literary fiction, romance novels, science fiction, whatever. I'm working on my final project now, which is an annotated bibliography on the topic of "great books discussion groups." I'm taking a broad view of "great books": My reading tells me a librarian should ask, "Great for who? Great in what way?" And I definitely don't mean that in a relativistic, throw-away-the-standards, "what anybody wants is fine" sort of way. I mean it in a rigorous, standards-based, "you're not going to stick my patrons with a boring book" sort of way. So I'm reading articles on how to select the best sorts of books for discussion groups, with nods toward the Western canon, multiculturalism and diversity, bestsellers vs. award winners, readability, and how books lend themselves (or don't) toward group discussion. Lots of interesting intersections here.
On another front, my book group just finished a very long selection (A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz, 500 plus pages), and now we're going to read two much shorter young adult novels (Stuck in Neutral and Cruise Control by Terry Trueman). So this means I have extra time to read my own choices. Nice. Here's what I'm reading right now:

• Nothing Right, by Antonya Nelson. This is literary fiction, short stories about upper-middle-class Americans and their nefarious ways. Affairs, deceptions, break-ups, stabs in the back, etc. I'm not sure why it's so interesting to read about the twisted characters in Nelson's stories, but it sure is. Nelson has this fascination-with-the-grotesque thing going, much like Flannery O'Connor. Except Flannery wrote about people living in the (mostly) rural South of the 1950s; Nelson writes about people who listen to NPR.
• Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the GOP, by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam. The conservative authors argue that the Republican Party needs to develop and promote policies that provide economic stability for the working class. Douthat was recently named a columnist to the New York Times, which will certainly amplify his voice on the national stage. I read Douthat's blog occasionally; I like that he puts his intellectual integrity ahead of his loyalty to party. (Actually, I love writers who put intellectual integrity ahead of loyalty to party -- any party. This is a nonpartisan blog.)
• Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, by Clay Shirky. This book looks at the implications of the Internet for group dynamics and organization. Shirky recently wrote a blog post, "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable," on the decline of newspapers that was pretty brilliant. He concluded we're in the grips of systemic, historical change similar to the advent of the printing press. So I'm just starting on his book and interested to see what the implications are for the future of journalism.
  

And after all this, I really, really want to read and stop putting off reading The Brothers Karamazov. It's time!

W. B. Yeats: The Poems

The spouse went to Ireland, and because I had to stay home, he brought me back a truly splendid gift: W. B. Yeats: The Poems, a hardcover collection from the British version of Everyman's Library. I really love Everyman's Library; it's an imprint of Random House that publishes the classics in these relatively compact but kinda sumptuous hardcover editions. (Interestingly, W. B. Yeats: The Poems is not part of the American version of Everyman's. Which seems a terrible oversight, but I guess Yeats still does not have the stature in the U.S. that he does in Europe. That's a shame.)
So the book includes most but not all of Yeats' poetry. Yeats was very prolific, so even this abridged version is 395 pages of poetry. His major works are represented in full, so it appears to have the complete content of books such as The Wind Among the Reeds, Responsibilities, The Wild Swans at Coole, Michael Robartes and the Dancer, The Tower, and Last Poems, just to name a few. Then it has extensive notes. Also, a chronology of Yeats' life and a critical introduction. AND an index of titles and an index of first lines. Awesome, awesome, awesome!
I am very pleased with this book. It's my new favorite book.

New translation of Divine Milieu by Sion Cowell

I love books as objects -- I do, I do, I do! And I much prefer hardcovers to paperbacks. I'm in my 30s, and I've seen beloved paperbacks lose their structural integrity over the years and literally fall apart before my eyes. Not so with hardbacks. They are sturdy things, built to last.
So I've been looking for a hardcover copy of The Divine Milieu by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. This book is hard to explain; it's very different from most other books. It was written by a paleontologist Jesuit priest in the 1920s as a way of reconciling Christianity and evolution, but it's also something of a spiritual self-help book, too, if I can say that without diminishing its theological complexity.
The latest copy of the book describes itself this way:

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's spiritual masterpiece, The Divine Milieu, in a newly revised translation by Sion Cowell, is addressed to those who have lost faith in conventional religion but who still have a sense of the divine at the heart of the cosmos. "The heavens declare the glory of God," sings the Psalmist. Teilhard would agree. "We are surrounded," he says, "by a certain sort of pessimist who tells us continually that our world is foundering in atheism. But should we not say rather that what it is suffering from is unsatisfied theism?" He sees a universe in movement where progress is the spiritualisation of matter and its opposite is the materialisation of spirit. Teilhard opts for progress. The Divine Milieu is the divine centre and the divine circle, the divine heart and the divine sphere. The Divine Milieu is written for those who listen primarily to the voices of the Earth: its purpose is to provide a link to traditional Christianity (as expressed in Baptism, Cross and Eucharist) in order to demonstrate that the fears prevalent in contemporary world society as it abuses its very foundation - Mother Earth - may be better understood by the Gospel path. Teilhard's primary purpose is to show a way forward, which he sees as the "Christian religious ideal".

Clearly, this is not a book for everyone, but it really rings bells for me as I have long seen science and religion as mutually reinforcing, not opposites. This is what happens to a person when her early education is overseen by the sisters of the Sacred Heart.
So my wonderful new translation in HARDCOVER arrived yesterday. I had to pay $36 (!) for it in these difficult economic times, but I did anyway, and that was Amazon's deep discount from the $50 list price. It is a lovely slim volume with a groovy cover design that implies cutting-edge sophistication. Interestingly, the cover resonates with some recent popular science writing.
Compare the cover of the new Divine Milieu ... :


... with the cover of a recent(ish) book, completely scientific on string theory by scientist Brian Greene called The Fabric of the Cosmos:


Kinda looks the same, doesn't it? Speaking of Greene, wouldn't that would be a dream dinner party: Teilhard de Chardin and Brian Greene. Throw in Pema Chodron and Jonathan Safran Foer for an ecumenical foursome. I'd cook a delicious feast and we'd talk late into the night ...

Book talk on The Book of Chameleons by Jose Eduardo Agualusa

Here is my book talk on The Book of Chameleons for my library science class after finding it on the Three Percent blog, an excellent source for news and reviews of translated literature. As I've noted before, the assignment requires that our book talks have to be very positive. But I honestly liked this book just as much as my book talks says! (Librarians, feel free to use this book talk as you like.)

Lovers of dreamy, experimental fiction, The Book of Chameleons is for you! Set in modern-day Angola, our narrator is a self-reflective gecko -- that's right, a lizard -- who lives on the ceiling in the home of Felix Ventura. Felix Ventura is an albino antique books dealer and seller of memories, and there's no shortage of customers. "They were businessmen, ministers, landowners, diamond smugglers, generals -- people, in other words, whose futures are secure. But what these peoople lack is a good past, a distinguished ancestry, diplomas. In sum, a name that resonates with nobility and culture. He sells them a brand new past. He draws up their family tree. He provides them with photographs of their grandparents and great-grandparents, gentlemen of elegant bearing and old-fashioned ladies. The businessmen, the ministers, would like to have women like that as their aunts ... old ladies swathed in fabrics, authentic bourgeois bessanganas -- they'd like to have a grandfather with the distinguished bearing of a Machado de Assis, of a Cruz e Souza, of an Alexandre Dumas. And he sells them this simple dream."

This fantastic premise actually works well with its real-world history of contemporary Angola, a former Portuguese colony on the southwest coast of Africa. In 1975, factions began fighting in a civil war there that was to last 27 years, dominated by Cold War politics. In 2002, the civil war ended. Angola has since been rebuilding its economy, primarily through oil exports. The cross-section of people who come to buy memories in 2004 from Felix Ventura represent the cross-section of people trying to reinvent themselves in post-civil war society.

In The Book of Chameleons, a retired photojournalist and war photographer comes to Felix Ventura and buys the identity of Jose Buchman, a persona that Ventura has invented based on his history books and antiquities. Buchman returns not long after, telling Felix he has been to the village where his "father" lived and photographed his father's grave. Buchman travels to New York City to find his American "mother," then follows her to South Africa. How can this be, Felix wonders? Meanwhile, the gecko meets Buchman in a series of dreams. The neighborhood hobo -- formerly, one of Angola's once-powerful Marxists -- is staking out Felix's house, while Felix's new lady love Angela Lucia visits regularly. The characters all take their parts in a murder mystery that comes together only at the book's conclusion.

The book's author, Jose Eduardo Agualusa, was born to Portuguese parents in Huambo, Angola, in 1960. The Book of the Chameleons won the 2007 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, a prize for fiction in translation published in the United Kingdom, and it was the first book written by an African author to win the book. Agualusa, a fiction writer and a journalist, has written seven novels, including Creole which was awarded the Portuguese Grand Prize for Literature. Both The Book of the Chameleons and Creole were translated by Daniel Hahn, who also translated the autobiography of Brazilian footballer, Pelé, which was shortlisted for the Best Sports Book of 2006 at the British Book Awards. The 2008 American edition of The Book of the Chameleons includes a question and answer with the author and a book group reading guide.

With its emphasis on magical realism and post-colonial politics, this book is particularly recommended for fans of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Colombian author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. Fans of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges will enjoy the sly joke that the gecko narrator is Borges reincarnated.

This is literary fiction at its most dreamy and interesting, but it's also accessible to more casual readers, thanks to our approachable lizard narrator. The book is also short in length, so if you are looking for something to expand your horizons that's not too much of a time commitment, this book be for you: The Book of the Chameleons, by Jose Eduardo Agualusa.

D.T. Max on David Wallace (DFW Memorial Part V)

D.T. Max of The New Yorker has a heart-breaking story about David Foster Wallace -- his career as an author and his last days. Wallace was working on a novel called The Pale King before he died. His publishers expect to issue the incomplete manuscript next year.
Max writes:

The novel continues Wallace’s preoccupation with mindfulness. It is about being in the moment and paying attention to the things that matter, and centers on a group of several dozen I.R.S. agents working in the Midwest. Their job is tedious, but dullness, “The Pale King” suggests, ultimately sets them free. A typed note that Wallace left in his papers laid out the novel’s idea: “Bliss—a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.” On another draft sheet, Wallace typed a possible epigraph for the book from “Borges and I,” a prose poem by Frank Bidart: “We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed.”

First, I find this description so poignant, and it vibrates on the same frequency as the Alcoholic Anonymous credo that Wallace depicted in Infinite Jest: One day at a time. Second, his passing yet again stikes me as so utterly sad -- an artist unable to complete his work, dead by his own hand from depression. Finally, I find it personally endearing that Wallace had become obsessed with taxes. I have my own obsession with taxes that developed relatively recently. It is its own arcane language, like a priestly code. Perhaps aliens will one day assume the IRS tax code was our holy book.
Read the entire article. Max wrote a previous article on the awe-inspiring literary archive at the University of Texas at Austin, so he has a great deal of sensitivity for Wallace's place in American letters.

Obama as Emma Woodhouse

I can't resist logging this amusing Jane Austen comparison from Sunday's Maureen Dowd column in The New York Times. The heart of the column is her fussing at Pres. Obama for his subtle jibes at Veep Joe Biden. Obama should show more respect, Dowd says.

Then the kicker: She compares Obama to Emma Woodhouse. Joe Biden is Miss Bates. Mr. Knightly is Dowd herself, I guess.

I'm not much of a fan of Emma -- Pride and Prejudice is infinitely superior, in my view. But the moment Dowd's referring to in Emma is my favorite of the book, and worth quoting here. It's Austen's fine-tuned psychological rendering at its best. The set-up is that Emma has made snide remark about how boring Miss Bates is. Then she tries to use the old excuse, "It was just a joke!" But Emma's suitor Mr. Knightly isn't having any of that, and calls her on it:

"Emma, I must once more speak to you as I have been used to do: a privilege rather endured than allowed, perhaps, but I must still use it. I cannot see you acting wrong, without a remonstrance. How could you be so unfeeling to Miss Bates? How could you be so insolent in your wit to a woman of her character, age, and situation?— Emma, I had not thought it possible."

Emma recollected, blushed, was sorry, but tried to laugh it off.

"Nay, how could I help saying what I did?—Nobody could have helped it. It was not so very bad. I dare say she did not understand me."

"I assure you she did. She felt your full meaning. She has talked of it since. I wish you could have heard how she talked of it—with what candour and generosity. I wish you could have heard her honouring your forbearance, in being able to pay her such attentions, as she was for ever receiving from yourself and your father, when her society must be so irksome."

"Oh!" cried Emma, "I know there is not a better creature in the world: but you must allow, that what is good and what is ridiculous are most unfortunately blended in her."

"They are blended," said he, "I acknowledge; and, were she prosperous, I could allow much for the occasional prevalence of the ridiculous over the good. Were she a woman of fortune, I would leave every harmless absurdity to take its chance, I would not quarrel with you for any liberties of manner. Were she your equal in situation—but, Emma, consider how far this is from being the case. She is poor; she has sunk from the comforts she was born to; and, if she live to old age, must probably sink more. Her situation should secure your compassion. It was badly done, indeed! You, whom she had known from an infant, whom she had seen grow up from a period when her notice was an honour, to have you now, in thoughtless spirits, and the pride of the moment, laugh at her, humble her—and before her niece, too—and before others, many of whom (certainly some,) would be entirely guided by your treatment of her.—This is not pleasant to you, Emma—and it is very far from pleasant to me; but I must, I will,—I will tell you truths while I can; satisfied with proving myself your friend by very faithful counsel, and trusting that you will some time or other do me greater justice than you can do now."

While they talked, they were advancing towards the carriage; it was ready; and, before she could speak again, he had handed her in. He had misinterpreted the feelings which had kept her face averted, and her tongue motionless. They were combined only of anger against herself, mortification, and deep concern. She had not been able to speak; and, on entering the carriage, sunk back for a moment overcome—then reproaching herself for having taken no leave, making no acknowledgment, parting in apparent sullenness, she looked out with voice and hand eager to shew a difference; but it was just too late. He had turned away, and the horses were in motion. She continued to look back, but in vain; and soon, with what appeared unusual speed, they were half way down the hill, and every thing left far behind. She was vexed beyond what could have been expressed—almost beyond what she could conceal. Never had she felt so agitated, mortified, grieved, at any circumstance in her life. She was most forcibly struck. The truth of this representation there was no denying. She felt it at her heart. How could she have been so brutal, so cruel to Miss Bates! How could she have exposed herself to such ill opinion in any one she valued! And how suffer him to leave her without saying one word of gratitude, of concurrence, of common kindness!

Time did not compose her. As she reflected more, she seemed but to feel it more. She never had been so depressed. Happily it was not necessary to speak. There was only Harriet, who seemed not in spirits herself, fagged, and very willing to be silent; and Emma felt the tears running down her cheeks almost all the way home, without being at any trouble to check them, extraordinary as they were.

On my bedside table

I was talking with a friend lately outlining my reading list for the next few months. Anyway, here's what I have read in what order.

• The Book of Chameleons, by José Eduardo Agualusa: This is for my reader's advisory class. The assignment was to pick a contemporary work of fiction in translation, in this case, from the Portuguese. This is an avant-garde murder mystery set in Africa and narrated by a lizard! I started reading it this morning, and it's beautifully written and already haunting me. In tone and mood, it reminds me just a bit of The Sea by John Banville. (Are you reading this, JJ?)
  
• A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Tolz: Speaking of JJ, this is her book pick for our next book group meeting. It's a zany literary-adventure novel from Australia; The Wall Street Journal compared it to my much beloved A Confederacy of Dunces. Because I'm a hard-working blogger, I dug up the exact quote from the WSJ: "Mr. Toltz's merry chaos -- a mix of metaphysical inquiry, ribald jokes, freakish occurrences and verbal dynamite booming across the page -- deserves a place next to 'A Confederacy of Dunces' in a category that might be called the undergraduate ecstatic." The reviewer then calls it "Voltaire meets Vonnegut." OK, so you get the idea. It is, so far, snicker-out-loud funny. And it's loooooooooong ... some reviewers say too long. 
  
• I have two books that I may review. I won't name them here but one is about post-Katrina New Orleans and the other is a first novel. 
  
• Finally, I made a deal with my mom. Either I read The Brothers Karamazov by her birthday or I give her my spanking new, hardcover, fabulous new translation copy of the book. I don't want to do that! Her birthday is May 4. Can I make it? Only time will tell!
  

The Inaugural Poem

You've heard of never speaking ill of the dead? Well, I choose never to speak ill of poets. I love poetry, and it's in too much trouble these days to crack on anyone trying keep it alive.

So with that preface, I'll say that I really liked the poem Elizabeth Alexander read for the recent inauguration. I advocate for plainer meaning in poetry, and this poem works nicely. Don't get me wrong, I love modernist poetry, which tends to be obscure -- think T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens. But the historical moment for modernism has passed. I think what we need now is a plainer poetry that is easier for people to "get." Less obscurity and randomness. Isn't there enough of that in the broader culture these days? Whereas Eliot and Stevens to me seem like artistic responses to a culture of conformity.

So I really liked Alexander's poem. Read the whole thing here. I liked the lines:

A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky.
A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.

I really liked, "Take out your pencils. Begin." Doesn't that sum up all the potential and excitement of learning? To me it does.

And I also really liked:

Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.
Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,
the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.

Now just so you know I haven't gone completely Pollyanna, I also liked this critical examination of the poem from the UK's The Guardian, which accuses the poem of being too prosy. ("Prosy"?) It is critical, but it's also serious textual analysis. It's serious criticism worthy of a serious poem, so to speak. And if you go over to Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog, you'll find a wonderful font of comments, both pro and con, about the poem. Ta-Nehisi's blog is mostly politics and culture, but he posts a poem every Friday morning and then opens the comments in the afternoon. It's a lot of fun.

Book talk on "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close"

Some of you have already seen this, but for everyone else, this is my book talk on "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close." Keep in mind that a book talk is different from a review in that a book talk is not overtly critical. It's a talk from a librarian meant to get patrons interested in reading a particular book.

Librarians, feel free to use this book talk yourself if you feel so moved.

Audience: Book talk at main library for "Book Group Night," for book groups looking for new ideas about novels to read.

Nine-year-old Oskar Schell lives in New York City. In his spare time, he likes to write letters to famous people, play the tambourine, and think up new ideas for inventions to save people's lives. But Oskar also had days when he's very sad, or as he puts it, he has "heavy boots." His father died in the World Trade Towers on 9/11, and Oskar is keeping a secret from his mother and grandmother about one of his memories of that day. Months after the tragedy, Oskar finds a key among his father's things in an envelope marked "Black." He's instantly convinced that if he can find whatever the key opens, he will find something wonderful. He decides its his mission to visit every person in New York City with the last name of Black to see if they know what the key opens.

So begins "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," by Jonathan Safran Foer. This is a novel for people who don't mind serious topics, but also enjoy a sense of the fantastic. Foer likes to throw in things that make a reader think, "That couldn't really happen, could it?" Perspectives shift -- sometimes Oskars' grandparents tell the story. The author also experiments with typography. One character literally circles words in the book in red, for example, and we see the red circles on the page.

Foer's first novel was the critically acclaimed "Everything is Illuminated," a novel about an author named Jonathan Safran Foer who travels to the Ukraine to find the village where his Jewish relatives lived before they died in the Holocaust. ("Everything is Illuminated" became a film you may remember starring Elijah Wood.)

Foer's work tends to get strong reactions from readers. Some people think of him as a "love him or hate him" kind of writer. About his work, Foer himself says, "Books make people less alone. That, before and after everything else, is what books do. They show us that conversations are possible across distances.''

If you like adventurous fiction about important world events, you will like "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," by Jonathan Safran Foer.

Michelle Obama biography

Just to note it, here's a link to a review I wrote about a biography of Michelle Obama. Bottom line:

For researchers and investigators, (the book) is mostly a compendium of the known record, although Mundy gets bonus points for her easy-to-read prose style and for documenting her sources well in above-average end notes. For confirmed Michelle Obama fans or for those who are simply intrigued by a new first lady and would like to know more, Michelle is great night-table reading.

It was interesting writing this because I wanted to make sure I was just talking about the book and not veering off into extraneous commentary on Michelle Obama herself. My other goal was to summarize the book for the people who read reviews so they don't have to read the whole book.

Readers Advisory Class

I've finished all the core courses for library science school and now I'm into eclectic electives. The one I'm in now is awesome: The course title is Adult Services in Libraries, but it might be more accurately described as Reader Advisory. Whatever you call it, it teaches all the ins and outs of recommending books for adult leisure reading. One of the primary assignments is book talks, where the librarian gives a 10-minute talk recommending a particular title. We have to give four book talks in four different categories this semester. We get to pick the books.

Here's are the categories and the books I've selected:

• Notable fiction, i.e. a recent work of fiction that has won a major award. I selected "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," by Jonathan Safran Foer.
• Notable nonfiction, same deal but for nonfiction. I chose "The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals," by Jane Mayer.
• A work of genre fiction from a genre with which we are personally not familiar. I chose "The Tin Roof Blowdown," a Dave Robichaux detective novel, by James Lee Burke.
• A work of notable fiction in translation. I chose "The Book of Chameleons," translated from the Portuguese, by José Eduardo Agualusa.

So far the class is excellent, excellent, excellent. Really interesting. In fact, I should be blogging more stuff from it like theories of reading and my new favorite reading theorist, Louise Rosenblatt. As usual, apologies for my very sporadic posting and I will try to do better soon. Sometimes life feels just too busy.

James Joyce reference

Last week in The New Yorker was a very charming, very sad personal history, Making Toast (subscription required; Dec. 15th issue). It's about a grandfather whose daughter dies, and he helps raise the grandchildren. (There's that death thing again, sorry.) But it also has a James Joyce reference that makes me laugh every time I read it. Here's author Roger Rosenblatt writing about his grandson.

One evening, he points to the shelf to his left and says, "Book." He indicates "The Letters of James Joyce," edited by Stuart Gilbert. It seems an ambitious choice for a twenty-three-month-old boy, but I take down the book and prop it up before us.

"Dear Bubbies," I begin. "I went to the beach today and played in the sand. I also built a castle. I hope you will come play with me soon. Love, James Joyce."

Bubbies seems content, so I "read" another: "Dear Bubbies, Went to the playground today. Tried the slide. It was a little scary. I like the swings better. I can go very high, just like you. Love, James Joyce."

Bubbies turns the pages. I occasionally amuse myself with an invented letter closer to the truth of Joyce's life and personality: "Dear Bubbies, I hate the Catholic Church, and am leaving Ireland forever. Love, James Joyce."

Wordy Shipmates review

Sorry for all the death and morbidity on this blog lately! I guess that's the literary world for you. A friend told me recently that sex and death are the only appropriate topics for great literature (I think she was quoting someone, not sure who). I'll try to scrounge up some sex then ...
Meanwhile, here's a book review I wrote about the Puritans.

A new-to-me Robert Frost poem

My online Yale course on modern poetry continues. Over the weekend, I listened to the two lectures on Robert Frost and learned about a poem of his I wasn't at all familiar with. It is very different from the more familiar "The Road Not Taken" and "Mending Wall." The poem is called "Home Burial," and it's mostly dialogue between a husband and wife who have buried a child. Although really they're having a fight. It's emotional and intense. Some of it just gives me the chills.

It's a long poem, and I won't copy it all here, but you can read it online via this link.

I'll just note that the spacing of the words on the page is important to reading it, and the above link is better than most others on the Internet. But it does differ a little bit from my copy of the poem in the Norton Anthology. (Anthology of American Literature Volume 2 Fifth Edition in my case -- old! -- not the new Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry that's on my Amazon wish list.) Point being if you have a Norton you might want to read "Home Burial" out of the Norton.

Alright, so our Yale teacher Langdon Hammer has this to say about "Home Burial":

The woman, the mother, wishes to--can't help herself from trying to hold on to the dead child, and she's caught looking behind her as if towards the past, which is also, frankly, a wish to escape her husband who is a frightening force, to escape his will, I think. His will, his force – these are his ways, his resources for responding to death. ...

Well, "Home Burial" is a poem about the limits of work, the inability of the worker to bring a knowable world, a safe world, into being. There is in Frost no God, no transcendental source of guidance or consolation, nothing out there in the world but the material conditions of our circumstances. Over and over again in Frost poems, you see speakers, you see the poet himself, wanting to know; and wanting to know means pressing towards some revelation, towards some sense of the meaning of things, a search for some kind of presence behind the way things are.

The Yale online people are so wonderful, they have posted the transcript of Hammer's lecture online so you can read it all for yourself if you like. I myself prefer to listen to the lectures on my iPod because Langdon Hammer has this wonderfully sonorous voice and his manner is the perfect combination of learned and diffident. Next up: World War I and Imagism.

Twilight and the act of reading

I was tempted to read the Twilight novel series, but I resisted with all my might. There were many things that may have tempted me: It's about vampires, and I love vampires. (Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire is a longtime favorite.) I like to keep my finger on the pulse of the hottest YA. (That's Young Adult fiction for you non-library types.) And it had a strong, Austen-like young heroine.

But no, I said, no. There are four novels and they're all long, potentially sucking me in for a total of 2000+ pages. I just feel like my reading time is very precious and I have to guard it for the best stuff, and 2,000 pages crosses some mental barrier for me.

Then comes Caitlin Flanagan with a fabulous essay on the series in The Atlantic (which is great magazine seemingly at the top of its game right now). Flanagan apparently loved the Twilight series with its tale of Bella, a high school student, who falls in love with a classmate and finds out he's a vampire. Flanagan writes:

The Twilight series is not based on a true story, of course, but within it is the true story, the original one. Twilight centers on a boy who loves a girl so much that he refuses to defile her, and on a girl who loves him so dearly that she is desperate for him to do just that, even if the wages of the act are expulsion from her family and from everything she has ever known. We haven’t seen that tale in a girls’ book in a very long time. And it’s selling through the roof. ...

Then Flanagan medidates on the act of reading itself:

The salient fact of an adolescent girl’s existence is her need for a secret emotional life—one that she slips into during her sulks and silences, during her endless hours alone in her room, or even just when she’s gazing out the classroom window while all of Modern European History, or the niceties of the passé composé, sluice past her. This means that she is a creature designed for reading in a way no boy or man, or even grown woman, could ever be so exactly designed, because she is a creature whose most elemental psychological needs—to be undisturbed while she works out the big questions of her life, to be hidden from view while still in plain sight, to enter profoundly into the emotional lives of others—are met precisely by the act of reading.

I think this is a really astute observation, and if it's a little bit of an overly broad generalization, it's only by a little bit. I particularly think her description of reading -- "to be undisturbed while she works out the big questions of her life, to be hidden from view while still in plain sight, to enter profoundly into the emotional lives of others" -- holds true for adults as well. Though it reading as an emotional escape is something I'm always on guard against. I don't want to be some zombie escaping reality through books. I then wonder if I should be out traveling the world and having extreme experiences instead of reading. But then I argue with myself -- I have only a moderate fondness for travel, I love the home comforts, and reading is not only about entering the emotional lives of others. Reading is also (at least for me) about entering into language itself in an abstact, metaphysical way that I would personally describe as sacramental.
Now that's getting far afield of Flanagan's essay, but it's the kind of interesting thoughts her essay evokes. If any of this interests you at all, the whole essay is really worth reading. (But I still don't think I'm going to read 2,000+ pages of Twilight.)

A book to give your sister

Over the holiday, I picked up a copy of Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds, one of the great Irish novels of the 20th century.
I can't stop laughing at the blurb on the front cover, from the poet Dylan Thomas:

"This is just the book to give your sister if she's a loud, dirty, boozy girl."

Home review

I'm a little late blogging this, but here's my review of Home, by Marilynne Robinson. 

In Gilead, a sleepy little town in Iowa in 1956, the elderly minister Robert Boughton is dying, cared for by his unmarried adult daughter, Glory.

" 'Home to stay, Glory! Yes!' her father said, and her heart sank," begins Marilynne Robinson's latest novel, Home, which is a finalist for this year's National Book Award for fiction.

Interrupting the quiet procession of the pair's days together is a letter from Jack — the black sheep son and brother gone for 20 years. Now in his 40s, he has yet to live down the bad deeds of his youth: cutting classes, stealing and, most grievously to Boughton, fathering an illegitimate child with a girl he doesn't love. ...

These characters will be familiar to readers of Gilead, Robinson's 2005 Pulitzer Prize winner. Not a sequel nor a prequel, Home eerily chronicles the same events as Gilead, but this time told from the perspective of Glory as she muddles through the drama of her brother's sudden reappearance.

This was a tough review for me to write, because I really loved Gilead, and there were a lot of things I found unsatisfying about Home, more for emotional reasons than easily defined artistic and/or critical reasons. Anyway, read the complete review here.

Sad about smoking

I saw an op-ed piece in The Washington Post recently that said to the effect "Let Barack Obama smoke if he wants to."


(Actual headline: "Let the Guy Smoke. Obama Is Probably Fibbing About Giving Up Cigarettes. That's Okay.")


I used to smoke, a lot. It's a depressing, suicidal addiction. It's not good. When you're smoking, you think it's harmless and fun, but that's the addiction tricking you. That's the nature of addiction.


It made me really sad to see that op-ed -- and not because it's particularly about Obama. I'd say the same thing about anyone.


To me, it's like saying, "Let him kill himself, what's the big deal?"


Having said all that, quitting smoking is one of the most personal decisions a person can make. No one can do it for you, and you're not gonna do it yourself until you're 100 percent mentally committed to doing it.

Nonplussed and bemused, followed by meh.

Add bemused to the list of words -- like nonplussed -- that seem to be morphing before our eyes.

The Boston Globe found several instances of political reporters writing that Barack Obama appeared to be "bemused" in debates. The context seemed to mean he was wryly amused. But bemused acutally means confused or puzzled.

Nonplussed also means confused or puzzled or taken aback -- not "nonchalant" or "unperturbed," as it's often used. (And as this blog has noted before!!)

What does this imply? Some deep-seated, society-wide revulsion to being confused? So much so that we must expunge the notion from the very language? Maybe, but probably not.

In other lexiconic news, RF would like me to note that "Meh" has gained a place in next year's dictionaries. It's an expression of indifference or apathy, supposedly originating with "The Simpsons." Homer asks Bart and Lisa, who are watching TV, if they want to go on a day trip. They say, "Meh," and keep watching TV.

I suspect "meh" was in circulation long before "The Simpsons." It sounds to me like it could be Yiddish or Italian, but that's just a gut feeling. I have no linguistic evidence to proffer.

Yeats and the Wandering Aengus

My life is full of things poetical lately. My car pool partner moved away, so to make the commute go faster, I've been searching out audio educational material. Open Yale Courses offers an online class in Modern Poetry, and I started listening to the lectures on Irish poet William Butler Yeats.
Yale has a pretty impressive set-up, and it's free and on the open Web. You can download video or audio of the lecture along with worksheets and other ancilliary materials. I like it better than the ubiquitous, proprietary, complicated Blackboard, which is the educational software of choice at University of South Florida (where I'm in library school), and many other places.

The first Yeats lecture discussed the poem "The Song of Wandering Aengus," (1899) a new poem to me. Here it is in its entirety.

I WENT out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

The teacher of the Yale course, the marvelously named Langdon Hammer, says this is an example of the early Yeats, and we will see Yeats move toward a different aesthetic as we go forward. So this is all very interesting to me. Make no mistake, I think "Wandering Aengus" is a marvelous poem, whether it's modern, romantic or whatever. I find Yeats fascinating.

I strongly suspect Yeat's Aengus is of Dun Aengus of the Aran Islands, a site we visited on our trip to Ireland last year. "Dun" means "Fort", so Dun Aengus is the Fort of Aengus. It's an ancient cliffside fort that looks out over the Atlantic Ocean. It's kind of hard to show from our photos, but look at this one below. People are lying on their bellies looking over the edge of the cliff because it's just too scary to walk up to the edge. There's no fence or anything to keep you from plunging over the side to your death. This photo was taken by me in August 2007.



I'll have some more thoughts on poetry in upcoming posts ...

For the NYT fans out there.

This is only funny if you're pretty familiar with New York Times columnist Frank Rich ... an actual conversation at my house Sunday night.

Scene: Me and the spouse sitting on the couch reading the NYT. 

Me: "Hey, did you read Frank Rich today? Was it good?"

The Spouse: "Yes, I did. Frank Rich is always good." 

Me: "Hmm. Can you boil down this week's column for me, so I don't have to read it?"

The Spouse: (thinks for a minute ...) "The pundits are all wrong. The administration is all wrong. Only I, Frank Rich, can tell what is really going on."

Too much RSS ...

Do you use an RSS reader, like Google Reader? Do you know what RSS is? Basically, it's a way to scoop up all the postings from your favorite blogs and gather them in a single place. Each blog's new updates are called a feed; you use your reader to subscribe to feeds.

I often get carried away subscribing to too many RSS feeds. When my RSS reader tells me that I have "1000+" unread posts, I know things have gone too far.
So every so often , I just give up and delete all the unread posts and start over. In the stock market, there's a term for when the sellers accept the fact that market has bottomed out and stop waiting for an upsurge: capitulation. It's typically associated with with a horrible bear market. That's what the "mark all posts read" button is. Once, I even deleted all my RSS feeds. That's super-capitulation.

There were dozens and dozens of posts made in the 48 hours after the election. Most of them variations on this theme: "Obama won! What does it mean? What will he do now? Maybe this? Or this? Or how about this?"

I'm not trying to make any kind of political statement here -- this being a strictly nonpartisan blog and all -- but this was mostly low-information junk food. The actual news content was very, very low. Political reporting has become like sports reporting, in that reader interest exceeds new content by a significant margin. Hence the massive proliferation of commentary. In my line of work, I'm more of a "just the facts, ma'am" type.

So I junked all my unread RSS posts -- I capitulated -- and started over again. Deep cleansing breath! Ahhhhh ...

The specter of economic meltdown

When the economy goes south, I turn into a business news ADDICT. We may be in heading for the worst downturn since the Great Depression, so you can imagine what I'm like these days. I'm always looking around for the next good stuff.

My favorite sources:

• National Public Radio's Planet Money blog and podcast. Fun, frightening stuff: It's got a casual, shooting-the-sh*t-over-beers vibe to it, cool music and interviews with global economists.
• A triumvirate of big dailies: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal. These guys rock. I particularly like The New York Times series The Reckoning, and I particularly recommend their story on ostensible wise man Alan Greenspan.
• Slate Magazine's The Big Money. I'm particularly fond of a Depression-era diary they're running, written by a lawyer who lived through it in Youngstown, Ohio. Check it out here and here.
  

When I get scare of what's going to happen in the coming months, I comfort myself with this thought: the life of the mind is pretty cheap. Instead of spending money, I'll stay home and read The Brothers Karamazov.