Reading Roundup Jan - March 2014

Me Before You by Jojo Moyes( 3 stars) 

There is a youngish man, formerly adventurous and successful and handsome, who is in a terrible accident and is now confined to a wheelchair. He needs a caregiver. There is a young woman who takes the job, whose unusual beauty and quirky personality are generally unappreciated. Can anyone guess what happens next?! This book was painfully predictable to me for about half the way through, then somewhat rescued itself as it turns out to not only be about their relationship, but what it means to have a meaningful life, etc. 

The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (2 stars) 

Sadly this book didn't work for me on any level. It is beloved and famous, however, and I've spent quite a bit of time today reading others' reactions trying to figure out what I missed. I'm still mystified. Things people loved I found just the opposite. People found Augie dynamic, I found him mysteriously and irritatingly passive. People found the endlessly rotating cast of characters that surround him authentic and real, I found them tediously described yet one dimensional. People found his language soaring and magical, I found it incredibly weighed down and un-evocative. I didn't laugh or find it insightful or revealing or clever or gripping. From the start I wondered when I was going to start caring about what happened to Augie, and it turns out, for me: never. And good thing, because at the end pretty much the same thing is happening to him as happened all along: he finds himself in some situation doing something with some woman along, but it probably won't last and then he'll do something else.

 I missed the greatness of the book, but it was published in 1953 I could see its influence in many late 20th century novels I've read, so there is that. Unfortunately, the things I recognized were often the things I disliked most about other books, so. There is the post-war scene of young Americans behaving badly in Europe (Hemingway). The journeying, seeking (but only in the most superficial, annoying, immature way) soul that travels only through weird corners of fringe society (Delillo). The sprawling 700+ page Great American Novel that seems to encompass nothing about America that I recognize as worth memorializing, sort of a Big Reveal of the scam of the American Dream (Roth, Updike, Franzen, Wallace to an extent). But the thing it seems to most foreshadow and that I find most inexplicable or at least most noteworthy is the pretext of a book to engage with the deep questions of life - why am I here, what does it mean to be an individual, where is the meaning in life - and to engage these questions by way of painting an absolutely masterful, exquisite picture of how entirely modernity fails to answer those questions and how completely alienating modern secular society is, how soul-numbing and harsh and inadequate it is to the yearnings of the human soul, and to paint this picture over hundreds of pages of journeying and drinking and failed human connection. The authors clearly spend years and careers and lifetimes pondering and observing these things. And yet it does not seem to occur to one of them that perhaps the Old Fashioned Things - religion, settling down, sexual discipline and restraint - might be worth considering. I don't know.

Anyway, I found this exceedingly tedious. It was like reading an extended memoir of a stereotypical Millenial who is so sure they are special and have some calling that they are unable to commit enough to do anything substantial in their life. So there is that prescience, too. But a Facebook feed is so much faster to read than this.

Djibouti by Elmore Leonard (2 stars)

Crime isn't really my genre and this is the only Elmore Leonard book I've read so take this for what it's worth, but I didn't much like it. The suspense didn't really build for me and in the meantime there was too much lewdness and killing, like sticking a gun in someone's mouth and pulling the trigger kind of up close killing. I felt a bit prudish, but I didn't enjoy the ride, and enjoying the ride is really the whole point of a book like this.

 Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris (4 stars)

So, so funny. The essays about his misadventures in guitar lessons and his brother The Rooster were my favorite. He does a marvelous job of walking the line between irreverence and tenderness, the Rooster essay being a perfect example of that line to me. (Note: Sedaris is a very openly gay man and there is plenty of profanity in the book, so the line might be far from where some of my friends are comfortable.)

The Orchardist by Amanda Coplin (4 stars)

I thought this book was gorgeous. It is quiet and moves slowly but significantly. The landscapes were beautiful, the characters sparsely but truly there. Things happen, but the consequences in the characters' hearts are what the book is really about. And what the characters are imperfectly yearning towards - love and connection and redemption and safety and resolution to deep hurts. What is left at the end of much struggle and loss and misguided heroics is a beautiful, hopeful testament to the best efforts of good people. 

Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness by Susannah Cahalan (3 stars)

This is a fascinating and harrowing story of a perfectly healthy, vibrant young woman descending suddenly into complete madness and - amazingly -back out in the matter of a few months. The delicate balance our brains and bodies maintain is so miraculous; it is very unsettling to see how easily things can go terribly wrong. The author is incredibly fortunate that three short years before her illness a researcher had discovered the rare autoimmune disease that was attacking her brain and they were able to diagnose and treat her, or else she would have been either permanently disabled or dead.

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson (4 stars)

A funny, insightful, delightful book, a memoir of Bryson's childhood growing up in Iowa in the 1950s. He was born in the same year as my parents, so it was a very interesting window into the world they grew up in, a world where a refrigerator was a cause for celebration and mild showing off, where children ran free and wild all day long, where people gathered to watch nuclear tests in the desert, and a world which by the end of the decade seemed irrevocably set onto the path of hyper consumerism and military obsession in which we find ourselves now.

Bryson is especially wistful (and who is not wistful about one's childhood?) about the loss of a world in which places were unique, where Des Moine had different restaurants and stores and movie theaters than, say, a place in California. Once that is lost, there is no getting it back. It made me think about what in our world today is undervalued and irreplaceable, and I thought about open spaces, both in our cities and communities and on a larger scale with national parks and forests.

If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home by Lucy Worsley (3 stars)

I found this book a bit boring even though I kept telling myself it was fascinating stuff. Something I had no idea about but did find really interesting was that kings would travel around to different castles to be visible to and in touch with his people in different parts of the kingdom (and also because the moats would start to fill up with sewage after a while), and they would bring essentially all their furnishings and furniture with them from castle to castle. Like, the king's bed was cleverly engineered to collapse for easy transport. Tapestries were also (relatively) easily portable, amongst their other virtues. But there wasn't a whole lot of furniture in those castles.

And the chapter about childbirth through the ages was predictably maddening and infuriating, how men who pretty much had no clue whatsoever about childbirth stormed into the field and displaced experienced midwives and made vulnerable women do completely nonsensical, counterproductive, dangerous things for a hundred years or so because they were men and said so.

Also, apparently the smell of food was super gross to people for a long time so they kept their kitchens outdoors whenever possible. This seems strange to me; cooking food smells super good to us today. Either it really is just a cultural thing or they ate mostly gross rotting food, I don't know. Incidentally, they were totally fixated on not eating any roughage or raw things, so they would cook carrots for at least four hours or so and salads were totally not a thing. Also, fruit was not popular and peasants could just pick fruit from royal land for free because no one wanted it, while you would literally get both your eyes gouged out for poaching a deer. Seems that hard stools were not the problem of their day.

Also, I learned about the very unpleasant Great Stink of 1858, in which the entire city of London and its environs smelled so horrendously of sewage that even the House of Lords smelled awful enough that they finally decided to spend the money on a sewage system that was a wonder of engineering and is in part still used today. The people had good reason to avoid bathing for hundreds of years, because available water was pretty much untreated sewage. Anyway, there were some interesting things in the book. But hooray for living today!

In the Freud Archives by Janet Malcolm (4 stars)

Well, I opened up a book about an academic struggle over who got control of the archives containing Sigmund Freud's papers, and I could hardly put it down. Is that as surprising to you as it is to me? I don't care a whole lot about Freud and petty academic disputes are generally really awful, but this book was just riveting. I absolutely, honestly can't wait to read Malcolm's other books about things I don't really care about either. I can't even remember where I heard her name awhile ago as some master of nonfiction writing, but I wrote it down and finally got around to reading her. Indeed, she is masterful. The book is an expanded New Yorker article, and it does read like a long magazine article. The people are fascinating and Malcolm's telling of the story is perfectly paced and insightful. Also, Freud was an exceedingly strange fellow.

Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks (3 stars)

Everyone loves Geraldine Brooks, but I think I just have to accept that I don't, although I liked this book a lot more than others of hers that I have read. Mostly, it is just amazing to put people, even fictional ones, in place of the numbers when we read things like two thirds of a small town died within one year from the plague. I mean, it is horrifying, but easier to think of in terms of numbers instead of people. Brooks does a really good job of humanizing the experience of it. There were times, however, when the characters seemed a little too modern to me. In particular, and this is kind of a tiny spoiler although pretty evident from the first chapter of the book, in the 1600s in Europe, if someone survived something really horrendous and unfair, was it even a possibility for them to conclude that God does not exist? Was that even in the realm of things that they might consider? Today it is common, obviously, but then? Also, the last chapter was just too much for me; it went from a quiet chronicle of suffering into a crazy soap opera in like twenty pages. But I did enjoy the book for the most part.

Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell (4 stars)

Incredibly sweet book! It is about a high school romance between misfits, but I kind of think its target demographic is more people my age. It takes place in 1986 and just has so many awesome references to that time. The Super Mario Bros. infinity turtle. Walkmen. The awesome opening to Love Will Tear Us Apart. The debate over and misunderstanding of lyrics pre-google, like does Morrissey say "I'm the sun/and the air" or "I'm the son/and the heir"? I was about seven years behind Eleanor and Park time wise and was surprised by how much of the music, which was an important sidenote to their relationship, I had listened to; I didn't realize I listened to such old stuff. Anyway, the story is super sweet and surprisingly substantial. At one point early in the book there is a discussion about Romeo and Juliet and why people still love the play and Eleanor says because adults like to remember what it is like to first fall in love. Indeed.

The Circle by Dave Eggers (3 stars)  

In the very near future, like so near it is practically already here, there are big, very rich technology companies staffed by all the best and brightest young people mining all the personal data that everyone is super thrilled to post online. Also, if you just drink a green smoothie with some fancy technology in it, suddenly all your health info can be tracked and shared too. One just gets the feeling that this isn't going to end well. So... why do we do it? That is the interesting question Eggers poses in his book, and it explores it in a kind of interesting story.

The problem is that things are just too over the top - people are just unrelentingly thrilled about all the increasingly creepy ways this company is progressively stripping away every semblance of privacy and autonomy, and the main character Mae is just too easily subsumed into the unthinking monster. Over the top stuff can work as a literary device, but it just gets in the way when thinking about serious current issues like privacy in the age of Big Data. The conspiracy folks can be annoying sometimes, but it's a good thing we've got them because this sort of thing is real and scary and we've got to find real ways to be sure that no one decides to be evil after all.

The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm (3 stars)

Here Malcolm explores the work of journalism and starts her book with the famous (apparently, in some circles) statement, "Every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible." She covers the libel suit an author, McGinnis, is defending himself against for having written a book about a murder trial. McGinnis gave the convicted murderer MacDonald every indication for years verbally and through letters that he thought MacDonald was innocent to keep him talking, only to publish a book representing MacDonald as a psychopathic killer. MacDonald was completely blindsided and resented the deception, and was serving life in prison so had nothing better to do other than sue him. He won the case. Malcolm, not incidentally, was herself sued by the main character in her book In the Freud Archives, which case drug on for more than a decade and even went before the Supreme Court, giving her plenty of time and motivation to consider the question of the journalist/subject relationship, both the responsibility of the journalist to the subject as well as the apparently unnerving willingness of most every subject to reveal themselves to a journalist. There is an almost pathological desire in most people to have their story told that makes them trust that the journalist is going to tell their story, when of course the journalist is going to tell whatever story the journalist wishes, often a devastating surprise to the subject. It is a cynical reality.

It reminded me of Rebecca Skloot's book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, in which the relationship between the subject and journalist was one of the most intriguing parts of the story. Lack's descendants were poor, uneducated, and vulnerable, seemingly sitting ducks for the sort of exploitative journalism Malcolm seems to find inevitable. And yet. Deborah did not trust Skloot. The whole premise of the book is how science had taken her mother's cells and used them however they pleased; she knew to her bones that educated white people were more than willing to use someone like her however they found convenient. Her reluctance, and the change I believe she demanded and created in Skloot as a journalist, was the best part of the book and adds an interesting perspective to Malcolm's position.