July 2011

Sometimes, I forget that I’m reading a lot of books at once.  Like Alix Kates Shulman’s To Love What Is, which is  subtitlted “A Marriage Transformed” and blurbed by Oliver Sacks as “an extraordinary and important book.”  Goodness.  It’s a memoir and is about a second marriage between people who were lovers when they were quite young and then re-connected in their 50s.  In their 70s now, the husband has a terrible accident and the wife (Kates Shulman) cares for him.  I am interested in love, and in married love and what happens to it, which is why I picked this one up.  So far, so sad.

Back to The Sportswriter, although I am oh-so-tempted to continue reading John le Carre and nothing but John le Carre for the rest of the summer.  But I want to know what a men’s book might be, so there you have it:  the Sportswriter.  Also, I am listening to an audiobook — on my Kindle, how cool is that? — by John Cabot Zinn, he who tells you how to eat a raisin in the most contemplative of ways.  He is a wonderful person to fall asleep to, although I think you are not supposed to fall asleep when he speaks but to fall into awareness of some kind.  I do not mean to make fun of John Cabot Zinn, but I cannot help it.  Still, I believe that it is important to be aware and to try not to be so crazy, hence the audiobook.

The Honorable Schoolboy, John le Carre.  Wonderful.  Oh.  Honorable is spelled the English way:  honourable.

Tonight, in the bath, I started reading Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter, which seems like men’s fiction to me.  You know what’s interesting?  The first person narrator, the sportswriter, uses exclamation marks.  (I mean, Ford does.)  Not a lot.  But when it happens I find this endearing.  It’s cute.  I never thought I’d say that about the use of an exclamation mark.  I heard Richard Ford speak once (I think it was around the time The Lay of the Land came out).  He’s from the south and has very good manners.  Plus, he’s articulate and interesting, and super smart.  I don’t think Frank Bascombe is exactly the same, but it’s pretty close.

Uncommon Arrangements, Katie Roiphe.  Available at the San Francisco Public Library.  Litlove talked about this yesterday.  I almost ordered it on Amazon, but then realized how much faster and cheaper it would be to walk over to the library and check it out.  Tomorrow, I’ll do just that.

(Not a book — but at least a literate experience, so I include it here.)  The Cherry Orchard.  Chekhov via the National Theater as seen in my own local independent movie theater.  Awful.  It would have been awful even if the translation had not tried so hard to be hip, which was pretty miserable all by itself.  I did not remember, from my earlier experience with this play in college, how often Chekhov has people stand on stage banging on about socialism and workers and capitalism and the past and all kinds of stuff that might be interesting to know about if you had voluntarily encountered it in a book of essays — but not when what you thought was going on was a play.  Nothing playful here.  How can a man who writes such good stories be guilty of writing such a crappy play?

The Seven Sisters, Margaret Drabble. I checked this out from the Berkeley Public Library while I was waiting for a kid to finish his Stage Combat class at the Berkeley Rep. I remember reading The Millstone on the recommendation of a friend who said it was a good example of a successful first person narrative.  The beginning of this is also in the first person — it’s a diary written by a woman in her fifties who’s moved to London after a divorce.  I like it.  I did not like Drabble’s middle period — if that’s what it can be called — which was all about a certain kind of London intellectual circle that I had no interest in and little tolerance for.  Her books seem to be charting her life and this later period is one I find interesting.  In the end, this one was pretty good.  I like it that she wanted to experiment with the first person narrator.  And there were some great passages.  I’m glad she’s not still stuck in that circle of aggressively smart people.

Daughters of the Revolution, Carolyn Cooke.  The second book I’ve received from a publicist that I’ve really liked.  It’s not perfect, but it’s really good, really interesting.  Cooke plays around with narrative structure, time, point of view.  It works beautifully, both as literary experiment and reading experience, with one exception, which does not detract much from the pleasure to be had in this really fine book.  To be reviewed after I finish gluing together bookmarks and booklets.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, John le Carre.  I checked this out from the San Francisco Public Library.  There were nine copies of his latest book (the name of which I cannot remember, but have read 1/2 of) on the shelf.  Now that’s good service.  I’m not through with this yet, but besides thinking he’s very good, I’m struck by the casual dismissal of women, of something misogynistic.  Has this changed in his work?  (After all, Tinker, Tailor was written in the 1970s, wasn’t it?)  We’ll see.

May – June 2011

An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness, Kay Redfield Jamison.  Manic-depressive, psychiatrist, very fine writer, Jamison tells the story of her own experience with this illness, one her father also had, at a time when there  was very little awareness of or useful treatment for it.  Luckily for Jamison, she was a professor of psychiatry at UCLA when she experienced her first descent into madness, and found help — lithium and psychotherapy — that made it possible for her to work, and write about the illness.  More personal than her earlier study of manic depressive illness among creative people (Touched With Fire), but no less intelligent.

In Her Shoes, Jennifer Weiner.  As part of my summer reading program, I checked this out from the South Lake Tahoe Public Library because I am under the impression that this is women’s fiction.   I laughed:  Yes.  I cried:  Yes.   I cringed at the writing:  No.  I learned something new about myself, about life, about people, about how fiction is put together:  No.  Is this a bad book?  No.  Is it a great book?  No.

Snobs, Julian Fellowes.  I can’t decide if I liked it or loathed it, which is a very odd reaction to a book and one I’ve never had before.  It’s a sort of field guide to the British aristocracy.  AnthroFiction.  But wouldn’t that be more an essay?  The characters in this are not fully alive, and the narrator, like Nick what’s his name in Gatsby, observes from a distance.  But the narrator is not as loving as Nick Carraway (that’s his name!) who wasn’t snarky about Gatsby.  The narrator in Snobs is snarky about the people he observes.  Or at least I thought he was.  I loved Downton Abbey.  Maybe that is more his thing.

Food and Loathing: A Lament, Betsy Lerner.  A stunning memoir about addiction and mental illness.  Much more to say about this later.

The Gift of  a Year:  How to Achieve the Most Meaningful, Satisfying, and Pleasurable Year of Your Life, Mira Kirshenbaum.  First of all, I’d like to note that I own two copies of this book.  I thought my first order was cancelled, so I ordered another one.  And now I have two copies of a book that is useless.  It begins like this:

Dear Reader,

We had the Year of the Woman.  Now imagine the Year of YOU.  One year, dedicated to you, to do with what you want.  Okay, you probably can’t take a year OFF — your boss and family wouldn’t like that.  But more and more women are setting aside a special period to get what they need most.

I’m seriously reconsidering my no obscenities (except for s**t and asshole) rule on this blog.  Because Mira is wrong.  I do want to take a year off.  And I want to know what to do when I encounter the inevitable “I don’t like that” reaction.  I want to know what it feels like, how much money you need, whether it was something people ended up regretting.  I want to hear “it changed my life forever” stories.  Or “it sucked.”  Whatever.  I want to hear from people who did something that really took guts.  I did not buy this book to read about people who’ve decided that what they need is to spend an hour a day every other day taking a bath.  That’s not what I need — not even as a metaphor.  To be clear, as goals go, the bath thing isn’t a bad one — and if you want to put yourself first in that particular way, have at it.  In fact, have my copy.  You can even have both. Because Mira knows of what she speaks, is eloquent and gentle about it.  She’s just not speaking to me.  That isn’t her fault — although maybe the title could have been a little clearer.

Also, while I’m at it, I’d like to note that I really hate those blogs written by women who once worked at Martha Stewart or Good Housekeeping who then decide they’re working too hard so they cash in and move to beautiful houses in upstate New York where they garden in solitude and write about it in public because they don’t have kids and never got married and/or have occasional visits from grown children when they aren’t floating around in linen dresses carrying gardening sheers and those long vaguely French wicker baskets in which you gently nestle long stemmed flowers you happen to have grown yourself and know the name of because you have plenty of time to grow them.  F-you, blog ladies with lots of money and lots of time.  F-you.   note to self:  work on envy.

trug (n): the thing you nestle flowers in if after you quit your job at Martha Stewart

Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, Joshua Foer.  I am liking this, and am not finished, because I cannot remember where I put it.

In Zanesville, Jo Ann Beard.  I’m not finished with this one, so this is a placeholder.  So far, it’s hilarious and moving, all at once.  I wish I could write like Jo Ann Beard.

A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan.  Couldn’t get much of a hold on this book, but I’m not giving up.  Still reading….

Caleb’s Crossing, Geraldine Brooks.  Although I do not like books that are written in the voice of someone speaking long ago talk, I read this quickly and with enjoyment.  A lot happened very fast toward the end, after a beautiful and leisurely beginning.  Also, enormous changes in the character occurred without much preparation.  In the end, I liked this, but I don’t think it was that well done, writing, plotting, character-development wise.

French Lessons, Ellen Sussman.  Ellen is a friend from that writing residency I went to a few years ago.  She sold French Lessons while we were at the residency.   Everyone had champagne.  And now it’s coming out in a few weeks.  It’s a wonderful read — pulls you right along, in fact.  I can think of few better ways to spend a Saturday afternoon on the couch in the rain than with this book.

Burning the Days, James Salter. Memoirs by one of the finest writers I know. I’m not finished with this, which is one of the best things about memoir told in the form of a series of essays — you don’t have to hurry and read it all at once. He quotes Dumas in an essay on West Point called “You Must,” “An officer is like a father with greater responsibilities than an ordinary father.” Adds Salter, “The food his men ate, he ate, and only when the last of them slept, exhausted, did he go to sleep himself. His privilege lay in being given these obligations and a harder duty than any of the rest.

The Rights of the Reader, Daniel Pennac. Read out loud to your children and your students, to your loved ones, without expecting anything in return and all will be well.

Call for the Dead, John le Carre. Is this the “breathtakingly ordinary” Smiley’s first appearance? I love him.

A Murder of Quality, John le Carre. “And the front doorbell rang out, like the scream of a woman in an empty house.” Smiley, again, solving a murder, no spies to speak of here.

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, John le Carre. How is it that I’ve never read this? He is so good.