Erica Simmons
I loved the first 50 pages of this book. They were brilliantly sharp and dry and laid out a situation for which a novel would never be written this century: a scandal of entitlement among local clergy in a small town in England. There were no women. (Why is it that I, a modern feminist, am most drawn to novels by the most committed misogynists? Is it their bitterness that I like? Or their complete lack of interest in the traditional love story?) But then it felt like Trollope just lost interest and kept writing the last 150 pages on autopilot. They served more to close out the wonderful opening than as a middle and end of a novel worth reading.
It was fun to read this book, since it is such an icon in the history of journalism and political scandals. But it really isn't very well written. And Woodward and Bernstein kind of come off as irresponsible, career-minded jerks. Of course, that might make the book more honest, but I don't have to like it.
I love George Eliot. I love her intelligent, erudite, incredibly critical, and, yes, pedantic view of the world. And I find that the longer and more pedantic her fiction, the more I like it. If you want to check her out, don't go the lazy route and read the much shorter Silas Marner, because it's just not that good. But Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda are vast, sprawling, and wonderful. This book takes commitment and stamina, but it's worth it for the complex and compelling characters and the astute narratorial asides. The central narrative of Daniel Deronda's spiritual journey is somewhat naive and two-dimensional, but the story of Gwendolyn Harleth and her quashed ambitions is what makes this book so resonant.
This book could have been so good. The subject matter, the chapter headings (“The Upper West Side” for peninsula open space efforts), the photo insets pointed toward a very important, fascinating book on the social history of Bay Area open space and environmental movements. However, in the end, it read like yet another bland environmental history book, with a few exceptions. It's too bad, because it's clear that Watkins could have written something much more interesting. The final chapters on inner city environmental justice campaigns and their relationship with the more genteel green movements were more interesting, though.
Chapter 1: I wasn't expecting to like Wallace Stevens, but so far he has me totally engaged. We'll see how I feel in 600 pages.
After 600 pages: Parts of this book are beautiful, others slow, others problematic. I wavered between wanting to give the book up and being completely captivated. It's a fascinating depiction of Western history, and overall I'm glad I read it.
The following is a true story:
Me, in a San Franscisco bar reading Orientalism.
The blonde girl next to me reading over my shoulder: “So what's Orientalism?”
I explain as best I can in a couple sentences.
Her: “There are so many isms in Asia - like Buddhism and Taoism. You know what book you should read? The Tao of Poo. It's sooo good. It's, like, the perfect way to teach Americans about Eastern Religion.”
Horrified, I look back to my book and take a sip of beer.
Evelyn Waugh is my guilty pleasure. His books are like candy, they are so easy to read. But if they are candy, they are lemon drops coated with arsenic. Waugh's bitter, sarcastic, and completely devastating portraits of humanity warm my heart. His characters destroy each other's lives so casually, and I love it.
In The Loved One, Waugh takes on L.A. British neocolonial snobbery in post-war Southern California, set in a Disneyesque funeral home (actually a “memorial park”) and a much less classy pet cemetery (“The Happier Hunting Ground”): how much better can life be?
I bought this book, because I was enticed by the artwork, and it turns out that is the only real reason to read it. Birk's Dante's Inferno is a modern refashioning of the Inferno with detailed illustrations translating the Dante's Hell into a decaying, commercially saturated, urban wasteland reminiscent of a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles. The cover painting and the engravings inside are beautiful (in that way that Hell and abandoned freeway underpasses can be) and a fun re-interpretation of Gustave Dore's 19th century illustrations. The text, on the other hand, is just lame. With awkward insertions of contemporary figures, such as Bill Clinton, Thabo Mbeki, and Dionne Warwick, and such glowing sentences from Dante's mouth as “I was bummed for him,” Birk's modern translation is an insult to the original. I think this book would have been better if he had just left the text as is. I would not have minded the incongruency between illustration and text as much as I did the mediocre word-smithery. Skim the book for the pictures, but read a more traditional tradition for the Dante.
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and Other Writings
After half a year out of college, I have experienced a prestigious but exploitative internship, a few months of unemployment, and my real induction into the working world (as a government employee). These experiences forced me to confront my own neuroses after years at a high-stress university - my inability to handle free time and cultivate a life outside of work and my fears of being useless. And so it seemed like time to read Weber. I definitely identified with this book more than I would like to. Granted, I had to slog through the really dense section about obscure reformation personalities. (I hadn't heard the name Ulrich Zwingli since that reformation history class I had to take in high school!) But I'm glad I'm read it, and the last 10 pages were heartbreakingly good.
Landscape and Memory is a long book. It is hard not to be impressed by the shear number of pages Simon Schama can put out. And his subject matter - the cultural perception of landscape and its use in national discourses - is one I enjoy. This is an incredibly broad-brush view of the subject, meandering through Lithuanian forests to Bernini's fountains and the gardens at Versaille, then on to Mount Rushmore, to name a small sampling of the locations he grazes. There are wonderful passages in this book. One of his biggest strengths is his incorporation of art criticism into historical narrative, so the 600+ pages are adorned with beautiful paintings and woodcuts. Perhaps an art historian would not be impressed, but I love it.
Like most of Schama's writing, Landscape and Memory is less about furthering a complex, nuanced argument than about taking a leisurely stroll through the things Simon Schama finds interesting. This can be fun if you have a lot of time and a lot of patience. (I read this monster in chunks on the train.) Otherwise, this is a fun book to skim, oogling the pretty pictures as you pass.
White Teeth is a fun, interesting read. Set in London from the 1970's to 2000, this book tracks the interwoven lives of a number of characters, each with their own complicated ethnic and personal histories. Her depictions of the confusions and stresses that different immigrants and their children face are really touching. Zadie Smith also writes beautifully. There were a number of one-liners and hilariously bitter exchanges that made me laugh throughout.