Julia

If I think too hard about the fact that this is the first work of fiction I've finished since January, I'll get really sad. Grad school, BAH.

So instead I'll sing Marilynne Robinson's praises. I read “Gilead” in 2007, and some of the same characters from the town of Gilead reappear here, in this retelling of the story of the prodigal son. Robinson has a real knack for writing about faith without being either cheesy or preachy, and gives a simultaneously delicate yet incisive voice to family dynamics–present, past, and our memories of both, even as the present unfolds and the past is dredged up. She is one of those novelists who I will always want to read what she has thought fit to write.

How to describe how I feel about this book...well, it came on a three-day, 30-mile backpacking trip with me. And it is 445 pages long. So, I think the simple fact that I didn't grow to resent the extra weight it added to my pack speaks pretty well of it.

It's a Kiwi book, set on the South Island in the early 80s. Some aspects I really liked; Hulme sprinkles a lot of Maori through the book, plus a glossary, and it's always fun to get a sense of a completely different language. At her best, she has a real knack for capturing the complexity of people (the mute and abused six-year-old Simon, for example, is at once cuddle-worthy and infuriating). At her more amateurish, complexity gives way to moral yuckiness (Simon's abusive father is a sympathetic character some of the time, but just because separating children from their parents isn't always what's best doesn't render the father automatically forgivable).

So, didn't love it, but was certainly interested by it. Read if you're ever tramping (as the Kiwis say) around NZ.

I labelled this one as “feministy,” because I don't think that Stacy Schiff could deny her “let's re-examine Cleopatra's ACTUAL awesomeness as opposed to this hyper-sexualized harpy-witch-seductress-harlot nonsense” angle. Pulitzer Prize-winning past or no, Schiff delivers fluff here. Good fluff, feminist as opposed to misogynistic fluff, but fluff nonetheless. Grad school is starting to ruin me for reading things that aren't in academic journals; after Schiff would state a presumed fact, my internal monologue would often go, “Yes, but how do you KNOW that? What source did you use? I don't want to thumb through the epic notes section in the back, I want to know NOW” (to be clear, I read all the notes, and found them quite worthwhile, it just involved a lot of page turning). All my griping aside, I was glad for the trip back through history, much of which I hadn't actually known in particularly much detail before. Schiff is also blessed with an eye for detail, combined with an ability not to get so enamored with all the jewel-encrusted whatevers in Cleopatra's history that she forgot to tell a good story.

Last of the Alexandria Quartet. I've quoted from the other three, so here's a bit of Clea: “A phrase of Pursewarden's came into my mind as I softly closed the door of the ward. ‘The richest love is that which submits to the arbitration of time.' “

Individually, any of the four is a gem. Altogether, the Quartet is magnificent. I don't love, or even like, Elizabeth Gilbert, but I read a quote of hers a bit ago about listening in a college freshman English class to some dude saying how Harper Lee was a one-hit-wonder. And how ludicrous that is to say about someone who wrote a definitive (perhaps the definitive) novel on racism in America.

I feel similarly about Durrell. I don't care if he wrote another damn word, because the Quartet is a masterpiece. The language is eloquent, the plot more intricate and surprising than I could have anticipated, and the total accomplishment is beautiful. It's hard, perhaps impossible, to summarize four unique novels succinctly, let alone attempt to describe their cohesive whole. But, a treasure!

Third of four in the Alexandria Quartet; review of the Quartet forthcoming. In the meantime, another favorite quote:

“Indeed, now the masters were beginning to find that they were, after all, the servants of the very forces which they had set in play, and that nature is inherently ingovernable. They were soon to be drawn along ways not of their choosing, trapped in a magnetic field, as it were, by the same forces which unwind the tides at the moon's bidding, or propel the glittering forces of salmon up a crowded river–actions curving and swelling into futurity beyond the powers of mortals to harness or divert.”

Second of four in the Alexandria Quartet; review of the Quartet forthcoming. In the meantime, another favorite quote:

“Fact is unstable by its very nature. Narouz once said to me that he loved the desert because there ‘the wind blew out one's footsteps like candle-flames.' So it seems to me does reality. How then can we hunt for the truth?”

I first read this (the first quarter of the Alexandria Quartet) the summer after graduating from high school. Apparently I wasn't ready for it yet–I loved the language, but didn't start the other three novels in the series.

Apparently the time is right. Loved, loved, loved this.

I'm currently on the third novel now, and will review the whole quartet when I'm finished. In the meantime, a favorite quote from this novel:

“I suppose we writers are cruel people. The dead do not care. It is the living who might be spared if we could quarry the message which lies buried in the heart of all human experience.”

Once in a while, I am vaguely amused after finishing a book to find that the description on the back cover actually did the novel justice. In this case, someone described “Blindness” as “a magnificent parable of loss and disorientation and a vivid evocation of the horrors of the twentieth century.” Indeed. Now, normally I am not one to shy away from the depressing. I fall more into the “bring it on” camp. Literature is about life, and life is frequently tragic. Tolstoy, happy families, blah blah. That said, SWEET JESUS. A glimmer of hope doesn't appear until the last five pages, but Saramago spent the previous 300+ pages doing a pretty damn fine job convincing me that even when there is goodness in the world, we squander it. And I'm an optimist! Retrospectively, I am glad that I read this, and appreciate the challenges that reading it entailed. However, Nobel prize be damned, I'm going to need some literary pep in my life before I attempt to digest any more of his work.

Liked it. Didn't love it. But quick and deft and a little bit (occasionally a lot bit) sappy, which sometimes is exactly what I want to read.

Ugh. Embarrassing!

But I was really stressed out all week, and realized that this schlocky gem was sitting on my bookshelf, as yet unread (I bought it just before a transatlantic flight, paranoid that my half-finished reading material would be finished too quickly). And Dan Brown is nothing if not a frothy distraction.

You know, the usual: nice art historical detail, questionable nonsense about science, a hackneyed and vaguely misogynistic love story, and a whole boatload of suspense that kept me reading despite the other shit.

Fun fact about the author: Lisa is a faculty member in my department, and in addition to being a ridiculously prolific researcher, she is an outstanding baker. (At high altitudes, no less!). This includes everything from whatever her grad students request as their special birthday treat to transgender ginger people before winter break.

Back to the book: fantastic. The moral of the story is that for decades, researchers treated a large segment of women as “noise” in their sexuality work: the women who identified as bisexual, the women who changed their self-identified orientation, the women who identified in a way that didn't match their behavior, etc. They didn't fit in neat boxes. Lisa, through a 10-year+ study of 100 such women, argues that these women don't fit in neat boxes because our boxes are a combination of male-centered theories about sexuality, and reductive notions about what orientation really means. In fact, the better and more sensitive research shows that such women are actually far more “normal” than we ever anticipated, and that female sexuality is quite nuanced, and still not well-understood.

One of the things that I think she handles most deftly is the inconvenient fact that more complicated understandings of sexuality generally do not lend themselves to easy advocacy for same-sex civil rights in this intolerant cultural climate. Acknowledging that sexual orientation, especially for women, involves a very complex interplay of genetic and environmental factors that span the entirety of women's lives means we can't necessarily continue to argue with statements like “Lesbians were born that way.” But Lisa points out, I think quite rightly so, that failing to do the necessary research to better understand how women develop their sexual identities is, in the end, far worse.

Her research is impeccable, and it's a real treat to get to hear the stories of many of the women she has followed, and is continuing to follow. Read if you're in the mood for something equally educational & fascinating.

So I feel like I'm committing literary sacrilege, but the stars say it all...liked it, didn't love it, and feel like I was supposed to. At times, Marquez did totally blow me away. But other times, I felt this sneaking suspicion that something had been lost in translation. Definitely glad I read it, though, and feel like I should give it a re-read at some point to reevaluate.

Wow. Read this in one day (today, actually). I'm intrigued how I picked it up after another big prize winner, “Love in the Time of Cholera,” and felt that Strout accomplished for me what I kept wishing Marquez had–written a book I literally could not put down. Not because the plot is so gripping, because it's purposefully not. The novel is full of a large cast of characters, though, all of whom at some point briefly glimpse the truth that a lot of the terrible things people do are really just because we're all lonely, but who then lose their grip on that truth in the muck of day-to-day living: from being on the causing and receiving ends of that loneliness. An excellent book to read in order to remember that everyone deserves empathy.

Dear Toni Morrison–

“Beloved” is still my favorite. But its status as a close contender means it's great enough to merit a resounding “Fuck yeah.”

Love,
julia

The only reason I'm not giving this book more stars is that straight-up evolutionary theory is not, in my opinion, the most scintillating thing to read ever. That said, Wrangham has written an excellent and provocative book. Basically, his (apparently radical, although I don't know enough mainstream evolutionary theory to know) theory is that learning to cook, thereby getting more nutritional value out of food for a lowered digestive cost, is what spurred the evolutionary churning that made humans out of apes. He employs tons of evidence, all fascinating. There are a lot of interesting side stories to this: how raw food diets are bullshit, because the energy costs of digesting that stuff alone are so high, how nutritional science doesn't actually give us accurate calorie counts because of how complicated our digestive processes are, and finally (I think most importantly), how cooking caused patriarchy:

“The idea that cooking led to our pair-bonds suggests a worldwide irony. Cooking brought huge nutritional benefits. But for women, the adoption of cooking has also led to a major increase in their vulnerability to male authority. Men were the greater beneficiaries. Cooking freed women's time and fed their children, but it also trapped women into a newly subservient role enforced by male-dominated culture. Cooking created and perpetuated a novel system of male cultural superiority. It is not a pretty picture.”

No kidding. Fuck that noise!

Lord, can that man footnote. I really enjoyed reading this book, but it was one of those books that didn't blow my mind–the idea of creating more local and more sustainable communities and economies (food and otherwise) is something I've been a fan of for a while. I get the sense that the type of people who might buy this book are the choir McKibben is preaching to. Which is a shame, since I think he's pretty even-handed in his presentation of facts, even for a crazy commie liberal. But if you're a commie liberal too, of whatever level of sanity, I'd recommend it for a fun read that is well-researched, to boot.

Mmmm, wow. The same wonderful friend who gave me “Autobiography of Red” tipped me off to poet James Galvin's novel-length effort. Although effort is probably the wrong word, as it implies to me that perhaps the effort wasn't successful, where instead, “The Meadow” is partially fictional, fully poetic, and totally wonderful. I read it with Edward Abbey in mind–Galvin chronicles the lives of several generations of farmers on a singular meadow on the Wyoming-Colorado border, and he also earns himself a spot (in my mind, at least), in the handful of writers who really capture this part of the country I now find myself living in. Galvin's pace is slow, and a hasty reader could be fooled into thinking nothing's going on. Instead, I think the real beauty of the book is how reverently Galvin captures the spirit of his friends and neighbors–their strength and willingness to make the best of the everydayness of life.

Hmm. This book was okay. Which I really feel like is damning with faint praise when it comes from a reader like me, who has a high tolerance for the type of “higher brow” chick lit that gets sold on the front table of airport bookstores. There's the potential for an interesting plot, but that really gets bungled by the fact that Edwards' characters all turn out to be martyrs, and not even martyrs who are all that different from one another. And I guess I don't really believe in martyrs who don't have martyr complexes, so I ended up not feeling a ton (or a tiny bit) of sympathy for the pathos they all endure. There were parts that were compelling, but whenever I finish a book mostly out of obligation (and the desperate, irrational hope that things will turn awesome in the last 100 pages), I feel like that's a bad sign. I guess that means I have a book-finishing-martyr-complex.

Wow. Summertime. Right after graduating from college. Chabon deftly captures the uncertainty, hope, sense of rootlessness, messy love affairs and the rapid alternations between feeling like summer is going to laze on forever, and the sense of urgency about wanting something exciting & earth-shattering to happen RIGHT. NOW. Plus it's sexy. Sometimes desperate, sometimes tender, but really, really sexy. And, perhaps oddly, the ending reminded me a bit of Brideshead Revisited, one of my most favoritest books of all time. So of course I'm sold.

I felt compelled to finish this because I always feel compelled to finish books, but doubly so when I've borrowed it from a friend. In fairness, there was a point in the middle when I cared about what happened to the characters. But that point was a long time coming. Chalk it up to the economic climate, my general disdain for unhappy people who don't DO anything about being unhappy, or the barometric pressure, but I was bored and uninterested in the beginning. Things did get better, but that had more to do with twists of plot than character development, and by the end, the several characters I did feel invested in were mostly dropped from the arc of the story. Yes, work, life, and love can be complicated when you're a thirtysomething in New York, but I feel like that story has been told before. Better.

Wow. If you want to read about food and romance, fuck “[b:Eat, Pray, Love 19501 Eat, Pray, Love Elizabeth Gilbert http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1269870432s/19501.jpg 3352398],” and get your hands on this book. Ruth Reichl is a gifted writer and incredibly knowledgeable about food, so her writing about food is nothing short of sublime, but what really makes the book fantastic is her unstinting honesty about all the messy parts of her personal life (and keen observations about her friends, family, and coworkers) as she moved professionally from a line cook in Berkeley to the food critic for the LA Times. No pun intended, because it's too apt to be funny–this book is juicy. And there's nothing better than a recipe with a little history to it, so it went right on the shelf with my other cookbooks, and I'm already plotting occasions to try recreate some of the food from her life in mine.

Vibrant. Truly. In a weird way it reminds me of Allende, I think because of Diaz's ability to combine a sweeping & heartbreaking cultural history with the minutia of a heartbreaking personal history–except there's very little cursing in Allende. And no footnotes. Both of which I loved. The narrator, Yunior, has as strong a voice as I've read recently, possibly ever, and the book as a whole is thoroughly, completely modern. Funny, tragic, and beautiful. A must read, even though I'm sure everyone else was ahead of me on getting to this one.

So if you've read anything that Barbara Kingsolver or Michael Pollan have written about food recently (which is quite a bit), you'll find that reading Wendell Berry is like going straight to the source, but about the larger picture of food production, agriculture, communities, society, and life in general. Berry wrote “Unsettling” in 1977, and it is absolutely terrifying and surreal how prescient he was then, and how important what he said still is for us today. Berry is a holistic thinker–interested in interrogating how we define health for ourselves and for our earth, and how really, the two are inextricably linked. “The body,” Berry writes, “cannot be whole alone.”

(I will say that he makes a slightly odd digression mid-book about monogamy & marriage, and I'm just not sure I'm ready to have even the great W.B. tell me not to have not-totally-committed-sex. But obviously that has a lot to do with me.)

I think part of the reason this book resonated so deeply with me was that I had the pleasure earlier this spring of hearing Berry live, right at a critical juncture where I didn't even know that I was dying to hear a southern drawl, but most certainly was. Into his 80s, he is just as thoughtful, funny, and wise. But, mostly, I think Berry is a revolutionary thinker, and “Unsettling” is a revolutionary book, which is a rarity of our times, to say the least.

Oh, Pema. The trick to what she writes about is that it is so easy to understand intellectually, and so incredibly challenging to know emotionally, much less to actually pull off in the mess of day-to-day living. But that's the point, really: to keep trying. To let things be messy (and there's good messy and bad messy) and be in the messiness and know that the messiness isn't what we're supposed to escape from to our real lives, the messiness IS our real lives. Which we're constantly trying to run from. So, as usual, she's given me lots to think about in a few precious pages, and I know it's a book I'll be going back to.

One of my favorite passages:
“People have no respect for impermanence. We take no delight in it; in fact, we despair of it. We regard it as pain. We try to resist it by making things that will last–forever, we say–things that we don't have to wash, things that we don't have to iron. Somehow, in the process of trying to deny that things are always changing, we lose our sense of the sacredness of life. We tend to forget that we are part of the natural scheme of things.”

(Re-read this book - I think for the 3rd time? - five years after this first review. It just gets better, and this is the quote that I'm loving the best these days: “To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.”)

Definitely cute. And some useful tips. But I realllllllly wish it had an index (I know, that's a tall order for a mini coffee table type book), because I have a terrible time remembering what household products to use in what amounts as cleaners (baking soda, vinegar, etc etc etc), and Callard does a good job with that, but now I'll just have to flip back through the damn thing to make a cheat sheet. On recycled paper, natch.