Silly Packing

Last year for Christmas a group of friends banded together to buy me a Kindle. I read incessantly. Starting in April I was backpacking around SE Asia for three months - and yet, in addition to the Kindle I still took at least 10 books. Perhaps I can't be taught.

One Day by David Nicholls

"He had mentioned it in passing, but only as a distraction and alibi. It seemed that as he ambled through his late teens his possibilities had slowly begun to narrow. Certain cool-sounding jobs - heart surgeon, architect - were permanently closed to him now and journalism seemed about to go the same way." Derek

"But at the best of times she feels like a character in a Muriel Spark novel - independent, bookish, sharp-minded, secretly romantic." Emma

The part of this book I liked best was that tiny bits of it were set in Edinburgh and I could totally picture Rankeillor Street (I lived just down the road from there) and Arthur's Seat is somewhere I went hiking up both drunk and hungover (and even sober) and I shopped at the grocery store on Nicolson Street that is mentioned for two straight years. I also liked the British slang - good job you, wahey, etc. But, it's not really enough that a book reminds you that your ex used to say wahey a lot or that it amuses you that Em and Dex sounds a lot like Ant and Dec (annoying TV presenters much like Dexter was in the novel). I didn't like Dexter at all as a character, so it was hard to care much about what happened to him. I did like Emma and occasionally identified with her life quite a bit. All in all, it was okay but would have been a much better read on a beach when I wasn't looking for much in the way of depth.

"These days grief seems like walking on a frozen river; most of the time he feels safe enough, but there is always that danger that he will plunge through." Derek

"'Live every day as if ti's your last', that was the conventional advice, but really, who had the energy for that? What if it rained or you felt a bit glandy? It just wasn't practical. Better by far to simply try and be good and courageous and bold and to make a difference. Not change the world exactly, but the bit around you. Go out there with your passion and your electric typewriter and work hard at... something. Change lives through art maybe. Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Experience new things. Love and be loved, if you ever get the chance."

Emma

Bright-Sided by Barbara Ehenreich

"What would it mean in practice to eliminate all he 'negative people' from one's life? It might be a good move to separate from a chronically carping spouse, but it's not so easy to abandon the whiny toddler, the colicky infant, or the sullen teenager. And at the workplace, while it's probably advisable to detect and terminate those who show sings of become mass killer,s there are other annoying people who might actually have something useful to say: the financial officer who keeps worrying about the bank's subprime mortgage exposure or the auto executive who questions the company's overinvestment in SUVs and trucks. Purge everyone who "brings you down," and you risk being very lonely or, what is worse, cut off from reality. The challenge of family life, or group life of any kind, is to keep gauging the moods of others, accommodating to their insights, and offering comfort when needed.

But in the world of positive thinking other people are not there to be nurtured or to provide unwelcome reality checks. They are there only to nourish, praise, and affirm. Harsh as this dictum sounds, many ordinary people adopt it as their creed, displaying wall plaques or bumper stickers showing the word "Whining" with a cancel sign through hit. There seems to be a massive empathy deficit, which people respond to by withdrawing their won. No one has the time or patience for anyone else's problems."

I loved the first chapter on positive thinking and cancer, but after that I was less impressed. The parts about business were really just a recap of Bait and Switch and the bits about religion and psychology felt a bit repetitive. Still, the main idea, that the emphasis on positive thinking in today's culture has a negative effect overall was a good one.

"Still, surely it is better to obsess about one's chances of success than about the likelihood of hell and damnation, to search one's inner self for strengths rather than sins. The question is why one should be so inwardly preoccupied at all. Why not reach out to others in love and solidarity or peer into the natural world for some glimmer of understanding? Why retreat into anxious introspection when, as Emerson might have said, there is a vast world outside to explore? Why spend so much time working on oneself when there is so much real work to be done?"

My time at RBS was an introduction into forced positive thinking. All that bullshit about people with negative attitudes but high production being "terrorists" in the workplace always pissed me off. Don't show me some stupid show about people happily singing as they work in the Seattle Fish Market and then think that I'm going to put on a happy smile whether I feel it or not. The rah-rah company events that are run like some sort of religious revival meeting merely pissed me off. I may work for you, but I am not you. And that should be okay as an employee.

"In the hands of employers, positive thinking has been transformed into something its nineteenth-century proponents probably never imagined - not an exhortation to get up and get going but a means of social control in the workplace, a goad to perform at ever-higher levels... With 'motivation' as the whip, positive thinking became the hallmark of the compliant employee, and as the conditions of corporate employment worsened in the age of downsizing that bgan in the 1980s, the hand on the whip grew heavier."

"This is the project of science: to pool the rigorous observations of many people into a tentative accounting of the world, which will of course always be subject to revisions arising from fresh observations... There seems to be an evolutionary paradox at work here: human survival in the face of multiple threats depended on our ability to live in groups, but the imperative of maintaining group cohesion can sometimes override realism and common sense, making us hesitate to challenge the consensus or be the bearer of bad news. So, after checking with others, it remains the responsibility of each individual to sift through the received wisdom, insofar as possible, and decide what's worth holding on to. This can require the courage of a Galileo, the iconoclasm of a Darwin or Freud, the diligence of a homicide detective."

"A vigilant realism does not foreclose the pursuit of happiness; in fact, it makes it possible. How can we expect to improve our situation without addressing the actual circumstances we find ourselves in? Positive thinking seeks to convince us that such external factors are incidental compared with one's internal state or attitude or mood...IT's true that subjective factors like determination are critical to survival and that individuals sometimes triumph over nightmarish levels of adversity. But mind does not automatically prevail over matter, and to ignore the role of difficult circumstances - or worse, attribute the to our own thoughts - is to slide toward the depraved smugness Rhonda Byrne expressed when confronted with the tsunami of 2004. Citing the law of attraction, she stated that disasters like tsunamis can happen only to people who are 'on the same frequency as the event.'"

Canyons by Gary Paulsen

"Brendan Cole lived in El Paso, Texas, and each afternoon after school he ran. He did not run from anything and did not run to anything, did not run for track nor did he run to stay in shape and lose weight. He ran to be with himself."

I liked the bits about running.

Subway Stories

Good in Bed, Jennifer Weiner

"The truth is this-I'm all right the way I am. I was all right, all along. I will never be thin, but I will be happy. I will love myself, and my body, for what it can do-because it is strong enough to lift, to walk, to ride a bicycle up a hill, to embrace the people i love and hold them fully, and to nurture new life. I will love myself because I am sturdy. Because I did not-will not-break."

The first time I read this book was my first year in Korea. I had discovered Abby's Book Nook in Itaewon for the first time and Abby herself recommended it. It is pure chick lit - implausible happy ending and all. That said, I loved the storyline about having a premie and I found the narrator easy to relate to. The point of rereading it was to read the sequel, though I'm going to need a chick lit break first.

From the author interview: "... but, of course, there's no new or original way to have your heart broken."

A Mercy, Toni Morrison

My first experiece with Morrison wasn't good - I disliked Beloved and then ended up feeling quite guilty that I didn't like it, so I went into A Mercy very tentatively. Perhaps it was my lower expectations, perhaps it's this time in my life, or perhaps it's just, for me, a better book, but I really enjoyed A Mercy. It explored the numerous ways it really sucked to be a woman in the 1690s, mostly in America, but England is touched on as well, and the numerous kinds of slavery found in the new colonies.


100 Bullshit Jobs, Stanley Bing

Unsurprisingly, it's a fairly bullshit book. In its favour, it's also a very quick read. And some good quotes:

"Coffee leads men to trifle away their time, scald their chops, and spend their money, all for a little, base, thick, nasty, bitter, stinking, nauseous puddle water." The Women's Petition Against Coffee, 1694.

"Times are bad. Children no longer listen to their parents, and everyone is writing a book." Cicero, circa 66 B.C.

"Waiting is painful. Forgetting is painful. But not knowing which to do is the worse kind of suffering." Paulo Coelho

"Before forty eting is beneficial. After forty, drinking." The Talmud

Recent Reads

"I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do."

Phenomenal. I read this back in 8th grade and do not remember even enjoying it, particularly. I'm not sure whether it's just because I'm a bit of a jerk and don't enjoy reading things that I'm told to or whether it takes adulthood and seeing injustices around the world over the past years of travelling, but this book moved me far beyond what I expected.

"I simply want to tell you that there are some men in this world who were born to do our unpleasant jobs for us. Your father's one of them." ... "We're so rarely called upon to be Christians, but when we are, we've got men like Atticus to go for us."

I was almost in tears reading parts of it on the subway. I was also highly impressed with the nine chapter lead up to the main event - not only does it foreshadow the action at the end, it slowly eases you into the life of a young child of the 30s in the South. It's such a materfully written novel.

"Well then, how do you explain why the Cunninghams are different? Mr. Walter can hardly sign his name, I've seen him. we've just been readin' and writin' longer'n they have."



"But his parents stayed together and it made you believe in the sanctity of divorce."

The Family Way, Tony Parsons

This was a reread - I didn't realise by the title, but I have read it before. When I first got into Tony Parsons as an author, I was with my ex and living in Scotland. I was pretty sure I was on my way to marriage and living there permanently.

This quote is about Hong Kong, but sort of expresses how I feel about Seoul - "There was something magical about this place, but what it was felt just beyond her reach. It was a city that was constantly being reinvented, where new dreams pushed aside the old dreams, and everywhere you looked there was land being reclaimed from the harbour, and shining skyscrapers being raised upon it while the soil was still wet."

Maybe that's why I recall liking all of his books quite a bit but I was so unimpressed with this book today. I found the characterization of all women as either baby crazy or cold really bloody annoying. And I wasn't very impressed with a lot of the male characters at all - I don't know that mnay assholes in life, but the book was fairly packed with them. This book really illustrated for me just how much the reader brings to the story, I suppose. but I wish I'd used my subway reading time on better material.

"I bet those Communists can't make a decent cappuccino." ... "A day should be enough, shouldn't it? I mean, how long does it take to see China?" ..."This country, thought Paulo. China. They have got cities of ten million people that we have never even heard of.

A Model World, Michael Chabon

"If you can still see how you could once have loved a person, you are still in love; an extinct love is always wholly incredible."

"Billiard ball trysts with models and waitresses, knocking into them and then spinning off into some other corner of the city."

"Friendship is different in another language; a foreign friend doesn't have to understand what you feel, and I don't expect it. It's enough if he understands what you just said."

Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert T. Kiyosaki

"To live a life dictated by the size of a paycheck is not really a life."

It's a different way to think about money, I suppose, but I can't say that I thought it was incredible. It was so obvious: that the fear of not having money controls you, that more money doesn't solve problems, intelligence does, that you will resent a luxury because of the debt it causes, or that laziness can involve staying busy to avoid something you don't want to do.

The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, Melissa Banks

"Sometimes you're loved because of your weaknesses. What you can't do is sometimes more compelling than what you can."

This is a reread, though it's been absolutely ages since I read it first. I recall when it first came out that it was billed as an American Bridget Jones and how startled I was last time that it wasn't chick lit.

"I tried to understand what Henry had told me. But I worried about that, too. Other people mght not try as hard as I did to understand him. I was always on his side, no matter what. My parents were, too. All he really had to do with us was show up. More had been expected of him as Julia's boyfriend and at that party. More would be expected of him everywhere."

I think it's a really good read - sure, it's mostly about relationships, but not just romantic ones. I liked the blunt narrative voice and the interplay between the narrator and her brother.

"Your mortality is at optimal distance, not up so close that it obscures everything else, but close enough to give you depth perception. Previously, it has taken you weeks, months, or years to discover the meaning of an experience. Now it's instantaneous."

While not a collection of short stories, it's also not exactly a novel, with one story in the middle only loosely related to the others. Worth a read.

"He will say that a modified radical sounds like a Black Panther who has moved to the suburbs and belongs to a food co-op."

"The only relationships I haven't wrecked right away were the ones that wrecked me later."

re buying self help novel "I take my copy up to the counter as furtitively as I would a girdle or vibrator."

"But advertising made my IQ go down; every night I had to work just to get it back up to regular."

Reading, Slowly

Elbow Room, James Alan McPherson

"A black mama birthed you, let you suck her titty, cleaned your dirty drawers, and you still look at us through paper and movie plots."

I started reading this at the same time as The Color of Water and completely preferred it. I loved many of the narrative voices, the title story in particular. The long read time was simply a result of how easy it is to be distracted from any short story collection (for me, anyway.) I had to order it over the Internet from a used book dealer, as it was the Pulitzer Prize winner in the year of my birth and apparently not much read anymore, which I think is a real shame.

"I saw Virginia Frost losing control of her stories. As her belly grew, her recollections began to lose their structure. The richness was still there, but her accounts became more anecdotal than like stores. They lacked clarity and order. She still knew the names, the accents, the personal quirks of individual Indians, Asians, Israelis, but more and more they fragmented into pieces of memory. There was no longer the sense of a personal epic. She no longer existed inside her own stories. They began bordering dangerously on the exotic and nostalgic. At times, telling them, she almost became a performer - one capable of brilliant flashes of recollection that stunned briefly, lived and then were gone. She had inside her an epic adventure, multinational in scope, but the passion needed to give it permanent shape was obviously fading."

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer

"The walls of the shed collapsed one autumn afternoon - "a leaf too many," her father joked - and the next day he made new walls of shelves, so that the books themselves would separate inside from outside. (The new, overhanging roof protected the books from rain, but during the winter the page would freeze together, come spring they let out a sigh.) He made a little salon of the space, carpets, two small couches, eh loved to go out there in the evenings with a glass of whiskey and a pipe, and take down books and look through the wall at the center of the city."

While I liked the book well enough, I was in no rush to finish it and in fact, stopped 40 pages from the end for over a week. The narrative voice reminded me strongly of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime.

"It's easy to be emotional. You can always make a scene. Remember me eight months ago? That was easy." "It didn't sound easy." "It was simple. Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they're nothing." "So what's something?" "Being reliable is something. Being good."

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon was greatly influenced by The Great Gatsby and Goodbye Columbus - in terms of using the outline of a single summer. Gatsby is better and I've yet to read Goodbye Columbus, but I assume it is too.

"I admit I have an ugly fondness for generalizations, so perhaps I may be forgiven when I declare that there is always something weird about a girl who majors in French. She has entered into her course of study, first of all, knowing full well that it can only lead to her becoming a French teacher, a very grim affair, the least of whose evils is poor pay, and the prospect of which should have been sufficient to sent her straight into business or public relations. She has been betrayed into the study of French, heedless of the terrible consequences, by her enchantment with this language, which has ruined more young American women than any other foreign tongue. Second, if her studies were confined simply to grammar and vocabulary, then perhaps the French major would develop no differently from those who study Spanish or German, but the unlucky girl who pursues her studies past the second year comes inevitably and headlong into contact with French literature, potentially one of the most destructive forces known to mankind."

It took me forever to finish this - it's never a good sign when you find the author interview at the end more interesting than the novel itself. I suspect I would have enjoyed it more if I had read it ten years ago.



Body Wars: Making Peace with Women's Bodies, Margo Maine, Ph.D.

While the book was interesting enough to keep me amused on the subway, it didn't introduce anything I hadn't read before. Go read The Beauty Myth instead. Also - don't bloody capitalize things you shouldn't. It's annoying. It talked a lot about how these days the self isn't viewed as a life force or a process, but a product to which we can add value. Most interesting new fact: the Barbie Liberation Organization switched GI Joe and Barbie voice boxes, "Vengeance is mine." "Let's go shopping."

The distorted Barbie

Books, Books, Books

I've totally done this before, but that doesn't mean I can't do it again.



Name a book you have read more than once.
Whenever I'm in a hibernating mood, as I have been the last couple of weeks, I like to reread. It's comforting. I've spent the last couple of days skimming through some vamp porn - for all that I get regularly mocked for my love of the vamp books, I'm not embarrassed to admit that I love them.

I do a lot of rereading at work: both books I read as a child, like Ramona Quimby, or things I read in high school. I have to say, I wasn't very impressed after reading The Catcher in the Rye now that I'm out of my teens, but I loved my reread of Lord of the Flies and 1984.

Has a book ever fundamentally changed the way you see life? If yes, what was it?
Dignity through candor is my new motto and I picked it up from American Nerd by Benjamin Nugent. Payback by Margaret Atwood also gave me some new ideas to mull over. Eat, Pray, Love made a big impression.

How do you choose a book? (by cover design and summary? recommendations? reviews? etc.)
Since I spend most of my book choosing time in used bookstores, I generally scan the shelves fairly quickly and pick up anything by a familiar author or with an interesting title (in which case, blurb and cover do influence me.) I've been sticking with stuff I've heard of lately - when I went to trade in books and pick up an order today, I got Tall, Dark, & Hungry (vamps!), Faster by James Gleick, and three books by Philip Roth: Exit Ghost, Everyman, and Indignation. Interestingly in the link above, I was hugely excited by a book by Roth. I do add books to my Amazon Wishlist based on comments on blogs and from Bust or Bitch reviews - though I seldom purchase directly off it, once I become more familiar with the title and author I am fairly likely to pick it up eventually.

Do you prefer fiction or nonfiction?
Both and usually one of each at the same time.

What's more important in a novel, beautiful writing or a gripping plot?
At least one of the two - both is better. I can quite happily read a book that goes nowhere but reads like fine wine and chocolate, but I also enjoy a good plot and mediocre writing. The writing can't be horrible though, because bad enough writing will pull me out of the plot too often and that I don't enjoy. I do have problems sometimes adjusting to really abrupt changes in tone when switching from novel to novel, so I've been trying to read things in related groups lately.

Most loved/memorable character (character/book)?
Recently, Franny K. Stein. Most recently remembered, Ramona Quimby and Leslie from Bridge to Terabithia. Maud in Possession by A.S. Byatt and Jeanette from Oranges are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson.

Which book(s) can be found on your nightstand at the moment?
Between the nightstand and the bed, I've got a stack of Anita Black vamp books that I picked up used. On the bed (and they've been there for several nights) Lynsay Sands's vamp series. Plus, I'm reading Ramona & Beezus, The First Woman Doctor and a Wrinkle in Time at work and at home, Tall Dark & Hungry, A Year of Living Biblically, Guilty Pleasures, and Losing Confidence: Power, Politics and the Crisis in Canadian Democracy.

What was the last book you've read, and when was it?
At work, The Magic Finger, to which I say "meh" and at home, Payback, which was fabulous.

Have you ever given up on a book halfway in?
Pride and Prejudice I started several times before finishing it. I accidentally stopped reading War and Peace - I was enjoying it and then I went hiking and by the time I returned, I had forgotten too much to keep going without rereading and that just seemed too annoying. I seem to recall not ever finished a Lloyd Alexander novel as a kid. There might be one or two others, but I'm usually too goal oriented not to finish - I even read magazines cover to cover. I've more recently been sidetracked while reading Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - they're still in the bookshelf though, and I'll get them. Oh, and I never did finish The Picture of Dorian Gray which apparently I was reading the last time I did a book meme.

The Optimists

I wouldn't say I loved the Optimists by Andrew Miller, but I found it interesting. It's an oddly visual novel, as the protagonist is a photographer and his sister writes about painters - many of the names I looked up. The photographer was in Rwanda during the genocide and the novel is a story about how he tries to process his experience.


Theodore Gericault, The Raft of the Medusa

There are quite a few references to Greek mythology as well, which I must admit to liking in a novel. When she leaves the mental hospital, Clare refers to three of the nurses as the Three Fates: Clotho, the "spinner" who spun the threads of life with her distaff to bring a being into existence; Lachesis, the apportioner, who decided how much time for life was to be allowed for each person or being, measured the thread of life with her rod and chose a person's destiny after a thread was measured; and Atropos, the "inflexible" or "inevitable" who chose the mechanism of death and ended the life of each mortal by cutting their thread with her "abhorred shears." After swimming in a quarry, she references Lethe, the River of Forgetfulness, and Acheron, River of Woe.

One of my favourite parts was Ray handing out the postcards with good news written on the back of them. Clem, the protagonist, joins in on a trip to help Ray buy a suit for a wedding.

"People do what they can," said Ray. "I find it helps to think of them as slightly better than they are."

Later in the novel, when Clem goes to Brussels with his photographs and interviews a man responsible for the genocide, he also makes postcards of one of his photos and distributes them around the city. Public art like this has always struck me as something I'd love to get involved with, I just don't have the slightest idea of where to start.

Many of the settings were incredibly familiar - I've taken that train ride between London and Edinburgh, through Berwick. I've been to Dundee and down the Arbroath Road. I've been to Brussels. The descriptions of Toronto - Chinatown, Union Station, Yorkdale - call up lots of memories. The product names were also very familiar - like Habitat furniture and Bialetti coffee machines. I loved when he described a library of books "more furniture than literature." The references to Chiang Kai-shek glasses reminded me of my trip to Taiwan, just this time last year for Lunar New Year.



Plus I googled to figure out what the hell a fish kettle is. It's worth a read.


Weegee


Dorothy Lange


Don McCullins


Don McCullins


Capa