Free thinkers

I just finished tearing my way ravenously through A.S. Byatt’s latest novel, The Children’s Book. There was so much stuff in it that I’m still thinking about a lot of it and how it fits together. It’s about Victorian and Edwardian England, artists and how what they do affects other people, the idea of “having” children and what that means, and the whole idea of progressiveness and free thinking –the way it sometimes leads to absolutely nothing, its unintended effects. Take “free love” in an era without widespread access to birth control. Guess who bears most of those consequences? (I’ll take “women” for $400, Alex.) Anyway, I raced through the end, as I often do, and was disappointed (as I often am; see my last post). Part of that disappointment, though, I think, comes from how realistic Byatt’s characters are. They make decisions based on circumstances, whim, pragmatism; they die suddenly; they don’t think about how their actions affect others.

Well, I’m done reading it now. It’s received a lot of critical praise, and I think that’s warranted. Now, however, I’m ready for something completely different. This is how I tend to read. I don’t go on “kicks” where I read a lot of the same kind of thing. I just finished an exhaustively researched and detailed historical novel by a British woman, so what’s next? Eldridge Cleaver’s 1968 memoir Soul on Ice (sure to be unsettling in many ways), alternated with Molly Peacock’s book of poems Take Heart. Then on, perhaps, to my long list of “Books to Check Out”....

Endings

I never had the desire to read Alice Sebold's novel The Lovely Bones when it was first published. I knew it involved the rape and murder of a teenage girl, and I thought: No thanks! Not right now. But the book entered my consciousness again because there's a film adaptation coming out soon (which I've heard is pretty awful). I was in a bookstore in California last week and started flipping through it, and I found myself immediately absorbed, in a way I haven't been absorbed in a book in a while. So when I got back to the East Coast, I checked it out from the library and finished it in about three days. It's very well-written. The scene where the main character is killed, narrated by her, is particularly haunting. And though a lot of the book takes place in "heaven," there's no syrupy morality or religion to be found. I appreciated that there were few "justice being served" moments or big revelations for the reasons behind both horrible and wonderful events. The events just unfolded, sometimes as a result of a person's will, and sometimes against his or her will.

The trajectory of finishing the book was very familiar - after being very engaged for most of it, I didn't like the book's climax, and found the last chapter or so unsatisfying. This happens to me a lot, and I'm not sure whether it's due to each individual novel, or my own propensity to rush to the end because I'm so involved and want to find out what happens. Or - I suppose there's a third possibility, that the end of a novel will almost always be disappointing, because what I loved was the book, and the book is now over. Which fits sort of nicely into the themes of The Lovely Bones, in fact. Though the dead character is still conscious and observant, nothing, she says, compares to the feeling of actually being alive.

Progenitors

Sorry, again, for the long gap. I've been taking a bit of a reading break to concentrate on another project...one I can't talk about just now.

Anyway, the last book I read was The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. My first (and only, aside from a brief linguistic analysis in college) encounter with Hemingway was A Farewell to Arms, which I read as a junior in high school. I had very little use for the simplistic style and the macho factor; I much preferred Fitzgerald and Faulkner. Recently, though, Michelle convinced me to give him another chance, that this was his most readable novel. And I did like most of it, though I struggled to get through the bullfighting scenes. And the drinking! My God, the drinking! If I put away four bottles of wine in one meal, I'd probably make bad decisions, too. Actually, I'd probably be unconscious.

More than that, though, I could see clearly (much more than being told, or in high school) the influence Hemingway had on subsequent novelists. I can appreciate that. It's similar to how I feel about the Pixies. I never really listened to their music; I just knew of and about them. And I'm going to see them play their album Doolittle this Friday, in their hometown, Boston. I realize this is a big deal. Like Hemingway, I appreciate and recognize their influence. But listening to them, and reading Hemingway, feels a bit more like conscious self-education than pure enjoyment. (Though maybe that's good for me.) Does that say something about my generation or my personality - that I like the derivative more than the original? I don't know.

Numbers

I was just thinking about two quantities: the number of posts I've made on this blog in the past few months, and the number of books I've read in the same time period. I've read at a steadier clip than I have in a while (though I suspect I might have missed recording a few in the August-September area). This might have something to do with the number of nonfiction books in the mix. Not only do they whiz along a little faster than Pale Fire or the entire Lowell-Bishop correspondence, but they tend to have large sections of endnotes. I'm talking about Anne Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down and Dave Eggers' Zeitoun (not strictly nonfiction, but based on a real story).

The thing that struck me about both of these stories was the profound effect misunderstanding can have. In Fadiman's book, there's a total misunderstanding between doctors and patients, which leads to an outcome that neither group finds ideal. (Interesting to read in light of the current health care situation; this was written in the '90s about events in the '80s). In Eggers' book, it's the paranoia and blinders in an emergency situation - the kind of pileup of small misunderstandings that leads to total disaster that I tend to hear on This American Life.

In any case, I recommend both of them. The Fadiman book is a journalistic piece (though the author clearly cared deeply about her subjects) and the Eggers book is a novel that veers close to sentimentality and preachiness, but never gets there.

Well, there are your mini-reviews. Speaking of mini, okay, I'm on Twitter. There, I said it.

Foxy Brainiacs

Well, it has been a long time. That's how it goes at academic libraries in September. I've been busy showing students how to navigate American FactFinder and telling them where the printer is.

But I have been doing other things too. Last night I saw Nick Hornby read from his latest novel Juliet, Naked (about to check it out from the library!) and do a very funny Q&A. It's a week full of shows - the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Girlyman, and Brandi Carlile. I've read Pale Fire (more on that in a later post), and I just finished a really enjoyable book I bought a long time ago at the Friends of the Library bookstore - Only in London by Hanan al-Shaykh. I thought it might be a run-of-the-mill mediocre novel, but the characters were pretty wonderful, and the ending satisfying (something I can't say about most of the books I've read this year).

Anyway, I also wanted to share a very funny synopsis of Dan Brown's new book from Powell's Review-a-Day. The whole review (which was written by Jeff Baker and appeared in The Oregonian) can be found here.

"Does this sound familiar?

World-renowned symbologist and all-around cool guy Robert Langdon is summoned to an Imposing Architectural Landmark, where something Really Yucky has been left in a way only he can recognize. You know, as a clue. Langdon snaps into action, and it isn't long before he's uncovered more clues that lead to a Secret Society full of Famous Dead Guys. There's a Super-Duper Secret, and the fate of the universe is at stake, but thank goodness Langdon has help from a Foxy Brainiac, which he needs because he's up against a Major Freak. Langdon and the Foxy Brainiac race through more Imposing Architectural Landmarks, pausing only to lecture each other about symbols and whatnot, and try to win a Race Against Time against the Major Freak.

That's the plot of Dan Brown's new novel, The Lost Symbol. It's also the plot of his last novel, a little number called The Da Vinci Code. It's also, more or less, the plot of the novel before that, Angels & Demons."

Imagined works of art

Sometimes you see people and you instantly know who you would cast to play them in the movie of their life. The other day I was at a meeting and as soon as someone started speaking, I had cast this character actor from In and Out and Six Feet Under. (For my part, people have variously suggested Anjelica Huston, Rachel Griffiths, and Tina Fey.) Not that anyone's going to make a movie out of either that professor's life or mine.

Then this morning as I was walking to the bus, I caught a glimpse down a side street of a truck slowly hauling up onto its base a big dumpster that said "BAY STATE" in big clean letters. Then I met the assembled truck as I crossed a different side street. And I just had this feeling that if Robert Lowell were alive and had seen it, he would have used it in a poem perfectly.

Do others do this - imagine good projects for people other than themselves? I just wish I could appropriate some of it for myself.

That's all for today. It's a lull in a very busy week at work, and I'm reading Pale Fire by Nabokov. I don't think I'm going to be able to tell you what I think of it until I'm done. I feel like I need a commentary on the commentary that is the book.

Word of the day (and it's a noun)

Anthimeria: the use of a word as if it were a different part of speech. In other words, verbing nouns and nouning verbs. I was thinking about this recently because I heard "the reveal" one too many times on reality shows and commentary on reality shows. Why is this a thing? I guess the word "revelation" has connotations that reality show producers don't really want to convey. But what's wrong with "unveiling?"

Then, of course, there's "impact" as a verb, which I'm afraid seems here to stay. I understand that language changes and that no amount of prescription can halt large changes, that doesn't mean I have to use it for anything but wisdom teeth.

Other nouned verbs: compile ("I like that photo compile"), fail, spend, ask. I've never heard "ask" a a noun, but apparently it's gaining currency; see this blog entry.

Other verbed nouns: gift (hate this one!), leverage, action, friend, favorite (the last two very 'Web 2.0'), and incent (apparently a back-formation of "incentive").

Here's another take on anthimeria from Daily Writing Tips.