Fullmoonblue

I've committed to the idea of keeping a log here, but haven't yet decided to how organize it. So, for now, a list of some of what I've read so far in 2009...

UPDATES (selected), MARCH 2009:

Beyond Silence (poetry) by Daniel Hoffman
Camus by Conor Cruise O'Brien
The Sultan's Seal (historical fiction) by Jenny White
"Affective Economies" (an article from the journal 'Social Text', Summer 2004) by Sara Ahmed
Warning to the West by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
and the Suez scenes from Indigo Nights by Olivia O'Neill

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Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
The Sexual Life of Catherine M
The Story of O
Sweet Jesus, I Hate Bill O'Reilly
Guilty: Liberal Victims and Their Assault on America by Ann Coulter
The Age of Grief by Jane Smiley
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby
Requiem for New Orleans (poetry) by Mike Sharpe
Babies in Baghdad
Everything You Know is Wrong
Re-takes: Postcoloniality and Foreign Film Languages
Rooms of Our Own by Susan Gubar
Nekropolis
Zade by Heather Reyes
Peppermints in the Parlor
Emily the Strange
The Child in Time by Ian McEwan

As you can see, it's quite a mix. I pick up whatever I can, to help me sleep. (Some titles help; others really don't...)

ETA: will begin to add reviews once I decide on a comfortable format. :)
ETA too: my touchstones are often faulty. :(

A hearty welcome! I look forward to your reviews and where you go next in your reading!

Hi fullmoonblue! Good to see you here. That is definitely an eclectic mix of books!

Hmm...I don't think that The Child in Time or anything by Ann Coulter would help me sleep. ;-)

How did you like The Child in Time? I'm definitely a fan of McEwan's works, and I have this book, but haven't read it yet.

'That is definitely an eclectic mix of books!'

(bows, curtsies)
I promised myself I'd be honest here...

Since you asked -- here are my thoughts on The Child In Time

The first McEwan I read was Atonement a couple of years ago. His prose style really entertained me (so many beautiful words and images!) and the ending surprised me to the point that I decided to read more. So I picked up Amsterdam (not my cup of tea) and On Chesil Beach (loved it) before snagging a BookMooch copy of The Child in Time...

So first, I have to say, I don't think this is a book to be read only once.

Why: The pace and main settings/characters shift pretty distinctly a couple of times over the course of the novel, and the reader who looks for a linear sort of plot development will be disappointed (if not annoyed).

It's not giving anything away to say that a child disappears; that's laid out right on the back cover and happens within the first few pages. So one might expect this to become the driving force behind the plot: who took the kid, where is she, will the parents ever find her again...?

But this is less a detective story than a chronicle of how the somewhat miserable main character watches his life fall apart in the kidnapping's aftermath.

If I did read the book a second time (possibly this summer) I would watch for whether or not McEwan may have snuck in any subtly cohesive plot devices that I missed on the first read. For instance, I wonder if perhaps he interwove gestures toward different stages of grief (eg Stages of Grief) throughout this meandering, somewhat unconventional plot. A device like that might help me understand why and how McEwan chose to include such vastly different (sometimes, but sometimes not connected) characters and scenes: the husband and wife, the parents, the political world, institutionalized school-related settings, a pub lost in time, a treehouse...

During a reread, I would also make a list of the overt questions this book raises about childhood and about loss. Some seem grand (as time passes, where does the past go?) and others are more particular (how is it different to lose a child than to lose an old friend?) Can looking at one's parents differently change your own sense of identity? And what role does the state (or rather the wackos who make up institutional bodies) play in the definition and identity formation of its subjects/citizens/children...?

To sum up, The Child in Time was not, for me, as immediately gratifying as Atonement or On Chesil Beach; those two resist gratifying the reader also, but in less (alternately) 'boring' and 'jarring' ways. But I did enjoy it anyway, especially upon getting to the end and trying to figure out how I felt -- same as I did after finishing Atonement and Chesil. The Child in Time just comes off as more experimental, in my opinion, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

I'd really, really love to know what readers here think of it.

On a whim, I've reread Helene Hanff's 84 Charing Cross Road today.

It's been years since I first picked it up, after seeing the Bancroft/Hopkins film version of course. And it was fun to see which elements stand out to me now, as a result of reading I've done since the first time.

For instance, Frank Doel's nervous but proud and excited references to having bought his first car. Having read Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day recently, I couldn't help but recall Stevens' outing with Lord Darlington's wheels. And then was slightly shocked to realize that Anthony Hopkins played the lead in that film, too...! (Since I've not seen that adaptation all the way through yet, I now know what I'll be looking for next time I visit the local library.)

I was also struck by the sudden disappearance of Cecily Farr, the first member of the shop (besides Frank) to correspond with Hanff. In one letter, there's a reference to how her husband, who's in the military, is stationed in Bahrain. In another, we learn that he's trying to get 'married' housing in Iraq. And then poof, she vanishes. Hanff never does learn what became of her, for the others at Marks & Co. never get any news after she heads to Iraq.

Makes me want to scour Google for the answer to the mystery: what in the world ever happened to Cecily Farr?

Three books read last week:

Albert Camus' American Journals
Iggie's House by Judy Blume, and
The Sun Dancers by Barbara Faith

Read the Judy Blume book to see what the fuss had been about; the story was published in 1970 and explores, through the eyes of a white suburban middle school aged girl, what happens when a Black Family moves into her White Neighborhood.

On a somewhat similar note, Faith's The Sun Dancers caught my eye because it's a mass market paperback romance featuring a white woman swept off her feet by an exotic (ie darker) man. I have a thing about those; hope to eventually write a history of the use of Arab men in paperback romance fiction... but anyway. Faith has written several stories where an Arab sheik sweeping a Western woman off her feet (Desert Song, Flower of the Desert, Desert Man, Beduin Bride) but, in the case of The Sun Dancers, the male hero is Mexican. So I wondered how Faith's representation of a Mexican hero would square with her depictions of Arabs. Took a few notes; may copy them here later.

Finally, Camus. It's late, so the one detail I'll mention now is that he comments on how U.S. customs/immigration agents pestered him for several hours before letting him into the States in 1946.

The problem...? His having written in questionable Communist newspapers.

American Journals sounds very interesting, I'll be ordering it soon! I have Camus at "Combat", a collection of his postwar writings, but haven't read them yet.

You may also be interested in America Day by Day by Simone de Beauvoir, which is one of my favorite travel journals.

7 -- Thanks for recommending it! I will certainly keep an eye open for a copy.

Got another Barbara Faith romance the other day, so it's back to the imaginary Middle East for me with Midnight Man (Silhouette, January 1994). However, since the hero is an American named Mike and the Arab is the bad guy, this one doesn't really count as a 'sheik romance', which is the subgenre I'm most interested in currently.

Anyway. The plot is coming off as a very Not Without My Daughter kind of thing; an American woman marries an Arab guy from a made-up country called 'Jahan' and then, after his psycho tendencies come out and they divorce, he steals away back to his homeland, a place where women can't travel freely and have few rights, et cetera, with their 4 year old son.

Note: the son's name is Tamar... a female name. (But no problem; his mom just calls him Timmie.)

Enter the hero, Mike Brennan, a Green Beret/Delta Force type who runs an extraction service called Command, Inc. (Lovely.) The mother, Jenny Cooper Hurani, convinces him to take her along and off they head to Jahan to retrieve her son.

Note: most of Faith's desert romances feature the same sets of characters who reappear in cameo roles from story to story. In Midnight Man, we get the first (?) (so far as I can tell so far) appearance of Josie McCall and her sheik/later husband, Prince Kumar Ben Ari, from the Silhouette title which would be published six months later, Desert Man (July 1994).

Still reading Midnight Man now; with then reread Desert Man and two of Faith's older titles, Bedouin Bride (1984) and Desert Song (1987).

I've realized that it would might be useful if I came up with a checklist of typical sheik romance plot points and other details, so that I can fill out a sheet as I read and then see at a glance which novels most closely follow the patterns set out in EM Hull's The Sheik (1919).

For starters...

CHECKLIST

Western heroine
Heroine has light-colored hair
Heroine likes horses
Heroine is a virgin
Heroine described as 'boyish'
Heroine described as headstrong or independent
Heroine's independent nature is linked to her nationality
Scene with heroine wearing pants or riding suit
Scene with heroine wearing robe, veil

Scene in which the heroine witnesses stark poverty
Scene in which the heroine feels she wants to 'help' the native population, e.g. via schools, hospitals

Hero is Arab
Hero is half-Arab, half-Western
Hero is not Arab, but the villain is
Hero's nationality is initially unknown
Hero's true nationality is revealed to the heroine
Hero grew up in an Arab country
Hero was educated in the West
Hero spent time in the Middle East while in the military
Hero likes horses
Hero breaks a horse
Hero finds heroine's boyishness arousing
Hero finds heroine's boyish, headstrong behaviors strange or infuriating
Hero described as dark
Hero or his heritage referred to as primitive, barbaric
Hero is proud of his culture, heritage
Hero is proud of his homeland's increasing development or modernization

There is a scene:
-in a luxurious hotel
-in a palace
-at a souk
-at an oasis
-with a sandstorm
-with a Jeep
-with a street demonstration or riot
-with a bombing
-at a desert campsite
-at night under the desert stars
-in a tent

There are:
-bandits
-guns
-knives, swords or sabers
-dancing girls
-camels
-veiled women serving food
-palm trees
-fountains

The author includes Arabic words and phrases
The author uses the word 'Allah'
The author specifies that God and Allah are different deities
The author specifies that God and Allah are the same deity
The heroine hears the call to prayer and finds it moving, strange, mysterious

Oil is mentioned
Oil companies are mentioned
The American (or British) embassy or consulate is mentioned
Political unrest is mentioned
Tribes are mentioned
Oil contracts with Western countries are mentioned
Oil wealth is mentioned
Modernization is mentioned
Segregation of the sexes is mentioned
The heroine meets friendly native women
The heroine meets unfriendly native women
Arab characters beside the hero strike the heroine as chauvinistic
The hero takes the heroine by force
The hero wants to have children
The hero has been previously married
The hero has had many women prior to the heroine
The couple will live in the US, England, etc
The couple will live in the hero's native land

The hero smokes
The hero smokes from a water pipe
The hero drinks alcohol
The hero specifically doesn't drink alcohol
The heroine drinks alcohol
The heroine enjoys native foods, recipes
The heroine doesn't enjoy native foods, recipes

The heroine is abducted by the hero
The heroine is abducted by someone else
The heroine's friend or relative (sister, child) is abducted

The heroine is married to an Arab against her will
The heroine has to pretend that she's married to an Arab as part of a ruse
Arranged marriages are mentioned
Marriage contracts are mentioned
Harems are mentioned
There are concubines or female servants in the present
There were concubines in the past
Women can drive
Women cannot drive

Author includes a reference to:
-the Thousand and One (or Arabian) Nights
-Aladdin
-Ali Baba
-Cleopatra
-the Nile
-the Sahara
-Saudi Arabia or 'Arabia'
-Lawrence of Arabia
-the Persian Gulf
-Desert Storm
-Iraq
-Babylon

---

I will probably add to this list.

---

ETA:

The setting/Arab country is a real one
The Arab country is fictional
The Arab country is fictional, but real countries are mentioned as its neighbors
Heroine is excited to visit an Arab country
Heroine is nervous or upset about traveling to an Arab country
The people are ruled by a king or prince
The people are ruled by a sheik

Likewise, I ought to fashion a sheet of common, hot-button words so that I can record which novels use which and on what page.

Some of these would include:

barbaric
primitive
exotic
chauvinistic
misogynistic
sexist
fundamentalist
Oriental
Eastern
Mohammedan

Also:
vast (esp. in reference to desert)
ornate
opulent
luxurious
ancient
old-fashioned
traditional
tribal
mysterious
strange
unfamiliar
bizarre
Turkish
Persian
Moorish
Egyptian
Nubian

And:
brutal
fearless
unforgiving
ferocious
bestial
cold
hard
crushing
sensual
sensuous
masculine
malicious
jealous
possessive
cruel
conservative
macho
feud/blood feud
native
indigenous
savage/savagery
wild
animal
instinctive
untamed
violent
vicious
arrogant
merciless
scornful
sneer
torture
dominant/dominating
master/masterful/mastery
tyrannical
despotic

A very interesting project, blue (but I have to tell you - Omar Sharif can whisper Arabic in my ear any day!)

Just don't drink his water!

Took a break from the sheiks today to begin the collection Christopher Durang Explains It All For You: Six Plays.

I mooched the book on a whim because I remembered Durang's play Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You from back in high school. It's a darkly hilarious piece featuring a deeply faithful and sadistic nun's dramatic run-in with some of her former students. Very wacky and violent, with a strong nod toward the absurd.

But anyway. Oh my. I had never learned anything about Durang's personal background before today, and his Introduction to Six Plays had me grinning in a big way. (Big as in trying not to laugh aloud, as I was waiting to get my hair cut and didn't want everyone else in the salon to think I was crazy, or to ask about what I was reading. 'Oh, it's just this funny little piece by a playwright who likes to grapple with religion and gender issues, plus I've just started the first play, which involves an abused wife, a drug dealer who's also a pimp and also happens to be her son, and a little boy whose penis just went down a neighbor's garbage disposal; it's hilarious...')

That play, by the way, is called The Nature and Purpose of the Universe (1971).

Parts seemed fairly heavy-handed, though I wonder if that was more a result of my reading it and not seeing it performed. But the play's ending caught my attention most; Durang refers back to the story of Abraham's near filicide, with a twist. I think the best way to sum up the tone of 'Nature and Purpose' comes from one of his later plays, The Marriage of Bette and Boo: "I don't believe that God punishes people for specific things. He punishes people in general for no reason.'

Will definitely at least skim the rest of the collection.

Mother and I had a moment of political dissonance the other day (a local bishop had been making a stink about Notre Dame inviting President Obama to do the commencement speech, which got us onto Obama in general and Guantanamo specifically, and then somehow Catholicism, which led to abortion, and then...)

Anyway.

I ended up digging up my copies of Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance by John Riddle, and the Seven Stories Press/Open Media anthology America's Disappeared: Secret Imprisonment, Detainees, and the War on Terror.

First, Riddle.

pp 20-21: As most of the Greek and Latin church fathers used Jewish scholars' interpretations of the Septuagint when it came to questions about souls and 'when life begins' (see Exodus 21:22), many of them (including St Augustine) made a distinction between 'formed' and 'unformed' fetuses and agreed that it should not be considered homicide or punishable as such if an 'unformed' fetus were intentionally aborted. Gregory of Nissa agreed too, writing that unformed embryos could not even be considered human. (See Gregory's Adversus Macedonianos.)

p 23: Riddle goes back to the Jewish tradition, pointing out that Hebrew religious law upheld the belief that there's a 30-40 day gap between conception and 'quickening', so that a woman couldn't even be rightly considered pregnant during the first 40 days.

Of course, as Riddle explains later, the key concern for most of these church fathers, scholars et cetera, and in Greek and Roman law, was *not* to make stands on abortion and contraception in terms of their religious morality or immorality (or in terms of women at all) but rather to ensure the rights of the fathers/husbands to their heirs. Riddle cites an oration by the Greek parodist Sopater, as well as that well-known Roman, Cicero. He then begins to explore where and when and how the Church's views on abortion began to change, such as illustrated in the ruling of the Roman judge Septimus Severus (AD/CE 193-211) that a woman accused of aborting her estranged husband's child should be punished by exile "for it would appear shameful that she could with impunity deprive her husband of children" (Riddle 63). Even here, Riddle notes, it was still not a question of life being sacred or of protecting the rights of the unborn, but rather of protecting the right of the father.

The church was also concerned with outlawing contraceptives *not* initially because they ended a pregnancy but, like the Romans, because the potions, herbs and ointments used to do so were considered 'witchcraft'. Thus you find plenty of cases against people accused of supplying an herbal/chemical means of abortion (especially if the woman died as a result of an overdose or poisoning or such) but few charges against those who used nonchemical means.

However, by the tail end of the 4th century AD/CE, Roman physicians were beginning to stipulate when abortion was or wasn't religiously (not legally, but expressly religiously) 'fas' or right. The physician Theodorus Priscianus, whose works on gynecology were still being copied and cited in the Middle Ages, stated for instance that it was not 'fas' to abort a fetus...unless the woman was too young or had too small a womb -- an early 'health of the mother' concession. So here we have a well-regarded source on women's health, still popular in the Middle Ages, in which the author provides not only information about how to have an abortion, "but, accompanying it, a moral justification: to save lives" (Riddle 92).

Riddle also finds, in the Middle Ages, numerous examples of church/secular disagreement about whether abortion was right or wrong, acceptable or a crime. Germanic, Allemanian, Bavarian and Ostrogoth law codes began to set specific punishments, from fines to lashes, for women found guilty of abortion or contraception use (109-10). Here too the Catholic church began narrowing down its positions on when the fetus gets a soul and becomes a protected quantity; Riddle cites bishop Caesarius of Arles, Columban, and Martin of Braga on things like the punishment/penance assigned for the sin of homicide by means of witchcraft (again, usually herbs). But even then the punishments were lesser if the abortion happened during the first 40 days. Apparently it was only in the 11th and 12th centuries, according to Riddle, as the church began really exerting its influence over western Europe politically, that the church started to really sharpen its stance. The message was hardly a unified one though; even the musician and abbess Hildegard of Bingen wrote on which herbs were best to 'regulate' a menstrual cycle, and which plants could be used to induce a miscarriage.

To be continued...

>14 Fullmoonblue: interesting, although I'm wondering the purpose of his study. Is it just a religious history of the subject meant for mass consumption or did Riddle hope to influence current religious thinking? I have a difficult time - still - reading this stuff without getting really angry.

#14 - Sounds fascinating. I am interested to hear more.

Will return to Riddle shortly, but first want to save a couple of quotes.

1. From Don Quixote p. 921:

"Tell me, captain, are you a Turk, or a Moor, or a renegade?"
To which the lad replied, also in Spanish:
"I am neither a Turk, nor a Moor, nor a renegade."
"What are you, then?" the Viceroy asked.
"I am a Christian woman," said the lad.

(And the following Scheherezadian twist: "A woman, and a Christian, in those clothes and in such a predicament? That's something sooner to be wondered at than believed." "Please suspend my execution, gentlemen," said the lad. "You haven't much to lose by postponing your revenge for as long as it takes me to tell the story of my life.")

2. From Indigo Nights, a 1977 romance novel by Olivia O'Neill, p.68:

"Was the island they'd passed at sunset a pirate hideout, or a Portuguese adventurers' lair? She sighed: all this beauty and strangeness -- a whole world inviting her to exploration -- and all she was allowed to do was sit in a stifling saloon *sic?* with two elderly women, speaking when spoken to and changing her dress three times a day."

Re: the stifling "saloon"--it would appear she is on a boat. A saloon on a boat is like the living room in a house.

Looking forward to your continuing discussion of Riddle.

Lisa, re #18, thank you! I had been a bit confused. :)

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Avaland, re #15 and the purpose of Riddle's study. The back cover summarizes Riddle's thesis thus: "that the ancient world did indeed possess effective (and safe) contraceptives and abortifacients. He evaluates the scientific merit of these ancient rememdies and discuses why this rich body of knowledge about fertility control...was gradually lost over the course of the Middle Ages."

Whether his intent included calling attention to inaccuracies in current Catholic (and other religious and secular) thinking on these topics isn't addresed overtly, but I find it pretty hard to conceive (pardon the pun) that it wasn't. But I like this book a lot, to the point of wishing my own mother would give it a read, because of Riddle's *extreme* care in focusing his attention on the historical and scholarly, and avoiding any and all contemporary ideological stands, at least that I can see. Instead, he simply reminds his readers in the intro that people today "tend to believe that quandries over birth control are recent, brought on by science and technology. In fact," he writes, our problems and arguments now "are much the same as when Juvenal wrote almost two thousand years ago that 'we have sure-fire contraceptives.' Hundreds of generations have faced many of the same problems that we do" (ix).

Those generations appear to have had far stronger midwife-based and folk medicine traditions, though.

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Okay. Back to where I left off above...

One of the reasons I decided to read this book in the first place was because I was curious to see how abortion and contraception were treated similarly, or differently, by the three monotheistic traditions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Although Riddle's treatment of the latter is rather brief, he does include a (short) chapter covering a few of the best-known Arab physicians of the Middle Ages, such as al-Razi and Ibn Sina, or "Avicenna". Riddle shows that a lot of medieval Muslim thinking was related to earlier precedents (especially Hebrew; e.g. that there's a 40 day period between conception and 'quickening'), but also that the Arab jurists and physicians whose work we still have access to *did* also refer to their contemporary sources and knowledge. They weren't simply translating and passing along older traditions, in other words (Riddle 134).

After that, the book includes some brief chapters at the end covering practices and court cases up to the Renaissance and beyond. In England, for instance, abortion prior to 'quickening' apparently remained legal (though more and more restricted) up to 1803. At that point, a law known as 'Lord Ellenborough's Act' was passed which criminalized abortion entirely (Riddle 158-59). In that case, a man was accused of procuring and administering a 'noxious' substance to a woman who'd been made pregnant by him; at her request, he got her the noxious substance (a mixture of a then well-known folk medicine plus pennyroyal) and she aborted at six months, after which both were brought to trial. Riddle cites the case because of the fascinating legal and medical disagreements it illustrates: first, the prosecution couldn't prove (or even decide!) whether the mixture was merely an emmenagogue (used to stimulate menstruation) or whether it was actually capable of ending a pregnancy. Some witnesses claimed that these were the same thing, but other disagreed. In the end, the prosecution had to drop the 'noxious' substances charge all together and argue -- and they won! -- that the woman had caused her abortion by horseback riding!

All in all, Riddle explains, the bottom line is that people used to have access to natural methods for controlling conception and ending pregnancies but, in modern times, we don't. The modern birth control movement/industry (featuring diaphragms, IUDs, machine-made rather than animal condoms etc) had some part in this, but Riddle asserts that his research shows that the prevalence of folk wisdom was *already* in decline by that point. And in modern times, he notes, it's more common to hear of women dying because they misused natural substances (e.g. three women who took pennyroyal oil incorrectly, one of whom died, in Colorado in 1978) than it is to hear about people using those substances properly and achieving the intended result.

For these reasons, the questions of 1) legality, and 2) access to mass-produced drugs and mechanical devices have become the pressing issues for modern people. "Modern medicine excluded drug controls for conception and pregnancy from its province," Riddle summarizes, "and eventually relegated the folklore regarding such control to small, mostly nonindustrial population groups. Physicians, in part because of a mistaken notion of what the Hippocratic Oath said," he adds (!), "were no longer expected to have such knowledge. The evidence is abundant, however, that the ancients had knowledge of chemical means to control birth. It is intriguing to ponder why so few now know what so many once did" (165).

Took a break for poetry today, skimming through The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry. Adrienne Rich and Louise Gluck always catch my eye, but I also stopped for Charles Simic and, for the first time, Edward Hirsch.

From Rich's "Planetarium" (1968): "I am an instrument in the shape/of a woman trying to translate pulsations/into images for the relief of the body/and the reconstruction of the mind."

One last note about Riddle's Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance...

In an early chapter on documentation of herbal antifertility agents, he mentions that pomegranate skins were mentioned from Hippocratic times and well before (he cites Soranus specifically) as effective if prepared properly. Then he makes this off-hand comment: "Curiously, modern scholars have not made the connection that the pomegranate was the substance that kept the virgin goddess Persephone from being fertile" (26).

I wanted to scribble 'whoa!' in the margin. The idea that Persephone might have been eating pomegranate seeds in the underworld for a reason (and that the amount she ate would have ramifications for the length of seasons, ie the fertility of the world!) stunned me. Don't know about you guys, but I had never, ever heard or read an explanation of why she might have chosen to snack on pomegranate as opposed to any other food. I always just accepted it as some completely arbitrary little detail of the myth... as if myths typically have lots of those. Duh, duh, duh.

Nice little nugget of information there. I had always just thought it one of those little details as well, but it makes sense that it would have a larger significance.

Blue, what a fascinating thread! Hope you don't mind if I lurk...

>21 Fullmoonblue: Great stuff, thanks for sharing it! I was thinking about the change that must have come in the early part of the 20th century when medicine became science (thinking of my own reading about the treatment of consumption/TB here)... I'm not sure where that fits in, but it's what occurred to me while reading the last two paragraphs of #19...

Back briefly to The Child In Time (post #4)...

Came across a good succinct summary in the book A Novel in a Year by Louise Doughty. It's the end I like: "This is why lost incidents are such rich material for fiction. A novel that begins with a character astray in a strange or sinister place is going to have an automatic hook for the reader -- and if you think this is merely a trick for the thriller/ghost/horror market, read Ian McEwan's The Child in Time. His account of a father losing his young daughter in a supermarket is one of the most chilling and compulsive episodes in contemporary fiction, and a great opener for a novel that is a gripping story as well as a meditation on what all of us lose as we become adult" (65).

sounds interesting Blue...will check it out

Finished this week:

The Blinding Absence of Light by Tahar ben Jelloun
Five Years of my Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanemo by Murat Kurnaz
What Remains by Carole Radziwill
The Character of Rain by Amelie Nothomb

Working on:

Uncensored: Views and (Re)views by Joyce Carol Oates

Skimmed:

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
Girls for Sale: A Play from Colonial India by Gurajada Apparao

Tonight: chapter 5 of Islam and Early Modern English Literature by Benedict Robinson...

All day I've been thinking about and reviewing works on political theology, literary history, sheik romances, and the production of figures of Muslims as Other. Decided to type out some notes on this reading.

---

Chapter 5, "From Pleasure to Terror"

The chapter opens with a reminder that, in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, certain English writers viewed romance (as a genre, like 'the novel' or 'imaginative fiction') as a distinctly Arabian import. "'That peculiar and arbitrary species of Fiction which we commonly call Romantic,' Thomas Warton wrote, 'appears to have been imported into Europe by a people, whose modes of thinking, and habits of invention, are not natural to this country'; that is, 'It is generally supposed to have been borrowed from the Arabians'" (Robinson quoting Warton's "Of the Origins of Romantic Fiction in Europe," found in The History of English Poetry, Vol. 1, p. i).**

Robinson suggests that this shift in attitudes about culture and literary genres "helped to prepare the way for Romantic orientalism" (146). He refers to the Eastern travel writing and histories that inspired the likes of Coleridge ("Kubla Khan") and Byron. "When Europe reclaimed romance," Robinson writes, "it reclaimed it as an eastern and archaic form, doubly removed in both space and time, and it reclaimed it in part through a rereading of its own texts about Islam." This shift in attitudes and trend toward rereading, he sums up, marks the "emergence of a new critique of romance, based not...on its supposed Catholicism and licentiousness, but on its irrationality and its encouragement of potentially dangerous forms of political fantasy" (147). He intends to show "how the question of political modernity in Europe has from its beginnings been caught up with the figure of the Muslim."

Robinson examines Milton at length in this chapter, stating that his late poetry "reveals a double relationship to romance, at once diagnosing the religious and political errors embodied in the genre and outlining a program for its reform" and "a continued hope for the reconciliation of human political action and divine purposes." For one thing, his work demonstrates a deep suspicion of kingship; Milton describes kingship as "a kind of idolatry," for instance, and explores throughout his Eikonoklastes "the strange pleasure people take in their misplaced worship of kings" (155). Milton even wonders whether people might actually enjoy being dominated by a powerful tyrant (see The Ready and Easy Way). Love for one's king, and for kingship in general, seems "a kind of fetishism" in Milton's eyes, Robinson writes -- making monarchy actually a lot like a romance, "a bewitching fiction that consumes those who consume it" (156). Milton, in his attention to the Christian experience, prefers hard work and self-control. Love of a king is idolatrous, misguided and spiritually lazy.

We then move on to Milton's attitude toward Christianity, with special attention to its relationship towards crusading/warfaring and Islam. For example, Robinson notes that Book One of Paradise Lost presents Satan as a "great Sultan" (1.348). And it's through his crusading imagery that Milton takes on the issues of human and divine violence. The two become completely intertwined, Robinson suggests, when holy war against god's enemies brings the sacred into relation with a certain kind of death, such as the deaths of the Egyptians drowned (by God, through Moses) in the Red Sea, deaths which (here Robinson references Agamben) are neither murder nor sacrifice.

Robinson then moves on to Sampson Agonistes, a poem of Milton's that climaxes with "a moment of spectacular violence directed against a crowd caught in a moment of unholy enjoyment" (161). This takes place when a group of Philistines are gathered in a large theatre, worshiping Dagon and celebrating a victory. Sampson enters and kills them all "While thir hearts were jocund and sublime, / Drunk with Idolatry, drunk with Wine" (1669-70). And Milton even specifies that God himself had provoked their frenzy: "Among them hee a spirit of frenzy sent, / Who hurt thir minds, / And urged them on with mad desire / To call in haste for thir destroyer"(1675-78). So here we have a God who "heightens this mad desire, encourages it, just as he hardened Pharoah's heart in Exodus (7:3-5, 14:4)".

Meanwhile, unlike in the Book of Judges, Milton offers readers no glimpse into Sampson's head as he contemplates taking action against the Philistines. "Is he praying or thinking?" Robinson asks (167). Because Milton doesn't tell, the reader has no way of knowing whether his horrific destruction of the temple and all within it in the next lines is a divinely-sanctioned act of just violence, or merely an act of simple human revenge. Robinson then states his disagreement with Stanley Fish and others who suggest that Milton's work shouldn't be viewed as political. "What Fish describes as pure epistemology or theology is political to its core," he states (168). After all, the operation of a power that can suspend "all normal juridical and constitutional functioning" -- whether that power is divine, or exercised by a sovereign who claims the right to suspend any law he likes if a state of emergency has been declared -- is political through and through. Thus even the most staunchly western theory of sovereignty (Robinson cites Machiavelli and Hobbes) "even in its repudiation of divine inspiration, nevertheless preserves at the core of the state a kind of hidden theology, the continuing trace of a relationship to the divine" (176). The state reserves its right to declare the exception: to suspend and even reverse any and every law on the books in order to preserve itself and/or its people. It declares what is law, but is not ultimately constrained by it.

With these issues so much at the fore since September 11, Robinson notes, many have looked at Sampson Agonistes with fresh eyes. Because the terror-related discourse of late so often describes the crux of the situation as a clash between those who favor a premodern, theocratic social and political order against modern, liberal, secular democracy, Robinson emphasizes that it is important to remember that the latter is a system ostensibly "predicated on an act of exclusion": "the exclusion of religion as the basis for a legitimate organization of political right" (163). And yet that kernel of hidden theology remains.

So there in the 17th century, Robinson explains, as Europe was still dealing with the effects of its own Christian religious wars, religious difference came to play an important political function. "In effect," he writes, "Islam became the stand-in for Europe's disavowal of its own premodernity, the name for everything Europe has refused in imagining itself as Europe. The production of the Muslim as a figure antagonistic to all modernity was the result, in the seventeenth century, of a political struggle over the question of divine violence. European modernity constituted itself through that act of exclusion" (179).

** note, Margaret Anne Doody explores this possibility in The True Story of the Novel (1996). She looks as far back as ancient Egypt and early Greek ('Byzantine') works in her argument that the notion that the English invented the novel is one of the greatest "lies" in literary history.

Working on the Joyce Carol Oates book (see 27) put me in the mood for some Margaret Atwood. I've always associated the two, ever since finishing The Handmaid's Tale left me feeling like revisiting Marya: A Life and Do With Me What You Will... there's the woman-focused fiction thing, and the Canada connection. I wonder if the two have ever hung out?

Anyway. Picked up Atwood's Writing With Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose. I read the piece "Writing Utopia" (about The Handmaid's Tale) then her recollection of visiting Afghanistan in 1978, and finally her review of Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003).

The three fit together nicely under the topic 'what is literature's relation to the political (particularly for women)?'

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This reading also reminded me of my ambivalence about Nafisi's book. On some levels, I enjoyed it very much (some of her group's comments on Lolita honestly changed the way I approach that book and the gist of its plot).

Yet I was also immediately uncomfortable with the way that Reading Lolita was promoted for the US market. In 2003, anything about women in Iran suddenly had resonance to the US public's sudden interest in women in Afghanistan, and the Taliban, and Islam in general, and the 'axis of evil' in particular. As Hamid Dabashi wrote in a scathing critique of Nafisi's book, it's probably not coincidental that "The publication of Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran coincided with the most belligerent period in the recent US history".

Because of the context of its publication, Reading Lolita's cover image is especially fascinating. It shows two young women in dark headscarves, leaning over what is assumed to be Lolita; they are 'reading Lolita in Tehran'.

But, if viewers were able to see the actual photo from which the cover image was cropped, they would see that "the two young women are in fact reading the leading reformist newspaper Mosharekat," Dabashi writes. "The cover of Reading Lolita in Tehran is an iconic burglary from the press, distorted and staged in a frame for an entirely different purpose than when it was taken. ... In the original picture the two young students are obviously on a college campus, reading a newspaper that is reporting the latest results of a major parliamentary election in their country. Cropping the newspaper, their classmates behind them, and a perfectly visible photograph of President Khatami--the iconic representation of the reformist movement--out of the picture" leaves the reader with a completely distorted sense of the image's significance. Or, as Fatemeh Keshavarz, an academic in the US and author of a reaction book to Reading Lolita (entitled Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran) put it, "Critics have compared the book to its cover image because it also omits the aspects of the culture that show that Iranian women have agency and are actively improving their lives".

In other words, because the actual setting and political context have been excised, Reading Lolita's American audience is left gazing upon a sweetly soft-focus, black and white (think colonial era postcards!) image of two veiled young 'lolitas' who are assumed to be eagerly bent down toward a novel that most people still associate with porn. Is it cynical to wonder whether the viewer is subconsciously being nudged toward a(n insidious) combination of 'oooh, how sexy, can you imagine reading Lolita in Tehran? I bet that book is SO banned there!' and 'but hey, those young ladies ought to be free to read whatever the heck they want to -- even porn! now let's go free them to do so...!' Either way, it just reinforces the same old tired obsession with how 'their women' are all stuck veiled and in harems (those crazy muslims and their weirdness about sexuality...!)

Keshavarz discusses her book here, http://monthlyreview.org/mrzine/keshavarz120307.html .

Dabashi's piece is from the Egyptian newspaper al-Ahram where, to my knowledge, the backstory about the book's cover image was first discussed in an English-language press. That's here: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/797/special.htm .

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"Novels are not sociological textbooks {...or} political tracts," Atwood notes in one of her collection's earlier essays. But they can definitely take on those shades, when packaged and marketed a certain way. And I guess I just tend to be a little suspicious.

A thoughtful and thought-provoking post, FMB! (I have not read the linked pieces yet).

I seem to be obsessed with both Atwood and Oates, but only connect them in that they are contemporaries and live in the same general area of North America, Atwood on the Canadian side, Oates on the American (and she wrote or edited the Ontario Review or something, didn't she? Some of her poetry is published by them). But the connection you make outside of geography (the novel related to the political) is most interesting, and I'd love to hear more, if you have more to say.

Fullmoonblue - Fascinating analysis of the Reading Lolita in Tehran's cover photo. It reminds me of Edward S. Curtis, who devoted his life to photographing Native Americans at the beginning of the 20th century. He often asked them to remove any "modern" items before he photographed them, or asked them to change into fancy dress before taking pictures of them doing everyday tasks. He also carried around "traditional" items for people to use or to wear if they didn't have what Curtis wanted. In this Wikipedia article (in the "Controversy" section), it shows one of his more famous doctored photos: "In a Piegan Lodge" originally had an alarm clock right in the middle of it, but Curtis scratched it out and superimposed a traditional basket.

All this doctoring was in the name of showing Native Americans as a "vanishing race" - trying to capture what they were before they were "gone." And this just 25-30 years after the Battle of Little Bighorn, when the Cheyenne and Sioux defeated Custer. Of course, in those 30 years, America came close to completing the genocide, and then decided to become nostalgic about it.

FMB, thanks for taking the time to post both #28 and #29. Not things I would ordinarily be aware of, but thought provoking and enlightening.

It is a while since I tried reading Reading Lolita in Tehran. I did not finish it and gave it away. There was something about it that I did not like, although I cannot articulate it now. Maybe I had a similar reaction to yours, but did not know it :-).

>32 LisaCurcio: Lisa, I did the same. Start it and didn't pick it up again. I certainly did think Lolita an odd choice for a reading group of any kind.

Talbin, re 31, thank you so much for mentioning Curtis! I had never heard of him before, but it sounds like his work definitely connects to what I was feeling about the Nafisi cover art. I'll be on the lookout for more info about him, for sure.

Re 32 and 33, it took me quite a while to get into Reading Lolita too...

It was actually given to me as a Christmas gift (by a relative who saw veiled women on the cover and immediately thought of me and my grad studies) but I didn't finally finish it until months after receiving it. I kept really, really wanting to pay attention and enjoy it... but then kept feeling conflicted as I read it. Some of the interpretations of novels are compelling, but I sometimes felt like I was being led toward conclusions that didn't ring completely true. The Dabashi reaction that I linked to in 29 is somewhat extreme, but it does touch on some of the issues that were bothering me.

To expand on my reactions: in 2003, right around the time Nafisi's book began getting so much attention in the States, I was living in Egypt. And that spring, when the US officially went back to war in Iraq, university students and others in Cairo (male and female) were busy communicating with each other and with foreign residents, organizing demonstrations and speaking out about how they viewed the conflict... but then all my family in the US saw on TV that spring were images of burning American flags and screaming crowds and such. But while they were watching the news and feeling scared for me and my safety, my Egyptian neighbors were actually stopping by my apartment to make sure I realized that no one there equated me with my government's decisions. And meanwhile, on the street, I was seeing that the Egyptian government had police out everywhere, breaking up even peaceful antiwar protests with fire hoses and clubs and such... because how could a(n Arab) country that accepts so much US aid not crack down on disagreement with US policy during such a tense time (and expect to keep receiving that money)...? So while my neighbors and colleagues were stopping by to make sure that I felt safe, I was a) watching their government hose and haul away protesters as the bombs began to fall, and b) getting emails from my mother about whether or not the American embassy was prepared to evacuate. It was a little surreal.

After returning home to the States and being given a copy of Nafisi's book, I kept wondering whether its representation of life under a theocratic Islamic thumb really told even half of the story. It seemed too easy, as an American reader, to be swept up into an 'us' versus 'them' reading of Iranian political realities, when my own experience had hinted at how much more complex things can be.

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PS, Avaland, re 30, I will definitely keep thinking about Oates & Atwood & women & politics and will see if I can get some thoughts typed out. (And Oates taught at a Canadian university for several years, I think.)

>34 Fullmoonblue: Since you lived in Egypt, perhaps you can make some suggestions. It seems it was akeela, rachbxl and I who were speculating about up & coming North African women novelists who might be the inheritors of Djebar and al Saadawi's mantles (on one of their threads here), so to speak. I think it was rachbxl who found and was reading a novel by a younger Egyptian author, but otherwise we couldn't seem to come up with much.

Are you working on a PhD? If so, what is your thesis (if you don't mind me asking).

>28 Fullmoonblue:, Fascinating! Please keep posting on your research - I love it!

>29 Fullmoonblue:, I am going to pick up the Keshavarz book and read that in conjunction with Nafisi's book, whenever I get around to reading that. I confess that I too am very ambivalent about it. There was an explosion of interest in Iranian women's memoirs around that time and U Chicago (where I went to grad school) invited someone to come speak about the phenomenon & about the representation of Iran in popular media over time. She - I wish I could remember who it was... - had a very strongly negative reaction to Nafisi's book. I believe she even implied that teaching the literature Nafisi writes about was not actually illegal in Iran - do you have any sense if that's true? I haven't had a chance to read the links yet, but I will do so shortly.

>31 Talbin:, Talbin - What you're describing with Edward Curtis is very reminiscent of something Elaine Showalter talks about in her book The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980. I'm plagiarizing from my own thread here:

Doctors diagnosed & labelled certain types of madwomen according to types they found in literature - the most obvious being Shakespeare's Ophelia, who came to represent a Romantic fantasy of the young, beautiful, lovestruck, suicidal madwoman. .... Doctors turned to artists & later to photographers to create representations of their female patients in the images of these types of madwomen - regardless of what these women actually looked like - as part of their clinical practice. These images were, in turn, used to study the flavors of madness and diagnose new cases. These images is that they are all very stylized - doctors and photographers dressed, decorated, posed, and accessorized patients in certain ways, sometimes with the compliance of the patients themselves, other times without. These images became representative of the medical "truth" about madness even though they were themselves a fiction....

Seems like there is a persistent tendency to make what we actually see conform to what we already think we know, thereby further distorting reality, since representations often stand in for reality for many who can't actually do things like visit Iran or time travel back to the early 20th century and visit Native American tribes. I think I remember learning in art history that when Paul Gauguin went to places like Brittany and Tahiti, he was disappointed that people were not as primitive as he had imagined them to be and "primitized" them in his paintings, creating the impression that they were less touched by modern manners and mores than they in fact were.

>36 fannyprice: fannyprice - Very, very interesting. I think photography is especially prone to be used to show the "truth" because - for most amateur photographers - the image can't easily be manipulated. (This was especially true before digital cameras - how many could process their own photos?) So, even though we know perfectly well that photos can be doctored, airbrushed and now Photoshopped, not to mention just having the subjects dressed and posed to prove a point, we tend to think of photos as showing a "real" or "true" image. Think about the uproar that the darkened photo of OJ Simpson caused (cover of Newsweek, I think?). Even though that type of thing happens all the time - heck, a magazine like Cosmo probably has zero non-airbrushed photos! - people were outraged that a magazine would print a photo that was doctored to prove a point (even though the magazine denied it, it's pretty obvious what the point was).

>37 Talbin: - newspapers and magazines manipulate the images of people in criminal cases all the time - common tricks to are to darken the image, highlight blemishes, put shadows round eyes, etc. They do the opposite with the victim. It also happens with language - think how many victims are portrayed as angelic, victims as loners, etc.
However, I would argue that we now accept that these images have been manipulated, but that we only accept them when they agree with the current opinion. The Kate Winslet scandal proves that this from the other size - when her image was altered to make her more shapely, it backfired because it contradicted the public opinion of her as natural. In the end, she had to go on a PR blitz to fix it.

>4 Fullmoonblue: - re Ian McEwan: all his novels perform the same trick. This is a good article by James Woods, from the London Review of Books, on his narrative manipulations.

>34 Fullmoonblue: FMB; I was in Egypt (as a tourist, not living there) in the early 1990s when tour buses were being attacked by some group or groups. I experienced the same local reactions and reactions from home.

I do not think the phenomena are limited to Islamic countries. In France in 2006, the French people I met went out of their way to point out that they liked Americans, but they did not like our government. At home, many of my friends seem incapable of distinguishing between individuals and the governments of their countries, and incapable of understanding that much of what we hear (in the U.S. and elsewhere) contains heavy doses of propaganda.

A question: I read The Bookseller of Kabul and thought that it was an interesting perspective and reasonably balanced. Have you read it (or anything else by Seierstad) and what do you think?

Quick post for now -- fannyprice, re #36 ("U Chicago...invited someone to come speak...I wish I could remember who it was...") could it have been Saba Mahmood? I heard her mention Nafisi in relation to Ayaan Hirsi Ali in a guest lecture once, and I believe she was published right around the time that might have been (The Politics of Piety)... So maybe?

>40 Fullmoonblue:, No, but I wish she had come to speak. We read Politics of Piety in a grad seminar, but it wasn't her. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is another one I'd love to hear your thoughts on (no pressure - I haven't read her book, but everyone I know has....)

Aha, jargoneer, re 38, thanks for that link! Off to read that now...

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Edited to add: oh my goodness I LOVE this article...

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And avaland, re 35, Ahdaf Soueif might make an interesting contemporary counterpart to Saadawi. Like Saadawi, Soueif has occasionally been accused of 'writing for a western audience' and has gotten lots of positive press in the US and Europe. Her novel The Map of Love was a Booker Prize finalist a few years back. It takes the conventions of the typical orientalist/'sheik romance' story (kidnapped western heroine, romance in the desert...) and interjects all sorts of political background and historical characters, English and Egyptian.

Soueif works as a journalist as well as novelist and lives in England, I believe.

And another modern Egyptian novelist is Somaya Ramadan. Her best known translated work, Leaves of Narcissus, is somewhat darker and more overtly 'literary' than TMOL. Lots of gender issues and family tension. In that way, her work might seem closer to Saadawi than Soeif's is.

Among Algerians, Ahlam Mosteghanemi has been translated and deals with some of the same themes as Assia Djebar: the historical past, language, memory, etc. Mosteghanemi's Memory in the Flesh is book one of a trilogy that I've been meaning to finish for ages...

Lisa, re 39, The Bookseller of Kabul is actually right here on my tbr pile...! I'll definitely see if I can get to it in the next couple of weeks and will post my thoughts here when I do...

I wonder if the tour bus incidents you mention were in the southern part of the country? There were still areas south of Cairo that tourists were nervous to go in 02-03. The security was still also higher there, with police stopping buses to check travelers' papers and such. (Which is supposed to make people feel more secure, I suppose, but usually seems to do just the opposite.) I had never realized how much of their economy relies on tourism... which opens up a whole pile of other cans of worms! ;)

>43 Fullmoonblue:, FMB, I will be interested in your thoughts when you get around to it. I have another of her books, A Hundred and One Days: A Baghdad Journal on my TBR pile, and have no idea when I might get to it.

I was in Egypt in late October/early November, 1992. The attack that occurred just before I arrived was near Luxor and while I was there there was another farther north. There was also "unrest" in the Fayoum area. When we were in the south, we had armed guards in vehicles traveling with our bus. Our guide was very upset exactly because of the concern for the economy. I remember him telling us that tourism is their number one source of income with cotton being a distant second.

Of course that was nothing compared to what happened at the temple of Hatshepsut in 1997. I cannot imagine the devastating impact that must have had on tourism.

I loved Egypt for the history, archeology and people, and I hope to someday return for a long visit.

Reread Joyce Carol Oates' novel American Appetites (1989) yesterday. Was tickled to realize that a significant part of the storyline relates to a shady Egyptian boyfriend, Fermi Sabri, who's suspected of abducting and/or killing his American girlfriend, Sigrid Hunt... I hadn't even noticed that the first time I read it several years back.

The words that kept coming to mind as I read were 'impulsive' and 'displacement'. Those also seem, to me, like the kind of descriptors Oates was going for in terms of the 'American appetite' in general. There's a thoughtless, almost accidental impulsiveness to the way that these people make personal decisions (to begin an affair, for instance). Oates' main characters here are, as in many of her books, among the intellectual and economic elite. The men work think-tanky jobs; the women maintain themselves and their homes and write cookbooks. Their money and social capital make their lives like buffets... and yet most seem bored and dissatisfied. So they impulsively sample whatever seems exciting (or is 'supposed' to be satisfying) and/or suspect those around them of doing so, but often in a very passive aggressive way.

Connected to this suspicion and impulsiveness and passive aggression is the constant displacement of emotion: fear, neediness, anger. I felt like displacement really drove the plot. When things fall apart, the characters focus their suspicion on either 1) the dark outsider (the Egyptian Fermi Sabri), and 2) the infidelities of their women.

But, even when he's arrested, the reader knows that the main (white, male, wealthy) character will be safe. After all, he's Not Really Guilty. However, since he's unwilling to admit personal responsibility or vulnerability, he gets sucked into a media circus and, in an interesting switch that I noticed after reading, the main character ends up effectively taking the place of Fermi Sabri by the end (both in a courtroom and in a relationship).

Random thoughts. Not sure where I'm going with this.

Going to look for other reviews of the novel and see what they say...

>45 Fullmoonblue: Great review, one of many of hers I have not read. I hope you will repost in the Oates group:-)

For some reason I do not know, I have avoided Oates all of these years. I thought I might have read something of hers that I did not like, but when I look at a bibliography I do not recognize any titles. So, your thoughtful review made me decide I really need to try reading Oates. I like the sound of American Appetites, but if you (or anyone else) think another work would be a better choice, I will appreciate hearing about it.

Thanks!

47 -- I've been thinking for a while, and I'm having a terrible time deciding what to recommend. (With so many books to choose from, perhaps it's no wonder!)

American Appetites is definitely characteristic of a lot of her work; there's this emphasis on the cracks beneath 'normal' lives being exposed. Or laid bare. Or she takes 'normal' and skins it would be another way of saying it.

I was in my late teens when I first discovered her work, so I recall being blown away by novels like You Must Remember This and Marya: A Life, probably largely because young women were among the main characters. Cybele and Do With Me What You Will were also hard to put down, but rather dark.

I remember reading a short story of hers published in Harpers Magazine several years back that really grabbed me, but I can't recall the title. It involved a man looking out from his apartment window at night, and then driving to an ex's house... very creepy. I think she also did a short story in which the main character is a female driving a sports car, but she's also in some kind of disguise... I'll have to post about these in the JCO group and see if they ring bells for anybody.

And duh -- that group would probably be a great place to scout out some advice about which of her novels would make a good place to start. http://www.librarything.com/groups/fansofjoycecaroloate

By the way, if it takes you a while to decide on fiction (or if you try some and just don't warm up to it) you might want to try some of her nonfiction. In that vein, I remember enjoying her collection of short essays Woman Writer very, very much. It was the first time I ever read about sports (boxing in this case) and actually felt interested. Likewise I recall coming to appreciate Emily Dickinson's poetry far more after reading Oates' comments than I ever had on my own.

ETA: I notice now, from the favorites thread in the JCO group, that a few of her more recent works are getting rave reviews from others. I haven't read any of the recent stuff (last 5-6 years) at all, so maybe we'd both be best off searching down copies of things like The Gravedigger's Daughter and Dear Husband and Rape: A Love Story... Must make a library trip soon!

Thank you for the link, and the thoughts. I did pop over there, but did not really see much in the way of reviews other than one of Middle Age: A Romance, and that sounded good.

I think I will just jump into a fiction work to see how I like it. For now my non-fiction seems to be on a history track, and I am very happy there.

The themes of American Appetites and Middle Age seem similar, so on the next library trip I will see what I can find. Who knows? I might join the JCO group!

Very interesting topics, Fullmoonblue! I hope it's not too late to make a few remarks about Reading Lolita in Tehran, and its criticism... and that I'm not misremembering the book too egregiously (read it when it came out).

I think you already mentioned what to me is the most important point:

It seemed too easy, as an American reader, to be swept up into an 'us' versus 'them' reading of Iranian political realities

This is of course true for just about anything outside the reader's immediate experience, and I wish we could always keep in mind the biases of our environments.

And:

Yet I was also immediately uncomfortable with the way that Reading Lolita was promoted for the US market.

The problem of presentation of foreign realities, the selection, explanation and "propaganda" of viewpoints is another general problem I run into all the time in North America. This is a very isolated continent in every sense of the word.

Back to Nafisi, I thought her book was excellent, well worth the attention it received, thought out and written on an infinitely higher level than, say, the journalistic travelogues by Westerners in the Wild East which louse up the writing in English on the region (I'd suggest that travellers to the East get discounts if they promise NOT to write a book about their remarkable two-week jaunt from Shiraz to Kabul).

It is a pity (although inevitable, I suppose) that it got enmeshed in the propaganda war, and that people come to it with expectations of "propaganda", or merely a critique of Islam. (You are, alas, only the second person I've heard who read it and took away a renewed interest in--Nabokov himself!) I don't know the details of the publishing history of the book, but let's remember that it's a memoir (not a political tract) of a time after Khomeini's revolution in the late seventies, that it's a meditation on literature as much as a description of life under fundamentalists, and that Nafisi, a former university professor, gave the meetings a decidedly educational slant. It wasn't just that she was sticking it to the (bearded) Man by any means necessary--she was outraged by the brainwashing imposed on the young, the perversion of the universal goals of education, the impoverishment of these youths' intellectual lives--of their lives tout court. (The fact that it was a women-only course was incidental--they were already risking enough without going co-ed.)

The cover, Dabishi--I don't understand what he's going on about. First, Nafisi herself probably isn't responsible for the cover (any of them). So, this criticism is turned specifically against the American (?) publisher (and, by extension, against American opinion-makers/politics etc.) Next--what does it matter which photo and how it was cropped? I really can't see what difference it makes what the girls are reading, or what we after a casual glance at this photo think they are reading. Considering the rates of illiteracy among Muslim women globally, the mere fact that they are reading is what's notable, in my opinion. Is reading a reformist newspaper more radical than reading Lolita? In those circumstances, I'd say it's just about equal. I wonder what would Dabishi have said if the title had been Reading Gatsby in Tehran? (I don't remember all of them, but Nafisi describes the reading of four books, one of them The Great Gatsby.) Is he objecting to the sensationalistic flavour of Lolita (something completely external to Lolita, Nafisi or Nafisi's book itself), or making a deeper point? If so, I don't see it.

>an interesting addition to the conversation, lola!

i, too, found "Reading Lolita" a very satisfying experience - it's really rather hard to learn about life in other cultures/societies except from memoirs (assuming one is inherently a non-traveler) and I take what I can get. Which, post revolution, is going to be mostly courtesy of exiles (Satrapi, Nafisi). I only have one friend who's who spent a sig. amount of time in Iran, a Danish woman working as a pediatrician during the Iran/Iraq wars for a couple of years. Her main memories were of being shrouded in black every time she had to travel anywhere.
(i'm not denigrating histories, travelers' tales, old and new, anthropology texts,etc at all - i enjoy and esp. when i was teaching geography, attempted to synthesize mounds of disparate info. But memoirs and literature are often, for me, the best way to get a 2nd hand feel of a place and a time.)

Bleh... am just getting over a flu bug. It was wonderful finding new comments when I logged on though!

Will find my copy of Reading Lolita and reply to 50, 51, and 52 asap. :)

ETA: read while sick a short novel called Property by Valerie Martin. Finished it in a single NyQuil haze of an evening... it struck me as being something like Edna Pontellier (The Awakening) meets Uncle Tom's Cabin with a touch of Beloved. Dealt with the American South and one woman's unthinking complicity in the enslavement of another. Not the best novel I've read lately (enjoyed Amelie Nothomb's The Character of Rain somewhat less reservedly) but it certainly wasn't bad. Just bleak, as so many reviewers say. Was blurbed by Ahdaf Soueif, who was a member of the committee that awarded it the Orange Prize for 2003.

You have definately made me want to read The Child In Time and Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance. I'm afraid it will be awhile though because all of a sudden I have a whole lot of books to read for one reason or another.

Finished this one in two sittings -- here's my review of Mark Dunn's Ella Minnow Pea.

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Cute setting, and very creative uses of language -- for example, the very name of the title character, Ella Minnow Pea (L-M-N-O-P). Some reviewers have likened this to Young Adult reading, and I agree in some ways, but I do fear the vocabulary would pose a serious challenge to anyone under 16 (and many older, probably). It's more advanced than 'Animal Farm', slightly less so than 'Brave New World' or '1984'. It's sort of like a softer, sweeter version of the dystopian novel and, significantly, one that gives far more attention to female characters than male. (I could imagine a bookish female in her junior or senior year of high school getting a kick out of this novel, and warming to it in a way that she might not to more classic titles like those above.)

Personally, I'm glad to have read the book and enjoyed parts very much, but found the premise not quite challenging/engaging enough and the conclusion fairly unsatisfying. It's worth reading, but nowhere close to five stars for me. (3.5 out of 5)

Realized last night, after finishing Ruth Picardie's Before I Say Goodbye, that I've been on a rather morbid memoir streak this year: there was The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Carole Radziwill's What Remains, at least one other whose name escapes me at the moment, and now Picardie's Before I Say Goodbye. Each features a medical dimension; for Radziwill and Picardie it's cancer (although R is writing about losing a husband to it, while P wrote about her own experience). But my gut reaction to Goodbye was much warmer than to the other two. Perhaps my being closer to her in age (Picardie died in her early 30s) had something to do with that, but I also liked the book better for its rough form: instead of a smooth, seamless 1st person memoir, Picardie's book is made up of emails, letters and opinion pieces, ordered chronologically. It comes off as a far more 'real' form for contemporary memoir in this electronic age. And it allows the reader to watch the evolution of certain ideas and ways of expressing them from their initial appearances in personal emails to their later published form, and I really appreciated that.

I should add that Picardie's emails to and from a friend named India were my favorite parts. Some had me laughing out loud. Those bits gave the book a sort of 'Bridget Jones Gets Breast Cancer' edge: comic rants, jokes about diet, fashion, followed by moments of (very self-conscious) self-pity followed by shots of self-deprecating humor... If I ever come down with a terminal illness, or correspond with a close friend who has, I can imagine reading and writing emails like these.

I read Before I Say Goodbye just after it came out, as Ruth Picardie was already known to me through her journalism. It seems strange to say that I really "enjoyed" her book, but I did - and like you, I can only hope that this is how I would react should I ever find myself in a similar situation. Her friend India is India Knight, a fairly well-known journalist (and novelist) in the UK who has a column in "The Sunday Times", and sister Justine is a journalist as well ("The Sunday Telegraph" women's magazine, amongst others), and I find it interesting to read their columns now and wonder how the loss of Ruth affects their lives now; I can't help but associate her with everything they write.

Re 57, "Her friend India is India Knight..." Thanks very much for sharing that! I hadn't heard of her. Will have to look up some of her writing now, for sure...

I'm still thinking about the end of that book, two days later. The postscript by her husband was really moving, and also so strange. But I completely respected his decision to share such raw details about how her illness changed her toward the end, even though it was pretty difficult to read, and a hard note to end on.

The two letters to her kids, handwritten, really moved me too. Especially knowing how hard she had to struggle to get the words out at that point. Definitely the kind of book that reminds you to live in the moment, and not take for granted how many more of them you (or anyone you love) will get.

Yesterday I finished Elizabeth Smart's By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. Can't decide what I thought of it yet; its whole 'poetic prose' genre thing struck me as annoyingly overwrought at first, but then every few pages a line would really jump out at me, so I kept reading. The story revolves around a woman's obsession with a married man, their affair, and her pregnancy by him. Apparently this was basically autobiographical.

Anyway, I can't lie; I ended up skimming a lot of it, looking for the touching lines and skipping the parts that reminded me too much of my late teenage diaries. But the chapter in which Smart alternates between verses from the Song of Songs and a police interrogation was gorgeous. Gripping and rhythmic and strange. I ended up reading that single chapter three times. Can't remember a whole lot of the rest of the book one day later, but that chapter was well worth finding.

Last weekend read another cancer story, about another 'Ruth'. (Odd coincidence.) This one was the fictionalized memoir by Elizabeth Berg, Talk Before Sleep. Very girly: lots of food and sleep-overesque details, lots of gabbing about bastard husbands and cute old flames. Not bad, but nothing that'll stick in my memory more than a few weeks I'm afraid. By the time of writing this, I'd already blanked on the title.

Getting to sleep lately with the help of The Gospel of Judas by Simon Mawer. Historical novel set during WWII and in the present, splitting the stories of a 'radical' priest translating said gospel in the now, and an Italian Jew working for German bosses in the 1940s. My only quibble with this one that that the author seems dead set, every page, on using at least three obscure words. Every so often, obscure language brightens up a story and makes things seem fresh and interesting... but litter each page with the stuff and it seems forced.

Anyway, not done with the Mawker yet. How the dual plot intersections are handled in the final quarter of the story will probably determine whether I end up liking this book or not.

Finished The Gospel of Judas... bleh. The wordiness never let up, and the three-part plot kept any one story from really standing out and drawing me along. Someone after a more verbose version of The DaVinci Code might enjoy it, or somebody who's lived in Jerusalem or Rome and recognizes the locations, but I wasn't and I haven't so I didn't.

Onto Minaret by Leila Aboulela and Kabul by M.E. Hirsh.

I'm really enjoying your reviews! Keep going! And I've never managed to read an entire Elizabeth Berg. She's not bad, just not gripping.

I really enjoy your comments. Hope you'll like Minaret--I read it a year or two ago but never reviewed it. All I remember is that I enjoyed it and appreciated the point of view...must take another look sometime.

Finished M.E. Hirsh's Kabul, which reminded me a lot of The Thorn Birds: epic family saga, intergenerational drama, harsh climate with agricultural details woven in, themes including religion and politics and the coming-of-age of the main characters. The main settings were New York, Kabul and Moscow (I liked the Moscow bits best I think, particularly those that dealt with an English college student trying to smuggle dissident lit out of the country). Unfortunately, the amount of political background Hirsh included meant that characters often spoke to one another pretty unrealistically. It was like cops on television crime sitcoms: describing processes and procedures aloud specifically for the tv audience's benefit, and you get this nagging feeling that real cops would never have to stand around defining such basic aspects of their jobs to one another aloud. So big chunks came off like thinly veiled lessons to the reader. Anyway. In short, it was a decent (and very thick) read, but nothing I'd probably pick up again unless I wanted to write a paper on the representation of Afghanistan in mass-market fiction.

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In other news, one of my younger sisters was visiting for the 4th of July weekend and handed me a copy of the first Harry Potter book. I'd somehow managed not to read any of the books or see any of the movies to this point... but hey, I'd just finished Kabul and figured something light might be nice, so I began reading last night at about 11pm. Finished it around six hours later. And at 5 am, as I set it on the bedside table and reached for the light, I found myself wishing I hadn't read it. Knowing what a massive thing the whole craze is and has been, I guess I was expecting something else. Something amazing. Maybe things pick up later in the series...?

My opinion is that the Potter books get better, but never really good. Buy, hey, they are a fast read, pull you along. Just surrender to it it - i.e. stop saying under your breath, "Tolkien is so much better". "Narnia is so much better", "Nesbit is so much better"

Hooray for Nesbit!!!!

Ooh... I don't know Nesbit. Will definitely go find out though, since I'm feeling the need for some pure enjoyment lately. (The following is why...)

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Okay. So I got this Early Reviewer book a while back. The Blood of Lambs by 'Kamal Saleem'. I've put off reviewing it thus far because I was so completely turned off by it... but, hey, I need to get on with it; need to finish reading and reviewing so that hopefully better things will follow...!

The thing is, once I started writing earlier today, this torrent of AAAAAAA! just started pouring. I've spent the last three hours on just half of the book.

Here 'tis. My review, part one...

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As I type this, Kamal Saleem's “The Blood of Lambs” is enjoying fantastic popularity among its reviewers on Amazon. Out of 24 reviews, more than half (14) award this book the highest possible rating, five stars. 8 more give it four stars. In other words, nearly 92 percent of Amazon reviewers liked The Blood of Lambs. They liked it a lot. The highest ranked reviews call this book thrilling, engrossing, and a “very enjoyable read.”

I disagree.

This book is disturbing. It is dishonest and thinly veiled xenophobic fear-mongering with a maliciously radical right-wing/anti-Muslim slant. It’s propaganda, pure and simple.

Before I go on, I’ll put a few things on the table. One, I'm not ‘anti-Christian’. I don’t find Christianity threatening or offensive, and I’m not predisposed against things that are overtly religious. I also have nothing against Republicans; I don’t consider them automatically threatening or offensive either. And I’m neither Arab nor Muslim (if that makes any difference). But every page of this repulsive book annoyed and even disgusted me, precisely because it was so clearly written TO and marketed FOR a right-leaning, republican-positive Christian readership, with the obvious intent of creating and reinforcing an intense fear and distrust of anything related to Islam.

Other reviewers here at LibraryThing have hinted around similar suspicions. Some don’t quite buy the whole story, suggesting that something about the book just ‘didn’t ring true’ in places, for instance. One particularly diligent reviewer here (‘nobooksnolife’ on May 27) mentions that doing a little digging confirmed that Kamal Saleem’s coauthor, Lynn Vincent, is an editor at a newsmagazine with an explicitly Christian agenda. Okay, no real problem there, right? And also that Vincent has been chosen to coauthor Sarah Palin's forthcoming memoirs... Okay. Interesting. But not yet a compelling reason to be skeptical of the book's veracity and level of bias/spin? So, hoping to ease your mind that you’re not about to read some blatantly biased screed, the reader might decide to check the book's publication info. And if you did, you’d find right on line one that Howard Books (the division of Simon & Schuster that published Saleem's memoir) is a specifically evangelical Christian imprint. Their mission, trumpeted across the top, “is to: Increase faith in the hearts of growing Christians; Inspire holiness in the lives of believers; {and} Instill hope in the hearts of struggling people everywhere... Because He's coming again!”

Ah. So. This overtly evangelical publishing outfit and pro-Palin coauthor would align themselves with an alleged-former-radical terrorist’s memoirs WHY? What could his story have to do with THEIR aims? Hmmm…

Flip a few more pages (past the dedication mentioning God and his American wife, and an epigraph linking “the Koran” and a gun) and you’ll find a helpful little map of the Middle East. Look a little closer though, and you may notice that there’s an area marked “Israel,” but (odd!) no little dotted-line-and-arrows number to demarcate the West Bank or Gaza Strip. Interesting, how this memoir by a ‘former terrorist’ once committed to the Palestinian cause would feature a map that skips right over the existence of the Palestinian territories. The evangelical connection suddenly takes on a heightened significance…

But surely I’m being petty, right? Splitting hairs? Nope, not as the rest of this xenophobic waste of paper bears out. If the reader hadn’t come to the book fearful and distrustful of Muslims in general and Palestinians in particular already, reading this book with a less than critical eye would certainly do the trick. We get horror stories about mothers who teach their children the glory of martyrdom, with no context to clarify that this is not the norm, and that most Muslim women would weep just as bitterly as Christian (or any other) women if, God forbid, they lost a child. We read about evil imams and, indeed, EVERY imam in this story is evil: they beat children (61-67), teach hatred of Jews and America (82), and even accost the author on the street in Seattle (my God! even here!) yelling about how Muslims are intentionally ‘seeding’ American women, converting children, and preparing to take over the country (87). And again, neither the author nor Ms. Vincent bothers to clarify for the reader that these behaviors and beliefs -- this variety of violent fanaticism -- is exceedingly rare... as rare among imams, perhaps, as pedophiles are among priests and grade school teachers. But without that context, while reading a book in which every single imam is a violent nutcase, might the average Howard Books reader begin to feel fearful and suspicious? Might that in fact be the intention...? On that note, I want to mention that in the last case above, Mr. Saleem doesn’t *initially* identify the man who stops him in Seattle ranting about the ‘seeding’ and converting of Americans as an imam. But he DOES slip and refer to that man as having been an imam several chapters later (123). So is the ranting Muslim on page 87 merely a man outside a mosque, or is he an imam? More importantly, does it really matter?? Nah. Not so much. Saleem describes the man's “sputtering” diatribe and “flashing” eyes before offering a one-sentence piece of advice to his readers: that they remember this maniac outside a Seattle mosque whenever they think about “the recent explosion” of Muslims in America and their supposed (he puts it in quotes) “religion of peace” (87).

Of course, like so many Islamophobes, Saleem and Vincent are keen on quoting the most ugly and salacious passages from the Quran to prove that this is the furthest thing from the truth, and that Islam is in fact rooted in and pervaded by bloodlust. And of course, like so many Islamophobes, they quote those passages selectively so as to make them as horrifying as possible. For instance, the oft-quoted line about “slaying the {varies by translation} idolaters/infidels/unbelievers wherever you find them” appears without inclusion of what precedes or follows (specifications relating this to battle, and that even ‘infidels’ are allowed to travel freely and safely through Muslim lands during peacetime or when covered by a treaty, and that there are protections in the case of refugees, and asylum seekers, et cetera et cetera… AND that the passages featuring words of peace and respect for non-Muslims outnumber this one heavily.) But if a person has already been told, and already believes, that Islam is an inherently violent religion whose adherents want nothing more than to kill Christians, none of these details will probably matter to our reading audience, because it would be enough to take a single line or two, isolated out of context and presented as Absolute Truth, to bolster an argument that anyone who calls Islam a religion of peace is either lying, misinformed, or deluded…

Sadly (but not surprisingly) Saleem and Vincent rarely bother to cite specific chapters – and never verses – from the Quran so that their readers would be more easily able to go figure these things out for themselves. Tough luck, Howard Books readers; you're just going to have to accept their word that all Muslims secretly want you dead. But while they DON'T give the sources of their ultra-scary selection of Quran excerpts, oddly enough Vincent and Saleem DO very carefully list footnotes for news stories related to terrorism… with a super impressive list of seventeen whole sources that includes citations from Fox News online and Wikipedia (337-38).

Meanwhile, although Wikipedia and Fox are trustworthy sources, almost anything connected to a college or university is presented as suspect at best, or downright tainted at worst. Saleem warns that we mustn’t trust people who claim to be educated (about Islam? or about anything?) here in mainstream America because it is too late: jihad is a “cancer” that already been “metastasizing in {America’s} learning centers, {while} the elite…closed their eyes, willfully blind, accomplices in the rape of their own nation,” Saleem accuses (4). And he repeats this charge repeatedly – that no one with an ‘elite’ education can be trusted. Terrorists have already infiltrated “the American education system, overrunning its universities,” he claims (7); they work covertly through Arab and Muslim student organizations (24); they work as “grocery clerks and university professors” (71). Saleem recounts being attacked by student groups at speaking engagements at the University of California, Irvine, and University of Michigan in Anne Arbor Michigan (87), and he notes that Yasser Arafat himself “was a university graduate…with an idealistic streak” (93) while Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, worked as “a schoolteacher” (69). Anyway, here in the US, anyone or anything affiliated with education reeks of multiculturalism. He denigrates the Council on Arab-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and almost every other Muslim organization that “claims to be educational,” suggesting that they’re all just cover operations for sending money to terrorist groups (124). And those who speak these truths may get branded as bigots, he warns (24), but we should all be on guard for the radicals in our midst anyway… although if, as he claims, they’re so carefully disguised as grocery clerks and teachers all around us, it’s hard to imagine just how! Racial profiling is a start, he suggests; so red-blooded (white skinned) Americans shouldn’t be ashamed about feeling suspicious of those who appear Middle Eastern “by their general look” in airports, because – hey – the jihadists “love” our penchant for “multiculturalism” and will use it to kill us (71). Sounds familiar; where have I heard that before? Regardless, be afraid. Very afraid. And trust no one… particularly if they look Middle Eastern or happen to have a big city education.

A few other issues. First, Saleem dutifully addresses his fanatical mother’s misstatements about America, suggesting that she was lying to him in those cases (130), but he fails to correct ANY of anybody’s misstatements about basic Muslim religious teachings or the Quran. (Example: when Saleem recalls his parents teaching him that boys are better than girls, he explains that they used the story of Adam and Eve to support it…and doesn’t bother to retrospectively note that, in the Qurannic version of the story, Adam and Eve are tempted simultaneously and are thus held *equally* responsible. So here we have a clear example of his parents misrepresenting and incorrectly teaching a story, as anyone could look up in the Quran's account of Genesis to find out... if they had an idea where to find it, of course.) As much as Saleem maligns his parents for mistreating him, he doesn’t correct any of their misteachings about his childhood faith for the reader, who's left to take these misrepresentations as truths… which seems terribly disingenuous, especially considering that Saleem became a convert from Islam to Christianity.

Second, in a similar vein, Saleem rarely misses a chance to highlight his terrorist teachers’ hypocrisy. In one such passage, the duplicitous trainer of child soldiers Abu Yousef (who hates Jews and Americans and quotes religious babble regularly) advises the 13-year old Saleem to visit a brothel to ‘take care’ of his growing interest in women. It seems almost too good to be true but, as Saleem recalls, this West-hating, faux-devout jihadi just happened to be smoking a Marlboro while counseling the young man to visit a prostitute… an impure act which would run ridiculously counter to the teachings of the religion they were ostensibly fighting for. Many of their holy warriors do it, Abu Yousef states offhandedly. And so again, as in the case of his parents’ misteachings, Saleem doesn’t bother to explain to the reader that this was a misguided example of what the faith condones.

Third, and perhaps most disturbing, fully a third of Saleem’s story takes place while he’s seven years old…but nearly every single detail is recounted like it were yesterday. He describes conversations word for word, identifies people and weapons as if he’d been taking notes, and always seems to have understood exactly what people’s political affiliations were. But oddly enough this hyper-vigilant and precocious eye for his surroundings apparently did NOT apply to his own language and culture; for example, as a child he recognizes one man as a “Syrian Baathist” at first glance, but when group of men introduce themselves as “Abu” this and “Abu” that, he recalls thinking it strange that they’d all be named Abu… when even (and especially since!) any Arabic-speaking child would have known that Abu means “father of,” and that adult men often introduce themselves according to their kids’ names (see pages 57 and 100). Apparently little Kamal Saleem didn’t know that yet; perhaps ‘Abu Kamal’ had been too busy teaching his son how to recognize Syrian Baathists, and was saving the word ‘father’ for age eight…?

To be continued…

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Bleh. I'm off to have a glass of wine or something.

Comments, anyone?

>67 Fullmoonblue:...and let me lift a glass to YOU! Thanks for giving this book the scrutiny it deserves. You are more articulate than I was, and I look forward to your continuation.

I'm glad you are suspicious - I wonder who the Amazon reviewers are.

But, if you do want to read E. Nesbit, my recommendation is for three that are kind of a series - Five Children and It, the Story of the Amulet, and the Phoenix and the Carpet. They occur in that order. In the first while renting a house in the country - if I'm remembering right - the children happen upon a bad tempered creature called a psamead who would rather bury in the sand, but for a reason I don't remember ends up giving them a wish, I'm don't remember if it is one each or one a day, but each chapter ends up being about one wish which, of course, doesn't quite go as intended. The Amulet results in some time travel. While the last book always makes me want to address someone as "My dear and glorious Phoenix" which is how their Phoenix prefers to be addressed. Nesbit was a socialist and a feminist and reveals a lot about conditions in England as she tells the story.

>69 solla: Three of my absolute favourite books from when I was a child - and I have to put in a word for The Railway Children too. I heard The Railway Children on the radio a few months ago and it was as good as ever - as a child I loved the story, whereas now I can appreciate all Nesbit says about the conditions in England, as solla says above. (It was actually a real surprise to me to realise what a lot of social commentary there is; of course it went right over my head 25 years ago!)

>67 Fullmoonblue:, Wow. Wow, wow, wow. This book sounds like a total load of crap. But parts of your review are truly hilarious:

"Apparently little Kamal Saleem didn’t know that yet; perhaps ‘Abu Kamal’ had been too busy teaching his son how to recognize Syrian Baathists, and was saving the word ‘father’ for age eight…?" had me rolling on the floor. There is nothing like a good snarky review in the morning. FMB, you're a better person than I am to even get through this crap and write a well-reasoned rebuttal. I would have just thrown it out the window.

Will you please post your excellent review on Amazon? I have very much enjoyed the reviews you and nobooksnolife have written on The Blood of Lambs, especially since 1) it seems to have been so quietly accepted elsewhere and 2) I will not have to read it!

I am sending you a virtual glass of chilled viognier in thanks.

I've read a couple of negative reviews of The Blood of Lambs before, but none so eloquent, detailed and convincing as yours. Yes, post it on Amazon, but why stop there--submit it to The NY Times Book Review magazine, Bookmarks magazine, and anywhere else it will get the readership it deserves.

Haven't been able to properly finish my review of The Blood of Lambs yet, but I plan to. I've been reading up on the Quran to get a better sense of how to do so. Most recently, I've been working my way through Neal Robinson's Discovering the Quran: A Contemporary Approach to a Veiled Text. It's fairly impressive, in that he pays more attention to the nuances of the original Arabic than some other 'intro' or popular books on the subject that I've seen. So far the point that's stuck with me most are his comments on the phrase "In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate" which begins every sura save one: significantly, the ninth sura, which contains some of the book's harshest language about war. That this particular sura, so often quoted by those who characterize Islam as inherently violent and anti-Jew/Christian, would be the only one *not* to begin with that phrase is striking. I'm hoping Robinson will flesh out some possible explanations later on in the book.

Meanwhile, I've engaged in some comparatively light reading over the past few days: fiction featuring cults. Read Laurie King's A Darker Place earlier this week, and Abby Bardi's The Book of Fred tonight. 'Fred' reminded me very much of a Young Adult version of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, with shades of Mark Dunn's Ella Minnow Pea. Kind of predictable and cutesy in places, but I finished it in a single sitting anyway, so I think I'd give it at least 3 stars overall. It would be a great read for someone 16-21 who's in a period of questioning both religion and conventional teen lifestyles/high school popularity.

I have always had a fascination with the Quran, and have a translation I have never read. It has always seemed important to try to understand the religion, but it is somewhat daunting to read the "holy book". I don't even really know much about the Bible--probably because I am Catholic and we never studied it. I will have to look for Robinson's book--maybe it will help me focus.

I just read A Darker Place, too. I never read any of King's books before, but really liked it and am looking forward to more.

Thanks for Ella Minnow Pea. Enjoyed it alot!

Picked up a copy of Vincent Poscente's The Age of Speed (warning, the touchstone isn't working out), which is subtitled "Learning to Thrive in a More-Faster-Now World." I grabbed it because it was cheap, and picked it up to help fall asleep the other night.

I don't think I'm going to finish it.

But I wanted to mention it here because reading just a few excerpts brought me to a an interesting realization: in terms of genre, this book is a combination of business and self-help. That's a marriage I'd never really thought about before. It makes me wonder how many other titles in the 'business' category actually bridge the two. I bet that mix is a lot more common than I ever would have realized.

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In other news, following the cult theme, I found myself gravitating toward a book I recently mooched: The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs. About 70 days into his year now, and it's not bad reading. The guy comes off as pretty self-obsessed, but I guess you kind of have to be to write a memoir. The book recounts how he spent a year trying to follow, as literally as is feasible in modernday New York City, as many biblical rules and instructions as possible.

The book is also a record of Jacobs' visits with folks from various groups of believers -- from the Amish, to the Jehovah's Witnesses, to countless Jewish and Christian groups -- as well as staunch nonbelievers, as when he visits an atheists club. His stories about meeting these people and learning how they intellectualize and live their beliefs are the parts I'm liking best so far; the many musings about himself and his inner world are way less engaging for me at this point.

ETA: And Lisa, I'm so glad you liked it. Kind of cute, huh? :)

Although I only had time to skim it, I loved the Blood of Lambs review. Being able to think critically is what education is all about

I recently read Barbara Ehrenreich's Bait and Switch, about unemployed white collar workers, which was primarily about how the two genres have melded so that if you can't find a job or were let go, there is something wrong with your attitude. It was a deeply depressing book, given that there seems to be an attitude that you are your job and you must be glowingly positive All. The. Time.

Finished The Year of Living Biblically. Not bad -- fairly entertaining -- but not really all that satisfying either. A sort of nonfiction beach read, maybe. Will see about reviewing it eventually.

Last night, started something completely different and which I'm already warming up to: Winifred Gallagher's House Thinking. She takes the layout and decorative features of various rooms from the typical American house and talks about how their design can affect the moods and even productivity of their inhabitants. She mentions, in the intro, how our homes and decorative choices reflect our personalitities but also influence our behavior, sometimes in comfortable and beneficial ways, and sometimes the exact opposite.

This immediately caught my attention, since for the past year I've been living and working (or not working) from less than wholly comfortable surroundings. I've been trying to finish grad school and a dissertation from a basement, to be precise. So why is it, I began wondering last night, that a basement *seems* like it should be the perfect retreat for escaping daily life and focusing on intellectual stuff, and yet in practice has left me feeling mentally sluggish and emotionally drained almost constantly? I thought back, for the first time, to the locations in which I've felt most productive and energized: the airy top story of a library, modern design, featuring clean surfaces, expansive high ceilings and natural light. In grad school, my attic apartment in which French doors connected the main rooms and made the whole space feel cozy and bright, like my own little nest, and my desk faced a window looking onto green trees and sky. During college, a 6th floor studio apartment in which the bed- and living-room windows faced east...

And then, without thinking it bizarre -- or even really noticing? -- I decided last fall to try to work on grad school papers and a dissertation from a bookshelf-lined ALCOVE in a windowless BASEMENT?

Going to rearrange the bedroom (put bed facing window facing east!) this evening, as well as relocating my desk and computer from the basement to the three-season room. Screw the humidity. It couldn't be much worse, could it?

ETA: can't get the House Thinking touchstone to load. Gah.

ETA again: fixed! :)

>79 Fullmoonblue:, I had pretty much the same reaction to The Year of Living Biblically.

Love your review of The Blood of Lambs. You were able to sum up all of my objections to the book in a much more eloquent way that I ever could have.

Amy and Isabelle by Elizabeth Strout

I'd never read a thing by her before, and picked this up by chance. Something about the setting called to mind Joyce Carol Oates, and so too did the promise of sexual tension between a young woman (Amy) and her teacher (Mr. Robertson). It had me expecting something akin to Oates' Marya: A Life.

Now, in my opinion, Strout is no Oates. But there were moments in the book that really stood out, and which made it feel worth reading for me. Most reviewers seem to find the mother character, Isabelle, somewhat more compelling than the daughter, Amy, but I found both portraits convincing and engaging. Amy's high school friend, Stacy, is a different story unfortunately (somehow, little about that character rang true for me; her voice never seemed real). And I found the 'Fat Bev' character kind of flat until toward the end... but Strout did flesh her out (pardon) very nicely in the final chapters.

To close, I have to add that I found the taut, tense, detailed descriptions of Amy's near-obsessive teenage infatuation with her math teacher totally believable. Especially in the second part of the story, after their former relationship has undergone a sudden change. Strout evokes, with Amy and nearly every other character too, a sense of being watched: small town people watching one another, everywhere they go, eager either to pass judgment or else to go home and beat themselves up for falling short.

The only major character whose inner world we see NONE of is Mr. Robinson... which is fitting, I guess, but this reader really missed it. If he (or any male character, really) had been given any emotional presence in the story at all, I think I would have given it a slightly higher rating. Maybe their absence was part of Strout's point, and intentional, but I think it would've added an important dimension. As is, I'd have trouble recommending this book to a male reader; their kind don't come out too well in Amy and Isabelle's town, the perhaps aptly-named Shirley Falls.

3.5 stars