detailmuse in 2012, part 2

Continued from part one here

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More Books Read in 2012

Fiction
84. Zone One# by Colson Whitehead (2.5) (See review)
77. My Antonia by Willa Cather (3.5)
76. Pigeon English# by Stephen Kelman (3.5) (See review)
71. Shine Shine Shine by Lydia Netzer (3)
70. The F***ing Epic Twitter Quest of @MayorEmanuel by Dan Sinker (5) (See review)
69. Primary Colors# by Anonymous (aka: Joe Klein) (4) (See review)
68. Logicomix# by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou (4) (See review)
66. The Awakening and Selected Short Fiction# by Kate Chopin (3.5) (See review)
63. Subduction by Todd Shimoda (3) (See review)
62. Park Songs by David Budbill (3) (See review)
60. Tinkers# by Paul Harding (4.5) (See review)
59. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian# by Sherman Alexie (3.5) (See review)

Nonfiction
83. Help Thanks Wow by Anne Lamott (4) (See review)
80. The Truth About Style by Stacy London (4)
79. Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks (3) (See review)
78. Mortality by Christopher Hitchens (3.5) (See review)
75. The Botany of Desire# by Michael Pollan (4)
74. Designing Information by Joel Katz (3) (See review)
73. When I Left Home: My Story by Buddy Guy (4) (See review)
72. Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace by D. T. Max (4.5) (See review)
67. The Oxford Project by Peter Feldstein/Stephen Bloom (5) (See review)
65. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson (4) (See review)
58. A Return to Love# by Marianne Williamson (3)
57. The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America by Julian Montague (5) (See review)
56. The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood+ by James Gleick (3.5)
55. My Life in France# by Julia Child (4.5) (See review)
54. A Moveable Feast# by Ernest Hemingway (4)
53. Writing Down the Bones# by Natalie Goldberg (3)
52. Winter Journal by Paul Auster (4) (See review)
51. How to Sharpen Pencils by David Rees (4) (See review)

Other
82. Bellevue Literary Review Vol 8, No 2; Fall 2008# (4.5) (See review)
81. Barefoot Contessa Foolproof by Ina Garten (5)
64. Child Made of Sand: Poems by Thomas Lux (3.5) (See review)
61. Bellevue Literary Review Vol 10, No 1; Spring 2010# (3.5) (See review)

Partials
A Flock of Fools# by Kazuaki Tanahashi and Peter Levitt (abandoned)
Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality# by Scott Belsky (abandoned)
Wait: The Art and Science of Delay by Frank Partnoy (abandoned)

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# denotes a book on my TBR shelves as of 12/31/11
+ denotes a “long book” (500pp+)

Recommended from the first 50 I read in 2012 (* = highly recommended)

Fiction
*Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
*Castle by David Macaulay (See review)
Cathedral: The Story of Its Construction by David Macaulay
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Glaciers by Alexis Smith (See review)
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry (See review)
Stay Awake by Dan Chaon (See review)

Nonfiction
*Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
*Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
Just Kids by Patti Smith (See review)
Life Everlasting: The Animal Way of Death by Bernd Heinrich (See review)
One for the Road: Drunk Driving Since 1900 by Barron H. Lerner (See review)
Quiet by Susan Cain (See review)
'Tis by Frank McCourt

More Non-book Reading
(tba)

How to Sharpen Pencils by David Rees

If this book serves any purpose, let it be as the definitive counter-argument to my teacher’s conspiracy theories {that my constantly going to the pencil sharpener was an attention-getting tactic}: Mr. Stewart, it was always about the pencil point.

I was thrilled a couple years ago when New Yorker shopping maven Patricia Marx took readers on a back-to-school spree for supplies, and have enjoyed using Mirado Black Warrior pencils ever since.

So I was thrilled again to learn of this book by Rees, an artisan dubbed “the number one #2 pencil sharpener.” I wasn’t sure if it was satire or serious, so borrowed a copy from the library just to see, and before I knew it I’d read it through. It’s serious! -- mostly -- he even operates a pencil-sharpening business, and he treats the subject with the precision of an engineer (cubed) and with humor, including footnotes that rival Mary Roach.

Rees begins with the anatomy of a pencil, including problem pencil points:



and how different points are suited to different jobs (knife-sharpened points, from left to right):



(1) -- gives the narrow line desired by architects and graphic designers
(2) -- quickly sharpened but needs constant maintenance, “not recommended for languid poets of the Romantic school”
(3) -- its low ratio of graphite to cedar (1:5) “ensures a point that can withstand greater than normal pressure {and} intense, heavy mark-making -- it is easy to imagine this pencil in the calloused hands of the contractor, the butcher, or the shack-dwelling megalomaniac with ideas to share”
(4) -- multiple surfaces = “many pencils in one” for artists.

He follows with physical warm-up exercises, then to the how-to of sharpening. His methods include pocketknife; single- and multiple-blade pocket sharpeners; and single- and double-burr crank sharpeners; and his accessories include an apron; tweezer; sandpaper and emery boards; protective pencil-point caps and tubing; and baggie (to return the shavings to the customer). The chapter on mechanical pencils is short (fulltext: “Mechanical pencils are bullshit.”) and the one on electric sharpeners is long (including how to identify which houses have them, how to gain access, and how to destroy them using safety goggles and a mallet).

I'm neutral about the chapter on sharpening pencils with your mind, skipped most of the chapter on sharpening as celebrity impersonators, and found some of the b/w photos too dark with too little contrast to see well. I wanted more about the (inside) engineering of burr pencil sharpeners (how they actually work) though overall was impressed that I came away knowing about both burr- and razor-sharpeners. And came away very entertained.

Winter Journal by Paul Auster

Perhaps it is something as simple as this: that a man fears death more at fifty-seven than he does at seventy-four.

I’ve only read Paul Auster’s nonfiction but I love it -- whether it’s life’s coincidences in The Red Notebook or this memoir on aging, written over the winter when Auster moves from midlife toward old age. I also feel that the total of an Auster book is less than the sum of its parts. In other words: I love the reading but like the overall works somewhat less.

Here he journals about his first 64 years and filters his recollections through his body and the spaces around and within it. It’s a chapter-less sequence of musings with just the occasional space on a page to separate vignettes. It’s written entirely in second-person point of view -- which immediately raised my guard and then surprised me by becoming less visible and even pulling me into the experience just like it’s supposed to. The best passages are the sections of 8-10 pages of solid, unparagraphed text, where he dives deeper and takes the reader along; I grew to love seeing them ahead.

Whereas Auster wrote about his father in The Invention of Solitude, here he writes about his mother, including this passage from a night after they visited her gravely ill second husband in the hospital:

…just when you thought it would be impossible for anyone to say another word, when the heaviness in your hearts seemed to have crushed all the words out of you, your mother started telling jokes {…} jokes so funny that you and your wife laughed until you could hardly breathe anymore {…} an unending torrent of classic yenta routines with all the appropriate voices and accents, the old Jewish women sitting around a card table and sighing, each one sighing in turn, each one sighing more loudly than the last, until one of the women finally says, “I thought we agreed not to talk about the children.”

And then this:

You have seen several corpses in the past {…} but none of those corpses belonged to your mother, no other dead body was the body in which your own life began, and you can look for no more than a few seconds before you turn your head away.

As a whole, it feels like a notebook filled with stream-of-consciousness writing from prompts in a memoir class (especially the 53 pages -- one-fourth of the book -- that recall the place of his birth and his 21 residential addresses since). Yet page by page it's so good! I’m definitely going to read the rest of his nonfiction.

Fascinating. Books on every possible topic in the world. Ironically, my daughter and I were reading a Life of Fred book this morning and about how Fred thinks there are only two types of books in the world: those he owns and those he wants to own. But the author adds another category: those that are not worth buying. The example is a fictitious book called The Names for Toenail in 300 Languages. Fred buys seven copies. After all, what if he is in Norway and needs to talk to someone about his toenail? BTW, we learned the German word is der Zehennagel. :-)

Edited to fix touchstone

Lisa too funny. My most recent read was a field guide to The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America. Excellent parody.

4 -
A very fun review about the Pencil book; sounds like he would make a great subject for a documentary as we follow his pencil cranking techniques. As for the following quote though?:

(fulltext: “Mechanical pencils are bullshit.”

I have had my Pentel mechanical pencil for nearly 15 years. I always carry it with me as it is ever loyal and always gives me the right trace on my paper, suitable to my handwriting and how I hold a pencil. I laugh at the face of those plastic "replaceable" mechanical pencils and at the face of the regular pencil that must be sharpened. No one is allowed to borrow this pencil as I find people just don't respect pencils and pens as they should.

I like Paul Auster's fiction and so I know I would like his journals. Excellent review of Winter Journal

bas I think I will get to his fiction ... something more by him soon.

lilisin, you and my husband! When I use his mechanical pencils (not Pentels) the leads just go snap! snap! snap! I’m much more suited to pencil (3) above (though a little sharper).

Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg is a collection of very short essays on writing, a classic of creative support and zen inspiration. I much prefer Julia Cameron (The Artists Way) and Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird) but this too has wisdom:

Learn to write about the ordinary. Give homage to old coffee cups, sparrows, city buses, thin ham sandwiches. Make a list of everything ordinary you can think of. Keep adding to it. Promise yourself, before you leave the earth, to mention everything on your list at least once in a poem, short story, newspaper article.

and

Talk is a way to warm up for the big game -- the hours you write alone with your pen and notebook. Make a list of all the stories you have told over and over. That’s a lot of writing to be done.

The tiny book image is not a mistake -- nearly 10 years ago, I received this “pocket” edition, which is the size of a double-thick stack of playing cards and difficult enough to hold and read that I only persevered now.

I'm huge wood case pencil fan myself and have been tempted to buy How to Sharpen a Pencil just for kicks. I've kept one of every brand type of pencil used from Kindergarden until today. My current favorites though are the Cedar Choice and the classic Mongol for basic everyday run of the mill writing tasks. For special tasks it's a Palmino or nothing. Needless to say sharpening is also a minor obsession of mine. Nothing beats that freash cedar cut smell of a wood case.For me though I prefer the single hole Boston pencil sharpener with suction cup from the 1960's, art deco design:
.
Prefect points every time. Not something I can reproduce with a pocket knife.

For the record friends and coworkers do think I'm crazy, but they don't laugh at my map of the Bloomington IU campus with every know working pencil sharpener, ranked by effectiveness come test taking time.

>8 lilisin:. Actually if you send Rees twenty bucks he'll send you a sharpened pencil, shavings included. and a certificate from his Artisanal Pencil Sharpening Not the best deal in the world but how often does a expert in the field

#12 How did I miss your map of the Bloomington IU campus with every know working pencil sharpener, ranked by effectiveness? When did you create it?

Five or Six years ago.

I've forgotten what a regular pencil looks like...oh, no, there are some in the kids art stuff. None of those are yellow, however. Very entertaining. And enjoyed your review of Paul Auster's Winter Journal.

Ah, after my time. :-)

omg Kevin (or are you David Rees??) fun post -- what are you waiting for, you'll love the book. I've looked at Palomino Blackwings online and would like to find a local source to try them.

Nothing beats that fresh cedar cut smell of a wood case
We just installed a new cedar fence and the aroma is fabulous. Thanks for reminding me I can create it indoors :) You also reminded me that Rees includes a section on wines that taste like pencil.

>dan I'd heard kids aren't learning cursive writing but now I wonder if they're doing much handwriting at all? Or are yours still too young for much of that?

Does he talk about the erasers at the other end?

#17 - no cursive in school -- which is weird to me, like a handicap. My daughter is in 2nd grade. Last year she did a lot of hand writing, and no, or almost no typing on the computer (she did use the computer for certain webpages).

>18 SassyLassy: You know, I can't remember so maybe not. Erasers can be dealbreakers for pencils! I'm happy with those on the Mirado.

I thoroughly enjoyed your excellent review of How to Sharpen Pencils, and the discussion about pencils is very entertaining!

#11: Those are my three favorite books about writing. I need to read them again. Thanks for reminding me.

>thanks Darryl
and the discussion about pencils is very entertaining
You should see all the pencil blogs online! I bookmarked some but at the top of my list to explore further is the visually lush “Pencil Talk”.

>Bonnie
I need to read them again.
Me too. The Artist's Way is a whole project but Bird by Bird just flies.

New favorite blog MJ, even if they occasionally allow those mechanical contraptions, but the sharpener makes me drool a little steep on price though. I'm also a fan of the Pencil Revolution (can't remember Hyperlink command) much more centered on the wood case, they are pretty good at reviews as well if you haven't tried them yet.

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

On writing:

I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, {I would think} All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know. {…} I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about.

…my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.

This is Hemingway’s memoir of Paris between the world wars -- living with his first wife, Hadley (who he makes as inane as Catherine in A Farewell to Arms; I should probably read The Paris Wife) and their young son when money was tight; writing and developing friendships with other expat writers; traveling in France. He touches on Gertrude Stein’s mentorship, on Ezra Pound’s nice-guy-ness, on Ford Madox Ford getting everyone published, and then quite a bit on F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda.

Through the first half and further, I decided this (my third by Hemingway) was my last. His sentence spareness is fine, I mostly agree about omitting (above), but he’s just so withholding. And then I got to the chapters on Fitzgerald where Hemingway opened up -- vulnerability! humor! opinion! -- and then brushed up against his own infidelity and the decline of his marriage. (He did something similar in A Farewell to Arms -- macho the whole way through then tender at the end.) Still, I was moved and maybe reeled in again.

The most surprising thing in the book was this photo -- I cannot find Hemingway in this gangly youth.

My Life in France by Julia Child (actually, Alex Prud’homme)

After A Moveable Feast, I moved on to a happier memoir of France -- this one of Julia Child’s time there, both geographically (living in a marvelous partnership -- including nooners! -- with her diplomatic-services husband in Paris, Marseille and Provence) and gastronomically (learning to cook at the Cordon Bleu and creating Mastering the Art of French Cooking, its sequel, and the American public-television programs).

It’s written in Julia’s first-person narration by her husband’s grand-nephew, sourced from letters and interviews and published posthumously. I pulled it from my TBRs to read in conjunction with what would have been Julia’s 100th birthday on August 15. I loved it.

Cooking was so endlessly interesting that I wanted to make a career of it, though I was sketchy on the details. My plan was to start by teaching a few classes to Americans in Paris. My guiding principle would be to make cooks out of people, rather than gobs of money {…} the teaching of gastronomy in an atmosphere of friendly and encouraging professionalism. {…} My ideal pupils would be just like the kind of person I had been: those who aspired to be accomplished home cooks…

I had three main weaknesses: I was confused {…} I had a lack of confidence {…} and I was overly emotional at the expense of careful, “scientific” thought. I was thirty-seven years old and still discovering who I was.

This book shows how she overcame those weaknesses and, as she would say, had Such fun! along the way.

Enjoyed your reviews of A Moveable Feast and My Life in France

> 25 I decided this (my third by Hemingway) was my last.
For high school English credit I read a succession of Hemingway novels, by the third or fourth I decided I couldn't handle his depressing endings anymore.

>26 detailmuse: My Life in France has been on my wishlist for a while. It does sound like fun!

I admit I like the endings, I want more of it throughout. He stops just when he's allowed us an honest glimpse, just when it gets interesting. And his pattern over books seems conscious and manipulative.

That is a great photo, Have you seen the Woody Allen film "Midnight in Paris"

Recently re-watched the movie "Julie and Julia", the movie where Meryl Streep plays Julia Child. She was excellent in that movie. So entertaining!

29 -
I hated that movie and still don't see why people like it so much. Terrible dialogue, actors, and manner of shooting. And it's not a Woody Allen thing since I've liked many of his other films. But this one inspires dread and loathing from me. It's not pretty.

Not a Hemingway fan. Not a cook, but might enjoy My Life in France or the new biography about her.

Great review of A Moveable Feast, MJ.

Enjoyed your reviews. Great stuff on Hemingway, and a fascinating photo.

Hi all and thanks. I'm interested to take a look at "Midnight in Paris" while Hemingway's book is fresh; the DVD is on my library's shelves. I also loved the Julia (Streep) part of "Julie and Julia" but really disliked Julie.

Lisa, I think both books show the marvelous underside to the public persona of Julia Child. Quite a woman.

Nice review. I think A moveable feast is one of his nicest books. I recently went back to reading Hemingway, and read The snows of Kilimanjaro, and other stories

Knowing of your interest in How to Sharpen Pencils, I thought you might find this Inc. article interesting.

>edwin you tempt me with his short stories. I was fascinated by the subtext in Hills Like White Elephants.

>lisa thanks! "Artisanal" fluff annoys me. I can't imagine an artisanally sharpened pencil has substantive benefit. Brings to mind a bread maker at my local farmer's market who refuses to slice his loaves, citing the olden days. Not everything was good about the olden days.

Coming up: the good, the bad and the ugly. In reverse order, over the next few days.

I abandoned these for offering nothing new to me:

 

Making Ideas Happen by Scott Belsky is about the “perspiration” in the Edison quote that genius (or in this case, success) is “1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.” Ideas are assumed to be voluminous here and are outside the scope; this book says making ideas happen = “the idea + organization and execution + forces of accountability + leadership capability.” I read a little of this book a couple years ago and, while I didn’t renew it from the library, I kept it in my LT library and came back to it now on audio. I still got through only a very little, it is a mind-numbingly basic primer on organizing one’s work and as I read through the rest of that equation above I can’t imagine there will be revelations in the areas of accountability or leadership either.

Wait: The Art and Science of Delay by Frank Partnoy

Don’t just do something, stand there!

This is the nth pop-science book I’ve read recently that references the Stanford marshmallow study, which compared children’s levels of self-control at age four with success in later life. Because Partnoy says waiting is good, in fact it’s best to wait as long as possible before making a decision or a move. Estimate the deadline for the decision, then gather information and/or gain physical expertise but don’t make the decision/move until the deadline.

It begins with a fascinating discussion about the human vagus nerve having two threads -- a reptilian aspect that favors “freezing” and a mammalian one that favors decision-making -- and concludes that children (even infants) whose vagus slows their heart rates in times of stress (i.e. the reptilian response) have better mental health and increased abilities to wait. But then it moves away from science to a collection of studies and stories, for example fast and slow(er) sports (tennis/cricket vs baseball) and how the best players are so mentally and physically quick that they can delay the milliseconds necessary to make better responses.

I listened to the first three (of seven) and then the last CD, then quit; there just wasn’t much new* to me.

*On the other hand, semi-off topic segues like this one kept me listening for those three discs:
There are high-power poses and low-power poses. (High-power = leaning back in a chair, hands clasped behind head, feet up on desk; or standing with legs apart, leaning forward with hands on a table. Low-power = sitting with hands in lap and shoulders hunched; or standing slumped with arms crossed.) In both sexes, high-power poses increase testosterone (increasing dominance/status) and decrease cortisol (decreasing stress/weakness). So you can manipulate (up or down as a situation warrants) your tendency toward dominance and stress by assuming the relevant pose -- in private, in advance of a meeting, since the hormonal effects last 15+ minutes. Hmm.

very entertained by your *. Looking forward to the good.

When I was away earlier this month and walked into the first bookstore of my trip, the very first book I saw was How to Sharpen Pencils, prominently displayed. I loved the production values and the book itself looked interesting and definitely quirky, however, I passed on this book thinking I would see in in many more bookstores before my trip was over, but alas, it was not to be.

>dan you're going to agree with one of my favorite "goods."

>sassy it was so fun to read I would have been happy to have bought it. But after having read a library copy I'm not drawn to acquire my own.

The "okays" and better:



A Return to Love is Marianne Williamson’s summary of / guide to / reflections on the 1970s workbook, A Course in Miracles, about the power of love (vs. fear) and intention in the meaning and living of life. New-age spirituality/metaphysics intrigued me when this was published 20 years ago. It’s been in my TBRs for many years and though I’m still intrigued, I didn’t connect with Williamson here.

I do like this passage, which is often attributed to Nelson Mandela:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we’re liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

Williamson writes that A Course in Miracles (i.e. one’s acceptance of spiritual/metaphysical love) is “a required course. Only the time you take it is voluntary.” Still intriguing.

Park Songs by David Budbill, from August’s Early Reviewers

There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy. (Mark Twain)

Numberless are the world’s wonders, and none more wonderful than man. (Sophocles, Antigone)

We learn in a time of pestilence that there is more to admire in men than to despise. (Albert Camus, The Plague)

Park Songs is a collection of vignettes about the people in and around an urban park on a single day, told in very short monologues and dialogues and interspersed with photographs.

It opens promisingly with the epigraphs above (I’m a firm believer that “everybody has a story”) and then the park caretaker arriving to rouse those who’ve slept there overnight, offer them a day’s menial work and otherwise shoo them out for the day. I was hooked. And I stayed interested for a dozen more vignettes where the dramatic and poetic styles emerge, character development seems promising, and the black-and-white photos intrigue with an off-balance, isolated tone. But the floor fell out by the middle -- the vignettes were snippets not scenes, many of the characters weren’t developing, nor was a narrative other than perhaps a lesson (vs. a story) on social responsibility.

The author’s Afterword encourages readers to write for permission to mount a production of the book in whole or part. I can better envision it staged, where actors will bring everything they have to a set. But it didn’t hold up as a two-dimensional book.

Bellevue Literary Review Vol 10, No 1; Spring 2010

The Spring 2010 issue of the literary journal based out of NYU’s Department of Medicine. My favorite entry was “Ghosts of Doubt” by Gregg Cusick (interwoven stories of Professor Hunter’s lit-class discussion about Lord Jim’s abandonment of ship, and the 50th anniversary of Private Hunter’s experience on the torpedoed WWII troop transport ship, SS Leopoldville), followed closely by “The Champion” by M.M. DeVoe (in which a father and daughter don’t talk about his terminal cancer or her terminal marriage).

The cover image is from 1908, of the first Bellevue Hospital building built with loggia “so that patients could take in the sun and the air.”

The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick

Some years before {Charles Babbage’s} death {in 1871}, he told a friend that he would gladly give up whatever time he had left if only he could be allowed to live for three days … five centuries in the future.

Information is not knowledge, and knowledge is not wisdom.

Whereas Park Songs (above) imploded, this book exploded. It’s about information and the history of how we share it, from African drums to dictionaries to DNA and dozens of methods in between, on levels both detailed and comprehensive, scientific and sociological, technical and anecdotal. It’s not academic, it’s not dry (although the reader’s voice is), it’s never boring. It’s very smart, mostly interesting, sometimes entertaining, but just not engaging. Like the volume of information today that Gleick says is too much, so his book has too much! I sit here in contradiction -- writing these comments has refreshed my memory about all that is good about this book … and also about listening on audio over a month, committing to just 3 CDs (of 14) at a time, and being elated to finish.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian by Sherman Alexie

The world, even the smallest parts of it, is filled with things you don’t know.

The partly autobiographical story of 14-year-old Junior’s freshman year in high school -- his life divided between loyalty to family and tribe on his Spokane Indian “rez,” and bucking the going-nowhere way of life there by enrolling in a better education at the “white people’s” school in a nearby town.

It won the National Book Award but I wasn’t quite as impressed. It addresses controversial topics (racism, sexual awakening) to a degree that’s earned it challenges, which does impress me. But it’s definitely a teen (vs. adult) YA and a little preachy, where it seemed the author bundled his five most powerful adolescent experiences into a freshman’s year.

And a couple good (great!) reads:



Tinkers by Paul Harding is an eight-day deathwatch as George Crosby succumbs to kidney cancer.

He’s surrounded by living relatives -- his sister, wife and children; but this novel is incredibly evocative of men, and I was touched by the passages where his grandsons keep watch. And then the special interest comes from the narrative also being inhabited by dead relatives -- George’s father (a horse-and-cart era rural peddler with severe epilepsy) and grandfather (a Methodist preacher) -- and it’s unclear where they are ... in George’s mind? in an omniscient narrator? in a diary a grandson reads from?

The details are quietly and purposefully chosen, for example, that George was a clock repairman and the story covers eight days -- the time it takes a traditional clock’s mainspring to wind down. And the language is beautiful, be it the experience of a seizure or this description of a clock:

…a clock supposedly seen in eastern Bohemia that had the likeness of a great oak tree wrought in iron and brass around its dial. As the seasons of its homeland changed, the branches of the tree turned a thousand tiny copper leaves, each threaded on a hair-thin spindle, from enameled green to metallic red. Then, by astounding mechanisms within the case {…} the branches released the leaves to spiral down their threads and strew themselves about the lower part of the clock-face.

My dad died nearly ten years ago and I would not have been able to read this before now. But I'll definitely re-read, there’s so much still to discover and understand.

The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification by Julian Montague

Until now, the major obstacle that has prevented people from thinking critically about stray shopping carts has been that we have not had any formalized language to differentiate one shopping cart from another.

This parody of field guides establishes a taxonomy based not on shopping-cart characteristics but on the characteristics of where they’re found and their condition and use. It defines two classes -- False Strays (carts that have been temporarily repurposed near their store or have strayed but will be rounded up and returned to the store) and True Strays (carts that won’t be returned to their store) -- and then 33 subtypes including variously damaged, vandalized, naturalized (e.g. into bodies of water), repurposed (i.e. stolen for personal or business use), and my favorite, “structurally modified”:

 

There are hundreds of color-photo field examples, each exhaustively categorized, and then a section on the Niagara Falls River Gorge, “a complex vandalism super site.” An appendix describes related phenomena: stray plastic bags, car tires and traffic cones.

It’s an extremely well-developed parody, insightful even, and deeply humorous

Enjoyed reading your review detailmuse. Tinkers sounds a very powerful book, and I take your point on how difficult this book may be for those people confronted by death due to cancer.

But stray shopping carts sounds a hoot. When I lived in London I was always coming across reconstructed shopping carts, or shopping carts in unlikely places. They certainly have many uses. Down here in South West France no one would dream of misappropriating a shopping trolley.

Enjoyed your reviews! The Stray Shopping Carts of North America sounds very funny. Would love to read it - if for no other reason but simply to say I read it! LOL! The city I live in is comprised mostly of strip malls so we have a growing population of stray shopping carts.

>bas, avid -- I do look differently at everyday stray carts now!

>bas, no cancer for my dad; he was a strong man who grew frail in his 80s and so the male vulnerability in Tinkers touched me. Nor is the book really about cancer, I think I summarized it better today on the "best reads" thread by saying it was a story of four male generations.

Glad you were able to read Tinkers. Excellent review (and thought-provoking book). You mentioned some key things that I didn't pick up on, such as the significance of the 8 days, and especially, the theme of male vulnerability. Your personal response is touching.

Entertained by the shopping carts too.

Too bad about several others, especially the Sherman Alexie.

I take your point on how difficult this book may be for those people confronted by death due to cancer.
My dad died a long time ago at a fairly young age (51) from kidney cancer and I remember the "death watch" - so Tinkers literally hits close to home but I would be willing to read Tinkers. It sounds like a powerful and poignant book - especially since you said you would go back and re-read it.

>avidmom, that's so young. It's tragic. I will reread Tinkers; it's accessible on a first read but I suspect Harding reveals more on a second.

Subduction by Todd Shimoda / illustrations by LJC Shimoda; a months-ago Early Reviewer

Subduction is a story of collision -- of the earth’s tectonic plates and of a small cluster of people who refuse to evacuate Marui-jima, a Japanese island increasingly prone to earthquakes.

It’s narrated conversationally (and with wry humor) by young physician Jun Endo, who was blamed for a patient’s death on the mainland and sentenced to serve the remaining years of his medical residency among the old fishermen on that “dust mote of an island.” To Endo’s relief, there’s also a young male seismologist doing research on the island, and a young woman filming a documentary, and the three of them ease into a companionship tinged with competition and paranoia.

So goes two-thirds of the book, which I started three times and put aside twice for long periods. I read everything except this book until I finally wouldn’t let myself read anything but it (thus a recent spell of no reading where I caught up on reviews). Anyway, when an unexpected death occurred on the island, things got more interesting ... and stayed so until a quick, convenient ending.

The physical book is also interesting -- smooth (almost glossy) pages, about two-thirds of which are text while the other third is abstract Japanese artwork backed by blood-red blank pages and captions. It’s beautiful, except the red pages are visually harsh, and the art and captions interrupt and frustrate (I couldn't connect them to the story). After the Shimodas' previous Oh! A Mystery of mono no aware (which I’m compelled to savor, vs. avoid), this novel was disappointing.

sounds interesting though.

Child Made of Sand: Poems by Thomas Lux

I’ve been exercising my poetry muscles and was excited to obtain an ARC of this slender volume of 42 poems -- my first exposure to Thomas Lux. It’s an accessible collection -- short, readable entries that resonate with layered meaning. In fact, many are narratives and end with surprises that pulled me right back to the first line to reread with new insight. Lux muses on disability and mortality; gives homage to poets, writers, poems and literature; reminisces; vents anger. As collections go, what strikes me here is not that I have several whole poems I’d like to post, but that I marked striking passages in a dozen poems.

Lux can delight with a single word

Penultimatum

and provoke thought

{…}the weight
of the ink (oh, I pray
not the pixels!) on an execution order

and get the sense detail just right

The dust motes of mud at a pond’s bottom,
sluggish river, or swamp. The finest, most ethereal
of muds, rising in soft pinheads
from the density below; the fog of mud, what first
grips your ankle so whisperly, a little warmer
than the water above it, a satiny sock

and morph dimensions

I read it all morning and I read it all night.
The next day all day
and 100 miles into the dark

and even rhyme

{…} If I live a hundred lives,
then I’ll know more truths, maybe, and lies,
to write my memoir, novella-sized.

We all need poetry fitness...

Subduction sounds like a failure of geology in fiction. Oh well. Glad you were able to finish the book, and be done with it. Lux sounds worth a look.

>dan haha my poetry fitness is about the equivalent of walking. I'm feeling pleasure in it. My goal is to jog not run.

Nice review of Subduction, MJ. That reminds me; I need to write my review of it for the LT Early Reviewers program.

We should all read and review more poetry! Great stuff on Thomas Lux detailmuse and I loved the extracts, especially the mud at the bottom of the pond.

fyi and in hopes that Subduction might have better luck with another reviewer, I listed my copy yesterday on LT's Member Giveaway. (And saw what an e-heap MG has become.)

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson, audio read by the author.

I’m as glad I listened to this on audio, read by the author, as I was with Patti Smith’s Just Kids. In fact, the feeling of comfort that persists after finishing the books is similar -- tenderly yet matter-of-factly told stories of women’s younger selves going out and getting what they need.

The first part of Winterson’s memoir is about her very young self growing up in the “wrong crib” -- an adoptive crib, with a mentally ill Pentecostal mother and deferring father. Winterson finds sanity in the public library’s shelves of “English literature from A to Z” (which this American loved hearing read as zed not zee); awakens to her (homo)sexuality; flees her parents’ home at sixteen; attends Oxford; writes prize-winning novels. But the reach of the “wrong crib” is long, and the second part of the book is Winterson’s recent midlife search for her birth mother.

If I’d read this rather than listened on audio, I’d have marked quite a few sentences for language or insight. There’s terrific evocation of small-town, 1960s working-class England and passages that made me think of Sybil. Now I’m eager to read what Winterson calls the “cover version” of her life story -- her 1985 debut novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.

We read Why be happy when you could be normal with our book club and everybody loved it. As you say life in a northern English working class town was brilliantly evoked.

Bas your review led me to this book! I'm enjoying authors reading the audio of their memoirs, it's another layer of character -- Tina Fey's lightning brain, Patti Smith's earthiness, Anne Lamott's zen, Carrie Fisher's fogginess. Winterson's voice hovers over her narrative, reminded me a bit of Julia Child.

Terrific review of Winterson

I see you read Oxford Project. Would love to hear your thoughts. I hosted Peter and the author for an event - it was really inspiring.

I've just gotten a copy of Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal. Every review I've read has made me want to read it more.

Thanks Dan, and Alison I'm eager to read your comments about the book.

Nancy, The Oxford Project = 5 stars. I've dipped into it several times on a library copy but finally bought my own and read it cover to cover. More forthcoming.

The Awakening and Selected Short Fiction by Kate Chopin

From the novella of the title:

It sometimes entered Mr. Pontellier’s mind to wonder if his wife were not growing a little unbalanced mentally. He could see plainly that she was not herself. That is, he could not see that she was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.

And from “Athenaise,” one of the 13 accompanying short stories:

Cazeau had always so much to do; but among the many urgent calls upon him, the task of bringing his wife back to a sense of her duty seemed to him for the moment paramount.

I read this collection of women seeking their personhoods last month during Banned Books Week, and can understand why they were intensely controversial when published in the very-late 1800s. Some of the women are married to prominent husbands, with young children, beautiful homes and servants, and lofty social standings ... and they aren’t much interested in any of it. Others have very limited means. And when they gradually awaken to their frank disinterest and disilluson, they find themselves hopeless in a society unable to deal with them.

I felt terrifically immersed in time and place (southern U.S., particularly New Orleans) and thought several times of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper. I read a couple of the stories earlier this year in a short-story challenge, and now especially enjoyed the surprising and ironic Desiree’s Baby, the poignant A Pair of Silk Stockings, and one of my all-time favorites, The Story of an Hour.

----------

A shocking aside: In the novella, written more than a hundred years before Hurricane Katrina, Chopin associates an (apparently invented) New Orleans legend with Edna Pontellier’s awakening:

On the twenty-eighth of August, at the hour of midnight, and if the moon is shining -- the moon must be shining -- a spirit that has haunted these shores for ages rises up from the Gulf. With its own penetrating vision the spirit seeks some one mortal worthy to hold him company, worthy of being exalted for a few hours into realms of the semi-celestials. His search has always hitherto been fruitless, and he has sunk back, disheartened, into the sea. But to-night he found Mrs. Pontellier."

Wishlisted...

Very interesting comments on Kate Chopin.

70 - Nice review. I just pulled this out to take on my trip to NO with me.

>71 alphaorder:-73 Sounds like "The Awakening" killed Chopin's literary reputation until well after her death. It's a complex question whether her fictional character, Mrs. Pontellier, deserves criticism today.

The Oxford Project, photographs by Peter Feldstein, text by Stephen Bloom

Some years ago, I participated in the University of Iowa’s Summer Writing Festival, and during one of the daily “Elevenses” sessions was fascinated by photographer Peter Feldstein’s discussion of his (then) new book, The Oxford Project. I’ve browsed a library copy several times and now read it through. Its premise: take the photographs Feldstein shot in 1984 of (virtually) every resident of small-town Oxford, Iowa, couple them with new photos of everyone taken in 2005, and add short biographies. The result: proof that “everybody has a story.”

I enjoyed the photographs -- the ways people changed over 21 years, the way some posed exactly as they had decades earlier. But I loved the bios -- quotes, actually, drawn from interviews conducted by writer Stephen Bloom:

More {people} than I would have expected broke down in tears and confessed life stories seldom acknowledged. Many talked about relationships gone bad. Several revealed they were victims of domestic abuse or had weathered infidelities. A few exaggerated facts, boasting about events that I doubt ever occurred. A number of people confided great regrets and profound sorrows. Often their words came out slowly and methodically, other times they poured forth in jags and torrents. The language of not just a few was pure poetry.

Among the ~700 residents there in the middle of flyover country is Jim Hoyt, “the last living of the first four American soldiers who liberated Buchenwald concentration camp.”

And Pat Henkelman, whose husband left their 45-year marriage: “I didn’t know who the {other} woman was, but everyone else in town did. I would have felt better if she was young and beautiful, but she wasn’t.”

Vince Grabin, whose wife is in a nursing home: "I try to see her every day. They don't allow visitors to eat with residents, so I bring a sandwich and eat it in her room."

Marguerite Stockman, whose son was working in a cornfield at night: “The cornhusks got caught in the picker and he reached in and got one of his hands stuck. Then he reached in with the other and that hand got caught. He stayed there overnight. In the morning, a neighbor boy ran across the field and found him. They took him to the hospital and removed both his hands at mid-forearm. He still has his elbows.”

Auctioneer Jim Jiras: “I took a two-week home course. You learn how to say all kinds of things: Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. Sally sells seashells by the seashore. A skunk sat on a stump. The stump thought the skunk stunk. The skunk thought the stump stunk. What stunk? The skunk or the stump? I got pretty good at it.”

And Bob Tandy, whose first daughter died as a newborn: “The doctors believed she died of placental abruption, which is a Latin term for Bad Fucking Luck. {…We} now have a year-and-half-old daughter. Her name is Isabella Noel, which means Beautiful Gift.”

Love your review. And love Oxford Project - it is a really special book. Peter is a great guy.

Wow, The Oxford Project sounds fascinating. That one is going on the wishlist.

The Oxford project sounds a wonderful book.

Interesting review of The Oxford Project, detailmuse. I am also adding Child Made of Sand to my wishlist. I love poetry but always struggle with how to present it in a review, and I enjoyed your approach to it.

fyi I'd resisted the hardcover of The Oxford Project (expensive and unwieldy -- heavy) and was happy to see a paperback had been released. Was nervous because it was described as "abridged" and I had no interest in that, so I compared them page by page and would not characterize it as abridged. Equivalent image/paper quality in a slightly smaller coffee-table size, with the same page layouts just slightly miniaturized, and lacking only a couple dozen images total (mostly those on the hardcover's fold-out pages, which the paperback doesn't do).

>Linda I'm beginning to be drawn to poetry...

Glad to hear about The Oxford Project in paper.

Really good review of The Oxford Project which sounds very interesting. A lot of nice quotes.

Echoing above, excellent review of The Oxford Project.

Logicomix by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou

Geometry showed me the only way toward reality: Reason. In it, I encountered for the first time the delicious experience of knowing something with total certainty. Proof thus became my Royal Road to Truth.

That dialogue is attributed to Bertrand Russell in this graphic-format, quasi-fictionalized* biography of the man -- particularly the math, history and philosophy of his quest for an adequate representation of reality and source of absolute truth, and his struggle to prove that his found source (logic) begets the answer to every question.

Geometry was the first math I loved and I’ve been yearning to return to where I began to struggle (somewhere between trig and calculus), master that, and move forward. While I admit to hovering over the math (and more so the philosophy) here more than fully understanding it, it was fun to be hovering over Wittgenstein (and sad to be connecting math-greatness with mental illness) both here and in my concurrent reading of the biography of David Foster Wallace. I enjoyed the intro to so many historical philosophers and I enjoyed the storytelling -- watching the authors and illustrators break the “fourth wall” of the story to address the reader directly or talk amongst themselves about math/philosophy and how to best present the material.

*The authors have gotten some grief for choosing to “select, reduce, simplify, interpret, and, very often, invent” Russell’s life to better tell this story, but for me it worked in their quest for the “truth” (i.e. vs. the “facts”). On the other hand, does embellishment contradict the concept of “proof”?

I really enjoyed Logicomix. You bring up an interesting question. It's a judgement call, but I think the authors handled the simplification and reinvention quite well.

I do too, Dan. But I did look up Russell online to get a fuller picture, and wikipedia'd most of the other philosophers.

Primary Colors by Anonymous (aka: Joe Klein)

Published in 1996, this is a fictionalized insider story of a staffer (a thinly disguised George Stephanopoulos) for a candidate (a very thinly disguised Bill Clinton) during primary season of the 1992 presidential campaign. I traveled a lot at that time and remember hearing people laughing on airplanes and when I’d look at their books it would be this, and there was high interest in uncovering the identity of “Anonymous” and matching the fictional politicians and staffers to their real-life counterparts.

It’s held up well -- still funny and also thoughtful, particularly regarding the moral complexity of political candidates and whether ends justify means -- but skip the novel if you’ve seen the film. Today’s “scorps” (the media corps -- “scorpions”) have of course ramped up exponentially. It was fun to read during campaign season and envision the behind-the-scenes dramas that were undoubtedly happening with each candidate misstep.

The F***ing Epic Twitter Quest of @MayorEmanuel by Dan Sinker is a Twitter feed that aggregates into an entertaining epic poem.

It’s journalist/web-geek Sinker’s unrestrained tweets under the fictional persona of Rahm Emanuel (former Obama White House Chief of Staff) during the man’s 2010-11 campaign for mayor of Chicago. I’m enamored of Emanuel and fascinated by his pit-bull, anti-people personality. I was especially fascinated to watch him glad-hand Obama supporters at one of the debates last month, and when I found myself imagining what was going on in his head, I pulled this from my TBRs.

Sinker began his @MayorEmanuel feed (bio: “Your next motherfucking mayor. Get used to it, assholes.”*) on the day rumors surfaced that Emanuel would run for the office that had been occupied by father-and-son Daleys for 43 of the last 56 years. Annotated with background and context where necessary, his couple-thousand tweets cover Emanuel resigning from the White House; returning to Chicago and facing residency challenges; finding innovative housing when the tenant renting his home refused to vacate early; commenting on his fellow candidates and the voters; and running his campaign. The real Emanuel blurbed the book with “My sentiments exactly,” and the entries do sound spot-on. For example:

Speech preview: I’ve spent these last weeks listening to your problems. And gone home every fucking night and poured bleach in my ears.

-----

Who the fuck is in charge of cleaning the CTA stations? Because at this point I wouldn’t mind taking a fucking meeting with that asshole.

{annotation} The actual Rahm Emanuel visited every single CTA L station (The L is the public train system in Chicago, so named because much of the line is elevated aboveground) during his campaign, many of them multiple times. Most of them are not very clean.

Emanuel’s campaign team is mostly David Axelrod and Carl the Intern, but along the way they add a dog (“Hambone”) and a duck (“Quaxelrod”):

I’ve been shaking hands outside of PetSmart all morning. Last day I let Hambone and Quaxelrod set my fucking schedule.

The tweets also reflect non-mayoral events that happened along the way, e.g. the national mid-term elections, the rescue of the Chilean miners, Super Bowl XLV, Chicago’s Snowmageddon storm, and Jeopardy’s Watson computer challenge. Sinker wraps up by detailing his coming out as the feed author and meeting Emanuel.

I loved this book! I’d expected to read a few dozen pages and then tire of the format, but while I wasn’t looking it developed a whole story arc, and became a touching homage to Chicago. I had to detox from only five days of tweet-reading, vs. five months for those who followed it live. But like them, I’m so sad there’s no more.

-----
*The language is extraordinarily profane and vulgar ... and it faded completely to background after I’d read a couple hundred entries. I didn’t sanitize it here but I did limit it.

88 - Sounds interesting, even though I barely know what Twitter is. :)

Also will be interested to hear your thoughts in Building Stories. I read a review of it that made it sound intriguing.

>jane it's a box filled with an assortment of books, pamphlets, posters, etc, each a graphic-format installment about the residents in a Chicago three-flat that you read in whatever order you decide. The format is a winner. Not sure about the content yet -- I've read 5 or 6 of the 14 pieces and am not sure if they're going to just be slices of life or an actual story with a beginning-middle-end.

Hi MJ, Sorry it's taking me so long to get to your thread. When I was offline, so many posts build up and then I'm intimidated to start. Anyway, I wish I could have made these comments at the right time, but I thought I'd share a few responses retroactively.

I'm sorry The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie didn't work for you. I was very impressed with it. Ah well, different strokes... Perhaps you had an expectation that wasn't met? I hate it when that happens. It's like drinking OJ when you expect it to be milk.

I have had Tinkers on my shelf for at least three years. You think I would have gotten to it by now, especially since it is set in Maine, my home state.

Although I am not much of a poetry reader, your review of the books of poems by Thomas Lux made me think I should become one. What lovely lines!

Finally, I added The Oxford Project to my library hold list. It sounds fascinating and reminds me a bit of Robert Capa's Definitive Collection. Each photograph told a story and then there was a bit of text to hold it together. Also they are both big honking books!

So glad to be caught up with you again!

Looking forward to seeing what you think of Hallucinations, I was disappointed with The Mind's Eye. A lot of it seemed rehashed from earlier books.

I hated My Antonia or anything from the early 20th century in America. But it may be because I took the class with a professor that could make anyone hate literature. Perhaps I should go back and try again. Everyone raves.

Hi Lisa! haha the OJ/milk in my reading of The Absolutely True Diary... was that I enjoy books about young adults, am much less interested in books for young adults (which I felt it was). Plus it felt a little preachy; I'm sensitive to the merest whiff of that. I do think Alexie's content is important.

Definitely have to check out Robert Capa.

:( I just don't connect with Oliver Sacks as I do with Gladwell, Gawande, etc.

For me, to read Willa Cather is to pull a lawn chair out to the edge of a prairie and stare ahead for days while people tell stories from the olden days. I want to like it, I do like it somewhat, but I'm not a huge fan.

On Sacks - The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat fascinated me in a previous life (1999)...I think I would like it less now, but not sure how I would respond.

I see only An Anthropologist on Mars in my library, though the title and for sure the cover of The Man Who Mistook... is familiar, I wonder where it is in my house? I haven't given Sacks a dedicated try (not even his piece about Temple Grandin) until now ... on the other hand, other medical/sociological essayists hooked me without my even trying.

A Flock of Fools by Kazuaki Tanahashi and Peter Levitt is a collection of short fables retold from the One Hundred Parable Sutra (6th-century China), each accompanied by a short recap and lesson. They’re cautionary tales, where “our laughter or horror” about the characters’ foolish behaviors “turns into recognition and insight” about our own, to “help us to cultivate wisdom and compassion.”

I’ve only lately realized that I dislike fables (because who doesn’t like fables?!), but I’ve had this book since 2004 and thought it’d be quick. I read half. The fables were okay. They seemed to be variations on a few themes (pride, all-or-none thinking, expecting benefits without doing the work) and the lessons drawn were sometimes confounding. And, later, I realized that co-author Peter Levitt authored another book that held zero energy for me, Fingerpainting on the Moon (ah, relief in consistency). Still, the Zen irony of rushing and resisting this book isn’t lost on me.

I thought The Man Who Mistook His Wife and Awakenings to be the best of the few Sacks I've read.

I haven't come round to The Man Who Mistook His Wife. I have read a few other books by Sacks and feel Awakenings should be regarded as a classic. Superb!

When I Left Home: My Story is blues-guitarist Buddy Guy’s autobiography -- from a sharecropper childhood in 1940-50s Jim Crow Louisiana, to a first guitar that he played day and night and slept with, to the small clubs and blues-great performers of 1960-70s Chicago, to his own success, and life now at his club in Chicago and farm outside it.

I do not pretend to know guitars or blues but I’m interested in people’s backstories, and this is an extraordinarily humbly told story. It includes a few dark characters, but I kept marveling at Guy’s tendency to encounter good people (or his choice here to be grateful for them). The audio is excellently and flavorfully read by Mirron Willis.

I remember being at a blues festival when I overheard two fans talking. They didn’t know my face, so they was free to say what they believed. They was looking over the program when one cat said to the other, “Buddy Guy is on the bill. You know who he is?”

“One of those old blues guys.”

“How old?”

“Buddy Guy? Oh man, he’s been around. Got to be in his nineties.”

At the time, I was 43.

-----

On the way to {the outdoor amphitheater} Alpine Valley, Eric {Clapton} said to me, “Hey Buddy, haven’t heard a record from you in a while.”

“That’s ’cause I don’t have a deal.”

“That’s crazy! I’ve copied all your old licks. How am I gonna learn your new licks if you don’t have a new record?”

Buddy Guy will receive a Kennedy Center Honor tonight, and I look forward to watching the taped program when it airs on TV, December 26.

Nice review of When I Left Home, MJ. I love those quotes! I almost bought this last month, so I'll add this to my Christmas wish list.

What a coincidence! I got to play at the White House reception last night before the Awards ceremony was taped. I saw Buddy Guy there of course. I'm in the Marine Band and our chamber orchestra and combo played for the reception. Always a fun job!

I'll have to put the book on my wish list.

>hmm Lisa, Dan, Edwin: between possible reverse psychology (I'd un-marked Hallucinations from CurrentlyReading) and your encouragement about Sacks, I am now gliding through the book.

>Darryl, you'll love everything about the music and musicians.

>Jennifer, Wow! All in a day's work, huh, and then you come home and post a book review on your LT thread! :))

Shine Shine Shine by Lydia Netzer, audio read by Joshilyn Jackson

Sunny, bald since birth, has accumulated decades of experience in wearing wigs, keeping up appearances, being normal. But now, not-normal involves circumstances far beyond baldness: her mother is in the hospital on life support at the end of a battle with cancer; her brilliant, autistic husband is away on business -- en route to the moon to establish a colony of robots; her autistic son's preschool has decreed that his meds be increased or he find another school; and she’s pregnant with her second child. So when she’s in a car accident that throws off her wig and exposes her baldness, she begins to reconsider normal, including if there’s any such thing.

It’s a somewhat imaginative debut novel which left some possibilities undeveloped* and others unresolved. I’m flatly “meh” about it, which makes this review feel like concrete.

-----
*Here’s a sentence that intrigued; I wanted more like it:

There are three things that robots cannot do: show preference without reason (love); doubt rational decisions (regret); and trust data from a previously unreliable source (forgive).

I must get to that Buddy Guy autobiography. enjoying your reviews.

#103 - yes, that's a great sentence! Almost worth reading the book for.

>99 detailmuse: Buddy Guy's autobiography is probably one of my favorite reads from this year! I am looking forward to the Kennedy Center Honors.

Shine, Shine, Shine sounds like it had great potential - at least for the quirky factor alone - too bad it fell flat.

Give it a try, Shine Shine Shine got lots of good reviews. I've about made the decision that fiction doesn't work for me on audio.

Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks

From the Introduction:

Here, then, is a sampling which I hope will give a sense of the great range, the varieties, of hallucinatory experience, an essential part of the human condition.

And “a sampling” it is -- essentially an accumulation of patient experiences that showcase the variety of neurological (note: not psychiatric) hallucinations, organized into chapters by sense (sight, sound, smell, etc.) or cause (sensory deprivation, intoxicants, Parkinson’s Disease, epilepsy, migraine, etc). And a “great range” it is -- the variety of experiences and the rates of incidence do suggest a commonality to the human condition. (Still, Sacks several times cautions against casually reporting hallucinations: “the single symptom of ‘hearing voices’ could suffice for an immediate, categorical diagnosis of schizophrenia even in the absence of any other symptoms or abnormalities of behavior.”)

The book was interesting to read and somewhat informative (there is almost no exploration of the underlying science). But it’s rarely engaging (the exception being a chapter about Sacks’ personal experiences with transcendent/ intoxicant drugs). I love a narrative, I'll poke around in an encyclopedia, but this felt too much like reading a dictionary.

It is interesting that, near the end of the book, I happened to be listening to a Science Friday podcast with neuroscientist David Eagleman, who talked about timing in the brain -- our temporal perception of action first then effect, and the problem of misattributing action/effect:

Schizophrenia might fundamentally be a disorder of time perception. {…} You’re always generating an internal voice and listening to it. {…} But imagine you got the timing wrong, so that you think you heard the voice before you generated it. That would be an auditory hallucination. You’d have to interpret that as somebody’s else’s voice. {…} Instead of pumping people full of meds, what if we could just sit them down and have them play video games that recalibrate their timing?

I know: Sacks is a practitioner while Eagleman is a researcher. But that’s the kind of scientific/exploratory material I'd expected here.

Nice review of Hallucinations, MJ. I'll take a pass on it, based on your review and other ones that I've read.

I don't know if you've read any of Sacks' early works, but I found them much more engaging than his later works. He is currently suffering from his own memory and neurological issues (from comments he makes in The Mind's Eye). I wonder if these later, lesser works are a result of his decline or is someone putting these together from his old cases and Sacks is signing off on them?

Darryl: thanks, and Lisa: very interesting. I plan to pull An Anthropologist on Mars from my TBRs soon and expect to like it more.

Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman

The best bit is running in the rain. If you point your face up to the sky at the same time as running, it nearly feels like you’re flying. {...} just run as fast as you can. At first you’re scared of crashing into something but don’t let it put you off. Just run. It’s easy. The rain on your face and the wind makes it feel like you’re going superfast. It’s very refreshing. I dedicated my rain run to the dead boy.

Eleven-year-old Harrison (“Harri”) Opuku is new to London from Ghana, living with his mother and older sister among gangs in the housing projects. He’s a dreamer, a curious observer, a bit of an underdog -- and so disturbed by the murder of an older boy that he and a friend devote the next several months to working their versions of TV’s CSI to solve the crime.

This is a coming-of-age novel to read for its unique narrative voice -- first-person present tense, with a sweet optimism and naïve unreliability to love and heavy street/immigrant language that intrigues then becomes tedious. It’s short, sometimes beautiful, but often juvenile to the point that I didn’t care to finish ... and then with a one-in-a-hundred ending that changed my rating of the novel from not-good to good. Important, even.

Nice review, MJ. I would have appreciated a few dozen less uses of the phrase "donkey years", and the pigeon was annoying and weird.

Interesting review of Pigeon English. I understand when you say you went back and forth on it. I had much the same reaction.

kidzdoc - ha! I'm still not sure how I feel about the pigeon. Sometimes it didn't bother me, other times I also found it odd (not in a good way).

p.s. - I'll be curious to see what you think of Zone One. I went into it much the same: really like Whitehead, but lukewarm about zombies.

LOL! I figured the title was to evoke pidgin and the narrative voice, but yeah the actual pigeon? I pretty much ignored it, including in my review.

edited: I hate spoilers; I don't think I can mark it well enough, so it goes

>114 ljbwell: so far I'm happy that I'm even learning about zombies! But the draw is mostly Whitehead, it's been awhile since I've yearned to get back to a book.

My Antonia by Willa Cather, audio read by Jeff Cummings

I awakened with a start. Before I opened my eyes, I seemed to know that something had happened. I heard excited voices in the kitchen; Grandmother’s was so shrill that I knew she must be almost beside herself. I looked forward to any new crisis with delight. What could it be, I wondered as I hurried into my clothes. Perhaps the barn had burned. Perhaps the cattle had frozen to death. Perhaps a neighbor was lost in the storm.

Did I ever do that, even as a child? -- view a crisis with delighted excitement? This novel is all about nostalgia, and here I am, thinking back. It’s Jim Burden’s story of growing up on a late-1800s Nebraska farm near a Bohemian girl named Antonia Shimerda, and his lifelong reconnections with her.

"I’d have liked to have you for a sweetheart or wife or my mother or my sister, anything that a woman can be to a man."

I tired of the “stories from the olden days” feel of this novel, yet now just two weeks after I finished it, I’m thinking about reading something more by Cather. I think the rooted-ness draws me and, especially here, the nostalgia.

Enjoying your reviews and the thoughts on the books you have read recently.

I always enjoy you popping in, bas.

Mortality by Christopher Hitchens, audio read by Simon Prebble

{...M}y book hit the bestseller list on the day that I received the grimmest of news bulletins. And for that matter, the last flight I took as a healthy-feeling person, to a fine, big audience at the Chicago book fair, was the one that made me a million-miler on United Airlines, with a lifetime of free upgrades to look forward to. But irony is my business and I just can’t see any ironies here. Would it be less poignant to get cancer on the day that my memoirs were remaindered as a box-office turkey, or that I was bounced from a coach-class flight and left on the tarmac?

Hitchens acknowledges that he’s “more than once in my time woken up feeling like death,” but in 2010 it was the middle of the day and it wasn’t just “feeling.” It was esophageal cancer. This very short book is a posthumous collection of philosophical Vanity Fair essays and other bits he wrote about his diagnosis, treatment and decline; the loss of his spoken and written voice; and the status of his atheism.

I haven't read much by Hitch, I’m just interested in the topic and his treatment of it. While this book feels a bit cobbled into sale-able length, it also feels intelligent, humorous and earnest.

Your review of Mortality reminds me that I have been meaning to look for this book, MJ. Thanks.

I like the passage you posted, MJ. He sounds interesting to read, even if it is just snippets.

Enjoyed catching up here and getting little samples of each book. Intrigued by the David Eagleman comment on timing and schizophrenia. The My Anotonia excerpt reminds me of my grandmothers description of her parents' wood mill burning down in Georgia, ruining the family's finances. I think she was three, and when she heard her first concern was that her toy mill was burning.

>Linda I was surprised to see the audio and hardcover editions paired on amazon as “Frequently Bought Together.” Yet I listened twice to the audio and might read it in print.

>Lisa the Vanity Fair essays are each fully formed, and the Afterword by his widow sort of stands in for his death being, of course, off the page. The Introduction by his editor and especially the found snippets felt like padding.

>Dan
her first concern was that her toy mill was burning
How sweetly self-focused!!
We’ve been watching “A Christmas Carol” on TV this week and with all the open flames of the time wonder how everything didn’t burn.

About My Antonia and “did I ever view a crisis with delighted excitement,” this passage from Colson Whitehead’s Zone One caught my attention. Having learned of a zombie uprising, a co-worker asks why the main character is smiling:

Shame rippled through him, the echo of a civilized self. He put it down. He was smiling because he hadn’t felt this alive in months.

It reminds me that much of my work has been at workplaces in crisis, and I amend my answer: I dove in eagerly!

Bellevue Literary Review Vol 8, No 2; Fall 2008

This issue of the biannual literary journal is one of the best I’ve read, and one of its few themed issues -- here on disability, as editor Danielle Ofri writes in the Foreword:

…as though disability were one single thing. The assumption is that the various disabilities have sufficient overriding similarities to live comfortably and logically alongside each other in one single category. {…} Maybe it is actually those who are not disabled who have more in common with each other. There is the shared obliviousness to the general functioning of the human body -- all systems humming invisibly, soothing the organism with blissful denial of the thousands of interconnecting elements. It is only when these components falter that awareness blunders in. We learn that there is no end to the permutations of debility that can unhinge us {…} So perhaps it is the non-disabled who should be saddled with the constricting, uniform label {…} “temporarily able.”

It’s sadder than most volumes, and I noticed connections between pieces placed alongside one another more so than in other volumes. My favorite entries are the short stories Plazoleta and Chromosome Four, and the poems My Friend Paul Says and Where God Must Sleep.

Zone One by Colson Whitehead

He’d never been to Buffalo, and now it was the exalted foundry of the future. The Nile, the Cradle of Reconstruction. All the best and brightest (and, most important, still breathing) had been flown up to Buffalo, where they got the best grub, reveled in 24-7 generators and uncurtailed hot showers on command. In turn, they had to rewind catastrophe. Rumor was they had two of the last Nobel laureates working on things up there -- useful ones, none of that Peace Prize or Literature stuff -- chowing down on hearty brain-fortifying grub, scavenged fish oil and what not. If they could reboot Manhattan, why not the entire country? These were the contours of the new optimism.

It's three days in the life of Mark Spitz, member of a sweeper team whose job it is to flush out and destroy infected “skels” (aka: zombies) that remain in a dystopian lower Manhattan following a near-future apocalyptic plague. I read very little horror and no dystopian fiction but I do enjoy Whitehead. And in the end, Whitehead is the only reason to read this, but not nearly enough of a reason.

The story opens and you’re in it, hurrying to catch up on what’s happened and get your bearings. Paired with Whitehead’s powers of observation and hip social commentary, it’s terrific fun. But 100 pages in, all he’s done is the world-building; there’s little characterization and very little action. The next hundred pages is all backstory -- post-apocalyptic reminiscences to pre-apocalyptic times -- and I grew frustrated. The final several sentences are great -- superficially clever but nowhere near a satisfying ending.

I'm glad I passed this one by the other day. I have never read this author. What would you recommend?

Interesting comments on Zone One. In the end I just felt that not much had actually happened. In Sag Harbor, for example, that works beautifully. Not so much here. It isn't even that a post-apocalypse requires that much action (see The Road), but this one needed something more to draw me in and keep me there.

Nice review of the tepid Zone One. I'll still end up looking into, even if my idea of horror doesn't run in zombie and monster direction.

>not much had actually happened
I agree! NOTHING HAPPENED! There is no horror. And there's also no characterization (probably The Road has lots of that?).

I grew very interested in Whitehead from a chapter in The Intuitionist, his debut, but hadn't followed up yet when Sag Harbor came out, so that was my first by him. It was okay and increased to good upon reflection. I'll definitely read The Intuitionist but will carefully vet any others by him.

Help Thanks Wow by Anne Lamott

Subtitled, “The three essential prayers,” Help Thanks Wow is an essay in book form that encourages the development of, respectively, humility, gratitude and wonder. Its memoir-ish, hard-knock musings are similar to those in Lamott’s other nonfiction and more spiritual than faith (or religion).

I’d initially quoted a passage about prayer in my comments on atheist Hitchens’ Mortality, above -- something along the lines that those who pray seek to suspend the laws of nature in favor of their own purpose, which resonated with the scientist in me. But it’s not how/why I pray, or at least not how I want to. Here, Lamott comes closer via a quote from C.S. Lewis that ends with:

{Prayer} doesn’t change God. It changes me.

Great quote from Ofri in Bellevue and enjoyed reading your response to Lamont. I'll skip the Whitehead.

Mark Spitz? Didn't he win a whole bunch of Olympic swimming gold medals back in the 1970's.

Thanks Dan and Yes bas -- the name here is (in my opinion mostly) attention-getting but also a poke at the stereotype that "black people can't swim."

Designing Information by Joel Katz

“Everything is designed,” Katz writes. Things don’t just emerge in final form. Here he explores the visual design of information, from early cartographers who added clutter to fill the blank spaces of no-information, to today’s designers who must sift and simplify enormous quantities of information.

Several years ago, I’d read so many references to Edward Tufte that I finally read him myself -- The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, a bible of information graphics -- and found him revelatory. I do also remember wishing his hugely substantive book was also “sexy.” Here, the problem is the opposite. Katz’s silky pages are beautiful and energetic -- each two-page spread consisting of a few paragraphs of text plus loads of full-color, supporting examples (photos, charts, graphs, maps), and sidebars with related quotations, recommendations for further reading, and links for further exploration on the Internet.

He captions one how-not-to-do-it illustration, “Less than meets the eye,” and complains:

This diagram of a rocket ship does show where important components are located relative to each other, but {…} there is no information about how anything works and virtually no information about what they look like. I remember being frustrated by these so-called diagrams when I was in elementary school.

That’s exactly how I felt about this book -- “paragraphs of text” does not equal “discussion,” and this is less a development of info design theory/practice and more a piling-on of interesting examples to illustrate fragmented topics.

My recommendation: first read Tufte for the theory, then browse this book for the examples.

I remember being wowed when I first saw The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, although I've never read it. I'm going to go add it to my library hold list. Sorry Katz was a disappointment.

Lisa yes wowed! Early in Tufte, it's Minard's map of Napoleon's march. But if you lose interest, do flip to a chapter near the end, where he strips away practically everything from a graphic and leaves it profoundly clarified.

Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace by D. T. Max

On the most obvious feature of DFW’s writing:

{Wallace} disliked how formally and verbally claustrophobic {minimalist} writing was. Minimalist stories gave the reader little experience of what is was like to be assaulted the way in real life their characters would be. They were effectively unease recollected in tranquility. While Wallace certainly knew what it felt like to be overwhelmed by the stimuli of modern life -- indeed his response to them when under stress was more extreme that anyone knew -- this was not his stance when he recreated experience. As a writer, he was a folder-in and includer, a maximalist, someone who wanted to capture the everything of America.

And on perhaps the second most-obvious feature … because even maximalism wasn’t enough:

Wallace would one day say that he loved endnotes because they were “almost like having a second voice in your head.”

I finished this biography two months ago. I can’t do justice to DFW -- D. T. Max hardly can in 300+ pages -- but I absolutely can’t leave this book unmentioned among this year’s reads.

David was the son of Jim (a philosophy academic) and Sally (a literature academic) and older brother to Amy in central Illinois ... and that’s about as much as we get of his childhood. He had a few friends and lovers and eventually a wife, and that plus his struggles with severe depression are about as much as we get of his personal life. Because this is more so a biography of his writing -- a deconstruction of who and what influenced and inspired him; his style; and his execution. Drawn from interviews and DFW’s letters and papers, it’s chronological and very straightforward. It’s objective, and yet such objectivity doesn’t prevent a gathering sadness at his psychiatric struggles and tremendous loss from his eventual suicide.

Takeaways I hadn’t known: he was competitive; he could be mean; he intended every word he wrote; and while his nonfiction was often embellished, his fiction was searing truth. Plus a reading list: Barthelme’s “The Balloon”; Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49; Bret Eason Ellis’s Less Than Zero; John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse; and DFW’s own story, “Little Expressionless Animals.”

The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan contains four essays on human desires -- for sweetness, beauty, wonder and control, through explorations of the history of, respectively, apples, tulips, marijuana and potatoes. I read this while traveling and wasn’t able to mark passages to excerpt here, but was fascinated. I love Pollan’s exploratory books -- The Omnivore’s Dilemma about the modern food industry is an all-time favorite; Second Nature about gardening, A Place of My Own about creating a retreat space, and the upcoming Cooked about grilling, boiling, baking and fermenting, are all at the top of my wishlist.

I deduct a half point for Pollan having approached the narrative from the plants' point of view, as if evolution works through plants’ motivation and intention to please humans, rather than the survival/cultivation of those species that do.

I just bought this biography of DFW, and plan to begin it soon, maybe Jan 1. Wondering whether a significant part of 2013 will be taken up exploring DFW...

Excellent review of Every Love Story is a Ghost Story. I am completely new to David Foster Wallace and I will start reading infinite Jest on New Years day with the LT group. If I like what I read then I think this biography will be a must read for me.

You are in for a treat, Bas.

>139 detailmuse: deduct a half point

Right! I also feel that that's a stupid notion; I suppose it stems from Dawkins' "selfish gene" theory. Bye the way, if you read more of Pollan you will come across a few other odd notions he has.

However, overall, I thought The Botany of Desire a wonderful book, with many gems of knowledge and facts, such as the Johnny Appleseed story.

Thanks for the review of the David Foster Wallace biography. I won't order it, but may pick it up when I see it.

>Dan you'll enjoy the biography and I really look forward to your comments.

>Bas if you end up enjoying Wallace I can see the bio (and its exploration of his writings) fitting as much as the bio/autobio did for you with Patrick White.

>Edwin yes the surprises with Johnny Appleseed and apples in general, e.g. their original non-sweetness and their propagation via grafts not seeds. Also with marijuana and the changes in today's supply to induce more wonder and less paranoia.

2012 Recap
Summary: A good reading year.

But with 74% of my books rated by me at 3.5 stars or better, it seems it should have been a great reading year. I think I’m particularly missing fiction, and will increase that in 2013.

Total books finished: 84

Fiction: 30
Nonfiction: 41
Other (poetry; literary journals; cookbooks; travel guides): 13

Female authors: 26
Male authors: 47
Mixed: 11

Authors new-to-me: 56 (+ many more in the anthologies)
Authors with more than one book in my 2012 reads: only 1 (David Macaulay), plus 4 issues of the Bellevue Literary Review

Date acquired:
1990s: 1
2000s: 14
2010s: 69

Original publication date:
1600s: 1
1800s: 1
1910s: 1
1950s: 1
1960s: 2
1970s: 3
1980s: 2
1990s: 6
2000s: 16
2010s: 51

Ratings:
5-star: 9
4.5: 11
4: 26
3.5: 16
3: 18
2.5: 1
2: 3
1.5: 0
1: 0
0.5: 0

24% = very good to great (4.5 or 5 stars)
50% = good (3.5 to 4 stars)

Best of 2012:
Fiction
Tinkers by Paul Harding
Castle by David Macaulay
Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry
The F***ing Epic Twitter Quest of @MayorEmanuel by Dan Sinker

Nonfiction
'Tis by Frank McCourt
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
The Oxford Project by Stephen Bloom/Peter Feldstein
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
Every Love Story is a Ghost Story by D.T. Max

I read 84 books this year too. :-) Still have to finish up my 2012 thread and my summary, but I'm visiting family this week and haven't had much time. The Oxford Project is on my table at home. Looking forward to it.

Have a great vacation lisa and Happy New Year to everyone!

On to 2013 -- please join me here!