detailmuse … 2010 continued

Continued from my original thread here.

I read mainstream and literary fiction, memoir and science-related nonfiction. I'm drawn to coming-of-age stories; debut novels; stories set in workplaces; and following my curiosity, especially into books with original styles or premises.

I'll keep an updated list of finished books (with ratings and links to reviews) in this message. See them in library format here.
# denotes a book on my TBR shelves as of 12/31/09.

Fiction
91. The Things They Carried# by Tim O'Brien (4)
90. You Know When the Men Are Gone by Siobhan Fallon (4.5) (See review)
88. A Christmas Memory# by Truman Capote (3.5) (See review)
87. An Object of Beauty by Steve Martin (3) (See review)
85. Great House by Nicole Krauss (3.5)
84. Touch by Adania Shibli (4.5) (See review)
73. The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey by Walter Mosley (4.5) (See review)
72. The Bluest Eye# by Toni Morrison (4) (See review)
70. The Recipe Club by Andrea Israel/Nancy Garfinkel (2) (See review)
68. Saturday by Ian McEwan (3.5)
65. Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons (4)
63. A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (4) (See review)
62. All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost by Lan Samantha Chang (3.5) (See review)

Nonfiction
89. American Terroir by Rowan Jacobsen (4.5) (See review)
86. 365 Thank Yous by John Kralik (3) (See review)
83. Dreaming in Chinese by Deborah Fallows (3.5)
82. The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey (4) (See review)
81. Simple Times: Crafts for Poor People by Amy Sedaris (4) (See review)
80. Penguin 75 ed. by Paul Buckley (3)
79. The Gourmet Cookie Book (3)
78. Mad Men: The Illustrated World by Dyna Moe (3)
77. The Shallows by Nicholas Carr (4)
76. The Fashion File by Janie Bryant (3.5) (See review)
75. The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande (4) (See review)
74. Pheromone by Christopher Marley (5) (See review)
71. The Book of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks by Bethany Keeley (3) (See review)
69. Huck by Janet Elder (2) (See review)
67. Chip Kidd: Book One by Chip Kidd (4) (See review)
66. Turn and Jump by Howard Mansfield (3) (See review)
64. Brain Candy by Garth Sundem (3.5) (See review)
61. True Prep by Lisa Birnbach (3.5) (See review)

All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost (an Early Reviewer by Lan Samantha Chang) opens to a bludgeoning. The setting is a poetry workshop in a 1980s MFA program at a Midwestern college, and the weapon is a style of manuscript critique filled with posturing, condescension and dismissal -- evocative of the real-life reputation of the (University of) Iowa Writers' Workshop (at least prior to author Chang becoming its director).

The harshness introduces the novel's first question: How should writing (poetry specifically and art more generally) be taught? Does support inspire an artist, or brutality dissuade? Chang then follows two of the workshop poets into their professional years -- one mostly successful, the other mostly starving -- to explore a more basic question: Can writing/art be taught or is it an innate talent? Does instruction merely make it possible, as one of the poets muses, "to write a better book, perhaps, but not to become a better poet"? And then the most fundamental question: Why do artists even make art?

The explorations are oblique in this literary novel, and via a distant narrative voice. But a story builds, and a passage that "longing matters in literature, more than love" resonates. By the last third of this short novel, the longing becomes superb.

True Prep is Lisa Birnbach's follow-up to 1980's The Official Preppy Handbook. It's a sort of mirror volume to the original -- Preppy seemed written from a twentysomething's perspective about childhood, private school/prep school/proper college, and young adulthood; True Prep looks through a middle-aged lens at house, fashion, work and leisure, re-marriage, legacy ... and (always) one's alma mater, which attaches to a prep for life.

It's also a sequel of sorts, applying the prep perspective to societal changes since 1980 (including the "Interthingy") and providing an expanded collection of all-star prep mini-biographies -- a "Pantheon" from Anderson Cooper to Edith Wharton (whose quotes begin each chapter) that focuses on boomers and even gen-x, some of whom are the children of those featured in the original Preppy's Pantheon.

I loved Preppy and remember the tone as humorous satire. True Prep is fun too, and wry. But overall, I expected more material devoted to preps in 21st-century culture -- much is mentioned but little is developed (preps’ love of Polartec fleece is a terrific exception). Possibly, it's not there because they don't much engage in it, but then I wanted to see that. The omission reduces the fun; it combines with the middle-aged perspective to lend a reflective tone to this volume, and makes preps seem more enigmatic here than in the previous volume.

Do you know those couple of pages near the beginning of most magazines -- the pages that present the short, entertaining and/or newsy snippets that you gobble up before moving on to the feature articles? Brain Candy by Garth Sundem is like 200 of those pages -- a collection of hundreds of puzzles, games, research-study snippets, and miscellaneous quotations and trivia.

It’s fun, and my only quibbles concern the layout. It’s often difficult to tell if a snippet ends or is continued (e.g. after a sidebar or page break). And while there’s an Answers section and a References section (pointing interested readers to the original sources, mostly magazine or journal articles) at the back, they’re not cross-referenced to the main text by page number but only by snippet title (many of which are repeated, e.g. Self-Test). It was a mess to find anything until I resorted to using multiple bookmarks.

The book is definitely candy -- curious and playful and more sensational-headline than explanatory-substance. But it’s Mensa-quality candy, and it’s as clever as the best shorts from three of my favorite magazines: Games, Mental Floss, and New Scientist.

I have a copy of All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost on its way to me. Thanks to your description, it may not have the customary wait on the TBR shelf.

detailmuse - your review makes All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost sound magnificent, I'm all ready to search it out...but, please tell us why you gave it only 3.5 stars...

I'm looking forward to your review of Ellen Foster.

I was surprised by the novel’s simplicity -- length, construction and language (which is delicate but not wow-some) -- from a third-time novelist and director of one of the country’s most prestigious writing programs. And disappointed by its thematic simplicity. My word “oblique” has gnawed at me since I posted the review -- it might describe the plot but not the exploration of artistry, which is nearly a debate about MFA programs with little new insight. The plot and themes seem inside/out, the themes worn like an exoskeleton. Helpful question, Dan; maybe I’ll come up with a sentence to add to my review.

And ha, a quibble from the beginning -- the poet-professor Miranda Sturgis completely evoked Miranda Priestly, from (egad) The Devil Wears Prada; it nearly did me in. But near the end, I was feeling that very nice longing I mentioned in the review.

----------

I liked Ellen Foster a lot, might have loved it if I hadn’t listened on audio. Comments forthcoming. I’ve had a couple road trips and am finally past the first third of Ian McEwan’s Saturday, my second try of that one on audio.

detailmuse, I'm intrigued by your comments in your first post here about the kind of reading you like, particularly about books "with original styles". I do like a similar thing and I wonder if we are talking about the same thing. Could you elaborate a bit and give me some of your favorite books which fall into this category? If you don't mind, that is.

>2 detailmuse: I also enjoyed this review. I see a lot of books in the catalogs while preparing Belletrista and this was one I included in our New & Notable section, but it's certainly nice to read someone's personal take on the book.

#7 thanks! Glad I asked.

might have loved it if I hadn’t listened on audio

I was worried about that! Who was the reader? I would think the author would be really good to listen to, but, in general, a reader gets in my way of really experiencing a book. Plus, I'm always doing something else when I'm listening, so I want an entirely different book to listen to, than when I'm reading. I think The Things They Carried is probably the only book that I would have liked equally well either way.

#10 - yes, I wonder about that specifically with Ellen Foster. On one hand it begs to be read out loud, but on the other hand, it has to be read out loud the right way...which would be a different way for every reader.

>hi avaland -- re: “original styles” -- I like novelty and experimentation in point of view and structure.

I love sideways looks at things and so am reveling in the recent batch of linked short stories -- McCann’s Let the Great World Spin, Reiken’s Day for Night, Rachman’s The Imperfectionists, Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad -- especially when the linking creates a larger narrative. I still have the oldest and probably best in my TBRs, Olive Kitteridge and The Things They Carried. I’m interested that the line gets blurry between what is a collection of linked stories and what is a novel composed of chapters narrated in numerous alternating points of view (Day for Night above, Shreve’s Testimony).

Similarly, I like multiple takes on a conceit: Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, Lightman’s Einstein's Dreams, Eagleman’s Sum, Butler’s Severance, Baillie’s The Incident Report, Ryman’s 253 (which is also linked flash fiction, though still in my TBRs).

I like imaginative if it’s clever (Jonathan Safran Foer’s fiction), not gratuitous or silly (Alice in Wonderland). I’ve been eyeing Powell’s The Interrogative Mood: A Novel? -- written entirely in the form of questions -- for a year because I’m unsure which it will be; I’ll likely get it when it’s released in paperback next month. I’m also eager to get to Calvino’s If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, and Dunn’s Ella Minnow Pea.

Are these in your interests? I’d love to hear about more like them.

>bonnie and dan -- here goes:

I was drawn to Ellen Foster, Kaye Gibbons’ debut novel, by its similarity to Elizabeth Berg’s debut, Durable Goods. Both are largely autobiographical, both about 11- or 12-year-old girls recently motherless with harsh fathers. But where Berg’s Katie is tender-sweet, Gibbons’ Ellen is tough-scrappy. Because where Katie’s father is military-tough, Ellen’s is certifiably abusive. Katie’s story is soft and reflective, with girly subplots of friends and boys; Ellen’s is of survival, involving extended family, society and race relations.

I listened on audio, where Ruth Ann Phimister’s voice was an old-lady crackle/little-girl combo. Weird, since (if I remember right) the story is told in the girl's present tense, with flashbacks covering the events of her previous year or so (not, as in To Kill a Mockingbird, from an adult looking back). But it was a good audiobook, other than the “distanced” feeling I get from any audio (or ebook) compared to reading a traditional book. And it’s a well-told story, the present time weaving with flashbacks so seamlessly that I’m compelled to find a hard copy and study how she did it. I loved the derivation of Ellen’s name and will not say more so as not to spoil. Durable Goods makes a warm spot in my heart, Ellen Foster makes one in my spirit.

This is probably a good time to finally get to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.

#13 MJ - great to see, thanks! You may already know this, but in case you didn't, Kaye Gibbons is manic-depressive, and apparently Ellen Foster was written in a single manic phase...I would argue it was written almost in one breath.

>14 dchaikin: Interesting, while reading (listening) I caught myself wanting to know what kind of woman a girl like Ellen grows up to be. I see Gibbons wrote a sequel but Ellen is still a teen in it? It sounds like the "real" Ellen grew into a successful woman who struggles. I didn't get the manic feel from the audio, but from what I hear about the (lack of) punctuation in the printed book, you make a great point.

#15 The sequel got hammered over on one of Linda's (Whisper1) threads recently in the 75 group. I'm not actually all that interested in it since this book completed the story for me and also didn't feel repeatable, if that makes any sense.

>16 dchaikin: perfect sense, and I agree the book was complete. I bet bonnie will be by to hammer the sequel :) I think I'd rather come back later and re-read Ellen Foster -- in paper.

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan is a novel in linked stories about a punk-rock record producer, his assistant, and their families, friends and colleagues as they grow (and decline) from who they were to who they are and who they’ll be. Think of it as a montage -- a soundtrack album, each of its stories (songs) memorializing key aspects of a larger saga.

And then Egan puts those key bits into a blender and they come out zigzagging between the 1980s and a dystopian 2020s; between San Francisco, New York City, Africa, and Italy; through various characters, tenses, points of view and narrative forms (including a magazine article with footnotes evocative of David Foster Wallace, and a 12-year-old’s slide presentation that’s nearly graphic-novel format). The structure borders on showy and distracting, but it’s also very fun and the stories are good -- the most extensively (and effectively) linked collection I’ve read yet.

Oh no! An "old lady" voice for Ellen Foster? Until you said that, I didn't realize how important it was that I heard Ellen Foster's voice--no other's. Though, Gibbon's voice would have been good, because she has a bit of a twang and a young voice--or at least did when I listened to her read years ago. If I go back to the Seattle Public Library's book sale, I'll buy a copy for a buck and send it to you. I just hope you can wipe that voice from your brain when you read it. And don't bother with the follow-up book; Gibbons really sounded manic in that one!

I just got Look at Me by Jennifer Egan--have you read it?

>19 bonniebooks: looking for a copy for me, sweet! :) I saw on your thread that you didn't go back ... because you want fewer than 10 tbrs by the end of the year? Insane! I'm closer to bragan’s challenge -- keeping a monthly eye on books in and out and paring the pile below 400!

Nothing else by Egan yet but I would read more, maybe The Invisible Circus. Nothing calls to me right now. I'm interested to hear your comments on Look at Me.

I had another road trip and the opportunity to finish the audio version of Saturday by Ian McEwan.

It’s about a day in the early-ish post-9/11 life of London neurosurgeon Henry Perowne: a chance sighting (from his bedroom window in the middle of the night) of an airplane on fire as it’s headed to Heathrow; an anti-Iraq War rally; a car accident; a game of squash; reflections on his surgical practice and patients; a visit with his mother at her nursing home; and a family dinner with his wife, father-in-law, musician son and poet daughter, where the day’s events recombine. And it’s McEwan’s endless mulling and musing, which is why I hated Atonement and probably why this was my second attempt at Saturday. I think I finished this time because I have a high interest in some of the book’s topics (illness, aging, neurosurgery, workplace), and because the audio version was excellently read by Steven Crossley. So McEwan moves from my “never again” list to someone I’ll consider if I’m veryvery interested in the story’s topics.

I’m new to writer Howard Mansfield but feel comfortable characterizing him: a curious historian, a reverent preservationist of New England history, and a thoughtful weaver of philosophy and practicality. His book, Turn and Jump: How Time and Place Fell Apart, is not as easy to characterize. “This is a book about time and place,” he writes; actually about “the divorce of time and place.” Collected, I could agree that these essays examine our change of perspective (in both geography and time) from local to global. But I found it a whole lot less tangled to simply read the essays as unconnected journeys into history.

And reading them is all about the journey -- a reader’s willingness to slow down and accompany Mansfield into the past in the same way that we accompany Bernd Heinrich on a nature hike in books like Summer World. Among my favorite essays are Mansfield’s exploration of the establishment of water rights and milling; the evolution of a family-owned country store into department store and then its extinction among corporate behemoths; and a look at time itself -- how it used to be locally determined, based on the sun, until the railroads required a nationally standardized time. I enjoyed some essays less (repetitive passages or topics less interesting to me) but developed such respect for Mansfield’s perspective and purpose that I'm drawn to read more by him, likely The Same Ax, Twice: Restoration and Renewal in a Throwaway Age.

It seems unusual when a book designer gets co-author status, but that’s been the case with two of my recent reads -- Caz Hildebrand’s The Geometry of Pasta and Chip Kidd’s True Prep. So when I noticed Chip Kidd: Book One, a collection of book covers he’s designed at Knopf, I snagged it through inter-library loan.

Kidd joined Knopf when Robert Gottlieb departed for The New Yorker and Sonny Mehta arrived. He writes that he mostly designs hardcovers because they’re enduring and he can see how they age: “What will something I work on look like in {x} years?” And he likes that “the luxury {of a hardcover} extends to the intellect as well as the wallet.” (I agree!)

In an Introduction, John Updike wrote that “Kidd reads the books he designs for and locates a disquieting image close to the narrative’s dark, beating heart.” This big coffee-table book has easily a thousand of those designs from 1986-2006 (including rejections) plus notes about their backstories and evolution, and often authors’ comments. The covers are diverse and memorable -- I’ve seen a lot of them, I’ve owned and/or read many of the books, and yes, I’ve added some new ones (hello, Henry Petroski) to my wishlist.

>8 avaland:, 12: You define very well something I like too. Thank you for asking, avaland :)

>21 detailmuse:: Glad to see I am not only one who has had problem with Saturday, the first and only McEwan I've tried. Did not even want to have another go after that one.

#21 - you might be aware of this, but I think Saturday was intended as a sort of criticism of Tony Blair. That atmosphere is kind of lost now, but if you can mentally go back there (a bit post-9/11), and then re-access the book, it adds an interesting layer.

#24 eairo - I haven't gone back to McEwan since either...then again, perhaps I will some day.

>25 dchaikin: I well remember the war argument between Henry and his daughter, and the criticism. I don't know if it's so memorable because it felt puppet-ish or because it's one of the book's few (maybe the only) truly dramatized scenes.

A mostly epistolary novel, The Recipe Club by Andrea Israel and Nancy Garfinkel opens in April 2000 with an email exchange -- an attempted reconciliation between former childhood friends Val and Lilly, now in their forties. It then backs up to the 1960s to trace that childhood friendship from its heyday of their “recipe club” (a pen-pal exchange of letters and recipes), to a falling out in early adulthood and then decades of estrangement.

There’s an easily guessed secret and an over-the-top-tidy ending, but this book is heavier on nostalgia than on story. And beyond the book’s epigraph*, there’s little insight -- I keep thinking of other wise, young narrators I’ve read but that is not these girls. Their angst-y letters might interest a child or teen reader, but this book is marketed to grown women (based on the nostalgia and reconciliation aspects, I suppose).

It was my December 2009 Early Reviewers snag but arrived just last weekend. Its epistolary structure and recipes had interested me, but I was disappointed in both -- the recipes are mostly old standards, and I’ve read better epistolaries (though still not an excellent one...)

* Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born. --Anais Nin

Think of the Acknowledgements section at the back of most books: a name-dropping memorial of gratitude. Now consider Huck as the title of this book; the subtitle, The Remarkable True Story of How One Lost Puppy Taught a Family -- and a Whole Town -- About Hope and Happy Endings as its whole story (although it’s really a story of perseverance and the kindness of strangers); ... and the 289-page narrative as an interminable Acknowledgements section.

I felt disrespected as a reader with this memoir by New York Times senior editor Janet Elder. The first paragraph introduces the author’s (breast) cancer and the second introduces Huck, a red-brown toy poodle puppy. But the third paragraph begins a long detour into backstory: her son; his desire for a dog; her diagnosis; her marriage; meeting her husband; her happy-turned-unhappy childhood; her sister and that family; their friends; their vacations; the uncaring actions of healthcare professionals; the hick-ness of people outside Manhattan. We do get back to Huck in time for him to be adopted by the author and run away from her sister’s house in suburban New Jersey, but the story is always much more about the idea of a dog than about flesh-and-bones Huck.

It’s tedious and overwritten, all journalistic exposition -- mostly mini-biographies, including of the New Jersey townspeople who help search for Huck (therein the “Acknowledgements” feeling). It’s without tension until we’re within hours of finding Huck, and then it’s police-procedural type tension. I didn’t care viscerally about anyone in this book, which seems better suited for self-publication as a family history or a thank-you note to Huck’s search party than released to a wide readership. But I did admire the collective residents of New Jersey who helped find the dog, and Huck earns two stars for its reminder of that kindness of strangers.

On to happier book comments. I'm finishing Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, which I started last week for Banned Books Week.

And I'm excited to have brought home two library holds: The Book of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks and the long-awaited Pheromone: The Insect Artwork of Christopher Marley.

The Book of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks by Bethany Keeley is a collection of photos and one-liner captions pulled from her “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks. It’s about the mark having been appropriated beyond punctuation (to designate a title or what someone said/wrote) now to a “tchotchke” that draws emphasis or denotes sarcasm along the lines of finger “air quotes.”

It’s a nicely produced little book and the couple-hundred examples feel about the right length. The concept is fun, the content is less funny or clever than I’d anticipated, but flipping through a library copy was a pleasant way to spend an hour.

#26 - Not in that way...well, actually maybe somewhat...but more like Henry Perowne was an alternate Tony Blair, and that there is an intended parallel in how Henry handles everything and maybe how wish-washy he is to how Blair handled himself as Prime Minister. But, really, I'm not sure (and I'm not an expert of Tony Blair, nor am I on the right side of the pond to know the difference. )

#28 "... and the 289-page narrative as an interminable Acknowledgements section." :) I'll skip that one

>dan -- Nice; yes that resonates.

Phenomenal er, I mean Pheromone, is a stunning collection of Christopher Marley’s insect artwork. I first heard of Marley on a CBS Sunday Morning segment last January and cheered now when this gorgeous coffee-table book finally became available through my library.

He grew into adulthood hating insects (their legs, especially), but when the colors, shapes and textures of particularly remote species caught his artist’s eye, his dread turned to fascination. His specimens are sustainably collected from around the world, supporting local tribes and their efforts to resist deforestation (and the loss of habitat that results in species endangerment).

He preserves, mounts and frames the insects, sometimes arranging mixed species (like the “mosaic” on the book’s cover, a sort of insect version of a wildflower garden), but more often composing groups of a single species (evocative of massed tulips) or even a striking lone insect. The nubby and hairy textures are practically tactile, the colors are fabulous, and every image is lively -- the circularity of a mandala of longhorn beetles; the waves of color washing across a page of massed scarabs; the page-full of 95%-identical moths that highlights their individuating differences.

The book’s Endnotes include the title of each work of art; the insect’s common name, scientific name, geographic location and actual size; and sometimes Marley’s personal comments, which made me re-visit the images with new insight. I've given more than a passing thought to buying a copy of this book so that I can pull out some of these pages to frame.

Another lovely one! You do dig out the most interesting looking books.
I have a Christopher Marley wall calendar for this year and am certainly planning to hack it up for the pics.

>12 detailmuse: well said, and yes, to some extent it describes some of the stuff I like also. I love story as much as anyone else but I also love to see the craft in how a story is told, interesting structure or prose style...etc. Take, for example, the book I just read Wide Open, when it came time to write about it I realized there wasn't a linear storyline that I could summarize, it was more a spiral that moves in on itself. And looking back on the book, I had to laugh because Nicola Barker wasted nothing in her book, everything was put in service to the story (clever, clever). And I love the way Herta Muller told her story in The Land of Green Plums using imagery - almost like another language... I also enjoy a well-done novel (or stories) using a lyrical prose. i.e. The Winter Vault by Anne Michaels, Tinkers by Paul Harding or I Lock My Door Upon Myself by Joyce Carol Oates. There is just endless delight in the art (and craft) of fiction!

I have been reading more short stories also, some linked, some not. A Taste of Honey was the last collection I read whose stories were linked (it read much like a novel), prior to that, Michael Crummey's Flesh and Blood are linked by place; and Touch by Adania Shibli is linked vignettes, not sure I'd call them stories.

>33 detailmuse:: I just saw a gorgeous calendar which must be by him.

> Avaland, there are a lot of good suggestions in your post. I've read Muller's The Appointment with my book club, and had to agree with some of my group that the book was not as we expected from a Nobel prize winner. But I might pick up The Land of Green Plums, since you like it so much.

>37 ffortsa: I have not read The Appointment yet, but have like Green Plums and the Passport, both different from each other.

>34 C4RO:, 36 calendars: good idea
Caro I love imagining the insect-art house that your lucky daughter has been born into!

>avaland
thanks, many new-to-me authors there; I think Touch is a must.

The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison’s 1970 debut novel

Eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove’s biggest desire is to be not black but white, with the bluest eyes ever. She believes that would make her beautiful, and thus beloved, and might have prevented her biggest problem, revealed in the novel’s opening sentences: “Quiet as it’s kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941. We thought, at the time, that it was because Pecola was having her father’s baby that the marigolds did not grow.”

The novel is an immersion in Black America between the world wars and, like Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, an exploration of people’s backstories to show how they become who they are. Its structure is clever, opening with a paragraph from the happy Dick-and-Jane reading primer that Morrison immediately implodes, reassembling the ruins as chapters about Pecola’s friends, house, family, cat, dog, Mother and Father. As with many banned books, it’s an important story and one that takes readers beyond pity and anguish to a mobilizing anger.

I’m grateful for my timing in reading this novel -- that it likely attuned me to reports of the new Sesame Street song, I Love My Hair (CNN story here), by the show’s head writer whose adopted Ethiopian daughter wanted straight blond hair.

Nice review. It's on my wishlist. I particularly like the Sesame Street song. Chris Rock did a documentary for HBO called Good Hair about the salon industry.

>jane
I lost track of Good Hair going to DVD but have requested it through my library now.

And at the other end of an African-American life...



From The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey by Walter Mosley:

He only had one chair, and that had a book, a glass of water, and three stones he’d found that day at the park on it. They were blond stones, a color he’d never seen in rock and so he picked them up and brought them home, to be with them for a while.

That’s exactly why I read Walter Mosley -- to “be awhile” with his characters, whose situations and moral complexities I always think I haven’t seen, but whose unfamiliarity always softens into a fond recognition.

Here it’s 2006 and 91-year-old Ptolemy Grey lives alone in squalor in south-central LA. He has a small pension, he has a radio and a TV tuned 24/7 to a dueling background of classical music and cable news, and he has sporadic contact with extended family two and three generations down the line. But his home and mind have declined since his wife died decades ago, and now dementia makes him believe he could have prevented the ages-ago deaths of a childhood friend in a house fire and the lynching of a beloved mentor. So when another loved one dies in street violence, and a new young friend awakens Ptolemy's spirit, he embarks on a mission to protect his loved ones before his own time comes.

Mosley narrates almost completely in scenes here -- in Ptolemy’s mind, a mix of confusion and distraction co-mingled with vestiges of philosopher and keen observer. A key plot point about experimental drugs required a huge suspension of disbelief ... or maybe it just required me to fully enter a world where the rules don’t resemble the ones I know, and to appreciate the point of this book: being awhile with this man in that world. I loved every page of it.

Sounds like a wonderful read. thanks.

detailmuse - terrific review of The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey!

>43 ffortsa:, 44
thanks! I'm still thinking often about that book. I get a lot of cultural and emotional truths when I read Mosley.

In The Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande explores error through examples from aviation, construction, finance, healthcare, restaurants and rock ‘n roll. He writes that while errors of ignorance decreased as society gained knowledge, errors of ineptitude have increased in the overload, distraction and isolation of modern specialization. His solution: checklists -- the to-do type, not the how-to type -- to improve individual performance and seed the communication that enhances team (system) effectiveness.

It’s a simple solution technically but complicated socially, for example Gawande's reaction to the adoption of a checklist in his own surgical practice:

Before: “Did I think the checklist would make much of a difference in my cases? No. In my cases? Please.”
After: “I have yet to get through a week in surgery without the checklist’s leading us to catch something we would have missed.”

And regarding team communication, he writes:

“We’re obsessed in medicine with having great components -- the best drugs, the best devices, the best specialists -- but pay little attention to how to make them fit together well. {…} Optimizing parts is not a good route to system excellence. {It’s like} trying to build the world’s greatest car by assembling the world’s greatest car parts.”

A quick read directed toward administrators, policymakers, standards-setters, professionals and the interested public, the book’s information is not new but is ground-shifting. And my reading of it is another case of fortuitous timing -- an article in today’s New England Journal of Medicine could have been a chapter.

The Fashion File by Janie Bryant is part memoir, part history of fashion since the 1920s (including mentions of AMC-TV’s Mad Men, where Bryant is costume designer), but mostly a guide to discovering and developing one’s own, individual fashion style.

It begins with a Foreword by January Jones and ends with comments by Elisabeth Moss and Christina Hendricks. In between, Bryant and co-author Monica Corcoran Harel guide readers through discovering their personal styles: Who are you, e.g. as a persona? What clothes, accessories, hair and makeup best characterize that persona? Which of them do so most flatteringly on your own body?

The book itself is stylish -- very fun, lushly printed on smooth, heavy paper with a variety of fonts, charts and sidebars, and almost every page enhanced by a period photograph or a full-color drawing by Robert Best (whose women, alas, are all model-skinny). It emphasizes core concepts, applicability and positivity -- Bryant keeps readers at the center and adapts fashion to them rather than the reverse -- and the parts gather into a somewhat substantive whole. There's also a section on men’s style.

Though I’m not the book’s likely audience of chic, urban twenty- and thirtysomethings, I’ve already noticed that Bryant has inspired in me a more style-oriented mindset. And among my favorite takeaways is a tip toward better posture, something every stylist attempts but Bryant nails: “By always keeping your thumbs facing forward, you can be sure that your shoulders are elegantly thrown back.” Thumbs up(ish) for the book, and thumbs forward for style :)

I reread the NEJM article referenced in >46 detailmuse: and love this passage by Gregg Meyer, MD:

I learned an important rule in the U.S. Air Force: “Never worry alone.” If you think something doesn't look right, whether you are a scrub nurse, a technician, a medical assistant, a surgeon, or an internist, never worry alone. Stop and discuss it, because those stops result in close calls instead of real events.

How many books have you read with a Library of Congress classification of “Snails as pets”?? The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating -- my first :) -- is partly a memoir of 34-year-old Elisabeth Tova Bailey being flat-out bedridden during the first year of a chronic illness that would persist for decades. But it’s mostly a gentle scientific exploration of the common land snail, which a friend plucks from the New England woods and places in a pot of violets at Bailey’s bedside. It brings her comfort and immeasurable diversion, and the information about snails that she excerpts from science, literature and poetry bring the same to the reader.

Now that's the definition of someone with time on their hands when they spend that much energy watching a snail move.

Yeah, she had nothing but time for a full year, and no way to pass it -- absolutely no activity and essentially no social or sensory stimulation. And I found myself carving out time to spend with her and that snail!

   

The Shallows by Nicholas Carr explores our brains in the Internet age. He acknowledges the enormous benefit of the Internet but argues that the adult brain is not static but instead remains plastic (i.e. moldable over time; not instantly “elastic”), and the Internet’s instant gratification and the distraction of its linkages is remolding our brains to prefer snippets and spoiling us for activities of depth, e.g. long-form reading. It’s good history, science and narrative, and is an important caution though with no real solution. As an intentional “test” of my own reading fitness, I read the book straight through in a day :)

The Gourmet Cookie Book compiles the best cookie recipe each year since the magazine’s launch in 1941 through 2009. I was eager to see 20th-century America characterized through cookies but came away disappointed. Gourmet didn’t have many cookie recipes until recently, so in some years the “best” was chosen from only four recipes. It nearly requires anthropology to uncover the period details -- the extraction of ingredients from the recipe instructions into a separate listing is one; the “old world” ingredients (lots of fruit, nuts, spice) would be another except they predominate even in the 21st-century selections. Few recipes interested me to eat and none to bake. Every recipe is illustrated, and it’s interesting that the collection of thumbprint photographs in the Table of Contents is visually fabulous; individually, though, as full-page photos accompanying each recipe, they seem uninspired and repetitive.

Penguin 75 examines the design of 75+ book covers (sometimes a group of books = a cover) through comments from the publisher, designer and author. It’s a slick, colorful paperback but the content just didn’t resonate, the comments weren’t interesting. Actually, the first entry was outstanding (informative and hilarious; sorry, I’ve returned the book to the library so can’t quote) and if I rate that a 100 then no other entry was above a 50.

On the surface, the magazine-size Mad Men: The Illustrated World by Dyna Moe (illustrator for the online Mad Men Yourself avatar-maker) is a satiric overview of America’s early-1960s. Underneath, it’s a satiric exploration of the TV show, full of inside jokes and reminiscences of memorable characters and scenes from Seasons 1-3 (not 4). It’s vacuous if gobbled up but improves during a slower second read.

Nice summary of The Shallows, something I couldn't see to accomplish:-)

>53 avaland: lol because your comments are what drew me to the book!

The Shallows sounds sounds like a fascinating book. Did Carr discuss the affects that the internet has had on the brains of young people? What happens to you when your brain when it is becomes accustomed to instant gratification while it's still developing during adolescence. As a high school teacher, that would be the part that would interest me.

>55 fuzzy_patters: Forgive me (I've returned the book to the library) but from memory I don't recall specific attention to the teenage brain -- maybe other readers can answer? Carr did compare age groups by noting that younger people know ONLY technology -- eg the computer, Internet, texting -- not other forms or tools of communication that give "older" people other skills. It's definitely a recommended read.

52: This is when I really hate having to spell out my thoughts one word at a time. I have so many conflicting thoughts and feelings about what I think Shallows is about. Not really fair to react until I've read it though.

55: There was a related article in the NYTimes this week that I think you're really going to be interested in, and a friend said she heard an interview with this author on NPR too. Going to go check that out.

Looking forward to your comments, bonnie, I thought of The Shallows when I saw you read Reading in the Brain (I haven't read it).

Simple Times: Crafts for Poor People by Amy Sedaris is a satire on the life and economic times of the olden days. It’s also a parody of today’s big, beautiful crafting books, with its thousand (intentionally messy) illustrations showing hundreds of (intentionally lame*) homemade crafts for every room and personality, and using every available material. (*I wonder what it says about me that I’m honestly interested in the thumbtack art and balloon art, the penny bookmark, rusty-nail wind chimes and tampon ghost!)

Fair warning: This book is by Amy Sedaris, in collaboration with other creatives like Amy Sedaris. It’s a bit darker and cruder than I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence, her book about entertaining. If you don’t know Amy, think Sarah Silverman -- both begin sentences in an innocent, extra-polite voice that lures you in and then veers, in the space between two words, into a shocking incorrectness that alternately makes you laugh out loud and cringe at the wrong, wrong, wrongness. A chapter here on crafting safety is particularly gruesome and hilarious.

55 - I wonder about that as well. For instance, in design schools they typically still require a semester of hand drafting because people who start on computers have much harder times grasping the use of lineweights (the different thicknesses of lines to represent different things).

59 - I am always very tempted to get her books. I feel like we are about 3/4 kindred spirits, but that other 1/4 keeps me from taking the plunge. Plus she has a rabbit too and that tickles me to no end. I think I'll put I Like You on the wishlist.

I Like You is excellent. And the illustrations are fantastic. I can't wait to get my hands on a copy of Simple Times. And Amy Sedaris is, to me, not offensive like Sarah Silverman; she'll joke about the ideal length of time for a children's party being 15 minutes, but she's not telling racist anecdotes.

Someday I'm going to read Amy Sedaris, but I saw/heard her once on TV when she was on a panel speaking before a group of writers (I think) and what she was talking about made some of the audience and fellow panel members so uncomfortable, it was hard to watch. She's been funny on the regular talk shows though.

oh uncomfortable, that's it exactly.

>Jane
I was out of town with family but had a late Thanksgiving dinner yesterday at a friend's who has a rabbit -- a Belgian (or English?) lop that stands up on his hind legs nearly like Bugs Bunny. While my friend was on vacation ~5 years ago the bunny chewed wires and burned her house down (I'm not kidding). But he was very cute yesterday, doing his own overeating from a plate of carrots.

eta for too many pronouns

Touch by Adania Shibli

Like a pouch of snapshots dropped and scattered, the 33 vignettes in this very short novella about a young Palestinian girl rely on the reader to put them in order and make meaning. Their spareness is riveting, and Shibli’s extraordinary language opens up the universe, seeding the subconscious and bringing forth details and a story beyond what is written on the page (for me, reminiscent of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying). I loved it and have it about half-understood; I look so forward to reading it again.

365 Thank Yous by John Kralik

Fifty-two-year-old John Kralik was failing on all fronts: a second divorce, estrangement from his grown sons, and a near-bankrupt legal practice far removed from the one he'd envisioned years before when he’d drafted a Jerry Maguire-like Statement of Ideals.

On a lonely New Year’s Day hike, he hears a voice -- Until you learn to be grateful for the things you have, you will not receive the things you want -- and is reminded of his grandfather’s* belief in the importance of expressing gratitude. Inspired toward such a mindset, he resolves to find someone to thank every day in the upcoming year -- and to do the thanking via handwritten notes. This book is Kralik’s project of writing those 365 thank-you notes (a few of which are included) and turning his life around.

As memoir, it feels a bit goal-oriented, documentary and overwritten. And though Kralik hints at some dark personal aspects, he doesn’t reveal them; in a memoir, that feels disingenuous. But as an inspirational book, it’s light, interesting -- and effective. I write book reviews in part to clarify and better remember my reading, and so Kralik’s practice of writing notes to memorialize his gratitude resonates. And I strive for mindfulness, so the appreciation he discovers in the most ordinary and overlooked aspects of business and personal relationships is helpful.

*At nearly the same time, I read a similar passage about Keith Richards and his grandfather in his autobio, Life. Methinks there be a message.

An Object of Beauty by Steve Martin is to some extent a novel -- a quick, satiric, caper-ish recounting of 20 years in the life of Lacey Yeager, a charismatic and manipulative young art dealer whose ambition “often left blood in the water.” But to a larger extent, it’s an inside look at Manhattan’s fine-art world in the late 20th- and early 21st-century.

I enjoyed Martin’s novella The Pleasure of My Company, but the novel aspect of this book -- the (shallowness of) story and character -- completely failed to engage me. I also kept getting bumped by the narrator -- a peripheral character whose job as freelance writer for an art magazine is supposed to make it believable that he’s interviewed the other characters to the point of omniscience about their every thought, motivation and activity.

Yet the art-world aspect is more interesting -- a look at contemporary artists, art collectors, dealers, galleries, auction houses and Manhattan itself, with a couple dozen full-color illustrations of the paintings referenced in the story. It sent me to the Internet numerous times to see which aspects were “real” and to pursue them further, and it will likewise engage other readers who are interested in the art world.

>55 fuzzy_patters: He talked generally about our brains being plastic and able to be rewired to suit the environment, with some commentary as a person of an age who can remember (as an adult) the days before the internet. You bring up an interesting subject worth discussing in a separate thread some time! What do we forsee for the younger generation...

I can’t remember what brought Truman Capote’s A Christmas Memory to my attention last year, but I bought it online and only upon delivery realized that my “Tale Blazers” edition of the short story was utilitarian and intended for classroom use. I was unaccountably disappointed with the vocabulary and reading-comprehension questions, and put it aside.

Well, now I pulled it out and enjoyed the autobiographical Christmas story about orphaned, 7-year-old Buddy, his fun, elderly distant (woman) cousin, and their disapproving relatives. It’s mischievous, satisfying, and somewhat sad, with a real sense of the 1930s setting and a peek into what likely stirred the writer in Capote. I even completed the quizzes and was rewarded with a succinct statement of the theme: “Some of the most common things and people are truly extraordinary.” And I learned a thing or two, for example that “prosaic” means “ordinary” (how did I think along the lines of the opposite?!).

Capote’s writing is very visual, but I think the must-read edition of this short story is the children’s (cover shown above), with illustrations by Beth Peck. Or you can read the text online here.

I'm not fond of Capote as a person (having just watched him on those talk shows acting all superior and cynical) but I did really enjoy A Christmas Memory.

I had the same feeling/impression that that was one of the meanings of "prosaic," just as you did, MJ. Funny how words can overtime begin to have the opposite meaning. Can't think of an example right now, but some words have held on to their original meanings while also coming to mean just the opposite, so if we live long enough we may come to be right! ;-) (Oh yeah, thought of one: overlook.) Most of us develop our meanings of words through reading and building multiple definitions through context, so I'm sure this happens a lot. It doesn't bother me that I'm sometimes wrong, because more often than not I'm in the ballpark with most words.

Edited to try to clarify my thoughts and to say: I could care less! (Ha! Ha! An expression which means the same as: I could not care less.)

bonnie, I also like how opposite the words overlook and oversee have come to be, compared with how similar look and see are.

I heard prosaic this week in an NPR story. They were already into the next sentence when I noticed it, and noticed myself manually translating it, oh, ordinary.

From American Terroir by Rowan Jacobsen:

{Terroir is} a partnership between person, plant and environment to bring something unique into the world. The soil and climate set the conditions; the plants, animals, and fungi respond to them; and then people determine how to bring out the goodness of those foods and drinks.

American Terroir* is Jacobsen’s exploration of that “taste of place” -- why certain locales grow certain plants and animals so well, and the attentive harvesting and processing that transform them into outstanding foods. Think artisanal not industrial; imagine a reversal of the past century’s flight from the farm and from all things “earthy.” Jacobsen organizes years of research and tasting into a dozen essays, each a primer on a food and an armchair trip to a locale: Vermont maple syrup; Panamanian coffee; Washington apples and Vermont (hard) cider; locavore honeys and mead wine; Prince Edward Island mussels; Quebec mushrooms and forest greens; Puget Sound oysters; Mexican avocados; Alaskan salmon; California wine; Vermont cheese; and Mexican chocolate.

There’s history, biology, climatology, gastronomy, agriculture, production and business, and as close to a tasting as a book can get ... all packaged in Jacobsen’s engaging narration, which has hints of Michael Pollan and Mary Roach. And each essay concludes with a recipe or two plus a list of sources that made me dizzy with possibility (first up: an orange-blossom sparkling mead wine). One of my favorite books this year!

*pronounced like Renoir

71 - Sounds wonderful!

detailmuse - I sent my wife a link to your review of American Terroir - we now own a copy.

>jane, dan
I'm giving it to two of my brothers for Christmas. I'd like to read more by Jacobsen, maybe Fruitless Fall about the bee colony collapse. Meanwhile I have Pollan's The Botany of Desire looking delicious in my TBRs.

You always make these science books sound so good, MJ! I've been trying to support local even over "organic" because in the long run I think it will be more healthy for everyone, especially for our environment and our local economies. It's so hard to bypass those raspberries in December. In fact, I didn't this week, but I keep trying.

I think you're exactly right: local comes first. But of course there are treats! -- a couple generations ago, it was fresh oranges at Christmas. So with raspberries today (just not everyday). Were yours flavorful? I've given up on supermarket fruit, it's been so modified in service of visual appeal and shelf-life that there's no flavor.

Countdown: 5 months till our farmers market returns. It's pricey, and the food spoils rapidly ... which is eye-opening about how different supermarket produce is and brings to mind a line from Michael Pollan: "The surest way to extend the shelf life of food is to remove its nutrients."

You Know When the Men Are Gone by Siobhan Fallon

In Fort Hood housing, like all army housing, you get used to hearing through the walls. You learn your neighbors’ routines: when and if they gargle and brush their teeth; how often they go to the bathroom or shower; whether they snore or cry themselves to sleep. You learn too much. And you learn to move quietly through your own small domain.

You also know when the men are gone. No more boots stomping above, no more football games turned up too high, and, best of all, no more front doors slamming before dawn as they trudge out for their early formation, sneakers on metal stairs, cars starting, shouts to the windows above to throw down their gloves on cold desert mornings. Babies still cry, telephones ring, Saturday morning cartoons screech, but without the men, there is a sense of muted silence, a sense of muted life.

Those opening paragraphs hooked me and I couldn’t be happier that my 90th (and likely final) book this year is my latest Early Reviewer -- a terrific collection of eight short stories that are linked through a shared setting of Fort Hood, Texas, its soldiers who are deployed to Iraq, and their wives and families who stay behind.

The first story sets up military domestic life and that too-closeness to neighbors and authority. The next follows a soldier serving outside Baghdad -- an investment banker who enlisted after 9/11. Others explore suspicions of adultery; wounded soldiers returning early; the difficulty of re-acclimating to home; the devastation of widowhood.

They’re intensely personal stories, not political, and they're straightforward, to be re-read more for comfort than for a layered understanding. But they may be the most engaging reading I’ve encountered this year … in fact their readability reminds me of Kathryn Stockett’s The Help, the first book published by Penguin’s Amy Einhorn imprint which is now publishing this book.

77 - Sounds interesting though I'm not sure I could make it through that one.

>76 detailmuse: I'm lucky to live within a block of a farmer's market that is open the year round, four days a week. Of course, in these winter months, it's mostly root vegetables, apples, baked goods and cheeses, but I don't complain.

In the summer and fall, when everything is local and fresh, the problem is overbuying. Jim and I have not been cooking much (the lure of NY takeout), so anything I buy in a 'normal' quantity - a head of romaine or broccoli, for instance - runs the risk of rotting before we eat it. I've made resolution after resolution to get back to cooking, or at least to salad-making and -eating, and the smells and sights in season are so tempting. so here's a new year again. I have at least 4 months until the first tender shoots of the new harvest hit the market - by then I should be able to remember what pots and pans are for, don't you think?

Judy, I tried to get my neighbors on my street interested in a salad coop during the summer, but no-go. How hard would it be to fix salad for a few other families just once a week? And then you would get salad made for you on a few other nights. And everyone knows that salad is always better if someone else fixes it. My other idea which works a lot better is to immediately share--it's much better than throwing it away at the end of the week.

Oops! Forgot to say the short stories sound good, MJ. Though I have to confess that I'm always reading books like that with an eye towards books that I give to my son to further convince him that joining the military would be a bad idea.

Sharing is actually a great idea. I've become more friendly with a few people in neighboring apartments - and they are much more the foody type than I am. If I buy too much, I'll just ring their doorbells!

>79 ffortsa: thanks for mentioning! -- I found one (!) Chicago market open year 'round, one (!) or two Saturdays a month now till spring. It's not close but would be a fun field trip. Looks like another market rotates through a group of Chicagoland churches, so there are possibilities :)

This has been in my TBRs forever, seemed like the perfect time to get to it...

>jane and bonnie
these (below) are the more difficult stories to get through, and are more “men’s stories” vs You Know When the Men Are Gone. Yet they’re both gentle -- this collection about wartime experiences, the other collection about its impact on domestic life.



The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

{The war} was boredom with a twist, the kind of boredom that caused stomach disorders. You’d be sitting at the top of a high hill, the flat paddies stretching out below, and the day would be calm and hot and utterly vacant, and you’d feel the boredom dripping inside you like a leaky faucet, except it wasn’t water, it was a sort of acid, and with each little droplet you’d feel the stuff eating away at important organs. You’d try to relax. You’d uncurl your fists and let your thoughts go. Well, you’d think, this isn’t so bad. And right then you’d hear gunfire behind you and your nuts would fly up into your throat and you’d be squealing pig squeals. That kind of boredom.

The 22 autobiographical short stories in this collection are linked around O’Brien’s military service in Vietnam and his ongoing attempts to process those experiences decades later. Its repetition -- events mentioned repeatedly, sometimes from different perspectives and reminiscent of Heller’s Catch-22 -- evokes the impossibility of wrapping one’s mind around the unreality of war.

An unexpected (and interesting) aspect is O’Brien’s embedded commentary about storytelling, including (my paraphrasing) the need to evoke the reality of an experience by communicating “truths” more so than “facts” -- which is still a contentious topic in memoir.

Hi MJ - I was surprised at how much I enjoyed The Things They Carried when I read it a couple of years ago. It's not really what I would consider my kind of book but, wow, I loved it.

Happy New Year to you!

Hmm. Seeing those "22"s stand out in the message above makes me wonder if the number of stories is O'Brien's homage to Heller?

Hey Joanne, to you too! Part of my pleasure with this one was just pulling it out and reading, then some comments, no "review." More of that next year!

Some 2010 stats

Total books finished - 91
Fiction - 40
Nonfiction - 50
Poetry - 1

Date acquired (incl from library):
in 2010 - 76
in 2009 - 12
before 2009 - 3
I want to turn this pattern upside down next year by reading from my TBRs

Publication date (iffy accuracy; I didn’t dig to differentiate an edition’s pub date from the work’s original pub date):
2011 - 1
2010 - 58
other 2000s - 23
1990s - 8
1980s - 1
I also want to turn this pattern upside-down next year

Notable tags:
9/11 mention - 4 (it’s appearing in increasing frequency)
Illustrated - 25 (visuals feel so indulgent!)
Humor - 14 (yay)
Linked stories - 7 (some are separate stories, some have the arc of a novel)
LT Inspired - 26 (yay)
Novella - 8 (under 200pp and often intense)

Ratings
5 4 ****
4.5 15 ***************
4 25 *************************
3.5 21 *********************
3 20 ********************
2.5 4 ****
2 2 **
1.5 0
1 0
0.5 0

Female authors - 38
Male authors - 48
Mixed - 5

Authors with more than one book in my 2010 reads - 1 (Art Spiegelman’s two-volume Maus)
Authors new-to-me - 77 (!!)
Authors I’m likely to add to my Favorites list (my rule requires loving at least two books by an author before adding as a Favorite) - 5 (Siobhan Fallon, Rowan Jacobsen, Jim Powell, Tom Rachman, Adania Shibli)

>68 detailmuse: number of times I’ve seen prosaic in print in the month since learning its definition - 4 :)

Happy 2011!

Join me for a new year of reading here.