George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

George Eliot, Daniel Deronda. Daniel Deronda is a smart, sweet, slightly aimless young man with unknown parentage being raised by a kind uncle. Gwendolen Harleth is a bratty, beautiful girl who would be rebellious if she had more brains or imagination. So far nothing surprising, and the story begins like many less imaginative Victorian novels. It's where the story goes that is remarkable. Eliot showed the few options available to Gwendolen and the extraordinary narrowness of her life without making her flat or robotic. Deronda, despite his dubious origins, has much wider horizons, and the only choice he really has to make is what to do with himself. While he doesn't change so much as Gwendolen, his outlook, opinions, and goals subtly shift as he becomes immersed in a different culture and history. The window granted through Deronda into early Zionism as well as 19th century mysticism was fascinating. Although the novel has the slow-moving ornate style of the era, it has great intensity. I'm going to go back and reread Silas Marner and tackle Middlemarch - I appreciate Eliot so much more than I did when I was younger. She's subtle and engrossing and her characters are real people (she's also slyly funny).

Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief

Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief. I bought this for my little brother for Christmas, but stole it back from him to read in a waiting room. It was fine, a fun little book. Mount Olympus is in NYC (the heart of the west, apparently) and the Greek gods are still up to their mortal-loving ways. Percy Jackson, a young half-blood hero in the making, has to go on a quest and battle mythical monsters and immortal gods while trying to live through middle school. I enjoyed the mythology, but it was laid on a little thick. The writing was too much aimed at middle-schoolers for me to enjoy thoroughly, and it did seem almost pandering to an imagined demographic. Much can be forgiven for a good adventure with swords, though. I guess it's not so much young adult books I enjoy as books that are written for everybody.

John Le Carre, A Most Wanted Man

John Le Carré, A Most Wanted Man. This story revolves around a young illegal immigrant, an elderly banker, and a human rights lawyer in Hamburg. It's a dissection of the chaos in the intelligence world post 9/11, as well as human rights, law, and morality. By now I ought to know what is coming when I read Le Carré (let's just say I don't expect a happy ending), but I can never guess just how things will go wrong. I love all these books. They have similar themes and even characters, but are all beautifully crafted. The similarity is that each person is utterly lonely, and the central threads of love, generosity, and choice. He keeps writing these wistful books, and they keep getting better. Authors that keep writing after they are sick of their characters and their forms, but go on anyway and write terrible books (I'm thinking Martha Grimes) are more than disappointing. Le Carré is most emphatically not in that category. Another lovely thing about him is that each of his books is thoroughly researched and embedded in the world at the time of his writing, but not in such a way that is forced or didactic.

Karen Cushman, The Midwife's Apprentice

Karen Cushman, The Midwife's Apprentice. A fantastic little book. A medieval story, perfect in detail, with a wonderful hero of a girl. I'm sad that this wasn't written when I was 10.

Marilynne Robinson, Home

Marilynne Robinson, Home. A story about family, fault, and sorrow. The love that we have for each other that is impossible to abandon, that withdrawal or absence underlines. Full to the brim with grief - and yet serene. A reminder that the details of housekeeping, of gardening, of simply living, can be an expression of love, that they can keep despair just outside the door. She is a surpassingly beautiful writer. No tears, but I kept swallowing them as I turned the pages, and my heart stayed in my throat.

Charles L. Bardes, Pale Faces

Charles L. Bardes, Pale Faces: The Masks of Anemia. A lovely old fashioned little book about blood. A scholarly rumination about history and medicine - the nature of diagnosis and illness. Sometimes a little too ruminative, a little too effusive. I didn't mind, although I occasionally rolled my eyes at prose like this:

"A red cell lives for ninety days, give or take, and when it is old and gray and full of sleep the spleen recognizes its senectitude and takes it aside, takes it down, administers some fatal blow and breaks it apart, recycles its parts for future use, its iron and vital stuff."

Even with this lack of restraint, the overall story was pleasing. I wouldn't mind if textbooks were written in the same style, with myth and literature interwoven with description. I picked it up at the library because it was small and attractive, and it lived up to its looks.

Dave Eggers, What is the What

Dave Eggers, What is the What. Simple, direct. Makes me respect Eggers - it's not his, but Valentino's voice telling the story. But the soul of his writing (what saves it from artifice and archness and makes it Staggering Genius despite self-consciousness) is there. I'm not sure what that essence is - saying it is love is inadequate. Anyway, it's a tremendous feat to write a story in the midst of massive human tragedy that is neither saccharine, overdrawn, nor despairing. This story made me cry, but for a friend -another person, not for nameless, faceless masses of people. More than cry, though. It was funny and beautiful, it made me love my life, I wanted to kiss strangers, and hug children. The best part of Valentino Achak Deng's story is that is didn't end when he left Kakuma, but it continues. The end is satisfying, even though completely unfinished.

Chip Kidd, The Cheese Monkeys

Chip Kidd, The Cheese Monkeys. Two art majors at State U wander into a Commercial Arts class and a comedy-manifesto results. A silly, fun and crunchy sort of entertainment. Such snappy dialogue, such back and forth, such stinging wit. An intentional homage to an extinct era of comedy. The plot itself seemed actually to be two stories jammed together: first semester, introductions and human interest; second semester, design theory and rising mania. One strange thing, the softcover is pretty ugly for a book about graphic design. It's busy at the least, it took me about a minute to figure out what the title was.

Neal Stephenson, Anathem

Neal Stephenson, Anathem. If you want a better introduction than I can give, Neal Stephenson reads from Anathem here: http://www.longnow.org/anathem/. I had more fun reading this book than was good for me. I hope that my future patients don't suffer too much from the effects of me reading it instead of studying (I did delay posting to study, at least). Every effort I've made to describe the story to friends has been a failure like this: "OK, so there is this society of math monks, kind of like the Pythagoreans, and it's another universe, and they live in maths which are like monasteries but cooler, and there is this awesome clock, and they garden, and learn stuff all the time and chant, and and and..."(here is where I drool on myself and am forced to stop torturing my friends). While I agreed with this criticism early on, I stopped noticing once I got into the story, and by the time I finished, I read all of the appendices, the glossary, and all the online acknowledgments. Maybe the Baroque Cycle was more fun, but I need to read Anathem again to decide.

Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. On reflection this has to be one of the more misogynist books I've read. Not a female in it that isn't a castrating fiend, hellish domineering (castrating) mother, or a whore. The whores of course are the good guys. Never read a book before where the redemptive act by the hero was sexual assault of the villain. Putting that criticism aside, it was a good story with vivid characters. Bromden's voice was compelling, and I liked the image of the combine as the oppressive homogenizing forces in society working together. Haven't seen the movie, but by percolation I had an idea what to expect, so perhaps the suspense was a little spoiled. Anyway, I actually thought the ending would be sadder than it was.

Neil Gaiman, Stardust

Neil Gaiman, Stardust. I've been reading this aloud to Matthew (with minor editing) but I peeked ahead. This was a darling story, the village of Wall and Faerie and the lands beyond were wonderful and the journey through was delightful. I especially enjoyed the asides and minor stories in Faerie (where all the lands that have been eliminated from maps have gone). The story had such a traditional feel that at times one could imagine it was a George MacDonald story while the next moment it read like a comic book. I loved the movie, and for once I didn't think that the book far outshone the adaptation, but it was still worth the read. There is definitely room for more stories from Wall.

Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint

Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint. The plaintive voice of Alexander Portnoy is familiar and droning and his complaint is an endless (although entertaining) circle. It's funny, very funny. It's also filthy almost unbearably, filthy to the point of wallowing. In fact, it's probably one of the most offensive books ever written (if taken seriously). Makes me glad Freud and psychoanalysis are pretty well out of fashion. I think I like later Roth better - frailty and decay of the body is a more interesting obsession than masturbation.

Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking. This book was terrifying to me. I don't want to think about how precarious life is and how fundamentally powerless I am to control it. And yet I've been circling around this knowledge daily, learning how fragile and intricate is our construction, and how contingent.

But, back to the story. Joan Didion is a graceful writer, and her precision and clarity make her emotion more powerful. It's not really a memoir of grief, but a story of the loves of her life, her husband and child, of companionship and friendship and living together, brought into relief by sudden absence. She conveys her grief and love in stark and thoughtful narrative.

Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth. Blah. Nothing worse than returning to something you loved as an eight-year-old and being disappointed. (Is it ironic that it seemed BORING and POINTLESS?) It reminded me of an eviscerated and very dull The Pilgrim's Progress.

Isabel Allende, Portrait in Sepia

Isabel Allende, Portrait in Sepia. This is the first Allende I've read, and it was pretty forgettable. All the individual parts of this story were fine, but the whole thing was lacking. It was a little trashy, a little superficial, but the real thing wrong was that it didn't seem true. I enjoyed the early unraveling of the family history, but the latter half of the story was just hollow. The protagonist, Aurora de Valle, was a delightful child and you could see through her eyes as she moved between cultures and households and you loved who she loved. But she was unconvincing as an adult, as a lover and as an artist (as a photographer she seemed especially forced) and so she was an seriously unconvincing narrator. I lost interest in the characters by the end.

Art Spiegelman, Maus(II)

Art Spiegelman, Maus(II). Once again thanks to Bredon I get reading material. These are really impossible to describe. I can only say that they were moving and beautiful and funny and that you should read them.

Philip Pullman, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass

Philip Pullman, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass. These were wonderful. Rich and fascinating, full of adventure and anguish, at once thoughtful and exciting. Bredon lent them to me and I disappeared for the next few days. I loved the universe and I loved Lyra and Will. I was not even a bit disappointed (in fact they were at least as good as The Golden Compass) and I still think that I haven't read such great stories as these in years. It's odd, since the theological perspective is opposite, how much these reminded me of Lewis's Space Trilogy (these were more fun and more engrossing, though). Actually, they weren't theologically as far apart as you'd think, since Lewis's Satan and Pullman's Authority are remarkably similar (you could certainly describe both as bent). They also motivated me to go back and attack Milton again. I had just been attempting to reread him, but I'll read happily along for five or six pages and then realize I have no idea what is going on. Maybe I can try again now with more success.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Shadow of the Wind

Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind. A bookish gothic adventure (more like Dumas than anything else). The title tells you what you need to know - great fun and melodrama with overblown prose. A boy is in search of a mysterious author whose books are being systematically destroyed in post-war Barcelona. Along the way are many burned letters, secrets, romances, tragedies, and Sugus candies. Even though the final plot twist was predictable, this was a wonderfully suspenseful and intricate story. Also, I would love to visit the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.

Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin

Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, translated by Charles Johnston. I enjoyed this translation much more than the one I first read. It veers between gossip, romance, tragedy, country soliloquy and high comedy, and it's in verse (which seems only proper). I loved Tatyana's opinion of the city socialite scene:

"This world's so vacuous that it's got
no spark of fun in all its rot!"

Pushkins' Tatyana is one of the few heroines that gets to grow up from the period. I was greatly cheered that she had the courage to shoot Evgeny down.
(Oh man, I really really would love to learn Russian, at least enough to start, but with my language skills it might take me decades, plus it would most likely be hard work.)

Art Spiegelman, Maus(I)

Art Spiegelman, Maus(I). Thank you Bredon, via Mom. I thought I had already read this because I have heard so much about it. I'm only angry that you didn't lend mom both volumes, although it gives me an excuse to go to the library. More after II.

Allen Ginsberg, HOWL and Other Poems

Allen Ginsberg, HOWL and Other Poems. ("I saw the best minds of my generation...starving hysterical naked,") well, you remember these, I'm sure, or at least a parody of them. The poems are oddly, faintly, occasionally vividly beautiful. Always thumping and often filthy. A little monotonous. Could be useful as voice over for an anti-drug campaign for one of those stark and ineffective television ads with pictures of squalor and madness. I prefer my squalor in prose, but hey.

Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policeman's Union

Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policeman's Union. So, Israel imploded in 1948 and a Jewish settlement was founded (a hopeful folly called Sitka) in Alaska and luckily for the fun of the language, it's a Yiddish speaking territory. Meyer Landsman is a (hard-boiled, soft-boiled?) alcoholic police detective in a unit that's about to be dissolved when the sovereignty of Sitka reverts to the State of Alaska. Ok, so maybe I can't explain the plot, but it's wonderful. Read this. So fun, so nice to listen to in your head, you'll laugh.

Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye

Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye. The story of the remembered girlhood of a painter. A book that reminded me how intense being nine was and how cruel and complicated children can be. Atwood always tells a good story.

Zadie Smith, On Beauty

Zadie Smith, On Beauty. Incredible. Funny, entertaining, appalling. The Belseys are a liberal, academic, contorted, and confused family who are insanely fun to read about. Class, love, politics, selfishness, everything Smith put in this book is alive and sharp and deadly. And this story is much more fun to read than Howard's End.

John Updike, Marry Me

John Updike, Marry Me. The older I get the more I love John Updike's language, and the more I recoil from his characters. I don't know why I keep coming back to him, but I do. There is something there that draws me, even in the most woeful of his books. But really, his suburban adultery stories I find the most hopeless and dismal to read of almost anything. I'd like to check out one of his really good novels or better short stories to cleanse my mind. This particular book was the story of two couples and the excruciating mess they make of their lives. Although Jerry, Sally, Richard, and Ruth are scummy and irritating, there is just such sorrow and lostness in their descriptions (not in themselves, really, but in aspects of themselves), well, I can't explain it but I find it somehow compelling. He's writing about miserable, cowardly people, but not to redeem, exalt, or make examples of them. They are just people. Not very nice people. But recognizable.

Richard Brautigan, A Confederate General From Big Sur, Dreaming of Babylon, The Hawkline Monster

Richard Brautigan, A Confederate General From Big Sur, Dreaming of Babylon, The Hawkline Monster. Brautigan is truly funny and bizarre in splashes, but somehow there wasn't much going on in these books. I enjoy the absurd, but it helps to have some sort of structure. Really, they just weren't that great. (What sort of masochist reads three novels by Brautigan in a row? Well, it is summer vacation and they were bound together so I just sort of plowed right through with no regard for my sanity). Years ago I enjoyed Trout Fishing In America, although it wasn't the work of transcendent genius that I'd been promised. If I'd read these separately, buffered by several decades, I might feel more charitably toward Brautigan, but as it is I feel as if I drank a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster and used my head as a battering ram.

Mitch Albom, tuesdays with Morrie

Mitch Albom, tuesdays with Morrie. A dear friend gave me this book as a gift. To be honest, I thought I wouldn't like it ("I don't usually go for the uplifting") but I did enjoy reading it. Maybe I didn't connect with the author's tone or his answers, but I did connect to the questions he was asking. These questions matter. How do you live a good life? How do you value other people and love them? What is important and what is distraction? What are the values of our culture and are they right? How do you live a good life within a culture that is dysfunctional? How do you tolerate fear, pain, and loss? How do you confront your own death, and worse, the death of those you love? I enjoy people who ask these questions and honestly try to answer them. It's not a matter of religion or no religion to me - I can deeply empathize with most people if they are thoughtful. The intolerable sin is apathy, a careless approach to life. Don't be unthoughtful or formulaic - have a reason for what you do and who you are. Not asking questions is worse than having the wrong answers or no answers. Morrie's insights reminded me of the Forster epigraph "only connect". So the answers in this book were simple - love each other, listen, touch, learn. Pretty basic humanism, hard to argue with (water's mighty wet stuff, chief!). I didn't love the author - he didn't delve deeply enough, it seemed to me, but I loved the subject of the book. A great teacher is important and should be cherished - don't let your teachers fade from your mind.

Malory, The Morte Darthur

Malory, The Morte Darthur. Oh the battles! And the courtliness and cruelty! And the High Language.... If I only had occasion to say something like: "Madam, I pray you that ye be not displeased with me for I will take the adventure that God will send me" or "Arise, for shame, and perform this battle with me to the utterance!"

Victor Villaseñor, Rain of Gold

Victor Villaseñor, Rain of Gold. I guess this came before the book Thirteen Senses, which I read a few years ago but didn't realize was a sequel. A funny, juicy, and joyful family history. The grandmothers are priceless characters, even though occasionally over the top (although for a lady that shares raunchy anecdotes with her personal friend the virgin Mary every morning, over-the-top is understatement). It successfully pulls off interweaving separate narratives that eventually join without being irritating or distracting.

Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner. I devoured this in an afternoon, although it was at times excruciating and heavy with visceral emotion. It's the story of a boy named Amir who betrayed his dearest friend, told in vivid and beautiful language against the backdrop of a disintegrating home: a story about the hope of redemption.

Anton Chekhov, My Life

Anton Chekhov, My Life. A short novel or a long story, perfectly told, that reminded me how much I really love Chekhov. Misail, Masha, Kleopatra, Blogovo - all the people are perfect, recognizable, and vivid. Misail is the son of an architect and is a failure. He absconds from his expected role and becomes a laborer, a roof painter. He is not truly a reformer or revolutionary. He finds a love and loses her. He doesn't change anything. The ending is right. (By the way, this was the Constance Garnett translation, the voice I grew up hearing Russian literature in. I think her words are perfect for Chekhov.)

Salman Rushdie, Shame

Salman Rushdie, Shame. Not as rich, florid, substantial or comedic as The Satanic Verses and disappointing by comparison. Still a good story, complicated, baroque, dramatic, mournful, recognizable. I enjoyed the mood of the sprawling, decaying architecture and the sprawling, decaying relationship between the families that tangled through the plot.

P.D. James, The Murder Room

P.D. James, The Murder Room. I don't know why it is, but I never can remember if I've read these before until I'm fifty or so pages in, and then it's too late to stop. P.D. James is a pleasure to read, but her stories don't grab me. Neither does Adam Dalgliesh, that cool cucumber. Odd, because he's so much a cousin of Peter Wimsey, who does (and Richard Jury, who sometimes does). There's something about all of her characters I don't connect with, except in the most minor ways. But rereading her is like rewatching one of those movies you always forget if you finished - fun and restful- and you can even let yourself be a little surprised at the end.

Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift

Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift. Charlie Citrine is a ridiculous puffed up writer (he's writing a perpetually unfinished treatise on boredom, but he made his big bucks on Broadway) who carries around a suffocating love for the dead. He owes and is owed debts to and from his boyhood hero, the washed-up poet Humboldt, who was the Guthrie to his Dylan. He spends every day worrying about his wife, his lawsuits, his girlfriend, his clothes, his racquetball game, his evaporating money, his car - but he longs to be a philosopher king. He keeps getting entangled in impossible messes with Chicago underworld types and he just can't seem to hold on to himself. Charlie is another Bellow hero filled with lofty yearnings and petty obsessions. I don't know why I love these ridiculous and idiotic men that Bellow writes about - they are nearly entirely worthless human beings.

Jane Smiley, The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton

Jane Smiley, The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton. This book reminded me of one of those young-adult pioneer stories with a girl in a prairie dress looking over the horizon on the cover. It's a familiar story form - a young woman marries, travels west, stakes a claim, and hardships and adventure ensue. The familiarity is absolutely intentional - there is even a scene where Lidie chops her hair and dresses as a man in order to travel freely. But this story has an adult level of emotional and political development. The historical/political detail about Kansas Territory and the abolitionist movement and conflicts were the most interesting parts of the book. I was actually pretty shocked that this book turned out to be like this - Jane Smiley is one of those odd authors whose books are entirely different from each other. She seems to pick up any form and tell a story comfortably. If it weren't for her style of humor I wouldn't recognize them.

All right, time to catch up on posting, I suppose. It's not that I haven't been reading, it's that I've been furtive about it. Technically, I've had no time, so that other than cartoons from back issues of the New Yorker and horrid journal articles my reading has consisted of allowances of novels when I am nearly asleep. But now I am a relatively free woman for six weeks or so, so I'll catch up on the backlog!

Joanne Harris, Chocolat

Joanne Harris, Chocolat. Ugh. Too sweet. The book equivalent of Hershey's Syrup. I haven't seen the movie, but I bet it was better.

Iva Pekárková, The World Is Round

Iva Pekárková, The World Is Round. A occasionally beautiful, filthy, shifting novel. A beat-inspired hedonistic travelogue (with a rare female protagonist) meets One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich . This wasn't nearly as powerful, but the small details of camp life were so significant and lovingly described that comparison was inevitable. Somehow I felt the structure, or the narrative, was lacking - too amorphous. But the characters, the feelings, the dialog, even in translation, were often perfect. So - flawed - but enough beauty to savor.

David Sheff, Beautiful Boy

David Sheff, Beautiful Boy. A memoir of living with a son's drug addiction, so a fairly terrifying book for a parent to read. Matt brought this home because they're promoting it at Starbucks and he wanted to know if it's "well-written" for his customers. Fairly. Not incredibly gripping, a little repetitive. But still, I had to keep reading, hoping for a neat resolution and a happy ending for Nic. By the nature of the story, you care for the characters despite Nic's flaws (the subject of the book, after all) and David's extraordinary navel gazing. Although you have to excuse some of the constant self-blame, because mostly David's role consisted of worrying. The second half of the book was tighter than the first. David suffered a brain hemorrhage some way through the writing process,and I wonder if that paradoxically cleaned up the narrative. I read that Nic Sheff wrote a memoir published at the same time, and I'm curious to read it. Not curious enough to buy it, but if I run across it I'll read it.

Roddy Doyle, Paula Spencer

Roddy Doyle, Paula Spencer. I really like Roddy Doyle - he's funny and gritty, and not too self-conscious. Paula is a rough, loving, recovering alcoholic struggling to stay dry and discover who she actually is. She's a working class house cleaner, widow, and parent relearning life. She's living in the new Ireland, but stuck in the economic past. She's great. She's grand. The only thing that struck me as a little off was the huge amount of pop culture references - they weren't jarring or anything, but the book's only a year old and I was struggling to connect some of them (but they were not pathetic, like poor Tom Wolfe's awful I am Charlotte Simmons) and they do work because the story is embedded in a very specific place and time.

M.T. Anderson, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing

M.T. Anderson, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing: Traitor to the Nation. Excellent, even though it has the longest title ever (there's another subtitle- Volume I: The Pox Party - which would have been great alone). Octavian is a classic hero, as precocious as his namesake, and absolutely indomitable. The children's literature I've always loved best contains heartless adversaries, punishing circumstances, and plot and characters that completely suck you in. The angles of this story about science, oppression, freedom, hypocrisy, and greed were incredible - the complexity and honesty of the perspective made every fiction of the revolutionary war I read as a kid seem hagiographic and shallow.

A. S. Byatt, Little Black Book of Stories

A. S. Byatt, Little Black Book of Stories. A Stone Woman was a magnificent and memorable image made into a story - I dreamt of turning to stone after reading it. Didn't so much care for Raw Material - the writer was just not convincing (ha). All of the stories were enjoyable. Byatt is always entertaining and clever. Her erudite characters make me wish I was better educated in the classics. Why didn't I attempt Latin instead of failing miserably at French and Spanish? I'll never feel learned unless I learn some Latin, but I don't think my chances are good.

John Le Carré, The Mission Song

John Le Carré, The Mission Song. My favorite comfort read, who is unfortunately never comforting. This particular Le Carré is about Salvo, a gifted interpreter, who of course works part time for a deniable government organization. On his first important assignment, he is the interpreter (above and below the waterline) for a shadowy multinational syndicate and a collection of warlords and political leaders who are of course going to bring peace to his beloved Congo. The story is like Le Carré's others, in that the unprincipled and ruthless win, and the possession of a conscience dooms a hero. But I think these books are always beautifully written, perfectly constructed, and true. The heroes are not good men and women, but they have a core of good. And, strangely, the stories are mostly about love.

Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March

Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March. Augie grows up in depression-era Chicago and floats from calling to calling, recruited by one than another crackpot or schemer and eventually rejecting him and drifting to the next. Something about Augie makes others want to adopt him, and all Augie knows about himself is that he is not a specialist and he has some fate to find. He is a reader (like so many Bellow heroes) and seems content to drift through life, although his defining characteristic is opposition. It's so easy be Augie - anyone who lived through adolescence should recognize the feeling of special destiny mixed with apathy and discouragement. It's not so much a "coming of age" novel, because it ends with Augie still half-formed. Bellow is becoming my favorite author.

Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia

Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia. I love Oliver Sacks. What I love most about his books is the boundless curiosity that spreads out from topic to topic, and I also appreciate the respect and obvious love he has for his patients. He has a passion for music himself, and so the exploration of the neurology of music was captivating, and more personal than some of his other books. This book also had a little less natural structure and tightness than some of his other collections. Lots of stories about memory loss and brain injury that alter musical experience, and summaries of interesting research and case studies related to music and the brain. I'm not a very musical person myself, but as I read this I did think about the place music has in my head, about the memories and emotions it can evoke -and I also thought about other more musical people I know, and how large a portion of their lives is wrapped up in playing and listening to music. Matt is like that, and it baffles me. I think my involvement with books is just as mysterious to him as his musical focus is to me.

Neal Stephenson and J. Frederick George, The Cobweb

Neal Stephenson and J. Frederick George, The Cobweb. If I were Stephenson and George I would have kept this under the pseudonym "Stephen Bury" - or better yet I would have buried it. I doubt it was the fault of George, but collaboration seems to have amplified every flaw in Stephenson's style and narrative and to have eviscerated the ornate plots and baroque flourishes that he can pull off with such cohesion. Put gently, this book was terrible. Think a John Grisham novel, but with a weaker plot and flatter characters (ok, maybe not flatter, but the plot definitely lacks conviction and seems mechanical). For one thing, the main character is a strong silent type, which is hard to pull off, even in a thriller. The botulin toxin plot (which could have been fantastic) was dull and forced, as well as unbelievable. But the insurmountable flaw was the horrible purple prose. Let me reproduce a sentence here (from page four) that should win some sort of award:

"Clyde had attended the same junior high school as Desiree, and he could still remember sitting behind her in algebra, tracing the construction of her French braids- straight dark hair pulled in on itself, stretched to explosive tension like the strings of a piano - and getting woozy over the lace that draped around her tanned neck like a ring of Ivory soap suds."

(!)I thought at first that sentence was satire, but I gave up that hope after a few hundred pages. Now, Neal Stephenson's never been phenomenal at romantic tension or writing female characters in general, but that usually doesn't stop me from loving his books. I suppose everyone is entitled to a few failed experiments. This one is best forgotten.

Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass

Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass. Wonderful - I can't wait to read the next two. Bredon recommended this to me, and when I saw a friend reading it before a class it looked absolutely tantalizing. The Golden Compass lived up to and surpassed my anticipation. Lyra was a perfect champion worthy to at least hobnob with Lucy Pevensie and Frodo Baggins. One of those books (maybe for children -mostly for everybody) that's not just a great adventure or fantasy but is a great novel without qualification. But best of all was the universe surrounding Lyra. Oxford was Dickensian and baroque and wonderful, and the passing reference to the historical pope John Calvin made my day! I haven't enjoyed a story like that for the first time since I can remember. And although I shouldn't criticize a book that I have another 600 pages to slog through, Thomas Pynchon has a thing or two to learn from Pullman about embedding actual characters into a fantasy world (the comparison springs to mind, because Against the Day contains a roughly analogous Verne-esque airship north pole aurora hollow earth clump of plots). Anyway - read this book, enjoy it, share it, and read it aloud.

Richard Russo, Straight Man

Richard Russo, Straight Man. This was hilarious. Better than Empire Falls (which struck me as a little bit cute - or at least the dirty old man Max was too much), even it doesn't have the same American Novel seriousness. Once again though, the main characters are disaffected acerbic middle aged men. The protagonist, Hank, is a jerk, but you have to enjoy him and identify with him (unless you are ALL sweetness and light, I suppose). He's a decaying second-rate academic at a second rate public university with one novel "favorably reviewed by the New York Times" to his credit. He likes to view himself as an outsider, an unpredictable "loose cannon", and ends up holding a duck (no, a goose) hostage over university politics. It's an academic satire as funny as Moo, and the situational and verbal comedy impossibly escalates as the plot unfolds.

Alice Hoffman, Here on Earth

Alice Hoffman, Here on Earth. Eh. Oprah's book club selections are always at the goodwill and so I end up inadvertently reading lots of them. I don't know how there can be so many fantastic books (which become so popular that I can swoop them up for fifty cents, for which I am grateful) and so many sort of blah books in the same list. I mean, Kaye Gibbons, Jonathan Franzen, García Márquez, and Tolstoy (for goodness sake! who puts Tolstoy in a BOOK CLUB?) right along with such trash as Chris Bohjalian. Oh well, I shouldn't complain about something that gives me a wealth of cheap good used paperbacks. This book certainly wasn't bad, anyway, it just wasn't good. March returns to her home town with her teenage daughter Gwen (now her, I like, but she didn't really pan out)for a funeral after leaving with a broken heart 20 years earlier. She rekindles her affair with her lost love (and sort of step brother) and disastrous consequences ensue, as he turns out to be your standard psycho boyfriend. I don't know, the story started out with such promise: beautiful descriptions, March had depth, there was the potential for a really great love story or reconciliation. But as the plot got moving, the characters sort of fell out of the book and turned into stereotypes. If the book had skipped the last half and taken up after the last page, it might have been more interesting. March's husband had the most potential for a really nuanced player, and all he got was a cameo. The horse was just silly, as was the back story for Hollis (the dangerous lover). And I HATE spunky friends.

John Mortimer, The Second Rumpole Omnibus

John Mortimer, The Second Rumpole Omnibus. During the school year, I read a lot of things like this - short story collections that I can dip in to for a few minutes at a time or leave alone for weeks. The Rumpole stories have the advantage of being funny and forgettable - perfect bathtub reading. I don't mean to be insulting, I'm getting affectionate toward Rumpole, and I always have a need for "light" mystery stories (you could easily slot these in for Agatha Christie or Rex Stout, for example). My favorite thing about the stories is that Rumpole is a defending barrister, so they are mostly about getting people off, instead of convicting people. I especially like the large family of inept small time crooks he is always defending (and rescuing from false implications by a less inept competing criminal family). I wonder how the first omnibus was, because I got a lot of small parcels of relaxation from this one.

Alice Walker, By The Light of My Father's Smile

Alice Walker, By The Light of My Father's Smile. Oh dear, I don't know what happened to Walker - I loved The Color Purple. But some authors have only a few ideas, and these can be recycled only so many times before their books become stale and disgusting. No amount of sex, pseudo-anthropology, ghosts, or moralizing could save this from being a trashy boring book with recycled characters.

Deborah Schupack, The Boy on the Bus

Deborah Schupack, The Boy on the Bus. This story reminded me of a book I read when I was a little girl - I can't remember the name of it or the details, but it was about a girl who switched places with another child in the past (or future?) and no one really noticed, because no one expected her to be different. In this novel, a boy arrives home from school and his mother Meg is nearly certain it is not her child (almost, but not quite). I think the metaphors and Meg's emotional conflicts were drawn to thickly. The idea was fascinating and the first few chapters were intriguing, but it didn't quite maintain enough depth or complexity to allow the conceit to work. An interesting failure? Now I want to dig up that childhood book and see if it was any good.

Marcia Angell, The Truth About Drug Companies

Marcia Angell, The Truth About Drug Companies. Well, I have a bit of a backlog of books to post due to finals and procrastination - I read this one for a sociology class. Anyway, this was a book with a compelling argument, but it was too little information stretched into too much book, and seemed repetitive. I recommend the summary from the New York Review of Books - it's almost all of the information and much more concise. But Angell (who was once the editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, and so is definitely what you might consider an insider in the world of medical research) gives a wonderful critique of big pharma and squashes the myths about direct to consumer advertising, drug development, and financial conflicts of interest with researchers and doctors.

Karen Cushman, Catherine Called Birdy

Karen Cushman, Catherine Called Birdy. Oh, this was delightful. A very stubborn young girl keeps a diary in 1290. God's thumbs! I don't know how I missed this in grade school (oh, it was written in 1994 - I am old!) because the fleas alone would have been fascinating. The home medical remedies were vile, but from what I remember of medieval medical history, Birdy's patients were probably pretty well off. Well, I needed a respite from writing a very horrible term paper for Ethical Theory and this was perfect.

Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson before Dying

Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson before Dying. Moving. Like a blunt instrument to the skull.

Christopher Moore, Coyote Blue

Christopher Moore, Coyote Blue. Coyote, the trickster, comes to life and causes chaos in a respectable insurance broker's life. Slapstick funny, charming, easy to read in a sitting. It was a little like eating a whole box of marshmallow peeps, though. It's fun and sweet, but afterwards you have a headache and you are vaguely disgusted with yourself.

Jane Maienschein, Whose View of Life?

Jane Maienschein, Whose View of Life? If you are looking for a passionately argued viewpoint on when life begins and how research should be conducted, you won't find it here. Jane doesn't present a picture of bad guys and good guys. Instead this book is a careful analysis of the history and research of embryos, cloning, and stem cells. I found the history of embryology fascinating, as well as the earlier (1970's) history of molecular biology - I loved learning about developmental biology.I didn't enjoy the latter sections of the book (on cloning and stem cells) that had a greater focus on policy, but that probably reflects my own preferences. This book is pretty rare, in that it presents carefully researched science, detailed history, as well as a balanced look at how science policy is made while still being readable. I have to make a disclaimer that it's by my favorite teacher, so how could I not enjoy it?

Kim Edwards, The Memory Keeper's Daughter

Kim Edwards, The Memory Keeper's Daughter. I had the pleasure of reading this during a weekend spent comfortably on the couch reading companionably alongside an old and dear friend. This rosy scenario probably contributed to my enjoyment of the story. A doctor delivering his own unexpected twins made a snap decision to secretly send away a daughter with Down's syndrome and raise only the healthy son. When he told his sedated wife about their daughter, he inexplicably said she was stillborn. It was one of those deceptions that has unfathomable repercussions and is very hard to back out of. The novel traces both the doctor's family and the life of the daughter who was mercifully kidnapped and raised by the attending nurse. Now that I recall the story, it seems contrived and and the twists of the plot slightly predictable, but nevertheless, it was pleasant.

Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma

Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma. I don't know what to say other than you absolutely must read this! I had more than the usual urges to look for people to read out loud to, and I was caught several times regaling panicking bystanders with the latest morsel about ruminants or fungi. I have about six people I want to force my copy upon. It is a delicious story. It's too rare that a nonfiction book of with such relevant subject matter is so beautifully written. I have been reading all sorts of horrendously boring and dense material lately, so this was refreshing - I'm so glad that my class assigned this as a text so that I could read it in good conscience.

Ian and Jennifer Glynn, The Life and Death of Smallpox

Ian and Jennifer Glynn, The Life and Death of Smallpox. A fantastic biography of a nasty and still wily disease. It's the only infectious disease we've ever purposely eradicated, and that only happened by the skin of our teeth. We still aren't free and clear because of post-cold war fears of bad actors and weaponization. The history of the disease is particularly rich because the unmistakable symptoms make it easy to track in historical accounts across cultures. The story of vaccination is fascinating, and much less straightforward than I had always thought. It replaced the fairly ancient process of variolation - a home-brew inoculation using regular smallpox (rather than vaccinia or cowpox) that protected the individual but was still contagious and so was epidemiologically problematic. Just the stories about the choices people had to make about vaccinating/variolating their children were incredibly compelling. Do you expose your child to a known (though smaller) risk, or play the roulette wheel that they won't contract the severe disease? It makes our qualms about the side effects of modern vaccines seem almost petty.

The story of the virus itself is fascinating, as we can trace different evolutions of smallpox strains and related animal viruses, even in modern times. Did you know, that actually nobody knows where the strains we use for vaccines come from? The original was supposed to have come from the famous cow, but it doesn't appear to be related to any known cowpox. It may be the cow was infected with horsepox (now extinct, and so we can't check), or along the way the vaccine strain got contaminated with another pox virus.

I also thought this was really interesting because they do work on vaccinia and monkeypox at ASU - I had had no idea of the continuing usefulness of vaccinia to make vaccinations against other diseases! I read this book as part of a project I'm doing with a group in my Biology and Society class on infectious diseases in human history.

Roddy Doyle, A Star Called Henry

Roddy Doyle, A Star Called Henry. Doyle is one of my new favorites. Tender and cynical, he gets tone perfectly. Henry Smart, hero, warrior, urchin, and lover, is our immensely entertaining narrator. We get a hyper-Dickensian view of squalid and desperate Dublin, a dark view of the Irish Rebellion, and plenty of words, blood and love. I'm probably the only person, though, who didn't prefer this massive, ambitious, and bloody epic to the comic story The Van. I sometimes like the smaller, more perfect books instead of huge masterpieces.

Gwyn Hyman Rubio, Icy Sparks

Gwyn Hyman Rubio, Icy Sparks. One of those southern novels about a child growing up in Appalachia. Actually wonderful - Icy was a grand heroine, one I really sympathized with. She had Tourette's which made rural school life difficult for her and also made the book screamingly funny. I actually cried in fury for her a few times (I hate schoolyard injustices and can barely tolerate reading about them). Icy as narrator was both convincing and absorbing. The ending was a little too easy, though - the epilogue was the weakest part of the book and the fabric of the story got frayed at the finish.

Terry Jones, Douglas Adams's Starship Titanic

Terry Jones, Douglas Adams's Starship Titanic. Well, Terry Jones is no Douglas Adams, but he IS Terry Jones and so is still pretty uproarious. I actually played that video game with my brother Bredon (which was Adams's and great) and loved it, but I never got too far. I wouldn't mind resurrecting it now. I borrowed the book from my sister to read on the way to the airport and I stole it to read on the plane - it was perfect for that purpose - silly and undemanding.

Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient. Gorgeous - a lush and beautiful novel.

Alexander McCall Smith, Tears of the Giraffe

Alexander McCall Smith, Tears of the Giraffe. I enjoy these stories, even if they are maybe overly sweet. This follows The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency and is a similar simple and compelling book that is not so much mystery as short interlude in Precious Ramotswe's life. Portuguese Irregular Verbs (a collection of short stories by Smith) was absolutely hilarious and you get touches of the same absurdist humor in this series. I do think there is a little too much philosophizing and moral reflection going on - I read these books because I enjoy the humor - not particularly because I want to be touched by Mma Ramatswe's unique perspective every other page.

Isaac Asimov, The Foundation Trilogy.

Isaac Asimov, The Foundation Trilogy. Shut up! I've been stressed out, ok? This is my Star Wars. I love the first one (Foundation), but I always hated the Mule, so I don't like the last two as much. Darn psychohistorians, anyway - I always thought it was a way to sneak predestination arguments into science fiction.

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. There are so few books that reduce me to my inner 10-year old. I gulped this down (didn't everybody? I heard from several people they thought there might be some spell causing the book to bind to their fingers untill finished), but I kept getting too stressed out and had to walk around the house flapping my hands before I could stand to read anymore. I cried through the last few chapters, just because it was over....(Neal Stephenson is the only other living author who does that to me). I won't say much, but I did see a strong reflection of the Lord of the Rings in the last two books.

Gary Shteyngart, Absurdistan

Gary Shteyngart, Absurdistan. Hilarious. Hopeless. Bilious. Shamefully funny and bitter. Misha Vainburg is so disgustingly self-indulgent, wallowing, and worthless that you can't help but love him even when you want to kick him. This book is almost like a tragic marriage of Candide and Borat - but even more skewed than that sounds. The best book I've read in a long time.

Matt Ridley, The Red Queen

Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: sex and the evolution of human nature. I love natural history books for the general public. They lack some of the passion of the partisan (think Stephen Jay Gould)- and I do enjoy the enthusiasm of scientists - but outsiders usually add interpretation and synthesis to make a larger picture cohesive. This was a pretty fun discussion of the evolutionary aspects of sex, well written and argued. Ridley gets a little more controversial, interesting, and tenuous when he ventures into the shaping of "human nature" by sexual selection - but that correlates pretty well with the current state of affairs in the field. The arguments he's collected are so diverse that at times they don't support each other: there are so many examples that eventually you feel that any theory can be supported by some animal model. The near-infinite number of reproductive strategies in the world make it difficult to prove any particular system by analogy. But I loved the way he traced through all the competing theories, and all the animal examples were the best part of the book, whether or not they detracted from the argument. Who doesn't love to read about the sex lives of chimps, lions, minnows, woodpeckers, snails, rotifers, and grackles?

Susan Tyler Hitchcock, Mad Mary Lamb

Susan Tyler Hitchcock, Mad Mary Lamb. I loved the Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare when I was a child and was always fascinated by the thumbnail biography of murder and insanity in the introduction. Hitchcock has retold the complete story of Mary and Charles' life together after Mary stabbed their mother in a fit of insanity. They lived together in happy domesticity although both suffered from periodic bouts of mental illness and instability. They began to have an influentail circle of friends who gathered informally in the evenings to drink, smoke, and talk. Charles was an aspiring poet and they were both close friends of the Wordsworth's, Coleridge, and other writers, poets, and publishers. Mary was a quiet and gentle woman by all accounts who stayed in the backround but displayed great kindness and intelligence when she participated in discussions. While Charles was the more published and confidant, eventually the two began to collaborate on projects and jointly wrote several children's books. It's interesting that Charles regarded Mary as caring for him rather than the other way around (since Mary had semiannual confinements in madhouses).
The Lambs had an extensive and fascinating correspondence of letters with friends that Hitchcock draws on to illuminate their story. She quotes Charles Lamb's letter about his sister's reading tastes: "'She must have a story - well, ill, or indifferently told - so there be life stirring in it, and plenty of good or evil accidents.'" Which is exactly how I feel when I'm deciding whether to continue a mediocre book. This was a great story indifferently told. Actually, most of the book was engrossing (and the story of the Lambs's lives and literary circle was wonderful material), but some of the author's assertions and extrapolations were illogical, self-contradictory, or vague. At times the writing detracted from the story, mostly when she was imagining the feelings and emotions of Mary herself. The conclusion seemed also hastily tacked on like a bit of a dissertation added so that the book could be said to have a specific argument. The excerpts from letters that form the scaffolding of the book far outshine the author's own voice. Flaws and all, though, a great deal of research was well synthesized to tell the story. I really wanted to go to the brother and sister's smokey evening gatherings to argue and talk about books or at least have someone to write long letters to.

Elizabeth Strout, Amy and Isabelle

Elizabeth Strout, Amy and Isabelle. Isabelle was an an infuriating but recognizable and pitiable women. Amy was superficially likable but essentially spoiled and vacant. A somehow lackluster novel about a complicated and fraught mother-daughter relationship. I can't define on what didn't inspire me - there were funny moments, true moments- but, while the people seemed real to me, the story didn't. And the sex (and sexual feelings, frustrations, and situations) in the book were really icky, not remotely stirring or even imaginative, and even more yucky than intended. Two scenes, however, were fabulous: 1) Isabelle furiously preparing to have "company" over, and decorating her downstairs bathroom, and 2) the hair-cutting confrontation. Both were absolutely right.

Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia

Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia. Shallow. Funny. I liked the main character in spite of himself (which was the point, I think). Almost everyone else was worthless. I don't even like fictional actors, I suppose. This book had more fashion in it - or at any rate it was highlighted over by a design major or clothes lover- odd. One of the reasons I like to read random used books is how you can see someone else's personality in their underlining, or even in the dog-eared pages and old receipts stuck in for bookmarks (also, reading more-or-less haphazardly picked up bargain books keeps me from getting imprisoned by my own taste).

Augusten Burroughs, Running With Scissors

Augusten Burroughs, Running With Scissors. Disgusting. Hilarious. I kept snorting as I read this. One of those memoirs that makes you look fondly back at the most traumatic moments of childhood, (such as the time you stayed up late packing to go live with the squirrels in the tree canopy because you were unjustly punished) and say: "ah, the golden moments of my cherished youth where happiness flowered!"

Colleen McCullough, Caesar

Colleen McCullough, Caesar. This was my post-finals binge reading. I enjoyed it very much. I didn't enjoy her as much the last time I read her - too many names, not enough character or depth to make me want to keep the plot straight. But this time, I knew the characters and the rough outline of the plot, and it made this book much more fun. The descriptions of fortifications and engineering works were fascinating. McCullough was obviously deeply enamoured with Caesar, but I couldn't quite ignore the massive civilian casualties going on in the background for the benefit of his glory. I'm glad I waited until after my ancient Rome class to read it, or my image of Caesar, Cato, Pompey, Cicero and all those old boys would have been hopelessly skewed. I was sad that it ended with Pompey's death, and now I'm going to have to find the hours to read the sequel.
P.S. I also found a fun comic set in post-Augustan Rome if you like the "sword and sandals" genre: SPQR Blues

Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest. It's funny how I read things in unintended sequence. After reading The Age of Innocence, I must have been hungering subliminally for some satire of ridiculous social structures. So I listened to a few of Wodehouse's stories from LibriVox and then randomly picked up the Oscar Wilde. After the overt Bertie and Jeeves, Algie and Jack's antics seemed tamer than they would have otherwise, so maybe I was a little jaded. But still, it was one of those plays that I put down and thought "is that it?" about - I mean, maybe the thing has to be performed to have the required zing or something.

Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence. A beautiful novel about unfulfilled desires, useless self-sacrifice, manners, and life in a restrictive society that could easily have been titled "Keeping up Appearances". Reading about an "atmosphere of faint implications and pale delicacies" is naturally frustrating, because the point of the book is that there is no action, no emotional climax, no "scenes" of any sort. Newland Archer's repressed rebellion doesn't seem worth pursuing anyway: the reality of a love affair with Countess Olenska would have been disappointing, and he's too lazy to have been successful in any of his imagined literary or intellectual circles. I think that his repression gave him a feeling of self-worth that an unrestricted indolent life would not have provided because he could feel himself a martyr for his wife and children while secretly contemplating his wasted alternate life. Somehow characters who don't barge on through and grab what they want always irritate me - although I suppose that includes every person in every novel of manners ever written - and if Newland had barged on through the story would have been boring and pointless.

Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies

Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith. Could I have found an author too emotionally high strung and overwrought for even my tastes (I enjoy Augusten Burroughs for goodness' sake)? Or maybe it's just that I don't share her conclusions and would have preferred her to dissolve into an sodden heap and remain intellectually consistent. Anyway, she seems like she would be a great person to know and talk to but she seems a little breathless and disingenuous in this book. I kept rolling my eyes at her histrionics while simultaneously enjoying and sympathizing with her (I did feel like I might know her). But it seems like she discovered faith in order to avoid utter nervous collapse, which while expedient, isn't necessarily valid.

Michael Dorris, A Yellow Raft in Blue Water

Michael Dorris, A Yellow Raft in Blue Water. I'm taking time away from writing a lab report to post this, but I've let it sit for too many days and I don't want to forget how much I enjoyed this story. I loved the relationships in this book, the shifting dialogues between the people, and how I found myself sympathetic with even the most hostile of them. It explores the complexity and intensity of mother-daughter relationships and their life-long importance no matter how estranged and distant they become. The character of Christine was amazing - the sort of person I usually unthinkingly despise or discount as trivial and stupid - and she became so compelling and far more self-aware and loving than I would have guessed. It's wonderful when the people in a book surprise you.

Goodbye Kilgore Trout

so it goes.

Alan Brown, Audrey Hepburn's Neck

Alan Brown, Audrey Hepburn's Neck. Somehow, I don't really love novels that focus on cultural differences or exchanges - especially between Japan and America - they seem trivial and a little clumsy, somehow, like people trying to get to know each other who aren't quite fluent in the other's language and stick to things like food and climate. But I couldn't help but like Toshi and his family and the parts dealing with his childhood were lovely. I can't catch precisely what bothered me, but his reactions to the stereotypically nutso Jane didn't really fit, for example. When I got past the first hundred pages or so and had ceased to be annoyed I liked it better because I was attached to the people. So, ok, I thought it was charming, but it didn't convince me.

LibriVox

I recently discovered this incredible site,LibriVox, that has tons of free audiobooks from public-domain works read by volunteers. You can download them as mp3s. We love listening to audio books on car trips, and have been driving up to Flagstaff a lot. Last week I'd listened to Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel (one of my dad's audiobooks - NOT free) in the car on the trip, and even Matthew enjoyed it, so I went on a hunt for more audiobooks. We downloaded Treasure Island, The Wind in the Willows, and Alice in Wonderland. So far the readers have been great - even doing all the pirate voices and everything! Much better than the BBC reading of The Hobbit. I have big plans to introduce my family to Sherlock Holmes, Father Brown, and P.G. Wodehouse - we just need a few dozen more road trips. The cds save me from getting carsick from reading on those mountain roads.

Thomas Mallon, Henry and Clara.

Thomas Mallon, Henry and Clara. I don't know why I keep stumbling into historical fiction; it's a genre I don't usually pursue. But this disquieting novel was one of those whose setting doesn't seem to inhibit the story and the historical characters seem to be themselves and not figures brought in from outside. It's the story of the unhappy couple who were attending the theatre with the Lincolns on the evening of the assassination. Mallon writes beautifully and his story, a tragic melodrama, is somehow nostalgic beyond the subject matter. Clara could be transported into a Henry James novel without any rearrangement.

John Mortimer, Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders

John Mortimer, Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders. The first Rumpole story I've read. I'm a new fan of the series. I'm glad to have chanced on it; it's funny and light, the perfect thing to read with coffee and toast or in the bathtub - like the Nero Wolfe series. And all day I've been visualizing my husband someday referring to me as "She Who Must Be Obeyed" in his memoirs.

Lloyd Alexander, Time Cat

Lloyd Alexander, Time Cat. I wanted to give my brain a rest and read something cozy. Not nearly as good (not even in the same category) as the Prydain stories, but cute.

Roddy Doyle, The Van

Roddy Doyle, The Van. I loved this book - it was absolutely hilarious. Two laid-off irishmen start up a "chipper van" - fast food on wheels. It was actualy a sweet story, even filled with rancid grease and profanity.

Elizabeth Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars

Elizabeth Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars. I just wrote a horrendous paper on this book, so I'll be brief. It's an unfocused recounting of life in New York's Lower East side for Italian and Eastern European Jewish immigrant women. Bogged down by jargon and random contradictory assertions, above all a DULL and rambling book in the author's voice - it was saved by the voices of the women themselves. Whenever the author quoted from extensive audio interviews (from the CUNY oral history project) the book suddenly became vibrant.

Carol Shield, The Stone Diaries

Carol Shield, The Stone Diaries. The intricate story of Daisy Stone Goodwill's life. She's orphaned, emigrates from Canada to Indiana, is married twice, raises children, writes, travels, gardens, and dies in old age. She remains an evasive and enigmatic figure to her family, who see her as they see themselves. Shields highlights the inaccuracy of memory, the incompleteness of stories, the fundamental mystery of other people - how we can never really know another person, how there are always mysteries and ambiguities, how often we deliberately misinterpret and pigeonhole for the sake of simplicity. Biography, even a fictional representation of a biography is necessarily incomplete. I enjoyed the early part of the book about Daisy's parents and early life, which was beautiful and direct.

Barry Hannah, Yonder Stands Your Orphan

Barry Hannah, Yonder Stands Your Orphan. I thought it was named after the Bob Dylan song - I had no idea it would feature actual orphans with guns. A bloody, grotesquely violent story about a bunch of old geezers living around a swampy lake, heading variously toward death. Full of gore, fancy cars, whores, nudity, even sex, without a moment of sexiness or joy. No sympathetic characters, no redeeming qualities in anyone, just rotting decay leading to moldy death. The book was full of beautiful, evocative sentences, but I didn't feel it cohered into a whole that said anything as ambitious as the epic Hannah was aiming for.

Brian Moore, The Statement

Brian Moore, The Statement. A chase-story in Southern France. Pierre Brossard, a convicted war criminal sheltered by the Catholic Church, police, and government officials, has lived for over forty years hiding in plain sight. Now a new set of gendarmes are looking for him in earnest, the church is under scrutiny and investigation, and a mysterious vigilante group is trying to bring him to justice by assassination. Fun. Different people are following his trail, and we also see events unfold from the hunted point of view. A weakness or two in the plot (Brossard was too smart not to have deduced who was betraying his movements, for one), but engaging and perfectly paced. A little complexity was introduced with the religious conversion of Brossard, but on the whole he was too revolting to feel even a twinge of sympathy for.

Martin Amis, Night Train

Martin Amis, Night Train. Well. I feel like I was bludgeoned in the back of the head, finishing that - one of those nasty, brutish and short novels. A stylized hard-boiled police narrative sort of book, but written by a British literary AUTHOR consciously trying to get the essence of the form down. The narrator was a tough ex-alcoholic female detective writing in Ed McBain dialect: there was a little too much Latin sprinkled around to be quite convincing, but he definitely got the world-weary cynicism down. The ending was purposefully unsatisfying and discouraging. I felt a little bewildered through the book, because I think I had Martin Amis mixed up with his father, Kingsley Amis (oops - he's the guy who wrote Lucky Jim), and was expecting a different kind of book, funny at least, which is why I wasn't ready for all the blood and cigarettes. But the man can write; he can't turn it off even when he tries.

The Year's Best Science Fiction (2001)

The Year's Best Science Fiction (2001), ed. by Gardner Dozois. This was my Christmas break binge reading. Anything that boasts "more than 250,00 words" on the cover isn't exactly highbrow, but it was a blast. I was talking with my mom about how the short story is the perfect vehicle for certain genres (chief among them SF and hard-boiled mysteries). Most speculative fiction authors don't excel at character development, at least it's not their focus nor ours when we pick up their work. The reason we read their stuff is the ideas, the fantasy, and the fabulous brain twisting, which are perfectly displayed in a short story which doesn't drag you along with some bland action-hero for hundreds of pages. Anyway, lots of good stories. I really enjoyed a story by Brenda W. Clough, May Be Some Time, about a revived member of the Terra Nova antarctic expedition - it dreamily combined the elements of an adventure story, comedic British imperialism, and time-travel. Part of my delight in science fiction short stories might be nostalgia - I remember reading old Asimov's Science Fiction magazines at my grandparents' Beulah Beach cottage (where lights-out was laxly enforced) late into the night and feeling deliciously sinful.

Frank Conroy, Stop-Time

Frank Conroy, Stop-Time. At the very end of this memoir (in the last ten pages), I got the distinct feeling I had read this book before. I couldn't remember any details, so perhaps it was just literary déjà-vu. Anyway, I didn't really like Frank in the book; but I saw myself in him, especially his escapism and unwarranted self-superiority. The book's a little Salinger-esque, very east-coasty, full of angst, exactly what you'd think an author's childhood memoir would be like. I liked it, but I disagreed with the blurb on the back cover in which William Styron praised "its almost total lack of self-pity"; I thought there was much calculatingly understated self-pity through every chapter. One thing that I liked was that it was such a solitary memoir, very much about being a lonely child, growing into a lonely young adult.

Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

Jeanette Winterson, The Passion. A beautiful compact small fairy tale. It has historical figures, but it's not historical fiction. A cook for Napolean and a Venetian pickpocket/courtesan/gondolier tell their stories. Elements of magic realism? Maybe surrealism? Not even really a romantic novel, despite the name and the cover; it's alternately creepy and precociously lovely. The narrators contemplate passion, disguise, truth, present, past, death, the nature of time... I'm not describing this well at all; I think it's the tension between gambling everything and choosing not to play that's the central conflict. Unclassifiable.

Marianne Wiggins, Evidence of Things Unseen

Marianne Wiggins, Evidence of Things Unseen. A strange and lovely book. Maybe a little too luminous; such beautiful language, but at times it seemed overwrought, too delicate and elaborate. Opal and Ray (the names are not an accident in a book whose principle obsession is light) are the two quietly elusive people whose romance and lives the main story arc follows. Ray Foster's scientific (or phenomenological) passions didn't really convince me, but the scientific optimism of the early part of the last century did; overall the place and times came through more strongly than the people - it's hard to have two such non-verbal people as your focus, I think. That may be why last portion of the book, dealing with the son Ray Jr (or lightfoot - see what I mean about the light vocabulary?) was a simpler story - more direct, maybe a little stock, but lightfoot and Flash (again!) were so much more transparent or accessible. Or less opaque? I'm being infected by the language of light... But a beautiful phosphorescent story.

Iain Pears, An Instance of the Fingerpost

Iain Pears, An Instance of the Fingerpost. This was a total riot - I actually had to hide it for a week so I'd study. It's four separate narrations of the same events, with, of course, each teller reaching different conclusions and in their own ways unreliable. But it's not one of those annoying post-modern non-mystery novels that you are supposed to make your own conclusions on and are frustratingly inconclusive; it's an old fashioned mystery that ties up quite nicely at the end. Set in Restoration England, and with a few Natural Philosophers as characters spouting great debate and experimenting away, it might remind you of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, although it reminded me more of the historical thriller The Name of the Rose (by Umberto Eco), or maybe Possession: A Romance (by A. S. Byatt). A nice fat book, the kind of book you wish was longer, not shorter, with tons of detail about Oxford in 1663 - even some experiments in Robert Boyle's elaboratory as well as boundless political intrigue. Of course, I wished there was more of the deciphering and experiments, but we do have the above mentioned trilogy for that. The story has an odd heretical conclusion that is really pretty interesting; I also might have liked even more on the religious sects. I suppose that's the advantage of using in-character narration, you're limited on how many discursive asides you can make without breaking role, or the temptation would definitely be to show off the research and you'd end up with several thousand pages instead of merely 685.

Atul Gawande, Complications

Atul Gawande, Complications: a surgeon's notes on an imperfect science. Another book for class, but I greatly enjoyed it. It's very straightforward, almost simplistic in delivery, but truly thoughtful and interesting. Good thought on medical decision making, mistakes, complications, balance between judgement and science, and the limits of knowledge. The perspective of a surgical resident is unique. The pieces on surgery and diagnosis were frightening and reassuring at the same time. Gawande's most original thinking was his honest analysis of medical training and the evasion that surrounds it. 1) training leads to mistakes, 2) training and practice are necessary to make good doctors, 3) The choices about who is practiced upon are partly chance, but mostly the disadvantaged are used for practice.

It's a hard book to categorize - it's similar to Oliver Sacks's, in that it's a series of case studies expanded and digressed upon, but without the intellectual and literary pretension (also perhaps not quite as nice to read; sacks writes like a novelist). It's better than most medically oriented nonfiction - more humble and chatty - think Stephen Jay Gould rather than the new england journal of medicine.

John Updike, In the Beauty of the Lilies

John Updike, In the Beauty of the Lilies. This book makes me wonder again, precisely what it is about Updike that I love so much. Because I do - I love reading his books, I love his easy beauty of language, the way everything is said perfectly without strain or effort. But so often I heartily detest his characters. I actually liked the family in this book (it's one of those multi-generational sweeping American epic sort of books), but I like them less down the generations. Clarence Wilmot was a Presbeterian minister around the turn of the century who lost his faith and couldn't continue - he didn't have a plan for an alternate career path and his family drifted into poverty as he succumbed to Tb. I liked Clarence, and empathized with his anemic and hopeless loss of faith, and I also liked his wife and her sturdy toughness. I liked their children, and wish he focused a bit more on Esther. I liked the very different relations with god and faith through the generations - it wasn't clichéd or insincere, although the doubters were more convincing than the pious. Alma DeMott, or Essie, I liked less, and wasn't really rooting for her film career. Her son could have been a great character, a modern anti-hero, but he wasn't quite fleshed out enough to please me. I almost had the feeling that Updike chose religion and cinema as two "great American themes" and set out to write a "great American novel"; that might be unjust, but I also never felt that the cinematic parts of the book were terribly compelling - they reminded me of example essays in an English 101 text. Sometimes with Updike I get this sense of unfulfilled promise - of something intangible lacking - of insufficient passion, perhaps. But I think it is only because I am so infatuated with him as an author, I have very high expectations. So it was a good, even grand, book; but not one of the best or his best.

Ann Packer, The Dive from Clausen's Pier

Ann Packer, The Dive from Clausen's Pier. This book was about Carrie, a young women who stayed in her hometown of Madison; first for college, and then for a job, to be with her high school sweetheart. She grew discontented and restless, and before that could boil over into a break-up he jumped in a lake and broke his neck. So, does she stay or does she go? That moral dilemma is pretty much the whole book.
I thought Carrie was bizarre - I didn't buy the whole "wants to design clothes" thing - she didn't seem passionate enough. Not to mention the descriptions of clothes were vague and antiquated. I was also dissatisfied with her final decision. And she has this completely unrealistic sojourn in New York City where she lives for months and months off a few hundred dollars. Just details, really, that didn't ring true. But I enjoyed the story, and sympathized with her sometimes; the narrative was great, and I liked her mother, I grew to like the boyfriend, her lover was interesting even if a stereotype. Madison seemed truer (although simplified) than the portrait of New York City. It was as if New York was included more for what it represents as "the big city", as anonymity, as culture, as escape, than for any portrait of the true city. LA or London would have done nearly as well. But it is true that New York occupies a special place in the American myth. So a good read, but faintly dissatisfying.

Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. I don't know how I managed to miss this book for all these years. Just beautiful: simple, moving, exquisite. The central figure is left an enigma. None of the people fulfill their potentials, their strivings. Life just wears on and leaves them behind. It's a sad story, but not wrenching - it just leaves you with a heartache.

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Anna Karenina. I've been reading this forever. Partly because I have a mountain of readings for school, and partly since I've been unable to feel any deep sympathy with any of the characters. Anna - her passivity drives me crazy, the same with her husband. Vronsky is just a vaguely likable slacker, and I have no patience for slackers. Kitty is just a child, and Levin, who is actually interesting, is annoying in his infatuation with nothing more than an ideal of romance and a young girl. I feel their relationship is so lopsided in many ways that I really don't feel empathy for them. Levin seemed to have a deeper relationship with his housekeeper and hired hands than he does with his wife. I love Tolstoy, for all that, and the book still manage to be gripping, but I don't really like any of the people in it. It's sad when I'm more interested in the discursive asides and arguments of bit players than in the central drama.

I hate to rant on about Anna, but come on! If you're going to sin, you'd damn well better enjoy it. At the very least get around to self hatred and despair a lot quicker, there's no need to drag on in a sickening muddle for years on end. Hamlet couldn't make up his mind either, but at least he made some great speeches. Rip that scab off or decide to tough it out and be a good girl. Take up knitting, or get to know your husband, or become a closet drinker or something. Jeez. And Vronsky sounds like a fun guy - if you're living in sin, why be so damn respectable and boring about it? Rob some banks, gamble, something - you run away with your lover and all you can do is go to museums? I realize Anna didn't have a whole lot of choices, and was circumscribed by her role in society - but she is a total wet noodle. That train arrived about 400 pages too late.

And Levin, although an admirable man, is just too condescending to be believed. Let me try to show why- here's a scene from Levn and Kitty's honeymoon: "He was supposed, as he understood it, to do his work and to rest from it in the happiness of love. She was supposed to be lovely and only that. But, like all men he had forgotten that she also needed to work. And he was surprised at how she, the poetic, lovely Kitty, in the very first, not weeks, but days of married life could think, remember and fuss about furniture, mattresses for guests, about a tray, the cook, the dinner, and so on. ... And loving her as he did, though he chuckled at those cares, he could not help admiring them. He chuckled at her arranging the furniture ...." Blech. He should have married a peasant, and at least they could have farmed together.