So many books, so little time

"The Welsh Girl"

2008-08-22T18:21:00.000-07:00

I first heard about “The Welsh Girl” on another book blog about a year ago, and it sounded like something I would like. I can’t resist historical fiction, especially books set during World War II. I finally got around to reading it earlier this month, and I was not disappointed.

The story revolves around two main characters (well, there’s a third but he was sort of peripheral to the main plot) – a German soldier captured by the British, and a teenage Welsh girl who lives with her widowed father in a small sheep-herding village. The novel follows each of them as their lives head toward an inevitable intersection when the soldier ends up in a prison camp in the girl’s town.

I thought this would end up being a traditional Romeo and Juliet type thwarted romance, but it turned out to be much more nuanced than that. Each character struggles with what it means to be home, and what freedom is. I highly recommend this book, and I think I will look for some of author’s short story collections. (The author is Peter Ho Davies, and “The Welsh Girl” is his first novel.)

"The End"

2008-08-07T18:03:00.000-07:00

When I started reading “Then We Came to the End,” by Joshua Ferris, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I knew it was part of the very small genre of “workplace fiction” – would it be a literary version of “The Office”?? It turns out that while some aspects of the book are very funny (my favorite section: one character decides that for an entire day, he will respond to his coworkers only with quotes from “The Godfather”), there is also an unexpectedly poignant story at the heart of the novel. The author also pulls off the notable feat of telling the story in the collective second person.

I have always thought that people in my office were a little crazy – almost as crazy as the people in this book, but not quite. (No one in my office has gotten fired, then dressed up as a clown and returned with a paintball gun to exact revenge – not yet, anyway.) Perhaps I should start taking notes at the office – someday I could create another addition to the workplace genre...

Book without end

2008-07-20T14:25:00.000-07:00

This weekend I had time to do a big chunk of reading and finally finished "World Without End," by Ken Follett. All 1,015 pages of it. I was very eager to read this because it's the sequel to "Pillars of the Earth," which I read in high school and really loved. The sequel was pretty good, but not as good as the original. It's set in England during the 1300s, about 200 years (I think) after "Pillars." Lots of scandal, death and disaster, as you would expect from that time period. Once this comes out in paperback, it will make a good beach read (the hardcover is so darn heavy!).

I also read a few other books during my mini blogging hiatus. The best one was "The Great Man," by Kate Christensen, which I read for my book group. Among the group it has now become known as "the book about old ladies having sex" (not with each other), but it's really much more than that :) The book explores the lives of four women with connections to a famous painter (including his wife, mistress and sister), five years after his death. I really liked the book, and it provoked a really good discussion in our book group meeting about the characters' decisions and their relationships with each other.

Another good read was "The Lobster Chronicles," by Linda Greenlaw, an Atlantic fishing boat captain who decides to see if she can make a living fishing for lobsters. I liked her descriptions of life on a (very, very) small island in Maine, especially since my grandmother lives in Maine on a (rather large) island, and I have a relative who is a lobsterfisherman. On a side note, Greenlaw also makes an appearance as a character in "The Perfect Storm" - her fishing boat was nearly caught in the storm, but she managed to get back to shore in time.

I also recently read "A Natural History of the Senses," by Diane Ackerman. That one was OK but not great. It's full of interesting bits of trivia, such as the fact that women usually have a better sense of smell than men, but it seemed a little disjointed. I tend to prefer books with more of a narrative structure.

Phew. That was a long post. It sounds like I have been reading a lot but I feel like I haven't. I always think that I should have tons of extra time to read in the summer, but it doesn't seem to be happening this year, with so much travel and other events... I have a vacation coming up next week though, and I will be bringing lots of books with me!

September in June

2008-06-19T18:04:00.000-07:00

A full week after our book group meeting, I have finally gotten around to posting ;) This time, we read “Septembers of Shiraz,” by Dalia Sofer. Everyone enjoyed the novel, which is a somewhat autobiographical account of one Jewish family’s ordeal during and after the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Each member of the family tells his or her own part of the story – the father who was taken to prison, the wife who was left behind, the daughter who wants to fight back against the regime, and the son, cut off from his family and drifting aimlessly through New York City.

I believe this is the first novel for Sofer, whose family fled Iran when she was 10 years old. This book was very eye-opening for me, since I didn’t know very much about the Iranian Revolution. It almost seems as though it started out as more of a class struggle than a religious battle, although the religious fundamentalists eventually gained most of the power.

When we chose this book, we almost ended up picking “Persepolis,” by Marjane Satrapi, which seems to cover similar themes, but in graphic novel format. Now I definitely want to read that one as well (another one to add to the list!).

And in case you were wondering, we did drink Shiraz during the meeting ;)

Up next for the book group is “The Great Man,” by Kate Christensen.

No more!

2008-05-26T15:08:00.000-07:00

As if I needed any more additions to my “to be read” list, I recently came across this article in the New York Times. It’s about a book with the somewhat threatening title, “1,001 Books You Must Read Before You Die.” Great. My own TBR list is probably already over 1,000, I don’t need anyone else telling me what to read. In case you’re wondering, I looked through the entire list, and I have read exactly 46 of these supposedly essential novels. (The list is all fiction, which puts me at a disadvantage, since I read about 50/50 fiction/non-fiction.)

There are several books that overlap with my own list, and some more that I should probably read some day (I really do need to read more Haruki Murakami). But I do not foresee myself attempting to meet this book’s challenge. I have even accepted that I’m not going to read all of the books on my own list. Speaking of which, I should get back to one of the three books I’m reading now….

"Kaaterskill Falls"

2008-05-11T08:53:00.000-07:00

“Kaaterskill Falls,” by Allegra Goodman, is a book that draws you in very gently. The story follows a group of Orthodox Jewish families who spend summers in Kaaterskill Falls, somewhere in upstate New York. There is not a lot of action, and I didn’t think I was all that into the story, but then about halfway through I realized that I really cared what happened to these characters. I especially liked Elizabeth, a young, devout mother of five daughters who decides that she wants something more than the very traditional life she has always lived.

I picked up this book in a used bookstore a couple of years ago, after reading another of Goodman’s novels, “Intuition.” That was another gently unfolding story, with a very different setting—a high-powered cancer research institute in Cambridge, Mass. Part of the reason I liked that one so much is that I have worked in similar places, and the story and characters rang true. I wasn’t sure I would like “Kaaterskill Falls” as much as that one, but it turns out Goodman is such a good writer that she can make you care about all kinds of characters. If you go into it expecting a beautifully described slice of life, rather than an action-packed story, you will not be disappointed.

"The Omnivore's Dilemma"

2008-05-07T17:41:00.000-07:00

When the Atkins diet became so popular, I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to give up an entire food group. (Especially BREAD, which is by far my favorite food group.) Michael Pollan, author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” thinks he has the answer for why Americans are so susceptible to fad diets.

The problem, he says, is that America has never had a stable national cuisine. Our traditions are so skimpy that any crackpot with a new diet plan can win legions of converts (and this started long before Atkins—remember the grapefruit diet?).

While other cultures choose their food based on taste and tradition, Americans rely on “experts” to tell them what foods are “good” or “bad.” This only feeds the national anxiety (the omnivore’s dilemma) over what to eat. When we can eat anything we want, it’s that much harder to figure out what we actually SHOULD eat.

Industrial food has seized on this anxiety and created all sorts of processed food products that supposedly add value to our diets, but really appear to just increase Big Food’s profits, at the expense of our health. Because we don’t know what real food is supposed to be, we’ll eat anything. We forget that tasteless chicken pieces breaded and fried in a variety of corn products is NOT FOOD.

In his book, Pollan traces the history of four meals — industrial (fast food), industrial organic (Whole Foods products), pastoral (from a small local farm), and a meal in which everything was hunted or gathered by the author.

It turns out that industrial food is based, to a rather shocking degree, on corn products. Not just high fructose corn syrup, but all sorts of other starches, oils, etc. Plus, most industrially raised livestock are fed on corn, a diet that cows and chickens are not designed to eat, which is why cattle must also be fed so many antibiotics. Between the antibiotics, the pesticides, chemical fertilizers, and petroleum needed to transport all this food to and from various processing facilities, it sounds like a completely unsustainable enterprise.

Which leaves us with what Pollan seems to think is the best way to eat – from a local farm, preferably one where you know the farmer or at least know a lot about how the farm is run. It turns out that old-fashioned agricultural principles like crop rotation and pasturing animals rather than force feeding them corn were actually pretty good ideas, in terms of quality of food produced and environmental health.

Reading this book made me very glad that I am a vegetarian — just think how much better off the world would be if we didn’t devote so much land to growing corn to feed livestock. Instead, farmers could grow food for people… and maybe we wouldn’t have skyrocketing food prices and food riots. Just a thought.

Extremes

2008-04-28T18:07:00.000-07:00

I have been sadly delinquent as a blogger and reader this month, for some reason. I have only finished one book! It was a good one though: “Under the Banner of Heaven,” by Jon Krakauer, which I read for my book group.

The book is about Mormonism, specifically a breakaway group of fundamentalist Mormons who still practice polygamy. Coincidentally, this story about a compound of Fundamentalist Mormons broke while we were reading the book. I had no idea that so many Mormons were still practicing polygamy, but, as Krakauer describes it, there are several towns in the Western U.S., Canada and Mexico where there are still enclaves of polygamous Mormons.

The Mormon church officially condemns polygamy, but these fundamentalist groups say that true believer must practice it, because it was proclaimed by the founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith. Smith claims that he received a revelation from God saying that polygamy was an essential sacred practice, but it seems like the truth was more like he decided he wanted to sleep with women other than his first wife, especially younger women. (His first wife was not very happy about this.)

Under pressure from the U.S. government, the church outlawed polygamy in 1890, but as illustrated recently in Texas, the practice still continues. Disturbingly, many of the “wives” are barely older than 15.

Krakauer focuses on the history of the development of fundamental Mormonism. As an extreme example of such fundamentalism, he relates the story of a murder that took place in 1984. Ron Lafferty, a Mormon who had decided he wanted to practice polygamy, claimed he received a revelation from God telling him to kill his sister-in-law, Brenda Lafferty, who he felt was obstructing his efforts to expand his family.

Krakauer’s descriptions of fundamentalist Mormons reminded me of another book I read recently, “The Looming Tower,” about fundamentalist Muslims. In both religions, when taken to extremes, followers believe that not only is their brand of religion the only valid one, but non-believers, or anyone else who gets in their way, must be killed.

There are so many bizarre aspects of Mormonism, from the founding revelation of the church, delivered by an angel named in Moroni in upstate New York, to the long undergarment that all devout Mormons are supposed to wear every day. But to be fair, all major religions have elements that are really strange if you think about them at all. It’s just easier to pick apart Mormonism because it developed so recently and its history has been documented extensively.

Not surprisingly, the book was not very well received by the Mormon church. Amusingly, one day while I was reading it on the T, a young Mormon missionary (I could tell by his nametag) got on the train and sat down across from me. I tried to obscure the cover of the book, I don’t think he noticed it. Phew!

"It's not you, it's your books"

2008-03-31T13:41:00.000-07:00

I love this essay from yesterday’s New York Times.

I have never broken up with anyone over their taste in books, though it seems like something I am capable of doing. I tend to agree with the author quoted in that essay saying, “It’s really great if you find a guy that reads, period.” Even better, I found a guy with pretty good taste in books—he even borrows mine sometimes ;)

Ghost stories

2008-03-23T15:09:00.000-07:00

OK, I have finally gotten around to writing about “The Ghost Map.” :) This is another in my series of books about death and disaster, which I so enjoy reading. In this installment, the agent of destruction is the bacterium that causes cholera, and the setting is 1850s London.

I don’t think I would really have liked living during this time period. For starters, the city was overrun with sewage. It was also a place where illness and death constantly lurked, in the air you breathed, in the water you drank. And the worst of it was, people had no idea what was causing cholera or any of the other diseases that periodically broke out in the overcrowded city.

As author Steven Johnson writes:

“To live in such a world was to live with the shadow of death hovering over your shoulder at every moment. To live was to be not dead yet… As a matter of practical reality, the threat of sudden devastation—your entire extended family wiped out in a matter of days—was far more immediate than the terror threats of today.”

One London physician, John Snow, suspected that cholera was transmitted through drinking water, but his theory was sneered at by most of the medical establishment, who believed the disease was “miasmatic,” or carried in the (very stinky) air that arose from London’s overflowing sewers and cesspools.

During one outbreak in August 1854, Snow determined that the vast majority of those who fell ill had drunk water from a particular neighborhood well. Even when he presented this map to city health officials, they clung to the miasma theory, but eventually Snow was able to persuade them he was right. That realization led Londoners to built one of the most extensive sewer systems in the world and essentially eliminate cholera in the city.

In fact, the development of modern sewer systems, according to Johnson, was one of the key factors that allowed cities to develop into places that can sustain huge numbers of people.

This book is loaded with historical detail and Johnson does a good job of placing the 1854 outbreak into a broader historical context. It’s also a definite page-turner. I highly recommend it, especially if you share my taste for books about disease and disaster…

Expectations

2008-03-15T10:34:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was an exciting day – I finished TWO books that I have been reading for a while. I’ll start with “People of the Book,” by Geraldine Brooks. I was really looking forward to reading this book because I really enjoyed all of her others. I even bought it in hardcover (though it was pretty cheap on Amazon :) ) I had high expectations, but I have to say they were only partially met.

The book is set in 1996 Sarajevo, where a book conservator named Hanna is asked to examine a very old manuscript, an illustrated haggadah (used during the Passover seder) known as the Sarajevo Haggadah. There is an actual Sarajevo Haggadah that inspired the novel, and its real history is fascinating – Geraldine Brooks also wrote a piece in The New Yorker recently about how it was saved from the Nazis by a Muslim librarian during World War II.

Anyway, back to the novel – it alternates between scenes from Hanna’s life and her study of the book, and flashbacks to critical moments in the book’s history, all the way back to its creation in the late 1400s. I would say that the book only half fulfilled my expectations because the historical chapters were very good, but the chapters that focused on Hanna seemed very unrealistic. They reminded me of “The Da Vinci Code,” but not in a good way (contrived plot twists, lame dialogue).

Both of Brooks’ earlier novels were historical fiction, and one of them won a Pulitzer Prize, so I’m hoping that she will return to that genre in her future work :)

I’ll post something soon about the other book I just read, “The Ghost Map,” by Steven Johnson. Stay tuned…

Take your broke rack home

2008-03-06T17:47:00.000-08:00

I have never really liked Scrabble. But for some reason, when you put it online and give it a catchy new name, I become addicted to it. I refer of course to Scrabulous, the most excellent time-waster I have ever seen. I am really not very good at it, but I usually have at least five games going at once. (I have to draw the line at playing at work though – I would never get anything done!)

Inspired by my new addiction, I decided to finally read a book that I bought a few months ago but hadn’t gotten around to yet – “Word Freak,” by Stefan Fatsis. The author is a Wall Street Journal reporter who decided to devote a year to Scrabble to see if he could become an expert level player.

Fatsis started hanging out with several of the best Scrabble players in the U.S., a motley collection of mostly unemployed, unsocialized young men who spend all of their time memorizing word lists and quizzing each other on anagrams. At first he is somewhat disdainful of all the time they spend on Scrabble, but soon enough he becomes sucked into the crazed world of competitive Scrabble.

These people are not joking around – it’s not unusual to see words like SUQ, ZINCOID, LIAISES and ACAROID appear on the board. Players compile and study lists of the letter combinations most likely to produce bingos (which use all 7 letters on your rack), lists of two letter words, lists of words that include BOAT, etc, etc.

An aside: My most glorious Scrabulous moment so far involves making ZANY with a triple-word score, with the Y hooked onto JAUNT to form JAUNTY. That totaled about 80 points, which is nothing compared to the moves that the elite players make all the time.

Fatsis profiles many of the major players and delves into the history of Scrabble as he relates his personal quest to reach the expert level. The game was invented by architect Alfred Butts in the 1930s and eventually bought by Hasbro (Mattel owns the international rights). Both companies have been making quite a fuss over the huge popularity of Scrabulous and are threatening to shut it down. In my opinion, that would just alienate all of the new Scrabble fans (like me!), which seems like a marketing fiasco. Hopefully they can come up with some kind of agreement… I’m optimistic that it hasn’t been shut down yet :)

Btw the title of this post comes from this fantastic song, “Scrabulous,” a parody of “Glamorous,” passed on to me by Mimi37 (who always beats me at Scrabulous! Grrrr). My favorite line: “If you ain’t got no vowels take your broke rack home.”

"The Penelopiad"

2008-03-02T18:38:00.000-08:00

This month’s book group selection was short but entertaining: “The Penelopiad,” by Margaret Atwood. It’s part of a series in which well-known authors retell famous myths – in this case, the story of Odysseus’ wife, Penelope.

I thought Atwood did a nice job of shedding more light on what was going on at Odysseus’ palace while he was off gallivanting with sirens, goddesses, etc., leaving his wife to the mercy of the gluttonous suitors. In the book’s introduction, Atwood writes that she has always been curious about the lives of the 12 maids whom Odysseus hanged upon his return, ostensibly because they were sleeping with the suitors. In Atwood’s retelling, the story is much more complicated and ambiguous. The maids and Penelope offer differing versions of events, leaving the reader to wonder who is the more reliable narrator.

Most of us agreed that while the novel was insightful and fun to read, Atwood could have gone much deeper into the subject. The book weighs in at less than 200 pages, though it seems like brevity is one of the intended features of the series, according to this article.

For our next book group selection, we decided to branch into non-fiction and will be reading “Under the Banner of Heaven,” by Jon Krakauer. It’s about Mormons, specifically some of the more radical sects. I loved his book about climbing Mount Everest, “Into Thin Air,” so I am looking forward to this one.

Miracle

2008-02-17T17:56:00.000-08:00

There are some books that are not only great reads, but can also change the way you live. One such book is “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle,” by Barbara Kingsolver, which I finished last weekend.

Kingsolver and her family decided to spend a year eating only food that they grew themselves or was grown/produced locally. They had many reasons to try this experiment, chiefly their horror at realizing the “carbon footprint” of the food that most Americans eat: We consume 400 gallons of oil a year per citizen for agricultural use, and each item in a typical American meal has traveled an average of 1,500 miles from farm to plate.

Another reason for going local? Food simply tastes better when it is fresh and in season, Kingsolver says, and I couldn’t agree more. There is nothing worse than the mealy tomatoes currently available in Boston supermarkets, and I would never dare to buy peaches or strawberries in February – who knows how long it has taken them to get to my neighborhood grocery store?

The experiment turned out well for Kingsolver – she and her family were able to grow most of the vegetables they needed, raised chickens and turkeys, made bread and cheese, and obtained most of their other food from other farmers in their Virginia county. By canning and otherwise preserving food, they had plenty to eat when winter rolled around. No one broke down and went to the grocery store for Twinkies and Jello (at least not that they admitted).

Reading about this “locavore” experiment, which has now become a minor movement, has inspired me to try to adopt some of Kingsolver’s ideas. Of course I live in an apartment in an urban area, so I will not be growing my own food, though I do want to try growing some basil in my window :) However, I did just sign up for a program that delivers fresh produce from local farms to drop off points in Boston and Cambridge. It starts in June, and I can’t wait!

Meanwhile, my friends Catherine and Andrew, who live in California, are doing their own local food experiment. They buy local produce and other foods, make their own bread and pasta, and have even learned how to can vegetables. I am completely inspired by them. They are keeping a blog to document their efforts, check it out!

Beach reading

2008-02-09T11:57:00.000-08:00

While packing for my recent trip to St. Thomas (destination wedding, woo hoo!), I decided I needed a good beach book. For me, a good beach book is not a trashy Danielle Steele, rather something that is light and engrossing but also requires a little bit of intellectual engagement. I decided on “In the Company of the Courtesan,” by Sarah Dunant, which ended up being a very good beach (and poolside) read.

Part of the reason I liked this book so much is that it is set in one of my favorite cities, Venice. It’s one of those places that you hear so much about it, you think it can’t possibly be as beautiful as everyone says. Then you get there and realize it really is. The book is set during the 1520s, and focuses on the life of a courtesan (basically a high-class prostitute) and her companion dwarf.

At the time, Venice was one of the most powerful cities in Europe, a leader in commerce and art. It was also known for its beautiful courtesans, whose clients included leaders of government and religion. Dunant paints a vivid portrait of the lives of Venetians: the intrigue and scandal, set against the beautiful backdrop of the watery city. The book is full of interesting characters, from high-class nobles to a famous artist and a mysterious healer/witch.

This is probably one of the best historical novels I have read, along with one of Dunant’s earlier novels, “The Birth of Venus,” which is also set in Italy (Florence).

More disaster

2008-02-02T07:46:00.000-08:00

There is no way I could resist a book with this blurb from the NY Times on the cover: "A classic disaster tale." The book is "The Worst Hard Time," by Timothy Egan, which won the National Book Award for nonfiction last year. The disaster in question is the Dust Bowl, which transformed the American prairie from fertile farmland into a living nightmare during the 1930s.

I had heard of the Dust Bowl, of course, but until I read this book I really didn't know quite what it was. I thought it was just a really bad drought. Well, it was much, much worse. Egan relates the long history leading up to the natural disaster:

The prairies of Oklahoma and the Texas panhandle were originally populated by tall grasses, bison and Native Americans. The land was perfect for growing grasses, but not much else. Then, after the U.S. government decided to remove both bison and Native Americans, settlers were encouraged to rip up the grass, build homesteads and plant wheat. This worked out pretty well for a few years, until wheat prices bottomed out during the Depression, and more and more grassland was dug up by farmers desperate to break even. Well, it turns out the soil is not so fertile once you take away the grass that is literally holding it in place. Wind storms, which had always been common in the prairie, started picking up the dirt and carrying it in massive storms that could blot out the sun for hours at a time.

For years, people who lived in the Dust Bowl endured these dust storms, several per month. Livestock died from swallowing so much dirt, and it wasn't very healthy for humans either. The worst of the storms traveled all the way to the East Coast, coating New York and Washington DC in prairie dirt.

Naturally many people decided to leave the plains, but it was hard to find another place where they would be welcome. Many others decided to stick it out, either because they loved the land too much or had no other place to go. Egan follows several families through their Dust Bowl experiences, which really makes the story come to life. I highly recommend this book—it illuminates a part of American history that most people probably don't know very much about.

I know I have not posted in a while, but I HAVE been reading :) I just finished a novel that I will blog about soon...

18-0

2008-01-21T08:29:00.000-08:00

So, the Patriots are going to the Super Bowl, again. Sports fans in New England are really in danger of getting spoiled, what with the Patriots, Red Sox and even Celtics having so much success. During most of the games this season, I always felt that victory was assured, even when the Pats were down in the fourth quarter. You just know that they will always come back. I’m trying hard not to take this for granted and become one of those annoying, entitled fans—I just need to think back to the early '90s when their usual record was 1-15 or 2-14, not 18-0.

Anyway, to get myself ready for the playoff run, instead of watching a lot of TV hype, I read David Halberstam’s book on Patriots coach Bill Belichick, “The Education of a Coach.” It was pretty interesting to see how Belichick became the somewhat mysterious figure he is now: brilliant defensive coach, grim workaholic, uncharismatic hater of the media, icon of unfashionable sideline wear.

As the son of a longtime assistant coach at Army, Belichick started analyzing game film around age 9. When he entered the NFL as a coach, he felt he had to work harder than anyone else to prove he belonged, since he never played in the NFL and went to college at Wesleyan, not exactly a football powerhouse. He spent long days and nights studying film and was generally considered, even early in his career, to be one of the best at breaking down a game and figuring out how to stop other teams.

Belichick later tried to instill that same work ethic in his players. To him, being the one of the best players on the team also means that you work the hardest, not relax because you’ve reached the top. That, to me, that is the most impressive aspect of Belichick’s amazing run—he has somehow convinced players who are among the best at their positions to subordinate their egos to what is best for the team. He even gets them to believe they are underdogs, a ludicrous proposition.

The book was written after the 2005 season, so it doesn’t make any mention of the recent scandals that have plagued Belichick—the “Spygate” incident, where the team was caught videotaping the Jets’ defensive signals, the ongoing hostility with Eric Mangini, former Patriots assistant and head coach of the Jets, running up the score against terrible teams, and the bizarre tabloid allegations of “wife-stealing.”

In spite of all this recent dirt, Belichick seems to have gotten pretty much a free pass from the New England fans and media (a little less so from the rest of the country, who now revile New England with the kind of venom formerly reserved for the New York Yankees and Dallas Cowboys). This just goes to show the accuracy of one of Halberstam’s assessments of life in the NFL, which goes something like “as long as you win, people don't care what else you do."

Myths

2008-01-08T17:17:00.000-08:00

My book group met last week to talk about "The Myth of You and Me," by Leah Stewart. Compared to the other two books we have read, this was kind of a disappointment. It's the story of two women who were best friends in high school and college, until something happens (exactly what is not revealed until the end) to end the friendship. Several years later, one of them reaches out to try to repair things. The book follows two plot lines: Will they reunite, and what drove them apart in the first place? The book was well-written enough to keep my attention as events unfolded, but there was not much originality to the story. (Turns out one of them slept with the other's boyfriend—yawn.) Anyway, it was an OK book, but I wouldn't recommend it very enthusiastically.

Our next book will be about myths of a different kind—Greek myths. We are reading "The Penelopiad," by Margaret Atwood, a retelling of the Odyssey from the point of view of Odysseus' wife, Penelope. Hopefully I will like that one better :)

Wow

2008-01-03T12:36:00.000-08:00

I just sat down and tried to write something about “Middlesex,” but words are failing me. I stayed home sick today and blasted through the last 200 pages of it, and I feel like I have just returned from immersion in another world. So mesmerizing, so original. It touches on so many interesting subjects (immigration, race relations, Prohibition), woven into a multi-generational story of a Greek-American family. The story is narrated by Calliope/Cal, who was raised as a girl but discovered at age 14 that she was genetically male. Sounds weird, but I promise you, it is worth reading.

Top 10

2007-12-31T07:35:00.000-08:00

The end of the year is approaching, which means that Top Ten lists are everywhere. List-making is one of my favorite activities, so I am going to do my own Top Ten list, of the best books I read this year. Most of these were not actually published this year, so the list has no real link to 2007, but that’s OK. Here they are, in no particular order:

Fiction:

“The Inheritance of Loss,” by Kiran Desai
A sad but lovely story of life in rural India (and the lives of Indian immigrants in the U.S.).

“The Voyage of the Narwhal,” by Andrea Barrett
The story of an ill-fated trip to explore the Arctic circle.

“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” by J.K. Rowling
The best possible ending to the series.

“Suite Francaise,” by Irene Nemirovsky
A very poignant and beautifully written story of life in Nazi-occupied France.

“The Road,” by Cormac McCarthy
Compelling and grim portrayal of a fictional but entirely believable post-apocalyptic world.

Nonfiction:

“Moneyball,” by Michael Lewis
You might not think that a book devoted to the dealings of the Oakland A’s front office would be all that fascinating. You are WRONG.

“Eat, Pray, Love,” by Elizabeth Gilbert
This book made me want to follow in Gilbert’s footsteps as she traveled to Italy, India and Indonesia.

“My Life in France,” by Julia Child and Alex Prud’homme
A lovely account of Child’s life.

“Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage,” by Alfred Lansing
A real life adventure story that kept me entranced, even though I already knew how it ended.

“A Walk in the Woods,” by Bill Bryson
A hilarious account of Bryson’s attempt to walk the Appalachian Trail.

Here’s to many more good reads in 2008!

Under ground

2007-12-30T14:03:00.000-08:00

“Beneath the Metropolis,” by Alex Marshall, is an excellent book for anyone who has wondered what lies below the city streets they are walking on. Each chapter features a different city, including New York, Chicago, Mexico City, Paris, Rome, Cairo and about a dozen others. I learned an awful lot about public transportation, sewer and water supply issues, but I will spare you a rundown of everything :)

Some of the highlights:

* Paris did not become such a beautiful and well-organized city by accident. A city planner named Baron Georges Haussmann was responsible for designing most of the city’s wide boulevards and building its first sewer system (in the 1850s), which is still in use and apparently is a great tourist attraction. At the time, some Parisians thought Haussmann wielded too much power, but the success of his vision (and envy of other cities) is proof that centralized city planning IS a good thing.

* Everyone knows that Venice is sinking, but that city’s problems are nothing compared to Mexico City’s. In the fourteenth century, the Aztecs chose the city’s location based on an auspicious sign from the gods. Unfortunately the site is swampy and 7,250 feet above sea level, which makes it difficult to pump water into the city. And, so much water has been drained from underneath the city that it is sinking at an alarming rate (30 feet in the last century). Some sections are sinking faster than others, so the famous National Cathedral is listing to one side and some houses are now below street level.

* In Rome, several subway construction projects have been delayed or halted altogether because so many ancient ruins are buried under the city. Seems they can’t drill anywhere without encountering something of historical import.

The book has a lot of interesting tidbits and is wonderfully illustrated, but one problem with it is the large number of typos/factual errors. The most egregious was the statement that Fenway Park opened in 1932… unforgivable! :)

This is my sixth and final book for the “Armchair Travel Reading Challenge.” I finished just in time!

Christmas bounty

2007-12-25T11:43:00.000-08:00

I usually get a lot of books for Christmas, but I think this year set an all-time record. Check out this pile:

Plus a couple of cookbooks:

This should keep me busy (reading and cooking) well into 2008!

Oops

2007-12-19T06:56:00.000-08:00

This has never happened to me before: I was so absorbed in the book I was reading on the T this morning that I completely missed my stop. I didn’t even realize the train had gone over the Charles River until I looked up and saw that we were pulling into Central Square (one stop past where I normally get off). Fortunately Central is still within walking distance of where I work. The book that had me so enthralled was “Middlesex,” by Jeffrey Eugenides. I know, I am the last person on the planet who hasn’t read it, especially after my nemesis picked it for her book club. Oh well, better late than never. But from now on, I will need to be more careful when reading it on the T!

"Ship Fever"

2007-12-13T14:01:00.000-08:00

I recently finished “Ship Fever,” a collection of short stories by Andrea Barrett. One of the things I like about Barrett is that her stories usually have scientific and/or historical plot elements. (The other book of hers that I’ve read, “Voyage of the Narwhal,” deals with a 19th-century naturalist who goes on an expedition to the Arctic Circle.)

Stories included in “Ship Fever” focus on a doctor who volunteers to treat Irish cholera victims fleeing to Canada to escape from the potato famine, two Englishwomen who try to disprove a commonly-held belief about swallows, the final days in the life of Carl Linnaeus, and a love affair between two science teachers.

But the stories are not just about science. Barrett deftly weaves the science into compelling tales of relationships and adventures, so you don’t feel like you’re reading a dry scientific text—far from it. I don’t often read short stories, but I enjoyed these and plan to read more of her work.

“Ship Fever” won the National Book Award in 1996, so I am counting it towards the “Book Awards Reading Challenge.” This is my fifth one, so I’m doing pretty well. I’ve been trying to do one a month, and I need to read seven more by the end of June 2008. Plenty of time….

Post Apocalypse Now

2007-12-04T16:55:00.000-08:00

OK, I may be getting carried away with all this postapocalyptic reading—I really need to find some more cheerful books! I just finished “The World Without Us,” by Alan Weisman, which is a scientific look at what would happen to Earth if humans just suddenly disappeared (assuming no nuclear fallout or asteroid-induced blocking of the sun, etc.). Think a virus that only infects humans and is 100 percent deadly.

Anyway, let’s grant Weisman those assumptions. What would happen to the world we left behind? Well, it turns out in some ways the planet would be much better off without us, and in some ways, much worse.

First, the positives: Some endangered species would retake and thrive in their former habitats. Deforested areas would regrow, and, of course, we would stop producing greenhouse gases.

Some not so good things: No one would be around to warn animals and the intelligent primates who might eventually evolve to replace us to stay away from nuclear waste storage sites. Nuclear reactors would eventually melt down without human monitoring, and oil refineries would catch fire and burn for years.

One of the book’s most alarming chapters featured plastics. Basically, every bit of plastic that has ever been manufactured (more than one billion tons) will remain on Earth, clogging waterways and choking animal and plant life, forever. That’s FOREVER. In a section of the Pacific Ocean called the North Pacific Tropical Gyre, an eddy the size of Texas draws in a never-ending stream of plastic. It’s choked with six-pack rings, sandwich bags and plastic grocery bags, and it will accumulate more as long as we continue producing plastic. Reading that chapter led to what I call my “plastic bag epiphany,” where I finally committed to taking reusable bags to the grocery store. (They are fantastic—you can fit so much more into them, so you don’t end up carrying 12 plastic bags, each containing two items.) I know it doesn’t help much in the grand scheme of things, but it’s something…

In the final chapter, Weisman offers what I think is, in theory at least, a fantastic solution to our environmental woes. He recommends that every woman able to bear children be limited to only one child. The current world population is about 6.5 billion and is projected to grow to a completely unmanageable 9 billion by 2050. If this measure went into effect immediately, population would drop to 5.5 billion at mid-century and 1.6 billion (19th-century levels ) by 2100. I admit the idea is a bit impractical (though China has had some success with it), but it just might be better than the alternative—finding out what happens when nearly 10 billion people are competing for the shrinking livable habitats on Earth.

From down under to all over

2007-11-25T14:16:00.000-08:00

Just finished “Foreign Correspondence,” a memoir by Geraldine Brooks, an Australian-born novelist and former newspaper reporter.

Brooks, who grew up in what she considered to be a very dull suburb of Sydney, does a lovely job of conveying her yearning to be part of a larger world. To her, Australia feels remote and restrictive, far away from the glamour of Europe and political excitement in the United States. To reach that larger world, she starts corresponding with several pen pals, in the United States, Israel and France. Later in life, after the letters whet her appetite, she goes to graduate school in New York and becomes a foreign correspondent for the Washington Post in the Middle East.

While sorting through some boxes of papers at her parents’ home, she discovers a pile of old letters from her pen pals and decides to track them down. The story of what has become of her pen pals, 20 years later, is compelling and gracefully told. The book comes full circle when Brooks realizes that what she most wants now, after nearly a decade spent in near constant travel, is a life of quiet isolation, which she finds in a small village in rural Virginia.

I’ve read several of her other books and liked all of them, especially “Year of Wonders.” I also recently learned that she has new novel coming out in January, “People of the Book.” It looks like it uses a similar narrative device as Susan Vreeland’s “Girl in Hyacinth Blue,” following a work of art as it passes hands over several centuries. I’m definitely looking forward to reading it.

"The Road"

2007-11-21T17:24:00.000-08:00

I can sum up “The Road,” by Cormac McCarthy, with two superlatives—it is one of the best books I have read, and one of the most depressing.

The story (such as it is) follows a man and his son as they travel through the southern United States 10 years after an unspecified apocalyptic event. The land is gray and charred, the air is filled with ash, and seemingly the only other folks around are roving bands of cannibals. The sparseness of McCarthy’s prose perfectly matches the setting of the book, so much so that it is hard to read too much of it in one sitting, lest one sink into depression, or at least start outfitting a bomb shelter with canned goods.

But in spite of the grim scenario, the story is ultimately uplifting, much more than I would have expected when I started reading it. This was the second selection of my new book group, and we spent much of the discussion talking about what we would do in a similar situation. Most of us agreed that we would want to end things ourselves rather than face the daily battle for survival, high risk of enslavement/being eaten, and no hope for the future. But one friend, the only member of our group with a child, said she would have done just as the father in the book did, and fight to keep herself and her daughter alive.

Another member of the group was so traumatized by the story that she stopped reading after 100 pages, but everyone else found the book impossible to put down. For me, it was especially enjoyable due to my lifelong obsession with disasters/post-apocalyptic events (probably not the healthiest obsession, but what can you do).

Up next for the book group, “The Myth of You and Me,” by Leah Stewart, which looks like it will be a more cheerful read :)

How depressing

2007-11-19T07:59:00.000-08:00

Here is a distressing but unsurprising news flash for you: “US report says young people reading a lot less,” from page one of the Boston Globe. The story reports on a new study by the National Endowment for the Arts, which contains the following nuggets:

• Only 30 percent of 13-year-olds read almost every day.

• Almost half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 never read books for pleasure.

• The average person between ages 15 and 24 spends 2.5 hours a day watching TV and 7 minutes reading.

This has led to a sharp drop in reading profiency. Again, not surprising.

Interestingly, the study found a correlation between reading for pleasure and other activities, such as voting, political activism, participation in culture and fine arts, charity work and regular exercise. It seems like the bottom line is, reading is good for you! (And fun!)

I guess I should consider myself lucky that when I was little, my parents took me to bookstores at least once a week and bought whatever I wanted (in retrospect, the library would have been a lot more economical, but my parents are like me—they like to own their books :) ).

Also I’m lucky that cell phones, ipods, Blackberries, etc. did not exist when I started my reading habit (not to sound like an old geezer—I’m only 30!). One of the reasons offered for the decline in reading is that people, especially teenagers and college students, have so many electronic gadgets to play with. I abhor the idea of electronic book readers, but maybe they will prove the savior of reading: Books just might seem “cooler” when you can read them on a tiny little screen with flashy colors. How sad.

P.S. I know I haven't posted on my current reading in a while, I did just finish "The Road," which I will blog about later this week... stay tuned!

Good God, she’s done it again…

2007-11-15T06:18:00.000-08:00

I think it might be time for Oprah and I to come to an uneasy truce, similar to the Oprah-Letterman detente. The book club queen just announced that her next book is “Pillars of the Earth,” which is one of my favorite novels of all time. I had to read it for a class in high school and was completely absorbed in the medieval world it creates. And Ken Follett just wrote a sequel, “World Without End,” which I am dying to read. Now the real question is, how many of Oprah’s loyal followers are actually going to plow all the way through “Pillars,” which clocks in at nearly 1,000 pages?

Faire la cuisine

2007-11-06T18:10:00.000-08:00

Earlier this year, I read a couple of books by and about Julia Child. I like to cook, so I was tempted to try some of her recipes, but my vegetarian self just couldn’t embrace the idea of wrestling with a roast chicken, or digging marrow out of a cow bone to whip up a Bifteck Saute Bercy. So, I was pleased to discover a more accessible, recently published French cookbook called “Chocolate & Zucchini,” which grew from a blog of the same name. The woman who wrote the book, 29-year-old Clotilde Dusoulier, basically has my dream job: living in Paris, cooking delicious food, eating it and writing about it. I tried her recipe for Quiche de Broccoli a la Pomme, and it was scrumptious. For some reason I had always thought making quiche would be really difficult, but this was pretty easy. (Although I cheated by using a store-bought crust.) Next up, Billes de Noisettes au Chocolat. Or maybe a nice Tarte Amandine a la Myrtille….

Dumbledore is what?

2007-10-28T08:28:00.000-07:00

I’m not quite sure what to make of J.K. Rowling’s recent outing of Dumbledore. At first glance, it seems positive for the books to embrace diversity and feature a gay character. But upon further reflection, maybe Dumbledore is not the best gay role model that Rowling could have offered up. Let’s think about it: He’s 115 years old, has no significant relationships, and spends much of his time with 13-year-old boys. Sound like any recent scandals we’ve experienced in Boston?

In an essay in Time Magazine last week, John Cloud, a gay writer, argues that the outing is “no gay triumph” and wonders why Rowling never acknowledged Dumbledore’s nature in the books. “We can only conclude that Dumbledore saw his homosexuality as shameful,” he writes. “His silence suggests a lack of personal integrity that is completely out of character.”

I also tend to agree with this boston.com blogger, who maintains that authors can’t just make major revelations about a character after the fact, without any mention of it in the text. Maybe Rowling didn’t want to give the Christian Right another reason to try to ban her books, but then why broach the topic at all?

Flippin' good

2007-10-24T18:16:00.000-07:00

Every time I try to make pancakes, it turns into a disaster. I know everyone says the first one is always a dud and you have to throw it away, but last time I tried it, I had to throw away the ENTIRE batch. At that point, I resigned myself to going to IHOP to fulfill my pancake cravings.

Then last week, while reading on the train, I came across an article that gave me hope. The article, written by a New York Times columnist, is part of an anthology I’m currently reading, “The Best Food Writing 2003.” (Yes it’s random, but I LOVE to read about food, so I am devouring it—sorry, bad pun.)

Anyway, this article ("With Pancakes, Every Day Is Sunday") made it sound like it was no big deal to whip up a batch of light, fluffy pancakes at the drop of a hat, so I decided to give it another shot. I’ve never made pancakes from scratch before, but I tried the author’s recipe for “Mississippi Pancakes,” which he claims are the best he’s ever had.

True to form, the first one was quite inedible (I accidentally folded it onto itself while trying to flip it, so it turned into an omelette), but after that, I did manage to produce a decent number of good pancakes. They were especially yummy with blueberries and maple syrup…...mmmmmm……pancakes……..

Here is the recipe, if anyone wants to try. It doesn’t say to grease the pan, but I used some cooking spray anyway. It also claims to make 20 “medium-sized” pancakes, but I halved the recipe and only got 7 (including the one I had to pitch), and they weren’t very big, so I would recommend making the whole recipe.

2 eggs
1 cup milk
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
3 tablespoons butter, melted
1 1/4 cup all purpose flour
3 teaspoons baking powder
3 teaspoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt

1) Place a nonstick griddle or a skillet over medium heat. In a large bowl, beat eggs until light and foamy. Add milk, oil and butter. In another bowl, sift together dry ingredients, then beat them into the liquid ingredients with a wire wisk.

2) When skillet is hot, pour in about 1/4 cup batter for each pancake, leaving space between. Flip when batter bubbles. Continue cooking for about a minute. Serve immediately.

For the topping (I made this up) heat 2 cups of frozen blueberries in a skillet with a few tablespoons of maple syrup. Pour over finished pancakes.

Between innings

2007-10-18T12:04:00.000-07:00

OK, this is becoming my mantra—I am a terribly delinquent blogger. My excuse du jour is the Red Sox. All these loooooong playoff games are really cutting into my reading time. Although for some people, the long games help promote literacy: During the interminable Game 2 at Fenway, the TV cameras caught Stephen King reading a book between innings. In an interview with a Fox reporter, King dissed the network’s extended commercial breaks, saying that he normally can read 18 pages per game, but now that Fox is airing the games, it’s up to 27. The reporter, seemingly oblivious to King’s point, replied “Thanks for the plug!” Huh? Anyway, maybe I will follow King’s example and read between innings of Game 5 tonight, but somehow I think I will be too nervous to focus on a book…..

9/11

2007-10-07T14:40:00.000-07:00

There have been plenty of books written about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. I just finished one of the most comprehensive, “The Looming Tower,” by Lawrence Wright, which is an account of the rise of Al-Qaeda in particular, and Islamic fundamentalism in general.

I learned a lot of things from this book. For starters, radical Islam has been around for quite a while, starting with the writings of Sayyid Qutb, a scholar who attended school in the United States in the late 1940s. Qutb’s writings excoriated the influences of modernity, specifically secularism, democracy, individualism, tolerances, materialism, mixing of sexes, etc. Things that Americans are rather fond of.

Wright recounts the long history of Islamic movements in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, culminating the formation of Al Qaeda in the 1990s, headed by Osama bin Laden. Their philosophy of mass murder of innocents relies on the concept of “takfir,” which essentially says that anyone, Muslim or non-Muslim, who does not agree completely with the fundamentalists’ particular interpretation of Islam, is an infidel and should be killed. A rather extreme point of view, which has no basis in the Koran but developed later among some radical Muslims.

Wright did exhaustive research for this book (his list of interview subjects takes up seven pages), and it shows in the meticulous detail of his story. For the most part the story moves right along, but it gets bogged down a little in the details of the long series of wars in Afghanistan (against the Russians), where bin Laden and his friends first started to wage “holy war.” As Wright humorously points out, the Afghans actually just wanted Osama and pals to go away because they were such incompetent fighters.

The book also describes, in painful detail, many of the puzzle pieces held by either the FBI, CIA or NSA, who didn’t share information and thus couldn’t put together the big picture of Al Qaeda’s grand plan.

Alongside the chronicle of Al Qaeda's rise, Wright recounts the compelling story of FBI agent John O’Neill and his efforts to track down the terror network. O’Neill was a flamboyant character who juggled relationships with four (yes, four) women at once as he worked long days and nights on the Al Qaeda case. O’Neill, the one person who could have probably put all the pieces together, didn’t get the support he needed and retired from the FBI in August 2001. He took a job as head of security for the World Trade Center and was killed on Sept. 11.

So, it’s not exactly a cheery tale, but it’s definitely worth reading, if you are interested in learning about the factors that led to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, and the people who tried to stop it. Six years later, the phrase “Sept. 11” has become so politicized that it’s easy to forget how horrific that day was, and the maniacal drive of the people who were responsible for it. (I note that those people are still roaming around the mountains of Pakistan—thanks again, W.)

"Suite Francaise"

2007-09-29T07:17:00.000-07:00

Well, the new book club has gotten off to an excellent start with our first book, “Suite Francaise,” by Irene Nemirovsky. I had heard such good things about the book that I was afraid it might not live up my expectations, but it definitely did. The group had a very lively discussion, which centered almost as much on the backstory of “Suite Francaise” as the book itself.

In 1940, while living in Nazi-occupied France, Nemirovsky started working on a collection of novels about life during the German invasion and occupation. She finished the first two of five planned stories, but never got to finish her work. In 1942, Nemirovsky, a Russian-born Jew who had converted to Catholicism after 23 years in France, was taken to Auschwitz, where she died of typhus.

Meanwhile, her young daughters escaped with the manuscripts in a suitcase. Thinking the handwritten pages were a diary that would be too painful to read, the daughters didn’t open them and discover the novels until a few years ago.

The first novel, “Storm in June,” focuses on the looming German arrival in Paris in 1940 and the Parisians’ frenzied efforts to escape. Nemirovsky illustrates the general panic by focusing on half a dozen groups of characters, each handling the situtation differently. She tells each story beautifully and makes you feel as though you are right there with the characters. (The book group members were divided on whether they liked the chapter in which the author describes the scene from a cat’s point of view—I actually thought it worked.)

“Dolce,” the second novel, moves at a slower pace and describes life in a small rural village occupied by German troops. After the initial fear and disdain the French feel towards their conquerers, they fall into an uneasy harmony with the soldiers, until one villager’s rebellion shatters the peace.

The ending, which was really more of a middle than an end, definitely left me wishing that Nemirovsky had been able to finish the entire story. If completed, the planned collection of novels could have become one of the great literary works to come out of World War II. As it is, it is still a masterpiece, especially considering that it was written nearly simultaneously with the events it depicts.

The book has a couple of extensive appendices, consisting of notes Nemirovsky wrote about her plans for the rest of the novels, and letters that reveal her concern about the situation in France and her efforts to avoid being sent to a work camp. Strangely the novels do not have any Jewish characters or mention concentration camps, which might reflect either a lack of knowledge about the Nazis’ plans or an effort by Nemirovsky to distance herself from her Jewish heritage.

Bottom line, in spite of the hype that this book has gotten, it is well worth reading. I highly recommend it to ANYONE.

The book group spent a lot of time trying to decide what to read next, and we finally settled on “The Road,” by Cormac McCarthy, which I have been wanting to read for a while, in spite of Oprah’s endorsement. I think enough time has passed since she picked it that it will be safe to be seen reading it on the train :)

Never a lender be

2007-09-19T18:05:00.000-07:00

On and off for the past couple of months, I’ve been reading a collection of essays by Anne Fadiman. I can’t believe I hadn’t heard of “Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader” until recently because it is a collection of essays about BOOKS. And reading books.

One of my favorites is a piece in which Fadiman describes two types of book lovers: those who like to keep their books in pristine condition (the courtly lovers), and those who think a well worn book is a sign of a well loved book (the carnal lovers). She falls into the latter category, I am firmly in the former.

According to Fadiman, although the words in a book are “holy,” “the paper, cloth, cardboard, glue, thread and ink that contained them were a mere vessel, and it was no sacrilege to treat them as wantonly as desire and pragmatism dictated.”

I could not disagree more. I love my books as objects. Like the hotel chambermaid who admonishes Fadiman’s brother “You must never do that to a book,” when he leaves a book spreadeagled on the nightstand, I would never break a book’s spine, dog-ear the pages or (gasp) write on them.

I learned the hard way that not everyone is compulsive about taking care of books: When I was in 6th grade, a really annoying classmate named Rachel borrowed my copy of “The Runner,” by Cynthia Voight, and returned it essentially shredded. I was so mad, but my timid 12-year-old self couldn’t muster the courage to protest. A year later, I nearly stopped speaking to one of my friends when she returned “The Clan of the Cave Bear” with the front cover completely creased.

The lesson I have taken from this is, don’t lend books! Or at the very least, engage the borrower in an Israeli-army-style interrogation of their attitudes towards books. Courtly lovers are welcome to borrow, page-folders, stay away!

Coincidence

2007-09-10T17:38:00.000-07:00

I just mentioned "Atonement" in my last blog post, and a couple of days later I got an e-mail from Amazon about the trailer for the movie, which is apparently coming out Dec. 7. I'm not always a fan of movies made from books, but the trailer looks pretty good.

Once again I have been delinquent in posting... I am currently reading "The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11," by Lawrence Wright. It won the Pulitzer Prize for 2007, so I am counting it for the Book Awards Reading Challenge. It's incredibly enlightening on the origins of Islamic fundamentalism—I will write more about it when I finish. I'm about halfway through but now it has to go on hiatus so I can read "Suite Francaise" for my new book group. That is, if I can find the book in the jungle of recently-moved boxes in my apartment....

"Amsterdam"

2007-08-31T14:47:00.000-07:00

Oh dear, it's been a while since my last post. Not because I haven't been reading, but because I haven't had time to write about the books—that is what happens when you undertake a month-long move! And especially when many of your possessions are (heavy) books. One that I recently finished reading is "Amsterdam," by Ian McEwan, which I liked but not as much as his later novel, "Atonement."

Reading “Amsterdam" was a little like watching a train wreck: I knew something ghastly was going to happen, but I couldn’t turn away.

The novel opens at a funeral and follows the subsequent events in the lives of two men, both former lovers of the dead woman. One a composer, one a newspaper editor, each faces a moral dilemma and ends up making a terribly wrong decision. The consequences? See train wreck analogy above.

I’ve read some reviews that suggest the ending is too contrived or predictable, and I tend to agree, but that didn’t stop me from being completely enthralled, mainly due to the great writing. This is my third McEwan novel, and what I love about them is their dead-on descriptions of the characters’ internal states and thoughts. And how can you not love a little gem like this description of the newspaper editor: “Within his profession Vernon was revered as a nonentity.”

However, “Amsterdam,” in spite of its graceful and incisive writing, seems much less fully developed than “Atonement,” so it seems odd to me that this novel won the Booker Prize while “Atonement” did not.

This is my first book for the “Book Awards Reading Challenge,” which started in July, so I have some catching up to do!

A very long walk

2007-08-22T18:47:00.000-07:00

I’ve never really been the outdoors-y type. I can count the number of times I’ve been hiking on one hand (and maybe a couple more fingers). When I was 9 years old, I went on a camping trip with my Girl Scout troop. I made it one night, then called my parents and demanded that they pick me up and bring me back to civilization. Yes, s’mores are yummy, but even they can’t make up for the discomfort of sleeping in a tent, surrounded by mosquitoes.

So, I can’t even imagine the horrors of spending days, even weeks and months at a time in the wilderness. But apparently thousands of (crazy) people do so every year on the Appalachian Trail. One person who attempted it is Bill Bryson, who then wrote a wildly entertaining book, “A Walk in the Woods,” which I just finished reading.

Bryson decided to hit the trail after he moved to New Hampshire and realized that the trail ran past his house. Many trips to the sporting goods store later, he found himself traipsing through the woods in the company of his overweight, out-of-shape friend, Katz, who has a disconcerting tendency to lighten his backpack by tossing key items like food and water over cliffs.

Neither one is an experienced hiker, and they soon give up their plan of walking the entire trail, which runs from Georgia to Maine, a distance of approximately 2,100 miles (apparently the distance keeps changing as the trail route is shifted). Of the 2,000 people who start on the trail each year, only 10 percent make it to the end. Bryson ends up skipping a few states and covering about 870 miles.

I found myself laughing out loud during several scenes, especially Bryson's encounters with bizarre hikers on the trail. The book alternates between descriptions of his travels and journalistic explorations of topics such as the history and geology of the trail, the vast mismanagement of U.S. wilderness by the National Park Service, and the many ways hikers have died on the trail (not a very cheery topic for potential hikers).

At one of Bryson’s first stops, in Neels Gap, Georgia, he and Katz visit a convenience store, where Bryson has the following epiphany:

"I was beginning to learn that the central feature of life on the Appalachian Trail is deprivation, that the whole point of the experience is to remove yourself so thoroughly from the conveniences of everyday life that the most ordinary things—processed cheese, a can of pop gorgeously beaded with condensation—fill you with wonder and gratitude."

I think I’ll keep the processed cheese and “pop” and leave the hiking to more adventurous souls…. :)

Gold rush

2007-08-13T17:18:00.000-07:00

I’m glad that Isabel Allende has written so many books, because now that I’ve read one, I want more! I just finished “Daughter of Fortune,” which is the story of Eliza Sommers, abandoned at birth and adopted by an English family in Valparaiso, Chile. Raised by the spinster (that term always cracks me up) Miss Rose, Eliza falls in love with an unsuitable young Chilean. They have a torrid love affair, but he abandons her to pursue his dreams of finding gold in California. Eliza, in turn, pursues him to California, disguised as a boy.

I loved Allende’s descriptions of life in 1840s Chile, California, and China (seen through the eyes of Eliza’s friend Tao Chi’en). Gold rush-era San Francisco was full of not only people who came to find gold, but those who found their fortunes in other ways (including prostitution, the occupation of several characters in this book). If Allende’s setting is historically accurate, it was also a fairly brutal place, with constant friction between the different groups of immigrants who settled there.

I also liked the character of Eliza, who went to California to find her lover but ended up finding something much more important—her own sense of who she was, and a new life away from the restrictive society in which she was raised. Secondary characters in the story were also developed in rich detail. (I think some of them appear in Allende’s other novels.)

The only complaint I have is that the story ended rather abruptly, as though the author lost interest in tying everything together, but I was enthralled through the rest of the story. This book has been on my shelf for a while and I finally picked it up on the recommendation of Mimi37 (thanks M!). It wasn’t on my original list for the Armchair Traveler Reading Challenge, but it definitely qualifies as armchair travel so I’m going to count it anyway :)

A rant

2007-08-09T07:08:00.000-07:00

This post has nothing to do with books, but another topic dear to my heart—the Electoral College. Or rather, the flaws in the Electoral College (which resulted in a certain Texan becoming president without winning the popular vote—but that’s a topic for another day).

Recently, some Republicans in California decided that they want to reform the EC. Great idea, in theory. They want to allocate California’s 55 electoral votes based on the winners of each Congressional district, instead of the winner-take-all system that most other states use. If every state in the U.S. decided to do this, I would be all for it. Then the EC vote might actually resemble the popular vote. BUT, if California is the only large state to do it, the Democratic candidate will be screwed, since a large minority of the state’s electoral votes would be siphoned away. (According to this article, it would be the equivalent of losing Ohio.)

Of course, the Republicans know this would give them a huge advantage, but as usual they are pretending they are looking out for the interests of the common man. A consultant who is pushing the plan says “We're unlocking 55 electoral votes, and making it so candidates have to compete for them…. Candidates are not going to be able to ignore California. That would benefit all Californians."

Yeah, it might benefit Californians, at the expense of every other citizen in this country...

Now, I am no fan of the Electoral College. But if this “reform” goes through, it will become even more of a joke. If every state has its own system for allocating electoral votes, we will no longer even be able to pretend that it is a fair and accurate way to elect the president.

This initiative will go on the ballot next June, assuming the supporters get enough signatures. We can only hope that the people of California will see through this charade and reject it.

another challenge...

2007-08-02T18:29:00.000-07:00

Oooh, I found another book challenge :) This one is called the Book Awards Reading Challenge, it started July 1, 2007 and ends June 30, 2008. So, I'm a little behind, but what the heck. You're supposed to choose 12 books, all of which have won a literary prize. I looked through the lists and realized that I already own 10 such books, and then I added a couple more that I have been wanting to read. Here they are:

The Road by Cormac McCarthy (Pulitzer Prize)
Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky (Prix Renaudot)
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (Pulitzer Prize)
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (Pulitzer Prize)
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (Booker Prize)
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke (Hugo Award)
Amsterdam by Ian McEwan (Booker Prize)
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (National Book Award)
Charming Billy by Alice McDermott (National Book Award)
Ship Fever by Andrea Barrett (National Book Award)
The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan (National Book Award)
The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright (Pulitzer Prize)

This should keep me busy for a while! And will help make a dent in the gigantic TBR pile.

More Harry

2007-08-01T06:26:00.000-07:00

I came across this story in which J.K. Rowling talks about what happens to her characters after the end of "The Deathly Hallows." Check it out.

Endurance

2007-07-24T12:06:00.000-07:00

When last I put down “Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage” (so I could devote all my time to Harry Potter), the intrepid explorers were about to land on the desolate Elephant Island, several hundred miles north of their original destination, mainland Antarctica. This is after their ship drifted north for almost a year, caught in solid ice; after the ship finally sank after being battered by shifting ice; after they spent months camping on ice floes the size of a football field, until they could finally make a run for solid land in three tiny, open boats. During all this time, the temperature did not rise above 30 degrees Fahrenheit.

So now, Shackleton and a few of the men have set off for South Georgia Island (a name that makes it sound much more hospitable than it probably is), about 800 miles from the freezing, windy Elephant Island. I already know how the story ends, so there’s not much suspense, but it is a thrilling story. I think it appeals to my love of disaster stories (Titanic, Mt. Vesuvius, you name a famous disaster, and I’m obsessed with it). Although things pretty much turned out all right in this one.

This is the first book I’m reading for the Armchair Traveler Reading Challenge, and in this case I’m very glad to be reading it in my dry, warm apartment and not visiting for real! Every time I complain about winter in Boston, someone should remind me that at least I’m not sleeping in a drenched sleeping bag on a floating piece of ice in sub-freezing temperatures.

The end

2007-07-23T09:08:00.001-07:00

I just finished a three-hour sprint through the last 200+ pages of The Deathly Hallows... I don't even know what to say. I laughed, I cried. J.K. Rowling hit it out of the park, in my opinion. I'm completely satisfied with the ending. I'm even happier that now I can starting using the Internet/radio/TV again :) I had a close call this morning when I turned on "Morning Edition" and then had to shut it off 10 minutes later when they started talking about Harry Potter.

Now that I'm finished with it, I feel a little bereft. One of the great things about the Harry Potter series is that we've been able to follow Harry's adventures as Rowling was dreaming them up. When I got my hands on the book (around 12:30 a.m. Saturday), I felt as though I was about to enter a world that no one had visited before. The other day at work, we were talking about whether there has ever been any literary phenomenon like Harry Potter, which I think it's pretty safe to say is NO. I can always re-read these, but it won't be the same as devouring them for the first time. (If I ever have kids, though, guess what I will be reading to them at bedtime :) )

OK, now it's time to rejoin the world and do some things I have been neglecting all day - like eat!

IT'S HERE

2007-07-21T08:14:00.000-07:00

You know what I'm talking about.

Contact with the outside world has been eliminated.

WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!

Lazy summer days

2007-07-09T17:31:00.001-07:00

Ack! I have been a very bad book blogger. I have not been blogging and have not been reading as much as I want to. It's summer—this is when everyone is supposed to have time for "summer reading," but somehow it has not been working out that way.

I'm still working on "Founding Brothers" (it's a good book but it's a little like doing assigned reading for your history class), and I just finished "The Botany of Desire," by Michael Pollan. I thought it would be a good summer read, since it's about plants. I have learned a lot about apples, tulips, marijuana and potatoes, and how they have been altered by human desires for sweetness, beauty, intoxication and control. Or, as Pollan intriguingly suggests, maybe the plants are manipulating US to their own evolutionary advantage.

Anyway, it's time to get into summer reading gear—July is almost half over and I haven't started any of the books I'm planning to read for the Armchair Traveler Reading Challenge, and, there are only EIGHT more days until Harry Potter comes out!

Independence Day

2007-07-04T08:19:00.000-07:00

Two hundred and thirty-one years after the Declaration of Independence was written, it can seem that the founding of the United States was inevitable. But any one of a number of obstacles could have torn the union apart during its formative years, historian Joseph Ellis writes in his book about the founding generation, “Founding Brothers.”

“What in retrospect has the look of a foreordained unfolding of God’s will was in reality an improvisational affair in which sheer chance, pure luck—both good and bad—and specific decisions made in the crucible of specific military and political crises determined the outcome,” according to Ellis.

Ellis focuses on the leaders of the revolutionary generation—Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, et al, to illustrate his larger point that the state of the early union was incredibly fragile. Several issues could have broken up the young nation in the last two decades of the 18th century —slavery was the most obvious but there were also disagreements over how much power the federal government should wield and whether the economy should be based in agriculture or commerce. These disagreements often led one region of the country or another to threaten to secede from the union.

In six historical vignettes, Ellis describes how the political talents, personalities and relationships of the “founding brothers” held the union together and set a course for the United States to become the oldest enduring republic in world history. Among the episodes that helped shape the nation are the duel between Alexander Hamilton and Vice President Aaron, the debate over where to place the federal capital, and numerous compromises made over slavery.

I’m only a little more than one-third through the book, but I figured today was a fitting time to write about it. It’s fascinating to see how the founding that we are celebrating could have failed nearly as soon as it began.

Addiction

2007-07-01T08:26:00.000-07:00

I finally figured out how to upload photos to my blog! So, to help you understand the depth of my book obsession (illness?), I am posting some photos of my piles of unread books:

Yes, there are more books piled behind the ones in the front of the first two photos. And, there are 15-20 more that I couldn't get good photos of because they are obstructed. You would think that these piles might discourage me from buying any more books, but you would be wrong. I went to one of my favorite stores yesterday and bought four more.... at least they were used, so I'm not blowing ALL of my discretionary income on books....

Countdown

2007-06-28T13:24:00.000-07:00

Just a little post to celebrate the fact that Harry Potter number 7 will be released in 24 days(!!!) I am already planning to sequester myself in my apartment for as long as it takes to discover the fate of Harry and friends (and enemies). Like the people in this NYTimes story, I HATE spoilers, so I am prepared to create an Internet and TV-free zone during this time period.

However, I don’t yet have a game plan for purchasing the book. Most of the bookstores around here are having release parties Friday, July 20, where you can buy the book at midnight. That sounds like fun, but I also have a totally irrational fear that some annoying kid will buy the book, flip to the end to see what happens and start talking about it. So, plan B is to slip into Barnes and Noble first thing Saturday morning, ears covered, buy the book and slink away without any human interaction.

Hopefully I will avoid any incidents where I start pushing little kids out of the way to get to Harry, as Stephen King has (jokingly, I think) threatened to do.

Armchair travel

2007-06-25T16:56:00.000-07:00

After I started this blog, I poked around a little and discovered that there are a LOT of other book bloggers out there. Those bloggers have started a host of “reading challenges,” which vary in detail but basically involve reading a number of books that are related by a theme during a given time period. There have been challenges for classics, mysteries, etc. This looked like great fun, so I decided to join “The Armchair Traveler Reading Challenge.” From July 1 to Dec. 31, each participant must read six books that fit the theme. This seemed like a good opportunity to get to some of the books that have been on my shelf for a while. Here are the ones I chose:

“Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal’s Journey From Down Under to All Over,” by Geraldine Brooks
“A Walk in the Woods,” by Bill Bryson
“The Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage,” by Alfred Lansing
“Beneath the Metropolis: The Secret Lives of Cities,” by Alex Marshall
“The Bookseller of Kabul,” by Asne Seierstad
“Assassination Vacation,” by Sarah Vowell

Slow is the new fast

2007-06-21T09:27:00.000-07:00

One way to measure the worth of a book is whether reading it has caused you to do things differently. That is definitely true for “In Praise of Slowness,” by Carl Honoré, which I finished last week.

The author, a Canadian journalist, relates his investigations into a variety of movements (Slow Food, meditation, yoga, flexible work schedules, making cities more walkable, etc.) that all have the same purpose: to slow down and break free from the constant rush of daily life and its time-saving (but soulless) accessories - fast food, BlackBerries, etc.

Honoré launched this project after reading about a series of “one minute bedtime stories” in the newspaper and thinking what a great idea that was. He realized then just how obsessed he had become with saving time, to the point where he was willing to sacrifice time with his son in order to make a few more phone calls for work.

Here is how Honoré describes the “Slow movement”:

“What the world needs, and what the Slow movement offers, is a middle path, a recipe for marrying la dolce vita with the dynamism of the information age. The secret is balance: instead of doing everything faster, do everything at the right speed. Sometimes fast, sometimes slow. Sometimes somewhere in between. Being Slow means never rushing, never striving to save time just for the sake of it. It means remaining calm and unflustered even when circumstances force us to speed up.”

Since reading this book, I have embraced many of its ideals and become more committed to a few “slow” things I was already doing. I’ve started meditating every day, cooking more, going to yoga classes (finally), and I’m cutting back on TV (easier to do in the summer when there’s nothing on anyway ;) ). I’m also trying to make more time for reading (hooray!).

A feast of books

2007-06-15T12:35:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday, my book group met to discuss “The Feast of Love,” by Charles Baxter. Everyone liked the book and said they would recommend it, although some (including me) found the first half a little depressing. It definitely picks up by the end though, if you stick with it. Each chapter of the novel is narrated by a different character in the book (some characters get more than one chapter), and Baxter did a good job of capturing each one’s voice, especially the teenage girl who was a central character.

Sadly, this was the last meeting of the group—our leader is moving away :( I’m kind of addicted to book group now though, so I’m thinking about starting a new one.

Since the group is ending, I thought it would be nice to list the books that we’ve read. (This is an incomplete list, because I’ve only been a member for a little less than two years, and it started a year and a half before that.) One of the nice things about the group is that I ended up reading a lot of really good books that I never would have chosen on my own (“The Lovely Bones” is a good example of this).

“The Known World,” by Edward Jones
“Straight Man,” by Richard Russo
“The Lovely Bones,” by Alice Sebold
“The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,” by Haruki Murakami
“The Plot Against America,” by Philip Roth
“March,” by Geraldine Brooks
“Saturday,” by Ian McEwan
“Running With Scissors,” by Augusten Burroughs
“On Beauty,” by Zadie Smith
“The Inheritance of Loss,” by Kiran Desai
“The History of Love,” by Nicole Krauss
“The Voyage of the Narwhal,” by Andrea Barrett
“The Feast of Love,” by Charles Baxter

and a few I didn’t read when I was a delinquent book group member:

“Mating,” by Norman Rush
“Good Scent from a Strange Mountain,” by Robert Olen Butler
“Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,” by Tom Robbins

Anyone want to join a new book group? :)

Eight random things

2007-06-14T06:55:00.000-07:00

MyWombinations has tagged me to write eight random things about myself, so here goes:

1) I am a crazy Red Sox fan: When they were in the 2004 World Series, I took three days off from work to make sure I could watch all potentially series-clinching games. Seeing the World Series victory parade (duck tour boats cruising down Tremont St., loaded with Red Sox) is one of my all-time favorite memories.

2) My favorite toy when I was 4 years old was a Ronald McDonald doll. You’d think this was a triumph of McDonalds’ pervasive marketing-to-children scheme, but I actually ended up a McDonald’s-hating vegetarian. I just liked that he was yellow (my favorite color) and had that goofy grin.

3) If I had followed my original post-college plans, I would have recently finished a Ph.D. in neuroscience - unless the misery of spending 24/7 in a lab made me throw myself out a window first.

4) My favorite movie is (please don’t mock me) “Bridget Jones’ Diary.” I can’t help it, it just makes me laugh and laugh.

5) I have weird food rules. For example, raisins by themselves are OK, but anything with raisins in it is unacceptable. I won’t eat raisin bagels, and I will painstakingly remove the raisins from any dish (say, salad or couscous) that has raisins in it. Dried cranberries, on the other hand, are perfectly fine.

6) When I was little, I had a cat named Muffy and a hamster named Puffy.

7) I am a kick-a$$ parallel-parker.

8) I have read all of Jane Austen’s novels except for “Mansfield Park,” which I have been putting off for years because once I finish it, I will have no more “new” Jane Austen to read. (I had to get a book-related item in this post somehow :) )

OK, those are my eight things. Now I’m supposed to tag eight more people, but I don’t know eight other bloggers, so I’m going to tag two:

Paulie, aka bosoxguy
Mimi37 at perpetual expat

These are the rules:
1. Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
2. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
3. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.

"Ma Vie en France"

2007-06-11T16:20:00.000-07:00

This happens every year—while watching the French Open on TV, I start to dream of strolling down the Champs-Elysées and sitting at little sidewalk cafés eating pâtisseries and drinking café au lait.

Since I don’t have airfare to Paris hiding in my couch cushions, I decided to do my traveling vicariously. After watching Nadal defeat Federer (again!), I scoured my bookshelves and came across “My Life in France,” by Julia Child, which I bought after reading “Julie and Julia” (see my post about that book here). Just what I was looking for. I’m only on the first chapter, but I’m already enthralled by Julia’s descriptions of the fantastic French food she ate when she first arrived in Paris with her husband after World War II.

Interesting to note that Julia, whom we now know as a master of French cooking, had almost no cooking experience before living in France. One of the earliest dishes she attempted was brains simmered in red wine—an effort she describes as "a disaster." Her husband, Paul, later put it more diplomatically: "Her first attempts were not altogether successful..."

Hold the fava beans

2007-06-06T13:48:00.000-07:00

Dear Oprah,
Why, why did you have to pick a book that I have been meaning to read for the past two years? Now I have to wait at least another year to read “Middlesex,” so no one will see me on the train and think I’m blindly following your recommendations. You have been really messing with me recently—I’m also dying to read “The Road,” but of course now I can’t.

As the NYTimes put it so well in an article today about competitive dinner parties:

“For him, serving a dish that is on the menu at several good restaurants in the city right now — a fava bean salad with shaved pecorino, for instance — would be like being caught reading ‘The Lovely Bones’ right after Oprah Winfrey endorsed it.”

Darn you, Oprah!

Coming attractions

2007-05-31T18:34:00.000-07:00

I was excited to hear that Ian McEwan has a new book out. Then I read this review in the NY Times, and I lost some of my enthusiasm. I absolutely loved “Atonement” and really liked “Saturday,” so it’s disappointing that his new one seems to not live up to them. But on the bright side, there are many older McEwan books that I have yet to read, so hopefully those will occupy me for a while.

Other new books I am looking forward to: "After Dark," by Haruki Murakami, and "Divisadero," by Michael Ondaatje. Also, Tom Perrotta, author of one of my favorite books, "Joe College," has a book coming out in October with the very intriguing title of "The Abstinence Teacher."

But maybe I should make a dent in the current pile(s) before I start any of those...

The pursuit of happiness

2007-05-24T13:42:00.000-07:00

When my boyfriend saw the title of the book I’m now reading—“Eat, Pray, Love,” by Elizabeth Gilbert—he said, “That sounds like a really dumb book.” I had the same reaction when I first saw it. In this case, my first impression was totally wrong.

In the book, Gilbert, a recently divorced thirty-something, chronicles a year she spent in Italy, India and Indonesia to recover from the emotional toll of her divorce and resulting depression. She decided to spend that year in pursuit of pleasure (by eating pasta and pastries in Italy), spirituality (by meditating and learning from a Yoga Guru at an Ashram in India) and balance (seeking both pleasure and spirituality in Bali). It almost feels like three separate stories, although the author’s very strong voice and the transformation she undergoes along the way tie them together.

While reading each section of the book, I found myself wanting to follow in Gilbert’s footsteps—maybe not by actually traveling to her destinations but embracing some aspects of her spiritual journey. (Why did I stop studying Italian, the most beautiful language I have ever spoken? And why do I never go to yoga classes, even though I always love it when I do?) Too busy, I guess. Maybe it is time to stop and think about what is really important to me … this is the kind of book that can have that effect on you. I highly recommend it.

(Up next: “The Feast of Love,”by Charles Baxter, for my book group meeting in June. Two books in a row for me with “Love” in the title! How nice.)

C is for cookie

2007-05-20T13:58:00.000-07:00

It has been raining all weekend, so I decided this was a good time to do some baking. My snickerdoodle project started out just fine: I had Nigella's recipe, which I followed faithfully, measuring ingredients while my fantastic new stand mixer did all of the hard labor. The flour that I grabbed from the pantry did seem a little lumpy, but I was not worried.

The first sign of trouble came when the round balls of cookie dough refused to flatten into nice normal cookie shapes, even after 15 minutes in the oven. A few also had mysterious cracks along the tops. Something was amiss. When I tasted them, they weren't horrible, they just didn't taste like they should have. They were kind of dry, they were misshapen and they kept falling apart. That's when I decided to look more closely at the flour and discovered that the use-by date was June 2004. (This shows you how often I bake.) I did some research and found out that flour actually does expire - you're not supposed to keep it for longer than six months. OOPS. I'm not discouraged though, I just need to try again, with non-ancient flour. I will conquer the snickerdoodle recipe!

"Bringing Down the House"

2007-05-18T07:55:00.000-07:00

I am definitely in the wrong line of work. I just finished reading “Bringing Down the House,” by Ben Mezrich, and I am ready to hop on a plane to Vegas and hit the blackjack tables. OK, maybe I don’t have the mathematical genius of the MIT students who figured out how to win millions of dollars by counting cards. And, I guess there are some pitfalls involved, like when the casinos figure out what you’re doing. (Guess what? They don’t like it very much, even though card counting is technically legal.) So, maybe I’ll rethink that plan. But I still highly recommend this book, which is compulsively page-turning. Probably a good book to read on a long plane trip.

It’s also being turned into a movie called “21,” starring Kevin Spacey and a few other big names. MIT refused to let them shoot on campus, so all of the campus scenes were shot at BU (a slightly more aesthetic locale). The producers caused gridlock in Boston a few weeks ago by shutting down the Mass. Ave. bridge to shoot there, but if the movie is as good as the book, it’ll be worthwhile.

Frankly, my dear

2007-05-16T08:24:00.000-07:00

I just found out that another sequel to “Gone With the Wind” (one of my all-time favorite books) is going to be published this fall. It’s not technically a sequel but more of a retelling of the story from Rhett Butler’s point of view, covering a longer time period than the original book. It sounds like it has decent potential - hopefully it will be more of a literary success than the first sequel, “Scarlett,” which was sort of enjoyable but mostly disappointing.

In my last post, I forgot to mention one book that I did finish recently: “When the World Was Steady,” by Claire Messud. The reason I forgot is probably that it was not a very memorable book. It’s about two estranged middle-aged sisters who are each trying to escape their personal crises - one flees to Bali after a messy divorce, the other takes a holiday to Skye (Scotland) with her mother after having a breakdown at work. The story did offer some interesting insights about relationships and self-discovery, but I wouldn’t say it was one of my favorite reads. I picked it up mainly because I really liked Claire Messud’s recent novel, “The Emperor’s Children.” I found that one more relatable (it’s about a group of twenty-something Brown alumni living in NYC in 2001), and the writing was really beautiful.

In the kitchen

2007-05-13T09:15:00.000-07:00

Haven't posted in a while, mainly because I haven't had that much time to read recently :( I'm going to try to change that. I'm also hoping to have more time to cook, especially bake, with one of the new cookbooks I got for my birthday recently. It's called "How to Be a Domestic Goddess," by Nigella Lawson. I am not harboring any illusions about actually becoming a domestic goddess, but I do aspire to produce (and consume) some darn good cookies and cupcakes. Maybe I will start with snickerdoodles. Who could resist cookies called snickerdoodles? I'll probably skip the recipe for steak and kidney pudding though. (Nigella is British, so she has a few items that I'm guessing appeal only to her countrymen.) I'll keep you posted on my baking successes or failures - who knows, maybe this will also become a food blog :)

Fun with cataloging

2007-05-02T15:57:00.000-07:00

Those of you who have been reading this blog faithfully (I think there are at least 3 or 4 of you) have probably been asking yourselves, "Where can I find a list of all the books in the fabulous Enna's collection?" Well, your prayers have been answered. Last summer, I discovered librarything.com, a site that is heaven-sent for people who are REALLY obsessed with books. I spent one really hot afternoon holed up in my bedroom (the only room in my apartment with an air conditioner) with my laptop, entering all of my books into an online "virtual catalog." So now anyone can see what books I have! And I can see other people's books! (This is inordinately exciting for me because checking out other people's bookcases is the first thing I do when I go to someone's house. Yes, I am a book voyeur.)

Anyway, if you actually do want to see my books, here they are:

http://www.librarything.com/catalog/enna406

I don't know if you need to have an account just to look at the site, but if you do, it's free. And if you decide to start your very own book catalog, let me know so I can snoop around it! :)

A great loss

2007-04-24T06:54:00.000-07:00

Last night I was half-watching the Red Sox postgame show when I looked up and suddenly realized they weren’t talking about the game anymore—they were reporting that writer David Halberstam had been killed in a car accident in San Francisco. He was reportedly on his way to an interview for a book he was writing on the 1958 NFL championship game.

Halberstam is probably best known for his political and war reporting (he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for his reporting on the Vietman War), but I know him best for his books on baseball. “Summer of ’49” is an excellent reminder that the heat of the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry is not a recent, ESPN-fueled development. And I loved “The Teammates,” a book about the relationship between four Red Sox players from the ’40s and ’50s—Ted Williams, Bobby Doerr, Johnny Pesky and Dom DiMaggio.

Halberstam was the master of the telling anecdote. One scene in particular from “The Teammates” stands out in my mind as a compelling illustration of Williams’ moody perfectionism: Williams berating his good friend Doerr for not slicing an orange in the proper way.

Whether he was writing about baseball or weightier topics like the United States’ involvment in Vietnam or the Persian Gulf, Halberstam was a master of his craft. It is our great loss that he will not be writing any more books.

Conservation of Apostrophes

2007-04-22T07:42:00.000-07:00

When I started this blog, I promised to write about some of the books I have read earlier this year. I have been very delinquent in doing so, so here is an effort to catch up:

"Eats, Shoots and Leaves" by Lynne Truss is manna for punctuation nazis like me. (The book's fantastic subtitle is "The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.") If you are like me and shudder whenever you see a sentence like "The dog barked it's head off," you should read this book. The much-misunderstood apostrophe gets the most treatment, since evidence suggests that most people were asleep during the apostrophe lesson in their 5th-grade grammar class. My favorite tidbit from this book is Truss' "Law of Conservation of Apostrophes," which states that "For every apostrophe omitted from an it's, there is an extra one put into an its. Thus the number of apostrophes in circulation remains constant, even if this means we have double the reason to go and bang our head against a wall."

Aficionados of other punctuation marks should not fear—the comma, dash, semicolon and other marks all get their fair share of attention too. The book even comes with a handy set of comma, apostrophe and period shaped stickers, so you can go around fixing other people's punctation mistakes. (Don't worry, I haven't actually used any of them.)

Patriot's Day

2007-04-18T17:02:00.000-07:00

Ah, Patriot's Day: that holiday that is hardly known outside Massachusetts but is one of my favorite days of the year. It has all the ingredients of a perfect day - a Red Sox game (in the morning!), the world famous Boston Marathon, and gorgeous spring weather. Oh, wait a minute. Scratch that last part, at least for this year. Monday, April 16 found Boston in the last throes of a nor'easter, complete with 50 mph wind gusts and steady rain. The race went on, but for the first time in several years, I was not there to watch it in person (partly because of the weather and partly because I had to make a little trip to the doctor's - nothing serious, just a little conjunctivitis). So, I only got to watch it on TV. As always, I was amazed by the sheer number of people who are able to run such an incredible distance. If those 60-year-old duffers can run 26.2 miles, why can't I? Maybe someday....

But, as great an accomplishment as running a marathon is, it pales in comparison with some of the exploits I have been reading about in "Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner." Dean Karnazes, the author, one day had a premature mid-life crisis and realized that his yuppified, sedentary San Francisco existence needed a jolt. His answer? Run. As far as possible. This guy is hardcore. He starts with a 100-mile race up and down several mountains in California. Then, a 130-mile race through Death Valley. In the middle of the summer, of course. That race ends with a run up the highest mountain in the continental United States. Not challenging enough? How about a marathon run to the South Pole - approximate temperature -30 degrees Fahrenheit. I know what you are asking - why on Earth would any sane person do these things? Karnazes offers this answer:

"What kept me going? Easy. The adventure. The challenge of pushing the human body beyond reality ... I had something to prove, if only to myself: that it could be done, that nothing was impossible."

Almost as unbelievable as Karnazes' running exploits is the list of food he consumes during races. During one 199-mile race (which is normally run as a team relay), he consumed 28,000 calories, including eight Power bars, an entire cheesecake, three burritos, five chocolate chip cookies, and the list goes on and on. Crazy!

You are what you read

2007-04-14T13:40:00.000-07:00

I almost never read poetry, but I couldn't resist taking this Internet quiz, "What Poetry Form Am I?" (April is National Poetry Month, after all.) It turns out that I am a heroic couplet:

I am heroic couplets; most precise
And fond of order. Planned and structured. Nice.
I know, of course, just what I want; I know,
As well, what I will do to make it so.
This doesn't mean that I attempt to shun
Excitement, entertainment, pleasure, fun;
But they must keep their place, like all the rest;
They might be good, but ordered life is best.

Pretty accurate for a personality quiz that only has 10 questions. Check it out - maybe you will turn out to be a limerick! Or a terza rima (whatever that is!).

The book is always better....

2007-04-07T08:25:00.000-07:00

Well, that's not always true. Sometimes the movie is as good as the book. Last weekend I saw "The Namesake," based on the incredible book by Jhumpa Lahiri. Once I got over the hilarity of seeing the guy who played Kumar in "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle" in a serious role, I really enjoyed the movie. Kal Penn was actually very good, but Tabu, the Indian actress/singer who played his mother, was the heart of the movie. You could sense just by looking at her the anguish she felt over being torn between two countries, neither one of them really being home. One minor quibble is that the setting of the movie was changed from Cambridge to New York, but it seemed to work. I had forgotten how much the book made me cry, and the movie did too. Kind of embarassing ;) (Let me note for the record that I almost NEVER cry over books - the only other one in recent memory is "The Time Traveler's Wife." If you haven't read it, do so immediately.)

I also recently saw "The Devil Wears Prada," which was definitely not as good as the book. Meryl Streep was fantastic though. Apparently the movie producers decided to give her character some glimmer of a human soul, unlike the book version of Miranda, who was purely evil. I didn't really like Anne Hathaway as the main character - she seemed much shallower than the book character. I also hated both her boyfriend and the suave writer who kept chasing her around, so I really didn't care which one she ended up with. (I won't give it away, but you can probably guess.)

"The Dead Beat"

2007-04-01T18:48:00.000-07:00

After all that angst, I decided to just let go of "Wickett's Remedy." I felt guilty for at least 10 minutes, but I have moved on. Now I'm reading "The Dead Beat," by Marilyn Johnson, which I picked up at the Harvard Book Store after hearing the author speak there. It's a book about..... obituaries! I know, you are wondering why on Earth anyone would want to read (or write) such a book. It turns out that there is quite a cult-ish group of people who zealously read obituaries, and after reading this book, I've become convinced that some of the best writing in journalism can be found on the obit page (depending on the newspaper, anyway). I have written more than my share of obits, but never one with a lede as spectacular as this, which Johnson quotes from the New York Times:

"Selma Koch, a Manhattan store owner who earned a national reputation by helping women find the right bra size, mostly through a discerning glance and never with a tape measure, died Thursday at Mount Sinai Medical Center. She was 95 and a 34B."

That's just one of the quirky tidbits scattered through this book. There's also a hilarious description of a convention of obituary writers and the frenzy that broke out when Ronald Reagan died on the last day of the convention. The chapter I'm on now describes the obituary obsession among London newspapers, who take a no-holds-barred, get-the-skeletons-out-of-the-closet approach to memorializing the dearly departed. The author includes a particularly amusing translation of some of the euphemisms often used in those papers - i.e., "tireless raconteur" = "crashing bore," and "affable and hospitable at every hour" = "chronic alcoholic," etc.

You might think that a book about obituaries would be hugely depressing, but this one has actually caused me to laugh out loud on the train (or at least crack a smile).

Dilemma

2007-03-25T12:36:00.000-07:00

So, I have been reading "Wickett's Remedy" since last week, and I have reached a point where I'm not sure I want to continue. This is distressing to me, because I HATE to not finish books once I start them. There have been occasions where I hated a book so much I finished it just to spite the author (I know, this makes NO sense). A prime example of this is "The Third Twin" by Ken Follett. I liked a lot of his earlier books, especially "Pillars of the Earth," but this one was just awful. I finished it anyway, seething with rage the whole time. Anyway, I am about 100 pages into "Wickett's Remedy," and the story really hasn't grabbed me. Nancy Pearl, the famous book-recommending librarian, has a rule that says if you're not into a book after 50 pages, you should abandon it. This book seemed promising after 50 pages, but it's really not going anywhere after 100. I have so many other books I want to read, it seems like a waste of time to keep reading one I'm not really enjoying.... (I hit one of my favorite used book stores yesterday and bought three more... I know, I have a problem).

Sick days

2007-03-17T11:13:00.000-07:00

I have been very delinquent in posting, mainly because I have been sick :( One of the benefits of being sick, though, is that you get to stay home and read all day. Yayyyy. On Monday I stayed home and read "The Devil Wears Prada," which was a perfect way to spend a sick day. A very guilty pleasure, and it also made me feel that my job is nothing to complain about. I'm looking forward to watching the movie and seeing how Meryl Streep portrays the insanity of Miranda.

I also finished "Black Mass" and have moved onto another book with Southie connections, although in a very different way. "Wickett's Remedy," by Myla Goldberg, is a novel set in Boston during the 1918 influenza outbreak. I haven't gotten very far in the book yet, but I liked the descriptions of Southie in the early 1900s.

"Julie and Julia"

2007-03-08T17:06:00.000-08:00

This book, by Julie Powell, is what gave me the idea to start a blog. Powell, a 29-year-old secretary in New York, decided one day that she would make her life more meaningful by cooking her way through Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" in one year. And, she would blog about it. I found myself totally drawn into the book, maybe because of my odd fascination with reading about people with really messed up lives. A good book to read when you are looking for an escape from your own messed up life. Reading this book inspired me to flip through Julia Child's cookbook at Barnes & Noble, but I was definitely not inspired enough to actually try any of the recipes.... especially not any of the ones that involve digging out marrow from a cow bone or bisecting a live lobster.....enough said. You'd think that as a vegetarian (mostly) I would be grossed out just by reading about such things, but I was strangely mesmerized—maybe because I know I will never actually eat such things. Anyway, good old Julie seemed to be having a pretty good time with her blog, when she wasn't wrestling with mayonnaise that refused to combine, so I thought I would follow suit—without the cooking part though.

Introduction

2007-03-07T17:22:00.000-08:00

OK, I stole the title of my blog from this excellent book by Sara Nelson. I admit it. I'm also stealing the premise of her book - she basically spent a year reading as many books as she could, and then wrote about it. Not a bad way to spend a year. Though, even if I spent an entire year reading, and doing nothing else (well, except sleeping and eating), I wouldn't be able to make it through the shelves full of unread books in my apartment. Last April, sensing the overflowing nature of my bookcases, my boyfriend gave me the very thoughtful gift of a new bookcase, which is of course now jammed full of books I have since accumulated but not read.

But let's get to the point - my plan for this blog is just to write about whatever I happen to be reading. I'm not really narcissistic enough to think anyone will care much about what I'm reading, but my friends who know what a bookworm I am often ask me for book recommendations. I tend to divide my reading pretty evenly between fiction and nonfiction, although so far this year I have been favoring nonfiction.

So.....let's get started. Right now I am reading "Black Mass: The True Story of an Unholy Alliance Between the FBI and the Irish Mob," by Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill. It's a book written by two Boston Globe reporters about the activities of South Boston gangster Whitey Bulger and some very corrupt Boston FBI agents during the 1970s and 80s. If you've seen "The Departed," Bulger is the real-life gangster that the Jack Nicholson character was based on. It's a fascinating story, especially for me since I live in the Boston neighborhood where Whitey grew up and based his criminal operations. All I can say is, Southie has changed A LOT since those days.... Whitey is on the lam and the old bar where he hung out is now fixed up and surrounded by a sushi place, a yuppie bar and tons of luxury condos. I didn't know much about this story until I started reading this book - it's almost unbelievable how far the FBI was willing to go to protect Bulger, who was in their eyes a valuable informant, but was literally getting away with murder. All in all, this is a very interesting look at a sordid piece of Boston history.

In future posts, I will talk about a few of the books that I have read earlier this year....