Cultural Consumption

I lied, sort of

2007-04-09T22:40:00.000-04:00

There is not a completed book at this time. I'm working on two: The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway (written when he was around my age!) and She Got Up Off the Couch: And Other Heroic Acts from Mooreland, Indiana by Haven Kimmel. The Hemingway is, of course, lovely. It makes me want to go fishing in Spain and drink ungodly amounts of wine. And there's nothing quite like unrequited love involving a impotent American writer and a mercurial, drunken British girl. When the new budget cycle starts, I'm going to buy a new copy of it for the library, as this copy is in pretty sorry shape. I've been enjoying Haven Kimmel's book as well. The highlight so far has been an account of Quaker summer camp.

I also must recommend a movie that I recently saw. It's a very literary movie, so I don't feel like I'm compromising the spirit of the blog by mentioning it here. The movie is called Surviving Desire, directed by Hal Hartley. Only sixty minutes long, Surviving Desire is about a frustrated English professor who falls in love with one of his students. My favorite part of the movie is a homeless women who shows up throughout, asking men to marry her, and muttering "to love and to cherish" to herself.

Where did March go?

2007-03-30T17:14:00.000-04:00

Recently, I decided that I love Austin so much that I wanted to make things legal. I am proud to report that in less than a month I will be a homeowner. While the prospect of living in a house that I own, and not having a landlord that makes me pay pet rent, is tremendously exciting, I've found myself absolutely swamped with paperwork: insurance paperwork, title paperwork, mortgage paperwork, etc. I'm sure that several trees have sacrificed themselves for the sake of this transaction.

Other recent distractions from my reading and blogging duties include a trip to Houston to visit the boyfriend's parents, a visit from my parents, a trip to the Hill Country for a friend's wedding, and a plethora of birthdays. And then there's work. But then there are days like today, which happens to be gloriously rainy. I have the evening to myself, and I'm going to cook dinner (something involving spaghetti, rainbow chard, grape tomatoes, and cannellini beans) and watch a movie, accompanied by my two special kitty friends.

There will be a book next time, I promise.

Syndication

2007-03-07T00:11:00.000-05:00

By the way, if you're a. reading this (which, let's face it, you're probably not) and b. you use some sort of RSS feed reader, you can subscribe to me. Amazing!

A milestone!

2007-03-05T00:08:00.000-05:00

I have just been informed that my friend Andrea links to this blog from her website. This means that two people link to this humble little corner of the Web. This outpouring of attention clearly necessitates a post.

2007 has been a fairly decent year for me, book-wise. I started out the year with A Taxonomy of Barnacles by Galt Niederhoffer. This book had a lot of interesting stuff going on. Maybe too much interesting stuff. One might even call it a "rich text." The book is peppered with binary pairs, which was both endearing and annoying. While reading this book certainly exercised my brain, I would not recommend it if one has been stuck at an airport all day. I read it under those conditions.

The next book that I read this year was Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone. If you want to give yourself nightmares, you should definitely read this book. You should also read it if you want a good overview of the situation in Iraq. The author, an editor for the Washington Post, does an excellent job of outlining the chain of events and all of the people involved. It also made me really, really scared, and really, really upset.

I also took it upon myself to finally read The Plot Against America by Philip Roth. I started reading this book about a year ago, and stopped reading it when the thesis monster took over. In case you missed all of the hubbub when it came out, this book is based on the premise that FDR, running for his third consecutive term, is defeated by Charles Lindbergh. Lindbergh has been hanging out in Europe, recovering from the tragedy of losing his son, and making friends with Hitler. Lindbergh, after taking office, makes a non-aggression pact with Germany. Meanwhile, America becomes a scary place to be a Jew. The book is narrated through a little boy aptly named Philip Roth, whose family is one of the few to be seriously concerned about Lindbergh's ties to Nazi Germany. The concept is rather ingenious, and the writing is delightful, but the execution of the story was kind of a let down.

Finally, I read Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. Honestly, I picked this book up because I read an article in American Libraries about how it has been challenged recently. The author frames both the stories of her father's demise and of her coming out (which are tenuously intertwined) with themes from great literary works, such as Ulysses. If Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being, while one of the most exciting things I've ever read, is a book that I can't seem to finish either) were a lesbian who wrote graphic novels, rather than a musically-savvy Franco-Czech guy, he would have written Fun Home. And that's all I have to say about that.

Upcoming: The Sun Also Rises. I developed a chip on my shoulder about Hemingway while I was in school, and I'm working on fixing that.

Back in the saddle...

2007-01-05T16:48:00.000-05:00

I decided that, in 2007, I would give this blogging thing another try. For some reason, finishing grad school made me extremely lazy. Also, gainful employment enabled me to afford digital cable, which means that I watch altogether too much TV. These developments resulted in not much reading and even less blogging.

Resuming my blog meant that I had to convert to the new Blogger, which proved to be a strange process. For one thing, it make me think that a blog that is most definitely not mine was on my account. Luckily, while I was trying to figure out how to contact Blogger, the mystery blog went away, and all seems to be fine.

Stay tuned as I finish my first book of 2007, A Taxonomy of Barnacles by Galt Niederhoffer.

Book 08

2006-05-03T22:49:00.000-04:00

I am now finished with my master's degree, so I am free to read whatever I want. To celebrate my newfound freedom, I read My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult. This book is about a thirteen year-old girl named Anna, who was conceived to be a donor for her sister, Kate, who has a particularly aggressive form of leukemia. Kate is in renal failure from having undergone eleven years of treatments, and needs a kidney. Anna has decided that she no longer wants to be Kate's personal organ bank, and sues her parents for medical emancipation.

This novel deals with a lot of tough issues. Which is more important: Anna's right to her own body, or giving Kate a chance to live? Should the girls' parents sacrifice one daughter's well-being to keep the other alive ? Their mom, who practiced law before she had children, decides to represent herself. She's opposing counsel and Anna's mother at the same time, raising all sorts of potential conflicts of interest. Dad is a firefighter and the girls' older brother is a closeted arsonist. Anna's attorney and her guardian ad litem are ex-lovers. You get the idea.

The book is narrated by several different characters: Anna, her sister, her mother, her father, her lawyer, her guardian ad litem, her brother. As we all learned in high school English, you just can't trust a narrator (Exhibit A: The Great Gatsby). Authors like Picoult combat the reader's lack of trust by using multiple narrators, which makes the reader feel omniscient. However, Picoult completely undermines this effect by inserting some major character-driven plot twists. I felt really let down by the end of the book, because none of the heavy issues that are raised in the novel get resolved. The ending was a cop-out.

I'm tired of reading books that are strong for awhile but ultimately can't follow through. With this in mind, I'm going to finally finish The Unbearable Lightness of Being (which I started, oh, last summer), because I know that this particular book won't let me down.

Book 07

2006-04-21T11:07:00.000-04:00

I just completed my leisurely stroll through Myla Goldberg's Wickett's Remedy. It's a novel that is mostly about a woman living in Boston during the 1918 flu epidemic, told with some really odd narrative strategies. An Irish girl from South Boston meets a rich medical student while working in a department store. They get married, and she moves out of Southie, and he decides to quit medical school in order to devote himself to Wickett's Remedy. Wickett's Remedy is this thing that he invented, which involves selling bottles of tonic, and then corresponding with the people who bought them. The actual "remedy" is supposed to be the letters; the tonic is more of a vehicle for selling it. Lydia's husband kicks it (he had always been sickly), she moves back to Southie, and her husband's business partner, a fellow named Quentin Driscoll, continues selling Wickett's Remedy. Meanwhile, Lydia deals with the flu epidemic, and decides to become a nurse to help the cause.

Some aspects of this book are really excellent. The main story is compelling, especially once the flu epidemic starts, although I could have lived without the actual Wickett's Remedy part. The book has actual news articles from that time period peppered throughout (mildly interesting), as well as various documents relating to something called Q.D. Soda. While the presence of the latter becomes apparent fairly quickly, I found them kind of tiresome. Goldberg also uses notes in the margins that provide other characters' memories of the events of the book, which are most told through Lydia's point of view. The margin notes were actually interesting, and their presence was more helpful than annoying.

I enjoyed Wickett's Remedy enough that I'll probably read Goldberg's other books at some point. Right now, I'm finishing Waiting for Snow in Havana, and having thoughts of reading Jodi Picoult's My Sister's Keeper.

An educational milestone...

2006-04-09T19:13:00.000-04:00

I have finished my master's paper! I will not mention the title, as it includes my place of work. However, I can tell you that it was a case study of library use among undergraduates who patronize the library in which I work, in the context of this "library as place" idea that's quite popular in the literature these days. I learned, among other things, that the students that I interviewed are very picky about where they study, and can be quite territorial.

Anyway, I'm still fairly busy at school, and will be traveling to a couple of different places for job interviews in the next couple of weeks. I'm currently reading Wickett's Remedy by Myla Goldberg, which I'm enjoying. I'm also reading Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy. I will be sure to post when I'm through with these two.

Book 06

2006-03-25T21:31:00.000-05:00

Although I'm pretty much devoting my life to finishing up my master's degree at the moment, I have found a few minutes here and there to read Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction by Sue Townsend. I've mainly been reading this first thing in the morning, when I'm drinking my tea, and right before bed.

This books is the latest volume in a series of books about Adrian Mole. I first discovered these books some time in high school, and they marked the beginning of a long-term love of books written in diary form. Since then I've discovered The Confessions of Georgia Nicholason, which is full of over-the-top British slang, and Youth in Revolt (whose main character, Nick Twist, is like the American Adrian Mole).

Adrian is a mediocre, self-obsessed man who fancies himself an intellectual. He's both incredibly dense and incredibly unlucky, which makes for some pretty entertaining scenarios. In the current book, he becomes involved with a woman who won't let him break up with her, and lives in an apartment building that is terrorized by an enormous swan. He also writes a letter to Tony Blair asking him to find proof that there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, because he cancelled a vacation to Cyprus and wants his deposit back.

I would recommend the whole series. It's fun to follow Adrian from the age of 13 and 3/4 to adulthood. I found the previous installment to be not so entertaining, but this new one makes up for it.

No new books for now

2006-03-22T07:56:00.000-05:00

I've been having bad luck with books lately. I've started a couple of books that were meh at best. One was Dog Days by Ana Marie Cox of Wonkette fame. Another was The Female of the Species, a collection of stories by Joyce Carol Oates. Part of the reason for my lack of interest might be the fact that I'm extremely busy with school right now. Thank goodness it will all be over in six weeks (!), and I will be able to read (and blog about books) guilt-free.

Book 05

2006-03-07T20:58:00.000-05:00

I've been meaning to read Until I Find You for a long time. John Irving has been one of my favorite authors since I was fourteen or fifteen. He was probably the first contemporary adult novelist that I really got into. My first John Irving book was the stellar A Prayer for Owen Meany, which I've read several times since. His novels are complex, detailed, and deeply personal. When reading his novels, you feel like you're spying on his characters and on him. This feeling is particularly acute in Until I Find You. In the publicity for this novel, Irving revealed that his latest work addresses some issues from his childhood, such as the absence of his father and the fact that he was sexually abused. While disappearing fathers and inappropriate sexual relationships are certainly present in Irving's other works, they take center stage in Until I Find You.

Book 04

2006-02-24T17:04:00.000-05:00

That Zadie Smith is so hot right now. And much of the hype is deserved. On Beauty is a good book by a better writer. I think that Smith will write better books in the future. While her command of language is commendable, her plotting and character development has room for improvement.

The major problem with On Beauty is that Ms. Smith is trying to do too much. All at once, this novel is about:

The dissolving marriage of Howard and Kiki Belsey.

The fact that Howard is white (and English) and Kiki is black (and American), and that they have three children who are dealing with being biracial.

Oh, and Howard is engaged in a very public academic feud with a conservative black scholar.

Who has conveniently been hired as a guest lecturer in their quaint New England college town.

I would write a great deal more about On Beauty, but I've already finished Book 05 and started 06.

Book 03

2006-02-19T17:42:00.000-05:00

So last week, I tried to update my blog, and Blogger wouldn't let me. Apparently, it thought that my blog was spam, and that I was not a real person. Can you believe that? Anyway, I got that straightened out, so now I can blog to my heart's content.

On Friday, I finally finished Freakonomics. Let me preface my comments on the book by saying that statistics scare me. Last summer, I took a research methods course for my master's program, and I learned how to do t-tests and chi-squares. I evidently learned what makes correlations positive, and how one determines whether or not things are stastically significant. However, all of that knowledge disappeared after I took the final exam. Steven Levitt uses a lot of statistical jargon. While he does (usually) explain what it is that he's talking about, I got confused at times.

If you've been living under a rock for the past year and don't know anything about this book, let me enlighten you. Levitt is an economist who likes to ask questions such as "How are real estate agents like the KKK?" and "Why do drug dealers still live with their mothers?" He then uses his econ super-powers to answer those questions. I think that the strongest aspect of this book is that Levitt challenges people to look at things in novel ways. Perhaps the most dramatic claim that he makes is that Roe v. Wade was responsible for the drop in crime in the nineties. In order to support his claim, he goes through all of the other standard arguments for a decrease in crime rates (use of capital punishment, increased number of police officers, a strenghtened economy, etc.) and refutes them. He also uses Romania (which had one of the highest abortion rates in the world, and then abolished abortion when the communists took over) as an example.

While I definitely think that Levitt is onto something (or a lot of somethings, really), I can't help but wonder if whether the relationships that he describes are causal. If I knew more about economics, I would probably be better equipped to assess the strength of his arguments, and I would have gotten more out of this book. One effect of my having read Freakonomics is that I've been thinking about incentives a lot, for what that's worth.

After venturing far outside of what I usually read, I think that it's high time for a novel. I'm working on Zadie Smith's On Beauty. I love novels about academics, so I've been really looking forward to this one.

Book 02

2006-02-04T20:04:00.000-05:00

At ALA, I had the good fortune of getting an advance copy of Pretty Little Dirty by Amanda Boyden. I have always been a fan of coming-of-age novels about suburban girls who get themselves into gritty, daring situations (along the lines of Blake Nelson's Girl, probably because my adolescence was nothing like that. Pretty Little Dirty spans eight years of friendship between two girls, punctuated by vignettes about the early eighties hardcore scene in Southern California. It sounds weird, but it works.

Professional Activity

2006-01-24T20:35:00.000-05:00

I just returned yesterday from the American Library Association's Midwinter Meeting. I have discovered the secret reason why people become librarians: free books. Now if only I had time to read them. Instead, I'm busy doing other things related to becoming a librarian, like finishing up my degree.

I am doing a bit of reading here and there. While at ALA, I started V for Vendetta. I'm also slowly working my way through Maureen Dowd's Are Men Necessary? and Freakonomics.

Book 01

2006-01-24T20:34:00.000-05:00

Between Christmas and, oh, two days ago, I completely lost my attention span. I have had little motivation to do anything else other than watch reruns of Lost. I decided to ease into the new year with a relatively small tome. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's latest novel, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, is only 115 pages long. The title in Spanish, Memoria de mis putas tristes, is much prettier.

I enjoyed this book, but with reservations. The premise is creepy; there's no escaping it. I have a great deal of trouble stomaching the idea of a ninety year-old man sharing a bed, night after night, with a fourteen year-old girl. The narrator, a journalist and scholar, has never had sex for which he didn't pay. He reminds me of another one of Garcia Marquez's characters, the luminous and obsessive Florentino Ariza of Love in the Time of Cholera. Like Ariza, the old man kept a diary of his sexual conquests, and had complex relationships with the prosititutes whose company he kept.

In any event, I should mentioned that I started writing this entry a couple of weeks ago. Perhaps I am trying too hard. Perhaps I have too little free time.

Happy New Year

2006-01-01T17:53:00.000-05:00

This blog has two purposes. The first is to serve as an external source of memory, in order to keep track of my reading. The other purpose is to improve my ability to write about literature in a non-academic way. While I am comfortable with analyzing aspects of literature (thank you, English degree), I have some difficulty reviewing books in a meaningful way.

At the moment, I'm still messing around with the settings and trying to make sense of the code used for the template. Hopefully, my blog will look a lot cooler as I learn more about web design this semester.

My first book of 2006 will be Memories of My Melancholy Whores, the latest work by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Disclaimer: I frequently link to the Wikipedia, and use it as a ready-reference source on my own time. However, as a trained librarian, I must remind my readers that it is not a reliable source of information in the academic sense.