The Final Martyrs, by Shusako Endo

Confession: I love Shusako Endo. Like, more than I love my pet. Seriously. I mean, I don’t know what he’s like in the original Japanese—and it may be worth it to me to learn to Japanese just to find out—but, at least in English translation, he’s one of my favorite writers. The reviews I’ve read that describe him as the “Japanese Graham Greene” perhaps help explain this irrational adoration of all his work; he is one of the few Japanese authors that I really get. Many foreign authors, particularly Asian ones, write from such a completely different cultural paradigm that, while I appreciate their literary value, their works really offer me nothing on a personal level. Endo, though, is a Catholic and therefore maintains some philosophical ties to the West; this makes him that perfect blend of foreign and familiar, and, with that blend, he brings unique insights into the psyche and experiences of a Christian. Moreoever, even his non-Christian characters are understandable, as they are cast in opposition to the Christians; in his works, the adrift soulessness of modern Japan, best exemplified in novels such as “Confessions of Love,” is not just presented as the norm, but identified for what it really is. With this positive identification, I can begin to understand, and even sympathize (since the West, of course, also suffers from its own brand of modern souless anomie). I have been deeply touched and impressed by all of Endo’s major works that I’ve read.

With that confession in mind, then, I can continue with the actual review. This book, a collection of short stories is, while enjoyable enough, far below Endo’s usual works in quality. I can think of several reasons for this: first, as a good postmodernist, I should confess to a bias of mine (other than the aforementioned fondness for Endo). I do not like short stories. They are, in my mind, the literary equivalent of a romantic fling: just as they suck me into the plot, just as I begin to understand and be fond of the characters, they dump me again, leaving me unfilled and frustrated. So, usually, no matter how good a collection of short stories is, any review I write will be less than glowing.

However, that wasn’t the only problem with this collection; I could forgive Endo nearly anything, after all, even having chosen the wrong medium. The main problem was that I had read it before.

Not in this form, of course. But let me explain. Endo writes in the introduction to this collection that he basically uses these short stories as practice, alternating between writing short stories and writing novels as a way to keep his creative juices flowing. As he says, “I can only assume that the characters who appear in the short stories collected here must be living in some form or other in the longer works that I am composing even now.”

Some form or other? Try “exactly the same form.” I recognized most of these characters—they were precisely the same as those in his novels, with the names changed to protect the innocent. So, while I appreciated the characters, it was hard to see them in this form, like seeing someone I know intimately reduced to a two-line description in a personals ad: single white female searching for single white male who likes eating ice cream and dancing in the dark.

So while these short stories are certainly good, in a very competent translation by Van C. Gessel (a professor at BYU, my former university—I’m proud!), and while they are certainly a fair representation of Endo’s genre--Catholics in Japan suffering persecution, Catholics searching for meaning in suffering, non-Catholics searching for meaning in suffering, former Catholics searching for meaning in suffering—they are but pale shadows of what he can really do, simple little warm-up exercises for the real performance. Unless you only have one day to understand Endo, don’t bother. Go read “Deep River” or “When I Whistle” or “Silence” or “Volcano” or “Wonderful Fool” instead. Oh, and prepare to be amazed.

Family Matters, Rohinton Mistry

Salman Rushdie once wrote that British literature was dead, “until the Empire wrote back.” I’m not sure if I agree with his pessimistic assessment of the contributions of the native-born, but he is certainly right about the Empire. Some of the best writers, recently, have been from the former colonies, most especially India and South Africa. Rushdie himself is on this list, of course, as are the likes of Anita Desai, J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gorimer, and V.S. Naipaul. And, having just finished “Family Matters,” I would, with complete confidence, add Rohinton Mistry to the list.

“Family Matters” is the story of, not surprisingly, a family; like so many family dramas, it features people rehashing the mysteries and dramas of the past, while struggling with difficulties in the present. In this case, the novel focuses on Nariman Vakeel, now an old man living with his stepchildren, and the results of an accident in which he breaks his ankle and becomes bedridden. Not-so-subtly kicked out by his stepchildren, he moves in the two-bedroom flat owned by his daughter, her husband, and her two sons.

Yet, though Nariman is a focal point at the beginning, as the effects of Parkinson’s become more pronounced, the narrative voice moves towards Yezad, Nariman’s son-in-law, Roxana, his daughter, and their sons. Mistry is an expert at balancing characters, and, therefore, balancing their problems; they are all equally likeable, and, alas, all equally unfortunate, fighting against poverty and past mistakes and, most of all, each other.

One of the brilliant things about this book is the way that Mistry creates a family that is, at time, dysfunctional, and, at other times, perfectly functional. This family loves each other, and they are trying their best, they really are, but sometimes circumstances are just too heavy to resist. If each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, this family is unhappy in the way that millions of families across the world are: poverty, tradition, and history are just too much for them. Nariman, an educated former English professor, fought against strict Parsi tradition by falling in love with a Catholic woman in his youth; he regrets, it is clear, letting tradition win. Yezad and Roxana fight against poverty, trying to raise their two sons and support their invalid father (-in-law) on a meager salesman’s salary. And everyone, from the stepchildren to Nariman himself, fight against history, against the family stories, against the death of their mother, Nariman’s wife, against their own complicated relationships with each other.

And, of course, they all fight against death. In contemporary American novels, when a character dies, that’s the point of the book: it consumes everything else that might have happened. Basically, nobody dies in American novels anymore. In Indian novels, however, it’s omnipresent, and not an all-encompassing obsession, not superfluous, and not ever silly. It’s just utterly ordinary—never a fuss, never unbelievable, never a plot focus, although sometimes a twist. It’s just something happens, all too frequently. And yes, it happens in this novel, and yes, it changes the plot, but, as always, it is handled by Mistry, as it should be, as just another trial in this vale of tears. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, but the story must go on.

At one point in the novel, a character says that, “everyone underestimates their own life. Funny thing is, in the end, all our stories—your life, my life, old Husain’s life, they’re the same. In fact, no matter where you go in the world, there is only one important story: of youth, and loss, and yearning for redemption. So we tell the same story, over and over. Just the details are different.” This is the best summary of the book anyone could possibly give: the stories are all the same, whether happy or unhappy. The novel gives a multitude of examples of youth, and loss, and yearning for redemption: Nariman, who has lost youth and his true love, and yearns for redemption from his choices; Yezad, who struggles, through photographs of his old neighborhood, to recall and regain his youth, and who begins to lose important relationships, and yearns for redemption for those choices; Jehanglir, who is youth, but who loses innocence and integrity, and who years for redemption from his choices. Redemption is, perhaps, the key here: redemption from poverty, tradition, history, life, and, perhaps most importantly, family. Redemption from the mistakes they make towards us and the mistakes we make towards them; the burden they represent and the joy that they bring.

In fact, the epilogue of the novel, which at first seemed jarring and out of place, best encapsulates this theme: the ending of the novel is happy, with all loose ends tied up, but the epilogue, five years down the road, is unhappy again, with a whole new set of problems. This is how Mistry keeps the book grounded, realistic: this is family. This is life. Overcome one set of obstacles and another one crops up. People change, house change, times change, and everything comes with a new type of loss, a new need for redemption.

This is a beautiful book; beautifully conceived, beautifully written. Through it, Mistry has convinced me, entirely, that family matters. Mistry has mastered the art of detail, the art of character, the art of plot, the art of setting, the art of dialogue. He has mastered the form, and I hope to see him “writing back” again and again and again.

The Five People You Meet In Heaven, by Mitch Albom

I read “Tuesdays with Morrie” a few years ago and was not impressed. It was gushy, mushy, sappy, cheesy, corny—whatever you want to call it, it oozed superfluous emotion and scurrilous wisdom, in the irritating “old dying man gives advice” package. It was, in a word, trite.

“The Five People You Meet In Heaven” is certainly a project along the same lines: Albom, seemingly as a career goal, wishes to give religion to people who are uncomfortable with religion. He’s basically a one-man pop guru, dispensing life advice with a heavy coating of secularism, and, as such, it’s nothing we haven’t heard before: treasure those you love. Look out for beauty. Follow the Golden Rule. Blah blah blah.

Yet, and I hate to admit it, I thought “The Five People You Meet In Heaven” was far better than “Tuesdays With Morrie,” although not quite good, per se. This is, of course, Albom playing his same song, but, like a piano-playing child progressing from the melody of “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” to playing the same song with chords, there’s an improvement. Basically, where “Tuesdays with Morrie,” was an irritating, self-righteous memoir, saturated in Albom’s own voice, telling his own experiences, “The Five People” is a novel, and, in it, Albom has learned the best lesson of all writing: show, don’t tell. Instead of telling us to treasure relationships, he shows us, through the guide of Eddie and his wife, Marguerite. Instead of telling us we are all connected, he shows us, through the chain of people Eddie meets in heaven, each of them having played a critical role somewhere in Eddie’s life.

And, actually, it’s a good message, and the execution isn’t half bad. The prose is nothing special, but it doesn’t distract from Albom’s goal. Maybe I was just exhausted from traveling through the night before, but I was, almost, touched. If you have to read one Albom work—and, as far as I’m concerned, they’re interchangeable, message-wise—read this one. At least you’ll get a decent story in the bargain.

We'll Always Have Paris: Sex and Love in the City of Light, by John Baxter

This is precisely the sort of book I read, enjoy well enough, and instantly forget. Some books don’t deserve this immediate oblivion: I’ve forgotten many a well-written novel, many a prize-winner, even, just because there was nothing particularly “sticky” about it for my memory, as Malcolm Gladwell might put it. However, I will feel absolutely no guilt about forgetting this book: it was unashamedly mediocre, and hence I will unashamedly put it out of my mind.

It’s not that John Baxter is a bad writer, it’s just that he’s not an amazingly good one either. His prose is just enough to get you through the book with pleasure, but not really memorable or brilliant. The real problem with this book, though, was its general confusion as to its own purpose. Was it a memoir of the author’s experiences of Paris? Yes. Was it filled to the brim with Parisian history? You betcha. Was it an account of his wife’s pregnancy and birth, and his own feelings upon becoming a father? Sure. Was it meant to trace the sexual appearances and practices of Paris of the past and present? Yeah, why not? Was it a paean to Paris’s beauty and uniqueness. Definitely. Was it all of these things at once, and therefore none of these things well? There’s the rub: in trying to encompass all of these varied topics, Baxter got in over his head and missed the mark on all of them. Plus, his persona was just not charming enough: I found myself not particularly caring about his personal life, and his research, while quite adequate, was not eccentric or interesting enough to merit my full attention. Some people can pull off the right blend of personal and factual: A.J. Jacobs’s Know-It-All was a good example for me. Adam Gopnik’s Paris the Moon is an even better example, considering that it’s also about Paris, but much better done. I still remember specific lines and scenes from that book—“elephants will be nudged” and “smooth”--and it’s been two years since I read. Baxter’s book, alas for him, will fade into oblivion by, oh, tomorrow. Too bad for you, Baxter.

The Master Butchers Singing Club, by Louise Erdrich

Like the lack of an apostrophe on its cover—is it really just missing? Or is it a singing club for master butchers? Should I have to wait until the second-to-last chapter to find out?—something in this novel is not quite right. The pacing? The character? Erdrich’s insistence on adding an Indian character (whose heritage is, in fact, totally irrelevant)? The lurking feeling throughout the book that something really truly earth-shattering is going to happen?

I should warn you, right up front, that nothing earth-shattering happens. If you happen to purchase a copy with the back-cover blurb that claims “the earth moves” when Delphine meets F, don’t believe it. Nothing moves at all, not even the plot. While it’s a pleasant enough story of a family and their complicated relations to their towns, their countries, their careers, and each other, it’s better suited to one of those vanity press-published family histories, rather than a major novel. And perhaps this is precisely what Erdrich intended: the characters are, rather loosely, based on her own German ancestors and their own immigration to North Dakota.

Basically, nothing in this novel hangs together to create an actually coherent plot. At one point, Delphine meditates on the idea of her life as a story line; Erdrich doesn’t mention it, but she must have felt quite disappointed. It’s the story line of everyone’s life: up here, down there, something small here, something small there. And, as such, it made me wonder why Delphine’s story line deserves a book, whereas my own will stay safely ensconced in my own journals, and lost forever after I die.

The characters are all pleasant enough, and the events, such as they are, interesting enough, but nothing really hangs together. Like the relationship between Delphine and her supposed best friend, with whom she never spends time, or her sham marriage to a gay Indian war veteran circus performer, something is not quite right here. Neither of those relationships is as they should be, and nor is the novel. I’m not sorry I wasted my time—Erdrich had her moments, including a particularly convincing bad English from a German (“I wish to Seattle to go”), and a book is rarely, if ever, a waste of time (though Moby Dick has a lot to answer for, with all those chapters about the cranial structure of sperm whales)—but I certainly don’t recommend it.

Moby Dick, by Herman Meville

It’s almost a pity this is a classic that everyone is forced to read, as it fits, and perhaps in some way even creates, the stereotype of a boring classic. (As for my own experiences, when I was little my mother complained about how boring it was, and up until now I’ve never had the courage to face it.) In reality, there’s a great story here, with some great themes—the obsessiveness of Ahab’s revenge, the war against nature, the perils of pride—but that’s about 200 pages, out of a total of 500. The other three hundred are long descriptions of sperm whales—their anatomy, their habits, their past, present, and future. Not only are these descriptions utterly boring, at least for those of us who are not cetologists, they’re utterly wrong: Ishmael, for example, stubbornly insists, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that whales are fish. If there’s anything worse than boring lectures, it’s boring lectures that are also incorrect.

Melville also indulges himself, more than occasionally, in his writing. He uses more than a few utterly irrelevant asides: at one point, he tells us of a certain character that ““He was a native of Cape Cod, and hence, according to local usage, was called a Cape Cod-man.” Good to know, Herman. I never would have guessed at this local usage. Also, he has a tendency to use words even I don’t know (“quoggy”? “pestiferously”? I swear he’s making that up) and he himself is so fantastically literate that many of his allusions went over my head (Melancthon? Paracelsan?) From time to time, it’s almost as if Melville descends into self-parody, and his writing ends up, to my ears at least, “mere sounds, full of Leviathanism, signifying nothing.” Oh, and because I’m immature, I kept giggling at the obvious homoeroticism of Queequeg and Ishmael; when, after sleeping in the same bed and waking in a “wife-like” embrace, Ishmael praises the size of Queequeg’s harpoon and his skill in using it…oh, and when Ishmael talks about “the milk and sperm of human kindness”…well, I couldn’t help it.

None of that really ruins the undeniable greatness of this book. Melville is a great writer when he can control his flights of fancy. He has an enormous vocabulary and an encyclopedic mind for literary allusions, and puts both of them to good use. He has an amazing ability to sketch details of eccentric characters, and many of his digressions can be forgiven just because of the sheer variation of humanity they reveal. He is well aware of the ironies of his story, and even the ironies of whaling at all (as he puts it, ““but pity [for the whale] there was none. For all his old age, and his one arm, and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all”). Ishmael is a great narrator, full of real personality, flaws, and ulterior motives, and Ahab, of course, is an amazing character—his first appearance on the scene is as dramatic for the reader as it would have been for the sailors. The story’s pretty rockin’, too, and has all the elements of great drama: jealousy, obsession, tragedy, love, adventure, you name it. Plus, that opening line will never die; despite having heard it a thousand times before, I was struck with real shock and awe upon reading it. Now that’s great writing. If only there was a little more of that, and a lot fewer paeans to the nobleness of the noseless brow of the sperm whale. At one point Ishmael, despairing of ever cataloguing all details about whales, exclaims, “Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!” If only Melville had had a little less of three of those, he might have generated a bit more of the third.

Ruth, by Elizabeth Gaskell

Thomas Hardy wrote a book very much like this one; it’s called “Tess of the D’Urbervilles,” and most high schoolers remember it, correctly, as a dour, unrelentingly grim tragedy of a doomed girl: having lost her virtue, Tess is left basically without choices, and, finally, is executed for the murder of her upper-class seducer. Hardy is not exactly a cheerful writer: as he reveals the fate of his tragic heroine, his prose, though clearly sympathetic for poor Tess, is dark and uncompromising. Unfortunate she is born, and unfortunate she must remain.

Ruth, of Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel by the same name, could be Tess’s twin: a pretty country girl with an unhappy childhood, seduced and led to ruin, almost unknowingly and certainly innocently, by an upper-class cad. Ruth suffers the humiliation of her downfall over a longer period than Tess, having been taken to a Welsh vacation town and paraded as a mistress, which, of course, antagonizes the proper townspeople. However, in Mrs. Gaskell’s imaginings, Ruth, while ultimately doomed, is given chances at salvation, and is doomed more through her own sense of duty than through any overseeing Fate. Moreover, Mrs. Gaskell’s voice, in contrast to the constant gloom and doom of hardy, is pleasant, even light, and manages to be exceedingly moralistic without ever seeming preachy—quite the accomplishment, if you ask me.

Indeed, the novel is, in a way, about redemption. Mrs. Gaskell sees the plight of “ruined” girls and sympathizes with it; what’s more, she protests against it, though this novel and several others. Ruth is hardly at fault for her transgression, Mrs. Gaskell seems to say, so why should it ruin her life? Through the Christian charity of a minister and his sister, Ruth is given another chance at a respectable life, pretending to be a widowed relation of theirs, and becomes a governess to an upstanding local family, while raising her young son, Leonard, whom she loves fiercely.

It is notable that Christian charity is what gives Ruth another chance; this book is strongly permeated with religion—true religion, even, seeing as how it focuses on the widowed (that’s Ruth) and fatherless (that’s Leonard) in their afflictions (the novel is still a tragedy. I’m warning you.). The most uplifting factor of the novel is Ruth herself; although Mrs. Gaskell goes perhaps a bit too far in emphasizing her saintliness, and so ends up somewhat heavy-handed in her descriptions of Ruth as a ministering angel, her gentleness, her modesty, her purity. However, playing up these aspects of Ruth’s character was probably the only way for Mrs. Gaskell to persuade her contemporary readers to not only accept a novel about such a shocking character—a fallen woman gone respectable! Heaven forbid!—but also to see that redemption really should be possible for such characters.

As a modern reader, I couldn’t quite empathize with the shock and horror that contemporary figures would have felt on seeing such a character, nor see the social progressiveness of Mrs. Gaskell in writing such a novel, but the attitudes of Ruth’s peers, that fallen women “meet with such leniency as they deserve” did get me thinking: what is today’s equivalent? We don’t judge loose women with such harshness nowadays—quite the opposite, we celebrate them—but there is a class of people we judge in the same way: the poor. Most members of the American middle class, I would venture to say, feel, somewhat obscurely and perhaps sub-consciously, that the poor are poor through some fault of their own, and, if they don’t meet with great leniency in society, their treatment is precisely what they deserve. It’s the old stench of Calvinism that still leaks into our culture, and, though the novelists, like Mrs. Gaskell, who are ready and willing to tackle the subject, are many, progress has been slight. I can’t help but shudder a bit when I think how future generations will judge us: will 22^nd-century readers, looking back on my time, have the same moral outrage towards society’s callous treatment of the poor as I do looking back on the Victorians? Only time will tell.

The Dante Club, by Matthew Pearl

On the back of The Dante Club is a quote calling Matthew Pearl a “new shining star of literary fiction.” What a quote! How flattering! What an honor! What veteran of the literary fiction scene said such a thing? John Updike? Philip Roth? Toni Morrison?

Oh. Dan Brown. Dan Brown. The man who gave us the two-page chapter, the muddled plot, the adverb-heavy style. He is now our judge of literary fiction? Oy. Heaven help us.

I don’t know what this says about our culture and its approach to reading; I don’t know what it says about the future of publishing; I don’t know what it says about the state of literature in the English language today. I do know, though, that I’m sick and tired of these “literary” thrillers. For heaven’s sake, people, there’s no need to appeal to the intelligentsia in your murder mysteries; they’re not going to be reading them anyway, except to look down their long noses through their monocles and sniff, ever so disdainfully. Why aim a book at people who will hate it, no matter what? Can’t we just call a spade a spade and admit these books are trash? I don’t ask for gunfire and grisly murders in my Booker Prize winners; why should I get Dante and divine mysteries in my pulp fiction? Just write a good old-fashioned shoot-‘em-up and I’ll be happy. That’s right, Mr. Pearl, I’m looking at you: less Oliver Wendell Holmes and his intellectual crises, more maggots feasting on dead flesh.

It doesn’t help that Mr. Pearl is terrible at doing anything literary. His pacing is all wrong: we spend the first hundred pages without a single clue about the first gruesome killing, and we discover the identity of the murderer a good eighty pages from the end of the book. His editing is shoddy: the book should be about 180 pages shorter, since that’s the number of pages that left me utterly bored. His ending is extremely anti-climatic; the murderer might as well have died of old age, for all the excitement the real resolution stirred. His research was, strange to say, too good: why was one of the main characters a mulatto? Just to show off his knowledge of the period. Why was there a horse distemper? Ditto. Most apparent of all, his ear for dialogue needs a hearing aid, and pronto: I know his characters are real shining stars of literary fiction and all, but is that any reason for them to say things, in all seriousness, like “I do not grow at all weary”? I know I grow weary of it. Also, puh-leeze: “I hastened here with the speed of an arrow.” Nobody talks or has ever talked like that, even, I venture to say, Longfellow himself. People write things like “hasten” and “the speed of an arrow”; they say things like, “I came fucking fast, man.” Perhaps Pearl is trying to point out these are Important and Intellectual Men; all it does for me is prove that this is Bad Dialogue.

All I can think is that Matthew Pearl must know someone, someone who decided to take this kid under his wing and publish the heck out of him. Someone who controlled the enormous advertising campaign, someone who called Dan Brown and begged flattering quotes out of him. (Come to think of it, maybe that someone was Dan Brown.) Or maybe it’s just the old Harvard fallacy again: just because I care about it, just because I think it’s the greatest place in the world, everyone must. Surely everyone will find this bit of trumped-up Harvard history appealing!

Not bloody likely, Mr. Pearl. And please, I’m begging you, stick to your day job and quit trying to be “literary fiction.” Please. I’m quickly getting tired of you and your kind. Or, since you seem to understand this better: I grow weary of you, with the speed of an arrow.

The Know-It-All, by A.J. Jacobs

Arcane Knowledge

In this book, A.J. Jacobs acquires a lot of it while reading the Encyclopedia Britannica cover-to-cover. Throughout the book, he spouts random facts—the opposite of déjà vu is jamais vu; hatters often became ill because they used mercury salts to make felt out of rabbit fur, and the mercury poisoning led to a mental deterioration known as erethism, hence the phrase “mad as a hatter”—that are sure to amuse and delight the reader. If, that is, the reader is me: I love knowing things, especially tiny bits of trivia to whip out at dinner parties, and so this book was eminently satisfying in that area. Too bad I don’t have any dinner parties to go to anytime soon.

Comedy

There’s also lots of this. A.J. Jacobs has a winning writerly voice; he manages to be self-effacing without being irritating—no mean feat for this reader, who is frequently annoyed by authors, clearly brilliant and talented, pretending to be otherwise. He also, unlike some other fact/memoir blends I’ve read (and here books like Wordplay and Crosswords spring to mind), manages to properly balance the public (the Encylopedia) and the personal (his wife, his child, his life). The combination of his facts and the reaction of his loved ones to those facts was not only hilarious, but also just right.
Not that his comedic voice rests only in his self-mockery; he also has a master touch for sarcasm and ridiculousness, which he uses throughout the book, particularly in pointing out amusing or ridiculous facts and situations. See examples to follow.

Encyclopedia Britannica

The real star of the book, I guess, and, let me confess to you: this book was so good that it almost made me want to go read the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Almost. I said almost. In any case, it increased my admiration for the E.B. and the people who write it; this is good, because Jacobs clearly meant to do so. At one point, he visits the office of the Britannica and is blown away by these people: their intelligence, their dedication, their quirky charm. They sound, in his description, like a bunch of librarians—“they love information—reading it, digesting it, and, most of all, organizing it”—but, since I have no less than three close friends in library school right now, I think that’s a great thing.

Giraffe

“The voice has so rarely been heard, that the animal is supposed to be voiceless; but it is capable of low call notes and moans.” Good to know next time I’m playing with kids: “A cow saws moo, a cat says meow, the giraffe says [imitate nonsexual low moan here].” (See? I told you he’s funny!)

Goethe

"...When Goethe wasn’t busy explaining to people how to pronounce his name, he found time to be a critic, journalist, lawyer, painter, theater manage, statesman, educationalist, alchemist, soldier, astrologer, novelist, songwriter, philosopher, botanist, biologist, color theorist, mine inspector, and issuer of military uniforms.

Well, at least he didn’t supervise irrigation schemes, that slacker. Oh, wait. My mistake. He was also a supervisor of irrigation schemes. "

Hip-hop

“...and yet just as I was feeling pathetic and totally un-phat, I read the Britannica’s assertion that Public Enemy and Wu-Tang Clan “were among the popular purveyors of rap during the 1980s and 1990s.” Purveyors of rap? Now that’s got to be the whitest phrase I’ve ever read. Yo, what up, dawg? Just hanging with my posse, drinking my Chivas, purveying some rap.”

Intelligence

Jacobs spends, I thought, an inordinate amount of time mulling over the true meaning of intelligence, including some meeting some experts, such a man offering memory-enhancing adult education classes and a psychologist specializing in intelligence. While this plot thread—and notice! I said plot! That’s how impressive this book is: he managed to take something as mundane as reading the encyclopedia and turn it into a real, honest-to-goodness plot!—is fun, and offers him a chance to reminisce about his father and his childhood, I spent the whole time with a lurking question: did he really ever, at any point, believe that intelligence is just facts? That reading the encyclopedia really would make him, in some concrete way, more intelligent? I hope, frankly, that I don’t get an answer, as an affirmative might make me lose respect for him, and here I was so enjoying thinking his self-effacing attitude was just a pose.

Memoirs

I’m not usually a fan, being more of a fiction lover, but I’ll make an exception here. It’s particularly refreshing to get a memoir that is so strewn about with hard reality, genuine facts, in addition to the author’s own musings. It certainly breaks up the monotony that the memoir genre can create. And, as I’ve said, Jacobs deftly and admirably balances the pitfalls of memoir, as well as the pitfalls of non-fiction, as well as the pitfalls of blending the two. We don’t get too many facts, or too little, and we don’t get too much of him, or too little. Three cheers for a genre structure well done.

Opinion, My Personal

Yes. Very yes. Find this book and read it--now!

Clear Light of Day, by Anita Desai

It’s been less than forty-eight hours since I finished this book, and the impression it made on me has already faded. It was lovely while it lasted, I’m sure, though a little slow, but why even bother to read something whose essence flees so suddenly after it is finished? I shut the covers, and bam! I forgot the main character’s name. (Okay, so I lied: the book focuses on the sisters Bim and Tara, and their brother Raja, and their brother Babu, and Tara’s ambassador husband Bakul. I had to look that last one up.) While it’s a nice little story—a blend between their childhood and their present, the attempt to come to terms with their very different present lives, and to heal the wounds of the past—for some reason it didn’t click with me. Meh. It looks like I’m just having bad luck with the Desais this month; maybe I should transfer to reading Singhs. Or Patels. Or Iyers. Or maybe even a Gandhi!

(I get the feeling Nehru would be boring.)

The Accidental, by Ali Smith

Overall, my feelings are mixed. This novel has flashes of brilliance, sentences, paragraphs, or even pages that made me nearly put the book down in pleasure and awe. The chapters about Magnus, for instance, were by far my favorites: the blend of mathematical thinking with Smith's cold, curt writing captured something lovely about the character and were beautiful to boot. When Smith had it going on, she had it going on, and at those moments I could see why this was shortlisted for the Booker--she can handle prose, that's for sure, toss it from hand to hand like a professional juggler, and her outings with poetry weren't bad. They were, in fact, precisely what her character would have written, with a little touch of authorial omniscience and irony in the sometimes maudlin, sometimes sober language.

Yet even the best juggler isn't entertaining for long if he neglects to vary the act. At many points I was, for lack of a better word, bored by Ms. Smith's attempts at "spare" prose, and confused by her vagueness. (Maybe I'm just stupid. Maybe I wasn't paying close enough attention. But is it too much to ask that an author explain herself, or at least her plot?) Also, someone needs to tell her to lighten up with the choppy, terse sentences--even Hemingway used long sentences sometimes.

The story was intense and emotional, yet from a few paces away--a searing family drama viewed from behind the projector, perhaps, with each of the characters just a little bit smaller, a little bit flatter, a little bit less real than they should have been. Yet, although that can be effective--some sort of postmodern, or post-post-modern, or whatever we're up to nowadays commentary on character, on society, on the nature of reality itself--in the end I was just confused. I didn't like the characters, with the exception of Magnus. Astrid should have been thirteen. Michael was bland. Eve was self-centered and unpleasant. Amber/Alhambra was just confusing. I don't care where you're born, honey, you've got no right to do that. And Ms. Smith, I don't care what your writing chops are, and I don't care what the Booker people think of you: give me a plot that makes sense, please.

Confessions of Love, by Uno Chiyo

There was something cultural going on with this book, something not quite right for my American sensibilities. The protagonist did nothing. That’s right: nothing. He was some kind of artist, it was clear, with some kind of fame, but I never saw him do any work. He was some kind of lover, I think, starting and stopping several relationships with several girls through the course of the book, but I never saw why. He was some kind of “sensitive new age guy,” I suspect, because he definitely had feelings—he shifted from rage to despair (suicide attempt included!) to passion to simple ennui—but I never understood why. He was like my slacker roommate from my sophomore year of college: presumably, he had a life, and friends, and real thoughts, and presumably he was supposed to mean something, but I, for the life of me, couldn’t figure it out.

I’m deciding to blame it on culture. There was something particularly Japanese about all this, I think—the way both despair and elation are glossed as inappropriate; the quiet acceptance of the demands of others, even when those demands are marriage (!), and, most of all, the notion of suicide as the best solution. I plowed my way through most of this book struggling to “get it”—why is this on the list of Japanese classics again? Is it just because the author was scandalous?—but finally threw up my hands in defeat when I read this line: “dying was the most natural step for us to take.” Was it really? I wasn’t even sure what their problem was.

(I’m kidding. I know exactly what their problem was. The protagonist was in love with one woman, but married to another. He met his beloved while searching for another woman he had slept with, and while in the process of divorcing; after getting divorced he married another woman, I’m not quite sure why. Because she was there? Because she was dying? That sounds like a Lifetime channel movie, but it’s true. Anyway, while his wife ran off with an old school friend, he chased her down and then left her abruptly to pursue this new love, who was really a former love returned, and after hanging out in his apartment for a while they decided to commit suicide. Are you confused yet? Now you see what I mean.)

I won’t give away the ending—that seems to be standard in the review business; not that it would make a difference with an ending as limp as this one—but, let’s just say, it was still weird and utterly foreign. Either that, or this was just a bad book. Take your pick.

(You can also find a better review here.)

The Piano Teacher, by Elfriede Jelinek

Phew. Based on my exposure to her, and, granted, that’s only one book and a few reviews, a few hours with an Elfriede Jelinek work is enough to make you lose faith in humanity. A domineering mother, a submissive and twisted daughter, a first gallant, then stubborn, finally violent piano student, and, well, a Turk having sex in the woods: here is our cast of characters. (Okay, to be fair, the Turk should hardly count, as he only features for a good five pages or so—which is a respectable amount of time to be having sex, I think—but he so nicely illustrates my point that I couldn’t resist.) Only two of those characters have names, and half the time they are simply referred to as “the teacher” and “the student,” as if Jelinek herself couldn’t be bothered to mention, or perhaps even remember, their names. (Come to think of it, it’s been a few days since I’ve read it and I can’t remember their names either.)

One gets the sense, though, that it doesn’t really matter with this book. Did you bother trying to remember their names? Or what they look like? Good for you. Nine thousand brain cells just died while you did. Aren’t you glad to have wasted them? Did you not bother remembering? That just shows what a narcissistic prat you really are. Have a thought for others for once in your life, why don’t you.

So yeah. She’s kind of a downer, this Ms. Jelinek. I don’t know what they’re putting in the water in Austria, but it’s not making her love her fellow man—even the fellow man that she herself created. She puts her characters in despicable situations and then tortures them from a distance. Sex, as usual, is the perfect example: nobody can just have a good old-fashioned roll in the hay, as that would be, well, fun. Moreover that would genuinely connect two people, even if only for a moment—heaven forbid she let a pinch of optimism seep in! (One review on the back of the book described her work as “pornography for pessimists.” This stuff is for pessimists, yes, but I shudder to think at anyone getting off on it.) Instead, sex is only sordid and disconnected—at a peep show, spying on a couple in the woods, and graphically described in a letter, rather than requested or even performed face-to-face. The one genuine sex act between main characters is, fittingly enough, rape. (I can hear Jelinek chuckling.)

I guess it’s good. I mean, the Nobel Prize committee can never be wrong, right? (coughToniMorrisoncough) Yet, as should be clear, I didn’t like it. I don’t agree with her view of humanity: it’s too dark, too disturbing. Isn’t there some good somewhere? Isn’t there a mother who can just let her daughter grow up? Isn’t there a piano teacher who is not stunted and bitter? Isn’t there a pair of lovers who can actually be together? And isn’t there a Turk, somewhere, someday, who could have a name? Maybe not in Austria. Gosh, I never hope I drink their water.

Manhattan Monologues

Reading this book brought back to mind a certain little poem I read many years ago, and haven’t forgotten (or, rather, whose concept I never forgot, and whose actual wording I Googled):

You praise the firm restraint with which they write -
I'm with you there, of course:
They use the snaffle and the surb all right,
But where's the bloody horse?

Auchincloss is clearly a master of prose; a master of quiet, well-restrained, appropriately bridled prose. Yet it did nothing for me, in the end, and the pairing of such polite prose with such polite people in such a polite society had me, if anything, a tad bored. It was like nothing so much as a society dinner party—some insight into people, some juicy gossip, but really nothing, narrative-wise, that I couldn’t pick up in a volume of Who’s Who. So, if you happen to bump into Auchincloss next time you visit the club—and he seems like the sort of man who would be there, sitting in the corner, reading a newspaper and smoking a cigar—tell him, next time, not to forget the bloody horse.

A Million Little Pieces, by James Frey

It is probably completely impossible, at this moment in time, for anyone to write a review of A Million Little Pieces and not mention Oprah’s “I’m disappointed in you” scandal, so I’ll just jump straight to the inevitable. When that whole he-fictionalized-some-events-in-his-memoir news first broke, I thought, “so what?” A memoir is, at bottom, a work of literature, not history, and I’ll lay money on the fact that every single memoir of all time has fudged some details—names, dates, timing, 20-20 hindsight—in order to create a pleasing narrative arc. No one wants to read a laundry list of facts, let alone a completely honest version of events—how good would a memoir be if it didn’t occasionally withhold information for the sake of tension? (Terrible, in case you’re not familiar with the concept of rhetorical questions.)

But then I read the book, and then I read the accusations, and I realized this isn’t just withholding a few names and dates here and there, or even reversing the order of events to keep a story logical: this is wholesale untruth. No wonder Oprah was disappointed; I was too. He fabricated major chunks of the story—hitting a cop with his car, nearly killing a priest, actively dealing drugs and skipping classes in college, instead of graduating on time and with honors. In essence, he turned the fairly bland story of a fairly average suburban kid, high on weed and occasional underage drinking, into a sensational tale of what has got to be one of the worst drug habits, not to mention the worst past, morally-speaking, of all time. (A list of his crimes could, and, according to him, extend past twenty-one pages. And that’s excepting the priest he beat unconscious.) This isn’t just turning 1971 into 1973; it’s turning Mick Jagger into the Devil himself, and it’s a complete and total lie.

All right. But what about the book’s intrinsic merits? Is it worth all this lying? As for me, I doubt it. Oprah called it “gut-wrenching,” “raw,” and “real” and said that it kept her awake at night. It had the same effect on me, at least the “awake at night” bit; however, I think that’s more on the rubbernecking principle than real literary merit: it’s really, really hard to turn your head away from a particularly gruesome train wreck, and the protagonist’s life (I hesitate to actually call it “Frey’s life”) is a train wreck if I’ve ever seen one. You keep turning pages just to discover how badly he’s going to screw up on the next page.

I don’t think I really learned anything particularly deep from the book; in fact, I think the protagonist’s stubborn insistence that there is no God and that he alone is responsible for his addictions, while a nice thought for those of us not a regular crack user, could do more harm than good among the millions of alcoholics who have found AA helpful. As for literary merit/writing style/all those pretentious reasons for reading, his prose was passable if not totally enchanting. I found his Habit of randomly capitalizing certain Letters irritating in the extreme, but otherwise the prose didn’t distract from the real story, and kept it flowing nicely, with plenty of swear words to make you believe that this guy’s hardcore, man, a real Alcoholic, Addict, and Criminal. Nothing like an F-bomb or two to get the reader’s respect and attention; maybe he should have sworn at Oprah for her forgiveness. It’d be raw. It’d be real. It’d probably keep her up at night. What do you say, Frey?

The Polysyllabic Spree, by Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby is my new hero. I think that every time I read a book of his, with the possible exception of “How To Be Good,” and I don’t know why I forget, in between reads, how completely amazing he is. This latest, “The Polysyllabic Spree,” which is a collection of articles he wrote for The Believer magazine about the books he bought and read every month, is perhaps my favorite of his works, as it tells, more than anything, his story. Reading this book is like hanging out with a good friend: it’s comfortable, it’s informal, it’s funny. Yet Hornby is infinitely cleverer, infinitely better-read, and infinitely, well, cooler than any friend I’ve ever had. (Maybe you’re lucky enough to have prize-winning contemporary novelists as your buddies. Hornby himself certainly is, as he constantly reminds us through his tongue-in-cheek name-dropping of Sarah Vowell.)

Hornby likes books, it’s clear, and that makes me like him. What’s more, he likes books in the best way: for their own merits, and their own pleasures. He’s the complete opposite of a snob about his literature, which is one reason I’ve always loved his novels. (He’s a good writer who, instead of striving to write in a “literary” way, strives to write in an accessible way. Most books aimed at the general public are trash, but Hornby has worked to make himself the exception. I love him for it.) As it turns out, he’s as much of a populist in his reading as in his writing. Although he reads plenty of highbrow literary stuff, and enjoys it, he’s not ashamed of reading and loving thrillers and mysteries. As he himself puts it, talking about a book he enjoyed for being not too excessively highbrow, “Kurkov loves his weltschmerz as much as the next guy—but he doesn’t see why weltschmerz shouldn’t come bundled up with a narrative that kicks a little bit of ass.” That’s right: why shouldn’t it? (I’m looking at you, Ali Smith.) Also, as he complains about literature about writers, or books about books, basically, he says, “What I’ve always loved about fiction is its ability to be smart about people who aren’t themselves smart, or at least don’t necessarily have the resources to describe their own emotional states.” Maybe he’s just overly persuasive, but I found myself nodding along with him: That’s right! That’s what it is! That’s why we love it!

Hornby states his populist attitude towards literature over and over again: in the introduction, for example, he tells people to read. Just read! But the point is, read for pleasure. Don’t struggle through “Lord Jim” just because you think you have to. Don’t only read what will make you look good in the eyes of your friends, or your English teacher, or the book reviewers at The New Yorker. Those attitudes are what make people hate books. Read what you want, when you want, and only then will you see the power and purpose of books.

Read, basically, because books are the best. I can’t put this better than Hornby, so I won’t even try: “Books are, let’s face it, better than everything else. If we played Cultural Fantasty Boxing League, and made books go fifteen rounds in the ring agains the best that every other art form had to offer, than books would win pretty much every time. Go on, try it. The Magic Flute vs. Middlemarch? Middlemarch in six. The Last Supper v. Crime and Punishment? Fyodor on points. See? I mean, I don’t know how scientific this is, but it feels like the novels are walking it. You might get the occasional exception—Blonde on Blonde might mash up The Old Curiosity Shop, say, and I wouldn’t give much for Pale Fire’s chances against Citizen Kane. And every now and again you’d get a shock, because that happens in sport, so Back to the Future III might land a lucky punch on Rabbit, Run; but I’m still backing literature twenty-nine times out of thirty.” Doesn’t that just make you want to curl up with a book?

The real brilliance of this book, though, is how it manages to hang together as a book, and not just a collection of articles (which, in fact, it is). Hornby has a gift for stringing along a series of inside jokes (such as his description of the Polysyllabic Spree, the imagined governing board of the magazine, or his repetition of a certain opening passage around Christmastime) that keeps the reader involved in the articles as a collective whole. Moreover, he throws in enough detail to keep his articles personal, to allow the reader a view of his year at home, but never really loses focus on the books. I loved the personal touches—they were just so true of books. We never read in a vacuum. We read while the kids are screaming, while dinner is burning, while a football match is on. Of course all these things affect our opinion of a book; why edit them out? This is the way reviewing should be.

At one point in the book, Hornby writes about reviewing. It seems to be apropos right now: talking about his friend Sarah Vowell, he writes that, “Asked by a magazine to review a Tom Waits album, she concludes that she “quite likes the ballads,” and writes that down; now all she needs is another eight-hundred-odd words restating this one blinding apercu. That’s pretty much how I feel about a lot of the things I read and hear...” That’s how I am at this moment: I quite liked the book. Loved it, even. I laughed out while reading it, in my room late at night, completely alone. What else can I say?

Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, Amy Krouse Rosenthal

You wouldn’t think such a “memoir,” written by someone with very little to tell, very little in her life that is not, as she herself puts it, “ordinary,” to be so gosh darn entertaining. Unlike most memoir authors, with their courage or cowardice or victimhood, the author’s only virtue over the rest of us is that she’s fantastically clever and funny; this, though, is plenty to make her book far from “ordinary.”

The virtue of this book is in the details—after all, those are all the author has going for her to distinguish her from any other writer, or indeed any other (wo)Man on the Street. She begins her hilarious spinning of details from the very first—as part of a page-long “Reader’s Agreement,” she cons the unsuspecting reader into agreeing to “thrust your arms upward and emit a loud, staccato Hey! just like circus performers do at the end of each stunt” and that “you agree that yes, we all suffer, perhaps even daily and deeply, but who wants to hear it?,” and even to offer a credit card number and expiration date. On the publisher’s page, where they list copyrights and “not responsible fors,” we learn that her publisher, or maybe just her, is “not responsible for the weather, the moon, or the scalding nature of soup.” How could you not love someone who messes with the mundane like this?

She also, in a helpful way, offers an orientation to her era and lifestyle, right in the first few pages, as she summarizes our day with some key information: Cost of Living Averages, Countries in Power, Top News Stories, Ways We Exercise, Machines We Own, What We Call the Other Driver When Angry (bitch, asshole, fucking bitch, fucking asshole, for the record). This also helpfully provides an orientation to the type of book it’s going to be—hilarious twists on the utterly ordinary, from a very, very clever mind.

The rest of the book is touted as an encyclopedia, with a number of alphabetized entries containing random thoughts, sketches, events, and ponderings from her life. She has a section devoted to her childhood, a timeline that contains everything from being born (1965) to wondering why the sign “NO STANDEES” at front of the bus doesn’t just say “NO STANDING” (1976-1983). She also, in this inspired section, includes a few tables, in which she charts Things That Confused Me For Much Longer than They Should Have (Horatio Alger—baseball player or famous writer?; Which ones were the mittens and which ones were the gloves; Thought they were saying “ten year,” like really good teachers would be granted a ten-year contract. Tenure. Oh. They’re saying tenure.) and What My Friends Were Confused By As Children (I used to think I could see atoms, but it was just dust; I thought that when my parents were little the world was in black and white because all the pictures of them were black and white; I always got the words pedestrian and Presbyterian confused. I didn’t understand why Presbyterians always got the right of way.) Other encyclopedia entries chronicle strange thoughts or habits (“It would be difficult to convince me that leaning has no effect whatsoever on the outcome of my bowling”), random facts she’s picked up from friends (one of the employees at Encyclopedia Britannica designed it so that the spine said “Menage—Ottawa,” and the editors never picked up on it) and daily habits, such as when she used to leave change lying around the neighborhood, along with a note and a prestamped postcard asking the person who picked it up to tell her how she spent it.

Since this book is small in aim and scope, it is unlikely to change any lives; yet, it is well worth the reading. As she weaves certain themes into her encyclopedia—childhood, parenting, happiness, loss—so subtly that a mere skimmer might not notice them, Rosenthal shows herself to be, in addition to being charming and utterly hilarious, warm and wise, a devoted wife and mother, a keen observer of human nature, both in herself and in others, and the foibles of modern life. (We really do call other drivers by those names, after all.)

The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell

Loved it. Very good pop science—summaries of real science, real-life examples, all in a crystal clear writing style that, while fluent and actually quite lovely, did not distract from the actual material, which is, after all, the purpose of journalistic writing. It's an interesting topic too—the theory of the history of ideas, trends, fads, even diseases.

Important Ideas from the book:

The 80/20 principle—20% of the participants will do 80% of the work. Thus, 20% of criminals commit 80% of crimes, 20% of beer drinkers drink 80% of the beer, 20% of drivers cause 80% of all car accidents. It's like group work, only more so.

There are three types of people important for the spread of an idea, epidemic, trend, whatever: Connector, Maven, Salesman. Connectors know a lot of people, especially "weak link" acquaintances, and bring them together. Mavens know a lot of information—sometimes on a certain subject, sometimes on a number of subjects—and like to share it. Salesmen are just what they sound like—they like to persuade people. Without their role, lots of people may know about the ideas, but they won't take any action.

Rod Steiger is the best connected actor of all time, in Kevin Bacon terms. Kevin Bacon can be connected to anyone in an average of 2.8312 steps, but that's only ranking 669^th.

Mutual exclusivity: children, when learning a language, don't believe that one object can have two different names. This is helpful because then if they already know "apple" and "red" and someone tells them the object is "round," then they know to assign that word to another quality of the apple, not "apple" or "red." Sounds logical and all, but I wonder when they gain the capacity for synonyms?

Research of small children shows that they often use narratives or conversations with themselves to make sense of their world; in these conversations, their language is much more complex than their language when conversing with their parents. I find the same thing when learning a foreign language—I have a much better accent, grammar, etc when I'm talking to myself. Why is this? I've always attributed it to performance anxiety, but is it possible that little children suffer the same sort of performance anxiety that a foreign language learner does?

The rule of 150: that's about the maximum number of people that can be in any group and still have the group feel close and small, with personal connections between each member of the group. (How big are wards nowadays?)

In one experiment, a psychologist put people in pairs, half of them dating couples, half of them strangers, and had them read a number of sentences with underlined words. In the end, the dating couples remembered the tasks better. The psychologist then concluded that "when people know each other well, they create an implicit joint memory system—a transactive memory system—which is based on an understanding about who is best suited to remember what kinds of things. Hence, divorces and breakups are so painful partially because it means a loss of that memory." This should also be why it's easier to remember memories with a person when you're actually with them—while KT and I were close friends, for example, we had no problem remembering our complex system of hand gestures, but now that I don't have her around anymore, I find my memory failing.

Children of smokers are twice as likely to become smokers themselves, but, as it turns out, children of smokers who are adopted and raised by nonsmokers are also twice as likely; in the end, it's the genes, not the childhood, that count.

All in all, a fascinating read.

Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell

Also a great book, at least as good as The Tipping Point. I’m highly impressed and I see why they were both bestsellers. Among the interesting facts I learned:

When corrected for variables like age and gender and weight, an inch of height is worth $789 a year in salary.

Spontaneity isn’t random. We have to train for it. As Gladwell says, “How good people’s decisions are under the fast-moving, high-stress conditions of rapid cognition is a function of training and rules and rehearsal.” Hence, even an improve team has to practice.

Lies My Teacher Told Me, James Loewen

This was amazing and I highly recommend it to anyone and everyone. It's entertaining, despite the fact that it's nonfiction, it's well-written, it's full of interesting facts, and it's utterly germane to anyone who's ever gone to high school in America. It made me think long and hard about lots of things, which I'll probably only briefly touch on here, along with the quotes that inspired the thought. (I'll also post some random facts that I learned. He includes some fascinating info.)

1. Some people think Columbus was Jewish, and a recent convert to Christianity. Awesome.

2. Reasons the Indians were so susceptible to European diseases: 1. they had no diseases with them, for the cold weather while crossing from Siberia killed all the germs, 2. they didn't have any large livestock (sheep, pigs, horses, cows, goats) that could transmit diseases, 3. the social density of their societies wasn't high enough to transmit diseases, 4. they practiced basic hygeine. (Squanto tried to teach the Pilgrims to bathe, but failed.)

3. In 1617, a disease (currently unknown, possibly the chicken pox or bubonic plague) brought by English fishermen wiped out between 90 and 96 percent of the Indian population of coastal New England. That is why the Pilgrims arrived to find lands cleared but no people farming them, and that's the only possible reason the Pilgrims could have survived--the "wilderness" what not actually a wilderness, but a highly cultivated area that had been recently depopulated. (Not virgin land, but a widowed land, as Loewen puts it.) Early Europeans arrived in some Indian towns to find that 950 of 1000 inhabitants had died, with their corpses still lying in the streets, with no one left to bury them.

4. Squanto, having been captured by Englishmen a few years before and sent to England as a slave, already spoke English when the Pilgrims arrived. Talk about the original "no need to study a foreign language since everyone speaks English anyway"!

5. Whites captured by Indians often had to be bound hand and foot and forced to return to white society; Indians captured by whites never had to be asked twice if they wanted to return. Embarrassing.

6. The Founding Fathers took a lot of their inspiration from the Iroquois League, including the American logo of the eagle clutching arrows. Too bad no credit is ever given.

7. An outsider's description of Christianity: "These Americans believed that one great male god ruled the world. Sometimes they divided him into three parts, which they called father, son, and holy ghost. They ate crackers and wine or grape juice, believing that they were eating the son's body and drinking his blood. If they belived strongly enough, they would live on forever after they died." Sounds pretty silly when put that way, huh?

8. "King Philip's War cost more American lives in combat, Anglo and Native, in absolute terms than the French and Indian War, the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, or the Spanish-American War. In proportion to population, casualties were greater than in any other American war." (111) Yet, who's heard of this war?

9. My impression is that the real problem with these history textbooks is that they are viewing history as an unbroken line of progress--from the past to the future, we just keep getting better! History isn't like that. We were different in the past, but not worse, and we're different now, but not better. That's all. Plus, this style of thinking leads one to believe that things "had" to be that way, which in turns gives us a completely simplified and uninteresting view of history. (Hence, the problem of the textbooks.)

10. "The largest single difference between our two main political parties lies in how their members think about social class: 55 percent of Republicans blamed the poor for their poverty, while only 13 percent blamed the system for it; 68 percent of Democrats, on the other hand, blamed the system, while only 5 percent blamed the poor." (199) This is why I vote Democrat. (Or, when I get a chance, Socialist.)

11. Educated people were more likely to support the Vietnam War--instead of education making people more tolerant and peace-mongering, it makes them more likely to support the system, having been thoroughly indoctrinated into it. Just a little bit of food for thought.

A Man Without a Country, Kurt Vonnegut

I love Kurt Vonnegut dearly, even if I don't always agree with him. (We are here on this earth for more than just to "fart around.") This book, mostly autobiographical ramblings, showcases both aspects: his humor, which I fully endorse, and his worldview, with which I take a few exceptions (although his bleak outlook on the modern world, unfortunately, looks increasingly true). He also adds in a few extra tidbits about creative writing--"do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college."--story narratives, using a graph of "good fortunate--ill fortune" and "beginning--end," and aspersions on George Bush and his world--"I do know that a sentence, if it is to be complete, must have both a subject and a verb." (This is about as mild as he gets about Dubya. Remember how I said his outlook is increasingly true? This is what I mean. He hates Bush, and I fully support that.)

Anyway, it's good reading for 45 minutes or so, for a Vonnegut fan, but I would hardly use it as an introduction to his stuff; "Cat's Cradle" or "Slaughterhouse Five" would do a much better job of both showcasing his worldview and his humor, and not feeling like they were written during a slow afternoon at the rest home.

The Art of Travel, Alain de Botton

I've never been disappointed by anything by Monsieur de Botton (all right, so he's English: so what?) and this book was no exception.

All right, thoughts/quotes from the book:

1. Why art is more satisfying than life: "the anticipatory and artistic imaginations omit and compress; they cut away the periods of boredom and direct our attention to critical moments, and thus, without either lying or embellishing, they lend to life a vividness and a coherence that it may lack in the distracting wooliness of the present." (p 14-15)

2. Why travel doesn't solve all our problems: "I had inadvertently brought myself with me to the island." Paradise, as pictured, can never quite be paradise because we are there, with all our same worries and flaws. (Rather like Schrodinger's cat, right?) Also, places cannot fully determine our happiness because they cannot fully change us.

3. "It was the fate of poets, like Christian pilgrims, to live in a fallen world while refusing to surrender their vision of an alternative, less compromised realm." Why then, can't a strict religion (like, say Mormonism, which definitely shares this "Christian pilgrim" view--only think of "in the world but not of the world") produce good poets? If the worldview is the same, one would think that religious folk would feel a certain kinship with poets, in acknowledging that shared awkwardness in post-Eden milieu. Is it that because religious people already have their vision as a given, they shy away from poetry, in which they would be forced to invent it on their own? Or is it like two awkward, unpopular teenagers, instinctively realizing that, in joining forces, they would only be asking for more bullying, more ostracism, more hatred from "the world"? Or have they just not realized the similarity?

4. About Edward Hopper: the paintings..."despite the bleakness they depict, are not themselves bleak to look at but rather allow the viewer to witness an acho of his or her own grief and thereby to feel less personally persecuted and beset by it. It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad..." (47). Bingo. Another of the redeeming features of Art.

5. "Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains. There is an almost quaint correlation between what is before our eyes and the thoughts we are able to have in our heads: large thoughts at times requiring large views, and new thoughts, new places. Introspective reflections that might otherwise be liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape. " (54) This is why I like travelling.

6. "To condemn ourselves for these minute concerns is to ignore how rich in meaning details may be." (75) One can fall in love, with a person, place, or thing, merely over the details. They are important.

7. "A danger of travel is that we may see things at the wrong time, before we have had an opportunity to build up the necessary receptivity, so that the new information is as uselses and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain." I've done this more than once. I really wish I could go back to some places--Greece, let's say--with a little more information about the significance, both historical and personal, of what I'm seeing.

8. He really liked the Sinai, saw in it the Sublime and the potential for communication with God. I had nearly the opposite reaction--it's a Godforsaken wasteland, the uglist place I have ever seen--yet came to the same conclusion: here, in that very same Godforsaken place, was a group of people perhaps the least God-forsaken of all time, and the marks of God's presence were, ironically enough, still covering the landscape.

9. This is the lesson he draws from the book of Job: "Do not be surprised that things have not gone your way, [God] declares: the universe is greater than you. Do not be surprised that you do not understand why they have not gone your way, for you cannot fathom the logic of the universe...Accept what is bigger than you and what you do not understand." (171)

10. "There was only one way to possess beauty properly, and that was by understanding it, by making oneself conscious of the factors (psychological and visual) responsible for it." (216) This made me want to learn to draw. Maybe that's something I'll do in all my spare time.

Ludmilla's Broken English, by DBC Pierre

I do not like DBC Pierre. I did not like "Vernon God Little," his first attempt, and I liked this second attempt even less--at least "Vernon God Little" had controversy. I can't exactly pinpoint why I dislike his books--their callousness? His bragging prose? The fact that he doesn't really know what he's writing about? (Seriously, Pierre. You're not American or Russian. Quit writing about it!) I don't find them funny, and I don't find them charming, and I do find them confusing. Definitely NOT recommended.

The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai

Quiet, beautiful, but hardly the type of book to make a lasting impression on me. This, I've found, has been the problem with many Booker Prize winners--they're either so pretentious as to be confusing and unpleasant ("The Famished Road" springs to mind here) or they're so artsy as to just fade into the background of elegant, almost soporific prose. This one made for a good two hours of entertainment on a Delhi-Bangkok plane ride, but now, only a few days later, I have a hard time recalling the names of the main characters or why I was supposed to care about them. It fits into much of fiction for me that way--I enjoy them while I'm reading them, but months later, when asked if I recommend it, all I can remember is, oh yes, that one was good. Sure, go ahead and read it.

What I really wonder, though, is why choose this one for the Booker Prize? Were there no more energetic books this year? Or was the tripartite America-England-India story line just too good to resist, politically? I suspect the latter, unfortunately. In the end, the America parts were my favorite, and I would have enjoyed more focus on the poor immigrant, finding America far from being the land of opportunity he expected. In any case, the split of the story lines, instead of introducing us to a number of sympathetic characters, only ended up splitting my affection for them--as if I only have so much tenderness I can give to fictional people, and by positing six or seven main characters, Desai reduced the portion given to each of them. What a pity.