This was extremely difficult. Interesting, but it's been a long time since I read something this theory-heavy (probably not since college) and I had to take it slowly.
Nemerov is an art historian who writes about the impact of art on its contemporary surroundings, and vice versa, and in this he attempts to substitute an 1863 performance of Macbeth for a piece of art. I think he falters slightly in doing so: as he talks about theater it becomes clear that this is not his forte, although he does a good job of explaining that a nineteenth-century performance, with its static set-pieces and tableaux, is far better suited to this than a modern one.
His thesis (I think) is that a piece of art, or a theater performance, in an age of mass communication, is able to become both a "place" and also impact other places. The photographs of actors as their characters which were distributed after every performance, the photographs of the battlefields, and the telegraph connecting a command from Lincoln (who attended the performance in question) to his officers in the field hundreds of miles away, are devices which de-isolated individual places in a way not previously possible.
Nemerov tries to cram his thesis into a discussion of almost everything he finds interesting from the time period, and jumps around a bit much: for two pages he's talking about a painting of an interior and then suddenly he's discussing the death of a Confederate officer in a prisoner-of-war hospital (and I have to confess I entirely missed what the point of that death, as regards art or places, was). It all felt rather hasty at times, and hasty juxtapositions combined with dense theory writing are a tad overwhelming for someone out of practice reading the stuff.
When Nemerov just pulls out his art history chops and talks about a piece of art in its historical context, and its structure, design, impact, I liked this book quite a lot. I had a magnificent art history class my senior year of high school, and honestly thought that was what I was going to do with the rest of my academic career and possibly with my life. The art history department at my college turned out to have needed more people like my high school art history teacher, desperately, and back to the inevitable English major I went. But I still love the subject and its vocabulary.
Nemerov also occasionally describes something as "testicular"seemingly just for the sake of using the word. In no case did I think that what he was describing was actually testicular. One passage, about women on battlefields collecting bullets, which I kid you not included the phrase "goddesses of sterility gathering the balls of dead men, nuts of a landscape serried with earthworks", made me shriek with laughter while the faces of all the theory boys I've known flashed before my eyes.
Overall, an interesting and very challenging read with some flaws. And I definitely had to turn on parts of my brain which I haven't used in a good long time, and that's never a bad thing.
Next up: The Tiger's Wife, by Téa Obreht, though I'm allowing myself some recuperative re-reading in between.
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Yellow Lies, by Susan Slater
I keep giving Susan Slater's Ben Pecos mysteries a try. They have approving blurbs from Tony Hillerman, after all. But after Thunderbird, and now this one, I have to conclude that she's just not good.
The characters are cardboard, the villains are identifiable ten pages in, and the mystery's solution consists of an Exposition Theater performance by said villains for someone they're about to kill. "Since you're going to die, let me tell you exactly what I've done!" The writing's unremarkable, and though this one constantly mentioned food, none of it was New Mexican food, and so I just do not get the point of that.
It's not the unfairness of reading this directly after Boyle, either. I happily sit down with Hillerman after reading Impressive Literature, all the time, and he doesn't suffer in comparison. Apples and oranges. But I'm not going to read any more books by Slater.
Next up: Acting in the Night: Macbeth and the Places of the Civil War, by Alexander Nemerov, which, by the third page, already features phrases like "instead I have aimed to treat that night's performance of Macbeth as a place, even as a Thing in Martin Heidegger's sense" and "the capacity of an aesthetic act to produce such an earth of self-secluding points". I may be in trouble.
The characters are cardboard, the villains are identifiable ten pages in, and the mystery's solution consists of an Exposition Theater performance by said villains for someone they're about to kill. "Since you're going to die, let me tell you exactly what I've done!" The writing's unremarkable, and though this one constantly mentioned food, none of it was New Mexican food, and so I just do not get the point of that.
It's not the unfairness of reading this directly after Boyle, either. I happily sit down with Hillerman after reading Impressive Literature, all the time, and he doesn't suffer in comparison. Apples and oranges. But I'm not going to read any more books by Slater.
Next up: Acting in the Night: Macbeth and the Places of the Civil War, by Alexander Nemerov, which, by the third page, already features phrases like "instead I have aimed to treat that night's performance of Macbeth as a place, even as a Thing in Martin Heidegger's sense" and "the capacity of an aesthetic act to produce such an earth of self-secluding points". I may be in trouble.
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
World's End, by T.C. Boyle
I found this book fantastic, which unfortunately means that I won't have too much to say about it. I find that I have tons to say about books I disliked, and not that much for those I liked.
World's End follows three families in upstate New York through three time periods - the 1680s, the 1920s, and the 1960s. Our protagonists either behave extremely badly - every married character save one, by my count, is having an affair - or are nice people to whom terrible things happen (maiming, eviction, affairs). It was hard to muster up sympathy much of the time, and yet I couldn't wait to see what happened next, and adored Boyle's writing style, and definitely am going to check out more of his books.
The line between unexpectedly good, heavily-metaphored writing, and pretentiousness, is a very fine one. This book won the PEN/Faulkner Award, and I have previously read books which also did and which read like my mercifully-soon-abandoned college attempts at imitating Faulkner (best example is The Mercy Seat, by Rilla Askew - it is very bad indeed). I can't really articulate why Boyle stays on the good side of that line, because occasionally his language does get too much, and he's dealing with dicey subjects like mystic Native Americans and ghost sightings and such. And yet it works. He balances it.
So, yeah. Don't have much more than that, but I highly recommend it, and am very glad that he's as prolific a writer as he is. Finding a writer you like and realizing there are ten-plus novels out there by that writer is a delicious feeling.
Next up: Yellow Lies, by Susan Slater.
World's End follows three families in upstate New York through three time periods - the 1680s, the 1920s, and the 1960s. Our protagonists either behave extremely badly - every married character save one, by my count, is having an affair - or are nice people to whom terrible things happen (maiming, eviction, affairs). It was hard to muster up sympathy much of the time, and yet I couldn't wait to see what happened next, and adored Boyle's writing style, and definitely am going to check out more of his books.
The line between unexpectedly good, heavily-metaphored writing, and pretentiousness, is a very fine one. This book won the PEN/Faulkner Award, and I have previously read books which also did and which read like my mercifully-soon-abandoned college attempts at imitating Faulkner (best example is The Mercy Seat, by Rilla Askew - it is very bad indeed). I can't really articulate why Boyle stays on the good side of that line, because occasionally his language does get too much, and he's dealing with dicey subjects like mystic Native Americans and ghost sightings and such. And yet it works. He balances it.
So, yeah. Don't have much more than that, but I highly recommend it, and am very glad that he's as prolific a writer as he is. Finding a writer you like and realizing there are ten-plus novels out there by that writer is a delicious feeling.
Next up: Yellow Lies, by Susan Slater.
Sunday, January 8, 2012
Moby-Dick marathon
Friday night I pounded through Why Read Moby-Dick?, by Nathaniel Philbrick. It was less academic than I expected; mostly it's simply Philbrick talking briefly about the parts of Moby-Dick which he finds most awesome. Nothing wrong with that.
Saturday morning, I collected my friend Paulina and we headed to the New Bedford Whaling Museum.
It turns out that, despite my best intentions, I cannot really just plunge into for a 25-hour Moby-Dick marathon any more than I could expect to run an actual marathon without any training.
I had formed the impression, on no evidence, that this was an informal thing at which you could curl up on the floor with your pillow and blankets, take off your shoes, and snack merrily. Instead, the moment we arrived I was told I could not bring in my backpack and that nothing but small bags would be allowed in until 8:30 p.m. The event starts at noon. This meant that unless we wanted to go eight and a half hours without food and drink (other than from the water fountain), we would have to leave periodically.
Which we did; around two we ducked out and ate our sandwiches, but it was not quite the atmosphere I had pictured (in fairness to the organizers, the atmosphere I pictured also included gorgeous well-read fishermen with a thing for nerdy women). I imagine it does get far less formal as the night wears on.
Some readers I could have listened to all day. When they were reading I didn't need to follow along in my copy, I forgot that I was physically uncomfortable, and I thought that this was the best thing in the world. The man who read the “Nantucket” chapter should record audiobooks for a living. A beaming middle school teacher brought up six of his students, who each read a paragraph of one section, and they were all great and beyond adorable.
Some readers to all appearances had never seen the words on the page before, despite having been assigned their portion months ago. Stumbling, mispronouncing, sometimes simply thrashing about in the middle of a paragraph, having lost the sense of it long ago and now just stabbing at the words without any regard for punctuation or emphasis. You don't know how long ten minutes can be until you are listening to that.
Paulina and I had to switch seats at one point because we were directly in front of a woman who uttered either a smugly wise, “Hmmm!” or hysterical laughter after every single sentence. Occasionally she laughed hysterically in a smugly wise way, as when the text refers to the Pequod as a lucky ship. Because, unlike everyone else in the room, she knows how the story ends! Paulina and I slipped up to the front row after half an hour of this, where I found myself next to a trio who believed that the front row of a reading event is an appropriate place to carry on extended conversations. Hell is other audience members.
Also, those folding chairs were astonishing. I have never felt sensations like that in my lower back, and had rather expected not to until I was in my seventies. Between that and the dehydration and hunger issues, after six hours we gathered our things and limped out. A quarter of the marathon, which is not bad at all. We figure that next year, with a massive meal beforehand and more attention to our water intake, we can easily do ten hours.
I'm making it sound like it wasn't all that great, but that's not the case, and I'm so glad I went. There were people there ranging in age from ninety to six. Families. Young couples flooded in around 5:00, as if on dates. Audience members filled the seats, cluttered up the stairs, leaned from the second story. All there to hear volunteers read from a giant, bizarre novel. It was charming.
So charming, in fact, that this morning, rested and scrubbed, I decided to go back for the last couple hours. I woke up blue, and finding an excuse to drive on highways under an oddly enormous sky while blasting Mumford & Sons was also a factor (where you invest your love / you invest your life), but this morning it was utterly charming as well.
I didn't go anywhere near the chairs, but went halfway up the stairs and leaned over the balustrade. At one point I realized there was a girl of about nine or ten next to me, and she was looking over at my copy of the book. I moved it in between us, pointed to where we were, and we read along together for a chapter. Every reader knows that wonderful moment, when without words or even eye contact you discover there is another reader beside you, and make a tiny accommodation to share the moment, share the story. It warms the heart.
Barney Frank was there, and read a good deal of the penultimate chapter. His district includes New Bedford, so it was politic, but he had obviously done his prep work. It was a very exciting section.
The man reading the very last bit broke down on the last sentence before the epilogue. He started audibly choking up on "then all collapsed", paused, tried to collect himself, and managed in a voice full of tears, "and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago". I don't even know why he was crying, but I cried too. (Although, because I am twelve, I don't know how you manage to do "From hell's heart I stab at thee," without doing a Ricardo Montalban voice.)
Amazing stuff. A couple hundred people turning out to celebrate a book. It doesn't get better than that. The chairs could, though.
Next up: World's End, by T.C. Boyle.
Saturday morning, I collected my friend Paulina and we headed to the New Bedford Whaling Museum.
It turns out that, despite my best intentions, I cannot really just plunge into for a 25-hour Moby-Dick marathon any more than I could expect to run an actual marathon without any training.
I had formed the impression, on no evidence, that this was an informal thing at which you could curl up on the floor with your pillow and blankets, take off your shoes, and snack merrily. Instead, the moment we arrived I was told I could not bring in my backpack and that nothing but small bags would be allowed in until 8:30 p.m. The event starts at noon. This meant that unless we wanted to go eight and a half hours without food and drink (other than from the water fountain), we would have to leave periodically.
Which we did; around two we ducked out and ate our sandwiches, but it was not quite the atmosphere I had pictured (in fairness to the organizers, the atmosphere I pictured also included gorgeous well-read fishermen with a thing for nerdy women). I imagine it does get far less formal as the night wears on.
Some readers I could have listened to all day. When they were reading I didn't need to follow along in my copy, I forgot that I was physically uncomfortable, and I thought that this was the best thing in the world. The man who read the “Nantucket” chapter should record audiobooks for a living. A beaming middle school teacher brought up six of his students, who each read a paragraph of one section, and they were all great and beyond adorable.
Some readers to all appearances had never seen the words on the page before, despite having been assigned their portion months ago. Stumbling, mispronouncing, sometimes simply thrashing about in the middle of a paragraph, having lost the sense of it long ago and now just stabbing at the words without any regard for punctuation or emphasis. You don't know how long ten minutes can be until you are listening to that.
Paulina and I had to switch seats at one point because we were directly in front of a woman who uttered either a smugly wise, “Hmmm!” or hysterical laughter after every single sentence. Occasionally she laughed hysterically in a smugly wise way, as when the text refers to the Pequod as a lucky ship. Because, unlike everyone else in the room, she knows how the story ends! Paulina and I slipped up to the front row after half an hour of this, where I found myself next to a trio who believed that the front row of a reading event is an appropriate place to carry on extended conversations. Hell is other audience members.
Also, those folding chairs were astonishing. I have never felt sensations like that in my lower back, and had rather expected not to until I was in my seventies. Between that and the dehydration and hunger issues, after six hours we gathered our things and limped out. A quarter of the marathon, which is not bad at all. We figure that next year, with a massive meal beforehand and more attention to our water intake, we can easily do ten hours.
I'm making it sound like it wasn't all that great, but that's not the case, and I'm so glad I went. There were people there ranging in age from ninety to six. Families. Young couples flooded in around 5:00, as if on dates. Audience members filled the seats, cluttered up the stairs, leaned from the second story. All there to hear volunteers read from a giant, bizarre novel. It was charming.
So charming, in fact, that this morning, rested and scrubbed, I decided to go back for the last couple hours. I woke up blue, and finding an excuse to drive on highways under an oddly enormous sky while blasting Mumford & Sons was also a factor (where you invest your love / you invest your life), but this morning it was utterly charming as well.
I didn't go anywhere near the chairs, but went halfway up the stairs and leaned over the balustrade. At one point I realized there was a girl of about nine or ten next to me, and she was looking over at my copy of the book. I moved it in between us, pointed to where we were, and we read along together for a chapter. Every reader knows that wonderful moment, when without words or even eye contact you discover there is another reader beside you, and make a tiny accommodation to share the moment, share the story. It warms the heart.
Barney Frank was there, and read a good deal of the penultimate chapter. His district includes New Bedford, so it was politic, but he had obviously done his prep work. It was a very exciting section.
The man reading the very last bit broke down on the last sentence before the epilogue. He started audibly choking up on "then all collapsed", paused, tried to collect himself, and managed in a voice full of tears, "and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago". I don't even know why he was crying, but I cried too. (Although, because I am twelve, I don't know how you manage to do "From hell's heart I stab at thee," without doing a Ricardo Montalban voice.)
Amazing stuff. A couple hundred people turning out to celebrate a book. It doesn't get better than that. The chairs could, though.
Next up: World's End, by T.C. Boyle.
Friday, January 6, 2012
A Trick of the Light, by Louise Penny
I read this on the Kindle, sitting in bed with a space heater blasting and my dogs curled up around me, because the furnace went out and I had to wait at home all day for the repairman. Occasionally I braved the frigid downstairs to make tea or hot chocolate, and then dashed back up to the one cozy room. It was a rather good way to read Louise Penny (and I am sure the dogs wish the furnace could go out every day), though I wish that this one hadn't taken place in June. Talk of the heat just made me crabby.
I do love Penny, and the village of Three Pines in which most of her books are set. I desperately want to live there except that a) they all speak French, and I am like the woman in Bury Your Dead who can read French but whose accent "could stop a train", and b) I would weigh four hundred pounds if allowed to eat at Olivier's Bistro frequently. Oh, the food descriptions. Lord have mercy.
Many of Penny's main characters are artists, and this book centers around the artistic success of one character and the resulting descent of the art world upon Three Pines. The murder victim was an art critic, and critics, dealers, and artists populate the pages. This is not new to Penny's books, yet I am increasingly finding that her descriptions of art are over-the-top. Paintings are constantly making people gasp aloud, burst into tears, know that they are in the presence of greatness. I much preferred the wonderful descriptions in The Brutal Telling of two wood carvings which at first seem adorable and then, after a few moments, people don't want to be in the same room with them. And when the part of the carving which caused the unease was identified, it made sense. The portraits by Clara Morrow, and the viewers' reactions to them, don't make quite as much sense. I remain unconvinced that anyone can actually paint, in a subject's eyes, "the moment when despair turns to hope", though I would love to think someone could.
Another major plot point in A Trick of the Light is AA. The murder victim was a member, and Inspector Gamache attends meetings, talks to other members, and reads the literature. I admit that my hackles flew up when I realized this was going to be a thing, because I have never come across AA in a book without the author buying into it hook, line, and sinker (admittedly I read a fair number of sobriety memoirs, and it seems that no one who has written one got sober without AA), and given my own extremely mixed feelings about the program, this irritates me.
Personal digression:
I got sober without AA. But I believe that if AA gets you sober, good for it. I believe whatever gets someone sober is good. Whatever works is good. And I feel that the ethos of AA does not accord that respect to anything besides itself. I had one maddening interaction with a therapist last year in which she preached AA at me for an hour and said that, because I had not done the steps, obviously I had no insight whatever into what made me drink or how to stay sober, and we would have to "start from scratch" on those topics. At this point I had been sober for over five years, and no one has ever accused me of being insufficiently introspective, but she was not hearing it.
Some of the steps are useful. Not all of the steps are useful for everyone. Everyone's addiction experience is different, and everyone's path to sobriety will be slightly different. I hate AA's emphasis on powerlessness; I kept drinking as long as I felt powerless over my addiction. It was only when I thought, No, I can do this, that I stopped. And while one can argue that any addiction has to be replaced by another, that an addictive personality doesn't stop being so and it's a matter of finding something less self-destructive, the addiction to the group and to the meetings makes me a little wary. I do believe that there has to be a replacement addiction - mine is exercise - but think that ideally your replacement addiction is something you can do by yourself if you can't find anyone else. I, personally, do not want my sobriety to depend on anyone but myself, and that includes a higher power. If I'd gotten sober for my husband, this year could have been a mess. If I'd gotten sober for a higher power, this year might have well made me lose my faith, and then what? I didn't get sober for anyone but me, and that's the one person I'll always have with me.
I'm not saying that my route to sobriety is better or stronger than that of someone whose route includes AA. I'm saying I respect AA as I would respect anything that gets an addict sober, but I don't feel that AA respects me back. It's like being a tolerant liberal around Tea Party nutjobs: we're saying, "Well, what you say is vile but I will defend your right to say it," and they're saying, "No one should have the right to believe anything other than what I believe." The road of tolerance is strictly one-way here. AA doesn't think anyone not in AA is really sober; we're just dry drunks, with no personal insight and no willingness to change. And that offends me mightily.
End personal digression!
So, Penny handles AA better than I would have expected, although she still comes firmly down on the side of it being a positive thing. The only dissenting voice is that of an alcoholic who is still drinking and makes an ass of himself at parties. But for the most part Penny simply reports on the facts about the program, and lets us see that the people within it are all there for different reasons and not all of them are noble. There are characters who claim to have worked the steps and be at peace, and Penny shows us that they are hypocrites.
The mystery is intriguing - there are plenty of suspects - and though the last scene, with a storm thundering outside and Gamache saying, "Someone in this room is the murderer," is a little much, I was willing to go with it. Penny does seem intent on unveiling the unpleasant sides of her recurring characters of late, and while that worked with Olivier in a way that kept him sympathetic, the more we learn about Peter Morrow the less sense it makes that anyone puts up with him, whether as a friend or a spouse. And at a certain point it's simply not fun to read about his feelings of inadequacy and spite.
Still, this was not a disappointment, and I will continue to be very excited every time Penny issues a new book.
And oh, she can write about dogs. The following is from Bury Your Dead; it comes halfway through and it marks the point at which I, struggling with the grief the entire book provoked, just started sobbing and didn't stop the whole rest of the way.
Though Gamache would never say it to Henri's face, they both knew he wasn't the most courageous of dogs. Nor, it must be said, was Henri very bright. But he was loyal beyond measure and knew what mattered. Din-din, walks, balls. But most of all, his family. His heart filled his chest and ran to the end of his tail and the very tips of his considerable ears. It filled his head, squeezing out his brain. But Henri, the foundling, was a humanist, and while not particularly clever was the smartest creature Gamache knew. Everything he knew he knew by heart.
Yeah, that got you too, huh?
(And yes, there was a post earlier this week which I have taken down. It was a revenge post and I want to be better than that. More importantly, it was poorly edited.
I shall keep the good part from it, though, to remember:
I want the word for 2012 to be "delight". I want to find something in which to delight every day. It can be the dogs, or a warm bath, or a silly TV show. It can be a big personal triumph or just the fact that I've laughed that day. It can be my own body, which can do yoga and walk long distances and lift weights, or Bingley's excessively round head. I am justly proud of the equanimity with which I handled 2011, but I'm going to be greedier than that in 2012. I want to be quietly delighted with something every day.)
Next up: Why Read Moby-Dick?, by Nathaniel Philbrick, in preparation for the Moby-Dick marathon this weekend.
I do love Penny, and the village of Three Pines in which most of her books are set. I desperately want to live there except that a) they all speak French, and I am like the woman in Bury Your Dead who can read French but whose accent "could stop a train", and b) I would weigh four hundred pounds if allowed to eat at Olivier's Bistro frequently. Oh, the food descriptions. Lord have mercy.
Many of Penny's main characters are artists, and this book centers around the artistic success of one character and the resulting descent of the art world upon Three Pines. The murder victim was an art critic, and critics, dealers, and artists populate the pages. This is not new to Penny's books, yet I am increasingly finding that her descriptions of art are over-the-top. Paintings are constantly making people gasp aloud, burst into tears, know that they are in the presence of greatness. I much preferred the wonderful descriptions in The Brutal Telling of two wood carvings which at first seem adorable and then, after a few moments, people don't want to be in the same room with them. And when the part of the carving which caused the unease was identified, it made sense. The portraits by Clara Morrow, and the viewers' reactions to them, don't make quite as much sense. I remain unconvinced that anyone can actually paint, in a subject's eyes, "the moment when despair turns to hope", though I would love to think someone could.
Another major plot point in A Trick of the Light is AA. The murder victim was a member, and Inspector Gamache attends meetings, talks to other members, and reads the literature. I admit that my hackles flew up when I realized this was going to be a thing, because I have never come across AA in a book without the author buying into it hook, line, and sinker (admittedly I read a fair number of sobriety memoirs, and it seems that no one who has written one got sober without AA), and given my own extremely mixed feelings about the program, this irritates me.
Personal digression:
I got sober without AA. But I believe that if AA gets you sober, good for it. I believe whatever gets someone sober is good. Whatever works is good. And I feel that the ethos of AA does not accord that respect to anything besides itself. I had one maddening interaction with a therapist last year in which she preached AA at me for an hour and said that, because I had not done the steps, obviously I had no insight whatever into what made me drink or how to stay sober, and we would have to "start from scratch" on those topics. At this point I had been sober for over five years, and no one has ever accused me of being insufficiently introspective, but she was not hearing it.
Some of the steps are useful. Not all of the steps are useful for everyone. Everyone's addiction experience is different, and everyone's path to sobriety will be slightly different. I hate AA's emphasis on powerlessness; I kept drinking as long as I felt powerless over my addiction. It was only when I thought, No, I can do this, that I stopped. And while one can argue that any addiction has to be replaced by another, that an addictive personality doesn't stop being so and it's a matter of finding something less self-destructive, the addiction to the group and to the meetings makes me a little wary. I do believe that there has to be a replacement addiction - mine is exercise - but think that ideally your replacement addiction is something you can do by yourself if you can't find anyone else. I, personally, do not want my sobriety to depend on anyone but myself, and that includes a higher power. If I'd gotten sober for my husband, this year could have been a mess. If I'd gotten sober for a higher power, this year might have well made me lose my faith, and then what? I didn't get sober for anyone but me, and that's the one person I'll always have with me.
I'm not saying that my route to sobriety is better or stronger than that of someone whose route includes AA. I'm saying I respect AA as I would respect anything that gets an addict sober, but I don't feel that AA respects me back. It's like being a tolerant liberal around Tea Party nutjobs: we're saying, "Well, what you say is vile but I will defend your right to say it," and they're saying, "No one should have the right to believe anything other than what I believe." The road of tolerance is strictly one-way here. AA doesn't think anyone not in AA is really sober; we're just dry drunks, with no personal insight and no willingness to change. And that offends me mightily.
End personal digression!
So, Penny handles AA better than I would have expected, although she still comes firmly down on the side of it being a positive thing. The only dissenting voice is that of an alcoholic who is still drinking and makes an ass of himself at parties. But for the most part Penny simply reports on the facts about the program, and lets us see that the people within it are all there for different reasons and not all of them are noble. There are characters who claim to have worked the steps and be at peace, and Penny shows us that they are hypocrites.
The mystery is intriguing - there are plenty of suspects - and though the last scene, with a storm thundering outside and Gamache saying, "Someone in this room is the murderer," is a little much, I was willing to go with it. Penny does seem intent on unveiling the unpleasant sides of her recurring characters of late, and while that worked with Olivier in a way that kept him sympathetic, the more we learn about Peter Morrow the less sense it makes that anyone puts up with him, whether as a friend or a spouse. And at a certain point it's simply not fun to read about his feelings of inadequacy and spite.
Still, this was not a disappointment, and I will continue to be very excited every time Penny issues a new book.
And oh, she can write about dogs. The following is from Bury Your Dead; it comes halfway through and it marks the point at which I, struggling with the grief the entire book provoked, just started sobbing and didn't stop the whole rest of the way.
Though Gamache would never say it to Henri's face, they both knew he wasn't the most courageous of dogs. Nor, it must be said, was Henri very bright. But he was loyal beyond measure and knew what mattered. Din-din, walks, balls. But most of all, his family. His heart filled his chest and ran to the end of his tail and the very tips of his considerable ears. It filled his head, squeezing out his brain. But Henri, the foundling, was a humanist, and while not particularly clever was the smartest creature Gamache knew. Everything he knew he knew by heart.
Yeah, that got you too, huh?
(And yes, there was a post earlier this week which I have taken down. It was a revenge post and I want to be better than that. More importantly, it was poorly edited.
I shall keep the good part from it, though, to remember:
I want the word for 2012 to be "delight". I want to find something in which to delight every day. It can be the dogs, or a warm bath, or a silly TV show. It can be a big personal triumph or just the fact that I've laughed that day. It can be my own body, which can do yoga and walk long distances and lift weights, or Bingley's excessively round head. I am justly proud of the equanimity with which I handled 2011, but I'm going to be greedier than that in 2012. I want to be quietly delighted with something every day.)
Next up: Why Read Moby-Dick?, by Nathaniel Philbrick, in preparation for the Moby-Dick marathon this weekend.
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
I Am Half-Sick of Shadows, by Alan Bradley
This is the fourth book in the Flavia de Luce series. Flavia is an eleven-year-old chemist (and budding poisoner) living with her two sisters and widowed father in an immense pile of a house in 1950 England. Murders keep happening around Flavia, and she sets out to solve them.
In this book, the financial straits of the family have forced them to rent out their estate to a film crew, who arrive over Christmas, in a blizzard, and havoc ensues. Then the star is murdered, and Flavia begins her investigation, around her plans to capture Father Christmas.
I felt as if this book was both shorter in page length and much lighter than the first two. The third I also felt was getting less substantial. Perhaps this is inevitable in a series like this - it reminds me of what happened with Alexander McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. But with that it took about six or seven books before I started mentally accusing Smith of phoning it in. Bradley had such potential, and I enjoyed the first two Flavia books so much, that I would be very disappointed if he's already settling for fluff. Not that there's anything wrong with fluff in its place, but I wasn't looking for it here.
Next up: A Trick of the Light, by Louise Penny. I am having to gird my loins for this, since the last one in this series was so emotionally devastating that I spent days recovering.
In this book, the financial straits of the family have forced them to rent out their estate to a film crew, who arrive over Christmas, in a blizzard, and havoc ensues. Then the star is murdered, and Flavia begins her investigation, around her plans to capture Father Christmas.
I felt as if this book was both shorter in page length and much lighter than the first two. The third I also felt was getting less substantial. Perhaps this is inevitable in a series like this - it reminds me of what happened with Alexander McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. But with that it took about six or seven books before I started mentally accusing Smith of phoning it in. Bradley had such potential, and I enjoyed the first two Flavia books so much, that I would be very disappointed if he's already settling for fluff. Not that there's anything wrong with fluff in its place, but I wasn't looking for it here.
Next up: A Trick of the Light, by Louise Penny. I am having to gird my loins for this, since the last one in this series was so emotionally devastating that I spent days recovering.
Monday, January 2, 2012
The Natural History of Love, by Diane Ackerman
This book is very flawed.
Ackerman contradicts herself about how the Old Testament god loved (in one passage it's unconditionally, a hundred pages later it's only if you've proven yourself worthy); she's only interested in heterosexual desire; her parental gender roles are set in stone (and in the 1950s); she gets the origin myth of the narcissus wrong; she messes up the chronology of the plot of Hamlet; she uses Pyramus and Thisbe as an example of a tragic romantic couple, when anyone who's ever seen a good production of Midsummer will go into a helpless giggling fit at the phrase "Ninus' tomb"; and she occasionally writes sentences like, "Why do we need a duvet cover for the warm, rich, feather comforter of sensuality?"
These are problems. The sloppy ones are especially problematic because they cast retrospective doubt on the research done for the first section, which is the history of love, sexuality, and marriage throughout the Western world, and which is really quite fascinating. I enjoyed this first third of the book very much, but later wondered about it once I'd seen that she couldn't even be bothered to glance back at Hamlet and find out if "Get thee to a nunnery" comes before or after "Lady, shall I lie in your lap?"
But it went off the rails for me entirely in the middle section, which she fills with:
1. Six pages about how a woman's hair is the only secondary sexual characteristic which matters, and that the longer and more wild the hair is (how much like Diane Ackerman's it is, in other words; this whole middle section is all about her personal experiences) the more sensual a woman is, that cutting off a woman's hair desexualizes her, and how women with children cut off their hair to signal that they are no longer sexually available. Ohhh-kay. Setting aside that this book was written in 1994, before the widespread development of the pixie haircut, some women (like me, showing my own bias here) have always looked better with shorter hair, and what about the exposure of the neck? Ackerman never once, in the entire book, mentions the neck as an erogenous zone. She's too busy talking about the times she's been considered dangerously erotic and womanly because of her hair.
2. Twenty-two pages (fully 7% of the book) about women and horses. Ackerman claims that all little girls not only go through a phase of being wild about horses but that all little girls have access to horses recreationally. Seriously. She looks back on her privileged Pennsylvania childhood and is incapable of thinking that a different type of childhood exists. And then we get 22 pages about having a big sweaty animal between one's legs (yeah, yeah, we've all read "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl", this is not news) and how every eight-year-old girl wants this (ewww) and how every eight-year-old girl can just buy jodhpurs and riding boots and head down to her local stable. I don't know, maybe it would be interesting to a woman who did have a passionate relationship with horses in her childhood. I have never cared about horses one way or the other. Ackerman does say that given her age, there were no sports really available for girls when she was growing up, so she turned to horses. But a better use of page space would have been a couple about horses and then a lot more about what exercise and sport in general means for girls coming into their sexuality and their bodies. The book at this point was rapidly turning into "Diane Ackerman's Personal History of Love and No One Else's".
3. Ten pages about the Indy 500, because all men love is cars. And only men love cars. Also, Diane Ackerman gets leered at by drunk men a lot, because her breasts are so amazing. After the horses, and because I adore my car and adore driving, I skimmed this part.
4. Four pages about flying in dreams and how wonderful it is and always about sex. Some of us are terrified of heights and only dream about falling, never flying, and I am just going to leave that in the hands of Freud.
...
These issues made me as angry as they did because the book really had potential. When Ackerman isn't going off the rails with duvet metaphors, she writes quite well, and like I said, the first third of the book was fascinating, until I started doubting the research. And it read quite quickly, and was often hard to put down. But she just comes at it far too much as if it were a memoir, instead of a piece of reportage. She tacks on a bit about pets at the end, and it's immediately obvious she's never had one in her life; after the pages and pages rhapsodizing about the bond between women and horses, the best she can say about a cat or dog is that its owner is holding it prisoner and what seems to be the pet's love is just Stockholm Syndrome. For heaven's sake.
So, alas, this book frustrated and irritated me, and yet it's not badly written, and the idea of a book on this topic pleases me. I imagine that there are probably better ones out there.
Next up: I Am Half-Sick of Shadows, by Alan Bradley. Yes, I recently read a Flavia de Luce book, but this is my EarlyReviewers one, and those get priority.
Ackerman contradicts herself about how the Old Testament god loved (in one passage it's unconditionally, a hundred pages later it's only if you've proven yourself worthy); she's only interested in heterosexual desire; her parental gender roles are set in stone (and in the 1950s); she gets the origin myth of the narcissus wrong; she messes up the chronology of the plot of Hamlet; she uses Pyramus and Thisbe as an example of a tragic romantic couple, when anyone who's ever seen a good production of Midsummer will go into a helpless giggling fit at the phrase "Ninus' tomb"; and she occasionally writes sentences like, "Why do we need a duvet cover for the warm, rich, feather comforter of sensuality?"
These are problems. The sloppy ones are especially problematic because they cast retrospective doubt on the research done for the first section, which is the history of love, sexuality, and marriage throughout the Western world, and which is really quite fascinating. I enjoyed this first third of the book very much, but later wondered about it once I'd seen that she couldn't even be bothered to glance back at Hamlet and find out if "Get thee to a nunnery" comes before or after "Lady, shall I lie in your lap?"
But it went off the rails for me entirely in the middle section, which she fills with:
1. Six pages about how a woman's hair is the only secondary sexual characteristic which matters, and that the longer and more wild the hair is (how much like Diane Ackerman's it is, in other words; this whole middle section is all about her personal experiences) the more sensual a woman is, that cutting off a woman's hair desexualizes her, and how women with children cut off their hair to signal that they are no longer sexually available. Ohhh-kay. Setting aside that this book was written in 1994, before the widespread development of the pixie haircut, some women (like me, showing my own bias here) have always looked better with shorter hair, and what about the exposure of the neck? Ackerman never once, in the entire book, mentions the neck as an erogenous zone. She's too busy talking about the times she's been considered dangerously erotic and womanly because of her hair.
2. Twenty-two pages (fully 7% of the book) about women and horses. Ackerman claims that all little girls not only go through a phase of being wild about horses but that all little girls have access to horses recreationally. Seriously. She looks back on her privileged Pennsylvania childhood and is incapable of thinking that a different type of childhood exists. And then we get 22 pages about having a big sweaty animal between one's legs (yeah, yeah, we've all read "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl", this is not news) and how every eight-year-old girl wants this (ewww) and how every eight-year-old girl can just buy jodhpurs and riding boots and head down to her local stable. I don't know, maybe it would be interesting to a woman who did have a passionate relationship with horses in her childhood. I have never cared about horses one way or the other. Ackerman does say that given her age, there were no sports really available for girls when she was growing up, so she turned to horses. But a better use of page space would have been a couple about horses and then a lot more about what exercise and sport in general means for girls coming into their sexuality and their bodies. The book at this point was rapidly turning into "Diane Ackerman's Personal History of Love and No One Else's".
3. Ten pages about the Indy 500, because all men love is cars. And only men love cars. Also, Diane Ackerman gets leered at by drunk men a lot, because her breasts are so amazing. After the horses, and because I adore my car and adore driving, I skimmed this part.
4. Four pages about flying in dreams and how wonderful it is and always about sex. Some of us are terrified of heights and only dream about falling, never flying, and I am just going to leave that in the hands of Freud.
...
These issues made me as angry as they did because the book really had potential. When Ackerman isn't going off the rails with duvet metaphors, she writes quite well, and like I said, the first third of the book was fascinating, until I started doubting the research. And it read quite quickly, and was often hard to put down. But she just comes at it far too much as if it were a memoir, instead of a piece of reportage. She tacks on a bit about pets at the end, and it's immediately obvious she's never had one in her life; after the pages and pages rhapsodizing about the bond between women and horses, the best she can say about a cat or dog is that its owner is holding it prisoner and what seems to be the pet's love is just Stockholm Syndrome. For heaven's sake.
So, alas, this book frustrated and irritated me, and yet it's not badly written, and the idea of a book on this topic pleases me. I imagine that there are probably better ones out there.
Next up: I Am Half-Sick of Shadows, by Alan Bradley. Yes, I recently read a Flavia de Luce book, but this is my EarlyReviewers one, and those get priority.
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