evelyn_b

This is a partial record of the books I've been reading, for my own reference and for fun. Completeness and quality of the record varies according to how lazy I'm feeling. It originated on Livejournal and LJ entries will eventually be archived here, unless Livejournal disappears before I get around to it.

What you won't find here: current events or politics, personal experiences not directly related to books, serious business of any kind.

What you will find: lists of books, uninformed opinions about and emotional reactions to books, earnest attempts to reduce the number of books in my home undermined by impulse buying and the "adopt-a-book" shelf at the library.

What I've Finished Reading

Warmth: Coming of Age At The End of Our World is a mostly very thoughtful and attentive small book by Daniel Sherrell, a climate-change activist who is trying to decide whether to have children and how to live meaningfully within what he calls The Problem without just crying all the time. It's written in the form of a letter to a hypothetical child, in explicit imitation of (and sticking the landing a little better than) Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me. I like this kind of book because I'm a sucker for tender and fraught parental feelings but also because I inevitably spend them imagining the bewildered, distressed, embarrassed and exasperated teenager defensively rolling his eyes at the end of all those plaintive and searching "you"s.

I loved Heavens on Earth by Carmen Boullosa, which is an elegantly weird double elegy for the end of two worlds, past and future. In the far-future cloud city that is all that remains of human life on Earth, a community member named Lear translates a mid-90s translation of the lost memoirs of a sixteenth-century Aztec boy turned Catholic priest, as her own community resolves to end history for real this time by forgoing language entirely. You can probably figure out for yourself whether this is a good idea, but it's worth reading the whole thing.

Credit Card Carole also deals with the end of a world, but author Sheila Solomon Klass isn't going to help Carole mourn it. Carole is 17 and loves to shop! She loves to do other things, too, like track and quoting Shakespeare, but she also just loves to shop! Her credit card, paid off every month by her parents, makes it easy and fun! Then one day her dad announces that he is leaving dentistry for the stage! and they will all have to tighten their belts. . . and cut up their credit cards!!! Carole mopes around for a while but eventually discovers The Value of Work, courtesy of the easiest job search imaginable (her friend's parents' collectable figurines need dusting! which also gives her the opportunity to eavesdrop on their troubles and reflect on the paltriness of her own) and also the Value of True Friends Who Are Not Shallow Bitches. The other side of the consumer-identity-formation coin is represented by Jim, who is so guilt-ridden by his father doing business with South Africa's apartheid government that he shaves his head and stops eating. There's also a con-man plot that I completely forgot about until I opened the book just now to check on Jim's name! It's a lot for 150 pages.


1980s Money Mores Check-In

Readers over 40 (or younger if you feel like jumping in), did you have the impression when you were a teenager that it was normal or desireable for minors to have credit cards? I ask because Carole's panic at being asked to live without one (in New Jersey, 1987) was so intense ("Mom - I can't. I don't carry cash like you and Dad. I can't write checks. I can't manage.") I'm about ten years younger than Carol and grew up in a mall-rich environment in the US, and I didn't know anyone in high school - at least, not anyone I was close enough to try on clothes with - who had a credit card as a minor, and it would never have occured to me to ask for one. So I'm curious about other people's experiences.

What I'm Reading Now

Robert Silverberg, The World Inside. Silverberg is a new-to-me science-fiction author who writes exuberant, fast-moving, weird but mostly transparent books - the other one was Project Pendulum, about a novel structure for a time-travel experiment involving identical twins. In The World Inside, 75 billion human beings live their whole lives within a procession of thousand-story tower blocks that girdle the continents, seldom leaving their five-story "cities" and never going outside. Since the problem of where to put everyone has been temporarily solved by eliminating privacy, building really tall, and shoving dissenters down the garbage chute at the slightest provocation, a culture of frenetic fertility has developed in which young people marry at twelve or thirteen and vie with each other to produce the largest families possible. Could this system have a flaw? Some of the characters are worried that it might.

The World Inside was published in 1970. Besides the population anxiety, its 70sness is expressed mostly through state-mandated casual sex (mostly but not entirely hetero and usually involving young teenagers), and occasionally by the presence of really good drugs. Its landscape owes a medium-sized debt to We and a large one to Urban Renewal.


What I Plan to Read Next

I just learned that Vernor Vinge wrote a book set in 2025! In which computers are tired and SMART AR CONTACT LENSES are wired! I tried and failed miserably to get contact lenses when I was 13 so I am always a little taken aback by how easily everyone in the world pops those little buggers in and out in speculative fiction.

(see also: the Very Topical Second Life Contact Lens Plot on Supergirl. Or don't, if you value any of the irreplacable minutes of your life).

Anyway, 2025 is right around the corner, so I'm going to see if the library has it.

What I've Finished Reading

In the end I gave up on the idea that The Power Broker was too large to take to bed or to the local coffee shop, even though it really, really is, and just let it bulldoze straight through all the hours of my life until it was over. The day after I finished it, I was on the porch of said coffee shop, trying to describe the desolation of the Cross-Bronx Expressway to someone who hadn't read it, when a guy from the other side of the porch leaned over and said, "Are you talking about The Power Broker??" And just like that, we were all talking about The Power Broker.

The subtitle of The Power Broker is "Robert Moses and the Fall of New York," and that's because the premise of the book is that while New York City in the twentieth century could theoretically have been ruined by a lot of things, it was actually ruined mainly by one guy, his unchecked power over all things concrete, and his insatiable love of gigantic freeways and bridges. And the New York Times being a magnifying mirror for the characteristic errors of every age, but that probably goes without saying. I don't have the background to know if this is an accurate analysis, but it's definitely a vivid one. If you like deep dives into city infrastructure and its discontents, or dazzlingly lucid descriptions of arcane political manuvering, you might like this book! Side effects may include nightmares about living by firelight in half-demolished buildings in the shadow of an unfinished freeway, and/or never again being able to shut up about Robert Moses for generations to come.

I also finally made good on my promise to read one of Kevin Kwan's rich-people books, which I've been making to myself ever since Crazy Rich Asians made a splash . . . what, ten years ago now? The one that turned up in the Little Free Library is Sex and Vanity, and it's a lot sweeter than I expected. It's also a meticulous homage to or hand-tinted xeroxed photocopy of A Room With A View. Some of the plot-driving mores fit a little awkwardly into the contemporary setting, but I know so little about Haute New York poshos, and Kwan serves them up with such breezy assurance, that I was willing to go with it 80-90% of the time.

And I spent a long time wishing to love but not really feeling His Dark Materials, which I bought in a big three-in-one paperback years ago. Why I didn't actually love it, it's hard to say. It's chock full of Cool Stuff that I wasn't super into. The only point at which I got emotionally involved was briefly when Will and Lyra met, and later when the worldbuilding contrived itself to force Will and Lyra to live in separate worlds. This is probably my own fault for not being ten.

What I'm Reading Now

It's Franzen O'Clock! Time to give the fiction of Jonathan Franzen another shot with The Corrections. The prose is admirably deep and specific but I don't care for it. Reading it feels like someone is gently forcing my head into a large fish tank, only instead of water, the fish and my head are swimming in Mid-American Malaise. But maybe, eventually, in a good way? Who knows; I'm just getting started.

I'm also reading A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge. My impression of Vinge based on one and a half books is that his plots don't thrill me but his aliens are the best. A year after reading it, I couldn't tell you with any certainty what happened in A Fire Upon the Deep, but I doubt a day has gone by since that I haven't thought of its pack-intelligent space dogs or its tragic cyborg kelp. A Deepness in the Sky alternates between the representatives of a couple of antagonistic human cultures investigating a very weird star system and trying to manipulate one another, who are all right I guess, and the star system's inhabitants, a civilization of hibernating spiders trying to reckon with the effects of industrialization on traditional culture, whom I will love to my dying day.

What I Plan to Read Next

I just bought a short-story collection called Shit Cassandra Saw, which looks promising! But I might not get to it for a while.

What I'm Reading Now

A long time ago, when I used to spend a lot more time online than I do today, I had a nemesis called Anne Lamott. Anne Lamott wrote a column for an electronic magazine called Salon.com, which at the time was a bustling hub of light iconoclasm and liberal Christianity, or something like that.

I'm sure there were far worse columnists on the payroll, but Anne Lamott consistently rubbed me the wrong way because she was conviced that her multi-braid hairstyle made her the "cool mom," and then as now I felt strongly that one should refrain from calling oneself a "cool mom" on any national news and commentary platform. Or was it dreads? I can't remember now. She wasn't really my nemesis, because she had no idea I existed and I never interacted with her other than hate-reading her column whenever I remembered to check for new ones. There was really nothing to it, except that I found her intensely embarrassing, with the boiling, choking, utterly useless secondhand embarrassment of the deeply insecure.

Anyway, I picked up her 1993 memoir Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year at a Little Free Library in Jacksonville, AL recently, and I'm trying to still the rolling of my eyes and sit with it in sympathy, possibly to prove that I'm not as petty now as I was in my twenties. It's not going all that well, but I'm trying.

The book itself is ok. You can see that Lamott is turning up the dial on a selection of her second- or third-worst thoughts in order to reassure her readers that they aren't monsters, which is a kind thing to do even if it doesn't always make for my personal favorite books. Then as now, I have this dislike of motherhood memoirs because I always imagine being the kid in them, now in middle school, with some gleeful homeroom galoot shout-reading all those heartfelt lyrical descriptions of my infant beauty and/or gushing bowels as I unsuccessfully pretend not to know what he's talking about. Maybe what I like best about it is that it's a window onto the world of 1989, when baby Sam was born. This world is sometimes hilariously similar to and sometimes far from our own, but there's probably a lot of interpersonal variation in which details will make you feel which way.

Some Other Books I've Read Recently

Charles Johnson's Middle Passage is noticeably funnier, and a more ripping yarn, than you would expect from a book called Middle Passage. Maybe that's the only description it should have.

The Great Turkey Walk is a middle-grade charm bomb from Kathleen Karr, about a fifteen-year-old called Simon with no head for figures but a decent sense for birds, who in the year 1860 gives up on taking a fifth crack at the third grade to seek his fortune herding turkeys from Missouri to Denver with the help of a few friends. This is a well-researched historical novel that is also funny and fun, where grim realities and wacky mishaps are treated with equal aplomb in Simon's immediately believable and lovable narrative voice.

I wasn't expecting a lot from Nightlight, the Harvard Lampoon parody of Twilight (also found in Jacksonville), but it hooked me right away. The end isn't as good as the beginning, but I thought it had a good ear for what was funny and weird about Twilight.

We sat at a table with Tom and some other ordinaries. They kept asking probing questions about what my interests were. I gently explained that that was between me and my potential friends.

It was then that I saw him. He was sitting at a table all by himself, not even eating. He had an entire tray of baked potatoes in front of him and still he did not touch a single one. How could a human have his pick of baked potatoes and resist them all?

What I Might Read in the Near Future

A few days later, in a completley different Little Free Library, I found a book called The Submissive by Tara Sue Me, and now I'm skeptical all over again. Can a parody of Fifty Shades of Grey possibly be as funny as a parody of Twilight? More to the point, will this one be? I'll find out when I find out.

What I Finished Reading A While Ago

I'll confess that I thought Hard Feelings was going to be enjoyably dumb and a little exploitative, and that's why I brought it home in the first place. It turns out to be pretty good. It's an honest attempt at literary versimiliude about being a sixteen-year-old tennis player in 1978, which means the perspective is sometimes brutal, sometimes painfully ignorant, unhelpfully reflective in unreliable spurts, and wildly inconsistent in all things, up to and including tennis. Is unrelenting versimilitude the best thing to shoot for when writing a novel about teenagers? It's hard to say. There's no real resolution to any of the plot threads except one (and that one is the least convincing thing in the whole book) but the half-formed muddledness of everything is part of what makes it feel so much like real life.

In My Dog Rinty, an extremely meandering picture book from 1948, Rinty is such a bad dog that David's family can no longer justify their leash and doghouse budget (Rinty keeps destroying them both). Eventually he has to be sold to a rich lady, who promptly takes him to obedience school and turns him into a good dog. But then the rich lady's landlord tells her that his building no longer allows dogs, so she gives him back to David. There's a happy ending, sort of, that turns on New York housing stock being full of mice.

What makes My Dog Rinty the absolute gem it is, though, are the beautiful quotidian photographs of 1940s Harlem on every page: children in living rooms, scuffed shoes and church shoes, a dime store and a hotel lobby, a fat baby (now over seventy) being bathed in a basin at someone's kitchen table). Two real-life children's librarians get a loving portrait each.

What I Finished More Recently

All I can say about Lent is be prepared for plot twists. And a pun that is also a punch. And take the dust jacket off if you can, because the cover copy is full of spoilers. Not that you have to be surprised to enjoy a book, but I was and I did.

I loved With Teeth by Kristen Arnett, even though (because?) the main character was so horrendously frustrating and I kept wanting it to turn into a kinder, less thorny, less hopeless story, like a chump. Basically, it's about a mother who doesn't understand her difficult son, or her wife, or any other human being, or herself. There's some deliberately disgusting cockroach content that hit a little too close to home, and a lot of miserable petty failures ditto. Nothing ever gets better for more than 30 minutes at a time and everyone ends up worse than they started. It's utterly bleak (and also funny) and I wish I were still reading it.

What I May Someday Finish Reading

Despite my long-standing promise to finally read some Jonathan Franzen fiction, I gave up on The Twenty-Seventh City about two-thirds of the way in. I didn't hate it, I wanted to like it, but I just got tired of not caring about any of the characters or the stupid edgy plot. Which might have been a perfectly good plot if I'd been in a better mood, who knows? It's a baroque city-corruption-plus-kidnapping plot, an odd clothesline to hang Franzen's large collection of coldly observed marital and municipal minutuae on, and I never got around to believing in it, for whatever reason.

A Milestone Is Reached

For the first time since I got it six years ago, there's space for new books on my little "to read" shelf. I've read all the unread books in my room! (I haven't read all the unread books in the apartment, but that's Phase Two, maybe).

What I've Finished Reading

There's a character in The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet who bears a very strong resemblance to Kaylee from (the short-lived sci-fi show) Firefly, or rather to someone's lovingly crafted fan novel about Kaylee. Some people might object to this resemblance, but I liked Kaylee and was happy to see her barely-disguised twin enjoying herself in a story with few serious dangers and no shortage of engines to mess around with.

In addition to Kaylee Plus, there's a no-nonsense sexy reptile, a loveable AI and her human soulmate, a surly space racist with a secret, the conflicted host of a navigation-enabling brain parasite, and the captain, whose primary character trait is "captain." The author clearly enjoys spending time with all of them and has contrived an incredibly leisurely plot in order to maximize your enjoyment and hers. I expect opinions will vary a lot as to whether this book is obnoxiously self-indulgent or delightfully self-indulgent. I spent about the first seventy-five pages getting progressively more and more impatient with the never-ending introductions (with eager thought-bubbles of worldbuliding popping up over each one), then very suddenly forgave everything around page 100 and never looked back. It's fun.

What I Finished A Couple Weeks Ago But Didn't Get Around To Posting About

I loved The Haunting of Hill House. It was one of those books that I keep meaning to put down very soon and just don't. A professor and some unattractive "assistants" haunt a weird, unpleasant old house - it's the classic "let's stay at the haunted house to see how haunted it is" setup - outside of a grubby town. After I'd stopped reading it I wondered about the ending "landing," but this is 100% a vestigal artifact of thinking I have to have something to criticize about a perfect book; I didn't worry about it at all while I was reading it. This book is nuts in a good way.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is also nuts, but I don't know how I feel about it - I love the mostly useless narrator and the wonderful May Kasahara (not all manic pixie dream girls are an evil) and was mildly excited when it got all Orphic for a second, primarily because poor Mr. Wind-Up Bird is such a useless everyman Orpheus and I have an intermittent weak spot for useless everymen. I'm pretty unclear on what, if anything, I was supposed to get out of this mishmash of war crimes, ambiguous magic, and sandwich making, but what does anyone get out of this messy and confusing world, I guess? Haruki Murakami has a very definite sensibility and there's nothing wrong with that.


What I'm Reading Now

Maida's Little House is a children's book from 1921 - I bought it because I'd never heard of it. It's actually a sequel to Maida's Little Shop, though I didn't realize that when I bought it (naively assuming that "house" preceded "shop"). It's an extreme example of a kind of children's book that was fairly popular at one time, in which poor (or, in this case, just not-obscenely-wealthy) kids get a rich benefactor and are set up with a series of highly choreographed, expensive and safety-netted adventures.

( A description of a book )

Also: this book called Hard Feelings that I got from a LFL because the back cover called its narrator "this generation's Holden Caulfield" (this generation = circa 1978) and hey, I like that mixed-up Caulfied kid. Bernie Hergruter is not as loveable or as mixed-up; he's mostly a normally stressed-out teenager who starts the book by winning a bet with his friend on which one of them is going to get laid first, but the circumstances are embarrassing. There's also a deranged bully after him (unrelated to the sex adventure) so he runs away to Cleveland to stay with an aunt. So far it's not terrible, not spectacular.

Is This Going to Be A Once-a-Month Thing From Now On?

Possibly for a while. I'm not all that busy, even, just constantly distracted.

Or, it's not Wednesday yet, but I'm going to be AFK all day when it is.

Last week, I found a very nice new Little Free Library that was suffering from lack of books - it was only half full and most of the contents were self-published inspirational memoirs, self-published self-help, and Consumer Reports - so I resolved to come back with a few good books once I'd finished them. The other day, I came back with Burger's Daughter by Nadine Gordimer, Les Mis, and Bring Out the Dog, a solid collection of contemporary war stories by Will Mackin - only to find the old selections gone and the library stuffed to the gills with appealing popular fiction (and two boxes of Kraft Mac & Cheese Dinner). There was only room for the smallest of my books, and then only after I took two books out of the box. So now I'm up a book, but I'm glad to see that the LFL is well looked after.

Normal Wednesdays to return next week, probaly.

Yet I still have some feelings about Les Misérables. Here are a few.

1. This book is a trap. The chapters are short, so I keep thinking, "One more won't hurt!" but the book is neverending. Usually when I get stuck in a short-chapter trap, I lose a little sleep and it's over in a few days, but this book never ends.

2. There are so many ludicrous coincidences that they very quickly cease to be ludicrous and start functioning more like a rhyme scheme than a traditional plot.

3. When I was a teenager, before I read the book for the first time but after my middle-school choir did "Castle on a Cloud," I thought it was a terrific bit of moral sophistication on my part to be annoyed that someone had taken this extremely important srs realist book about the plight of the poor and made a trashy singing-dancing extravaganza out of it for filthy lucre. I could not have been more wrong about the nature of Les Misérables-the-book, which is practically a musical already.

( Spoilers ahoy! )

7. Writers who are deeply concerned with how little (literal) shit there is in everyone else's literature will always have a place in my heart.

That's about all I can report on this week, except that I found this book during an ill-advised procrastination jag. It's a collection of satirical suffrage verses from 1915, and it's just a basket of gems.

I'd like to apologize for the recent streak of non-posting, which is likely to continue off and on. There are some non-book things in real life that are taking up all my spare time. One of them involves cockroaches.

However, I can say that I've started reading Les Miserables for the first time in many years and it's so great. Hugo has just decided that he's going to let this melodrama finish bUT FIRST it's very important that he set the scene with twenty chapters on the battle of Waterloo. Maybe it won't turn out to be literally twenty! But then again, maybe it will.

What I'm Not Reading Anymore

Immediately after Luo Ji used his cop connections and ultra-top-security clearance to have the real woman who most closely resembles his imaginary fake girlfriend sent to his stylish mountaintop lair, The Dark Forest pulled a time jump five years into the future and now they're married with an adorable baby so we can all get back to the part of the plot I didn't care about. I decided that life was too short to read the rest of The Dark Forest. If you have read this book and it turns out that Luo Ji and his perfect wife have a falling out when she discovers he invented her on a dare, or anything like that, let me know and maybe I'll double back in a decade or so.

(There's a whole very sixth-grade Gary Stu secret global security reason why Luo Ji lives in a stylish mountaintop lair and can get whatever he wants; it has to do with aliens who are going to invade Earth in about four centuries and it's been explained at great length at several very important meetings but I still couldn't manage to care even a little bit, so it's for the best that I'm not reading The Dark Forest anymore).

What I've Finished Reading

Ring Shout is a hell of a book and there's not much of it, so give it a try if you like the premise of grossout parasitic demons using the Ku Klux Klan as a vehicle for world conquest (or trying anyway). It fell suddenly flat for me for just a second toward the very end, because there was a kind of Avengers: Endgame supporting character charge and I hadn't, as it turned out, developed any feeling for or interest in the characters involved. The rest of the time, it was a fantastically fast moving, confident and humane splatterfest. Hate and fear are bad, songs and love are good; be careful when fighting ravening fleshbeasts that you don't accidentally get fleshbeastified in turn: this isn't a complex moral universe, but it's a gorgeously and hideously illustrated one.

What I'm Reading Now

VOTING WORKS, or at least it did in this case; the sci-fi book club is NOT moving on to the next Three-Body book and even more exposition for the exposition gods, but will be discussing my own first choice, Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. It's good so far! It diverges a little from my usual Ishiguro pattern of being very slightly bored for two hundred pages and then suddenly overwhelmed with feelings, because I'm already pretty verklempt about this sad robot friend getting bullied by her human friend's human peer group. Don't bully your robot friends, poor little rich kids of the future!

Also reading: Our Environment: How We Use and Control It, an innovative multi-science junior high school textbook from 1931, with a special focus on the mind-boggling complexity of modern life. As a textbook, I don't think it's as good as Harold Rugg's Introduction to Problems of American Culture from the same time period, but it is valuable if you want to contemplate, for example, the eternal problem of sewage, plus I like to imagine an irritable young LM Montgomery heroine having to read this paean to Industrial Man and just getting more and more upset. And at this point in the history of What The Heck Is Light Even, the existence of ether is still the going theory, which was a complete delight to stumble across.

What I Plan to Read Next

I've actually already started My Year Abroad and the latest Most Comfortable Man in London book, but I'm kicking the can down the road as far as saying anything about them goes, so I can post this now before I get distracted again.