Becca Reads

Police Log

2007-06-14T22:44:00.001-04:00

[no link to the local paper so as to preserve geographic anonymity]

At 6:22 p.m., a B Street resident called to report harassment from a friend. The woman said she went to breakfast with a man who then took her home to meet his wife. The wife was not home when she and the person arrived. The man then asked her if she wanted something to eat, which she thought was strange because they just ate. Police advised her that there was no criminal activity. She responded that she thought the person was being a bad friend and wanted to end the friendship.

Maybe she would have felt better if he'd asked her to give him a blow job.

Sextuplets

2007-06-13T16:45:00.001-04:00

I'm not an infertility blogger, but I have to wonder how artificial insemination could lead to sextuplets. (Reading it, I just assumed, perhaps skimming over the "in," that it said in vitro, and I was outraged that anyone would implant six embryos, but now I'm just confused.)

Knocked Up

2007-06-13T16:26:00.000-04:00

It wasn't as funny as The 40 Year Old Virgin.

It was still pretty funny.

Especially the shrooms in Vegas scene.

Which was really, really funny.

I love Paul Rudd.

Better not to think about politics or plausibility.

D couldn't decide which campaign sponsored it: Brownback, Rudy, or Hillary.

It was occasionally slow. And predictable.

But it was funny.

And I love Paul Rudd.

(In other news, I got a new phone, which was kind of traumatizing, though I'm getting used to it, except that the front screen stays dark except when it's open, so you need to open it to see if you have messages, which is kind of a drag. S got the same phone as me, so I put glitter flower stickers on mine, which is so unlike me--not the glitter flowers, but putting stickers on my phone. M got S's old phone. She is super-excited and has already changed all the settings, covered it with stickers, and sent me a text with a smiley face. I didn't know you could send texts with smiley faces.)

Blindsided by a Diaper

2007-06-09T22:51:00.000-04:00

As we know (how do we know? well, I know because I'm me, and you presumably know because you've heard me say it before, only it is late and I don't even know why I'm blogging at this hour, but I'm certainly not going to try to find out where I said it, so, alas, no link, but let me assure you, I've said it...OK, must abruptly exit this parenthesis)...where was I? Ah, as we know, I am over anthologies (got this one in galleys, and had to THROW IT OUT it was that bad, and I would never throw out a book, but it was a galley, and I just couldn't bear to have it in my house anymore) (no, it wasn't a galley, it was...what do they call it when they send you a book that looks like the book but the table of contents has no page numbers and there are lots of typos and a sticker on the front saying it is a whatever it is and you can't do certain things with it? come on, Dawn, help me out, what are those things?). OK, the point. The point is that I am over anthologies and I'm pretty much over parenting too--not the doing of it (yes, you've heard me say that before too), but the writing about it. So there is absolutely no way in hell I am going anywhere near this book (i.e. you might call this post BeccaDoesn'tRead rather than BeccaReads).

Nevertheless (you needed a paragraph break there, didn't you?), I am oddly intrigued by the subtitle, which is, of course, the same old anthology subtitle in its Number-Noun of Identity-"Reveal" [though this one, thank goodness, omits "the truth"]-Topic format [though, thank goodness again, this one does not formulate its topic as a string of Additional Nouns]. But what is interesting here is that the number is "Over 30" which makes me wonder if this is a book about thirtysomething Nouns of Identity ("Men and Women," in this case) or if there are in fact 31, or perhaps 32, essays in the book, in which case who on earth thought "Over 30" was a good idea?

Parents, Kids, and Networking Sites

2007-06-07T23:15:00.000-04:00

M hasn't made it to Facebook yet, but I joined LinkedIn this week. Weird, very weird.

The Glass House

2007-06-06T22:23:00.000-04:00

Visiting Fallingwater was a highlight of my life, and I am certain that visiting the Glass House will be another. Just reading about life there makes me tremble with excitement. So not me, but so eminently desirable.

The Muggwaps

2007-06-03T22:15:00.000-04:00

New from Dorrance Publishing (typed verbatim):

A book about the differences in each of us; A woman rescues defective stuffed animals in this tail of family, unity, and love.

(M and I debated whether "tail" was purposeful. We think perhaps it is. But maybe not.)

Jonathan Lethem and Ian McEwan

2007-06-03T22:11:00.000-04:00

This passage from Lethem's review of McEwan's new novel gets it exactly right on what it's like to read a great novel (obviously I'm in the "delicious agony" camp) (Atonement is one of the novels I experienced like this, another is Salman Rushdie's Shame, also Julia Glass's first novel, and, though not every sentence, The Portrait of a Lady) (I think I need to read some Jonathan Lethem) (and catch up on the Ian McEwan novels I've missed):

Among the encompassing definitions we could give “the novel” (“a mirror walking down a road,” “a narrative of a certain size with something wrong with it”) is this: a novel is a vast heap of sentences, like stones, arranged on a beach of time. The reader may parse the stones of a novel singly or crunch them in bunches underfoot in his eagerness to cross. These choices generate tension: in my eagerness to learn “what happens,” might I miss something occurring at the level of the sentence? Some experience this as a delicious agony, others distrust it. Our appetite for Ian McEwan's form of mastery is a measure of our pleasure in fiction’s parallax impact on our reading brains: his narratives hurry us feverishly forward, desperate for the revelation of (imaginary) secrets, and yet his sentences stop us cold to savor the air of another human being’s (imaginary) consciousness.

Shrek 3

2007-06-02T22:57:00.000-04:00

The big kids got to go somewhere exceedingly exciting with their grandfather (we'll just say it involved the number 38 and leave it at that), so my sister and I took the little girls to see Shrek 3 as compensation. This was a bit of a challenge for me, given my linear compulsions, because I have seen neither Shrek nor Shrek 2. However, my cultural antennae have given me the gist and, besides, it was not all about me.

Which is a very good thing because that was one boring movie. I don't get the appeal of Shrek, the guy, at all, and yes, I get that they are making fun of fairy tales, but...well...whatever. Maybe the original is just better.

The one thing I liked was when the lame princesses suddenly became superheroes. But E liked all the baby scenes, and L chortled frequently, and the children in the theater seemed generally happy, and it was only an hour and a half, so all was good.

Sarah Hannah

2007-05-31T08:51:00.000-04:00

I never heard of Sarah Hannah until I read her obituary. She committed suicide last week, at 40. Her poems are wonderful.

The Post-Birthday World

2007-05-29T23:23:00.000-04:00

I wish I hadn't read anything about The Post-Birthday World before I read the book. I don't even want to check before I write this, but I'm quite sure Jenny loved it (when I got to the pie scenes, I remembered her quoting them), and I'm fairly certain that the Times review (was it the Times? must have been, as I only read one review, and that would be the most likely candidate) was not so enthusiastic. But at any rate, my ability to respond instinctively was somewhat hampered by my knowledge that someone liked it and someone didn't, although you could also say that if I had a powerful instinctive response, whether positive or negative, it would have overcome the reactions of others. And, indeed, I have to say that my response to the book was fairly intellectual, which suggests that it did not bowl me over like, say, Lionel Shriver's last novel, or, most recently, The Last of Her Kind.

So this is the book in which Irina goes out to dinner with her husband's friend/friend's (ex) husband on his birthday and either kisses him, or doesn't. The novel then unfolds, in alternating chapters, two narratives: the one in which she kisses him (choosing passion over stability, and reaping both the benefits and the painful consequences) and the one in which she doesn't kiss him (choosing stability over passion and reaping both the benefits and the painful consequences). And that's the thing: The Post-Birthday World is clearly a work of virtuouso fiction, but it is profoundly schematic, and in its meticulous schematism, it profoundly irked me. If there is a win in one narrative, it is countered by a loss in another. If there is a dinner party in one narrative, there is a contrapuntal dinner party in another. If Irina's rival is fat in one narrative, she is thin in the other, but both her fatness and her thinness--or perhaps it is the dialectic between fatness and thinness--are so contrived that they never let you forget you are in a work of fiction, under the power of a meticulous author who never lets you--or the text, or the characters--out of her control. My success as a reader, then, came in learning to read Shriver's patterns skillfully enough that by the last third of the book I always knew what was going to happen, and while that may be success, of a sort, it is not my preferred form of pleasure.

The place of 9/11 in the novel is perhaps the best example of what I am describing. In 1997, Irina's partner Lawrence, searching for a foreign policy specialty, settles upon terrorism, which nobody else cares about. You know where this is going, don't you? Terrorism becomes a minor motif, there's the occasional suicide bomber simile, and there is a line repeated in each narrative (can't find the exact words) about falling through the sky from a tall building. When Irina goes to New York for an awards dinner, there has been one brief mention that it is 2001 and another, many pages later, that it is September. OK, OK, I get it. But was I supposed to figure it out (I did), or were these references meant to subtly shape my reading experience without me even being aware of it (they didn't)?*

Ultimately, I think, the issue at stake is realism, and I'm not quite sure I've worked out these ideas, but I'm going to try them out. Realism is one of those things you know when you see it, which means that of course untold numbers of words have been expended on pinning it down. But, basically, realism is about the representation of everyday life, complex ethical frameworks, and an illusion of coincidence and randomness that is in fact meticulously shaped by the author and feeds directly into those ethical frameworks. Think George Eliot; think Flaubert. Think, too, The Post-Birthday World, which has everything in the previous sentence--except for one word: "illusion." For the bargain the realist author makes with the reader, and the reader makes with the author, is that the fiction will in fact occlude the author's controlling hand. We know it is there, but we all agree to forget it and believe, as we read, that we are in the real, not the realist. Shriver eschews that occlusion: her hand is everywhere. So, we can read the novel as a critique of realism's illusions which, I'll be the first to agree, is a noble intellectual project. But I am the reader who derives profound pleasure from realism and has no problem with the bargain it insists upon, even as I know its terms. I'll take my realism magical if I must, and I'm fine with experimental fiction of some sorts (though I'd argue, perhaps iconoclastically, but maybe not, that modernism, of the Joyce/Woolf variety, is in fact realism taken to its extreme, as is minimalism), but I want my realism, I want to uphold my end of the bargain, and I'm just irked by an author who doesn't uphold hers, even if I know it's for a good intellectual cause.

*I am starting to think that at this historical moment, the only viable 9/11 fiction must take 9/11 as its premise and then explore its effects (this is why I'm so eager to read Falling Man) or touch upon it obliquely--gently?--in the course of a larger fictional agenda. Perhaps someday readers who have forgotten the details will be able to read a novel that begins in 1999, or mentions a perfect bright blue September day, without knowing exactly what is to come, and thus the fiction will be able to stand on its own, but The Post-Birthday World is, like The Whole World Over and The Emperor's Children, too portentous for 2007 (hmm, looks like I liked the 9/11 part of The Emperor's Children better than I remember, but it was still way too overdetermined, plotwise--I must say that the few pages where Shriver does describe 9/11 are really good, so again it's not the representation of the actual events, but their framing and foreshadowing which is just too much).

Buzz, Not

2007-05-29T23:18:00.000-04:00

I had no idea about the bees. The headline ("the sudden death of the nation's bees") is a bit alarmist compared to the text ("Last fall, the nation's beekeepers watched in horror as more than a quarter of their 2.4 million colonies collapsed"), and perhaps it's just a fluke and the bees will return, better and buzzier than ever, but still, this is the kind of article that makes one shiver and think perhaps it is better not to know and then feel really bad for thinking that.

Wherefore Art Thou, Thomas Hardy

2007-05-29T23:16:00.000-04:00

Jude the Obscure in real life. Truly ghastly either way.

Not Quite Sure

2007-01-05T20:47:00.000-05:00

Here's something to read, though I can't say how long it will be there.

Edited to add: For now I'll be blogging about what I read there. Two blogs just seems like too much.

Digging to America

2007-01-02T11:54:00.000-05:00

What makes a 9/11 book? Certainly a book in which 9/11 is central to the plot, or a book that uses 9/11 as an occasion for significant reflection, is a 9/11 book (I'm thinking The Emperor's Children and that Lynne Sharon Schwartz novel, and of course the Julia Glass novel). But what of a book that simply mentions 9/11, because it takes place now? Could we say that all our literature, post 9/11, is 9/11 literature, or is 9/11 simply the condition of our current literature, five years later?

It can be pretty persuasively argued that Digging to America is Anne Tyler's 9/11 novel, though there's only one overt reference. No, that's not right. The overt reference I'm thinking of is the arrival of the Dickinson-Donaldson's second child. When their first daughter arrives from Korea in 1996, everyone greets her at the gate; when they come back from China with their second daughter, at some point after 9/11, the grandfather and first daughter meet them outside security, everyone else waits by the baggage carousel, and momentum is lost. There are other overt references too, though, I'm remembering now, because the Iranian Yazdans, whose daughter Susan arrives from Korea on the same flight as Jin-Ho Dickinson-Donaldson, refer to how they are treated after 9/11.

But Tyler is more subtle than the writers who make their characters face the falling towers. I would call this a 9/11 novel because it addresses the question of what it means to be American, especially for immigrants, and it does so not through young Muslim men, but through Maryam Yazdan who comes to American as a young woman who opposes the Shah, her son Sami who doesn't even speak Farsi, Sami's wife Ziba and her more-recently-immigrated family of Shah supporters, the Korean girls, Jin-Ho and Susan, and Bisty Dickinson, Jin-Ho's culturally appropriative liberal mother. OK, now that I'm writing this out, I'm thinking it's not so subtle, perhaps oblique is a better word, or, and I know this is a lame compound and there's probably a better word, lightly oblique.

At any rate, there is something deeply comforting about reading Anne Tyler, and I mean that as the highest praise. Her worlds and characters are so fully realized, her dialogue so present, her plots so naturalistically meandering (though the end of this one is just a bit forced): she is a master of fiction, and we all should always remember to read her. (Just as I read great chunks of Joan Didion as I wrote my senior essay, I devoured Anne Tyler as I finished my first pregnancy and then sat on the couch and nursed for weeks--I nursed longer than weeks, but in those first few weeks it seemed like all I did was nurse and read Anne Tyler.)

Guest Blogger: Samantha Learns a Lesson

2006-12-27T18:19:00.000-05:00

(E demanded a turn.)

I've read these two chapters of the book a lot of times. These two chapters are called "Nellie" and "Mount Better School." But today is my first time reading the whole book.

What happens is her friend Nellie, the servant who lives two houses away, has just started school. She's nine, but she's in second grade. The teacher is mean and so are the children. And Samantha goes to Miss Crampton's Academy for Girls. Her teachers are Miss Crampton and Miss Stevens.

After Nellie's first day of school and after Nellie told Samantha how her first day of school was terrible, Samantha gets the second grade books from Miss Stevens and starts to teach Nellie. She teaches her to read and do all other sorts of schoolwork so she can move up to the third grade. She moves up to the third grade. But her desk is next to Eddie Ryland's because they sit in rows of how smart you are. Eddie Ryland isn't that smart, so he sits in like the back row or somewhere around the back row. Nellie just moved up from second grade, so she's not so smart for third grade, so she sits around the back row too.

Also at the end of the book, there's a speaking competition and Samantha is chosen to take part in it, but there's a mean girl in her class whose name is Edith Ettleton. She gets chosen too. But Samantha wins. I already told you about the part where she has a little school for Nellie. That was my favorite part. That's why I keep reading the book over and over again.

[Can I just say how thrilling it is that E now sits around and reads with us? The other day, S was cooking, and M, E, and I were reading in the kitchen with him, and I realized that my dream had been realized: everyone reads! so I can read! Can I also say that we are working on the difference between "smart" and "capable of doing the work," and it's a work in progress?]

Guest Blogger: Climbing the Mango Trees

2006-12-27T18:11:00.000-05:00

(M wanted to guest blog about her latest read.)

A movie star, food, India: all this stuff sounded kind of cool to me when I got this book. Before then I hadn't even known who Madhur Jaffrey was. Now I think she's probably a really cool woman because she had a really cool childhood.

Imagine having lunch, dinner, and breakfast with aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents, as well as your small family. This is what happened in India.

Also imagine being able to have exotic fruits to us in America almost any time you wanted.

This is some of what Madhur Jaffrey enjoyed.

I did learn some interesting facts about Madhur too. Such as: she was in one play when she was five and then wasn't in another till almost high school. Also, as a child she had never been out of India. She didn't go until she was out of college.

So if you like learning about food and India a tiny bit before, during, and after World War II and when the British didn't have India as one of their colonies any more, this is the book for you. I know I loved it.

Cheat and Charmer

2006-12-27T17:57:00.000-05:00

I'll just come out and say that I thoroughly enjoyed Cheat and Charmer, to the tune of 550 pages in three days (OK, so I spent two of those days sick in bed) and staying up till 4 in the morning to finish it (uh, not such a good idea after two days sick in bed). I get the mixed reviews, but hey, this novel has sister rivalry, sister love, Hollywood, Communists, Paris, London, writers, sex, betrayal, beaches, swimming pools, and melodrama, all wrapped up in the 1950s. If you liked Jill Robinson's Bed/Time/Story or have a secret yen for Irwin Shaw, by all means pick up this one. The story of nice girl Dinah Milligan Lasker and her glamorous younger sister, Veevi Milligan Ventura Albrecht; of their Communist pasts and the consequences of their encounters with the House Un-American Activities Committee; of Dinah's husband Jake's escapades at Marathon Pictures, in Paris, and in bed; of Veevi's first husband, Bulgarian filmmaker Stefan Ventura, and her second, novelist Mike Albrecht, and all her men before, betwixt, and after; of...oh, hell, either you are ready to get it already or you're already bored. If this is a novel for you, you know who you are.

Reinventing the Wheel

2006-12-25T15:52:00.000-05:00

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Today we are here to present the Reinventing the Wheel Awards for writers who become parents and make the remarkable discovery of a whole new realm of textual possibility, one that nobody has ever written about before, because nobody has ever been thoughtful about parenting, or had such a special child. Nope, nobody, not ever. This year, we are lucky to have not just one but two lucky winners.

- Peggy Orenstein receives the "What's a feminist mom to do when her little girl likes pink stuff?" award, with special mention for being the first feminist mom ever to encounter the quandary that is Libby Lu, or to realize that a girl can love princesses and still want to be a fireman.

- And in the dad category, the "My kid is remarkable and what a miracle it is to be a father, so let me tell you about it, in detail, and sometimes I'll even be self-deprecating" award goes to Steve Almond, who is pleased to follow in the footsteps of last year's winner, Neal Pollack, because his kid is cuter, his sex life is wilder, and he's a better writer.

Thanks for listening, folks, and remember, when you have an original idea, go for it, don't bother checking to see if anyone else has ever had it, because surely, even if their idea is some sort of facsimile of yours, it's nowhere near as original!

MotherTalk Blog Tour: Cycle Savvy

2006-12-18T10:15:00.000-05:00

When the savvy women at MotherTalk put out a call for moms and their teen or pre-teen daughters who wanted to participate in the blog book tour for Toni Weschler's new book, Cycle Savvy: The Smart Teen's Guide to the Mysteries of Her Body, I jumped on the bandwagon immediately. I am one of the legions of sworn adherents to Weschler's first book, Taking Charge of Your Fertility, without which, I am quite certain, we would not have the pleasure of E. And I'm the sex-positive, pro-communication mom of a pre-teen daughter who is definitely interested in what's happening to her body. So we signed right up, the book arrived right on time, and here we are.

I have to say right off the bat: pre-teen, not so much. M was initially taken by the cartoons, the quotes from actual teens, and the first factoid which is that you actually come into being inside your grandmother's uterus (you'll have to read it yourself to find out why). But after sitting down with the book three times, M ultimately pronounced it "boring," her code word for things she can't handle as well as things that bore her, and "too old for me," which makes sense, given that Weschler herself says it's targeted for14-18 year olds, and their issues--and bodies--are quite different from ten year olds' (for the younger set, I hope the blog book tour powers that be will not take it amiss if I slip in a quick plug for The Care and Keeping of You: The Body Book for Girls--yes, it's American Girl, but two of my smartest, coolest friends with slightly older daughters swore by it, and when things started to, shall we say, develop, I got it for M and she devoured it and still rereads it, as is her wont--it's a chatty, humorous, appropriately explict account of puberty and its consequences: a solid precursor to Cycle Savvy).

After M put the book down for good, I picked it up, and I was impressed. Those who are already aficionados of TCOYF, as Weschler's first book is colloquially known, know that her thing is helping people to understand all facets of the menstrual cycle (did you know your temperature goes up when you ovulate? how about that stuff in your underpants--know what it is?). Reading that book was a total eye-opener for me at 35--and I read the first edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves when I was ten, so it's not like I started out hopelessly uninformed. Weschler explains in her preface that she wrote Cycle Savvy because the most consistent response to TCOYF is women wishing they'd learned all this earlier, even been taught it as teenagers. So in Cycle Savvy, she does just that: teaches it to teenagers.

The book definitely aims for its target audience: it's got jokes, asides, sidebars, quizzes, pictures, and lots of italicized quotes from teens and former teens. Amidst all that teen magazine design, it packs in loads of great information--not just the details of the menstrual cycle and how to chart it, but what to expect at your first ob-gyn appointment, how to recognize and deal with PMS, first-time stories, birth control methods. Tone is hard, and I'm not a teenage girl, so I can't say if Weschler hits it (now I wish I'd grabbed my oh-so-teenage niece last night at our Hanukkah party and asked her to give it a skim), but I thought she struck a good balance between chatty and serious, humorous and informative. It seems like the kind of book a girl might resolve to skim and only look at the fun stuff, but then get seduced into reading the complicated parts (hormones, luteal cycles, and the like).

The one thing that makes me sad about the book (I've searched for the right adjective and sad, I think, is it), is the way contemporary mores force Weschler to equivocate more than I sense she wants to about teenage sexuality. Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of realistic, positive rhetoric and information, from first-person stories of teens who regret being pressured into sex (and first-person stories of teens who had great first experiences) to descriptions of how different birth control methods work. But the goal of TCOYF is, as the title states, to help women take charge of their fertility, whether they want to avoid or facilitate getting pregnant, and that book helps you use all your newfound knowledge for precisely that purpose, via the Fertility Awareness Method. Apparently, though, urging teens to chart their cycles so they know when they are or aren't fertile is way too edgy in this abstinence-only climate, so in the "Note to Moms" Weschler provides feeble reassurance that this isn't her goal, and later on she gives similarly weak rationales for charting (so you won't be surprised by your period on a trip to the beach! so you can tell if you have an infection!). Like I said, I don't fault her for this, and she is pretty brave to include a lot of the material she does, and HarperCollins deserves kudos for publishing the book at all; it just makes me sad, once again, that we have come to this.

All in all, then, thumbs up from me, and I think in a couple of years, M will be glad to rediscover this one on her shelf.

It's Pronounced Dice-K

2006-12-13T22:36:00.000-05:00

You've just got to love Boston and the Red Sox: where else would a police cruiser be waiting on the tarmac to accompany the almost-signed (cross fingers, knock wood) star pitcher to his physical? (It's not Red Sox blogging; it's reading blogging: I READ the article.)

So Long, Paris

2006-12-12T17:02:00.000-05:00

I was just thinking about Paris Hilton this morning. Actually, I was thinking about Nicole Richie, which led me to Paris, and the general gist of the thoughts was how totally useless they are, and how sick it is that we allow them to waste so much of our bandwidth, literally and metaphorically. But Rebecca Traister says it better than I could, so I'll just let her.

Hanukkah Books

2006-12-09T22:07:00.000-05:00

I've always admired parents who rotate the toys. You know, the ones who only keep, say, one third of the toys out at a time, so the kids actually play with them, and then when they start getting bored, out come the next third and it's like new toys all over again? At least, I think that's how it's supposed to work, and it sounds admirable, though, in fact, I'm not sure I know anyone who actually does it. Oh no, that's not true, M and E's old daycare provider did it, and she was Admirable, at least very much so in her own mind, but we parted with her on bad terms, so maybe the rotation thing isn't all it's cracked up to be, though, then again, the toys had nothing to do with the bad terms...

Anyway, the only realm in which I have ever rotated is the Hanukkah books. And you can't really call it rotated if there's nothing to rotate with, because really what it is is putting them away from about two weeks after Hanukkah till maybe two weeks before, because we have--thanks to doting grandparents and Jewish friends in No-Longer-Red State with almost-grown-up kids--what is probably the world's largest and most beloved collection of Hanukkah books, and there is nothing more boring than reading Hanukkah books--except reading Hanukkah books in July! (Is it like that with Christmas books? God knows, the No-Longer-Red State Capital City Suburb library had the world's largest collection of Christmas books, every single one of which I believe I refused to check out, because while I am highly ecumenical on many things, and, yes, we have checked out Barbie books, I simply do not do Christmas books, so I wouldn't know.)

Anyway, I thought I would offer my opinion of the Hanukkah books worth reading (or rereading, as the case may be), which is to say: my favorites.

Sammy Spider's First Hanukkah. I love Sammy Spider (we also have Passover, and either Shabbat or Rosh Hashanah, I'm thinking Shabbat) (you know, I've been clicking on www.powells.com frequently these days, and they list the top five bestsellers of the hour on the home page, and The Gourmet Cookbook and the new Joy are always up there, but today #1 is Don't Let the Pigeons Drive the Bus! Go figure.). Sammy is--duh--a spider who lives with his mom in the Shapiros' house and learns about the holidays by watching Josh and his parents celebrate. These are really about holiday practices, not so much beliefs, and they have bright colors and not a lot of words and are great for toddlers, though my kids still love them, albeit perhaps sentimentally.

When Mindy Saved Hanukkah. Another tradition one, though it nicely weaves in the Hanukkah story as brave little Mindy fights Ahaseurus the mean cat to get the candle. The schtick here is that Mindy's family, the Kleins, are tiny people who live behind the wall of the Eldridge Street Synagogue in the Lower East Side, ca. tenement days. I love books about tiny people, from Mistress Masham's Repose to The Borrowers and even The Littles, and in this one Mindy is brave and tough and the denouement features a piece of herring. Fun pictures too, with bottle cap lamps and Mindy scaling the ark with the aid of a paper clip.

Judah Who Always Said No. Hanukkah is a tough one for the not-quite-not-Zionist pacifists among us, who don't want to buy into the nationalist rhetoric with which the minor holiday of Hanukkah has been imbued (it's not all counter-Christmas). Then again, we can always go with resistance to tyranny and oppression, which is our preferred ideology. When we first got Judah, I was not so happy with the indoctrination aspects. Then I started going into preschool to do Hanukkah. I went to preschool and kindergarten and afterschool to do Hanukkah more times than I can count--and then we moved to Blue State and were no longer the only Jews around, or at least, the only Jews in preschool, kindergarten, and afterschool, and I didn't have to do Hanukkah any more. But you haven't done Hanukkah with little kids unless you've led them in a rousing chorus of "No!" as Judah resists his mother, his father, his brothers, and, eventually, the evil Greek king. There is even a battle scene with elephants and bows and arrows. I'm a convert--to the book.

The List

2006-12-08T08:16:00.000-05:00

I keep a list of the books I want to read in the back of my datebook (I still buy a datebook every year--and it's time to get one, because the tiny lines for each day of next year are getting crowded--and inn the back of the book I rewrite, every year, my phone numbers, and everyone's social security number--I know, I shouldn't--and an updated version of the list.)

The list includes books people tell me about, books I see reviewed or read articles about or glance at on the table at the bookstore, books I hear about in conversation. Sometimes I write down the title, but sometimes just the author, and then later I look at the name and wonder who on earth it is.

The problem is: I keep the list, but I rarely refer to it. I get sucked in by the new books shelf, or someone gives me a book, or I pick up a book at someone else's house. So the list gets longer, and rarely shorter.

Here's the 2006 version, exactly as it looks in the back of the datebook (crossed-off books are, obviously, the ones I've read [uh, nope, I actually have no idea how to cross things out in Blogger--I thought it would be obvious, as everyone seems to do it, but it's not, so let's just go with asterisks for the ones I've read, or abandoned, which is in fact more visually accurate, as on the list itself I just make a dash at the beginning of the item, kind of ticking it off, rather than crossing it off]):

Laura Waterman, Losing the Garden
Donald Hall, The Best Day The Worst Day
Housekeeping [I know, isn't it scandalous?!]
* Wesley Stace, Misfortune [abandoned]
Towelhead
*Ruth Reichl [this was Garlic and Sapphires]
*Ian McEwan, Saturday
Andrea Levy, Small Island [I have taken this one out of the library many times, to no avail]
Christine Schutt
Lydia Davis [I wrote "short stories" by these two]
Patrick Hamilton [???]
Alice Mattison
*Jude Morgan, Passion [abandoned]
Lily King, The English Teacher
Dana Spiotta, Eat the Document [got this one from the library yesterday]
*Jay McInerney [read a few pages at the bookstore--yuck]
*Ayelet
Poppy Z. Brite
Octavia Butler
*Steve Almond
Deborah Eisenberg
Mary Gaitskill, Veronica [sitting on my desk since August]
Sarah Gran, Dope
I Capture the Castle [I know, I KNOW]
Megan McCafferty, Sloppy Firsts, etc. [I'm pretty sure I'll never read this one]
*Justine Picardie, My Mother's Wedding Dress [referenced here]
*Michael Walker, Laurel Canyon [abandoned and blogged]
*Shari Goldhagen, Family and Other Accidents
Lee Server, Ava Gardner
Edward P. Jones
Michael Patrick MacDonald, All Souls [I'm working on it]
Naomi Alderman, Disobedience
Alan Moore, Lost Girls
Elizabeth Frank, Cheat and Charmer [got it from the library]
Mark Haddon, A Spot of Bother
Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog...
Rodrigo Fresan, Kensington Gardens
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Jim Crace
The Plot Against America
Cancer Vixen
*Alison Bechdel, memoir

Family and Other Accidents

2006-12-08T07:36:00.000-05:00

I fell off the wagon. I failed the non-fiction challenge. I went to the library, took out three novels and stayed up till 2 finishing the first one. At least they were novels from The List (to which eventually I will devote a post, maybe even this morning).

Somebody recommended Family and Other Accidents (if the text on the cover is all lowercase, should I write it like that? it's also in lowercase on the title page, but in caps on Powell's...if it's not e.e. cummings, or been down so long it feels like up to me [which has caps on Amazon, but was in lowercase typescript on the cover of my parents' paperback from the 60s], I'm going with the conventions). I'm thinking the recommender was A (not California A, the other A).

This is an interesting book that made me think about the nature of the novel. Actually, I'm not sure it's such an interesting book, but it kept me interested. It's a relationship novel--about men: two brothers, orphaned when one is 15 and the other 25, and the next 25 years of their life, which includes a bit of career, a lot of ambivalent brotherhood, and some women, and a lot of ambivalence about them too. What makes the novel worth reading is the ambivalence and complexity of the relationships, and the characterization, which is convincing and captures how we both change and stay the same over long periods of time.

Technically the book interested me because it was so completely focused on Jack and Connor, and, to a lesser extent, Anna, Mona, Kathy, Beth, and Laine. That is, though the point of view shifts from chapter to chapter, this is a single-focus novel: there are no subplots, no side characters (is that a term or did I make it up?), no history or politics, hardly any description, albeit quite a lot of rain. The characters are embodied: Jack and Connor are dark, Mona has red hair, Laine and Kathy are blond; Jack rubs his eyebrows when he is stressed; Connor's hair is long and lank; there is quite a lot of throwing up (really, I don't think I've ever read a book with so much throwing up). Some of this embodiment is compelling--actually, the throwing up, though it is oddly persistent, and thus perhaps meant to be thematically meaningful??--but some--the hair--seems like characteristics hung upon characters.

I think Family and Other Accidents could be made emblematic of the anemic bourgeouis (sp.?) domestic novel, probably in a critique-of-MFA-programs kind of way, but, still, it's a fine portrait of a family and a handful of psyches, and I'm not sure whether that is damning with faint praise.

[Just to compound my reputation as nitpicker: two things were glaringly wrong: ca. 1998, nobody used pins for diapers, and a former AmeriCorps volunteer now getting a master's at the Kennedy School would never read the Herald at home. Also, the novel is strangely atemporal. It happens in the present--lots of cell phones--but if Jack, Connor, and Laine talk about dead John and Carolyn Kennedy the first time Jack meets Laine, when Laine is pregnant with Jorie, then the novel must end several years in the future, for Jorie is 16 in the last chapter. It's just kind of odd.]