a light aslant

41. La Batarde, Violette Leduc

Wow. Although I'm pretty sure I read some Leduc at some point in college, I came to this remembering next to nothing about her, and was completely, solidly blown away. Her writing is absolutely amazing. This is her first volume of autobiographical nonfiction (not her first book -- her first novel, L'Asphyxie/In the Prison of Her Skin, was also autobiographical), and it follows her from her childhood, born out of wedlock, through her unhappy adolescence in a girls' boarding school, to her young adulthood working in publishing in Paris, and her war years as a somewhat hapless but successful black marketeer. But all of this is just background to the story of how and with whom Violette falls in love -- in boarding school with the luminous Isabelle, and then Hermine, a teacher, with whom she lives for many years, a ridiculously awful marriage to a strange man named Gabriel, and then later she falls in love with a gay Jewish writer, Maurice, who finally convinces her to write, while they are isolated in a Normandy village during the occupation. (Yes, somehow, I cannot avoid reading about WW2, yet again. My obsessions, let me show you them.) And much of her love life is shot through with memories of her grandmother, Fideline, who loved her in a tender way that her own mother never offered. The passages when Leduc writes about Isabelle are spellbinding, perhaps moreso because I felt she captured so perfectly that weird experience of sexual exploration, with a girl, when it's hidden and of a piece with the whole bubble of being at a school -- nearly precisely my experience in college (because for various reasons, at the gayest school in the country, I was quite closeted, and as inexperienced as Violette was at age 12 or 13, apparently). The beauty of her writing is how it has so many unexpected turns and images in it, like this, in one of her night trysts with Isabelle: A wave carried her away and she sank down into the bed, then rose up again, plunged her face toward me, and held me to her. There were roses falling from the girdle she put around me. I fastened the same girdle around her. Or this, from the book's closing passage: This August day, reader, is a rose window glowing with heat. I make you a gift of it, it is yours....I walk without flinching through the burning cathedral of the summer. My bank of wild grass is majestic and full of music. It is a fire that solitude presses against my lips. Does that capture it? No? Maybe? Anyway, amazing. The book faltered a bit, for me, in the long awful sections of her chasing Gabriel and Maurice around. She has a doggedly low opinion of herself, and although she was taken in by Simone de Beauvoir and other famous post-war writers in that circle, she never quite achieved fame as a writer. It's a shame, reading this book, because she is really something special.

I'm working on finishing the second autobiographical volume that follows this one, Mad in Pursuit, which is so far proving to be almost better. Though nothing will quite match her lyricism about her awful childhood and her early loves, I think. Sad but luminous, her writing has inspired me so much this past month. I wish I'd known her work better in college, she is a perfect match for my other favorite autobiographist, Dolores Prato. Anyway -- this book is highly, highly recommended.

37. Kings of Infinite Space, by James Hynes

I wasn't sure what to think of this novel, but halfway through it turned into a "well at least let's finish it" book. I dunno, I'm very lukewarm on it. I think it was supposed to be witty -- guess what, there is highly surreal campy cultish horror hiding behind the facade of a fallen academic's dead-end job in a Texas cubicle! Complete with Fringe-esque pale men who keep showing up and doing mysterious things, and strange undergrounds that are a little too overtly Dantean, a ghost cat, excruciating Texas twang verbal tics that are overdone, too. Like the clueless boss who mixes his metaphors EVERY TIME. Or the girlfriend who always says ain't/was and then helpfully winces and corrects herself to aren't/were every time, which after a time began to seem like a lazy author's way of getting around being snobbish toward a genuine undereducated poor southern girl. Like, if she hadn't been so helpfully self-abasing, he would've been too much of a snob to fuck her, or something? Poor Callie. Luckily it was her GREATEST DREAM to read the Norton Anthology and parade around in the protagonist's buttondown oxfords. (Hey Levelland, all two of you reading this, Callie is exactly like a young Kerri Rivera, I think. Sardonic, doesn't take shit. The most fun reading this book was picturing Kerri in her place.) This was kind of a fun take on zombies, I suppose, except the excruciating realities of a cubicle job AND the awful flat hellish Texan heat were so overdone that they occasionally went right over the top of surreal into belabored. This would have been a great update on the zombie genre if Shaun of the Dead hadn't already done it with more wit and humanity, you know?

38. Broken Harbor, by Tana French

Super glad I waited for this to come in at the library rather than buy it -- I love Tana French, but this was a terrible slog, had to force myself to finish it. I guess it's all been downhill since In The Woods, in my opinion, because in that book she was clever enough to combine an old mystery, a new mystery, and a love story gone wrong (plus it stars Clive Owen, in my head); in this one, we just had a new mystery that never quite lived up to its surreal touches, and I guessed 75% of the Great Big Twist about 100 pages in advance. There were none of the layers, especially in the main character, who was so emphatically Old School Boyo Hardbitten Irish Detective that he seemed to have no inner life whatsoever. Or, I guess this one did have an old story layered into the new/current story, but it wasn't really mysterious enough, it was just This Made Me A Tough Guy. Okay, so what? The most compelling part of this story was where Detective Hardbitten almost fell into bro love with his rookie partner, except he didn't. What a disappointment. Oh also, French's characters seem to all turn out to be mysterious synesthetes, but this seems to be an authorial tick more than anything else, and it got old. People are always shaking the mysterious waft of perfume out of their nose, or being surprised by weird theatrical flashbacks. Her writing isn't awful, but what seemed deft in novel #1 becomes old hat and annoying, to me, by #4. My recommendation: go read In The Woods if you haven't, or read it again (I might), and then maybe The Likeness if you need a bit of a follow-up thrill, but in my opinion, Faithful Place and Broken Harbor are not really worth the time.

33. American Wife, Curtis Sittenfeld

I loved Sittenfeld's Prep but resisted this book for a long time -- needlessly, as it turns out, because it was very enjoyable. I don't know a lot about Laura Bush, but watching her qua Alice Lindgren, and George W. Bush as Charlie Blackwell, made them both a lot more likable. That is to say, made them more redeemable than the view I'd had of them before, as 1) George, stupid and rich, and 2) Laura, Stepford wife, cipher. As the reviews all say, this book is fascinating during Alice's childhood and early adulthood, especially during Charlie's courtship of Laura, which really made me like him and feel affectionate for his weird, horny, drunk character...but then the whole thing gets boring once she/they get to the White House. Furthermore, as a character I was kind of repulsed by Alice, frequently, for her "oh horrors we are privileged and other people are poor" attitude, alleviated by very occasional good deeds, and for her "I really liked housework, it was just kind of soothing, even though we were rich enough to hire servants" attitude (what the fucking fuck). This portrait of a small town working class girl who ascends to the highest privileges was perhaps just truthful, in that sense, by portraying someone who really didn't put a lot of thought toward housework, or fame. Though that was also its weakness (and the weakness of Laura as first lady), because some of the most fascinating dilemmas of the person -- a liberal pro-abortion librarian married to the GOP president? -- came down to, essentially, well I believed in supporting him so I kept it to myself. In that sense, a lot of the tragedies of her generation come down to simply not thinking very much about tragedy/complication. I know my grandmothers are like that, too. Weirdest things: wishing good old George had stayed a horny rich drunk bastard, wishing the Karl Rove character had more substance, wishing Sittenfeld had kept the Bush twins in the book (the Blackwells have only one daughter). Oh, and wishing that Laura/Alice was not quite so eye-rollingly orgasmic, in that predictably novelistic sense, where it seems she is Super Vanilla Girl who reliably, obediently comes in missionary, somehow. Whatever, Sittenfeld, fix that next time, but otherwise you write pretty damn good fan fic. Keep up the good work.

34. The Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss

On mordicai's excellent recommendation -- this book fucking rules and I have a crush on Rothfuss now. This is the first fantasy book I've read since finishing the Song of Ice and Fire series over a year ago, and it soothed a lot of my pain about Martin's books. Why? Because yes, it is really *is* possible to be a feminist author writing about a male protagonist in a not very enlightened society who is not constantly engaged in rape culture! And it's not heavy-handed! And I trusted Rothfuss as an author! You know, I didn't trust Martin because I genuinely disagreed with his character-killing choices, the further I got into it; not because I didn't want the characters to die, but because it was so sloppily done and further evidence of a so-so writer at work. With Rothfuss I was neither anticipating/dreading the plot moves nor questioning his choices. It's actually a little rare for me, when reading a book, to just fall into the prose and not rewrite the sentences in my head, but I fell full into this book. Awesome. Kvothe, the main character, is one of those I'm A Magical Genius Prodigy At Everything I Do characters, but I didn't mind it, because he held genuine mystery; in fact the book was loaded down with so many fantasy tropes (magic! the wayside inn! lonesome journeys! mysterious powers! manic pixie dreamgirls! apprentices! traveling performers! street urchins!) but Rothfuss managed to make it feel fresh, deliberate, made with careful authorial intent, and the world feels expansive and rich. Even the Hogwarts and Obi-wan Kenobi parts of the story were good, because they scratched that itch for tropes of the genre, but Rothfuss never tried to trade on familiarity, nor did he belabor his tropes or try to make them overly unique. It felt genuine. I really got caught up in this book, aside from being a good story it just gave me genuine hope for the genre, can you tell? I found bits of the book's rhymes caught in my head, too, sure sign of a novelist with a poet's soul. What's their plan, what's their plan / Chandrian, Chandrian. If you like fantasy, go get this right now.

I am home sick with Penny today, so let's get two more book reviews out of the way!

29. Rose: My Life in Service to Lady Astor, Rosina Harrison.

Thanks to kore for the timely recommendation, this was a nice companion to #28, Below Stairs, though where Margaret scraped for decent employment and was desperate to escape via marriage, by contrast, Rose, who came from a similarly impoverished background, held far higher ambitions and achieved far more (the obvious answer to the obvious question is, yes, education and social capital: Margaret left school at 13 and had no connections or advice beyond "don't tell them you worked in a laundry, everyone knows laundrymaids are sluts," but Rose stayed a number of years beyond that and moreover had an unpaid apprenticeship at a tailor's shop, and Rose's parents were driven enough to make this happen financially and to give her solid advice on how to actually become a lady's maid, no mean feat for someone living in poverty). Rose goes in short time from a young lady's maid (a position which entailed being something between a seamstress, international diplomat, travel agent, nursemaid, fashion consultant, etc) to lady's maid to Lady Astor, Extremely Rich Person, which is about the highest status job in service, for one of the highest status women in Britain. Lady Astor was one of the early female MPs and had an active political life until just after WWII; she was also a pretty terrible human being to Rose, insulting, tempestuous, condescending, mean, though eventually they worked out a sort of truce where Rose would boss Nancy around as much as vice versa. They were like best friends, if your best friend was your (poorly) paid devoted servant, and like an old married pair in their cyclical rages and manipulations. For some reason Rose has this crazy blissful temperament and it never bothers her, or not much. My favorite part of this book was the more in-depth description of life between and among the Astors' various palatial residences, all the entertaining and backroom scandals and the regimented service rituals, including bits of interviews with older servants who talk about prior times that were even more formal. Also, she became closer to her employer after weathering the firebombing of Plymouth, her whole description of wartime was very intimate; she illuminated something else, too, which was how wartime improved servants' conditions not only because of labor shortages, but because the bombings forced formerly-aloof mistresses to take refuge in the belowstairs world, where their scrimping habits were more obvious, to themselves and to guests. Rose was fairly ambitious, in that her entire reason for going into service was to travel widely (which she did in spades with the Astors), and that within the restrictive norms of the times she managed to accrue substantial leeway and respect both above and below stairs; all that, however, and she apparently never received a raise from Lady Astor, despite asking, except once, and she received maybe one afternoon off per week, far less than others in service, and yet seemed to like it that way. In general there was a bit of Stockholm wafting around, but as a portrait of employment, lowerclass upward mobility, richesse, and class portraiture, this was a fantastic book and I recommend it highly.

30. Origins: How the nine months before birth shape the rest of our lives, Annie Murphy Paul

How did I come to pick up this book? I only know it showed up in my request queue at work. Paul is a decent science writer, though the conceit of each chapter being a month in her own (second) pregnancy wasn't quite as awesome as it could have been. I had one big quibble with this book: it was very quickly obvious to me that she was solidly on the OB side of the birthing spectrum, and indeed at the end has a scheduled c-section, and she wasn't that interested in looking at research that challenges this model of care, focusing more on other kinds of interactions, such as those in diet, mood, environmental chemicals, drugs, genes vs epigenetics vs nurture, etc. For someone whose metanarrative was pretty persuasive on the idea that the gestation process is more responsive, reciprocal, subtle and sensitive than we may think, where does that reciprocal sensitivity go during labor? She seemed to breeze right by the scheduled c-section, which to me said, okay, this is not a book for me, so I admit to skimming at times. Still, her review of plastics research galvanized me (pun intended?) to get rid of a bunch of plastics, be more vigilant about avoiding fire-treated pajamas, things like that. Perhaps I shouldn't have been so optimistic about a pop sci book; it is still interesting stuff, but I feel I've picked up a good deal of the same conclusions just from reading the odd research finding, over the past couple years, you know, mom media radar. And honestly, as weird as it is, I found Sarah Blaffer Hrdy's Mothers and Others a more useful primer than this, though perhaps it isn't fair to compare the two writers there. Both are writing, in some ways, about prior eras of drastically incorrect science. But most of Paul's findings (and she is summarizing, obviously, not drawing new conclusions) are in the category of stuff we mostly already know about, whereas Hrdy's stuff is more squarely outside the realm of modern western practices. In any case, yes, still a very unfair comparison, but oh well. Go read Hrdy, ignore this one, unless you are somehow still convinced that plastics are utterly safe, pollution is no big deal, vitamins are stupid, etc etc.

25. Babylon By Bus, Ray Lemoine and Jeff Neumann
This was a lot of fun. A lot of depression and a lot of fun. Ray and Jeff are these two Boston asshole kids who sell Yankees Suck tshirts, and then give it up to take a bus into Iraq semi-illegally (after the "liberation" but right before things got really really bad) and got jobs and did some good in the world, mainly because they didn't give a shit about rules, and also they took a lot of drugs along the way. Sadly, or perhaps not, this is the most helpful guide to the development of the Iraq conflict, post-2004, that I've seen so far -- not that I've been looking, but I didn't pick it up expecting to learn so much. And about Israel, too, along the way. It's a sobering but hilarious read, definitely gonzo style warzone romping and a kind of outsider's-insider view of how war media live and the occupation government worked (or not) and the rest of it; they run with semi-famous journalists and filmmakers and humanitarians, some of whom are killed. I kind of wanted to read a follow-up, can they also explain to me what's happened since they left? But then perhaps that's the whole point -- no more asshole Red Sox rats trying to help/occupy/bungle. Highly entertaining and not stupid at all, they are actually highly educated liberal assholes, but not in a flaunting-it kind of way (though some of their background research does show through a little baldly in some of the exposition, it wasn't too overt) and they are mildly aware of their own privilege and assholeishness throughout, and they have a healthy respect for nuance, and for people who get things done, and have lived through more than most American kids my/our age have, that's for sure. Highly recommended, very quick read.
{ETA: this is another book found through an old This American Life episode.}

26. Cassandra at the Wedding, Dorothy Baker
I picked this up from a NYBR review (it's their reprint edition) and was surprised, pleased, taken in. A short novel of tight, closely-observed narration by a crypto-lesbian twin in the 1960s. Apparently I didn't read the review very closely because I totally missed the whole lesbian thing until I got into it, and so it was pleasantly shocking to read between the lines and realize what the narrator was saying/not saying, though her coded words and very oblique references could probably have gone over the head of a blinkered reader, I'm sure. But this was part of the fun! It's also a sad and weird novel, almost of a piece with the Bell Jar; if I could go back in time I'd tell myself at 16 to read this along with the Bell Jar, I suppose. It's a nice companion to that kind of claustrophobic dissociative first-person depressed youth early-feminist vibe. When I finished it I was kind of despondent (a night's sleep was helpful) because it was hard to come out of it, wanting more. Highly recommended -- stylish early 1960s, alcohol-soaked, unreliable narrator, interesting character studies. I really wanted this to be a film, maybe in the vein of the Virgin Suicides or even Picnic at Hanging Rock. That kind of dreamy, sun-soaked, surreal vibe. Looking online, seems like someone is planning to make a modern update -- it would have been fantastic with those old 60s movie voices, though; if done right it could be a real style maker, like Mad Men gone off the rails. In a way I suppose it kind of has been updated for modern times -- it would be hard to beat Rachel Getting Married, to which it has more than a few passing similarities.

How did I forget about #14 and #15? Devoured during my early June trip to NYC, I suppose. Chronologically these are all way out of order now, back to reality-order beginning with #17.

14. The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides.
Eugenides wrote one of my top desert island books, Middlesex, and this book was not exactly bad, but definitely a disappointment in comparison. Less epic, much more annoying. I kind of hated the narrator Madeleine (who has become conflated with a girl I work with, Madeline, towards whom I occasionally feel intense jealousy) and the idea that her peregrinations around husband X or one-time lover Y could really add up to much. Did she wrestle with feminism in a convincing way? Hard to say, she's not my generation, maybe this resonates more for someone ten years older than me? The conceit is also that the book, in wrestling with the trope of the marriage plot, creates a new marriage plot...I remain unconvinced. Was pleased in the end that I only bought this in Kindle form -- not one I'd feel good about spending the full hardback price on. (ETA: upon reading the NYT review [please note I put "peregrinations" in my summary above *before* reading the review!], I'm kind of fascinated to realize I wholly missed the unsubtle DFW tribute, but mollified to read between the lines a kind of subtle damning-with-faint-praise critique...or is that just wishful thinking? Oh Michiko Kakutani.)

15. Wild, Cheryl Strayed.
Allow me to tell you my tale of woe, which is that the amazing Strayed, a.k.a. Sugar (are you reading her yet? they are not advice columns they are on another plane of awesomeness I can't even articulate very well), MOTHERFUCKING SUGAR was going to come to my bookclub in September and recently had to cancel. WOE IS ME. I am so sad. I am completely, utterly lovesick over her as a writer, and this book is amazing. Personal history, travelogue of unbelievable deprivation and naivete and luck on the Pacific Coast Trail, meditation on loss and addiction and sex and divorce, maybe this one just hit me right at the right time, but it is legitimately amazing. Even my crazy dad who only reads books about string theory gave this a go and then texted me raving about it. Go read it now, before Oprah's book club starts up again and makes you feel silly for reading it. (That is an actual thing happening. Oprah's book club was closed up, did you know that? And then she read this book and decided to start it up again?)

16. Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury
I've had this on the re-read list ever since his death. In addition to devouring pretty much any Bradbury I could get my hands on at the library, Dandelion Wine held a special place in my heart from when I read it in middle school. My re-read revealed one interesting thing: I remembered it being a series of short stories, but of course it's one continuous novel. It made me nostalgic for the analog world of the 1920s, everyone on their porches in the evenings, kids running crazy all over town. Not so much nostalgia for the racist bits and the xenophobic bits but there is magic around the edges of this book. It's pure pure summer, compared to my other favorite Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes, which is of course pure pure autumn. Reading this in the summer is fun because it's all about dying of heat, sluggish summer heat in Illinois -- probably easier to read from early summer in Oregon, when some days it barely hits 78.

17. After Such Knowledge, Eva Hoffman.
Hoffman's memoir Lost in Translation was a big part of my comparative literature studies in autobiography in college, but this one was unknown to me until Heidi recommended it as a good counterpoint to #18 below. As one long nonfiction essay, this is a beautiful but occasionally tedious meditation about being a part of the generation born to parents who had survived the Holocaust. Hoffman's parents hid in a tiny attic space in Poland, then fled to the US soon after the war ended, but the actual facts and memories and impressions of this history are frustratingly scattered thinly throughout the text. Maybe this is somewhat like her generation's experience, where their Jewish parents' experiences were so unspoken/dark/forgotten/hidden/etc that it wasn't until much much later that many of her generation actually learned the circumstances of the survival or death of parents and relatives. A later chapter covers Hoffman's return to the village where her parents had lived, and she paints an interesting picture of the multi-cultural fabric of these small villages (another famous work of hers is on the vanished shetl communities, so this is her specialty), going into some of the weird post-facto who-sheltered-whom and who-betrayed-whom stuff that is everywhere under the surface of these return journeys. Ultimately I didn't feel incredibly enlightened by this book -- it's beautiful, it's no consolation, it's opaque. Her point, of course (not quite intentionally evoked by this opacity, in my opinion) is that there is no explanation, no reconciliation. It's much more subtle than I'm making it sound, and very well written, just not quite what I was looking for. Skip to the chapter where she goes back to Poland, honestly.

18. Patterns of Childhood, Christa Wolf.
I thought this was a re-read but as I got into the later chapters it was clear I'd never finished it the first time around (in 2004 or so?). This is Wolf's novel-that-really-a-memoir about her childhood in eastern Germany, as her father joined the SS and she joined the Hitler Youth girls, and then later to their flight from the advancing Red Army and life as displaced persons. The narrative is told in slightly confusing layers that overlay (1) her childhood memories with (2) a 1971 trip to her childhood town (formerly Germany, now Poland) with her brother, husband and daughter and also (3) the period of writing of the book, some four or five years after the 1971 trip. She refers to Nelly (pseudonym for the young Christa), and also writes in second person familiar. This book, when I read its first chapter, was tremendously important to me, it expressed something about autobiography I'd felt but never articulated: how memories cannot be separated from how they are evoked in the present time; there are also aspects of her personality that I identify with (to be good is to be obedient) which is an uncomfortable feeling, to feel similar to a child in those circumstances. (I often felt conspicuous carrying this book, which has a vaguely nazi colors and a girl saluting in the picture -- though I realized that these were symbols that only became huge in my mind because I was reading this particular book.) As a young teenager on the flight westward, they come across a man, liberated from a camp where he had been imprisoned as a communist. But that can't have been why they put you away, says Nelly's mother. Where have you all been living, he says to her. I found myself always looking for these kinds of clues -- how was it okay? Did the Wolf family really know no Jews? What about all the German people who did? How does that mindset evolve and thrive? How did propaganda work? Nothing that can be answered, maybe, but seeing their family life (albeit through the occasionally stilted translation and through the distortions of Nelly-as-child) at such an intimate level was fascinating in its own right, as were the accounts of the flight, and eventual life under the Soviets in the refugee village. As Gunther Grass wrote, the unspoken parallel in the text is that Wolf cannot really speak to the parallels between life under Nazi rule and life in the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany). Having read his piece on all this around the time of her death, I was looking for signs of that too -- there are few traces of the GDR, only in things like papers and passes at the borders, but it's another tantalizing layer. (ETA: that is not the Gunther Grass piece I was looking for...well okay someone wrote that about Wolf, the thing about East Germany being the silent shadow in Kindheitsmuster, Patterns of Childhood. Also ETA I really really want to take German now. Trawling the stacks on campus for her books did not help this desire.)

19. Shadow Tribe: The Making of Columbia River Indian Identity, by Andrew Fisher.
My friend Se-ah-dom is the daughter of Ed Edmo, of the Shoshone Bannock tribe and a member of Celilo Village at the (drowned by the Dalles dam) Celilo Falls. Se-ah-dom and I write a lot of grants together at work that support various tribal projects, and once or twice she's mentioned this book to me. Happy to read it finally, and happy to discover her dad is one of the writer's sources, too. Fisher writes a fascinating history of the people who refused to affiliate with the various reservations in Eastern Oregon/Washington along the Columbia River, where there have been thriving fishing and trading gatherings and settlements for the last 10,000 years (at least). This book was helpful because it illuminates the process of how "tribes" were created by the War Department's Indian Office (later the Interior Dept's Bureau of Indian Affairs) with basically zero relation to actual identities -- perhaps this is no surprise, but it's especially tricky in the Pacific Northwest, where people didn't identify with many of the structures common to Natives in the east (i.e. living in "bands" that were connected hierarchically to a "tribe"), and where due to the seasonal round (salmon in the spring and fall, camas root and berries in the summer, longhouse/village life during the long wet winters) and complicated inter-familial relationships and heriditary fishing locations, you might identify according to many different names, groups, locations, indigenous tribal structures or government-imposed tribal structures. Whenever we write grants in Oregon, we always talk about "the nine Federally-recognized Tribes" but then there are other "locations with significant populations of Indians" which we include in any project requiring state-wide participation or input -- this is because many of the people who live at the (tiny) Celilo Village are not enrolled members of Tribes in Oregon, or identify as the Columbia River people more than anything else. I don't think Fisher made this history quite as comprehensive as I would've liked -- for instance unless Tribal communications were recorded in government records or newspapers, there were very few Native voices, aside from a few quotes included from people he interviewed about contemporary affairs on the river. It would have been helpful to hear from the Tribes more -- how do they tell their memories of these times? What is the narrative there? Fisher tells a great story about how the Columbia River people, unaffiliated with Federal tribes and resistant to the many efforts to disperse them, served as an important focus of resistance to colonial powers and how their existance as a "shadow tribe" is relevant even today to understand the complicated politics of Oregon and Washington tribes. Also, Fisher, get your chronological storytelling house in order...more signposting in the text? He would skip from one storyline into the next and skip in time so there was often little relation between the progression of two related (but separately told) stories.

20. You're An Animal, Viskovitz!, by Alessandro Boffa, translated from the Italian by John Casey.
This was fun! A tiny compact book, short chapters each a story about Viskovitz, in love with Ljuba, as a different animal in each chapter. And the next chapter title is always a sort of commentary on the prior chapter, like a call and response, a neat little mental puzzle to follow. Viskovitz is a snail whose progress is measures in months, a sponge, a vegetarian lion jaded by the documentary scene, a classic noir cop dog, all kinds of fun creatures. Boffa's little bio sketch says he is Russian and studied biology in Rome, which perhaps explains the encyclopedic, detailed vocabulary in the book. A fun, quick read, melancholy and hilarious and weird. Science and love and puns! Super fun. It is like $3 at Powells, or get it from the library like I did, it is so worth it.

.

Books! Hooray! I have another stack of them on my bookstand! Cod bless the long boring bright summer with all these lazy days at home. We're about to go camping next week, and then I have a week off after that, and a whole month of Fridays off. It's going to be glorious and I'm going to read a zillion more books, just you wait and see. Perhaps I'll even review them as I go, instead of spamming you all with six at once, ha.

powells x 2
harvard book store x 3
borders
porter square books x 2 (sparkly red bookmarks!)
ripped harvard coop bookmark
2 TWA tickets (one to hartford in september for school; one home at thanksgiving to see jennie back from australia and dump perry)

culled from books en route to powell's. three big grocery sacks worth.

plus not pictured:
- 6 post-its (my preferred bookmark)
- 1 post-it that read "talking on the phone w/ mom about camp -- enlightenment vs. the dark ages" (i still remember this conversation vividly)
- printout of my senior year spring registration, including crossed-out computer science that was replaced with the poetry seminar with eleanor wilner.
- half a new yorker cartoon "if anyone"
- tiny drawing jennie made
- postcard from soul coughing's el oso album
- powell's receipt from 2012
- poem from my sister about birth
- au bon pain receipt from 2003 (kendall square)
- copy of penny's birth announcement
- ups delivery notice from september 2005
- description of floor exercises and machine circuit with a wardrobe inventory on the back ("avoid: linen")
- a photo from my grandparents remarriage in the early 80s, my (dead) great aunt in the foreground, me or possibly my sister in the background, wide-eyed, in a white dress with a red sash

maybe this is silly but i am going to try to number these all sequentially -- see my first review batch here. apologies in advance, this batch contains one book i abandoned, one book i hated and was not even the book i was supposed to read, and one book that is a qualified recommendation (better ideas than writing?). but hey -- books! reading and reviewing! not so much the pretending-they-are-all-awesome, right?

here we go!

3. The Valleys of the Assassins: and other Persian Travels, by Freya Stark.

I'm not happy that my third book of the year is Status: Abandoned but I'd rather record it and move on than mope around and pretend I'll finish it later. Because even getting two-thirds through was a hard slog, sadly. I was excited about 1930s travel in Persia/Iran with Freya Stark (whose name I kept thinking I had cribbed from Game of Thrones), bona fide fascinating gal, but instead it was dry and awful. This was not in the camp of bohemian adventure, or even colonialist misadventures, it was just straight-up uninteresting writing with the culture-clash anecdotes sprinkled too thinly to keep me interested, even in the titular Valley of the Assassins part. Even once I started skimming the interminable descriptions (she was often map-making for the RGS) it was boring, sadly, so I just stopped. The most interesting part, if you can call it that, was how it made me think about the relative value of culture. Who has a right to sell out a previous culture? In the book the locals are constantly helping her rob graves, which they are okay with because the previous cultures were not Muslim and therefore not worthy of respect, even though there was some genetic links between the older culture and the current (semi-nomadic) one. But even though she was allegedly in an untravelled (by white people) area of the Persian mountains and highlands, almost all the "interesting" graves had already been looted. So I don't recommend this book at all, really. I wanted to add this to my bookshelf of British interesting women's bios and writings but it doesn't quite fit. Maybe what I need is a book about Freya Stark. Ah well.

4. The Last Word on The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense, by Suzette Haden Elgin.
It's always a bad sign when you can't even find an image of the cover of the book you've read, but oh well, I'm not recommending this one, either. This was a book recommended by Havi for those of us entering a year-long program she's running. In theory, I love the idea of gentle verbal self-defense, but this book was awful awful awful and I need to process how awful it was. First: reading dialog and descriptions of verbal abuse was very uncomfortable (hi, mom!). On the one hand I had trouble thinking about where the heck this would apply in my life, but then on the other hand I kept thinking, ugh, this is exactly what my mom sounds like. Second: it is super outdated, written in 1987 and I had a hard time translating some of its 80s-ness into modernspeak. Third: I often disagreed with the author. In the sense that I felt her points were sometimes poorly made, but also that there was invisible culture I couldn't interpret, like the Josephine Ferrero anecdote that just made no sense to me. Fourth: Very disorganized. Who is the audience for this book?
Drat and blast and fuck. In the process of writing this and looking up the book I've now discovered that I read the wrong one. Havi's picture is of one book, but her link goes to the wrong title because Elgin wrote a half-dozen different sequels and follow-ups to her original book. Okay. Listen up, imaginary personified feminist American science fiction and also nonfiction author Suzette Haden Elgin, I'm giving you one more chance to not suck. I recognize that this is pretty violent verbal language but hey. I'm trying to be okay with the fact that I wasted time reading this (and disliking it) because of someone else's mistake.

5. Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life, by Marshall Rosenberg.

This is another book recommended before starting Havi's program (see #4 above) and I went into it with Havi's constant reminder: don't forget to skip the problematic poetry in this book, which truly does suck. It's true. Marshall Rosenberg is a wonderful empathetic listener and a tolerable writer, but his poetry just doesn't do it for me.
Poetry aside, this book is a great, easily digested intro to the concepts and practice of NVC. If you've never run across it before, the basic idea is to listen for observations, feelings, needs, and requests, and reflect those back to the other person. I love this idea, and Rosenberg does a good job of telling lots of stories in which it is useful outside of the academic/therapy context -- such as between street gangs, within hostile work environments, or during boring meetings, or between cantankerous family members. In my own life, I feel like I haven't quite gotten the trick of applying this yet. Perhaps the most mind-blowing idea is listening to the implied-fact statements people make and then respond with language that helps the person unpack that feeling and get down to what they really want. But not in a robotic therapist way -- in a way that demonstrates compassion for what they're really saying or trying to say. This concept is deeply connected to ideas of self-compassion that I believe in -- the idea of not being able to express empathy for others until you can be compassionate towards yourself. We all have trouble being aware of our own needs, and expressing them, and this is a pretty cool system for trying to get closer to that practice.
One of the most powerful parts for me was when he describes choice/value statements. Instead of saying "I hate my job" you make a statement like "Even though I dislike my job, I choose to go because I value financial stability" or something similar. This is a pretty powerful tool for me because it asks me to identify with choices and values rather than ascribing my pain to an arbitrary awful reality, like a job I hate or a house I regret buying or whatever. His techniques also apply to full expression of our emotions, awareness of our motivations, and other related issues behind empathy and NVC communication in general. I think of this stuff as Advanced Practice -- awesome to know, hard to put into work all the time. But when I take the time to be more aware in this way, I can sense that my communication becomes gentler in general, always a good thing. A good example is how the author models the little quizzes at the end of the chapters. No answer is wrong: he says "we are not in agreement" and explains his reasoning. Oh if only every so-called expert was more aware of their language in this regard!
My end judgment: if you're at all interested in this stuff, read it. The writing is not stellar but it's serviceable. Kind of like a pop textbook, if that makes sense. Skip the poetry or send little healing thoughts to the part of you that cringes in embarrassment when you read it, and recognize that this is part of it: recognizing when it's difficult to witness others being vulnerable. And then read the actual book, and maybe you'll love it. Or at least its ideas. But if just reading this review has made you puke a little bit, move along, no harm done.

.

onward! i just received hrdy's mothers and others in the mail yesterday, a book has been recommending for oh about five years now. looking forward to reading that. and to using my library privileges at work, too. so many books, so few dollars. yes.

i've started commuting to work on the free college shuttle, which is pretty awesome. more time to read! unfortunately, this means more time to get pissed off about sloppily written books.

things that are pissing me off in the first 85pgs of the memory keeper's daughter:

1. preserved fruit does not "gleam like gems," fuck poetic license.
2. i'm so glad that lady's husband is an orthopedist, so we can insert lots of shitty bone metaphors and poetic bone images and generally obsess about bones every time someone holds a hand or whatever.
3. someone did a little too much research about pregnancy and breastfeeding, why do i care that books about breastfeeding were hard to find in the 1960s? all kinds of random pregnancy factoids scattered in the text, not really integrated in the story at all. it's like the author had a list of Poetic Images from a pregnancy book and felt compelled to add them all.
4. did suburban 1960s women who didn't go to college really know about expensive french red wines?
5. do i really need to know that your sister has "long, white legs" every time she appears?
6. if i read one more description of a baby's hands like stars or their back being the size of your hand, i will puke.

ugh ugh ugh. so many writing cliches in this book! i am just barely supressing my annoyance in order to read the story, which is mildly interesting. it would have been more interesting if the surprise were saved for the reader, instead of waiting for the character to learn the truth and learning all the mundane details about it all along.

sometimes i wonder if editors or copyeditors read through manuscripts like this one, that end up on the nyt bestseller list and are actually semi-competent, and can tell that a book is great but kind of cluttered up with crap. it's subtle, in this book, but once i started to notice this kind of stuff it appeared everywhere.

reading painted shadow: the life of vivienne eliot, first wife of t.s. eliot.

vivienne compulsively stole sheets at the many hotels she stayed in with tom, sometimes but not always because she had stained them with menstrual blood. she would send the sheets back by rail to her maid, who would launder and post them back to the hotel. "tom went mad." later she became attached to the idea of black sheets and pillows, and black silk pyjamas.