books #37-50

Finally! I really should have done this earlier, when I could still remember the books...

37. Drugs Are Nice by Lisa Crystal Carver. What struck me most was how Lisa Carver is pretty much the anti-me. "We get these impulses and we don’t do them because there are all these invisible walls up everywhere, but they’re not real. There aren’t really any walls at all." I'm constantly restraining myself to avoid hitting the invisible walls, whereas she followed every wild impulse she had. I got this from the library after reading flea's review (you should read it for a real review) and there's no way I could come up with a better description of the book than this: "like riding shotgun on the vomit-smeared passenger seat of a shockless, brakeless Gremlin, screaming down a back road filled with pot holes at seventy miles an hour, blowing past all the "Bridge Out Ahead" warning signs as she asks you if you want her to turn out the headlights".

38. Pearl by Mary Gordon. This one reminded me a lot of Unless by Carol Shields (book #6), except that I liked it a lot more (sorry, Andrea). It's also about a daughter who's given up her comfortable life (in this case by going on hunger strike) as a response to injustice in the world, and her mother trying to understand her actions. What I really found interesting was the discussion of why one should want to live, whether everyone deserves to live and be happy and how to justify your own decadent lifestyle when so many people in the world are suffering. As the amazon review says, the ""Gentle Reader" asides" can be annoying, but I'd still recommend the book.

39. Potiki by Patricia Grace. I'm not sure how to describe this one for some reason, even though it should be simple enough. It's about a maori clan, mainly their struggles to hold onto their land and keep their traditions going, focussing particularly on one nuclear family. Reading it was like listening to a storyteller, which I'm sure was intentional, since storytelling is an important part of the story. I liked it a lot.

40. Homecoming by Cynthia Voigt. I'm not sure this should count, since I've read it 6 or 7 times, at least. I was glad to see that watching the (very mediocre) tv movie of it didn't ruin my mental images of the characters.

41. Harriet the Spy and The Long Secret by Louise Fitzhugh. I read Harriet the Spy in primary school, but I didn't realise there was a sequel until Phantom mentioned it as a watershed book. If I had read the sequel earlier, in particular this passage picking up from where Phantom's quote left off:

“Shy people are angry people,” said Mrs. Hansen and snapped her head around to see beth Ellen’s reaction.

I am not a lady, thought Beth Ellen. It’s coming now. She’s going to say I am not a lady.

“You know,” said her grandmother, smiling, “it’s important to be a lady, but not if you lose everything else, not if you lose yourself in the process.”

Beth Ellen felt her mouth drop open.

“There are times when we must express what we feel even if it is anger. If you can feel it and not express it… it might be better, but you must try to know what you feel. If we don’t know what we feel, we get into trouble.” She looked hard at Beth Ellen. “You’re a very angry little girl. I have no idea what you’ve been doing about it because you’ve never shown any of it before yesterday, to my knowledge.”

maybe I would have thought about whether or not I was angry before now. I'm still thinking about it, so I think that will have to be another post.

42. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. I can't believe I didn't copy out any quotes from this. I liked this for the same reason I liked The Writing Life by Annie Dillard (book #14): I'm not a writer, but I have just the same problems with starting work, as seems to be common to writers. I wish I could figure out some data-analysis-equivalent of the inch square space to fill with words.

43. Why? by Charles Tilly. Don't bother reading the book, just read this review that made me borrow it from the library; it has all the interesting information. The book's about the different kinds of reasons people give for things (stories, conventions, codes and technical accounts) and the contexts that are appropriate for each. What was mentioned in the review that I thought would be interesting, was how different types of reason are used to negotiate relationships with other people (e.g. you can get away with using a convention with a stranger, where a close friend would require a more detailed story) and I wanted to read about how people decide what is appropriate and what happens if people have conflicting expectations. Instead, the book just seemed to be "Sometimes people tell stories. Here's a big, long example of a story. See? That was a story" repeated for each kind of reason.

44. Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. Such a wonderful book! I copied out big paragraphs to keep. You'll probably see them at some point, whenever I write a relevant post. Ruthie's disconnection and loneliness was heartbreaking and I wished I could bridge the void separating her from everyone and everything else, just as I wish I, or someone else, could do that for myself.

45. Veronica by Mary Gaitskill. Isn't this a gorgeous description?

Street and star light made the shoveled walks gray corridors of soft white mass and softer black shadow, and the crunch-crunch-crunch of our boots played up and down them in the ringing dark. Across the billowing snow, gaunt trees signed in shadow language. Modest houses hung their squares and rectangles with lights the blunt sweet colors of happiness – secret delight hidden in the cold body of winter. Felt but unseen except for now, the deity’s birthday, when people climb wobbling ladders to string symbolic lights on trees and around windows.

The story isn't that pretty in general, though. It reminded me a lot of Like Being Killed (book #30), but it was a lot easier to read and to like the characters. It's a portrait of a woman reflecting on her destructive lifestyle as a model when she was younger and her friendship with an older, unglamorous woman with HIV. What I liked was the way the book captured Allison and her friend and sisters' different coping mechanisms for life.

46. King Dork by Frank Portman. I liked a lot of this book. Parts of it were very funny (particularly the french class conversation, that reminded me of conversations my friend and I had when we knew very little french, but were still trying to speak only french, or at least franglais and glossary at the back is almost worth a read on its own). I liked its anti-Catcher in the Rye stance a lot (I so do not get why that's supposed to be such a great book). It was definitely a book for boys, though. Hmm, I'm writing these reviews out of order and after writing the bit about The Little Friend, I realised this book is kind of similar in theme, but not remotely in execution. The main character is a boy who's trying to make sense of a death, as well as avoid humiliation in everyday life (here it's similar to Black Swan Green). I would recommend the book if it weren't for the girls who inexplicably line up to give the main character blow jobs, while seeming uninterested in any reciprocal arrangement.

47. Black Swan Green by David Mitchell. One of the blurbs on the back of the book said the book "captures the sheer pleasure of being a boy and brings to mind adventures shared by Huck and Tom"*, but the book made me very glad I wasn't a boy. Sure, girls can be nasty, but I would hate to have to deal with the physical bullying and pressure to be stereotypically masculine that seems to characterise boyhood in the book. I loved the book, though. It's a wonderful portrayal of how it feels to live focussed on presenting the right outward appearance so as to avoid attracting the wrong kind of attention and subsequent humiliation, with precious few moments alone to relax and just be. Apparently that's typical 13-year-old life, so once again I feel like I still haven't grown up.

*I just realised that quote was taken out of context and was referring to one specific chapter, which makes a lot more sense. I had been wondering if the reviewer had even read the book, or had a very different idea of pleasure.

48. Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living by Carrie Tiffany. I'm still not sure how much I liked this book. I think I was expecting better, given that it's nominated for the Orange prize. It's about a young woman who demonstrates sewing on a train that travels the Australian bush to educate the locals on farming and domestic science, before marrying one of the men on the train and living on a farm (it's set in the 1940s). One of the themes seemed to be the limits of scientific progress and I didn't really appreciate the way that developed, since the things that were meant to show the shortcomings of science just made me think the husband wasn't a very good scientist. I think my main problem was just that I didn't really believe the main character genuinely loved her husband, although, admittedly, I'm not sure if I was meant to.

49. The Little Friend by Donna Tartt. Another book I loved. I think I see a pattern. All the books described here that I liked have negative reviews on amazon, complaining that they just ramble on with no cohesive narrative and the characters are all whiny and self-centred, which would be a fair criticism of this blog, too. I like that they're just portraits of people's lives, and they're about people who are misfits and loners and not especially likeable. I think those reviewers were particularly disappointed with the Little Friend because much of the book is very exciting. If you pick up the book after reading about the murder and danger and intrigue on the back of the book, you're going to be disappointed with all the side plots and description and especially that there's no neat resolution with the bad guys in jail and the good guys safe again. If you're in it for the complex relationships and following a smart, neglected child as she tries to make sense of the world, it's a far more satisfying read.

50. Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. And another dysfunctional family portrait that I loved. A portrait in a more literal sense, this time, since it's a graphic novel. It's a memoir that mainly focusses on Bechdel's father, who had affairs with other men while remaining married to her mother. The combination of text and pictures works well for this story about the disconnect between appearances and reality. The juxtaposition of scenes from family life with text about the minotaur and Icarus legends makes the metaphors more effective.
I'm still not sure what I found so unsettling yesterday. She includes some of her diary entries starting from when she was 10 and some of them remind me a little of what I wrote in my own diary around the same age, when my parents were first separating. The panels where she reads Dr Spock to herself while her parents argue in the background also remind me of how I used to read the TA for Tots books. She describes the experience as being "my own parent and my own child" in a "self-soothing, autistic loop", which also rings true for me.
I was wondering, though, if I'm uncomfortable with stories about fathers. Only because, the last time I can remember feeling similarly unnerved by a story was when I saw Mrs Doubtfire, when I was 12 or so (after my father moved back in with us). I consciously avoided thinking about the movie for weeks afterwards because it made me feel jittery and nervous. I eventually made myself think through the whole story, trying to figure out what disturbed me about it. I couldn't figure out what it was, but at least it stopped bothering me after that.