“Incardnadine,” by Mary Szybist

Gorgeous.

That's how I would describe this book.

“Oh Dear God What Wouldn't I Do To Have Published This” is another feel I have here. Also, “I will never write like this but I can almost accept that painful truth given how grateful I am that this exists in the world.”

Let's see. How else can I talk about this poetry?

I don't think I can. Luckily, several of my favorite poems from this book are available on-line.

Touch Gallery: Joan of Arc The careful selection of detail is remarkable, and more remarkable are her well-placed similes, like bombs of meaning (sorry). Also, how she evokes a mood with a moment (something I want in any poet, but few succeed so well.) 

On Wanting To Tell [ ] About A Girl Eating Fish Eyes Apparently Szybist knows how to add 2+2 and get 5, a talent I am deeply impressed by. Here she takes a strange moment and makes it about death and life. Like a boss. Also, she shows quite the talent for the Last Line.

How (Not) To Speak Of God There is a creative play with space that would be trite and gimmicky in another poet but is so expertly handled here that it works amazingly well, actually adding to the meaning of the poem, and in fact, adding in a theologically interesting way, instead of being pretentious and intensely dislikable. I might have to print that poem out and hang it up somewhere. And did I mention her imagery? Her imagery.

I haven't fallen so hard in love with a poet since . . . I don't even know since. I have become incoherent with pleasure. I will stop babbling. Just go read her. And then, ideally, buy her books.

The fact that she won the NBA for this book reassures me re: the inherent good taste of humanity. Sometimes I feel that the poetry world is just an enormous echo-chamber and mutual back-patting society, where reward is meted out less for talent and more for writing what everyone else is writing . . . and then work like this comes along and proves otherwise.

Read this book.




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Alison Bechdel's “Fun Home”

I whole-heartedly loved this book.

I'm not a big believer in the virtue of Identifying With Books. That's not why I read. I read to be stretched intellectually and also to have a beautiful aesthetic experience. I don't need or even, really, want to identify with the characters in a book or the themes of a book in order to enjoy reading it. In fact, I think that overly strong identification with a book can blind me to the faults in a book.

The books I identify with most strongly are Middlemarch, The Age of Innocence, Gaudy Night, and Mrs Dalloway; certainly several of these do stand on their own as works of art but if they didn't I'm not sure if I could see it (I would love them anyway), and I think I see their merit less clearly for how strongly I identify with them.

Books that I love but don't identify with so strongly I have a much easier time picking apart intellectually; The Divine Comedy, Pale Fire, Paradise Lost, and Bleak House are four more of my favorite books that I love but don't really identify with at all, and therefore am able to stand back and consider them as art much more easily.

All that to say: I loved Fun Home, but I also identified with it strongly, and so I am a little unclear how much of my love for it is due to my identification with it, and how much of my love is because it's a damn fine book.

Fun Home is Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir about her relationship with her father. She has a tense, fraught relationship with her father in early childhood, a relationship that gradually grows closer until it was truncated by suicide in Alison's* young adulthood. What bridges their relationship is in part their mutual realization that they are both gay, and in part their mutual love and sharing of books.

My dad is not gay and is also alive (and will be so for many years, I hope!), but I similarly had a fraught childhood relationship with him that has become close and warm over the years, mediated by our mutual love for books. Just like Alison and her father could talk about books even when they couldn't talk about anything else, me and my dad have also always been able to talk about books even when we weren't able to talk about anything else. So this book made my eyes water which is my equivalent of full-on sobbing (I am not a crier in any way shape or form) and yeah, I identified with it.

But I think it is also damn fine art.

The narrative is very cleverly multi-layered. I've read any number of books that do the flipping back-and-forth-through-time thing, and usually I find it clunky and contrived. (I particularly dislike it where it is used as a way to avoid disclosing some Tragic Incident.) Not so here. Bechdel** uses a fairly tight narrative structure focusing on theme, and adduces incidents anywhere on the timeline she is using to elucidate that theme. Therefore, while the narrative does flit around in time, it does not flit around in terms of the story it is telling. In fact, the story Bechdel is telling about her life is more coherent than most memoirs I have read.

About that. So all memoir is the author imposing meaning on a sequence of life events that may or may not have inherent meaning — but that's the way our lives are, right? We have to tell a story about ourselves, or we find ourselves facing down into the terrifying nihilistic maw of our own mortality.

A lot of memoir, though, isn't very self-conscious in the way this is done. A lot of memoir I have read imposes the meaning (like we all do, like we must) but carries on blithely unaware of how the way we cathect these experiences is itself an artistic or personal choice, not something inherent to the experience. Right?

For instance, I have read other memoir or personal essays about difficult father-daughter relationships that interprets an externally similar father-daughter relationship very differently than Bechdel interprets her relationship. Often those authors have a sort of unspoken assumption that there is something inherent in the relationship or experience that obviously must be interpreted that way. In a way that's fine, because it reveals the author's unexamined assumptions about the world and that's interesting, but in a way it is frightfully irritating because I rather feel that someone who lacks that sort of insight into their own basic assumptions doesn't have much business writing memoir. Sorrynotsorry.

Bechdel doesn't do that at all. She has great insight. She is perfectly, consistently aware of the way her own personality, values, and of course desire for meaning are imbuing her memories and feelings about her life with a meaning that may have been external to the actual events. And then she talks about it in the memoir which is a level of self-awareness I have rarely seen in memoir (maybe I don't read enough memoir; the lack of this self-awareness was something that has turned me off to the genre).

It was fantastic. Omigosh I loved it. I loved the layering of reflection: this is what happened, this is what I felt at the time, this is the meaning I imbue it with now, but these are my assumptions that cause me to so imbue it.

I loved following her trails of thought and the way they crisscrossed her life. I loved her awareness of how her current knowledge influences her memories of childhood. Oh, and did I mention how I loved the way she discusses literature here? I loved that too.

Frankly there wasn't much I didn't love about this book. Bechdel has also written a memoir about her relationship with her mother, and I can hardly wait to read that one, too. And then to read everything she has ever written, ever.

Anyway. Um, I recommend this? Could you tell? If you have any interest in memoir, father-daughter relationships, the experience of coming out, literature, or any combination of those things . . . read this book.

*sorry, usually I respectfully call authors by their last name, but since I am talking about an author and her father, who share the same last name, it feels too cumbersome. I don't want to talk about Bechdel and Bechdel. I will switch to my usual respectful distance when I am only talking about Alison Bechdel.

**See?


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Atul Gawande, On Being Mortal

I was worried I wasn't going to like this book.

Silly, I know; aging and end-of-life issues are one of my Huge Main Interests and I never really get tired of them.

But, I dunno, I've read so much good on this subject recently, I was worried Gawande's book would feel repetitive.

It didn't. First of all Gawande is just a thoroughly competent writer. Man knows how to write a compelling bit of medical non-fiction. I am bit of a connoisseur of doctors writing things (is anyone surprised? please tell me no.) and while Gawande is not quite as delightful as, say, Oliver Sacks . . . he has his craft well in hand.

Second, most of the reading I've done re: end-of-life issues has been very focused on the very end of life, usually the last six months as that's what's covered under the States' paltry “hospice” benefit (and don't even get me started on that!). Here, though, he expands the focus a bit to also discuss issues of ordinary aging. I really enjoyed the perspective he brought to this.

One of the ways our culture is unintentionally cruel to the elderly is in our obsession with safety. We tell the elderly, “no, you can't eat that; you have to eat purees; you might choke!” We stop them from having relationships because we are worried they might be abused. We tell them not to live alone any more because they might fall and hurt themselves.

The thing is, though . . .if you're 98, perhaps being able to just eat a sandwich is worth more to you than avoiding chocking. Perhaps choking to death at a sandwich at the age of 98 (or, more likely, getting aspiration pneumonia from it) is a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Perhaps, at the age of 85, you're willing to take your own risks with relationships rather than being warned off — even if you're “demented.”

Perhaps living independently is more important to you than safety. Perhaps, as the end of life nears, what matters most is not planning to be around for five more years but to enjoy the time you have now.

Gawande talks about this sort of thing — about how all our good intentions sometimes (often?) conspire to make a misery of our elders' waning years.

This is a topic near and dear to my heart, and he did good work with it. If that was the only good part of the book it would still be worth reading, but there is even more going on. My verdict: well worth the time you might put into reading it. Just do it!



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Walter Mosley, “Devil in a Blue Dress”

Reading Mosley on lunch break!
Those are my feet in argyle socks at the bottom
of the photo. 

Well this was fun.

It's been a darn long time since I have found a new (well, new-to-me) mystery series that I can whole-heartedly enjoy. The Easy Rawlins mysteries are now officially on the list!

I just love me some good detective fiction. I am a bit picky. I tend to strongly prefer whodunits and am a big fan of Golden Age detective fiction. I read a lot of British authors, but I also really enjoy American authors like Rex Stout.

And now Walter Mosley.

I wouldn't say this is a perfectly classic whodunit, but it comes close. It is written in a gritty hard-boiled style, rather than a “cozy” style, which is a change for me, but one I definitely enjoy (I don't like cozies because they're cozy; I like cozies because they're whodunits).

Anyway, our sleuth Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins is a reluctant sort of sleuth. He's just been fired from his job for standing up to his racist boss. He needs money or the bank will foreclose on his house. So when a mysterious stranger approaches him in his friend's bar and offers him a hundred bucks just to find a girl . . . it's hard to say no.

Adventures ensue.

This series is set in the 1940's through, I believe, the 1960's (obviously I haven't read the whole series yet, so I don't know what the full time-span is). This one is set in the late 40's. Easy is a black man living in L.A., just back from combat in WWII. And Walter Mosley? Damn fine writer. The last murder mystery series I tried was the Maisie Dobbs series by Jacqueline Winspear. I like historical series a great deal, and I like female protagonists, so I hoped that one would be up my street, but no. The prose was painful, the historical background was poorly considered, and the lead was a Mary Sue. Ugh.

Walter Mosley, however, just nails it. if I didn't know better I'd say this book was written in the 40's. His writing is crisp and compelling and never ridiculous. His characters are vivid and well-imagined and his dialogue is snappy. His descriptions are evocative and never wind on pointlessly. The story was well-plotted, carefully paced, and just damn good overall.

If you like noir-style detective fiction, you will. like. this. book. Highly recommended.


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Finding God in the Verbs, by Jennie Isbell and Brent Bill

This book was much different than the sort of books I usually read on religion. I like to read rather academic work on theology and/or the history of religion; spiritual memoirs; and spiritual or devotional classics.

I'd probably call this a modern devotional. I wanted to read it partially because these are My People. I know Brent very slightly; we met once at a big Quaker conference . . . in the bookstore, of course! I've never met Jennie, but we travel in the same circles. I am sure we must have at least one mutual friend.

Mostly, though, I wanted to read this because the book uses the sort of technique I'm used to from reading and writing poetry to analyze what's going on when I pray — and suggest improvements.

This book didn't end up speaking to me, but it was still a good book.

Poetry and faith are very close to the same thing in my mind. I use the same approaches to each. I understand my faith as, more or less, an enormous sort of poem that interprets the world for me. The part of my brain that analyzes a poem is the same part of my brain that analyzes theology. So applying techniques usually used in a writing seminar to prayer? Right up my street.

The problem, I realized about halfway through this book, is that I don't use words when I pray. At all. I just . . . am not a prayer-in-words, and I feel no compulsion to be. I am fond of “centering prayer," which is the Western version of mindfulness meditation (and almost as old), but even my intercessory prayer is a wordless directing of the attention, not at all a verbal thing.

(In secular terms, if I am praying for someone, I am sitting there holding my love and care and worry or sometimes frustrations with and for that person foremost in my mind. Which is why intercessory prayer “works" for me, even leaving God out of it, because when I do this for a person nine times out of ten I come to some insight about how I can be a better friend to them, and always, always I am then able to be kinder to them when I see them in person. This is especially useful for people I don't get along with very well. So anyway, I pray a lot for people and it works really well, even without any reference to God.)

The authors talk about “resistance" to various spiritual practices towards the end of the book. In their terms, a “charged" resistance is when there is something emotional going on under the surface preventing you from doing something that you really might want or need to do. Then there is “uncharged" resistance, which is when you don't want to do something 'cuz you just don't wanna. Maybe it doesn't work for you; maybe it's fine but it's not a priority; something like that. But there's not an emotional block.

At any rate, I realized by the end of the book that I have an uncharged but pretty strong resistance to using words when I pray. It just isn't my jam. I can do it. but it is not so satisfying for me.

So in the end, sadly, the book itself was not for me — but that was entirely because of my whole not-praying-with-words thing and had nothing at all to do with the quality of the book, which really was excellent. I am strongly in favor of anything that combines writing and faith! They go together like a hand in a glove so far as I'm concerned, and this was such a clever and insightful way of doing it.

I'd recommend this book heartily for anyone who does pray with words and would like to use the techniques of a writing workshop to improve their prayer life. I think you'd get a lot out of it.



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Jon Ronson, The Psychopath Test

I tend to roll my eyes when I hear a book described as a “romp." It has always struck me as Too Precious By Half.

But that was before I read Jon Ronson. I recant! I recant!

One wouldn't think a book on psychopaths could be considered fun, but this one is.

The titular “Psychopath Test" is a diagnostic tool created by Bob Hare to evaluate for psychopathy. The book isn't about the test per se, but uses the story of the development and use of the test as a proxy for our understanding of psychopathy. This could easily become a Serious Study on Mental Illness, but Ronson treats it playfully, largely through his own self-deprecating humor.

In addition to his self-deprecation, he has a keen eye for the ridiculous, as when he profiles the possibly psychopathic CEO who owns a truly excessive collection of predator statues: bears, lions, birds of prey, etc. Even more pleasurably, he has a knack for playing up his subjects' inability to themselves appreciate the ridiculous; his sly rendering of his interview with said CEO was delightful. 

“Lions," said Al Dunlop, showing me around. He was wearing a casual jacket and slacks and looked tanned, healthy. His teeth were very white. “Lions. Jaguars. Lions. Always predators. Predators. Predators. Predators. I have a great belief in and a great respect for predators. Everything I did I had to go make happen."

Item 5: Conning/Manipulative, I wrote in my reporter's notebook. His statements may reveal a belief that the world is made up of “predators and prey," or that it would be foolish not to exploit weaknesses in others. 

“Gold, too," I said. “There's a lot of gold here, too." 

I had been prepared for the gold, having recently seen a portrait of him sitting on a gold chair, wearing a gold tie, with a gold suit of armor by the door and a gold crucifix on the mantelpiece. 

“Well," said Al. “Gold is shiny. Sharks." 

He pointed at a sculpture of four sharks encircling the planet. “I believe in predators," he said. “Their spirit will enable you to succeed. Over there you've got falcons. Alligators. Alligators. More alligators. Tigers." 

“It's as if both Midas and also the Queen of Narnia were here," I said, “and the Queen of Narnia flew above a particularly fierce zoo and turned everything to stone and then transported it here." 

“What?" said Al. 

“Nothing," I said. 

“No," he said, “what did you just say?" 

He shot me a steely, blue-eyed stare, which I found quite debilitating. 

“It was just a jumble of words," I said. “I was trying to make a funny comment but it all became confused in my mouth."

If you are one who feels that grim subjects must always be Approached With the Gravitas They Deserve, and feel that lighthearted treatment of grim subjects is Disrespectful To the People Impacted, you will not enjoy this book. 

I, however, deeply enjoy lighthearted treatments of grim subjects; further, I felt that the conceit of using the diagnostic test for psychopathy as the thread we followed throughout the narrative made for a very interesting look at the limits of our knowledge of mental illness in general and psychopathy (if you can even define it as a mental illness, which is debatable) in particular. 

What is a thing if no one can agree on its definition or diagnosis? What does our desire to label others say about ourselves?

This pageturner of a book approaches these questions in a light and easily digestible way. It's a book that can easily be read in one sitting or one afternoon, so if you have even the slightest interest I would say it's worth your reading time. If only for the giant menagerie of tiger statues. 

V. S. Naipaul, Among the Believers

V. S. Naipaul, for those who are unfamiliar, is a Trinidad-born British author and Nobel laureate (2001). He is perhaps best known for his novel A House for Mr. Biswas but his nonfiction, and particularly his travelogues, are also quite well-known.

Among the Believers is one of those travelogues, though it is often billed as a commentary on Islam. That's certainly why I picked it up. Naipaul spent six months traveling through Iran, Pakistan,
Malaysia, and Indonesia, writing about his experiences.

The prose was my favorite thing about this book by far. Here's a passage right at the beginning that was part of what drew me in when I picked this up off my dad's shelf:

We came to an intersection. And there I lost Behzad [Naipaul's interpreter in Tehran]. I was waiting for the traffic to stop. But Behzad didn't wait with me. He simply began to cross, dealing with each approaching car in turn, now stopping, now hurrying, now altering the angle of his path, and, like a man crossing a forest gorge by a slender fallen tree trunk, never looking back. He did so only when he got to the other side. He waved me over, but I couldn't move. Traffic lights had failed higher up, and the cars didn't stop. 

He understood my helplessness. He came back through the traffic to me, and then—like a moorhen leading its chick across the swift current of a stream—he led me through dangers that at every moment seemed about to sweep me away. He led me by the hand; and, just as the moorhen places herself a little downstream from the chick, breaking the force of the current, which would otherwise sweep the little thing away forever, so Behzad kept me in his lee, walking a little ahead of me and a little to one side, so that he would have been hit first. 

And when we were across the road he said, “You must always give your hand to me." 

It was, in effect, what I had already begun to do. Without Behzad, without the access to the language that he gave me, I had been like a half-blind man in Tehran. And it had been especially frustrating to be without the language in these streets, scrawled and counter-scrawled with aerosol slogans in many colors in the flowing Persian script, and plastered with revolutionary posters and cartoons with an emphasis on blood. Now, with Behzad, the walls spoke; many other things took on meaning; and the city changed.

Prose like that, the portrayal of an image and a moment like that, is what drew me to this book, but what I really wanted from this book was a big fat piece of religious, social, and cultural analysis, and that's not at all what I got here.

As a cultural critic, Naipaul leaves a lot to be desired.

He is very aware of how the people he meets are culture-bound. He meets businessmen, students, journalists, religious and political leaders, poets, and teachers, and he has a knack for putting his hand on the blind spots in their thinking, the place where their unexamined beliefs are leading them into fallacious thinking. That's actually a great trait in a journalist, but he combines this with a total lack of insight into how his own beliefs are culture-bound.

He pushed hard against the idea he heard over and over that “Islam is a total way of life." What did that mean? he asked them, and never got a satisfactory response. He was frustrated by that and attributed it to a certain failure to examine closely held beliefs, which it may well have been, but he had a total lack of empathy for that position. This exasperated me, given that he himself expressed the value he placed on “secular" or intellectual life and I would be surprised if, when pressed, he could give an adequate expression of what that means. I doubt I could, especially not when pushed by an interviewer from a very different culture.

This lack of insight into the universality of humans not examining their deeply held beliefs led him to sound pretty damn condescending. As he (as I praised him for above) skillfully laid his hand on the unexamined flaws in his interviewees' thinking, I could smell the condescension coming off the page. “Look at these ignorant rubes," was the strong implication.

Additionally, I felt that he was trying to draw lines of causality between the values of Islam and people being ignorant rubes. I am allergic to suggestions like that (I could list a lot of -isms right here but don't want to; also V.S. Naipaul is an author of color himself so . . . complicated), and it turned me sour on the whole book.

If we must paint others as ignorant rubes (which is a questionable move to begin with), it would behoove us to point out that being an ignorant rube is common to the human condition and doesn't  have much to do with country of origin and religion. Thinking that other people are ignorant rubes has a lot to do with class and privilege, though. JUST SAYING, V. S. Naipaul.

JUST SAYING.

After writing the bulk of this post, I searched for other commentary re: Among the Believers, and found that the Christian Science Monitor posted this thoughtful piece from their archives (originally published in 1981, just as the book came out.)

Their take on it is less that Naipaul is Islamophobic (which tends to be my take) and more that he is of the school of thought that Religion Makes You Stupid.

Possible. Possible. This is not an unusual belief in academia. On the other hand, the CSM might also be biased; they may well be over-sensitive to any suggestion that Religion Makes You Stupid. Either way, though, their article is worth reading.

While I have Beyond Belief, the fifteen-year follow-up to this book, sitting on my shelf, I do not think I will be picking it up any time soon. Whether Naipaul is Islamophobic or hates religion in general or just expresses himself unfortunately, or even if I am just being over-sensitive (also possible) I need to give myself some time for my hackles to smooth back down before I want to read more of him. If and when I do, I might go for his fiction, instead.



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The Painted Veil, by W. Somerset Maugham

I liked this book a great deal. I picked it up on a whim at Barnes & Noble where I was browsing with no particular purpose. I have been wanting to try Maugham for a while but felt overwhelmed by the heft of On Human Bondage. I leafed through this book and The Razor's Edge and this book won, in large part because the edition of The Razor's Edge I picked up was in painfully small font, which tends to irritate me over the course of a book. Such are the deep considerations that go into my novel selection.

Anyway.

 The Painted Veil follows Kitty Fane, a young English socialite who marries unwisely for selfish reasons, moves to Hong Kong with her husband, proceeds to have an affair with a rather odious man, and is found out (this all happens very early in the book; no spoilers).

Kitty's husband, Walter, is rather a tortured soul and wishes death on both himself and his wife, which he decides to accomplish by “heroically” dragging Kitty into the epicenter of a cholera outbreak (he is an MD specializing in bacteriology). There he proceeds to fight cholera and be tortured by his soul, while Kitty proceeds to have some very interesting spiritual and emotional growth.

I've read a few books about adultery; Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina spring to mind. I thought the handling of it here was much more interesting than either (though I'd say Anna Karenina is the greater novel overall).

Neither Emma nor Anna really learns much from their affairs. Their experiences just pull them deeper and deeper into all sorts of misery. Both of them end (SARCASTIC SPOILER ALERT FOR HUNDRED YEAR OLD BOOKS!) by dramatically killing themselves. Because DEATH is the price of a woman's transgressive sexuality!

Not for Kitty Fane, bless her heart and the heart of Somerset Maugham.

Seven Last Words, by Terry Minchow-Proffitt

In the interests of full disclosure, I'm biased about this book. Mud Season Review published this poetry while I was poetry editor there; I blurbed the book for Terry; he kindly sent me a copy as a gift.

I'm not sure if all that means that I am likely to not tell the truth about the book, though. I mean . . . I published the poems! I blurbed the book! I am SO EXCITED about this work!

I really like poetry that takes up religious themes (I should, given my current editing position . . .), but I am damn picky about my religious poetry. I don't like abstractions. I don't like schmaltz (well, I like schmaltz, but not in this context). I don't like thinly veiled theological polemics. I don't like trite answers.

This poetry is none of those things. Rather, it presents a cycle of seven poems, each of which meditates on one of the Seven Last Words of Christ as he died. These may be found here, where they were first published at MSR. (Go ahead and read the poems there, but don't hesitate to buy the chapbook too if you like them, as it includes extra material, like an extended author interview, a forward, and an afterward. Also the artwork is bound up with them, which is great!)

Georgette Heyer: All The Love!

I had grand plans this month to do a lot of reading for Black History Month. I sort of accomplished some of this . . . but mostly, I am afraid that I binge-read Georgette Heyer. I read eight (EIGHT!) Heyer novels over the course of perhaps two weeks. Nothing could stop me, not even my promise to finish reading a Very Intellectual Bork On Islam for my two-person book club (V.S. Naipaul's Among the Believers, which I am not really enjoying.)

Georgette Heyer is worth being lazy for.

Heyer was an English writer of romance and mystery novels. She was born in 1902, died in 1974, and wrote from the 20's until her death. There are not many authors who give me more pure, unalloyed pleasure than Heyer. I didn't think I could possibly enjoy romance novels until I read Heyer (and I have read many romance novels since trying to discover books I will like even half as much as hers . . . to absolutely no avail. Other than Austen, I like literally no other romance authors.)

Her romances are almost all Regencies (set between 1811 and 1820), though a good handful of them are set thirty years earlier than that. Her thrillers are generally contemporary to when she was writing them, though some are also set in the Regency or Georgian periods. She more or less single-handedly created the modern genre of the "Regency Romance," but no one afterwards has at all equaled her.

What I find so delightful about her is her sense of the ridiculous. She knows exactly when to lead us along with a ridiculous plot (almost always) but also when and how to make fun of it (again, almost always).

Octavia Butler: “Parable of the Sower” and “Kindred”

I am afraid that I didn't love these books as much as I had hoped to. I was really ramped up for reading some Octavia Butler, as I had heard every good thing in the world about them. I'd read Parable of the Sower in high school and didn't remember much about it. I wanted to give it another try, as well as check out Kindred, which is possibly Butler's most famous novel.

They're both good books for sure. Parable of the Sower is the first in a dystopian duology about a near-future crumbling America (rising temperatures have driven the cost of water and food up enormously; the central government exists in name only; anarchy reigns) and follows a young woman  — a teenager, really — who ends up founding a new religion. It explores issues of morality, change, and race.

Kindred is about another young woman (slightly older — early twenties) who finds herself drawn back to the antebellum South in order to save the life of her slave-owning ancestor so he can father a child by his slave and, thus, ensure that Dana (the narrator) is born herself. This book explores race as a much more primary theme (obviously) with the nature of love thrown in as well.

I found Sower more thought-provoking and interesting but Kindred more compelling as a story.

Sower is a more complex story in a lot of ways. There are many more characters, more moving parts, just a lot more going on. I found the heroine, Lauren, a little irritating (we follow her from about age 15 to age 18 and she is ridiculously, preternaturally, more mature, intelligent, and on top of things than everyone around her, which I found a bit exasperating), but I liked her more than I didn't. I would have liked some more world-building; there's some, but not what I had hoped for given the praise I heard for the book. The reasons for the collapse of civilization are left more than a bit unclear, for one. There wasn't as much plot as I'd hoped for, either. It was about surviving in a dystopian near-future (and founding a new religion), which you might think would be Enough Plot for me, and probably it should have been, but . . . I wanted a bit of something else driving the forward momentum of the story.

This could have been done in a number of ways — introducing a bit more self-doubt in Lauren would have been particularly compelling to me, as it would give her an internal challenge to overcome. Alternatively, she could have stolen a bit of character development from one of the secondary characters — one of these had an interesting arc wherein he really struggled to accept the brutalities of a dystopian reality (for instance, he struggled with the idea that he had to injure or even kill others). If this had been Lauren's arc, I also would have been more compelled by her. But I wasn't, because she was so smugly right all the time.

I think if I was more into dystopians as a genre I would have been really into this (and if you are into dystopians, you should definitely read this; it was way ahead of the curve, sort of the ur-dystopian, like 1984 or Brave New World), but I just wasn't. Again, I want to reiterate that this wasn't a bad book by any stretch of the imagination. It was smart and well written and thoughtful and everything good . . . I just wasn't into it, and I was disappointed because I really wanted to be.

I liked Kindred more but I still wasn't entranced by it.

Rebecca, by Daphne duMaurier

I expected to like and enjoy this book; I did not at all expect the passion I ended up feeling for this book. I stayed up until 1 am on a worknight unable to put it down! The next night I binge-watched the BBC mini-series! This book was a ridiculous amount of fun to read, the prose was excellent, and the author held together what should have been (well, which kind of is) a ridiculous plot with amazing aplomb, pulling off some special effects along the way.

Here's the basic deal with Rebecca (non-spoiler paragraph to come; all of this you can get from the back cover or the first few pages): Young innocent girl falls in love with billionaire (well, this is Britain between the wars, so not billionaire but landed gentry) Maxim DeWinter, who has a Tragic Past: his wife, Rebecca, died just a year ago. He meets our ingenue (who remains unnamed throughout the book), marries her, and carries her off to his ancestral home, Manderly, where our heroine has to make sense of the past.

It's a classic gothic romance that more than lives up to expectations. It can be read and enjoyed even by those who have zero interest in gothic romances. I don't want to try to tell you about my love for this book while trying to hide what happens, so: spoilers behind the cut!

If you don't want to read it, there is a BBC miniseries starring Jeremy Brett (swoon) that I have now also watched. It hews very closely to the text, almost all of the dialogue being lifted straight from the book. Recommended!

Spoilers away!

Karen Armstrong, Dorothy Day, and Matt Mikalatos: my thoughts on three very different pieces of “religious” writing

If you're not religious,  I do think you might be into one of the books I'm going to discuss (the Karen Armstrong), so keep reading or skip down or whatever, but don't automatically click away!

As everyone who knows either me or this blog is well aware, I am a Quaker. Specifically, I am a progressive Christian Quaker who likes to keep a foot in multiple worldviews. I am (almost) equally comfortable hanging out with evangelicals, atheist skeptics, academic theologians and philosophers, and of course My Own People, liberal Quakers.

My faith is a choice. I don't "know" there is a god in the bedrock way many do, though sometimes I wish I did. The best way to describe that part of my brain is agnostic — I just don't know. Again, I wish I did. I wish I had that kind of ontological certainty. I don't. There isn't any way to give it to me, and I am not going to lie: I ain't got it.

However, I give my heart and my life enthusiastically to the idea that God (the Christian God) is real, and act in all things as if ze is. Which, you know, I think is fine, because isn't that the whole point of faith? Not knowing, but giving yourself to it anyway? I don't really see myself as less of a Christian or as a Quaker for being honest about that, though I do strongly identify with the Thomas of the Gospels. Anyway. 

All that is a preamble to say, I read a lot about religion, and what I read is quite diverse. I like academic theology (including in religions other than Christianity, mostly Judaism), religious memoir, pure philosophy (including from atheists — I have always been fond of Bertrand Russel, though I can't stomach the New Atheists), and straight-up devotional literature.

In the past monthish, I've finished reading three very different books: Karen Armstrong's Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence, Dorothy Day's The Duty of Delight, and Matt Mikalatos' The First Time We Saw Him: Awakening to the Wonder of Jesus.

Nothing More to Lose, by Najwan Darwish (book review)

Nothing More to Lose, by Najwan Darwish 

Inspired by the pleasure I gained from reading Citizen cover-to-cover, the first time I had ever done so with a book of contemporary poetry, I decided to do the same with this little volume. I was so glad I did.

Najwan Darwish is a Palestinian and is (unbeknownst to me until a few weeks ago) one of the pre-eminent Arabic language poets.

He deserves it.

Nothing More to Lose is a collection largely emphasizing themes of displacement, loss, war, brutality, and the love of family. It is a painfully clear-eyed look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and even as I read it I felt my frame of reference for that war shifting.

Just as Maus by Art Spiegelman frames my understanding of the Holocaust (not necessarily because it's the most important book written about the Holocaust but because it is the book that spoke to me most clearly, the book that is seared into my mind), just as The Things They Carried frames my understanding of the Vietnam War . . . Nothing More to Lose is becoming my frame for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Let's put historical importance aside for a moment.

Damn, the man writes well.

I read a lot of poetry, OK? I read poetry for one publication and edit poetry for another. I probably read at least a dozen to two dozen poetry submissions a week, plus the poetry reading I do for pleasure. Almost no one can write about emotionally charged injustices (emotionally charged anything) without collapsing either into the sentimental or the polemic.

By way of illustrative example, let's take the Cancer Poem. On the one hand, some poets enjoy painting a Hallmark portrait of the Noble Sufferer. On the other, some poets enjoy writing about Inhumane Modern Medicine. On the third hand, other poets (or poetasters, perhaps I should say) take an even lower road and write about the Ennobling Truths of Suffering, and Everyone Is All The Same Underneath. Hurk. The same three tropes pop up again and again in many poems about suffering of all sorts.

Najwan Darwish does none of these things. He does for the poetry of war what Jane Kenyon did for the poetry of illness. He writes about moments, about details, and the emotional detonations that a detail can encompass.

He writes honestly but unsentimentally. His writing shocks, but he is not writing to shock. He is writing to be true. And oh, he is.

Verdict: Poetry lovers, read this book.

Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine (book review)

Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine 

Read this book.

Okay, that's not going to be my entire blog post on this book, but it could be.

Citizen is a book-length poem about racism, both micro- and macro-aggressions, in America. It is written primarily in the second person, and is actually the first book-length work I have read in the second person (No, I haven't read Bright Lights, Big City.) The use of the second person was remarkably compelling to me. I knew it was written in the second person before I picked it up, and was worried it might come across as "gimmicky" to me, or even annoying. It didn't. It was gripping and helped propel me through the narrative.

Until I read Citizen, not only had I never read in the second person, I had also rarely (ever?) read a volume of modern poetry as a coherent entity (of course I have read epic poetry like that — my obsession with The Divine Comedy is a topic for another day!). I have been reading all modern poetry collections as if they were anthologies, dipping in and out, never reading straight through.

Citizen is not meant to be read that way. The work is not clearly separated into different poems with titles that can be easily excerpted (though part of it was published in "Poetry" in March 2014 and can be found here; please, please, at least check this out to see if you could be into the full work), but each section of poetry is set off by whitespace and sometimes imagery.

Rankine has amazing range as a poet. She seems to effortlessly turn from a stream-of-consciousness style (as in the excerpt I linked) to a more abstract style, sort of Jackson Pollock poetry; at times she is working more towards effect than towards meaning. (I am sure there is a name for this style of poetry; can any blog readers out there help me out? Is it just modernism?)

Stylistically, the closest thing to Citizen that I have read is probably Ulysses, which I am reading right now. Both works use dialogue, stream of consciousness, and words-for-their-effects. Both Joyce and Rankine turn almost effortlessly from one voice to another. (Lest my comparison to Ulysses turn you away, I will reassure you that Rankine is much more readable than Joyce. Also, Citizen is only 160 pages long, with fairly large print and pictures. Ulysses, let me assure you, has no pictures.)

Is this my favorite style of writing? No. No, it isn't. But Rankine is so very, very good at it that I actually don't care. In a totally-not-at-all sort of way (they are entirely different poets) my reaction to her reminds me of my reaction to Sylvia Plath: not at all my type of poetry, but omigod you are so good at this. 

I've been reading a lot about racism recently (like lots of people in America right now), and this is hands down the best thing I've read, both in terms of compelling me and in terms of sheer artistic virtuosity.

Read this book. 

Franny and Zooey, by Salinger (book review)

I loved this book.

Upon finishing this book, I was immediately seized by Book Evangelism. I wanted everyone in my life to know how amazing this book was, and I took to Goodreads to find out who else had read it, who else had loved it, and who was just waiting to be converted.

I was in that blissed-out trance state of Book Infatuation and it was inconceivable to me that — wait for it — perhaps not everyone liked this book.

Until I realized one of my friends hated it. She didn't put it on her  "books to be hurled from me at great velocity" Goodreads list (a list title which, God help me, I now dearly wish to copy), but she one-starred it, which is the Goodreads equivalent of a death wish (the same rating I gave to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, for the record).

Honestly, though, I can see why someone might fairly hate this book.

It is billed as a short story and a novella, but it's not, not really. It's a morality play, or a parable, or possibly a religious text. So if you want actual plot, I have to say this falls a bit short. 

I found the Glass family (the two main characters are sister and brother, Franny and Zooey Glass) to be rather precious and unbelievable as well. It is a family with seven extraordinarily precocious children who go about doing things like starring in child trivia competitions and memorizing Epicictus. Also they speak in italics all the damn time. It's annoying as hell, godamit.

The whole lot of them would fit right into a Wes Anderson movie. In fact, this whole book reminded me vividly of a Wes Anderson movie. And if you hate Wes Anderson movies, well, it's hard to blame you (though I, personally, enjoyed The Grand Budapest Hotel very much, thank you.)

All that said: I loved this book. 

Book Review: On Immunity, by Eula Biss

Eula Biss: On Immunity

“Some prefer to assume health as an identity. I am healthy, we tell each other, meaning that we eat certain foods and avoid others, that we exercise and do not smoke. Health, it is implied, is the reward for living the way we live, and lifestyle is its own variety of immunity.
When health becomes an identity, sickness becomes not something that happens to you, but who you are. Your style of life, I gleaned from the way the word lifestyle was used in junior high school health class, is either clean or dirty, safe or unsafe, free of disease or prone to disease...
...My generation came of age in the shadow of the AIDS epidemic, and it seems to have left us believing not that we are all vulnerable to disease, but that it is possible to avoid disease by living a cautious life and limiting our contact with others.”

Eula Biss's thoughtful book is not a pro-vaccination polemic (although I certainly enjoy such polemics, and if you also enjoy them, I thoroughly recommend Paul Offit to you). Rather, it is a meditation on health and disease in the tradition of Susan Sontag's classic essays "Illness as Metaphor" and "AIDS and its Metaphors." (I also recommend Susan Sontag. Strongly!)

What I liked most about Biss's work was how explicitly she called out the classism that pervades the anti-vaccine movement.