What Are You Reading?

I just looked that up cause it sounded intriguing and now I want to read it but I am scared!!

Oh, I have that to pick up at the library!  I definitely don't plan to read it in public. 

I remember one time back in middle school when I was reading a book about Mary, Queen of Scots on the school bus home.  I started crying when she died!  I was so embarrassed!

I finished The Yiddish Policeman's Union for TI Book Club about a week ago.  I thought it was very good, but I'll save anything resembling real analysis for the Book Club thread.

I also just finished My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk, and it's probably the best thing I've read this year so far.  While on its surface it's a mystery story about the murder of a 16th Century Ottoman gilder concerned that the book he and his peers (one of whom is his killer) are illustrating is a sacrilege worthy of damnation, Pamuk's thematic focus on the nature of art, style, creativity, and conflict between East and West elevate it into a legitimate masterpiece in my opinion (and, presumably, in the much more trustworthy opinions of members of the Nobel Committee, who awarded Pamuk the Nobel Prize in 2006).  Pamuk's narrative style is pretty fascinating too, each chapter written from the perspective of different characters, all of them unreliable to various extents, many of them contradicting themselves with the sense that even they are unable to tease out what is and isn't a lie.  Anyway, at the risk of rambling on about this, I'll just say that I highly recommend this book to anyone who found my poorly-written comment the least bit interesting.  

Next I'm planning to finish up Richard Dawkin's The Selfish Gene, which I read the first 60% of a few months back.  Then it's on to Raymond Chandler's The Simple Art of Murder for TI Book Club, and taking another stab at inching my way through the increasingly frustrating Wheel of Time with The Fires of Heaven.

Follow-up; The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August is by Kate Griffin, author of my fave London urban magic series.

Current read - old Michael Marshall (Smith) books, starting with The Intruders (soon to be a BBC America series starring John Simm), then We Are Here.

My upcoming vacation to Denmark and Sweden is gonna have a crap-ton of book-readin' time: flights from Texas to Europe and back, three-hour ferry boats to and from the island of Gotland, possibly the train trips from Copenhagen to Stockholm if my traveling partner isn't a genius conversationalist.

So I have loaded a whole pile of diverse books onto my Kindle. Alphabetically now:
- Ball Four, Jim Bouton, the classic baseball memoir;
- Foreign Gods, Inc., Okey Ndibe, new thriller about a Nigerian immigrant finding lucrative ways to exploit his heritage;
- Mad Men on the Couch, Stephanie Newman, a psychotherapist diagnosing the show's characters;
- Making of a Chef, Michael Ruhlman, adventures in cooking school;
- Six Amendments, John Paul Stevens, brand-new book by the 94-year-old former justice, with his suggestions for constitutional amendments;
- Vampires in the Lemon Grove, Karen Russell, short stories.

Plus a clutch of Great Big Books I'm saving for a Summer of Russians: Crime and Punishment, Brothers Karamazov, Tolstoy short stories.

Yeah, that should be plenty.

Currently reading The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer, 2013 novel about a group of clever friends from teenage summer camp, and how they cope with each other's success, failure, envy, and pain. So far, better than I expected.

Love that you plan your reading for vacations as obsessively as I do. I book a vacation, the next thing I do is like "And what will I read?!"

(Do you Kindle it? This is one of my biggest reasons for being pro-Kindle: it totally changes traveling.)

And as an awesome coincidence, Crime & Punishment is on my short list for reading during my upcoming trip to Thailand. High five! 

I consider long flights a perfect time to read big classics like C&P. I know most folks go a different route with travel books, but for me there's no better time to immerse myself in a big, complex book than when I definitely won't have anything more exciting to do for the next 12 hours.

My wife really dug Interestings too. I guess I'll read that pretty soon; suddenly it seems like everyone's giving it the thumbs up.

Flipback

Halfway mark on Interestings. It's not perfect: sometimes the precocious teenagers engage in the kind of smug we're-so-smart dialogue that makes me wince because it's true and I did it once, but sometimes the dialogue veers into "hmmm this doesn't sound authentic like the rest did". And, relatedly, the teenagers also make a lot of terrible, terrible jokes, with Wolitzer making it clear she knows, but their sense of humor as adults does not improve, and I can't tell if Wolitzer is just writing unfunny characters or if she's not very good at funny. There are some pretty hilarious improvised song lyrics and the occasional one-liner which shows she can do it.

But in general, it is so far completely worth my while, and in fact the kind of book where sometimes I go "hey I deal with that mental thing in my life!" and then watch the characters' reactions extra-closely. There's an event one-third of the way in that is handled with infuriating fairness and see-every-side-ness.

I'm reading Super Sad True Love Story and not really loving it.

Be prepared to cry!

I didn't cry - does that make me a monster?

Finished both Red Sorghum and Twilight of the Elites[/i]. Although I complained earlier about the writing style (translation?) and imagery, once I got into the swing of it was fine. Good, but not necessarily as great as it seemed when it first came out thanks to there being more Mo Yan, and Chinese literature in general, available in Englsh.

For me, Twilight of the Elites did not entirely live up to the potential of its first chapter, unfortunately. The conclusion is already astonishingly dated as well (the book was written in 2012, I think, and topically it’s still hot), being most about Occupy and the Tea Party and potential ways for them to link up into some kind of mass anti-authoritarian movement. Given that Occupy seems to have eaten itself and the Tea Party has turned into a way to separate fools from their money (and that both of these developments were pretty foreseeable by 2012), I’d hold off on some kind of ground-up left-wing/right-wing alliance.

Anyway, I’m continuing with the Chinese stuff with William Willetts’s Foundations of Chinese Art, a giant old art history book I found in a street market. It’s incredibly detailed—you could almost grow your own silkworms, make an iconographically-correct Buddhist sculpture or glaze a Tang-dynasty (or T’ang-dynasty—the book’s good, but it’s old so it uses Wade-Giles instead of Pinyin) vase with the info in here.

I’ve also swung to the right with Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind, which I might have more to say about when I’m actually finished. My preliminary impression, though, is that despite its almost totemic status among older conservative intellectuals, it actually doesn’t strike me as all that conservative a book—Bloom strikes me more as a midcentury liberal who’s a bit baffled by the direction things took post-1970 and how a lot of stuff—particularly Civil Rights, didn’t end up as expected (he’s under the impression that black people would integrate into American society in much the same way Jews did, which was a common assumption for a lot of northern, urban liberals in the 1950s; he blames the failure on radical and identity politics, rather than considering that ~400 years of slavery and oppression might leave deep sociological scars). It’s also a bit frustrating that his main data points for pre-1970 American culture seem to be his own milieu, and for post-1970 that of his students—it feels fairly blinkered. Even more frustrating is the Bloom has a lot of real insights and well-grounded critiques for late eighties (and often extending into contemporary) American society and our lack of awareness of our own origins, but they’re mixed with long passages of “I don’t get these kids today.”

I just finished Temporary Duty by Ric Locke, which is about a US Navy fighter plane squadron seconded for service on an alien interstellar merchant ship. It's an inadvertently funny book, in that if the story was meant to parody the mindset of a particular type of right wing American yokel then it would actually not be very different in plot. The IRS are cartoonish villains backed up by stormtroopers, the only lesbian character is a mannish rapist who's had her breasts removed, and the heroic West Virginian hick who is the protagonist (and who is unfairly kept in the lower ranks by clueless and shortsighted superiors unable to appreciate his true brilliance) continually seduces alien women and impresses others with his out-of-the-box thinking and his working man authenticity.

My description makes it sound funnier than it is, but the book isn't batshit enough to be enjoyed as a literary equivalent of a train wreck. Had it actually been a parody, then the story might have played to its strengths, but as it is it basically takes itself too seriously.

Also, I just googled the author and found out he died of lung cancer two years ago, so now I feel kind of bad about what I wrote, but I still can't pretend that I liked the book. I'm compelled to finish everything I read, which is why I kept reading even though I wasn't really enjoying the book. Anyway, I guess they can't all be winners.

After binging on Apocalypse Now and its blu ray extras last weekend, I've returned to Heart of Darkness. I've read it a few times, though rarely for pleasure, and I can say that this is the first time I'm actively finding it an easy, compelling read rather than a slog. Funny how much more you get out of things when you're enjoying them.