The Goldfinch

After watching "Blue Jasmine" (which was extraordinarily good), my friend A turned to me and stated, with the utmost confidence, that Cate Blanchett would be nominated for -- if not win -- an Academy Award.  It didn't matter how tremendous other actresses' performances were in the upcoming months:  Cate Blanchett was simply that good.

This is how I felt about The Goldfinch.  It was extraordinary, and I can already tell that it will be one of my favorite books of 2014.

There are many, many things I loved about it:  the dark humor, how vividly Tartt painted (no pun intended) New York City and Nevada, the unexpected twists and turns in the tale.  It's a long read, but a rewarding one.

Some favorite passages:

• "And her laugh was enough to make you want to kick over what you were doing and follow her down the street."
• On Greenwich Village:  "It was a little weird being in the Village on my own because it wasn't a place where you saw many kids on the street on a weekend morning; it felt adult, sophisticated, slightly alcoholic."
• On his mother's death:  "Every new event - everything I did for the rest of my life - would only separate us more and more: days she was no longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us.  Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away."
• "And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky -- so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly the middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime."

And this entire passage:

A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning understand: we don't get to choose our own hearts.  We can't make ourselves want what's good for us or what's good for other people.  We don't get to choose the people we are. 

Because -- isn't it drilled into us constantly, from childhood on, an unquestioned platitude in the culture --?  From William Blake to Lady Gaga, from Rousseau to Rumi to Tosca to Mister Rogers, it's a curiously uniform message, accepted from high to low: when in doubt, what to do?  How do we know what's right for us? Every shrink, every career counselor, every Disney princess knows the answer: "Be yourself." "Follow your heart." 

Only here's what I really, really want someone to explain to me.  What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can't be trusted --?  What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster?

Best of 2013

Oh man.  Despite barely blogging in 2013, I still read a bunch.  It was the usual mix:  lots of fiction, some smutty books, a handful of non-fiction.  All around, it was a great year for reading, but here are my top five faves: 

1)  The Orphan Master's Son:  I don't think I've ever read anything quite like it.  Completely original and completely deserving of the Pulitzer.

2)  World War Z:  Courtesy of my friend Mark, I picked up this page-turner.  I also did not sleep for the entire month of September due to zombie nightmares.

3)  The Circle:  I get the criticism:  Dave Eggers' characters aren't fully formed and the 'plot twist' is pretty apparent from the first few chapters.  It doesn't matter.  The book does a great job exploring privacy, social media, and what we give up when we opt in.

4)  Americanah:  Hands down, my favorite book of the year.  I highlighted over a dozen passages, but I could have easily highlighted the whole book because it was that good.  

5)  Lean In:  I was a little torn about whether or not to include this one.  Like many others, I think that Sandberg writes from a position of incredible privilege, and that she seemed a little out-of-touch with some of her suggestions.  That said, I thought the book was thought-provoking with its discussions on work-life balance and how to make parental leave conversations more inclusive.

Happy 2014, everyone!

How It All Began

J's been traveling for work and, left to my own devices, I've been on a reading bender.  A backlog of posts coming!

From the latest, Penelope Lively's How It All Began, another reflection on why I read:

"Forever, reading has been central, the necessary fix, the support system.  Her life has been informed by reading.  She has read not just for distraction, sustenance, to pass the time, but she has read in a state of primal innocence, reading for enlightenment, for instruction, even.  She has read to find out how sex works, how babies are born, she has read to discover what it is to be good, or bad; she has read to find out if things are the same for others as they are for her -- then, discovering that frequently they are not, she has read to find out what it is that other people experience that she is missing."

Overall, I thought the book was lovely: it reminded me a bit of Major Pettigrew's Last Stand with its tone, meditations on getting older, and, well, quintessential British-ness.  I would recommend it for anyone looking for a light, engrossing summer read.

Travels to India

From Justice Sotomayor's autobiography, My Beloved World: 

"Traveling with Mami to Puerto Rico was a little like being around Rip van Winkle on the day he woke up.  She wore an expression of constant wonderment: everything surprised her by how much it had changed, except for the things that surprised her because they were just as she remembered them."

Life After Life

Based on Djhilwol's recommendations, I recently picked up Kate Atkinson's Life After Life.  It was my first time reading something by the British author, and it transported me back to living in London:  Argyll Road, Kensington High Street, Holland Park.  Like Replay (one of my all-time favorites), Atkinson's novel examines what you would change if you could re-live your life.  

I thought the novel was pretty depressing -- most of it occurs during the World Wars -- but here are some of my favorite passages:

• "Ursula craved solitude but she hated loneliness, a conundrum that she couldn't even begin to solve."
• "Pamela, even at a distance, was the voice of her conscience, but then it was very easy to have a conscience from a distance."
• "She noticed recently that the more he rose through the echelons in the ministry, the more one-sided their conversations had become.  He made statements, raised questions, answered the questions and drew conclusions without ever needing to involve her in the exchange.  (A lawyer's way perhaps.)"

Comic Strips and Bedtime Stories

Courtesy of Josh and his Kindle, I just finished Number9Dream by David Mitchell.  While I didn't love it as much as Cloud Atlas, I liked it more than The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.  The book shares a number of themes with Cloud Atlas (e.g., what does -- and doesn't -- get reported by the media, the power of corporations), and also has a dream-like* Murakami-esque feel to it.  

Some favorite passages:

"In the cities we Japanese force ourselves to live in, the question should not be, 'Why do so many of us suffer from mental illness?' but 'Why do any of us not suffer from mental illness?'"

(That should probably be true for Manhattan too.)  Also:

"At what age did.. I learn that the world is actually two: one outside, and one inside, which we call 'imagination'?  A stupendous discovery, you would have thought, but I have no memory of the day."

Finally, a discussion on why the Japanese newspapers fail to report the Yakuza wars.

"Yakuza wars make the police look useless and the politicos look corrupt.  Which, as everybody knows, is true.  But if the authorities admit it, the voters of Tokyo may be prompted to wonder why they bother paying taxes at all.  So it gets kept off TV."
          "But the newspapers?"
"Their pet journalists are fed reports of battles already won and lost higher up in the mountainside.  Original, story-sniffing journalists get black-listed from news conferences, so newspapers can't keep them. Subtle, isn't it?"
          "Then why bother with the news at all?"
"People want their comic strips and bedtime stories.  Look... a dragonfly."

* No pun intended.

Carry the One

Just finished Carol Anshaw's "Carry the One", about a group of friends who accidentally kill a young girl while driving drunk one night.  The book follows the characters after the accident, charting how they each cope with their guilt.  Unsurprisingly, the book is super depressing, but has some great passages:

• "Helping her students make art that was hideous but meaningful to them was a small torment Alice had devised for herself."
• "Telling people you are an astronomer, he found, was not usually a conversation starter.  Or, worse, it started a conversation with the other person telling you his sign."
• "Marriage and parenthood seemed fascinating to her right from the start.  [Her husband] had come into the picture already assembled, a full complement of personality aspects with which she had to acquaint herself.  [Her son] was a total surprise.  Until his arrival, she had only considered him hypothetically, as someone small who would need to be fed and changed and kept from harm and illness.  One or another of the generic babies on the covers of the books she read in preparation.  From the moment of his birth, though, he had been such a specific person."
• "Romance no longer looked like so much fun, more like a repetitive stress injury -- beginning with Maude, but by now also including all the failed and pathetic attempts to replicate that constellation of emotion with someone else.  She could measure this past effort in all the underwear she had left behind in apartments, all the bottles of pricey wine she had brought to dinner, all the recitations of bad childhoods and adult disappointments she had earnestly listened to."