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."

State of Wonder

One of my favorite books is Ann Patchett's Bel Canto, and so it was an easy decision to pick up her latest novel State of Wonder.  The story follows Dr. Marina Singh, a research scientist whose father grew up in India and mother in Minnesota, as she navigates through the Amazon.  Two of my favorite passages:

"Like her mother and all her mother's people before her, those inexhaustible blondes who staked their claims in verdant prairies, Marina was cut from Minnesota, the soil and the starry nights.  Instead of growing up inquisitive and restless, she had developed a profound desire to stay, as if her center of gravity was so low it connected her directly to this particular patch of earth."

"Her skin was all cream and light in comparison to her father's and very dark when she held her wrist against her mother's.  She had her father's round, black eyes and heavy lashes, his black hair and angular frame.  Seeing her father gave her the ability to see herself, the comfort of physical recognition after a life spent among her mother's people, all those translucent cousins who looked at her like she was a llama who had wandered into their holiday dinner.  The checkers in the grocery store, the children at school, the doctors and the bus drivers all asked her where she was from... Being the child of a white mother and foreign graduate-student father who took his doctoral degree but not his family back to his country of origin after he was finished had become the stuff of presidential history, but when Marina was growing up there was no example that could easily explain her situation."

Admission

After seeing the trailer for Tina Fey's new movie Admission, I picked up the novel.  I figured it made sense to read the book first, since the book is (nearly) always better than the film.*  Both the book and movie revolve around an admissions officer at Princeton.  Beyond that, though, I'm not sure how much they have in common:  the trailer suggests that the movie is a comedy whereas I found the book to be fairly depressing.

One common theme through the novel is how *difficult* it is to be an admissions officer at a top-ranked institution:  parsing through thousands of remarkable applicants who, at a certain point, are virtually indistinguishable.  After all, nearly every applicant has stellar grades, excels on standardized tests, participates in extracurricular activities, and volunteers.  And the pressure that comes with making those judgments, knowing that your decision as an admission officer will affect the applicant's next four years (if not the rest of their life.)

The novel also touches on the fact that, while high school students are plagued with insecurities, admission to an "elite" university doesn't necessarily assuage those fears:

"Inside every one of [the college] students, she understood now, was a person who didn't live up to his or her own expectations, a person too fat, too slow, whose hair wouldn't hold a curl, who had no gift for languages, who lacked the gene for math.  They were convinced they were not all they'd been cracked up to be:  the track star, the classicist, valedictorian, perennial leading lady, campus fixer, or teacher's favorite.  The driven ones… feared they weren't driven enough, and the slackers were sure they'd find out how deficient they were if they ever did apply themselves.  Up and down the corridors of the dormitories, behind each closed door, and whether the person within was davening over organic chemistry or drinking himself into a store, the Dartmouth she'd attended was populated by young people who were terrified of exposure."

While the impostor phenomenon isn't something new - and not necessarily sometimes that even goes away - I do think that it's particularly pronounced in college.  And, perhaps, your first year at a law firm. ;)

*  Notable exceptions:  Gone With the Wind, The Godfather.

The Best of 2012

Books! So many books! Fifteen trips and one new book club, and I’ve been reading even more than usual this year. Not everything was great, but, without commentary, my top three:

1.  Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
2.  A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
3.  Bossypants by Tina Fey

I don't think it's a coincidence that all of them are by women: one of my resolutions for 2012 was to read more books by women, since last year I disproportionately read novels by men. I didn’t always like what I was reading, but it was interesting to see how my reading material affected what I was thinking about in, you know, life. 

 And with that, digital vacation for the next one week. Happy holidays!

How Should A Person Be?

Oh man.  I feel like I'm on a roll:  First "How To Be a Woman", then "Gone Girl", and now "How Should a Person Be?"  From the titles of the books alone, you might surmise I'm having a bit of an existential crisis.

But, in any event, I just finished the last:  Sheila Heti's "How Should A Person Be?"  Despite the accolades, I couldn't get into it.  Mostly, I found its the characters irritating.  (The book has been widely compared to Lena Dunham's Girls, which means that I should probably skip that too.)

Still, there were some great passages:

• Two painters, discussing what it means to have freedom to paint:  "Sholem was saying that freedom, for him, is having the technical facility to be able to execute whatever he wants, just whatever image he has in his mind.  But that's not freedom!  That's control, or power.  Whereas I think that Margaux understands freedom to be the freedom to take risks, the freedom to do something bad or to appear foolish.  Not to recognize that difference is a pretty big thing."

• "You remember the peur aeternus -- the eternal child -- Peter Pan -- the boy who never grows up, who never becomes a man?... Such people will suddenly tell you they have another plan, and they always do it the moment things start getting difficult.  But it's their everlasting switchings that's the dangerous thing, not what they choose... [W]hile others actually build a life in which things gain in meaning and significance, this is not true of the peur.  Such a person inevitably looks back on life as it nears its end with a feeling of emptiness and sadness, aware of what they have built:  nothing.  In their quest for a life without failure, suffering, or doubt, that is what they achieve:  a life empty of all those things that make a human life meaningful."

• "What is American cheese anyway?"  I heard one of them say.  Her friend replied, "I think it means it has a chemical in it."