What I Recommend

One of the questions I get most often is:  "I'm looking for a new book!  What do you recommend?"

It's been a while since I've updated this blog regularly, but here are some favorites from the past two years:

1)  Station Eleven:  This book really got under my skin.  It's been over a year since I've read it, but passages still come to me at random moments.  The novel is about human survival after an apocalypse, and while we all know that I would go down in the first wave, it made me think about how much we depend on modern conveniences.

2)  Modern Romance:  It's been years since I've dated and so much has changed since then (hello, Tinder!).  I thought that the authors did a wonderful job of discussing the data behind dating trends, and the impact that technology has on how we communicate and connect with one another.  (I highly recommend reading the print version for the graphics.)

3)  Re Jane:  Jane Eyre was one of my favorites as a teenager, and I loved the adaptation to modern times.  It's not perfect - it's overly wrought at times - but I still enjoyed it.

4)  The Expatriates:  I read this right before giving birth, but I've found that I can't stop thinking about it since then.  There's a gripping plot line involving a young child, plus I identified with the descriptions of living abroad:  the displacement that comes with being in another culture, along with the expat friendships that spring from muddling through the unknown together.

The Story of the Lost Child

From The Story of the Lost Child, the fourth - and final - installment of the Neapolitan novels:

"It was marvelous to cross borders, to let oneself go within other cultures, discover the provisional nature of what I had taken for absolute."

Also:  

"Every intense relationship between human beings is full of traps, and if you want it to endure you have to learn to avoid them." 

And so I'm done with the series.  I deliberately waited to start the novels until I gave birth -- among other things, I wanted to read them without interruption (ha!).  Finishing the series feels especially poignant, coinciding with the end of the so-called fourth trimester.

I've given no background about the novels, but, in brief, they trace the friendship of two women over fifty years.  And while the friendship is the heart of the series, the novels also explore class struggles, female identity, the complexities of motherhood, the impact of communism on Italy, the violence of Naples, and what feels like dozens and dozens of other themes.  

And though I grimace at the Trump-like overtones of the word, I can only describe the books as being tremendous.  Highly recommended!

Two additional thoughts:  

• Its scope reminds me a bit of A Suitable Boy, which I also highly recommend.
• Though Ferrante is a pseudonym and the author's identity remains unknown, we all think that the author is a female... right?

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

From Elena Ferrante's Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (the third book in the Neapolitan series):

"Become.  It was a verb that had always obsessed me, but I realized it for the first time only in that situation.  I wanted to become, even though I had never known what.  And I had become, that was certain, but without an object, without a real passion, without a determined ambition.  I had wanted to become something - here was the point - only because I was afraid that [my friend] would become someone and I would stay behind.  My becoming was a becoming in her wake.  I had to start again to become, but for myself, as an adult, outside of her." 

Also, I love this description:  "There is no woman like you, you throw yourself into life with a force that, if we all had it, the world would have changed a long time ago."

The Story of a New Name

From Elena Ferrante's The Story of a New Name (the second book in the Neapolitan series):

“...I had arrived there full of pride and realized that -- in good faith, certainly, with affection -- I had made that whole journey mainly to show her what she had lost and what I had won.  But she had known from the moment I had appeared, and now... she was explaining to me that I had won nothing, that in the world there is nothing to win, that her life was full of varied and foolish adventures as much as mine, and that time simply slipped away without any meaning, and it was good just to see each other every so often to hear the mad sound of the brain of one echo in the mad sound of the brain of the other.” 

New words learned!

• excrescence:  a distinct outgrowth on a human or animal body or on a plant, esp. one that is the result of a disease or abnormality
• philologist:  the branch of knowledge that deals with the structure, historical development, and relationships of a language or languages

My Brilliant Friend

From Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend:

“Children don’t know the meaning of yesterday, of the day before yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this, now: the street is this, the doorway is this, the stairs are this, this is Mamma, this is Papa, this is the day, this the night.” 

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."

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."

Gone Girl

Courtesy of Hurricane Sandy, I found myself with a bit of free time and picked up Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl.  It. Was. Fantastic.  

While I desperately want to talk about the plot, I also don't want to risk spoiling it for anyone who hasn't gotten to it yet.  (Go out and read it already!)  

Instead, I'll focus on one of my favorite passages, told from the viewpoint of wife Amy:

"Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding... Men actually think this girl exists."

That's pretty much how I feel every time I happen to look at Maxim (shudder).  I started to look for links to prove the validity of that passage, but I got too grossed out.  (Thanks, Internet.)  Instead, I'll just point to today's article in Jezebel about the new "Good Girl Gina" meme making the rounds.  :-|

p.s.  As a total aside, I'm not sure what it says about me that I found myself relating to Amy.

How To Be A Woman

My latest read is Caitlin Moran's "How To Be A Feminist."  I enjoyed it, although I wouldn't say it was my favorite read of the year.  Unfortunately, the author has a propensity to TYPE IN ALL CAPS WHEN MAKING HER POINT, and nothing is more of a turn-off than the dreaded all caps.  (Well, perhaps some things are more of a turn off, but, you know.)

A friend called the book as "pop feminism", and I'd wager that's a pretty accurate description (see, e.g., the chapter on how Katie Price is harmful to women, whereas Lady Gaga is a symbol of empowerment).  And while I didn't think the book was particularly earth-shattering, I thought that Moran raised some interesting points.  For instance, when discussing clothing:

"Women are just supposed to be Good at Clothes, and to look down on those who aren't -- who screw up even one outfit, as evidenced by all those "Circle of Shame"/"What Was She Thinking?" spreads in every magazine and every tabloid newspaper every week.  Prominent female politicians are lambasted for a single pair of "wrong" shoes.  At its best -- and I love a nice frock -- fashion is a game.  But for women, it's a compulsory game, like netball."

I suppose that arguably -- especially in New York -- mores are changing, and men are also being judged by their attire.  Still, I think that the degree to which women are judged by their appearance, and expected to look a certain way, far outweighs the pressure felt by male counterparts.

Also entertaining:  Moran devotes a chapter to strip clubs and contrasts them to burlesque clubs, and argues that the former are objectionable whereas the latter are permissible.  Although she makes several points, she ends with:

"Do you know what the final rule of thumb is with strip clubs?  Gay men wouldn't be seen dead in Spearmint Rhino - but you can't move for them in a burlesque joint.  As a rule of thumb, you can always tell if a place is culturally healthy for women when the gays start rocking it."

Touche!

The Best Possible Light

I've been thinking a lot about interference in other people's decisions and when it's necessary to speak up.  After all, we're all adults, and people are entitled to make their own choices.

Still, it can be hard.  Harder, I think, when you're a parent and might see your (adult) child's actions as a reflection of your prior parenting decisions. One of my favorite passages on this point is in The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, when the narrator is dealing with the fact that her son has impregnated two women:

I turn and face him.
For a long time I see this man.
I see him and I think, I am the one who taught him to regard himself as a blessing.

The Paris Wife

"To marry was to say you believed in the future and in the past too––that history and tradition and hope could stay knit together to hold you up."