Archive for June 9th, 2012|Daily archive page
Life Work
author: Donald Hall
name: Paul
average rating: 4.40
book published: 1993
rating: 3
read at: 2012/05/07
date added: 2012/05/08
shelves: memoir, non-fiction
review:
Let’s assume you were wondering if there was ever a market for blogging before the semi-coherent daily ramble became a legitimate form of communication ten or twelve years ago. To confirm this, you need look no further than Donald Hall‘s Life Work, a semi-topical serialized set of quasi-daily ruminations on the subject of work, self, life, death, family, history and the intersections of all the above. Written in the very early nineties, this book is a blog, regardless of whatever memoir title might be attached to it. The short essay formatting, the tangental discussions on a broad central theme; the only things missing are ironic hyperlinks and the occasional “sorry I haven’t posted in a while, I’ll be better soon, I promise!” entires.
I was assigned Life Work as a part of an English course I took during one of my failed attempts at college. This would be back in like 1996, when the web was just starting to be ubiquitous and when the notion of an online life was still mostly science fiction. In that time, which sounds quaint to describe and depresses me greatly to think of a time less than twenty years ago as such, the notion of a person spending an hour or more a day on actual post mail as opposed to email or Twitter or whatever was still current enough to not seem strange. Reading the book now, it kind of boggles my mind to know that something so central to communication when I was not even just a small child but a teenager, a near-adult, has all but been antiquated. Hall describes his work, his idealized day involving the anticipation of a day spent working on poems and essays and letters and books, then relaxing with his wife and attending to various chores come evening. He describes the workdays of his parents, his grandparents and great-grandparents. He talks about work in a general sense, he talks about it in great detail.
You can tell that Hall is a poet; his prose and essay stylings are peppered with dips into lyrical rhapsodies. He’s also kind of hard to like sometimes: he is stuffy and pretentious one moment and then grounded and rootsy the next. I kind of liked that he manages to convey the complexity of a real person by preserving the daily shift in tone and mood, in refusing the temptation to not edit down or smooth over these transitory notes. Still, there are a lot of points where Hall’s topic of work, as presented in this proto-blog format, become a kind of slushy non-thesis, weighed down by specifics that I don’t think anyone asked for.
Partway through the book, Hall deals with a health crisis, which puts a new spin on the topic (and a welcome one, though saying so sounds absolutely terrible I know), propelling the end of the book through with a renewed urgency that adds a nice edge to the languid tone of the first half. I did like that Hall kind of sold me (as if I needed selling) on the quiet life of the comfortable country writer; his depictions of an unhurried New England life ignited both my aspirational drive as well as some wanderlust to explore the semi-rural areas of Vermont and New Hampshire he creates in mental landscapes. Perhaps these places don’t or never did exist, but I’d like to go and see for myself.
And maybe, then, this is the final success of the book. In a collection of meandering essays about living and working, Hall has made me interested in doing both, doing more with each, and finding a happier junction where the two—inevitably, as Hall believes—meet.
A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama’s Diplomacy with Iran
author: Trita Parsi
name: Paul
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2012
rating: 2
read at: 2012/06/04
date added: 2012/06/04
shelves: new-in-2012, non-fiction
review:
Whew. This was a tough one for me to get through. About a year ago when I started making a concerted effort to finish more books, I made a little deal with myself that if I ever had a bit of downtime and I found myself specifically not wanting to pick up the book I was reading, that meant I wasn’t into it and I needed to set it aside and read something else. It was an effort to prevent the logjam that sometimes happens when I’m reading a difficult or dry book that I want to finish (either because someone recommended it or because the subject, if not the presentation, is something I’m interested in) but struggle with. I came close to putting Trita Parsi‘s book about the Obama administration’s early efforts at diplomacy with Iran aside in this way because there were some times when I had a chance to read and found myself looking at the book thinking, “Meh.”
In the end I powered through because while I wasn’t thrilled about reading it all the time, I did continue to stick with it. I think, ultimately, the main complaint I have with A Single Roll Of The Dice is that it doesn’t feel to me like it needed to be a book. This is an exhaustive examination of a period of only about three years, and a lot of the detail here frankly feels like TMI. For example, Parsi goes into an insane level of detail on the backstory of Brazil’s diplomatic history and their desire to win a seat on the UN Security Council, which he presents to contextualize why Brazil partnered with Turkey in order to get Iran to agree to a diplomatic deal that had originally been floated by the US to ship low enriched uranium out of Iran in exchange for fuel rods (enriched elsewhere) to power a research reactor that would provide medical isotopes. In other words, the US wanted to stall Iran from enriching their uranium toward weapons grade but didn’t necessarily feel they shouldn’t be allowed to use non-arms applications of nuclear technology.
While it’s sort of interesting that Brazil wanted to get involved, the whole explanation of why Brazilian President Lula felt his country could assist here is tangental to the point that Turkey and Brazil had reasons for getting involved and ultimately got Iran to agree to the deal that US and European negotiators some months before had been unable to sell to Iranian officials. This is but one example of where Parsi over-explains, possibly just to show off how much he knows about all of the details of the complicated matter of diplomacy with Iran, but loses the forest for the trees.
I think in the end the core story here is fascinating but this should have been an in-depth article, something like 30-40 pages worth, condensed to its most pertinent essence, and not a 200+ page book of wearying tales of which ambassador was present in which meeting and what sources say was discussed and how they relayed the information to the press, ad nauseum. Most tellingly, the drama conveyed by the snappy title does not carry through to the sea of minutiae within.
I certainly didn’t hate this book, and the subject that compelled me to check it out from the library pulled me through to the end, as a pleasant side effect of the belabored point is a pretty decent education on the history and current state of international relations as pertains to Iran. There’s also a very good overview of the Iranian elections which caused so much news cycle coverage a few years ago, told from both the internal perspective of Iran as well as from the external point of view as seen by the rest of the world, and by those inside the Obama administration. For that reason alone I might be tempted to suggest that someone with some general questions about the state of affairs in Iran check out this book. But then again, it’s possible I’d recommend it only because, for now, it’s the most timely portrait of that and even then, it’s probably been supplanted by newer works covering the latter half of 2011 and the first part of 2012. And those would probably be shorter, more journalistic articles. By the end of this year, I suspect the reasons to read this book would have almost disappeared entirely unless someone really wanted to know exactly what US-Iran relations were like as of late 2011. Not exactly a ringing endorsement.
The 4 Hour Workweek, Expanded And Updated: Expanded And Updated, With Over 100 New Pages Of Cutting Edge Content.
author: Timothy Ferriss
name: Paul
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2007
rating: 3
read at: 2012/05/21
date added: 2012/05/21
shelves: non-fiction
review:
There is an element to Timothy Ferriss‘s treatise on how to decouple yourself from the standard life track of school-work-retirement that rings a bit like P.T. Barnum. At times, hearing Ferriss wax about creating revenue streams that dump money into accounts without real heart or soul commitment gives one a cognitive dissonance effect as you wonder if the book was written as some kind of hokum he cooked up to finance his latest round of jet-setting and continent-hopping. There is a passing reference late in the book where Ferriss seems to indicate that writing is what he feels is his passion, but it still feels like he’s somehow gaming the reader.
Which would be more of an offense if he weren’t so persuasive in his efforts to sell the notion of skirting standard practices and focusing on that which is truly enjoyable in life. The early sections in the book where he describes the drudgery of the daily grind felt like he was talking directly to me at times. His passion for travel is infectious and his ability to convince readers that this sort of drastic course correction is not only possible but maybe imperative really worked on me. I suspect the efficacy of his arguments will depend somewhat on how dissatisfied the reader already is going in, but a lot of the stuff about embracing the worst case scenario and delineating your personal goals is easily adaptable to even smaller shifts in the program.
Of course, not everything Ferriss presents as shrug-worthy is really so easy. His recipe for creating businesses sounds like the kind of thing anyone could do, but I suspect that if anyone could come up with a business model that would permit a Ronco-style cash flow you couldn’t throw a rock without hitting one of his oft-referenced New Rich. And at times he seems to be advocating a strong link between being kind of a steamrolling jerk with being successful. Maybe that’s actually true, but if so, I’d have to consider if Ferriss’s brand of success is really something I’m interested in.
Some of the sections that are full of very specific, practical advice can feel a bit like filler, and in my edition can come across as dated. I guess this is the hazard of a book that advocates technology solutions; newer developments that could be easily leveraged to facilitate some of the things Ferriss discusses (like social media or crowd-sourcing) are ignored or perhaps simply post-date the edition I read. Then again, considering Ferriss’s unusually luddite-like approach to communication tools considering his leveraging of other technological solutions, maybe he would think of the babysitting necessary for building cults of personality like Twitter or Kickstarter to be wastes of time better spent living the “dreamlines.”
I’m of two minds about The 4-Hour Work Week. On one hand it’s incredibly compelling, and easy to read, full of thought-provoking and motivating bits and pieces. On the other hand, it’s never clear how many of these strategies are effective independently of each other. As a full lifestyle design blueprint, I’m sure it could work out for people willing to devote all the effort to modeling your life after Ferriss. For those who don’t necessarily want to tell people that they only check email once a week or practice staring down people just to learn how to maintain eye contact at the risk of a profound butt whooping, I’m not sure there is enough here to really make this more than an interesting thought exercise/case study in subverting societal expectations.
Let’s Pretend This Never Happened
author: Jenny Lawson
name: Paul
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at: 2012/05/17
date added: 2012/05/18
shelves: humor, memoir, new-in-2012, non-fiction
review:
Jenny Lawson is a recent discovery for me. I came to be aware of her website, The Bloggess, following the Beyoncé (the giant metal chicken) post. As a result, I don’t know for sure how much of what appears in Let’s Pretend This Never Happened is lifted directly from her blog, how much is expanded or condensed from other blog posts and how much is new material. I say this because the Beyoncé entry appears late in the book, verbatim from the blog as near as I can tell. That’s not really a complaint because the original post was awesome and deserves to be included. What I mean, really, is that it’s possible that if you’re a longtime reader of her blog, some or most of this won’t be fresh material.
For me, that doesn’t really matter because like I said, there was only one brief chapter (worth re-reading anyway) that was familiar. And, I suppose, if you were a longtime fan of Lawson’s blog, you might be the kind of person to pick up this book just to have it, or just to support her career. So I’ll assume for the sake of the argument that you’re like me and un- or passingly-familiar with The Bloggess.
The main thing to be said up front is that Lawson is hilarious. I mean, really, really, hilarious. It’s hard to remember the last time I laughed out loud at a book as frequently or as uncontrollably as I did reading Let’s Pretend. It got downright embarrassing at points to be reading this book on the train/shuttle combo I take to work, because I’d be sitting there, shoulders shaking with laughter, tears and snot running down my face, side aching and trying desperately to convince my fellow commuters that I wasn’t having some sort of attack. Which of course I couldn’t, because I was laughing too hard to breathe or speak. I’m really surprised no one called an ambulance.
What surprised me a little is how touching the book can be as well. It’s not really a see-saw kind of thing that plays with your emotions, but there are nuggets of sweet truths peppered throughout, just enough to make you understand that this isn’t simply a stand-up routine in prose. Lawson is brutally (I actually want to use the word “ruthlessly” here) honest, over-sharing almost on every page, but to perfection. I really can’t think of anyone else who can make a chapter about three miscarriages and the resulting mental breakdown that understandably accompanied them snort-beverage-through-your-nose funny, but Lawson manages it.
I will say that, in case you didn’t catch the implication from the above, Lawson’s humor is raw, no-holds-barred and totally inappropriate. Which is the same as saying it’s not for everyone. I assume, anyway; maybe there aren’t any people out there who dislike jokes about taxidermy and OD’ing on laxatives. What do I know? I do know that there are people I can think of to whom I wouldn’t necessarily give this book as a gift, so maybe that’s all I’m really saying. But for me, this was just a funny, funny book from cover to cover.
I must be really weird about comedy, though. Because my inclination is to give this book four stars, even though I loved it. Somehow something that makes me laugh feels like… I’m not sure. Easy, maybe? But then I just got through saying that I couldn’t think of a book that had made me laugh as much as this. I guess something makes me think of humor as sort of disposable, as if it could only ever reach a certain plateau if it also contained a riveting plot or something. But then I have to remember that this is a memoir, and plot isn’t really the point. Then I start to think, “Yeah, but does this book really belong up there with my all-time favorites?” Perhaps not. But then again, I can’t think of a single reason for anyone not to read this book unless you’re the kind of person who doesn’t find Lawson’s brand of warped, irreverent, neurotic writing funny. At which point I decide to stop being stingy with my ratings just to be a grump and give it my highest praise.
Seriously, though, read the book.
Something Borrowed
author: Emily Giffin
name: Paul
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2004
rating: 3
read at: 2012/05/16
date added: 2012/05/16
shelves: novel
review:
Now and then I like to choose a book to read that maybe I wouldn’t usually try, just because it is one that means something to my wife. Her and I have pretty divergent tastes in a lot of things, but I would hope that if I found an amazing science fiction novel that I thought she might be able to enjoy, she would humor me and give it a shot. So likewise from time to time I ask her what book she would want me to read. Emily Giffin‘s Something Borrowed is, for the time being at least, among her very favorite books so when I asked which of her books she’d recommend, this is what she selected.
Something Borrowed follows Rachel, a straight-edge lawyer living in New York, and her best friend from childhood, Darcy. Darcy is a force of nature: beautiful, casually successful, engaged to a great guy and full of the self-confidence unique to the chosen few who seem to figure out early that life is a game and the deck is stacked. Next to Darcy, Rachel is mousy and doormat-ish, but like anyone who has ever had a self-absorbed friend, she accepts Darcy at face value. Then, on Rachel’s 30th birthday, she ends up alone with Darcy’s fiance, Dex, and they sleep together. At first, Rachel is horrified by her mistake, but as she timidly navigates the reconciliation with Dex, she finds that he wants more and she’s surprised to discover she does, too.
Eventually Dex and Rachel begin a full-fledged affair, fall in love and struggle with their twin betrayals of Darcy. The majority of the book is spent on this back-and-forth internal monologue where Rachel presents a series of anecdotes that gradually paint Darcy as a steamroller, an egotist, deceitful and more than a little petty. She struggles with her feelings for Dex, with her feelings for Darcy and faces some hard truths about herself in the way she lets herself get pushed around at work (in a job she hates, no less), the way she passively experiences life and the way she frames everything about herself against the backdrop that is Darcy.
The core of the book hinges on the following premise: make The Other Woman seem sympathetic and justified. To a certain degree this works, but I think perhaps not in the way Giffin intends. For one thing, the Darcy character, up until the end when Giffin pushes her so over the top to drive home the point, never really seems like she’s all that bad. Sure she’s self-obsessed and domineering, but those traits are also framed as if they’ve been present in her since elementary school so the negative impact they have on Rachel ends up feeling more like Rachel’s fault for not being honest about how that makes her feel more than justifications for betrayal. I suspect Rachel’s is supposed to be in self-discovery mode throughout the novel, but it really comes across more as if she’s discovering the truth about a friend she’s known for over twenty years. Perhaps this is intended to be revelatory but the effect to me was just to make Rachel look like an unobservant patsy.
Mostly it all feels very contrived, as if Giffin were trying her hardest to create this monstrous character in Darcy but constantly had to pull back to make it believable that this venomous wretch would actually have plural friends, or even singular friends. Meanwhile Rachel waffles and grovels and commiserates and acts flighty, never really seeming all that likable. It’s a strange sense because I don’t have a problem with protagonists who are flawed, complicated people and I don’t have a problem with antagonists who are less than pure evil, but where I struggled with the characterizations was in the way that I got a clear sense of what the author wanted me to think, but I simply couldn’t reconcile it with what I actually took from the way the narration presented them.
Granted, at the end Giffin stops splitting the middle and drops all the main players into neat little buckets which creates a pat ending to a novel that was, up until that point, happily complex. I think what I resent most about Something Borrowed is that I would have liked to read the book that was coming through the pages, but someone needed to tell Giffin that it’s okay to keep the point-of-view characters a little out of arm’s reach and to let the bad guys in books be mostly good. I would have enjoyed a story that didn’t always feel like it had to apologize for the bad behavior of the main character and had to add a twirl-ready mustache to the conflict sources. A more nuanced, more neutral approach to all the characters and their relationships would have made for a less clear cut but far more fascinating novel.
Still, I enjoyed Something Borrowed a lot more than I maybe expected to. This is a first novel so I was able to forgive a few of the rough edges like sketchy characterizations of some peripheral players and the persistent brand name dropping which I think is supposed to add an air of authenticity but comes across like product placement somehow. I do think that my wife’s suggestion that upon finishing this book I would be compelled to run out and read the follow-up, which I guess is told from Darcy’s point of view, called Something Blue, is not accurate. More than anything I think a book containing a bunch of snooty rich New Yorkers who (without irony) say they’re going to “summer” instead of “vacation” and who think the core of a person’s being can be defined by how they reacted to news of Princess Diana’s death is the kind of book I can tolerate once in a while, but not in a back-to-back kind of way. But, I won’t say that I’ll intentionally exclude Something Blue from my to-read list.
The Mysterious Benedict Society
author: Trenton Lee Stewart
name: Paul
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 2012/05/15
date added: 2012/05/15
shelves: childrens, novel
review:
To say that Trenton Lee Stewart‘s The Mysterious Benedict Society is a children’s book is kind of like leveling the same “accusation” at the Harry Potter books. This is a big, grand adventure book featuring remarkable children as protagonists and as such it will appeal to middle-school readers, but I think there is plenty here to draw in adult readers as well.
The story concerns Reynie Muldoon, an exceptionally bright young orphan who really wants nothing more than to fit in. He answers a peculiar ad in the newspaper and finds himself taking a series of curious tests and meeting a small band of other, similarly exceptional kids: Sticky Washington, a nervous, timid boy with an incredible head for knowledge; Kate Weatherall, perhaps the most resourceful bucket-toting girl he’s ever met; and Constance Contraire, a world-class stubborn grouch who completes several of the tests simply by refusing to cooperate.
Thus assembled, the team then meets a strange man named Mr. Benedict, who tells them an alarming tale about the efforts afoot at a secret Institution nearby to control and influence the world via mind-control techniques broadcast through television and radio signals. The kids’ mission then is to infiltrate the Institution, learn what they can, try to stop the plot and keep in contact with Benedict via Morse code signals.
It’s the kind of set up that I think appeals more to the younger audience than the adults, to whom it may sound a little corny and convoluted, but the strength of Stewart’s writing is in his ability to help older readers like myself recapture some of the youthful wonder of storytelling, back when every plot contrivance was fresh and new. I found myself not dismissing the notion of a hastily-assembled team of children secret agents as implausible, but embracing them the way I might have when I was ten or eleven years old. This is the same effect that J.K. Rowling achieved in the early Potter books, to force suspension of disbelief through the power of imagination.
Despite drawing two parallels to Rowling now in four paragraphs, I do want to point out that The Mysterious Benedict Society may feel at times like a gadgety/spy analog to the high fantasy of Harry Potter, this book isn’t quite as good as the early books in that other series. Part of it is that Stewart needs his action to take place predominantly at The Learning Institute for the Very Enlightened, but, frankly, the Institute (and even the mission) isn’t as interesting as the recruitment and the hideout of Mr. Benedict. One thing that Harry Potter’s stories did was make the principal setting—Hogwarts—this amazing place that you really wanted to visit. Having Benedict Society’s action take place in a mostly unpleasant place that the characters don’t want to be means the middle (once they begin their mission) drags in comparison to the beginning. Eventually the pace picks up around the two-thirds mark and the book becomes much better toward the end, but there is a reason everyone and their pet hamster has read Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone but this book is far less well known.
Still, I really enjoyed the book. It’s big and meaty (and probably could have been even bigger, if Stewart had wanted it to be so), it has extraordinarily likable characters, crisp pacing, some fun nods to puzzle solving and love of obscure trivia. In fact, this is a book that very much celebrates the cerebral; unlike a lot of hero tales aimed at kids, the protagonists in Benedict Society survive and thrive by their wits far more than their hits, and I like the focus there.
I also can’t get through this review without mentioning the absolutely wonderful cover and chapter art by Carson Ellis. Her work and style will be familiar to those who have enjoyed artwork done for the band The Decemberists, but the distinctive, whimsically old-fashioned feel to the art gives the book just the right touch of tone and really helped propel an already swift read even faster toward the back cover.