So, what's the big deal?

NOW READING: The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

This is kind of like one of those moments when you have been hearing so much about something for so long that it could not possibly be as fantastic/scary/earth-shattering as it has been built up to be by the sheer amount of upbuilding. You know, like Amelie...The Blair Witch Project...The Catcher in the Rye...(ahem)Harry Potter... I'll even give it up to my peeps (of which I have several) who have proudly made it through three decades or more without seeing It's A Wonderful Life. That film IS wonderful, but you're right: it will never live up to all you have heard about it. At this point, it simply can't.

However, I would like to point out that this is only kind of like one of those moments. Because the work of art of which I now partake, the work of art about which I have heard so much for twenty years, the truly big famous deal, is not just big and famous and built up subjectively, and it is not a mere subject of enthusiastic acclaim, but it also was, like, objectively a big deal. It sent Salman Rushdie into freakin' hiding! A "fatwa" was issued against him, and all those involved in the publishing of the book. In fact, I recently learned, several of the translators and publishers in countries around the world were attacked and while some survived assassination attempts, the translator in Japan WAS stabbed to death.

Perhaps more shocking: the fatwa is still in place. If it weren't so murderous and wrong, it would just be pathetic. You want to kill someone for writing a book? Give me a break!!! Only it's not pathetic, because it's a threat to people's lives.

Now, I will (obviously) go on the record as saying that any such death threat to anyone for simply writing anything is so clearly unacceptable it's not even up for debate.

But my goodness, when I finally get around to reading the book I would at least expect there to be something to it. Something shocking, let's say. Something blasphemous and juicy. Something that could at least purport to try to pretend to be "worth it."

Yeah, not so much. It's kind of a silly, whimsical story. I'm 150 pages into it. As a book it's somewhere between average and good, but I am definitely carried along in reading by my fascination that this? THIS?! is what has motivated some twisted people on this planet to be violent. I just can't believe they actually feel justified in doing so.

I was already a huge supporter of Salman Rushdie, just for the idiocy of the whole thing against him. But now I'm reading this and all I can say is -- really, though?

Let's eat!

NOW FINISHED: Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
NOW READING: The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

Ishmael, for all its silly contrived gorilla-ness, made me seriously consider a thing or two. Among the thing(s) was the very notion of agriculture. As he interrogates the narrator, Ishmael opens our eyes to the fact that everything we've grown up learning about the agricultural revolution is the mythology of our culture. We learn about the cradles of 'civilization' as the beginning of it all. But of all of what? There were peoples before that, and some peoples continued living the old ways without dominating the land for years after that. There are even some such peoples around today, though fewer and farther between, and we civilized folk tend to call them "primitive."

Now, one of the things that Ishmael helps the narrator realize is that we defy the laws of nature with our agriculture. As opposed to hunting and gathering, if you will, we have ceased accepting that this or that food will be available in limited amounts, and we store it up and more importantly we insist that we have X amount available for ourselves at all times. Do you ever see the lion kill more than one gazelle, putting some aside for tomorrow?

Whether you are into the touchy-feely earthy-crunchy stuff or not, it is interesting to ponder agriculture. A few days after I finished Ishmael, Brian and I were eating dinner at our neighborhood Peruvian restaurant and pondering many things and he was talking about Anthony Bourdain, whom we love to watch (who doesn't love Anthony Bourdain?) Brian was saying how much he loves the way Bourdain gets at the heart of a culture by eating the food there, and it suddenly dawned on me in that way things will dawn on you when you are munching and pondering things, that that's the whole point. The whole point of Ishmael and of us. Agri-culture. Field cultivation. Our whole concept of "culture" IS a concept of dominance, but also creation. It's as if producing food gave us cultures, and that is in fact why each culture has representative food. Meanwhile, the "primitive" peoples are handing down over the millennia the ways of their ancestors and all kinds of wisdom and guidance about the right way to live. Did we lose that wisdom by turning the focus to food? Is it possible to pass down both?

No, I ain't gonna work on the farm no more...

NOW READING: Ishmael by Daniel Quinn

I should be saying a lot more about Ishmael. It's really grown on me. But not in a normal novel way. I give Quinn an A+ for his Philosophy 101 essay but I still don't really understand how (let alone why) he decided to make a "novel" out of it. It is barely, barely, barely a story. And there are barely characters. Just dude and Ishmael, with the occasional forced interaction with a janitor or carnival roustabout or something.

But I get excited about my periodic checking in! I look forward to my little nightly gorilla lesson. I am almost finished with the book, actually, and I'm eager to see what dramatic little exhortation will be used to send the reader back out to the world.

Most recently, Ishmael has taught the narrator and me about how the story of our civilization, our post-agricultural revolution civilization(s), were destined to fail. Ishmael has also taught us that we are totally misguided in how we look to the story of Adam and Eve as the meant-to-be dawn of our culture, when it is really more of a cautionary tale about how Adam/Cain/dominion slays the pastoral lifestyle... In fact, I have a whole deep thought to share about the meaning of food in culture, and of agriculture. But I'm tired tonight so I might save that for tomorrow. Tonight, it's straight from the gorilla's mouth.

"Whenever a Taker couple talk about how wonderful it would be to have a big family, they're reenacting the scene beside the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. They're saying to themselves, 'Of course it's our right to apportion life on this planet as we please. Why stop at four kids or six? We can have fifteen if we like. All we have to do is plow under another few hundred acres of rain forest -- and who cares if a dozen other species disappear as a result?"
--page 181

Funny, just today I was reading octuplets' mother news and caught a clip of Jon & Kate Plus 8...

There is only one Ishmael

Well, actually, I guess there are two. But I mean only one post-biblical literary Ishmael. In Moby Dick. I guess it's sort of funny how I just discounted the original Ish, eh?

Anyway, I am currently reading my 'Q' author. This brings me to the upstart, wanna-be Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. Ishmael in this book is a gorilla. A gorilla teacher. How can a gorilla teach his pupil? Well, in this case he "talks" via a sort of telepathic communication to his earnest, ex-hippie kind of narrator.

If this is all starting to sound very new age and perhaps silly, well, it is. I've heard about this book for a while, mostly that a)some book lovers I know hated it and b)these days, some high schools are making it required reading. But only adventurous high schools. Of course both of those things did nothing to promise me it would not be very new age and perhaps silly.

I'm having novel issues with it again, as I have with some other letters (O, J...) This one strikes me as particularly not a novel, not even a thinly veiled memoir or anything. It's more like a metaphysical self-help philosophy book that Quinn makes into a novel by giving it two "characters" who have the conversation, instead of Quinn just writing his philosophy for the world to see. I'm 157 or something pages in, and the man and his instructing gorilla never go anywhere or do anything. The man leaves at night and comes back the next day for more instruction. The whole book is dialogue, nearly.

So if one can handle all that and get over the fact that 'Q' is not going to be a novel, what then does one think about Ishmael?

Well, it's a little weird. (Obviously.) But I kind of like some of its ideas: humans think they're not subject to the laws of nature, etc. Most recently, the idea that the gods had a perfectly good reason for telling man he'd "surely die" the day he tasted the fruit of the tree of knowledge was pretty fun. I liked the explanation behind that. But I am still convinced as I read it that I'm secretly sitting in Philosophy 101 and not actually reading a novel.

I read a slew of reviews on Good Reads that totally ripped Ishmael up one side and down the other. I half agreed with them. The book is really kind of silly, and yet not. I am currently quite amused with myself when I think, "hmm, I'll just go off and check in with my gorilla for a little while."

Genre fiction, no less!

Hey, I read an actual book! Two, in fact! (Actual book = not a law school text.) I read two of Alafair Burke's mysteries, Judgment Calls and Dead Connection. Why, you ask? Why mystery/thriller novels in lieu of, say, the next project book? Because Ms Alafair Burke is also my Criminal Procedure professor this semester, or, I should say, was because the semester is finally OVER! I took her final the day before yesterday in fact. I justified reading her novels this month because they totally were review. She peppers them with criminal procedure issues! Take that, stuffy overworked classmates who never crack a literary spine!

Tomorrow morn I'm off to Curacao, and I'm bringing with me 'Q' - Ishmael by Daniel Quinn.

Yay!

the end of The Road

now finished: The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Well, would you look at that? I almost went the entire month of November without a post to this here literary supplement! But never fear: in the nick of time, and thanks to the holiday weekend during which I did not feel guilty about picking up the novel from the bedside table instead of lugging a few law textbooks into my lap, I have just finished reading The Road.

Short answer? I love it.

Of course I have more to say than just that. But it's one of those about which it is hard to speak eloquently. The book itself is simply and elegantly written, despite being about harsh things. Or maybe because it's about harsh things. You'll surely hear a lot of people going on and on about how it's depressing, dismal, bleak, and so forth because it is about a man and a boy journeying together along the road through a post-apocalyptic, basically destroyed country. There's a lot of death. And desperation. And ashes.

But the book is so life-affirming, as these so-called "depressing" works often are. I'm not going to give away the ending, because I highly recommend it and want you to read it. I am just saying this: how can a book that contemplates death, destruction, and the real possibility of entirely destroying civilization not make a reader contemplate life and come away with a renewed sense of all that is good about your life, relationships, and communities?

I am all kinds of excited for the movie, which, unfortunately, has been delayed until next year. (It was supposed to be out this month, but needs more time in post-production.) It's such a powerful story. It's kind of weird that just last year we had Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men, which was the first book of his I'd read, and which I basically read because the movie was coming out. Actually, I read half of it because the movie was coming out, and then I went back and read the second half of it to try to figure out how it ended, since the movie certainly doesn't tell you. I must say I am glad I delved deeper into McCarthy's oeuvre because I was much more impressed by The Road, but I was expecting to be thoroughly impressed because as you may know The Road won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007. See, everyone loves the road - me, Oprah, the Pulitzer committee. What more do you need?

The book starts a little slowly as it draws you into this world, but you become a part of it and it's really hard to put down. I'm sure if I hadn't been obliterated by law school fatigue on any given night I would have read it in one or two sittings; it moves quickly. But there are moments when the boy or the man expresses some thought summing up all the despair and hope into one tight, worried, heartbreaking sentence and at those moments you pause, you must pause, before going on to the next page.

While it is about what would happen to the survivors as they approach the end of the world, it's much more about the relationship between the man and the boy, and what that says about all of us and how we treat each other even before we get to the end of the world.

Hitting The Road

now reading: The Road by Cormac McCarthy

As promised, after my man-it's-been-too-long feelings on Thursday, I picked up a novel Friday and read thirty pages or so while subwaying to and from my internship.

God, I love reading novels.

Of course, this is my second year in a row to read one of his books in preparation for a late-in-the-year release of a film I expect to be quite good. Last time around, No Country for Old Men didn't really do it for me. But The Road won the Pulitzer; you know how I feel about that. ( = I love reading Pulitzer Prize-winning books, for the new folks)

Its paragraphs are even shorter than the paragraphs in NCfOM. But so far I can see where a person could get intrigued early on by the compelling premise of this man and boy -- who appear to be father and son, though it's not explicitly stated yet -- wandering through a wasteland, even if one had not read a lot about it and heard the buzz and watched it sell like mad after being distinguished by the Pulitzer committee AND Oprah. I even watched that Oprah interview with McCarthy last summer because a)I like authors b)I think it's awesome that Oprah gets someone who never does interviews to do an interview. Maybe she should be vice-president. Or maybe that says something about ol' Cormac appreciating what she does for reading -- or book sales.

Time to get back in the game

A month without a post? A month without picking up a novel? Can we say "Third Year of Law School" ... sigh!

I am reading, reading, reading, but none of it is fiction. Legal fictions, maybe, which are a whole other ball of wax. (Hmm, interesting, do lay people know what a "legal fiction" is? I can't say I ever gave it much thought before I came to law school.)

Two weeks ago, upon the sudden, unexpected (by me anyway) death of David Foster Wallace I started thinking a lot about when I will get to read another book of his, now that a few months have gone by since finishing Infinite Jest. I even touched The Broom of the System in the undergrad library and read a few pages before deciding not to check it out because it's 485 pages more than I can afford to deviate from my seven-class, 17-credit law regimen.

But 'Q' awaits -- Ishmael. Furthermore, I really want (need?) to read The Road before the movie. Time is running out, apocalyptically or no.

I Survived

now finished: Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk
now reading: um...nothing. lots. law textbooks.

It was okay. It's good that I have now read Palahniuk, master weirdo. This wasn't the weirdest book I have ever read. I mean, it's no Infinite Jest. It's not even Naked Lunch. It had a coherent story, at least. But the ending was -- well, it was silly.

So, the book was all right, I suppose. I guess I just expected Palahniuk to be more literary. I am not even sure exactly what I mean by that. I also found his device of numbering backwards to be silly. The book starts with chapter 47 and ends with chapter 1, and likewise it starts on page 289. Right: an-NOY-ing. It seemed to have no point. I mean, it's not as if he tells the story backwards. He goes back to the beginning and then tells it in order. Whatever, Chuck.

Meanwhile, all those adjectives you've heard about Palahniuk, like volatile or bizarre or creepy or whatever? Yeah, not really. Just a little kooky. But the Super Bowl bit was fun.

Chuck

now reading: Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk

Don't you maybe think "Chuck" is one of those names where you sort of become a certain type of personality just by having the name? Kind of like "Tiffany" or "Butch." Well, I guess with "Butch" you have to have a certain type of personality to get the name, but with Chuck it's as if only certain Charleses can be Chucks. This despite Peppermint Patty's harassment.

I will leave aside for now the utter frustration I feel with nicknames that have lots of letters that aren't in the original name. Chuck. Jack. Peggy. Ugh. Even Jim and Bill annoy me for that reason. As opposed to, say, Kim, Jenny, Rob, and so forth. Or like if I were Elizabeth but called Beth even though at least it's contained in the full word that would freak me out, because then you have different initials sometimes. How can you live life having two different sets of initials? That's just wrong.

OK, I guess I didn't really leave that subject aside. I ranted. Coincidentally, Rant is another of Chuck's books. So, back to the subject at hand, which is Chuck.

Hmmm, I say, in response to this man. I mean, Survivor is enjoyable enough, but it is not leading me to think any great literary thoughts. Chuck Palahniuk, so far, strikes me as the guy who you're always glad comes to writing group and to whom you enjoy listening but about whose work you never have really much to say after except maybe "That was good."

And since his reputation of weirdness precedes him, I don't have much to say about the weirdness either, really.

Anyway - I'm almost done! So there's that. A few people at law school rave about Mr. Palahniuk. But they're the intellectually curious misfits, just like the people at the bookstore that raved about Palahniuk. I wonder what authors the boring law review people like?

Surviving law school

now reading: Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk
now also reading: Comparative Legal Traditions: Text and Materials by Glendon et. al.

That's right, the school year has begun. I did not quite finish Palahniuk before the dawn of Fall Semester 2008, but maybe that's because "Fall" began in the middle of freakin' summer. Worse yet, in the middle of the summer Olympics! But I have managed to still watch lots of The Games, and get organized, and even though now it's time for the reading of text after text, case after case, scholarly journal after scholarly journal, I think I will be able to finish P, Q, and R by the end of September. I already know what 'Q' and 'R' will be, too.

As for Survivor, I can maybe make the case for it being relevant to one of my classes. In Legal Decision Making for Children and Incompetent Adults (longest class title ever) we are starting off discussing autonomy in the courts and other legal and medical decisions for children and adolescents, as well as for adults' right to end their lives at the time and in the manner of their choosing. So Survivor, being partly about the Creedish religious cult who all want to kill themselves and almost all succeed, with our narrator being the last surviving member now regaling us with his tale, is maybe somewhat related. Or at least related enough for me to not feel guilty reading it while school is in session!

I say it's "partly" about that because it's equally about obsession with celebrity and how hilarious said obsession is. Palahniuk, as I knew he would, amuses me and is crazy, and this isn't even one of his darkest works. I'm two-thirds of the way through and enjoying it. I'll say more about it when I'm not watching the closing ceremonies...if law school doesn't swallow me whole...did I mention it's my final year?!

It is O-ver

now finished: The Puttermesser Papers by Cynthia Ozick
now reading: Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk

I can't remember the last time I was so glad to finish a book! The Puttermesser Papers was a giant letdown. It was also the closest I have come in this literary blog project to stopping a book in the middle and choosing a different author for that letter. I even stood there in the bookstore fondling Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara. But I ended up sticking with it, partly because I was trying to get through a few more letters before school starts up again (waaaay too soon!) All I can do now is apologize to Kenzaburo Oe. (I'm sure he cares a lot.)

I can honestly say that if I were forced to reread (who would do that?) either this travesty or Burroughs' Naked Lunch I would opt for Naked Lunch. At least it's silly and ridiculous and thinks it's deep and would give me something to puzzle over as I throw it across the room. Puttermesser is just stupid. I can't even understand who likes those stories as individual stories nor who likes them gathered together masquerading as a novel.

The last bit was the worst of the entire travesty. Was that supposed to be shocking and daring, that she got raped and murdered? Ewww. It was as lame as the rest of the book.

So, I don't really like this book, see...

now reading: The Puttermesser Papers by Cynthia Ozick

First of all, I'm skeptical of the use of the word "novel" to describe it, and that annoys me, because if I had wanted to read a collection of linked short stories, I would have. This even has that whole "A Novel" thing going on on the cover (which I find annoying, generally, but vindicating here) and I selected this book in lieu of some of her other books on the Borders Penn Plaza shelves because I had heard of her and wanted a NOVEL for this literary blog project. But as I mentioned last time, it appears these vignettes of Puttermesser's life were previously published separately. In three separate magazines. Some at least as early as 1982, and this book copyright 1997. I protest!

But anyway, I'm in now. Only, some of the vignettes (not, you see, chapters) are terrible. Others are just boring. The weird thing is, she can write. It's not a terrible writing style or anything (I'm looking at you, Burroughs) so I just kind of move along reading it, but it's kind of like reading a textbook: often, I come to the end of a page and haven't a clue what I just read. So, ugh, because that's thirty seconds more I have to spend re-reading and I may have wasted seven or eight minutes of my life over the course of the book.

So, what's good about it? (Thanks, Thumper.) Well, Puttermesser is a lawyer who loves literature, so she's a likable character for me. Sometimes. And Ozick is snarky about lawyers and city politics from time to time, so that's fun. I've also learned a whole lot about George Eliot, in a bizarre chapter short story in which Puttermesser marries a "younger man" age 40 who duplicates master painters' works of art while refusing to call himself a copyist (he "reenacts") and they sort of reenact George Eliot's life, because she also married a younger man after her longtime companion died. But it's weird. Not as weird as the golem bit, but weird.

In short, I just can't wait to be done and move on to another novel. Oh well, you win some, you lose some.

Oh, Thumper, I also liked the part where Puttermesser's ex-lover told her she has no feelings: "he meant that she had the habit of flushing with ideas as if they were passions" (p.44). I could see myself being accused of that. I also liked when she went to a neighbor's party three floors above her and wryly observed the cliched "New York" patter of the guy programmed to flirt sarcastically versus the other version of the patter, all about volunteer programs and poetry. "The wisecrack version and the earnest version, and all of it ego and self-regard." (p.117) Guilty as charged, I suppose.

Well that was 70 pages ago and I'm still waiting for the next interesting thing to note. SO want to be done with this book!

'O' dear

now finished: Thomas Jefferson by R.B. Bernstein
now reading: The Puttermesser Papers by Cynthia Ozick

My 'O' author is weird. Apparently, Puttermesser is a character about whom Ozick wrote several sketches and stories, some of which were previously published in The New Yorker or The Atlantic Monthly before she gathered them into this novel. Well, ugh, but I got past that as I was enjoying the first bit about this lawyer in her thirties who is smart and likes to be intellectual even if her strange-thinking, book-and-philosophy-loving side rubs some of the lawyer and city politics schmoozing people the wrong way.

But then around 40 pages in suddenly it got into some weird stuff. And by weird, I mean Jewish magical realism. When Joe and Jodi and I used to joke about our literary "walls" (I famously have one with sigh-fi) beyond which it is hard for us to get -- to keep reading -- to not get annoyed at the thought of a certain thing interrupting our novels. Joe kind of has a wall with South American things and I think the magical realism is part of it. A lot of people have that wall; I think that's a pretty reasonable wall. I don't totally have it because I do like me some Garcia Marquez and Allende, but, for example, Like Water for Chocolate? NO thanks.

However, I also have a kind of Jewishness literary wall. I'm almost terrified to write this because it will sound so -- well, anti-Semitic I guess. But it's really not. Anyone who understands the wall knows it's not anti- at all. Because it has nothing to do with actual Judaism or Jews. It's like a literary thing. A thing about fictional happenings. Joe, where are you?! Help me out here! It would never happen reading history. It's a literary wall. An example of my "Jewishness wall" would be when I'm reading Erica Jong's Fear of Flying and going along nicely relating to her and all of a sudden she brings up out of nowhere some weird reference and I have to puzzle through a paragraph or two and then I finally realize I'm not totally getting it because she's alluding to something insidery and then I get annoyed. I am totally not explaining this well, so if anyone wants to accuse me of racism just sit down and talk to me about books first so I can suss out your literary wall and then we will understand each other.

My point (and oh, do I have one) is that the Jewish magical realism was a bit too much for me. A wall stacked upon a wall-let, if you will. All of a sudden Puttermesser has created a golem. And I do mean all of a sudden; the story was going along quite nicely realistically, with civil servant bureaucracy and whatnot. And then it got all Jewish mystical rabbi what-are-you-talking-about creating a golem who is breathed to life with the intoning of aleph, bet, some other Hebrew letters... I don't know, it was weird. Is weird.

But, it's my 'O,' so I keep reading.

Down in the valley, the valley so low

now finished: McTeague by Frank Norris
now reading: Thomas Jefferson by R.B. Bernstein

Well, I really liked the ending of McTeague. Which means this blog post will probably be pretty spoileriffic. You have been warned.

First of all, we know I'm a fan of the desert, the stark heat, the intensity of the land, the vast spaces, and so on. So for the book to culminate in a Death Valley death scene totally works for me. But there you are with McTeague and Marcus, the former friends, killing themselves in the process of trying to beat each other, and with Marcus' last breath he clicks the handcuffs onto McTeague's wrist so that McTeague is now chained to his fate and doomed to die there as well. All the while the canary in its cage twitters feebly. What a scene! What a great ending in the annals of literature! We are chained to our fate and the doom we create. Our violence and greed for the money end up making us prisoners. Nature will kick our ass when we get so caught up in material society. But only after our fear and guilt and past misdeeds that haunt us drive us away from the real treasures -- both gold and wife -- that we've found. And so on.

A lot of book endings suck. I don't mean to criticize; as a writer I, too, find endings difficult. But it's so wonderful when you get to a glorious ending, a fully realized vision, such as that of McTeague. And just like the scenes in San Francisco, the ending chapters' trek down through California, prospecting for gold in them thar hills, and finally death in the alkali sands are all so vividly written.

Frank Norris is so interesting to me now. He had his whole literary career in a life of thirty-two years. !!! He traveled, dabbled in art, sucked at math (perhaps to spite his businessman father), played hard, made himself a legacy in his Berkeley fraternity...he's really interesting. I've been reading the intro to the book (which I can never read until after in novels, for fear of plot spoilers) and seeing all the real life influences that led him to create McTeague. So there is that "thinly veiled memoir" element, but in more of a "write what you know" way, and his writing is honest and literary. He's clever. I may seek out The Octopus, too, which is the book I'd always heard of by him.

Speaking of my desert love, I was intrigued as he tries to make his escape to Mexico when some people he meets think he's trying to escape a crime he committed and thus "trying to get down to Arizona." It's so interesting to think of what people thought of Arizona in 1899, when it was still a territory and not very populated. I like finding references to it and finding its place in people's minds back in the day. (The movie In Old Arizona was great for that, too.)

And who wouldn't love this quote, from page 280 of my edition? (ISBN: 014-0187694)

"'No, no,' Trina had exclaimed, when the dentist had repeated this advice to her. 'No, no, don't go near the law courts. I know them. The lawyers take all your money, and you lose your case. We're bad off as it is, without lawing about it.'"

Awesome!

Oh, Trina. Seriously -- the book is pretty horrifying. I read that Norris had read about a real life instance of an estranged, drunk husband murdering his wife. It's so frightening to imagine. But the horrifying reality happens in this world -- often. I mean, we never think about it, keeping it out of sight and out of mind, because it's impossible to really deal with thinking about it. Imagining being killed is hard enough. Imagine being killed by someone you know. Then by someone who supposedly loved you. I mean, what must it be like in those final moments? How must it be to be killed and to see and feel this person killing you? My brain hurts. My whole body hurts and shudders, actually, to think about it. It's SO creepy to try to really conceive of being killed and the life slipping out of you as you are violently pummeled. And it's SO creepy to think about how horribly some humans behave to their intimate partners.

I'm going to stop writing about it now for the same reasons we all want to stop thinking about it.

For those who are curious, no, obviously, the Thomas Jefferson is not part of my A to Z literary blog project, but part of a non-fiction project I started a couple years ago, abandoned, and to which I have now returned, in which I read a biography of each U.S. president in order to see where we went wrong. I read Joseph Ellis' His Excellency and David McCullough's John Adams. Now on to number three. I'll probably try to do a presidential bio a month among my other readings, until law school gets too intense again. I hemmed and hawed forever about which Jefferson because there's the Pulitzer-winning Dumas Malone multi-volume work about him that I will probably read someday, but maybe not as part of this all-the-presidents project which is meant to go quickly.

Dying in a pool of blood and stuff

now reading: McTeague by Frank Norris

So here's the thing. All of a sudden McTeague gets totally violent and creeptacular! It starts when Trina, his wife, becomes a liar and he becomes a violent abuser. Now, neither of those behaviors is acceptable and both are terrible in their own ways. But herein, his violence is almost like some kind of vindictive thing against her keeping the money, whereas I just want to scream at him, "It's not that she kept the money! She lied to you about it!" Then her: ugh. She's paranoid. But she's also desperate, and that is sad. And his violence is never acceptable.

But with all that, who knew how ugly and violent it could be in the end!

I was supposed to say something more profound about this but I don't remember what it was. Maybe tomorrow.

But, p.s., goooooo concertina!

If you're going to the dentist in San Francisco

now reading: McTeague by Frank Norris

Before Brian, my main concept of Frank N. was The Octopus, this perhaps because I started working in a bookstore when I lived in California and it just kind of happened that way. But then I started this little literary blog project and Brian suggested Norris for 'N' because he (Brian) loves McTeague.

So now I'm more than halfway through the tale of this big ol' bumbling dentist and his friends and neighbors and antics on San Francisco's Polk Street (not to mention at the theatre and on their picnics in Schuetzen Park). The story is written in a simple, charming fashion that I find delightful. I read that it is a Zola-esque "literary naturalism." But you know what else it reminds me of? Candide. (my favorite!) It's like the anti-Proust. But not with the dry choppiness of, say, a Hemingway. It's that easy, straightforward storytelling that can come across as "old-fashioned" but not in the stiff old flowery old-fashioned way.

He also does this thing of showing you how lover/fiancee/wife Trina's family speaks in their German accents which is funny and which for some reason I'm not finding nearly as annoying as other times when authors write a character's speech in the vernacular. D.H. Lawrence did a bit of that with Lady Chatterley's gamekeeper/lover to show how he switched back and forth between proper talk and that of his native village, not to mention everyone from Mark Twain to Toni Morrison having used it for African-American English, particularly in the South. I generally find it tiresome to read.

Am I the only one who gets annoyed by that stylistic device? It's OK in McTeague so far. Maybe because even out of the dialogue he'll write the son named August as "Owgooste" because that's how they say it and how McTeague hears it, so the book is reflective of McTeague's experience.

At any rate, the best thing about this book is the little flat with its various rooms and how all the neighbors who have apartments there come to life and have their quirks and interact.

A through M

Halfway through: that's me! I have closed the book on 'M' and begun 'N' (and even for good measure bought 'O,' but let's not get ahead of ourselves). At this time it is only fitting that I pause, reflect, look back, and rank those first thirteen books in order from favorite to hated. I have supplemented my rankings with the rating I give to each book, so where two or three books share a number-of-stars rating, the order of the list reflects which of those I have judged to be better.

This was hard to do!

(For those who don't remember the scale...
***** - Mexican food
****1/2 - Tibetan food
**** - Indian food
*** - Italian food
** - Thai food
* - Korean food)

With no further ado, then:

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote ****1/2
A Passage to India by E.M. Forster **** 1/2
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco ****
Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence ****
The Information by Martin Amis ****
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick ***
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett ***
None to Accompany Me by Nadine Gordimer ***
Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler ***
The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer **
Fear of Flying by Erica Jong **
Cuba and the Night by Pico Iyer *
Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs *

OK, second half of the alphabet! Bring it on!

War is over (whether or not you want it)

now finished: The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer

Well, I'm done! I know, that was fast, right? It was a long 'un (721 pages) but it moved quickly and it wasn't tiny, crammed type or anything. It just kind of moved along, like a mass market book would. (Notice how the blogger has learned to be careful about slighting genre fiction...)

So in the end it wasn't just about war. It was also about the soldiers fighting the war. And that really was all it was about, but he did pull it off, I think. You get to know the men in the platoon, and as you go along they each get a flashback dropped somewhere in the hundreds of pages, in which you learn about their pre-war lives, which illuminates their war selves, and it's pretty interesting. I will say that I did totally care about what was going to happen at the end, so that's a good book, I guess.

As I read it I could see how ol' Norman "burst onto the scene" with this, in 1948, half a century before Saving Private Ryan and still a few decades from Apocalypse Now. But i was starting to seriously question how Mailer came to be known as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, if not the greatest. Maybe when I read The Executioner's Song I'll feel differently. (And I will read that; it won a Pulitzer, after all.)

In the end he concocts this powerfully symbolic trek -- two actually, both the mountain climb and the carrying of jackass Wilson on a stretcher -- and he really brings it all together nicely.

But I just didn't have too much to say about it. It was, well, you know: about war.

Maybe tomorrow I'll share some thoughts on the pages I folded down that contained political ideas.

Meanwhile, 'N' has long been settled when Brian (who is sometimes a participant in this project) put in an early plug for Frank Norris' McTeague. Sorry, V.S. and Anais. But the question is, should 'O' be Kenzaburo Oe or John O'Hara? And if Oe, which Oe?

Next up, a ranking of the books read so far...

War vs. Buddha

now taking a break from: The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
now reading: Stealing Buddha's Dinner by Bich Minh Nguyen

Don't worry, I'm totally going to finish the 700-pager about war. I think. I'm just pausing because we were sitting around Brian's parents' living room and they had Stealing Buddha's Dinner on the shelf there and it had already intrigued me when I touched it at Borders a while back and then I picked it up and it's about a girl who immigrated from Vietnam as a baby and she grew up in Grand Rapids and she's my age so reading her memoir is like reading my own childhood as far as what happened in 1984 and how I felt about it and it's the perfect book to read on one's last day in Grand Rapids since it all takes place here and so that's why.

Of note: Mr. Mailer himself notes in the introduction to the 50th anniversary edition that The Naked and the Dead now strikes him as amateurish when he looks back. (Or, I should say, when he wrote that intro -- who knows how things strike him now, wherever he is, hanging out with George Carlin or whatever.)

As for my little Buddha book, it's not about Buddha at all except for the awesome bits where this 7-year-old Vietnamese-American girl blithely and matter-of-factly shuts down her uber-Christian friends playing in the backyards of Grand Rapids as they ramble on about being saved and she's like, "Whatever, Christianity!"

You know I'm not the biggest memoir fan, but I'm glad I dipped into this one. It's something about the my-age thing, too, of course.

I'm sure I'll return to The Naked and the Dead soon enough. Did I mention it's about war?