Nazis, Bees, and Murder, Oh My!

So I finally finished my giant slog through every possible awfulness that World War II could possibly present, all 900+ pages of Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones. God. This is one of those well-reviewed books that I have a hard time believing anyone actually read. I mean, I admire the effort. It seems to be impeccably researched - he has an intimate knowledge of every possible detail of the workings of the SS, the Russian front, the camps. And I feel, having finished it, a small sense of what it must have been like to live through it: the nauseating evil alternating with the boredom of the routine banalities of war administration...the feeling that you think you've seen the lowest humanity can go and then things sink lower. He rubs your face in extremity after extremity...cruelty, pornography, feral children. Suffice it to say, I felt like I needed a shower when I finished. I also felt very, very lucky.

So as a palate cleanser, I turned to some lighter fare: Doug Coupland's Generation A and a mystery by J.A. Jance. The Coupland was different than I expected. The title leads you to expect something very similar to his famous Generation X, but it reminded me a bit more of Nick Hornby's A Long Way Down: multiple narrators building on each other, giving a new perspective on the same events. It was fun and a little depressing at the same time, especially in contrast with a New Yorker article I read this week on psychiatry and drugs, The mystery (which I can't even remember the title of) was an overlap of two of her stock characters, Joanna Brady and J.P. Beaumont. These are totally a guilty pleasure: the writing is pretty clunky, the mysteries aren't ever that mysterious, but they feel like drinking diet coke - they keep your mind occupied while being somehow restful.

School has been presenting me with some lovely writing: Hamlet and In Cold Blood. Capote's sentences are amazing and I'm always a sucker for Hamlet's words...How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem all the uses of this world...

So I've worked my way through everything I had out from the library. Time to start looking!

Off the tracks a little...

So while I should have had plenty of time to read in February (a week of vacation, reading-friendly bad weather), I got derailed by a book. I started reading The Kindly Ones in early February and it has just completely bogged me down. It was well-reviewed and sounded interesting to me (WW II through the eyes of a conflicted Nazi), but it's killing me a little. It goes from being an interesting character study to an in depth military history of the Russian front, with detailed discussions of the internecine warfare of the various camps of the German command, in the blink of an eye - in short, from fascinating to deadly boring in roughly 2.5 seconds. I hate to say boring, because it drives me nuts when my students say it about anything, but that's really all I got. So every night, when I go to read in bed, I get about three pages done (and I'm usually a 30-50 pages a sitting AT least kind of reader) and my eyelids start getting heavier and heavier and heavier....And considering the book is around a thousand pages, it's beginning to take on a Sisyphean feel. I'm not giving up on it though - there's enough interesting there to keep me going and I feel like the author has sort of thrown down the gauntlet...it's a matter of honor now.

So I had to take a break from it for a little bit, largely because I had two books on short term loan from the library and they were starting to rack up fines. I had a reading frenzy at the end of my vacation, knocking off two decent length books in as many days. The first was Zadie Smith's Occasional Essays, which I loved, but made me feel bad. Her writing is terrific - a light touch with a powerful intelligence behind it. And our tastes are similar; she writes with love about both E.M. Forster and David Foster Wallace, two of my favorites who have little in common. The depressing part is that I really, really wish I could write as well as she does. I rarely have this feeling reading novels; I've always known that was never going to be my forte, I'm much more interested in reading stories than creating them myself. My one great literary idea is more about reading than it is about an original story. But many of her essays are really readings more than they are writing...and she's a damn good reader. I envy her that more than the novels.

My second book was The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt. I loved Possession back in the day; it completely fueled my fantasy of what academia would be like (a notion I was quickly disabused of upon entering graduate school), but her other books have disappointed. This one was somewhere in between. I liked her world of late Victorians, I learned a lot about ceramics, puppetry, and women's medical education, but I couldn't quite shake the feeling that she could have used a more energetic editor. A little Dickensian - all the ends tied up - but I have no problem with that.

So now I'm back to The Kindly Ones, not feeling too kindly...I'm sure he wants me to really feel the banality of the horrors of the Nazi organization, but there is a limit to the dedication of the reader. We'll see if I'm up to the challenge or not.

Lark and Termite

So I finished this on Sunday and I've been letting it sit. I certainly can say that I liked it, but definitely with reservations. It's a multiple perspective/setting/time novel, shifting around through the eyes of four connected characters. Three of these views - the aunt, the father, and the daughter - worked for me; the fourth, the non-verbal disabled younger brother, didn't really. I felt like she didn't find a believeable voice for him - it made too much sense, it was too syntactical, something our interior voices almost never are - and I'm not sure his contributions added much to the story. There was also what I can only call a supernatural (or maybe magical realism) moment that I found perplexing - I have no problem with imaginary characters entering an otherwise realistic text, but I find it hard to buy when they actually deliver something concrete. It seemed out of tone. There were also a couple of scenes near the end of the book - a creepy next door neighbor, an action movie moment - that didn't really seem to belong to this book. They didn't add to the family story and seemed like third act jeopardy inserted to add excitement (for the movie, perhaps?).

Next up: The Kindly Ones, a 900+ page opus on WWII and the SS. Not sure why I picked it. I'm about 100 pages in and it seems to alternate interesting first person narration with extremely detailed descriptions of German military hierarchies and troop movements. I'm hoping there's some point to it, but, at this stage, I'm wishing he had a more ruthless editor...

Specials for books

So my husband and I go to this neat movie theater near our house on a pretty regular basis (The Strand, in Clinton, MA), where they have a restaurant and serve beer and wine to go with second run movies. Since we are arm-chair theater owners (it's my husband's career-if-I-won-the-lottery choice), we spend the time waiting for our food discussing how we would run the place. One of our genius ideas(if I do say so myself) is that they should have food specials to go with the movie. Some of these are easy - a crockpot of boeuf bourgiugnon to go with Julie and Julia - some require a little more thought: goat cheese pizza or maybe hummus and pita chips for The Men Who Stare at Goats, airline peanuts for Up in the Air (and, of course, passing out random "Executive Club" cards that would enable you to jump the beer line). Anyway, I was thinking about this last night and I started doing it for books too. Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanesi is clearly bellinis and samosas or daal; The Financial Lives of the Poets would be pizza and coffee. I think Lark and Termite will definitely involve cake and maybe Korean food. This is my new party game...

Avatar: blue beer?

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanesi

So I'm not sure why I keep choosing books that feature middle aged men experiencing moments of epiphany, but it really seems to be a trend. Must be something in my subconscious - or maybe that I've been on a kick of reading things that appeared on "Notable Books of 2009"- type lists and the authors of many of those are probably - you guessed it - middle-aged men. Anyway, Geoff Dyer's Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanesi, which I finished yesterday, definitely fits the bill, but twists things around a little. The book is divided into two parts with two settings (unsurprisingly, Venice and Varanesi) and two narrators, though the main character, Jeff, seems to be the same. I enjoyed the first half, set during the Biennale, more than the second. I chalk this up partly to curiosity about events like the Biennale, partly nostalgia for my trip to Venice last spring, but mostly to the fact that Jeff, awkward, uncomfortable, and self-conscious as he is, actually seems to be happy for most of that section of the book, a refreshing change from the other narratives I've read recently, which primarily involve the main character going from misery to vague acceptance and nobody actually gets to be happy - not unhappy seems to be the grail there. Jeff's happiness clearly is going to be shortlived - I had hope, but the signs were against it - but it does underscore how little it takes most of us to actually be happy: someone we like who likes us back. That's it. And, honestly, I gotta agree; this jibes with my experience exactly. It's nice when it lasts; it made me sad for poor old Jeff - a older Nick Hornby type who clearly has spent too much of his youth worrying about what's cool - when it became clear that it wasn't.

I didn't respond to the second half as much; it twists out of my realm of experience into a life with little grasp on reality, almost reminding me of the uncomfortable ending of The Egyptologist. And, to be honest, if the narrator of the second half is the Jeff we've gotten to know in the first, I don't quite understand his psychology...it didn't work for me. The best part was the rich descriptions of Varanesi, a place that intrigues me but that I don't quite want to visit.

In general, I enjoyed the book, but no raves.

Next up: Lark and Termite...I'm about 100 pages in and I'm enjoying it...I didn't think the Korean war stuff would hold my interest (even though I was once an manaical MASH fan), but there was just enough of it before we shifted back to the family drama stateside. And some strong female characters too!

Why do we read books? Have I, in any way, encouraged you to read something new?

So it was a busy week...several nights of turning into a couch bound zombie after all of the energy I had was thoroughly expended at school. We had a couple of big events this week: the all school Poetry Out Loud contest and a Saturday prep session for my AP English students. The Poetry Out Loud thing was actually pretty exciting. We've been doing it as long as it's been around (about five years), but we'd never had the whole school participate before. All the teachers (with a little gentle nudging) got on board this year, so around 1700 kids, from ELL 1 through AP, learned and performed a poem for their classroom contest. This past Thursday and Friday, all of the winners of the class contests(and their classmates) came to a semi-finals in the cafeteria. That's between 250-350 kids in the cafeteria listening to other kids recite poetry on a '50s vintage microphone. Sounds like it would be awful, right? Wrong. The kids - in the audience! - were fantastic, super supportive and respectful. I teach at an urban school, mind you...it's not a war zone by any means, but it ain't white bread suburbia either, so this was something of a revelation. Brought a little tear to my eye...And Saturday was another good day; we have a grant to increase our students' participation and performance in AP English, math, and science classes and part of what it pays for is Saturday prep sessions - in this case, a complete practice exam and a review of the multiple choice. I work with three other schools, so I had to prepare test materials for 250 kids and schlepp them over to a different school. I didn't really get to sit down for about eight hours, but, all in all, it went well.

All that being said to excuse my lack of reading and posting. But I did get to read a couple of books this week, both of which I quite enjoyed. The first (the inspiration for the title of this post) was Padgett Powell's The Interrogative Mood, a short little novel composed entirely of questions. Although it has no story, per se, the voice definitely sucks you in and some threads do begin to emerge (blue jays...infant squirrels..train sets), but I can't pretend to have any great insight into meaning. Mostly I just enjoyed the tone. At one point, I started reading it out loud to my husband and he started answering the questions, which was fairly entertaining. I could also see using it as a writing exercise in class.

My favorite question of meaning: "Is there anything you might do today that would distinguish you from being just a vessel of consumption and pollution with a proper presence in the herd?"

My favorite pair of questions, just because: "If you were to be executed and, by standard practice in executions, were offered anything you wanted as a last meal, and instead of ordering lobster or an impossibly thick Porterhouse steak or some peculiar fond dish like fish sticks and packaged macaroni, you said, "I want boiled kittens and puppies, and I want them boiled alive, like crabs," do you think there would be amusement, and do you think they would comply? If you were to be executed and you ordered boiled kittens and puppies as your last meal and they were served you, would you eat the kittens and puppies?"

My other book this week seems to be part of an accendental trend of "middle aged literary men have mid- life crises," which would include The Anthologist, which I read late last year, and one or two others that are currently escaping me(only underscoring why I want to keep this blog). This particular one was The Financial Lives of the Poets by Jess Walter, a very contemporary work - job layoffs, foreclosures, websites combining poetry and financial advice. I think the genre in general doesn't give men enough credit - I personally know very few men who've made it past thirty-five with as little self-knowledge as some of these characters, but maybe I'm just lucky like that. I think what makes me keep coming back to these types of stories is the sense of gratitude I've mustered by the end, both for my somewhat charmed life and my nice, steady husband (although sometimes they make me wonder a little if he can possibly be as nice as he appears to be...), and the idea that we don't need much, which is what these men seem to learn. Some nice people, something we like to do...that's all.

My New Year's Resolution

So I read a lot. I mean, all the time. And this doesn't include the enormous quantity of student papers that are just a given. And I lose track of what I've read and what I've liked...more than once, I've picked up a book, read the back, bought it, and realized thirty pages in that I've read it before. Not that I have anything against rereading; I'm an inveterate re-reader. But it is a little bit of a waste of money. So I thought I'd spend this year writing about what I've read and what I think about it - it'll help me avoid repeat reading and maybe someone else might be interested.

So this New Year so far has been all about food. I finished up Jason Sheehan's memoir Cooking Dirty, which was a good gonzo read. I'm a kind of addicted to the Food Network and Top Chef and it was interesting to read something that was the grittier, tougher side of things - cooks versus chefs, sex, drugs, and knives...it's similar to Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, but a generation later - Sheehan's just a few years younger than me. And today(in between waay overdure grading of essays and making brunch for some friends) I read Ruth Reichl's Tender at the Bone, her memoir of becoming an eater. I used part of it earlier this year in one of my English classes, so I was interested in the rest. One of the things I liked about both books - and something I loved about Julia Child's memoir - is the inspirational value of second acts in American lives(contrary to Fitzgerald's famous line). All of them - Child, Reichl, Sheehan - found their calling later than we're expected to...in their thirties and forties. None of them planned to be what they became, and ended up loving and being really good at. It gives me hope. Not that I don't love my career and my life, but it's nice to feel that there's always the opportunity to change course.