Becca's Blog

Reading a Book a Day, Every Day

Last Oct. 28, on her 46th birthday, Nina Sankovitch read a novel, “The Elegance of the Hedgehog,” by Muriel Barbery. The next day she posted a review online deeming it “beautiful, moving and occasionally very funny.”

via www.nytimes.com

I don't think I'll ever try reading a book a day, but this does remind me that I've wanted to post reports on books I've finished, particularly those that make me think.

Lately I'm reading The Yiddish Policemen's Union, which is very amusing. I'm loving the alternate reality and the hardboiledness, but I have to wonder: Why are some Yiddish words in the glossary in the back but not others?

Like potato chips

Last weekend I tore through the book Cooking for Mr. Latte in less than 2 days. I wasn't planning to read it (it was published in 2003); I found it at the library while I was looking for something else and figured it could be light, amusing reading.

Cooking for Mr. Latte is a memoir by Amanda Hesser, a food writer for the New York
Times, about meeting her husband, a writer for the New Yorker. I have always liked Amanda Hesser's columns in the Times magazine, which are always built around a recipe. When she writes about the experience of cooking and its techniques, she's clear and engaging, and I usually find her taste very good.

I probably hesitated to read “Mr. Latte” because I figured it would excite my jealousy to read about someone with such a glamorous, cosmopolitan life—and it's a heterosexual romance besides (I'm not supposed to like those).

In addition, I have kind of a bad track record with memoirs by women (a least contemporary ones). I couldn't bear Eat, Pray, Love for lots of complicated reasons, and I hated A Three-Dog Life as well. But pondering what the common thread among the three might be is leading me off-topic.

Mr. Latte had lots to entertain me, with stories about going to movies and restaurants in New York, stories about family connections forged during summer weeks at the family compound on Long Island, dinner parties and fabulous engagement parties, and recipes. Almost all the recipes are things I would like to cook, like walnut cake, oeufs mayonnaise, and papardelle with lemon and ricotta salata. Although I certainly could find most of these recipes or similar ones among the collection of cookbooks I already have, if I found this book for cheap at a used bookstore, I would buy it to remember the recipes. And I'm going to search out "grains of paradise," which she mentions as an aromatic alternative to pepper. Since I'm addicted to pepper blends with black, red, green, and white pepper for their aromatic qualities, I was intrigued by this new-to-me spice.

But the book puzzled me as well, I think because it didn't go deep enough. Hesser would disclose something negative about herself, but then not reflect on whether it had gotten better, or whether she had grown. She readily admits to being bossy, such as during the family trip to Rome where she makes her entire family miserable pursuing the perfect Italian dining experience and gets frustrated when everyone else doesn't share her passion. I can relate to that type of frustration, actually, but Hesser makes no attempt to excuse or redeem herself. I think I wanted her to write about apologizing, or trying to make up for her bad behavior. Instead, she writes about a comforting dinner (made by a family friend) that seemed to make everyone feel better. But Hesser herself didn't fix things, unless she's taking credit for arranging the dinner. And there are numerous instances where Hesser admits to meanness or bossiness toward a friend, or reveals unflattering feelings about a friend, and I had to hope that the friend didn't learn about them by reading the book. Either I crave the cliché of redemption, or I'm just not mature enough to appreciate someone who can put the negative side of themselves out for scrutiny without attempting to mitigate it. Or maybe I missed what Hesser intended to be the self-redemptive parts.

The central of these conflicts is with the Mr. Latte of the title. As Hesser characterizes him, he's basically a brainy frat boy when she meets him—and apparently, for him food isn't the be-all and end-all (gasp). She wonders whether she can have a relationship with someone who orders lattes after noon, sweetens them with artificial sweetener, and feels oppressed by the service rituals and flourishes at classical French restaurants. And Hesser doesn't dwell on his good qualities or examine what she sees in him; she says only that she's happy and excited to be with him. But why? To read this book you have to suspend the belief that to judge someone on their restaurant preferences is shallow; in fact, it does matter whether your life partner shares the passion that you've constructed your life around. But it seemed to me throughout that Mr. Latte met Hesser more than halfway, and she was carping about minor points, many about appearances. Again, she has to understand that these admissions are unflattering (doesn't she?), so why leave them unchallenged?

There's always the possibility that Hesser is simply a diva--who happens to write best when she sticks to the subject of food. That was certainly true of MFK Fisher. When I read a bunch of Fisher years ago, I was rather repulsed to read about her extramarital affair (which you can put down to prudishness or naivete on my part); when I read about Fisher's divalike behavior years later, I was even more repulsed. Whatever there is of value in Fisher's writing is soured for me, knowing that she was a prize bitch.

LinkedInto Library Thing.

This is probably stating the obvious, but I have a contrarian streak (although I always have a very good reason for my contrarian stance, unlike my Dad, whom I suspect of taking contrarian positions just to annoy me and others). So I find myself, say, supporting John Edwards rather than Barack Obama or Hilary Clinton, and having a "brand X" MP3 player rather than an iPod.

But just as often I end up following the herd, sometimes after initial resistance. For instance, I am now on the Ravelry waiting list, after holding out long enough to land as number eleventy-nine hundred (or so) in line. And I'm such an independent thinker that I apparently had exactly the same thought process as every other sentient knitblogger.

a) It's just another private club for the in-crowd. Phooey on them and their dumb club.
b) I don't have time for another bloglike thingy; I don't have time to keep up with the blog I have let alone uploading a bunch of photos to Flickr.
c) Um, well, I'm a bit curious, and I love making lists. It couldn't hurt to get in line and check it out.

And, perhaps prompted by Franklin's post, I remembered that I signed up for LibraryThing awhile back and decided to fool around with that a little bit more. And dang if it isn't fun and fascinating. I have wasted quite a bit of precious time this past week uploading titles and dinking around with tags. I finally "get" folksonomy--which is really quite valuable for someone who edits books about webby things.  I'm so enamored that I paid for a membership and ordered a CueCat from the LibraryThing folks. (I am so old that I remember when the CueCat was foisted on the world, and like many know-it-all journalists, I sniggered.)

Amazingly, my very own CueCat arrived in today's mail, and I got to try it out with the LibraryThing site and some ISBN bar codes. Not foolproof and not always easy (in fact, it doesn't work on some bar codes; coated, shiny covers seem to work best), but it's stupid fun. I'm probably going to steal a lot of time away from housework this weekend to sit in the middle of my office floor and scan more bar codes, then write capsule reviews. (Edited later to add: The book detail pages are a geek's dream, and I just discovered the statistics page and the power-editing mode. I may disappear for days.)

Also this week I was surprised to find that many of my colleagues and friends have joined a club that I thought wasn't worth belonging to: LinkedIn. I don't know if it's a little trendlet that runs through offices like a wave, or whether everyone joins the way I did; after the third flack or marketing guy you don't know sends you an invitation to join his network you finally accept. In an odd coincidence, the day after I joined I find out that Jane—like, the person I live with—has a LinkedIn account, along with many of my present and former colleagues. So I've been having a very good time nosing into their networks to see how they present themselves and who they know. And I wonder, is this MySpace without the MP3s and the eye-scorching graphics? (Needless to say, I don't get social networking sites.) LinkedIn has done much of the difficult organizational work of old-fashioned networking, and it seems like it would be much easier to ask for an introduction from behind the safety of a computer screen. Of course it's likely to be wonderful fuel for my insecurities, too: Look how many people are ignoring my invitations!

Enforced idleness.

I'm at home this afternoon, recuperating from having my two wisdom teeth yanked. It was mercifully brief, and so far I haven't dipped into the Vicodin I got prescribed.  I just peeked at the teeth, which they gave me in a little envelope. The bottom one was in pieces, and the top one, which has been surfaced for years, had a big black disgusting splotch of decay on it. Yurk. Glad to have that over with, and resolved to be *religious* about flossing forevermore. And looking forward to some Bailey's-flavored Haagen-Dazs later this evening.

It's nice to have an excuse for idleness for the afternoon; I've been switching off between listening to a Cliff Janeway mystery on my MP3 player and working on the blue baby blanket and reading the first Harry Potter book. Yes, I got sucked in by the hype and decided to start reading the series from the beginning. So I checked the first one out of the library. The first time I started reading it I couldn't get into it; I'm running hot and cold with it now. Some sections are involving and affecting, but I think maybe the movie has ruined the "action scenes" for me.

Edited Saturday morning to add: This is kind of weird--half my tongue is still a bit numb and I can only taste on one side of my mouth. And now my jaw aches.

What I read on my summer vacation.

One of the best things (for me, at least) about our vacation was spending more than half of it parked in a beach chair, sunburning my shoulders and reading a novel. I took, and actually finished, The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen.

I guess I'm only six years (and about ten thousand titles) behind people who keep up with serious fiction now. I didn't realize that The Corrections came out, and there was all that Oprah uproar, in 2001 until I looked at the copyright page.

The book is worth reading: Franzen is a very good prose stylist and satirist, and I started making Jane read passages (or reading them to her) from almost the first page. And the plot and characters resonated with me; the characters' histories had echoes in my family history. The family patriarch, for example, rises to fairly high management at a midwestern railroad from a skilled technical position; my grandfather was in middle management at one of the early big computer companies having started as a technician. My grandmother worked as a girl in her mother's boardinghouse; so did the matriarch in The Corrections. Writing about them now, those sound like superficial similarities, and they probably are. In the book, I think "worked in a boardinghouse" is just a plot device that supplies how the couple met and the detail that Enid is good at math and business, skills that get set aside when she marries. In my family history, "grandma worked in her mother's boardinghouse" is shorthand for all kinds of midwestern gothic horror, such as "waited on her brothers hand and foot," "was abused and unappreciated by her mother," and "was essentially a servant in her own home." All of which, in the family mythology as I understand it, were contributing factors to grandma's crazy unhappiness all her life. Now that wasn't in the book, although the book dishes out plenty of other kinds of midwestern gothic crazy unhappiness.

I liked how each family member was given equal time, and I liked how Franzen saw the family's crisis through to its end, and let you know they survived and went on.

I thought Franzen did a great job of showing his characters' motivations and inner life through their actions and dialogue, and the female characters were well-drawn--except that they are all good-looking. I've got a chip on my shoulder on this point since I am, as the Ani diFranco song title goes, not a pretty girl. Having all the women in the book be pretty enough that people are drawn to them and life's doors open for them seems to me either laziness or a blind spot on the writer's part. Either it's a shortcut to get the plot where he wants it to go, or, as I strongly intuited while reading, the author likes thinking about pretty women; getting inside the mind and life of an unattractive woman would be much less interesting and pleasant. None of which is to say I thought they were crudely characterized or unrealistic. Like I said, I have a chip on my shoulder about this point.

Ironically, the second book I started during vacation was Lucy Grealy's Autobiography of a Face, a memoir all about what it's like to live with illness and disfigurement. I'll leave that book report for when I've finished the book...
 

Oh, pardon me, was this a knitting blog?

I'm sorry, I seem to have strayed from the knitting content in the past several posts. And actually, I'm so unenthused about my knitting at the moment that I'm going to continue to ignore it. Maybe if I can work up the energy tomorrow, I'll hook up my card reader and post some progress shots and natter about the knitting that's boring me and hurting my hands but that I'm determined to friggin' *finish.*

In the meantime, I've posted before about discovering the pleasant surprises at my local library, including downloadable audiobooks. And I must say again that the electronic reference materials accessible on the Web rock—the entire Oxford Reference Premium site, for free. As much as I love buying reference books and geeking out on some new topic, it's great to get that information without paying for it (trying to be profitable and all). I'm editing a book with a bit of dialogue in German (not a language I know), and it took a bit of will power not to race out to Barnes & Noble for a Lonely Planet phrasebook (they also rock—a traveling must-have; though it pains me to say it since LP competes with Jane's employer) or a German-English pocket dictionary (I'm partial to the HarperCollins Concise editions).

What's made me really happy in the past three weeks is having to consult my Oxford Concise Wine Companion and Provencal cookbook while working. Yeah, that's work.  And only another copyeditor could understand the obscure glee of being able to root out the misspelled name of a Corsican wine grape and correct an author's grammar in French. And Italian. My client is getting their money's worth, if I do say so myself.

So anyway, free downloadable books. Which have a couple of small drawbacks, the first being their rights-protected Windows Media format that doesn't work with the world's iPods. Another is a somewhat limited selection. Finally, they come as one giant file that's not broken into chapters, so it's much too easy to accidentally rewind all the way back to the beginning. At least with my tiny el-cheapo player, finding your place involves holding the fast-forward button down for several minutes of trial and error. I kind of think I went a bit too cheap on the player, but I don't know if a player with an iPod-style scroll wheel would make this process any faster.

Over in my sidebar I listed a couple of highbrow, cultured titles that I started listening to, but I've booted them in favor of trashety trash trash. I stumbled upon the vampire/fantasy/ horror/ chick-lit/romantica genre, and heaven help me, I'm hooked. I spent the blistering weekend sprawled in a leather easy chair, desultorily knitting on the boring yet neverending cotton stole and listening to this pulpy novel about a human-but-telepathic barmaid who's mixed up with a crowd of werewolves and were-panthers and vampires. Incidentally, the genre seems to require hot sex between the ingenue and some supernatural creature--tell me you don't want a boyfriend who is sometimes literally a tiger and who has a raspy tongue. The latest Plum Sykes, which I also started listening to, pales in comparison. I don't read chick lit, and I haven't read anything this formulaic and lowbrow since I went through a sci-fi phase in college, but you know, Beowulf just wasn't pulling me through exercise sessions and housework.

A perfect companion to insomnia.

The deeper I read into Joan Didion's The White Album the more I like it. My favorite line so far: "We're living like revolutionaries here at the College of San Mateo."

The essays on California are the coolest, because they describe, from a thoughtful adult perspective, events that I lived through and remember from childhood. In one she asks "Tell me, who is the elected representative of the invisible city?" meaning those whom The Sixties didn't touch. I wanted to answer, "Well, Dana Rohrabacher, for a start. They're in charge now."

It makes me want to read something she's written that's more current but in the same vein. I do want to read The Year of Magical Thinking--partly because grief is such a powerful, moving subject--but I'd like to read more on broad social changes, and what she thinks happened to the social revolution of the Sixties.

I was carping to Jane last week about a book I was proofreading (I'm afraid I come off as a know-it-all because I'm always saying "that book could have been better if only"), wherein the author says that studies prove that the Dutch are extremely civilized, tolerant, and content with their lives. I said, "the author needs to read some more current studies." I was thinking of the social trend of the Dutch leaving the Netherlands in large numbers because the religious fundamentalism of immigrants has profoundly changed their way of life. 

I think we are in the midst of another wrenching social shift. And personally, I don't like it one bit. As a child, I found the turmoil shown on TV news disturbing and frightening, not realizing that a) if it bleeds, it leads; b) struggle and change are constant at some level; and c) it could have been much worse.  It's reassuring to be reminded that even adults are bewildered by events in the big world out there.

Sorry, but this is way better than a Harlot book tour.

Alison Bechdel is on a tour with her new book, Fun Home, and she's in the Bay Area. Apologies if I'm belaboring the obvious for Bay Areans--without a subscription to a local newspaper, sometimes I'm not too quick on the uptake. That's my excuse, anyway.

Tonight she's in San Francisco, and I'd love to go into the city to see her and get a dose of Gay Pride month good feeling, but we're having dinner with out-of-town friends tonight, so we'll see her here in Berkeley tomorrow night at Cody's on Fourth St.

So tomorrow night the plan is to buy the book, stand in line to have it signed and feel sheepish, mumble "I'm a huge fan," and have Jane tease me about it.