Kiddie Lit: A Penguin Story

A Penguin Story is one penguin’s quest to see something that isn’t white (snow), black (the night sky), or blue (water, sky). “There must be something more.” She’s got a good spririt of adventure to find the humans in their bright orange coats and tents (tents? in the Antarctic? really?) Cute, but the overanalytic adult in me keeps asking just how the penguin knows there must be other colors if she’s never seen or heard stories about them. How do you know there’s something missing if you can’t see the hole? But that’s a Kate/adult problem. The book is adorable and I love the illustrations.

A Penguin Story: Recommended

Kiddie Lit: Thump, Quack, Moo

Thump, Quack, Moo is another one of the Click, Clack, Moo books. The basic premise is: Duck is a troublemaker, Farmer Brown knows it, but can’t quite keep him under control because Duck is crafty. Probably not good if you’re trying to keep your kid innocent – Duck’s a bad influence. Funny, but a bad influence. The language usage is pretty simple, too, which is good for new readers.

Thump, Quack, Moo: Recommended

Generation X

I first read Generation X in college, but I didn’t understand it, not very well. I mean, I got it intellectually, but really understanding it? Knowing what diminished expectations really are? Hating how much stuff you own? Worrying that you’ve replaced family and friends with the media and stuff? I didn’t have a clue. This time it spoke to me far too much. In no particular order:

• The need to get rid of your stuff. We do it because we move so often — twelve times in sixteen years at last count — but I also have recurring fantasies of losing everything we own in a fire/earthquake/some other disaster. We could start from scratch! Only get what we really need! I take a lot of pleasure in getting rid of things.
• Diminished career expectations. I’ve moved so much that I haven’t really had a coherent career, though I expect that while we’ll move houses at least one more time, we aren’t going to leave the Bay Area anytime soon. I let you know as soon as I believe it.
• Wanting something authentic, where authentic = not mass-marketed, not from a nation-wide or world-wide chain. This was actually more pronounced last month — we lived somewhere that didn’t have many non-chain restaurants or stores. We’ve moved to a town — though still the suburbs — at least used to be a town at one point. There are more locally owned businesses here.
• Wanting authentic experiences (as opposed to stuff). Shopping still seems to be the dominant activity, even in the downturn. What to do? Go to the outdoor mall! It’s not really a mall if it’s outside, right? Right?
• Feeling poor and like you’re never going to be able to afford the American Dream. At least as it relates to actually owning my own residence someday. The median house price in our zip code is still over $800,000 for houses that are mostly ~1500 sq feet. This is probably related to diminished career expectations.
• The vague feeling that the world is going to end in a generation or two? You betcha. In the book, nuclear war is still the main reason the world might end. Now the ever-present danger is pretty clearly global warming. And it’s inevitable.

Generation X: Recommended, because it pretty clearly relates to my life a bit too much.

The Long Winter

Disclaimer: I’ve got a soft spot for YA literature and the Laura Ingalls Wilder books specifically. They, combined with frequent visits to my grandparents in rural Iowa, form some of the do-it-all-yourself, what-it-means-to-run-a-good-house attitudes that I have. They might be the reason I’ve never been able to bring myself to hire a maid or why I cook supper most nights.

Anyway, on to the book. The Long Winter is about a seven-month-long winter in the Dakotas that causes all manner of hardship for the Ingalls and the other families in town. The Ingalls have to leave their homestead and move to town simply to survive. No trains arrive after Christmas, which means very little food. They almost starve and there’s a close call with a grain riot when a merchant tries price gouging. They lose the energy to do anything except prepare food – school for all the townschildren is cancelled altogether because of the lack of heat and light. There’s music and dancing at the beginning, but Papa’s fingers eventually become too stiff and sore to play the violin. After the warm weather comes again, the music comes back, in a particularly obvious bit of symbolism.

Laura Ingalls Wilder is particularly good at pulling you into the setting. I couldn’t get warm while I was reading The Long Winter. Their comparative lack of stuff, and the work they have to do to get things we take for granted — food, entertainment (they get a shipment of magazines and letters in November and nothing else), clean clothing (line-drying clothes when it’s below freezing doesn’t sound fun or easy), and warmth (they end up twisting hay into sticks that they can burn in the oven, and they close off all of the house except the kitchen in order to conserve heat) — it made me feel guilty at the very clear excesses we have today: more food than we can eat, turning up the heat when we’re not comfortable enough instead of putting on a sweater, TV, the internet, radio, more books than I could read in a year… I’m happy I live now, when food is plentiful and heat is easy. Putting myself into that house in town was somewhat scary.

Overall, though, I do enjoy these books.

The Long Winter: Recommended

Home

Home is wonderful. Marilynne Robinson is an amazing writer. Read it. Buy it, don’t just read it. Read Gilead. Read Housekeeping (but only if you’re prepared to be a little bit crazy when you’re done).

Home: Highly Recommended.

Watchmen

I’m pretty sure that to really explain how I feel about Watchmen would actually require therapy-level analysis that would take far longer than I actually have to write this. So, my basic impressions:

• Ohmygod Nihilistic.
• Clearly written in the-world-is-going-to-end nuclear mess of the mid-eighties, which  might explain the nihilism.
• How on earth did they turn this into a movie that they expect people to see?
• If you read carefully, the real message is that the world is way better off without superheroes, people who are going to take care of everything. So maybe not so nihilistic? Just a commentary on where society was in the scary mid-80s? Hmmm…

Watchmen: Recommended, but it’s not for the faint of heart.

Kiddie Lit: The Lump of Coal

Lemony Snicket’s not-so-big-secret? Underneath all that ironic detatchment is a gooey heart that really believes in the best of people. If it weren’t wrapped in all that irony, though, it’d probably be too sweet to handle.

This is a cute, short read. I got it out of the library for myself, not my kid. It’s aimed at slightly older kids (and me).

The Lump of Coal: Recommended

The Good Thief’s Guide to Paris

I picked up The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam at the library awhile back, and it turned out to be a fun, light mystery, the kind I like to read at the end of a particularly long day. (I like being led through the story, knowing all will be revealed with minimal work on my end. It’s relaxing when I’ve spent the day trying to ferret meaning from reams of seemingly meaningless data.)

The Good Thief’s Guide to Paris was also fun in the same way: lighthearted, doesn’t take itself seriously, with just enough complexity to make it interesting. I’m looking forward to the next one.

The Good Thief’s Guide to Paris: Recommended

American Wife

I’m conflicted about American Wife. On the one hand: I was completely sucked into it. I stayed up too late reading it more than once, I loved the exploration of the difference between the perception and the reality of a relationship, and I loved the way the author portrayed the rural Midwest as a place to love and be proud of, instead of treating it as something to run away from.

On the other hand, there is the presumptuousness of the premise. It’s a take on Laura Bush’s personal history and a fictionalized version of who she is and what she thinks. And I find that very… presumptuous. The author doesn’t know who she is, doesn’t know that she’s secretly a Democrat, doesn’t know so many things, and to think that someone who researched but never interviewed the subject could get anywhere near who Laura Bush is, is baffling to me. Aren’t there better ways to explore the same themes that are going to be less wrong?

And maybe I could let that go, but every time something happened in American Wife that didn’t quite ring true — the husband’s conversion to Christianity (it really took just two weeks with only a nominal struggle?), the whole section where her husband is President — it was because it sticking too close to the Bush story and the author couldn’t let the characters develop naturally.

It’s really the combination of those last two that makes me unable to recommend this otherwise very good book; strip off the Laura Bush premise and you could fix both problems. But they probably wouldn’t have sold nearly as many copies without it.

American Wife: I just don’t know.

More Information Than You Require

John Hodgman is best in small doses. A book is not a small dose.

More Information Than You Require: Not Recommended (But it does hurt to type that. I wanted to like it.)

Kiddie Lit: Just So Stories

Just So Stories

There’s this line from The English Patient (which is a couple of miles away from me, so there’s no exact quote) about reading Kipling slowly, imagining him sitting at his desk in India looking out the window as he writes. I’d add that you should only read one Just So Story at a time, and you should read them out loud. Both help to make sure you read them slowly, which really does help.

The Just So Stories are folk tales that explain why animals have the features they do: why the kangaroo hops, how the elephant’s nose got so long, that kind of thing. And they’re fun, silly stories, though I could do without the phrase “best beloved” being repeated that often. He uses it as though he’s reading them out loud to his own children, and I found it annoying after the first couple of stories.

My daughter seemed to enjoy them — she kept asking to read new ones — but I don’t remember lots of repeats. It’s been awhile since we read them, so my memory may be wrong. We certainly haven’t gotten it out of the library again. But then maybe she was too young when we read them?

Just So Stories: Meh. But maybe recommended if you have an older child.

Kiddie Lit: Duck Dunks

(Quick admin note: My own reading has slowed somewhat, but I do read to my daughter an awful lot. I know that a number of you have kids or are occasionally on the hook for baby shower presents. So I’m going to start reviewing some children’s books.)

Duck Dunks is a cute little book, full of good rhymes, and is a ton of fun to read out loud. It’s about five little ducks – no parents in sight, just like the best kind of kids books – who spend the day having fun at the beach. It’s idealized of course (you mean there’s no TV anywhere?), but that’s the best way to think about childhood: full of fun and friends and activity, coming home and collapsing at the end of the day. (Forget childhood, the summer after my junior year of high school was largely spent with my friends at the beach, swimming, reading magazines, talking, playing vollyball…) It’s definitely the kind of childhood you want for your own kids.

Duck Dunks: Recommended

The Ladies of Grace Adieu

Susanna Clarke is a good writer; I enjoyed Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. But her stories take a good 25-30 pages to get into. Ergo, this book of short stories doesn’t work all that well. By the time you figure out who everyone is and what’s going on, the story is finished. Not a good thing.

The Ladies of Grace Adieu: Not Recommended

Prague

The grass, the old saying goes, is always greener on the other side of the fence. Prague will always be better than Budapest, the past will always be better than the present, and everyone, as Nicky says, is in love with someone else.

We believe these things because we are masters of the romantic, of self-deception: Nadja, the old piano player whose stories make John happy is one prime example. He doesn’t care if they’re true or not, and she conveniently always makes everything sound like a great adventure. Emily — her whole character — is one giant exercise in self-deception, wrapped in denial. Mark is so into nostalgia and studying it that it drives him insane.

Mr Phillips obviously cares about his characters and clearly loves the self-deception that we all engage in. Who would know about the art of deception better than a storyteller? This is a lovely, elegant book that makes me nostalgic for 1990. Which you’d think wouldn’t be far enough away, but on the other side of 2001, it is.

Prague: Recommended

The Thin Place

I don’t have much coherent to say about The Thin Place. It’s time for a simple, bulleted list.

For:

• There are lots of characters, just like real life. It’s nice when a story can admit that one person interacts with more than just five people in any given day.
• The characters are well-drawn. In most cases, they feel like real people. There are some stock characters, but not too many.
• The small-town atmosphere is small, but not backwards. The author realizes that real people live somewhere other than the coasts. (OK, The Thin Place takes place in New England, which isn’t exactly far away from the Atlantic, but the people in it could live in the middle of the country and not look like freaks.)
• It’s not flashy, which, even though I like Michael Chabon, is a nice change from his books.

Against:

• There’s a lot of religious symbolism.
• Because a lot of that symbolism goes over my head, I didn’t really understand what the book was about. I mean, I get that I didn’t understand it, but knowing that doesn’t make it less frustrating.
• This definitely falls into the “Plot? We don’t need no stinking plot,” category that I don’t like that much. Although that may be because of the aforementioned symbolism that went over my head.

The Thin Place: Meh.

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

As in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (both by Michael Chabon) is largely about what it means to be Jewish. (Chabon’s Jewish, so he’s enjoying exploring his heritage.) In The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, you needed to know what a golem was in order to understand what was going on. Before you read The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, you’ll probably want to refresh yourself with Elijah (specifically his role in the messiah arriving), the story of Abraham and Isaac, and Judgment Day.

This is not to say that The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is a largely religious book. It’s not.* It’s about a murder that takes place in a seedy hotel and the detective who solves it. There’s also a lot of noir in it, right down to a minor character named Spade. The noir combined with the Jewish culture set me on edge, which is I think probably what Chabon wants. The detective is at the end of his rope (because it’s noir, and that’s how noir detectives are) and everything is not-quite-right for him, and the combination of Jewish culture and its stereotypes juxtaposed with the hard-drinking, hard-nosed detective put me in a similar mindset. For example, there’s a hard-drinking klezmer music club. That’s just weird. But it worked to draw me in.

Will you like it even if you don’t get all the Jewish and 1940s detective story references? Probably. It’s a compelling story, there are fun chase scenes, and the bit where he describes the nighttime city sky as having “the translucence of onions cooked in chicken fat” is clever. I liked it.

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union: Recommended

* In fact, at one point he draws a parallel between religion and drug abuse, that were I religious, I might have found offensive.

Housekeeping

Routine. Keeping things neat. Participating in societal norms, having roots, people you connect with, paying more attention to the world than your dreams. This is how you keep a house, according to Marilynne Robinson. She’s not wrong.

Housekeeping is about a lack of housekeeping: slowly letting things go, starting with a strict routine, then how a life can slowly fall apart. In this case, as the house falls apart too. It’s no coincidence that when Sophie, the last guardian of the two main characters, arrives the house floods. The last thing that Sophie and Ruth* do before leaving is to set the house on fire.

There are also very few male characters in Housekeeping. The first is the family patriarch, who dies right off. The second is the sheriff, who tries at the end to stop Ruth and Sophie from leaving. Housekeeping is also about women, particularly women from the mid-twentieth century, and how they keep their worlds together: through religion or sheer willpower or not at all. Which makes sense, when you think about using housekeeping as a metaphor for life, since housekeeping is, at the time the book takes place, primarily a woman’s task.

I learned something about myself from reading Housekeeping, and that’s almost the best thing to say about it. It’s not as good as Gilead, but anything that is both nauseating (Ruth’s descent into transiency is not pretty) and makes you want to keep reading is damn impressive.

Housekeeping: Recommended

* From whose perspective the story is told, and this is one of those times I wish I knew the Biblical story of Ruth because I bet that plays into the book.

The Emperor’s Children

You know what? I’m just going to face the fact now: I am never going to read The Emperor’s Children. I’m twenty pages in, and I just got to the which-character-from-War-and-Peace-are-you discussion that a couple of the characters are having and no. Who the hell has read enough War and Peace to actually have that discussion? Pretentious, over-educated people with nothing better to talk about. And I don’t want to read a book about them, particularly one that doesn’t seem to hold any promise of smacking these people upside the head and telling them to get out of their insulated little world.

I mean, given that the title is The Emperor’s Children, who else is going to be in this book?

Whatever. I picked it up because I remember reading a decent review, but clearly that reviewer and I have a difference of opinion.

The Emperor’s Children: Not recommended

Slaughterhouse-Five

It’s wrong — really, fundamentally wrong — that I’m 32 and Slaughterhouse-Five is the first Kurt Vonnegut book I’ve read. Ever. I saw him on The Daily Show last year, and added a bunch of his books to my wishlist. I got this one for Christmas, but it’d been sitting in my to read pile for the last three months. Then he died a few days ago and reading it seemed like the Right Thing To Do.

In fact, it was such The Right Thing To Do that I wonder why no one hit me upside the head and told me to read it earlier. It is a completely non-linear story of one man’s life, a life whose main event is the Dresden bombing in World War II. The non-linearness emphasizes that a life’s climax isn’t at the end, like a book’s is. That life goes on, and you have to live with it however you can.

Because the main character can travel through time within his own life, it also is about free will. How do you act when you know how everything turns out? How do you get up any enthusiasm for it?

If you’ll excuse me, I have to go get the rest of his books from the library now.

Slaughterhouse-Five: Highly recommended

The Maltese Falcon

I’m noir-ed out. I’ve been reading too much Raymond Chandler, Elmore Leonard, Ian Rankin, and now Dashiell Hammett. Instead of thinking about the story, I found myself thinking about how shadows and nighttime play a large role in noir (books and movies), and wondering if it was a reaction to electric lights being more widespread in the first half of the twentieth century, with more people staying up later. (A simple search on “when did electric lights become widespread” doesn’t answer the question.)

The Maltese Falcon is one of the earliest noir novels that I know of. The mystery itself — where the hell the statue is — is pretty simple. The mystery comes from who’s lying, who’s double-crossing who, and who’s really in cahoots with whom.

Honestly, I read it because I felt like I should have read it, not because it particularly piqued my interest. That’s why it didn’t click: I didn’t care very much and it didn’t engage me.

The Maltese Falcon: Meh.