pomegranate

Insomnia

Some books you have to think about when and where to read them.  I took Stephen King's Insomnia with me on vacation and learned after one night of sleeplessness that I couldn't read this right before I planned to slumber.

It's a huge book of big ideas that begins with sleep. On the back side, there's a photo of King wearing a T shirt that says "We Never Sleep."   He looks bemused and very tired.  In the book, he writes about different sleep disorders and many different ideas for cures ranging from acupunture and hypnosis to eating honeycomb right before bed.  I imagine he has tried them all.

After that, I read the the book in the daylight, often with the TV on -- all those football bowl games and no Tivo in the hotel provided an invitation to read during all the commercials. The insomnia turned out to be a springboard to the big issues.  The book is really about the natural cycles of life and death, and what happens if those are tampered with, and the energy that we all have and how it's expressed and used.  I hadn't read Stephen King for a long time, just as I haven't seen a scary movie in forever, because, as I discovered again with reading this book, scary movies and books keep me up at night.  But I really wanted to read Insomnia, because it was such an ambitious book that made you think and wonder, not the things you would expect from a popular author such as King, but there it was, and I was glad to have found it.

Cannery Row

December is a time for reading.

I was an English major in college, and often that feels laughable to me, because I'm not that well versed in the classics.  How can I have majored in literature and not have read the big books?  I tell myself it's because I focused on the Lost Generation, which I kind of did.  I say that I also majored in French, which is true, but I can't remember any of those big books either, except there at least I know I read Sartre and Camus and Moliere and Flaubert, but I can only remember Trivial Pursuit like pieces from each.  Certainly nothing that would fill up a blue book any more.

So, I went to Hawaii once and my friend read Cannery Row on the plane.  And it seemed to me that he read it so thoughtfully and carefully and then he lent it to me, and I thought inside, "No, you can't lend me this book.  I'm a fraudulent English major." So, I ended up picking it up and then misplacing it over and over again for a year.  I think I started this book over five times, and  it's a slim book.  But that's not a bad thing, because it's also a truly wonderful book.  It's one of those books that reads poetic, where the language is so beautiful, and a lot of the beauty is from its simplicity and lack of pretension, and a lot of it is also from the heartfelt nature of the writing.  It's a book that tracks many characters.  Every chapter reads like a story.  Everyone comes out good, even when they botch things up, or even when they are looking to take advantage, sometimes knowingly, sometimes not.  No one is criticized.  They're all looked upon lovingly.  It's easy to read this book and imagine knowing these people.  It's one of those books that when you put it down, you feel good about humanity.  How often does that happen?

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

This was a case of reader's remorse.  I had enjoyed "Me Talk Pretty Some Day" so much that I felt certain that I would love any book of essays that David Sedaris wrote.  But I really didn't like this book. At first, I thought there should have been more editorial interference, that the problem with these pieces were that they weren't fully pieces, that someone needed to push Sedaris and say, "They're not done.  These are nice little seeds of ideas, but they're not going anywhere yet.  Keep working."  Then I wondered if I read "Me Talk Pretty Some Day" again now, if I would enjoy it as much I had when I had read it several years ago.  In this book, as I continued to read, I grew more and more uneasy.  It's that "writer talking about his or her life" concern.  When are you talking about your stuff and when are you crossing lines?  To me, the stuff Sedaris wrote about his family was mean.  It got in the way of my reading, because it felt unfair and something that shouldn't be put down on a page.   And often when I felt he wasn't being mean, I thought he was immature.   There wasn't any take aways from this for me, although I can remember two I loved from his past book.  One was the frustration of being an older American person in France, trying to learn the language, and not being able to remember the gender of words.  It's something that if you grow up as a kid in that country, it's just the way it is and you know it.  A chair is feminine; a cat is masculine.  C'est ca.  As an adult, it makes no sense.  I loved that, and also the notion of going to a foreign country and spending your time watching American movies.  That's something I've done, and something that I could see myself doing again, and I thought it was a quirky, interesting thing to note.   Those were two things that I remembered from his last book that still stay with me.  Would the rest?  I don't know.  But  I didn't like this book at all, and that so surprised me.

Moneyball

As an A's fan, it's hard to believe that I'm so late to the party in reading this book.  But I did indeed just finish it and learned many things.  Such as I never knew that Billy Beane had been slated to be such a successful ballplayer.  And I was one of those fans who listened to Joe Morgan and wished that the A's would play more small ball, without  ever realizing that there was in fact this whole rationale about the importance of outs, and how sacrifices such as bunts and hit and run and stealing a base don't fit into that whole approach. 

And after reading the book, the whole approach made sense, although I have to say that I still like to see small ball.  I still like the strategy.  Although I understand the philosophy, the notion of just wanting guys who can slug and who know the strike zone and can get on base just seems so limited to me still in my heart, although my mind now knows that the numbers back them up.    It's something that I've always just attributed before to the A's low budget, but now after reading this book, I realized that no, what they know so far statistically is that offense matters more than defense--at least they can measure it more effectively up to this point--and so if you have to make a choice, you choose offense.

It reminds me of this one time, years ago, when I saw Billy Beane at spring training, and I yelled, "Billy, get rid of Rich Becker."  Becker was our centerfielder at that point, he just butchered the job in the field.  Billy stopped in his tracks and said, "He went 3 for 4 today."  And now reading this book, I truly get it. It's an interesting book, one that I would recommend to people who weren't even interested in the A's, who didn't even like baseball, because there's a lot of great human stories in it, and then there's also a lot of great stories about not considering humans as humans.  After reading this book, I would never want the third base coach, Ron Washington, to ever become manager, because he's old school and he would hate being in a system where the front office would basically want to make his decisions based on stats spit out of a computer.  It's a book about taking all the stories you were ever told about baseball, all the romantic notions that you thought that you could see with your own eyes, and tossing them aside.  It's about people who were considered losers by many who became surprisingly effective.  It's just a great book.

The Breaks of the Game

This book by David Halberstam stayed on a shelf for a long time.  I had gotten it from the Good Will years ago, because I love the way Halberstam writes, and as a girl, I loved NBA basketball.  This book is about the Portland Trail Blazers in particular, but also about what happened to basketball in the late 70s, when players' salaries skyrocketed, new owners and teams entered into the equation, and television factored in, and how all of this affected the game. 

The book stayed on the shelf for a long time, because it seemed daunting.  It's a tome of a book with very small, single spaced type.  It seemed just too much for me, but two months ago, I had this revelation.  I got my prescriptions changed and actually purchased a pair of glasses just for computer and reading work.  So, now I'm wanting to read everything.  Very soon after I got these glasses, I remembered the Halberstram, and I pulled it off the shelf and began to read.

I did realize soon after that this would also be what I would call a vacation book.  When I go on vacation, I go on reading jags where I give myself the space and time to completely fall in love with books.  That is what this book deserved.  Instead it got the 20 odd moments that I devote to reading in my everyday life.  So, it took a long while to read, and at a leisurely pace that seemed at odds with the seasons described, and I was glad I read it.  Halberstam is a thorough and humane writer.  He seems iminently fair in how he depicts people, and his stories resonate wtih the details that can only be gotten from interviews and research.  I think that this is the type of book that anyone could love, regardless of one's feelings towards basketball, because it talks about human nature, and you're introduced to so many interesting people.  That's what I would say, but I also have a fondness for basketball from back when I was a girl, and my parents realized early on that the best punishment for my impertinences was to forbid me from listening to the radio broadcasts of our college basketball team.  That was a prohibition that truly stung.  This book brought back to me those feelings of how exciting and layered this game could be.

No writing here tomorrow in observance of turkeys.  Happy Thanksgiving.

A Redbird Christmas

I got this book before I went to the doctor's office.  I knew that I couldn't count on him being on time, and that I needed reading material for his waiting room.  I had actually debated between two books to bring before leaving and then forgot them both.  So, I stopped at a drugstore along the way, and felt nostalgic.  Back when I was young, it seemed to me, one could walk into a drugstore and find great books.  You could get things like Phillip Roth at a drugstore.  You could at least get James Michener. Now, if you're lucky there'll be a Robert Parker on the shelf, and if I haven't read it, then I would feel very lucky indeed.  But this time there was no Parker, and I had to resort to the random sentence read.  Open a book and pick out a phrase and see what you think.  If the characters are shrieking or mumbling or exclaiming in some sort of a way, it gets put back. 

When I opened Redbird Christmas, I read, " On the way back home, Oswald thought about it and wondered which was worse, being an accordion player or being an alcoholic.  He figured it was a toss-up."

I bought the book.

And I enjoyed it, although it made me really realize something about me as a reader.  To me, it's all about language.  I really have a hard time reading things that don't sound good to my ear.  You could have the best story in the world, but if it doesn't sing to me, it's painful.

Now, Fannie Flagg is great with words.  But at least in this book, she's not great with actual story.  There was definitely points in the story where I inwardly groaned or just resigned myself to the inherent corniness of the situation.  It's the story of a man, Oswald T. Campbell, a recovering alcoholic who has been told by his doctor that he doesn't have long to live, who goes to this eccentric community in Alabama to convalesce.  There's a lot of homespun quirkiness, where a little goes a long way, and there's creaky plot conventions -- will Oswald take a drink?  Will he ever figure out which woman he's truly interested in?  Just silly things like that that when your rational mind considers it, you want to go running off to the bookshelf immediately to pick something else.

But the thing is, I actually looked forward to reading this book every day.  Even though the story was really silly, it was written with good heart and cadence, and I read it quickly and happily.

Truth & Beauty

This was one of those sad, beautiful memoirs that I never wanted to end.  It was one of those books that made me go to Amazon and create a huge wish list, starting with Lucy Grealy's Autobiography of a Face and continuing with Ann Patchett's The Magician's Assistant, a book I've already read, one that I wish to own, one that I read in a doctor's office, and wished that the nurse would never come out and say my name, the writing was that good.

This book was written by Ann Patchett about her friendship with Lucy Grealy, a woman who had lost most of her jaw through childhood cancer, a mesmerizing person, someone continually in search of the medical treatment that would make her face again whole, that would restore her teeth, that would finally make her lovable in her own eyes.  It's a book about two incredibly gifted writers, and what it means to live that life.  It's a book that talks about the bonds and the separations between people.  It's a book that makes you think and feel.  It's a book that could have easily been written wrong.  It's a book that displays the largesse of this author's heart and vision.  It's a book that I want to lend to all of my friends, and a book that I want to keep in my home.  I really was sad to finish this book.

Songbook

There's two things I concluded this week, always subject to change, but this is what I think right now:

1) Personal essays are my favorite things to read.

2)  What makes a writer fun to read is their prevailing spirit behind their words.  It's especially true, I think, in memoirs, which can be such a treat if the writer is funny and smart and self-effacing even in the midst of recording their own anecdotes.  But if the writer is, in my opinion, whiny or clueless or self-congratulatory, well, then the read becomes more like watching a house burn down--horrifying and fascinating at the same time, while there's this compelling, simultaneous urge to run away and to do something to make it stop immediately, while all the while knowing that it's hopeless, and you just wished that you had never been a witness to the event. 

This is the second book of essays that I've read by Nick Hornby, and I wish I had one to read every week.   Songbook is, as you might imagine, all about music.  Each essay is about one particular song that Hornby loves.  His particular passion is pop music. It's something we share.  And it is a funny thing to love, because as Hornby notes in his book, it can often be silly, except for when it's not.  (And it's here that I make a mental note:  Buy Aimee Mann and Michael Penn.  Invest in intelligent pop music.)  It's a very funny thing.  I love music, but I've quit listening to it.  I used to know a fair amount about it.  When I was in college, I was a d.j. at a 90 watt freeform station that you could hear if you were on a certain block on  a certain side of the street.  But I learned a lot about music and I got to listen to a lot of music.  I always thought that I majored in radio and somehow got a degree in French and English.  But I didn't keep up with the music.  Part of the sadness that I felt reading this book was that I didn't know any of the current references.  It's expensive to keep up.  You can't really stay educated by listening to the radio, I think, but that might not be true, because I just listen to ballgames and NPR.  But it's also that, as Hornby says, pop music is supposedly dead, even though there's still people doing it, they're not getting the attention of the "Yesterdays" of yesteryear. 

I did know (and agree) with a lot of his choices from his youth.  Rod Stewart's "Mama, You've been on My Mind" has always been a favorite of mine as well, along with all his old catalog.  To me, what happened to his professional career has always been a cautionary tale, and I was interested to hear that Elvis Costello wanted to take him under his wing and produce a record for him, and that Hornby shared this same dream (and I wish he had said what songs he had in mind for Stewart to record.)  And I loved what Hornby had to say about Jackson Browne--that during the 70s when all the girls (including me) had his albums, Hornby actively avoided his music.  And it was only in his later life, after a divorce where he had worn out his cache of divorce music (Springsteen's "Tunnel of Love" and Derek and the Domino's "Layla") that Hornby finally turned to Browne, and realized that this is a man who wrote beautiful ballads, and that David Lindley is a briliant accompanist.  Hornby talked about being a bigot, of disliking Browne for his bowl cut hair style, and for missing something wise and beautfiul, that he had to grow up before he could appreciate it.  They're thoughtful pieces that stick with you and remind you of how important songs can be in life.

The Polysyllabic Spree

A friend gave this Nick Hornby book to me for my birthday, and I have to say that my first interior initial reaction was puzzlement and a bit of disappointment, because this book looked as dull as dirt.

Boy, I was wrong.

It's a collection of essays from the Believer magazine, all about books.  At the top of each piece, Hornby writes a two column list.  On the left, the books he bought that month.  On the right, what he actually read.  And then he writes about his experience.

He has a very funny sense of humor, I think.  He has a passion for books and for vocabulary.  He has a passion for Dickens.  Several times after a column, he'll include an excerpt from something he wrote about.  So, there's a bit included from David Copperfield, a book he devoted an entire month to, a book he mourned once it was over.  I have to say I don't get it. But I also have to say that it would be hard for me to rationalize my English major, as I'm not well versed in the classics at all.  Some day, I may have to break down and read some of the books everyone is supposed to have read, but I'm still not there, and it didn't matter.  I still loved to read about someone writing about an author they loved and having a relationship with books, although mine is primarily reserved only for vacations.

I'm Just Mad About Harry

There may be some spoilers.  If you're not up on the current events of Harry Potter, it may be best to not read.

I just read Books 4, 5, 6 of the series during the last week.  I went away the past two weekends.  Both times, I got sick.  One, I think might have been altitude sickness.  The other was your common cold.  I could still get up and about, but I spent good parts of the days reading and napping, which is actually two of my favorite things to do.

I really do believe that there is a different gear in my brain for vacations.  Somehow reading becomes immensely important during those times, when in "normal life," I only read a little bit each day.  So, for both trips, I brought along these three books, convenient doorstops or heavy enough to throw at someone, if necessary.  Great yarns to pass the time.

When I started Book 4, I realized I had never read Book 3.  I had seen the movie and liked it, although it was one of those pivotal times when I decided that I needed to be judicious about my experiences in movie theatres, as the people behind us brought a child with them who was too young for this movie, and expressed that wrongness through cries and chatter, breaking any sort of a trance I could have hoped to have and I think would have, because that movie had some really beautiful visual moments that I could remember when I wasn't frustrated and irritated.

But I began these books and enjoyed them much more than 1 and 2, and wondered if they were better written.  They read like movies to me, and I wondered if the earlier ones had that sense or whether it was something that Rowling began to do once she knew that all of these books would eventually be films.  I am not generally the sort of person who tries to figure out what happens next, but this time, I found myself speculating.  I did guess what major character would die in Book 6, and it still seemed right.  I wondered if Harry's attempts to alert people to wrongdoings in this last book would have been so unheeded.  Malfoy's house is searched, but it seemed to me that the black magic store could have been investigated further.  Certainly Snape could have been under further testimony and scrutiny.  Dumbledore's "I trust him.  He's a good man" wore a bit thin, especially coming from a wizard of his knowledge and experience.  I also wondered if there would be more books.  All the tasks that Harry (rather pedantically) said he still needed to do seemed like they would need at least three more volumes to accomplish (find the four places where pieces of Voldemort's soul were hidden, have at least one final battle with Snape, fight Voldemort to the death.)

But even when I questioned, I enjoyed.  It's really fun having a series of books to follow and to just spend large chunks of time reading.