Book 301: Man's Search For Meaning

 

"Not only our experiences, but all we have done, whatever great thoughts we may have had, and all we have suffered, all this is not lost, though it is past; we have brought it into being. Having been is also a kind of being, and perhaps the surest kind."

Dates read: March 9-12, 2019

Rating: 7/10

One of the interesting/terrifying things about the world as we know it is the amount of information we have access to at any given time. We can learn about virtually anything we want, whenever we want. We can see the world's greatest art works on demand. And we can see the worst things that people are doing to each other all over the globe. If you start looking, the tragedy in your hometown alone could break your heart.

In the face of profound despair, it can be easy to wonder what the point even is. The Holocaust, of course, is one of the worst events the world has ever seen. Viktor Frankl was a Jewish psychiatrist living in Austria when Hitler came to power, and like most European Jews, he ended up in a concentration camp. He survived Auschwitz, though, and wrote about how he did so in Man's Search for Meaning. The book is divided roughly in half: in the first, he tells his own story, and in the second, he expounds upon the therapeutic technique he used to make it through, which he calls logotherapy. Essentially, logotherapy consists of finding meaning in one's life, no matter how meaningless it might seem.

Like most Holocaust memoirs, this is difficult to read. Frankl's pre-existing training in psychology is obvious, as he breaks down the ways in which people were psychologically broken upon entering the camps. The procedures used by the Nazis to strip their prisoners of their humanity, their sense of personal dignity and purpose, were brutal and effective. And then, of course, there were the actual physical dangers of the camps: starvation and overwork, which took away strength and energy. For those that did manage to survive, their liberation was not the end of their story. They had to go on to live in the world, and Frankl also talks about the difficulties of re-adjusting to life on the outside.

While not "enjoyable" per se, the portion of the book concerned with Frankl's own experiences is the most compelling and powerful. The actual detailing of logotherpy in the back half of the book feels almost superfluous, because it's both described and demonstrated in how he used it to survive. The more it's described, honestly, the less impact it has...it boils down essentially to the power of positive thinking, to refusing to succumb to the darkness. While it clearly was tremendously important to Frankl, and has surely been helpful to others in their own struggles, it's not all that interesting or novel to read about. If you're looking for a Holocaust memoir with unique psychological insight, this is something you'll really get a lot out of. Just...skip the part at the end with all the psychobabble.

One year ago, I was reading: The Good Soldier

Two years ago, I was reading: Seeing

Three years ago, I was reading: Juliet Naked

Four years ago, I was reading: Valley of the Dolls

Five years ago, I was reading: The Other Side of the River

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Book 301: Man's Search For Meaning

Book 276: Uncle Tungsten

 

"My own mood had been predominantly scientific for four years; a passion for order, for formal beauty, had drawn me on—the beauty of the periodic table, the beauty of Dalton's atoms. Bohr's quantal atom seemed to me a heavenly thing, groomed, as it were, to last for an eternity. At times I felt a sort of ecstasy at the formal intellectual beauty of the universe." 

Dates read: November 14-19, 2018

Rating: 7/10

Sometimes I wonder how much our family has to do with who we turn out to be. Would I love reading so much if I hadn't grown up in a household where it was heavily encouraged? Then again, I do love TV even though my mom didn't let us have very much of it when I was growing up. And you hear all the time about nerdy kids who grew up in Sports Families (and vice versa). I guess the only thing I feel comfortable concluding is that raising can encourage latent tendencies in a child that already exist.

That being said, though, is it any surprise that Oliver Sacks grew up to be a scientist? The world-famous neurologist was himself the son of doctors, and had several aunts and uncles who made their living from science. The title personage of Sacks' memoir Uncle Tungsten was an uncle who owned a lightbulb factory that made filaments from, well, tungsten, and gave young Oliver the inspiration to study chemistry, which persisted through his London childhood. As Sacks got older, he became more and more engaged in studying the periodic table, and the book uses its development as a framework for Sacks' own.

In many ways, his recollections are tales from a lost world...not just the major historical events like the Blitz (which sent Sacks and one of his brothers to a boarding school in the countryside where they were treated with cruelty), but of a time when a child could get himself to the chemistry supply store and just buy the things they needed to perform their own experiments. Sacks built himself a chemical lab station in his room and happily produced minor explosions without much in the way of adult involvement. He recounts these experiments, along with the development of the periodic table and the discovery of new elements, in sometimes-tedious detail, but by the time he reaches his story's end, he's entered his teenage years and his interest in chemistry is no longer as all-consuming as it once was.

Much to the consternation of my own pharmacist mother, I never really took to chemistry. I found it dry and complicated in a way that did not engage my brain. This book's emphasis on the subject, therefore, kept me from being as fully immersed in it as I'd hoped to be. It is as much a book about how the elements were discovered and organized as it is about the childhood of Oliver Sacks. I actually found it fairly interesting despite myself, at least until it got later on when the naturally occurring elements were all on there and it turned towards the chemically derived ones.

On the whole, though, if you're inclined to like Oliver Sacks, you'll likely enjoy this memoir. In both this book and A Leg To Stand On, he treats his own experiences much like those that he recounts of his patients in his other work...with kindness and genuine curiosity. A lesser writer would have used the pathos of the awful boarding school experience he had to manipulate the emotions of his readers, but Sacks recounts it straightforwardly and without dismissing its ultimate importance, lets it slide mostly into the background. At the end of the day, this book recounts the childhood of a well-off British Jewish boy, surrounded by high achievers, who became deeply entranced with chemistry and grew up to be a neurologist. Very little exciting actually happens, but Sacks' skill with words and the obvious delight he takes in learning and sharing his knowledge, it ends up being a compelling read. I'd recommend it for anyone, especially Sacks fans and people who enjoy memoirs.

One year ago, I was reading: Lost Children Archive

Two years ago, I was reading: The Stranger

Three years ago, I was reading: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Four years ago, I was reading: Chemistry

Five years ago, I was reading: The Nazi Hunters

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Book 276: Uncle Tungsten

Book 270: Detroit

 

"The city, what's left of it, burns night after night. Nature—in the form of pheasants, hawks, foxes, coyotes and wild dogs—had stepped in to fill the vacuum, reclaiming a little more of the landscape each day. The streets were empty and cratered. The skyscrapers were holograms. I stood and admired a cottonwood sapling growing out of the roof of the Lafayette Building. This was like living in Pompeii, except the people weren't covered in ash. We were alive."

Dates read: October 21-25, 2018

Rating: 6/10

I was born in Detroit. Not "Detroit", the way some people use it, to mean Royal Oak or Birmingham. But actual City of Detroit, in Harper Woods. My mom had lived there for her whole life, from the fifties when she was born until the late eighties when we left. When I was about three, we moved out to what had been her parents' summer lake house, about an hour away, and that's where I was raised. Though I barely lived there, and it was three decades ago now, I'll never stop rooting for my native city.

The City of Detroit's motto is "Speramus meliora; resurgent cineribus", which translates to "We hope for better things, it will rise from the ashes". Which sounds really on the nose for Detroit now, but actually dates back to 1805 and the aftermath of an actual fire. So how did a city once known for its prosperity and loveliness (called the "Paris of the West"!), turn into...well, Detroit as we know it? When reporter Charlie LeDuff returned to his hometown after spending more than a decade working at The New York Times, he started up at The Detroit News, and his attempts to answer that very question went into his book, Detroit: An American Autopsy.

Detroit is a mix of a little bit of several things: part history, part investigation of public corruption, part memoir. The issues of the city aren't just abstract facts to LeDuff...he grew up there, watched his mother struggle to maintain her business and raise her family as the crime rate spiked, and his own sister became addicted to drugs and died young, leaving behind a daughter who's on the same path. He traces the city's boom, and then the white flight that began when the Great Migration brought Southern black people to the industrial north, and then the increasingly shady operations of the City Council. LeDuff began his tenure at the News as Kwame Kilpatrick's reign as Mayor was in its death throes, his misconduct and that of other City electeds like Monica Conyers finally becoming so blatant it could no longer be swept under the rug.

In the strongest portions of the book, LeDuff takes one aspect of the very real consequences of municipal mismanagement, the woeful underfunding of the Fire Department, and uses it as a microcosm of the larger problem. He introduces the firefighters, constantly called out into a sprawling, arson-happy city with trucks and equipment well past expiration dates. But they keep on going anyways, out of love for each other and a sense of duty to the residents, even though the conditions they're put in mean they're at much higher risk of death and injury.

These firehouse sections are so strong, in fact, I found myself wishing they had been the whole book. LeDuff's an undeniably talented writer, but his lack of focus made it less compelling than it could have been. I found the memoir-esque portions least interesting, and while his look at the malfeasance at City Council did grab my attention, it wasn't nearly fleshed out enough to paint a full picture. LeDuff's connection with the firefighters and sympathy for their Sisyphean task is obvious, and the work just comes alive when he's spending time with them. As it is, the book tries to do a little too much, and sacrificing its ability to do any of it to a level of true excellence. It's good, and if you're into reading about Detroit, it's well-worth your time, but if you don't have an underlying interest in the city, it might not be for you.

One year ago, I was reading: Whores of the Devil

Two years ago, I was reading: The Mind's Eye

Three years ago, I was reading: Thank You For Smoking

Four years ago, I was reading: Orange Is the New Black

Five years ago, I was reading: Creative Mythology

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Book 270: Detroit

Book 266: The Fly Trap

 

"People sometimes call me for help in investigating the possibilities. I am a biologist, after all. Their projects are often said to have an environmental dimension—the infallible key to getting grants—so I’m considered a good person to talk to. When we were new out here, I used to say that I was a writer, but all the women on the island felt so sorry for my wife that I started insisting I was a biologist instead. What else could I do? And if you’re a biologist on an island widely known for its rich biosphere, you have to put up with a lot of phone calls from morons. They always seem to assume that I’m a moron myself."

Dates read: October 3-6, 2018

Rating: 7/10

For my dad, it's lizards. For my mom, hearts. For me, my book stockpiling has reached critical mass. Most of us collect something. And the rest of you can Marie Kondo your lives as many times as you like, you'll never convince me that the reason so many of us have so much stuff isn't that there's a primal human urge to gather. For most of us, it's just a side habit. But depending on your line of work, it can literally be your actual job!

If I had to come up with an insect that people collect, I'd get to butterflies, and maybe moths and dragonflies, before running out of ideas. Those are the good ones, right? But Fredrik Sjoberg catches and studies nothing so glamorous. Rather, near his home on a tiny Swedish island, he collects hoverflies. In case you, like me, have no idea what those are, they're large flies that look like bees. In The Fly Trap, he ruminates on a life devoted to an obscure bug, as well as the story of the man, Rene Malaise, who invented the fly trap with which he does most of his work.

Like me when this was announced as a selection for my book club, you might be extremely skeptical about the idea of a book about a guy who collects flies. I was very sure it would be either weird or boring or both. Surprise! It's delightful! Funny and smart! It feels like having a conversation with the slightly odd but very charming person sitting next to you on an airplane...there's a circuitousness to the narrative, with Sjoberg starting on one subject but getting sidetracked into another, but it's carried off with humor and verve. The way the narrative thread keeps looping also ensures that the pace is lively and it doesn't get bogged down anywhere.

There's also, as you realize when you get to the end, surprisingly little about Sjoberg himself. There's a remove to it that feels Scandinavian, very pleasant but ultimately very firmly impersonal. There's a lot about the nature of being a collector, pleasure of focusing your attention on one little small facet of the world and working inside that little niche, the thrills of finding something rare in your chosen field, the loneliness that can come from essentially solitary pursuits. It's thought-provoking in its own way, not in the heavy way that the term is usually used. This is a lightweight little snack of a book, enjoyable but not especially memorable in any way, and I would recommend it. Hey, at least now I know what a hoverfly is!

One year ago, I was reading: Queen of Scots

Two years ago, I was reading: The Winter of the Witch

Three years ago, I was reading: Ghost Wars

Four years ago, I was reading: American Heiress

Five years ago, I was reading: Mr. Splitfoot

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Book 266: The Fly Trap

Book 231: On Trails

"When I was younger I used to see the earth as a fundamentally stable and serene place, possessed of a delicate, nearly divine balance, which humans had somehow managed to upset. But as I studied trails more closely, this fantasy gradually evaporated. I now see the earth as a collaborative artwork of trillions of sculptors, large and small. Sheep, humans, elephants, ants: each of us alters the world in our passage."

Dates read: May 3-7, 2018

Rating: 3/10

There's an outdoorsy, hiking culture in the West that's unlike anything I ever knew growing up in southeast Michigan. People camped (which I quickly discovered was Not For Me) occasionally, but generally spending time outside consisted of making friends with someone who had a lake house and then going out on the boat. The only time I'd ever hiked was on trips to the Upper Peninsula to visit family, and that was under duress. But on the other side of the country, spending time in the wilderness is treated with a kind of reverence. I have to confess I remain unconverted...I'm not deeply opposed to getting out there for a few hours, but left to my own devices I'd rather stay home and read.

Even out here, though, there are casual weekend-type hikers and then there are the truly insane, the kind who do things like hike the entire Pacific Coast Trail, or its east coast counterpart, the Appalachian Trail. Robert Moor is one of the latter kind of people, and his experience "through-hiking" (start point to end point, not just doing the odd segment here or there) the Appalachian Trail inspired him to write On Trails. In it, he examines not only the trail he hiked (his experiences with it form a significant part of the book), but trails and paths the world over. Human trails, yes, but also ant trails, sheep trails, elephant trails, the entire idea behind trails and paths and what they signify.

Moor is committed to offering a broad perspective on trails and trail-making, and while his efforts to get across the long, long history of this behavior among living organisms (he recounts a trip to Canada where he goes to talk to scientists conducting research into the very first fossil evidence of trails among very small organisms) is laudable, this book as a whole is just terribly organized. If Moore doesn't have ADD, he does a very good impression of someone who has it. He's jumping all over the place constantly, from his through-hike to micro-organisms to ants to sheep now back to ants and then elephants you guys! Now some Native American trails and then back to another subject and everything is touched on briefly instead of explored in depth, and all of this together just drove me batty trying to get into it.

And the parts based around the Appalachian Trail and Moor's hike of it? Could not have been less interested. Navel-gazing outdoors-y memoirs do less than nothing for me. Congratulations, you undertook a challenging experience that you knew full well would be challenging going in and learned and grew and that's great for you, I wish you the best in your future endeavors, but I really don't care. I already didn't especially enjoy the book, but then we came to the Epilogue and holy smokes you guys, this sent me into an almost burning rage. Moor chronicles time spent hiking with a guy called "Nimblewill Norman", apparently something of a legend among serious hikers, who basically just abandoned everyone in his life and decided to be constantly hiking and has been doing so for years. While Moor doesn't present him in an entirely positive light, he gives him and what he represents (the kind of people who get all Holden Caulfield about how society is "fake" and they just need to be free from outside expectations at the monetary and emotional expense of everyone who's invested their time and energy into them) a kind of respect that it absolutely does not deserve. I hated Norman so much. And Moor also takes the opportunity in this section to repeat many of the often shallow and trite observations he made about paths and trails over the course of the book and getting all of that together completely destroyed any regard I might have had for it.

Now for a caveat: this was a book club selection, and I was essentially alone in that I did not like it. Most of the other members of the group at least liked it, and a couple of them outright loved it. It seemed like most of the rest of the group had a connection to hiking experiences and perhaps this is the source of some of the disconnect between book and reader on my part. As always, my impressions are my own and what I bring to and take away from the book might be extremely different than anyone else. That being said, I hated this and would heartily recommend avoiding it at all costs.

One year ago, I was reading: First

Two years ago, I was reading: The Book of Unknown Americans

Three years ago, I was reading: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Four years ago, I was reading: Chasing the Sun

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Book 231: On Trails

Book 224: The Color Of Water

"The question of race was like the power of the moon in my house. It's what made the river flow, the ocean swell, and the tide rise, but it was a silent power, intractable, indomitable, indisputable, and thus completely ignorable. Mommy kept us at a frantic living pace that left no time for the problem."

Dates read: April 11-14, 2018

Rating: 8/10

When we're little, parents are like gods. Their word is law. They take care of us, make sure we are clean and fed and loved. They have the magic to heal the ouchies. But eventually we find out that they're just people, after all. They have flaws, and scars, and demons of their own, and sometimes even when they do their best it doesn't work out. Realizing the humanity of your parents is a little bit scary and a little bit comforting.

When he was young, James McBride's mother, Ruth, wouldn't talk about her own life. He knew there was something different about her, but when he tried to figure out why he was the only black kid he knew with a white mom, she would brush him off by telling him she was light-skinned. Eventually, though, she relented and told him her story, of how a little girl born Jewish in Poland, the daughter of a rabbi, came to marry a black man, have eight kids, become a widow, marry another black man, have four more kids, and then become a widow again, leaving her with twelve children, all of whom graduated from college despite the family's poverty. McBride sets her story against his own recollections of his childhood in his memoir, The Color of Water.

They're both extraordinary stories: Ruth's for its sheer improbability, and James's for being the kind that you'd think would end up one way that actually ends another. James' story has plenty of struggle and heartbreak, but Ruth's is just heartbreaking. Everytime you think it can't get much worse for her, there's another twist and worse it gets. And somehow it ends well, with Ruth being the last in her family to finally get the chance to go to college and graduate and James as an acclaimed writer. It's a testament to resilience, of refusing to let your lowest moments define and drown you, of defying the voices that would dismiss you and discount your worth.

But it's also just very good writing. McBride's juxtaposition of his experience of his childhood against his mother's early life is balanced, neither story feels as though it is given the short shrift in favor of the other. He renders his mother's story in what feels like essentially her own words, not flinching from the difficult parts, of which there are many. Much of this is heavy stuff (interested potential readers should know there's sexual abuse, abortion, death, and racism herein), but while he doesn't sugar-coat it, neither does he dwell on it in the way that books about hard lives sometimes do. Ruth is a woman who came through a lot of terrible things and carved out happiness for herself in a world that did not want to give her any. And though he was raised with much more love and care than his mother was, McBride's own upbringing was still challenging and he managed to come through it, too.

Memoir can be a hit-and-miss category, for me. Not everyone's life story is all that dynamic or engaging for anyone outside of it, and even if it is, so much depends on the skill of the telling of it. But when executed well, as this is, it can be an enlightening window into a realm of experience outside of our own. I don't necessarily know that this is a book for every reader...there's a lot of darkness here, and while it does end well, there's not necessarily a sense of triumph and uplift to counterbalance it. For me, this is part of why this book works, because it doesn't seek to lionize its subjects or turn itself into a paint-by-numbers tale of conquering adversity, but for other readers that might be hard to deal with. But I do think it's a book that should be read, and I do recommend it, so if what I've written here intrigues you, definitely pick it up!

One year ago, I was reading: The Club

Two years ago, I was reading: Court Justice

Three years ago, I was reading: City of Thieves

Four years ago, I was reading: Sex with the Queen

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Book 224: The Color Of Water

Book 173: The Year of Magical Thinking

"If the dead were truly to come back, what would they come back knowing? Could we face them? We who allowed them to die? The clear light of day tells me that I did not allow John to die, that I did not have that power, but do I believe that? Does he?"

Dates read: August 29-31, 2017

Rating: 8/10

Lists/awards: National Book Award, The New York Times bestseller

I'm very lucky in many respects, and one of them is this: my entire nuclear family is more or less healthy and very much alive. My parents, my sister, my brother-in-law, my husband...I've never experienced that kind of loss. My mom had lost both of her parents by the time she was my age, which just blows my mind. Even now, I don't feel prepared to lose either of my parents, much less both of them. I know this will change, and one day I'll find myself having to say goodbye to people that I love dearly, but for now I'm grateful.

I was reminded of just how lucky I am when I read Joan Didion's memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking. In it, she recounts an incredibly terrible time: while their adult daughter Quintana is fighting for her life in the hospital, a normal-seeming winter cold somehow having progressed into pneumonia, septic shock, and coma, Joan and her husband John come home, and while she's getting things ready for dinner, he suddenly keels over, dead after a massive heart attack. She doesn't know that right at the moment it happens, of course. All she knows is that he falls, is non-responsive, she calls an ambulance, they try to resuscitate him, and then off to the ER. She finds out shortly after she arrives that he's gone. Forty years of marriage, and then he's gone just like that.

But she can't just focus dealing with the loss of her constant companion for decades (as professional writers, they both worked from home). Her daughter is still comatose, and Joan has to break the news to her not once but twice (she forgets when she falls back into a coma after being told the first time). Quintana does seem to recover, the funeral happens, and she flies back to California with her own husband...only to collapse again on her way out of the airport. Joan leaves her NYC apartment to head to LA to be there for her daughter, and is constantly buffeted by memories of her family's early, happy years in the area. Eventually Quintana recovers again, and Joan returns home, wrapping up her book a year and a day after her husband's death.

On the surface, there's very little in Joan Didion's life that I can relate to: she and her husband lived at a level of financial security where they made regular trips to Paris (their quibbling over what turned out to be their last trip, taken at John's insistence because he had a vague feeling that it might be his last chance is something Joan relates), they lived in LA for a time to write screenplays, they take daily walks in Central Park. And like I've said, I've never lived through the kind of awful experiences she recounts in this book. But she's an extremely talented writer, so her words spoke to me and tugged at my heart. She doesn't just tell you that grief takes you around in circles, she has motifs in her writing that pop up over and over again, taking you on that journey with her. You feel her agony when she thinks she's plotted her route around LA when she's there with Quintana to avoid anything that would remind her of when her husband was alive but she finds that she didn't plan carefully enough and the fragile scar tissue she's built up is battered by waves of memory.

It feels odd to say that I "enjoyed" reading a memoir about profound grief. But I found it incredibly compelling and difficult to put down even though it was hard to read. She really takes the reader on a journey with her. Knowing that even though she was alive at the end of the book, Quintana died shortly thereafter, made its impact even greater. I'd never read any of Didion's work before, but I picked up one of her novels and two of her essay collections after reading this book, because I wanted to read more of her writing. I'd recommend this book to anyone that feels like picking it up.

Tell me, blog friends...do you have to relate to a memoirist's experiences to get into their book?

One year ago, I was reading: Possession

Two years ago, I was reading: Stranger in a Strange Land

Three years ago, I was reading: Private Citizens

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Book 173: The Year of Magical Thinking

Book 167: Who Thought This Was A Good Idea?

"I loved being a part of an administration that I thought was making the country better, and I had an incredibly generous, kind, and helpful boss who I felt had not only my best interests at heart but also the entire nation's. Plus, when I traveled for work, I took Air Force One, which never got old, and instead of wasting time at boring conference centers I was doing things like eating goat in the courtyard of Hamid Karzai's palace. They wouldn't let me go inside because I was a woman and they didn't believe I was actually part of the senior staff that was cleared to go in, but still: not much is cooler."

Dates read: August 7-10, 2017

Rating: 7/10

I've been a woman working in politics for six years now. It's an interesting field, but it's hard. In lobbying, you have to constantly be juggling your client's expectations, your relationships with legislators and how much you can bother them before they get sick of seeing your face, and keeping coalition partners engaged and trying to figure out if they have another angle they're trying to work at the same time. When you add into that the necessity of waking up at 5:15 to make sure that I get into the office on time (it's a 40 minute commute, and committees start at 8, but we need to make sure we have time to get the day prepped) and not getting back until at least 6:00, if not later, most nights...I'm glad our state only has session every other year.

And session started this week, by pure coincidence of publishing schedule and reading order. Which means that it's the perfect time to review Alyssa Mastromonaco's Who Thought This Was A Good Idea?. Mastromonaco was the deputy chief of staff to President Obama, and the book is structured around various personal qualities she feels helped her rise in her field (leadership, preparedness, etc). As she talks about these concepts, she fills in details about her experiences in the political world, from interning with Bernie Sanders to working on the Kerry campaign, to getting her start in with Obama when he was a senator and staying with him through the presidential race and then into the White House. There are highs and there are lows, and there's even some romance (and a look at the gentler side of her husband, a former Harry Reid aide known, like his boss, for being caustic).

Mastromonaco is up front about why she wanted to write her book: while there are plenty of works out there from male political types talking about their time in public service, there are comparatively few by women. Part of that is because there haven't been as many women walking the hallways of power, but even among members of that group there's some reticence about being out there about what they've experienced. Mastromonaco wanted to write something honest about being a young person, and a young woman person specifically, living and working in a field not necessarily known for being welcoming to females. And honest she is: she talks openly about her IBS and dealing with it when traveling around the world with the President, being walked in on at the office doing sit-ups, coping with the death and illness of a pet, and the sleep/health destroying stress and pressure that come along with working in the nation's most exclusive address.

I really enjoyed reading this book! When I'd seen the press around the book before I read it, it was described as being as if you had a smart, funny older sister who happened to work closely with Barack Obama, and that's exactly what it is. Mastromonaco's voice is warm, droll, and strikes a great balance between downplaying her success and bragging about it. She owns that she worked really hard and sacrificed a lot to earn what she earned, and how frustrating it could be to deal with people who sometimes let themselves treat her like her youth and gender made her less worthy of their respect. As someone who also works in the general field (though nothing like DC, thank goodness), her words and experiences rang true to me. Politics is exciting and frustrating and there are some of best people who work in it, but also some of the worst. There's nothing quite as great as the feeling of pulling together with your team to get some really good work done and winning the day, but there are also the days when you go cry in the bathroom stall because there are just too many things happening at once and it's overwhelming.

If I was going to offer a critique, it would be that the timelines could get a little hard to keep track of, jumping back and forth from the later part of her time at the White House back to the campaign trail, then forward and then backward again. Organizing around subject areas keeps it cohesive, and by the time you get into the back half off the book it's more chronological, but there were some moments of confusion when I started to read it. Overall, though, it's a look at a side of political life that most people don't ever think about, much less get to see, and I think it would be a great read for anyone interested in what it's actually like to work in this crazy field. I would recommend it particularly highly to women, but men absolutely should read it too. It's a very solid book.

One year ago, I was reading: The Sellout

Two years ago, I was reading: Flowertown

Three years ago, I was reading: Creative Mythology

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Book 167: Who Thought This Was A Good Idea?

Book 166: Party Monster

"Oh, Angel was probably dead, all right. No big deal. Or maybe he was in the hospital. Who cared? They had probably been partying too hard and Angel overdosed. Happens all the time. People die around us all the time. Drop like flies. Overdose. AIDS. Sometimes they kill themselves. People come. They go. Dying is the same as rehab or moving back to Missouri. It just means I won't be seeing them again. New people were already in line to take their place."

Dates read: August 5-7, 2017

Rating: 5/10

I've never really gotten what makes drugs fun. I'm not a total square, I drink regularly and I've partaken in the occasional marijuana cigarette, but nothing really harder than that. I don't like feeling out of control. I'm already high-strung enough without the help of uppers. Even very low doses of pain or anxiety pills just make me sleep, which I do love to do, but I don't really classify as "fun". And the idea of seeing or feeling things that aren't there just seems more scary than anything else. Who knows, if I tried those things maybe I'd like them, and if other people do enjoy them, that's their business, but I generally feel like I'll be okay if I meet my maker (or don't, I don't know what happens after we die) without ever having tried cocaine.

Suffice it to say that when it comes to drugs, James St. James and I have different opinions. In his memoir of his days as a New York City club kid in the late 80s/early 90s, Party Monster, he gleefully recounts his experiences doing LOTS of drugs, with ketamine as a special favorite. But the drugs aren't really the focus of the book. The focus is really on the murder of Angel Melendez, a crime that marked the end of the reign of the Club Kids. It's not a who-dunnit, as the murderers, Michael Alig and Robert Riggs, are identified right at the beginning through Alig's own confession to St. James. We even know how and partially why. What's left is the context.

To give us that context, St. James tells his own story. An earlier arrival on the scene than Alig, St. James tells us how he came to occupy a fairly high rung on the social ladder of the nightclubbers, introducing us to the people whose asses he kissed to get there. Just a short while later, Alig arrived and St. James tells us how he at first watched and then became a friend and sort of mentor to Alig as the younger man engineered his own meteoric rise up the hierarchy. And part of what Alig brought with him, along with a new group of hangers-on, was drugs. Well, there were already drugs obviously. But more drugs, and harder ones. The kind that let two strung-out junkies, high on a cocktail of pills and their own sense of importance and untouchability, brutally murder a drug dealer, shove his body in the river, and carry on with their lives like they're going to get away with it. And they very nearly do: despite the fact that Melendez is a missing person and Alig and Riggs' involvement in his disappearance is an open secret in their community, it isn't until the body is found that the police actually take any action.

I've never been one to find substance abuse memoirs especially appealing...reading about someone's experiences taking a lot of drugs doesn't really do much for me. But St. James' arch, gossipy writing style makes it about as good as it can be. And while there's no doubt after reading it that he mostly enjoyed the experiences, he doesn't shy away from exposing the less glamorous side of it. Like groups of addicts ripping the radiator out of an apartment wall because they think they remember someone dropping a bag back there, a scene he renders darkly humorous while still exposing as pathetic. Indeed, it's St. James' strong writing that makes this book workable overall. 20somethings drinking and dancing and getting high out of their minds wearing weird costumes is something that seems like it would make a decent essay but would be tiresome at book length, and yet the way St. James tells his story makes it mostly pretty fun to read. This is not great literature, but it's an interesting, well-told account of a very particular time and place.

Tell me, blog friends...are drugs more fun than I think they are?

One year ago, I was reading: Lost Horizon

Two years ago, I was reading: Marlena

Three years ago, I was reading: Creative Mythology

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Book 166: Party Monster

Book 165: Butterfly Boy

"I want to tell him the truth. Yes, I know this story. He's told it to me at least three times, and each time he tells it he remembers more details. That's how my father lies, convincing himself more and more that what he's telling is fact, because fiction isn't this exact and memorable."

Dates read: August 2-5, 2017

Rating: 7/10

Since I've started tracking my reading for this blog, I've tracked particular categories. Fiction vs. nonfiction. Hard copy books vs. Kindle editions. And male vs. female authors. Like a lot of white people educated in predominantly white schools, I've been exposed constantly to white writers, usually male (my AP English teacher did make it a point to have us read works by black authors as well). I took it for granted until I started reading book blogs before I launched my own, and I started to really think about how many books I was reading that were written by dudes. I decided that I wanted to keep an eye on that metric...women are half the world, shouldn't we be telling half the stories?

Turns out, I often really like books written by women! And I've become more and more sensitive to the number of white and heterosexual (and cisgender and able, etc) narratives I read as well. Books force us to really think about people that don't look like us as people worth investing our time and energy in. And so I was intrigued when my book club chose Rigoberto Gonzalez's Butterfly Boy. I'll admit that I was initially concerned about finding something to relate to in this memoir of a gay Latino man's coming-of-age, but I realized how ridiculous that was very quickly. What there is to relate to is the experience of being a human growing up. Although the details of Gonzalez's childhood and adolescence are very different than mine, the broad themes are very similar: trying to figure out who you are and who you want to be, struggling with your relationships with your parents, finding yourself in unhealthy relationships. There's a reason the coming-of-age genre is so popular: everyone's gone through it, so everyone can relate.

Gonzalez centers his narrative around a bus trip he takes with his father to his maternal grandparents' village in Mexico. Gonzalez, at this time a college student, has just had another ugly, violent fight with his lover and reflects on this relationship as well as his life growing up, particularly his conflicted relationship with the man he's traveling with. It's a harsh life he's led: the family's poverty keeps them rootless, chasing unskilled labor jobs, constantly living with relatives to keep a roof over their heads. Their time living with his paternal grandparents is especially bad: his grandfather is physically abusive and rules the home through fear. Gonzalez knows fairly early on that he's gay, and while his sexuality is mostly a topic avoided by his family, his mother encourages him to hide it from his father, so he lives in a constant state of shame and suppression.

Gonzalez's writing is really beautiful, even as he describes brutal violence and searing embarrassment. He mostly avoids telling the reader who people are (himself, his father, his mother) in favor of showing who they are through their own words and actions. When, early in the book, Gonzalez gives his father money for two first-class bus tickets and the older man returns with two coach tickets, overriding his son's decision about how to spend his own money, we can tell what kind of person he is. By the time Gonzalez gets to the end of his story, we understand how the ways he's been taught to hate himself leave him vulnerable to a relationship in which he's treated with contempt. This would probably be a very difficult book to read for people with a history of domestic violence, but I'd recommend it for other readers. Regardless of your background, there's a story here that's very worth reading.

Tell me, blog friends...do you think about who writes the books you read?

One year ago, I was reading: Mansfield Park

Two years ago, I was reading: Helter Skelter

Three years ago, I was reading: Creative Mythology

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Book 165: Butterfly Boy

Book 154: The Year of Living Biblically

"The Bible says thou shalt not steal; I stole my neighbor's wireless signal. And now I'm limping around the house with a bum knee."

Dates read: June 21-24, 2017

Rating: 6/10

I read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a senior in high school and remember being shocked at how many n-bombs there were. I'd heard the word used by white people maybe a handful of times in my life to that point (not that there weren't racists in my very white town, there were plenty, but they kept that kind of talk out of the public sphere) and here it was just all over this work of classic literature. The book tends to inspire challenges and protests for this very reason, and I'm definitely speaking from a place of privilege here, but I don't agree with campaigns to produce a version that has it censored out. All historical documents are a product of their time and place and working with that context is an important part of thinking critically about the world.

The Bible, for instance, is a historical document. The Old Testament dates back to hundreds of years before Christ, and the New Testament to within 100 years after his death. It's a holy book, but it's also the product of two distinct time periods, both very long ago. It's filled with rules, both specific and vague, that reflect the world of nomadic, desert-dwelling herding people rather than the world in which most Judeo-Christian people live today. Writer A.J. Jacobs decided to see what it would be like to actually try to live by these rules in the modern world in his book, The Year of Living Biblically. As Jacobs is a secular Jewish husband and father in New York City, wackiness ensues.

He's no stranger to offbeat projects...he'd previously written a book about his experience of reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica. But when he was doing prep work for this book and realized that the Bible contains over 700 rules, ranging from very specific things like fiber-mixing and beard trimming prohibitions to very general things like restraining from covetousness, he decided to focus on the Ten Commandments first and tackle as many of the others as he could, because he knew he couldn't do all of them every day. He also seeks out people who are devoted to their religious beliefs in their own ways, leading to a visit to Amish Country, the Creation Museum, to see snakehandling Pentecostals, and even an overseas trip to Jerusalem. This on top of a regular job writing for Esquire, parenting a small son, and being a partner to his pregnant wife.

Jacobs is witty without being snarky, which is a good tone for this book. There's sometimes a tendency among secular types to get condescending about matters of religious faith and belief, which is counter-productive at best. He admits that since he's deeply agnostic, one of the hardest rules for him to follow is regular prayer, but he gamely tries anyways and is honest about both his initial discomfort and the ease that grows after months of practice. After having a hard time, in a hyperconnected world, retreating into the quiet of the Sabbath, he comes to look forward to that time to unwind and recharge. While he can't quite get into the harshness of parenting his son from a "spare the rod, spoil the child" perspective, he knows he needs to be better about discipline and he starts taking steps in the right direction.

I found this book enjoyable, if a little on the lightweight side. Although it's necessarily from Jacobs' perspective, I found myself really curious about how his wife felt about this particular experiment and what it was like to live with someone doing this. It's pretty clear from what Jacobs writes that his wife was often irritated by the project, and his frequent absences while leaving her with their son to handle while she was pregnant with twins had to be absolutely infuriating. Then again, that Jacobs seemed to simply expect her to shoulder the mental and emotional burden of dealing with his choices isn't really out of line with the very patriarchal culture in which the Bible was steeped. Recommended for people curious about religion and/or with a sense of humor about their own.

Tell me, blog friends...do you think it's valuable to look at books through their cultural context?

One year ago, I was reading: The Underground Railroad

Two years ago, I was reading: What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

Three years ago, I was reading: Primitive Mythology

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Book 154: The Year of Living Biblically

Book 142: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

"Beth and I are still thinking it's too early to leave Toph with anyone but family, that to do otherwise would cause him to feel unwanted and alone, leading to the warping of his fragile psyche, then to experimentation with inhalants, to the joining of some River's Edge kind of gang, too much flannel and too little remorse, the cutting of his own tats, the drinking of lamb's blood, the inevitable initiation-fulfilling murder of Beth and me in our sleep. So when I go out, once a week, on a day Beth and I have chosen together, Toph gets his things together, stuffs them into his backpack, uses both straps, and walks over to her house and spends the night on half of her futon." 

Date read: April 24- May 1, 2017

Rating: 4/10

Lists/Awards: New York Times Bestseller

By the time she was my age, my mom had already lost both of her parents. My grandmother died when my mom was just 25, and my grandfather had a massive heart attack in his sleep when she was in her early 30s. My dad, on the other hand, didn't lose his first parent until he was just about 50 and his second only earlier this year. I can't even imagine what it must have been like to lose two parents by my age like my mom did. My parents are still a big part of my life and there's so much more still to share with them.

Dave Eggers, though, had it worse than anyone I personally know. He lost both of his parents, to cancer, one just about a month after the other, when he was only a senior in college. In his memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Eggers recounts those deaths and his subsequent guardianship of his 8 year-old brother, Toph. The Eggers brothers leave their Illinois home behind and move to the Bay Area, in part to stay close to their older sister Beth, and in part for career opportunities for Dave as he tries to get a new magazine, Might, off the ground while also trying to figure out how to raise a child.

Before I even picked this book up, I was aware that it seems to inspire strong feelings. Some people HATE it and some people think it's magnificent. How you will receive this book depends entirely on how you feel about Eggers' writing. If you think his stream-of-consciousness, wildly tangential, constantly-on-the-verge-of-a-panic-attack style of narrative is great, you'll think this book is amazing. If, however, you want a straightforward, relatively linear narrative, you will think this is the worst thing you've ever read.

It feels beside the point to talk about story structure, because there isn't really any (it's very hard to tell how fast time is passing and there aren't really narrative beats to speak of), or character development, because there isn't really any of that either. Even for a memoir, a sense of story and character tend to be important, but neither is a priority for Eggers. While I'm usually fairly open to nontraditional narrative, this book is 100% style over substance. The most compelling part, for me, was the relationship between Dave and Toph, and Dave wrestling with both his fierce love and concern for his brother and his acknowledged resentment of being prematurely thrust into a parental role. However, I mostly found it tiresome. It held my attention inconsistently at best, I was usually bored long before a particular side riff was over. Eggers' flaw isn't that he's wildly self-absorbed (I think memoir is an inherently self-absorbed form since it's literally assuming that your own life is so compelling that other people want to read about it), but that he's not nearly as interesting as he thinks he is. I wouldn't recommend this book, but I wouldn't tear it out of anyone's hands and I can understand why some people really respond to it. I just didn't.

Tell me, blog friends...do you think your life is interesting enough to write a book about?

One year ago, I was reading: Mildred Pierce

Two years ago, I was reading: Wild Bill Donovan

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Book 142: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Book 129: A Leg To Stand On

"And in that instant, I no longer knew it. In that instant, that very first encounter, I knew not my leg. It was utterly strange, not-mine, unfamiliar. I gazed upon it with absolute non-recognition...The more I gazed at that cylinder of chalk, the more alien and incomprehensible it appeared to me. It seemed to bear no relation whatever to me. It was absolutely not-me—and yet, impossibly it was attached to me—and even more impossibly, 'continuous' with me." 

Dates read: February 26-March 2, 2017

Rating: 7/10

When I was in college, I quite often used a shortcut to get back to my apartment after a night at the bars. It was a short, dark path than ran next to a parking garage. I almost never saw anyone back there. A few times I saw some homeless people, but no one ever tried to stop me or talk to me. Thinking back on it, it sounds like the beginning of a horror film: a young, drunk, small college student walks down a secluded path into the dark. But it never occurred to me to be afraid. And, obviously, nothing ever happened.

We often feel impervious to danger until something happens to frighten us. In his memoir A Leg To Stand On, Oliver Sacks recalls a time in his life that began with a hike on a solo trip to Norway. Sacks was an adult man who frequently traveled and was in excellent physical condition, so the idea of going for a hike alone didn't phase him in the least. It wasn't until a chance encounter with a bull during the hike lead to a fall that drastically injured one of his legs that he realized how very precarious his situation was. The leg was incapable of bearing any weight. No one knew where he was. It would get dangerously cold at night, and the path was little-traveled enough that he very well might not be found until it was too late. Somehow, miraculously, he managed to get himself back down the hill where he was discovered by locals. But that was just the beginning of his tale.

After surgery to repair the grave damage to his leg, he woke up to feel as though that leg wasn't really his. It was like the opposite of phantom limb syndrome: instead of feeling as though a limb that had been amputated was still there, Sacks felt like his existing limb wasn't a part of his body. His recovery, both from the underlying injury and the neurological symptoms, make him, for the first time since he'd become a doctor, a patient. He finds himself feeling meek and helpless, and even though his situation wasn't contagious, he's treated as though his suffering might be.

Eventually, he did recover, and continued to be physically active and practice neurology and write books. But it's not hard to imagine that this experience of being a patient helped inform the compassion in his work. Writing case studies is a delicate balance: there can be an exploitative edge to it, the feeling that the writer is mining suffering for their own pecuniary gain. But for my money, Sacks' works never come off that way. The things that come across clearly are his endless curiosity for how the brain works, how symptoms can be treated, and a respect for the fundamental humanity of the people he worked with and tried to help. Which is why I've been such a big fan of his books, and why I'm a little sad each time I finish one because I know it means there's one more that I'll never again get to experience for the first time. I found this one in particular a fascinating medical memoir, and a moving meditation on the experience of being a patient. I would definitely recommend it, especially for anyone who works in the medical field.

Tell me, blog friends...have you ever realized how unsafe something you did unthinkingly was?

One year ago, I was reading: If We Were Villains

Two years ago, I was reading: We Need To Talk About Kevin

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Book 129: A Leg To Stand On

Book 125: Between The World And Me

"You must resist the urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children."

Dates read: February 9-11, 2017

Rating: 10/10

Lists/Awards: National Book Award

Reading has many different purposes. One of the primary ones is entertainment, to take your mind off the things that are weighing on you and activate your imagination. Another is knowledge, the deepen and enrich your understanding about the world around you. And another is to challenge you. To make you see things from a new perspective, to force you to reconsider your assumptions about the way things are. A book doesn't have to fit just one, many get at least two or even all three and more besides. But I think to the extent practicable, it's a good idea to try to make sure your reading touches all of them.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a writer that I find challenging. He's incredibly talented and smart, but he pushes back against the way I'm inclined to view the world left to my own devices. Which are, of course, rooted in my own experience. It's easy to forget that the way you see and interact with the world (and the way it sees and interacts with you) isn't universal. Which is why I was really excited when my book club chose as a selection Coates' lauded Between The World And Me. It's a book I'd been meaning to read and that I was glad I had an excuse to force it upwards on my reading list.

Coates structures the book as a pair of letters addressed to his son. Part memoir and part social commentary, Coates relates his experiences growing up as a black man in America, filtered through the lens of trying to impart the lessons that his son will need to stay safe. Between The World And Me focuses intensely on the body, and the ways that the bodies of black people have been used to fuel the American Dream for white people. It's a startling thing to read about in writing as powerful as Coates' is: what it must feel like to always feel like your body is at the risk of being broken.

As a relatively attractive woman, I'm familiar with the feeling of a body that doesn't quite belong to me alone, that others (and by that, I mean men) feel like belongs to them in a particular way. But it's use, rather than breaking, that's usually at issue there. Coates makes the feeling of constantly knowing that your body, and the bodies of those that you love, are targets for violence and rage simply for existing, visceral and real. Coates' love of and fear for his son, his desperate desire to somehow protect him from a world that will see him as a threat simply by virtue of his existence as a black man, is palpable.

This book has become a must-read for white liberals who want to learn more about race relations, a group into which I myself fall. I read an article before I read the book where Coates himself addressed the way his book has been received and expressed some frustration about being constantly asked about how he feels about the way white people have reacted to it. He wrote the book after a friend was murdered by the police, but the conversation hasn't been about police brutality. It's been about how to help white people better understand race. That should be a wake-up call, fellow Caucasians. It's not the job of people of color to make it easier for us to understand what they go through, especially when there is plenty of literature, like this book, that will help us to that work on our own.

Tell me, blog friends...do you think it matters who the author's intended audience is when they write a book?

One year ago, I was reading: The Children of Henry VIII

Two years ago, I was reading: Dune

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Book 125: Between The World And Me

Book 123: Orange Is The New Black

"It was a weird place, the all-female society with a handful of strange men, the military-style living, the predominant 'ghetto' vibe (both urban and rural) through a female lens, the mix of every age, from silly young girls to old grandmas, all thrown together with varying levels of tolerance. Crazy concentrations of people inspire crazy behavior."

Dates read: February 2-6, 2017

Rating: 7/10

My mother is a pharmacist, but she was also a single parent to my sister and I. Most retail pharmacy jobs require nights and weekends, which were a no-go, so she worked for the State. Which meant working mostly in prisons and psychiatric facilities. Pharmacists have relatively little interaction with the prisoner population, but she still had interesting stories about what it was like to work on the inside. Now that I'm an adult, I can't imagine how weird it must have been to go to jail every day, Monday through Friday, as her job.

But of course, there's a world of difference between working at a prison and living inside of one. Piper Kerman's memoir, Orange Is The New Black, chronicles the latter: just about a year of doing time at a minimum security women's prison in New England. This book was the basis of the Netflix show of the same name, but it's a very different piece of media. Like any memoir, it's rooted in the author's personal experience. So while many of the characters, and even some of the incidents, will be familiar to those who watch the show, the book is really all about Piper.

Which, for me at least, worked just fine. She doesn't spend much time dwelling on her crime, but rather focuses her attention on what it actually means to be a prisoner. What comes through the most strongly is the dehumanization, going from being a person with autonomy to a number at the mercy of the system. There's virtually no privacy, there are strip searches required for every visit with someone from the outside world, the smallest concessions are subject to the capricious whims of prison officials. While many of the women are due to be released relatively soon, there's no meaningful rehabilitation or real preparation to be re-integrated into the outside world.

It really makes you think about what the point of prison actually is. Kerman's case, in particular, was a crime that was nearly a decade behind her by the time she actually saw the inside of a cell. She had long since ceased to be a threat to society, so protecting the world from her by putting her away clearly wasn't the point. The near-total neglect of actual education or career prep that might enable women to be able to quickly secure a job that might keep them out of the kinds of situations that landed them in prison in the first place shows that rehabilitation isn't what's going on. Our ever-growing prison population shows that deterrence isn't working. So it's just punitive then. And what point does that actually serve? Do most people feel like it's a moral victory to imprison low-level drug offenders, with all the costs that it entails?

Kerman is a good writer, and is more sympathetic than her television portrayal would suggest. She accepts her guilt for her crime, and while she's certainly surprised and upset that her brief stint with crime comes back to haunt her years later, once she's gotten used to the idea, she's mostly regretful about the impact it has on her family and loved ones. She takes the reader inside a world that most of us won't ever experience, and renders it with empathy and humor. This is a solid read, and as long as you're not expecting it to be just like the show, I'd definitely recommend it.

Tell me, blog friends...do you anyone that's ever been incarcerated?

One year ago, I was reading: Moonglow

Two years ago, I was reading: Suspicious Minds

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Book 123: Orange Is The New Black

Book 85: Life Itself

"Every time I see a dog in a movie, I think the same thing: I want that dog. I see Skip or Lucy or Shiloh and for a moment I can't even think about the movie's plot. I can only think about the dog. I want to hold it, pet it, take it for walks, and tell it what a good dog it is. I want to love it, and I want it to love me."

Dates read: August 30- September 4, 2016

Rating: 8/10

When I joined Twitter, what feels like a million years ago, I joined for one reason: to follow Roger Ebert. I've loved movies for years, and there were no one else's reviews I enjoyed reading like Ebert's. He had a way of honing in on the essential truth about a film with understanding and eloquence. When I started reading his blog that he wrote after cancer complications took his physical voice, he brought the same style to his reflections on life. I know there's this showy public mourning that goes on when someone famous dies, but when Ebert passed, I felt a real sense of loss that I'd never be able to read something new from him again. Before he was gone, though, he wrote an autobiography: Life Itself. It was made into a documentary, which I watched but didn't think was particularly special. But I bought the book, hoping it would be better. And for me, it was. Not only was it better, it was wonderful.

Life Itself is structured loosely chronologically, beginning with Ebert's family history and going through to when he was near the end of his life and knew it. The first few chapters, which detail how his ancestors came to the United States and his parents' upbringings as well as his own early years, are probably the weakest. While most of us are interested in these details for ourselves and sometimes our loved ones, reading about someone else's is not exactly captivating stuff. Once Ebert gets to his own life, though, the book really finds its footing and takes off. He recounts his life with insight but largely without excess sentimentality: his father's early death and his mother's alcoholism, his experiences on the college paper at the University of Illinois, his journalism career, his international travel, his own alcoholism, the joy he found with his wife Chaz, his relationship with Gene Siskel, his meetings with prominent actors and directors, and his own insistence on an aggressive course of cancer treatment that likely lost him his jaw and ability to speak. He clearly knew that this book was his last chance to put his own story out there and it's obvious that he didn't want to squander the opportunity. Given that he spent his final years in a painful and uncomfortable situation, it's remarkable how little bitterness his writing contains. Instead, he uses his last testament to to reflect on a full life, with all the moments of joy and sorrow it contained. 

If you're thinking about reading this book, you're probably already interested in Roger Ebert and his writing. But if you haven't, I recommend going to his blog (still online) and browsing around a little. If you like what you find and enjoy autobiography/memoir style books, this will likely be a win for you. If that's not something that intrigues you, you may appreciate the writing but find it a largely pointless exercise to read. For me, I found it moving and a likely future re-read, but I could completely understand if it's not for everyone.

Tell me, blog friends...who would you like to read an autobiography of?

One year ago, I was reading: The Shipping News

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Book 85: Life Itself

Book 76: Reading Lolita in Tehran

"The worst crime committed by totalitarian mind-sets is that they force their citizens, including their victims, to become complicit in their crimes. Dancing with your jailer, participating in your own execution, that is an act of utmost brutality."

Read: August 3-7, 2016

Rating: 7/10

I was allowed to read pretty much whatever I wanted growing up. Which was awesome! My mom definitely encouraged my sister and I to read whatever we liked, which often meant things she wouldn't have picked out for us (my brief Lois Duncan phase comes to mind), but it was more important to her that we were reading and enjoying it than that she put a lid on what we wanted to read. I've always been suspicious of people who want to exercise a lot of control over what other people read. Sure, there are some books that have themes that are more mature and younger readers might benefit from being able to talk about, but books are just books. They develop your imagination, hone your curiosity, open you up to experiences outside your own. What's so bad about that?

Totalitarian regimes tend to believe everything about that is bad. An uninformed, incurious population is much easier to control. Theocracies, too, tend to be interested in suppression of alternate ideas. So a totalitarian theocracy, like the modern-day Republic of Iran, is doubly suspicious of books. So when native Iranian but American-educated former university professor Azar Nafisi starts teaching Western literary classics to a small group of past students in her home, she's doing more than assembling a book club with promising young minds. She can't even get enough black market copies of Lolita for everyone to have one...some of the girls use photocopies to read from.

Nafisi uses four major works of the literary canon as lenses through which to tell her story: the titular Lolita, The Great Gatsby, Daisy Miller, and Pride and Prejudice. She touches relatively briefly on her childhood in Iran, her emigration to the United States to study, and her brief, unhappy first marriage followed by her second, much better one. The book spends much more time discussing life when she returns to Iran with her husband and begins teaching as the Islamic Revolution unfolds, and the restrictions on female and literary life under the ayatollahs.

Nafisi has a unique perspective on the Islamic Revolution as both insider (she was born and spent a large portion of her childhood in Iran, and married a fellow Persian and moved back) and outsider (she spent her early adulthood in the United States and got a Western education before she came back). It's fascinating and horrifying to read about how women's roles and rights were pushed back and back as time went on...Nafisi is never run out of the workplace per se, but she is threatened with an anonymous note and was subject to constant harassment over not wearing her headscarf properly, and eventually decides that continuing to teach is more trouble than it's worth. As she watches her students struggle to make their own lives and raises her daughter, it becomes obvious to her that she can't stay in Iran even though she doesn't want to leave, either.

It's useful to come in with a working comprehension of the novels Nafisi focuses on, since she discusses them and how their themes relate to situations she deals with at length. I'd read three of the four coming in (no Daisy Miller for me), and while it's certainly possible to understand the book without the literary references, it's definitely richer and deeper if you can follow along. For the most part I enjoyed the way she used the focus novels, though I did get a little irritated in the section on Lolita when she claimed repeatedly that she wasn't comparing the ayatollahs to Humbert and Iranian women to Lolita and then went on to do just that over and over. I think it's an interesting and valid way to look at Lolita, but if you're going to go there don't pretend that's not what you're trying to do. On the whole, though, it's a very interesting memoir, especially for a bookish audience!

Tell me, blog friends...have you read all four of the classics that Nafisi uses in this book?

One year ago, I was reading: The Witches of Eastwick

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Book 76: Reading Lolita in Tehran

Top Ten Tuesday: Things That Will Instantly Make Me NOT Want To Read A Book

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week's topic is the opposite of last week's...rather than the things that make us intrigued when we're thinking about picking up a book, it's the things that make us put that book back down.

Mystery/Thriller: Remember how last week I was talking about my preference for character-heavy rather than plot-heavy books? While there are certainly mysteries and thrillers with fantastic character building and/or that I've enjoyed immensely, I've tried enough out that were duds that I tend to shy away from the genre unless it comes highly recommended.

Romance: The kind of tropes that tend to give a story with romance at its center its drama...the misunderstandings that could be sorted out with honest conversation, meddling side players like friends and family who try to get in the middle of things, big lies to cover up small mistakes, are just exhausting to me in real life. I have no desire to read about them in print.

A "boy becomes a man" storyline: Maybe it's just because I grew up in a family full of women, but stories focused on a specifically male experience of growing up (usually involving violence and/or repression) are so boring to me.

Memoir: This one, I'll admit, is odd. I love reading personal blogs and I love stories about people, but an entire book about a not-otherwise-remarkable person always makes me wonder why I'm supposed to care.

Avant-garde: I'm willing to give a little bit on certain things (like the way Blindness uses no quotation marks), but I hate Hunter S. Thompson and writers who are weird just for the sake of being weird.

Sparse: If a writer is described as Hemingway-esque, that's usually a sure sign I'll hate it. I like adjectives, thank you very much. I want to be immersed in a world when I read, not have to try to fill in all the color and interest on my own.

Poetry: I like the occasional poem here and there, but as a whole, poetry doesn't much speak to me. It's just never been a form I've particularly enjoyed.

Warfare: A book full of descriptions of troops and maneuvers is a book I have little interest in reading. I skimmed the portions of War and Peace and Vanity Fair that were just war stuff because snore.

Characters described as "quirky": I am so deeply over the tendency, especially for female characters, to give them a collection of quirks instead of an actual personality. But even for dudes, it's tiresome. 

Philosophical: This is an issue I've run into with some sci-fi (I'm looking at you, Dune and Stranger in a Strange Land) and some classics, where it's less about a story with a plot and characters and more about expressing the author's view of the world as it is/should be. It gets old fast for me. 

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Top Ten Tuesday: Things That Will Instantly Make Me NOT Want To Read A Book

Book 68: Under The Tuscan Sun

"On my way out, I see a man in a sweater, despite the heat. The trunk of his minuscule Fiat is piled with black grapes that have warmed all morning in the sun. I'm stopped by the winy, musty, violet scents. He offers me one. The hot sweetness breaks open in my mouth. I have never tasted anything so essential in my life as this grape on this morning. They even smell purple."

Dates read: July 7-12, 2016

Rating: 5/10

I am super fortunate: not only have I been able to travel internationally, but I've been to Italy three times. I don't think there's any way to say it that doesn't sound like humblebragging, but my mom has always valued traveling with my sister and I, so she's been generous enough to take us on family vacations. The first time I went was Florence and Rome, the second was just Florence, and about a year and a half ago we went to Sorrento. Of the places I've been, Florence is my favorite. Tuscany is an incredible place and I hope I get to go back someday.

Even if I never do go back, though, I feel incredibly lucky to I've been able to go to Tuscany at all. But it's one level of privilege to be able to visit briefly. It's a whole other level to be able to buy property over there and actually live there for parts of the year. But what some of us can only dream of, others are able to make happen and Frances Mayes' Under the Tuscan Sun recounts her experiences buying and renovating a farmhouse in Cortona, Italy, and the first years she spent with it as her Christmas and summer home.

First things first: the movie (which I've never seen) is apparently not a strict adaptation of the book. While in both cases Frances' divorce from an apparently very wealthy man (she mentions it only vaguely in the book) is what enables her to purchase the home, the movie apparently gives her a hot new Italian man to mend her broken heart. In reality/the book, she is already happily remarried by the time she decides to start looking for a summer home in Italy. Let me stress that again: they have the means to start searching for a summer home in ITALY. If rich white people doing home renovation, eating food, and contemplating their navels is not your deal, this book will not be for you. I've seen rather a lot of negative reviews focused on the premise that the book is not like the movie and/or annoyed that it's about nothing more than wealthy people doing construction and eating.

There are reasons I found the book to be a mixed bag (hence the very middle of the road rating), but they don't have anything to do with either the lack of romance or the privilege. Well, sort of the latter, I guess, because my biggest beef with the book is that there isn't really any conflict. Story structure has remained remarkably consistent over recorded history, which means there are clearly elements that are naturally appealing to people when they're taking in a tale. One of the fundamental pieces of a story is conflict: we want to see our protagonists struggle with obstacles. Frances...doesn't, really. She obliquely mentions that things are expensive, but there's never any indication she has to scrimp or save or go without in order to afford them. She and her husband do a lot of DIY to fix the place up, but the impression is that they enjoy doing it, and don't need to do it for money's sake. It all just seems to roll along...they find the house, they buy it, they do gradual repairs, they start spending a lot of time there, they make new friends, and they're happy. Which must be lovely to experience, but pretty boring to read about.

What saves it from being a total snooze is the writing. Mayes is a poet, and it shows. It's beautifully written, and the way she writes lets you see with your mind's eye the lawn at Bramasole with the bright yellow table she had painted, loaded with fresh and simple but delicious food, looking out on the olive trees and flowers and rolling hills. There's an enjoyable element of wish fulfillment fantasy...very very few people will ever get to live the kind of dreamy life she shows us (I have no doubt there were and are less wonderful elements behind the scenes, but she doesn't go into them), so it gives us a window into what seems like an incredible experience. But I had trouble focusing on it because I was honestly mostly bored after about the first 100 pages or so.

Tell me, blog friends...have you ever been to Italy?

One year ago, I was reading: To Die For

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Book 68: Under The Tuscan Sun

Book 58: Spinster

"It's true that the per capita divorce rate has dropped from its all-time peak in 1981 of about 5.3 divorces per 1,000 people- but even so, today nearly half of all marriages end in divorce. It's amazing, really, how deftly we hold in our collective consciousness this disconnect between what we want marriage to be and how so many marriages actually turn out. Freedom is unbearable. We opt again and again for the sugarcoated confinement of matrimony, a promise that life will work out just the way we want it- without that promise, false as it may be, the institution's many encumbrances might be impossible to bear."

Dates read: June 1-5, 2016

Rating: 6/10

This is probably strange to hear from a newlywed, but sometimes I find myself missing my single life. Not the dating part, that part sucked. I love my husband and he's just the best and I'm the luckiest that we found each other. But the part where I had total control over my own life. Where I did pretty much only what I wanted to do, whenever I wanted to, and slept on the whole bed all by myself whenever I wanted to go to sleep, and could stay up reading until 2 AM without worrying about keeping the person next to me awake. Where I put something down in my apartment and found it exactly where I left it. Where no one else used the last of the toilet paper and forgot to replace the roll. I don't want to go back to it all the time, most of the time, or even frequently. But every once in a while, I miss the complete autonomy of single life.

I'm not alone: my married/coupled up friends cop to the exact same feelings sometimes, no matter how happy their relationships. And it's just that kind of longing for a life lived accountable ultimately to only herself that drove the writing of Kate Bolick's Spinster. Once a neutral term for an unmarried woman, it's come to have pejorative connotations, implying a woman alone past her prime, probably with cats. It's always cats, those old witchy familiars, that seem to accompany jibes about older single women.

Bolick's book takes us through her life as the daughter of an accomplished and driven woman who got started chasing her dreams late because (like many women of her generation) she got married and had children pretty young. As Bolick serial-monogamies her way through her high school, college, and early adulthood, she finds herself drawn to fellow female writers (like Edna St. Vincent Millay and Edith Wharton, who she deems her influencers) who dared to live the way Bolick herself was increasingly intrigued by: alone. She ends her seemingly marriage-bound long term relationship and spends her 30s trying to figure out what she wants out of life. She experiences various employment scenarios within her field as a writer, finds herself in different living situations, and she dates around, exploring how her influencers lived and how their lives relate to her own situations.

First things first: Bolick is an engaging and talented writer. If she weren't, I wouldn't have enjoyed this book even as much as I did. Which wasn't especially much, to be honest, because this kind of personal memoir is just not the kind of thing I enjoy. Going in, I thought it would be personally focused but also take a broader sociological look at the increasingly large number of unmarried women and how that phenomenon is changing our culture at large. But I suppose I'll have to get my hands on a copy of All The Single Ladies for that, because Spinster touches only extremely briefly on anything outside of her life and the lives of her inspirations. Like with many of these kinds of books, I found myself wondering when I finished it why I'm supposed to care, exactly, about the apartments Bolick lives in or her love life or her professional struggles. Her writing was enjoyable enough to keep my attention, but at the end I found myself wondering what was the actual point of anything I'd just read. I realize the irony of this coming from a woman who starts almost every review with a personal tidbit or anecdote. I do actually read several personal blogs, and I think I would have enjoyed reading something like this over a period of time in a format like that, broken down into smaller posts and spaced out a little. But taken all together it's hard not to see it as self-indulgent navel-gazing, no matter how well-written it is. If personal memoirs are a kind of writing you enjoy, this would be a solid pickup for you. If not, though, I didn't think it was good enough to transcend its genre.

Tell me, blog friends...are you coupled or single? Do you ever envy people in the other position?

One year ago, I was reading: Thirst

**I received a free copy of this book from the publisher, Random House Crown, through Blogging for Books in exchange for a fair and honest review**

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Book 58: Spinster