A scary book, just in time for Halloween

I'm a few pages away from finishing the scariest book. I know what they mean now when they talk about not being able to look away, because as scary as it was, I just had to keep reading. The book was about a world where these large faceless corporations were in total control. Somehow, many of the people that lived there were unaware of this. The people at the bottom were forced to do dirty, backbreaking work with toxic chemicals for pennies. The people at the top were manipulated and controlled into working long hours to give most of their money to these corporations in exchange for the things made from these toxic chemicals.

What's the worst part of this story? It's a nonfiction book, and it's about you and me. The Story of Stuff, by Annie Leonard, tells the tale of all the mundane items we're surrounded with, how they're made from carcinogenic chemicals and resources extracted at great price by poor people. She shows how we're manipulated into buying more and more, through planned obsolescence and advertising, and how our so-called durable goods have been so complex that no one can fix them when they break. She shows how most of the Stuff we own is generally thrown out fairly quickly, how we've poisoned the earth and trampled on people in third-world countries to obtain all this crap that never really goes "away" once we kick it to the curb.

Leonard does a good job of portraying how we're all sort off caught in a web. She doesn't aim to make an individual feel bad, because there's no real way to be "good" in this sort of system. No way to avoid consuming the carcinogenic chemicals that are in virtually everything we buy. No way to truly reduce your environmental impact to zero.

And yet, throughout the book, she continually offers alternatives and shows signs of hope. A flooring giant has begun taking responsibility for its products through its entire life, offering a sort of "tile" model for its carpets, since anyone who's recarpeting is really just looking to address the worn portion where the traffic pattern was, and the parts that were under furniture usually still look decent. They also experiment with renting carpets to offices the way they rent copiers: the company will service it and replace it when it's worn. A professor has developed the GoodGuide to help people consume better.

Other people are simply realizing that buying all that crap is stupid and choosing to define themselves more as parents, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, Kiwanis members, hikers, literacy volunteers, Catholics, etc. than as Gap shoppers, iPhone users, Balenciaga devotees, etc. It's a growing trend, coinciding neatly with the recession and people's reduced ability to buy crap. Also, the people in Third World countries that always get dumped on are beginning to fight back. Leonard calls Bhopal the "resistance capital of the world" as its residents continue to agitate to force Union Carbide to clean up its mess. Leonard writes of working with communities in Haiti to force the city of Philadelphia to take back its incinerated garbage ash from its beach (incinerated garbage ash is loaded with toxic heavy metals and carcinogens).

This is a very difficult book to read, not mentally, but emotionally. And heaven help you if you have to buy shampoo or anything in the middle of it. I had to, at the end of a very long workday, with no time to research how bad the product I planned to buy was. I wound up just getting what I always getting, washing my hair with it next to my toxic PVC shower curtain, drying it with a dryer probably made by Third World people forced off their land into factories, then laying my head down on my toxin-laden pillow, pulling the sheets dyed with carcinogenic chemicals over my head, and curling up next to my toxin-laden mate with my toxin-laden cat.

That's how you'll start to look at everything. When I went into work the next day, it was hard not to warn my co-workers against getting their cans of pop from the vending machines. (Aluminum cans, along with PVC, are the things Leonard tagged as "stupid stuff" that are so costly and dangerous and pointless, they should just be eliminated. I wanted to scream, "Don't you know how they made those!" but of course, they probably don't).

But it's definitely an important book. It's one everyone should read, because I don't see how you could read it and not want to help. Leonard gives lots and lots of advice as to how. It will scare you, but not nearly as scary as the alternatives.

She's Not There

It takes a talented writer to bring out the humor in a serious topic, even more so when it's something that happened to the writer him (or her) self. I think society has made a lot of progress towards understanding and accepting homosexuality. But transgender is a whole other thing. It strains the tolerance of otherwise accepting people, who just don't get it. Their issues get lumped in with gay and lesbian issues, but it's a whole different thing.

Jennifer Finney Boylan's She's Not There is something I encourage everyone to pick up, then. Not just because it'll help towards understanding, but because it's a good and funny and heartbreaking read as well.

Boylan's best friend is a favorite writer of mine, Richard Russo. They taught together at Colby College and remained friends all their adult lives, even as the guy Russo knew as Jim got to the point where he could no longer deny what was inside of him and began going through the process of becoming a woman. Despite the presence of a crossdressing villain named Finney in Russo's novel about academic life, Straight Man, I wondered if Boylan was more the model for Hank, the protagonist pain-in-the-ass prankster. One of my favorite moments in She's Not There was a reproduced email correspondence between the two when Boylan was in transition. Russo poured his heart out about his difficulties in trying to readjust to the fact that his best drinking buddy was now female and closed it with something like "Then again, my biggest problem has always been myself." Boylan shot back with a one-line reply: "Funny, my biggest problem has also always been yourself."

One great thing about Boylan's two memoirs that I've read so far is that they read like novels: great characters, a plot that really moves, lots of detail. I like how, in this one, Boylan takes advantage of her unique perspective. Anyone who's ever wondered whether women get discriminated against in buying cars, who has an easier time shopping for clothing, if men and women actually think differently, etc. can actually find some answers in this book from someone who's in a position to tell you. It's a wonderful book, I highly reccomend it.

Adults only? An interesting debate

There's an interesting debate about library use and rules going on at Free Range Kids right now. You can read the post that sparked it here, but basically, the author of the post (who is also an author of children's books) and her husband were shooed out of the children's section of their local library because they didn't have a child with them. The rationale they were given was that "we can't have people hanging around and looking at the kids."

Based on that, I knew what I thought. I think society has gotten incredibly hysterical about "stranger danger" and has made all sorts of normal behaviors suspect, from sitting on a plane next to a child to giving out Halloween candy, to just smiling at the sight of someone else's kids having fun in public. This seems to be another sad and pathetic example of that, especially since the library was deserted when the writer and her husband were shooed away. There weren't even any kids for them to ogle.

But then I read some of the comments, especially those from public librarians. They stated that the goal was to provide a separate space for the kids, away from both the creepy people that genuinely do like to hang out at libraries and the overbearing yuppies who treat it as their personal office. They want it to just be a sort of "adult-free zone" where the kids can get into books without any disapproving stares, and from a practical standpoint, without having to fight for space with people who have the entire rest of the library.

I can see both sides of the issue, I guess. I always think it's bad to keep anyone away from any kind of book. But I also confess that I've been irritated many, many times by the screams of a bored child whose mom, in her infinite wisdom, dragged her into the adult section while she looked at adult books when the children's room was RIGHT. FUCKING. THERE. and full of things Young Screamer would have found more to her liking than the newest Lauren Weisenberg. Maybe if that mom had felt better about leaving her kid in there, the rest of us wouldn't have been treated to her Symphony of Boredom.

And while Lenore's blog focuses on overprotective parents, there are the other kind, too. The kind that see any supervised, kid-friendly environment and think: FREE BABYSITTING. The kind that will leave their three-year-old in the Kid Zone at Barnes and Noble while they go get their hair done. Those parents love libraries, too, and you know that if "something happened," they'd suddenly take a huge interest in their parenting duties and would sue. Maybe the policy was to address that issue, too.

I think it has to be applied judiciously, though. There are all sorts of legitimate reasons to want to use that space. In my city library, I see lots of new immigrants there who are trying to learn English. When you're switching entire alphabets, "Make Way for Ducklings" is probably a more appropriate place to start than the newspaper. Teachers use it to get books out for their classes. Museum educators use it to get books out for programs. Parents may want to use it when their kids are elsewhere. Students taking courses in children's lit, teens who have to babysit, there are a million reasons why. Many commentators pointed out that it's often simply the most attractive place in the library. Would you rather read your book in a beanbag chair by the 10-foot tall windows that overlook the park, or in a dimly-lit 1970s fake-wood cubicle?

I guess, sadly, a policy is needed to make sure adults are considerate, though. I think the librarian in the original example went a little overboard, kicking out obviously harmless people when the library was empty. But you see so much selfish and bizarre behavior in libraries that, sadly, there needs to be some way to curb it. No, you can't keep kids safe forever, and yes, the people who flock to libraries that need social services have the right to be there too. But you don't want to chase out the library's core audience just because our society fails so miserably at mental health care.

Currently Reading

Felt like blogging, didn't really know what to say, so turned to BTT. And they had a ridiculously easy one up:

What are you reading right now? What made you choose it? Are you enjoying it? Would you recommend it? (And, by all means, discuss everything, if you’re reading more than one thing!)

(I’ve asked this one before, but, well, it’s not like the answers stay the same, and darn it, it’s an interesting question!)

So right now I'm reading Private Life by Jane Smiley. I chose it because of an ad in The New Yorker. For a long time, I've had an irrational prejudice against this author because I really hate her last name. I know it's stupid, but I find it annoying. I did actually try one of her other books once, called Moo. And she did that thing I hate, when she makes an animal a symbol of something negative, like loss, or the toll that neglect and someone's whims takes on something. It always makes me miss the point.

So, to me, Moo is about a pig who's stashed in an unused building at a college and meticulously cared for by a student who bonds with the pig because he grew up on a farm and kinda misses it, and then after being stashed in the dark for months, they tear down the building because no one knows the pig was in there, and the pig (who's been depressed for a while) gets so excited to see the sunlight and smell the fresh air again that he goes running across campus, except he's big and fat now and can't really run and dies.

So anyway. Private Life. So far, I'd give it a meh-not-bad. It's another family saga, and I'm beginning to think maybe I checked out too many of those. It's about three daughters, especially the youngest, who were born in the late 1800s, and their marriages. Two of them stick close to home and make financially advantageous, conventional matches. But who cares about THEM. This book is about Margaret, consigned to old-maidhood until a naval astronomer (the joke is that they're never sure whether to address him as Dr., Captain, or just Mr.) marries her and takes her to California. All this is a rather slow burn, and I'm substantially into the book at this point. Hard to think of what to say about this one.

Salt and Sand

The House on Salt Hay Road appealed to me as a family saga, but it turns out it's just as much of a time/place saga. When you read this book, you'll smell sea salt, you'll feel the mosit wind lashing your face, you'll hear the cry of birds and you may just be the tiniest bit irrationally cautious of where you read the book, lest you get sand in your bed or your car.

This is a first novel by Carin Clevidence. It's set in the late 1930s on coastal, rural Long Island. It's a family saga, like I said, about a blended family. Nancy (age 20) and Clayton (age 12ish) are brother and sister. Their parents are both dead, and they've been living for several years with the grandfather, whom everyone calls Scudder, their aunt Mavis who was abandoned by her drunken husband and now works as a domestic at a lodge, and their uncle Roy, whose first girlfriend died when he was about Nancy's age and heralded his permanent retirement from all that, and from many other things.

It's their story over a few years. Nancy feels trapped. Clayton loves it, being a real nature type who loves fishing, crabbing, clamming, drawing dead animals, hunting birds, feeding live birds (Mavis' employer has a ton of them) and all variety of outdoor pursuits. Scudder inevitably ages and declines. Roy gets forced out of his comfort zone for one. Mavis confronts all the unpleasantness in her marriage that she's worked hard to ignore for years.

Nature plays a major role in their story. The book opens with an explosion at a fireworks factory and essentially closes with the biggest hurricane the region had ever seen, although there is denouement. I give this one a strong reccomendation. While it wasn't one of those that impelled me to read late into the night or one that I was thinking about when I wasn't reading it, it was a beautiful, realistic novel that felt like life and has one of the stronger senses of place I've ever seen in a book.

Today's catch at the library

It was a good day there. I found parking right away, I got a large quantity of books, and as it turned out, didn't owe them any money. I did have a secret weapon, though: the spring fiction issue of the New Yorker. It is to readers what the September issue of Vogue is to fashionistas. It tells you what's going on in the book world and why. It's as valuable for its ads as it is for its editorial content. It has the added advantage over Vogue, though, of being in reach of anyone with a library card, whereas the average Vogue reader will probably have to wait for the knockoffs to come to their local mall, or seek out a vindictive ex-husband of a wealthy fashionable woman who's putting all her purses on eBay for $50 each.

I noticed a couple of interesting things at the library today:

1. They're putting in a handicapped entrance near where I usually park. OK, I guess it's not that interesting, but it's disrupted things a bit.

2. You can make anything sound trendy and modern by sticking an "i" in front of it. Like iPoe, who is the subject of the local Big Read. Calling him ePoe would have made more sense, but I'm not in marketing.

3. If you eat right and try to exercise on an increasingly regular basis, "as many books as you can carry" becomes less of a solid benchmark for what your personal limit should be. Today, I could carry ten.

So, what'd I get? I'm so glad you asked.

The House on Salt Hay Road by Carin Clevidence. Just because it sounds cool.

Lockport Boy: a memoir of a magical time and place by Frank Bredell. I like to read books about the area, and this just sounds like such a joyful one. It was on their staff picks table, proving again that their stff has great taste.

She's Not There: a life in two genders by Jennifer Finney Boylan. I read her other book and thought it was terrific. This has been on my mental list for a while. Since I actually came with a paper list this time, I remembered to look for it.

Private Life by Jane Smiley. This was in the New Yorker issue that I mentioned. It sounded very good. I only read one of her other books, and it had an animal subplot that was so compelling and upsetting that I completely missed the point of the rest of the book.

The Family Beach House by Holly Chamberlin. A sort of quandary, because it's a family saga, which I tagged as suitable for fall, but about a beach house, which makes it more summery. I figured this in-between period would be perfect.

Midnight on the line: the secret life of the US border by Tim Gaynor. I passed it looking for something else and I thought it seemed like a valuable thing for a Northerner to read. We hear so much about border issues up here, but they don't really affect our lives to the point where we might have an informed opinion. I want a better understanding of why this is such a big issue, and if it's a real issue or just a 'wedge' issue like the so-called Ground Zero mosque or gay marriage.

Glass, paper, beans: a revelation on the nature of... by Leah Hager Cohen. I also found this on the way to something else. I guess it tracks the sources of these three things or something. Looking at my list, I would dub this one Most LIkely to Be Returned Unread, especially since it's so similar in subject matter to what I was really looking for, which is...

The Story of Stuff by Annie Leonard. Consider me her Colbert Bump: this is where I heard about her book, but it's a topic that's sort of interested me for a while: how the poorest Americans have tons of shit, where it comes from, and what happens to it when we're done with it.

The Beans of Egypt, Maine by Carolyn Chute. I guess this was the It Book one year in the 80s. My parents had it, and as a little kid, the title confused the absolute hell out of me, especially since on closer examination, the book was not set in Egypt nor did it have anything to do with beans. I think it's about white trash, actually. I also think I've tried it before and not gotten far, but I'm interested in trying again.

Rest area: stories by Clay McLeod Chapman. This one had me at the description of the story in which preteen boys pretend that the lifeguard at the pool is a witch and they have to safely get to the bottom of the slide to defeat her. It's been a while since I read a good short story collection. I hope this qualifies.

Characters welcome?

Despite my belief that long books are better in the winter, I dove headfirst into David Copperfield three weeks ago. I don't know why. I bought it at Barnes and Noble a few months ago, and suddenly, there was nothing I wanted to read more. I finished it over the weekend.

I liked it, overall. But I know this is one book that frequently has the "boring" charge brought against it, and I can sort of understand why. Most of the stuff that happens develops rather slowly, and there is quite a bit in there that's not relevant to the main plot, which in itself is hard to define, since it's just a coming-of-age story and you could argue that everything that happens to you while you're growing up is relevant in a coming-of-age story.

And it's all there in David Copperfield. We get treated to accounts of what he ate in the inn on his way back to boarding school, what the interior was like of every door he darkened, and lengthy scenes with random characters. I think Charles Dickens liked making interesting characters so much that he just couldn't restrain himself.

And all of the random characters are pretty interesting. His beautician-dwarf made me think of the beautician-dwarf in the Tales of The City book where Michael goes to London. The cheerful funeral outfitters were interesting too. My co-worker was coincidentally re-reading it at the same time and pointed out that there was a great deal of foreshadowing in the book, and she's definitely right. Steerforth is described in too glowing terms not to have a dark side, and Uriah Heep is just shady as hell. But really, the cahracters make this one. And I love character-driven books.

Even though I liked Great Expectations better (it was much funnier), I enjoyed David Copperfield so much that I picked up Our Mutual Friend and Ye Old Curiousity Shoppe this weekend at B&N.