Booking through Today

OK, I'm trying this meme on the right day now. Anyone out there who knows how to make the button thing happen...seriously...even if it's very obvious, I won't be embarrassed, just post a comment! Anyway, the question before the panel this week is:

This week’s question is suggested by Puss Reboots:

How much do reviews (good and bad) affect your choice of reading? If you see a bad review of a book you wanted to read, do you still read it? If you see a good review of a book you’re sure you won’t like, do you change your mind and give the book a try?

Damn, damn and damn. Despite the fact that I worked a 12-hour day that had both criminals and cocoons in it (don't even ask!), I still felt like blogging tonight. But I don't have very much to say on this particular topic. I generally don't pay a whole lot of attention to book reviews, which may seem odd for a book blogger. On the other hand, often the slightest positive comment will make me want to read a book. I read The Devils Candy based on a three-sentence post in the Craigslist film forum. Wicked made my TBR list after a friend gave me a brief description and said it was good.

I received a gift of a subscription to the New Yorker for Christmas, and my first one just arrived. Maybe I'll have a different opinion on reviews after getting back into reading that. Usually, their book reviews are good, even if the books in question aren't anything I'm interested in. I'll let you know, as always.

Booking through...Wednesday

I found a link to this collection of memes over at The Sleepy Reader. I know that it won't technically be Thursday yet for twenty more minutes, and that this is last week's anyway, but I'm in the mood to blog tonight, and I liked this one, so here goes. I'm trying to figure out how to get her button onto my site. Anyone with advice, feel free to post it in comments.

May I Introduce…. January 10, 2008
Filed under: Wordpress — --Deb @ 1:05 am

Booking Through Thursday

How did you come across your favorite author(s)? Recommended by a friend? Stumbled across at a bookstore? A book given to you as a gift?
Was it love at first sight? Or did the love affair evolve over a long acquaintance?

I found this one especially pertinent to my life, as I just had a conversation with our office clerk about favorite authors. I usually bring a book to work with me to read during lunch, and she was asking me who my favorites were. I immediately flashed on my blog, with the list of favorites as long as my arm and had trouble even stammering out an answer!

But the majority of the ones on my sidebar don't have a smashing story related to them. Dr. Daphne Kutzer, one of my professors in undergrad, got me into Barbara Kingsolver by assigning Animal Dreams. Dr. Paul Johnston got me into Edgar Allan Poe during a survey course on American Lit.

My parents got me into Molly Ivins and Sarah Vowell: Ivins at a fairly young age and Vowell just a couple of years ago. James Herriot is a family tradition on my mother's side. My grandfather, who died when I was only 5, loved books, and his in particular. My mother bought all of them for him as gifts over the years, and the rule that both sides of my family have always observed is that you have the first right of refusal on anything you gave as a gift to someone who died. So, my mother had all of the James Herriot books in the house. I started reading them last year, and she let me borrow them all.

My sister got me into Phillip Pullman and Jasper Fforde. A former roommate and former friend (and yeah, the two were related, as always) got me into Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum books, and I just picked up the habit again recently. I first became acquainted with Alice Munro, ZZ Packer and George Saunders through New Yorker short stories.

The rest were simple stumble-upons at the library or bookstore. They applealed to me for different reasons: Jack Keroauc made me feel grown-up and badass; Richard Russo had a book set in a town twenty miles away from where I was living (which was in the middle of nowhere, so I was amazed someone else could find it on a map, let alone sit down and write about it!). The book by Sandra Dallas was remaindered and was cheap at one of those fly-by-night "Book Sale" places that set up in abandonded Hollywood Videos. The cover of Tawni O'Dell's book screamed FUN!FUN!FUN! and turned out to be so well-written I didn't mind that it was really sad. A. Manette Ansay's book had a beautiful line on the cover about souls rising like dandelion seeds. But in nearly all cases, it was love at first site. I guess I tend to make up my mind quickly about books and authors.

Chick Lit Short Takes

Oh shit, I've just gone and pissed of Jennifer Weiner, who hates having her work called "chick lit." Since I like her, I don't really want to do that. I do feel, though, that her stuff is chick lit with heart...chick lit with a twist?....chick lit for real chicks? At any rate, it's definitely a cut above the stuff that Plum Sykes and her ilk churn out endlessly. Weiner's women are real. They're not all rich, they're not all skinny, and there's more ambivalence than pure "happily ever after."

Her best-known book is Good in Bed. Unfortunately, no library system on planet earth, or at least in upstate New York, carries it. I've often wondered why. The branch I grew up with had an odd penchant for acquiring lesser-known works by an author and passing up their best-sellers. You could get The Risk Pool by Richard Russo, but not Empire Falls or Nobody's Fool. They carried Martin Chuzzlewit, but not A Tale of Two Cities or Great Expectations. They carried books 2, 3, and 5 of the six-volume Tales of the City series by Armistead Maupin. So I wasn't unfamiliar with this quirk the first time I encountered it, but it seems to be everywhere. The only reason I can think of is the title, but the fact that I just checked out a book called The Porno Girl kind of blows that theory away. At any rate, while I haven't read Good in Bed, I have read most of the rest of her books: In her Shoes, Little Earthquakes,Goodnight Nobody, and now, The Guy Not Taken.

Merin Wexler could learn something from this collection, for I believe this is what she was trying to do: women at pivotal moments. Weiner's collection feels more organic. It's not all "lookz at me an' my cool idea LOL!!1!!11!!!1" She starts with the characters, and the stories develop naturally from there, until they feel like people you've always known, telling you about simple stuff that happened to them. In an afterward to the book, Weiner explains that she'd been working on the stories in the collection since she was in college and writing a lot to get over her parents' divorce. She managed to keep the sincerity a young adult would naturally bring to her work, yet add enough polish so that no one feels like they're reading someone's diary.

The collection is fun and upbeat, but manages to bring in the ambiguity of real life. Couples don't always stay together. New mothers aren't always thrilled about their babies. Fathers walk away and never return, not even for the wedding. Even the happy couples aren't perfect. I read once that part of the reason for the high divorce rate is high expectations. Many people have this belief that romance and marriage will make their lives perfect. When they get married and still aren't happy all the time, they walk away. Weiner's books, then, are an appropriate amount of realism for this overhyped world: sometimes warm, sometimes fuzzy, occasionally alternating between warm and fuzzy, often neither warm or fuzzy, but once in a great while, just for a moment, both warm and fuzzy at once. The reader savors the sweetness of that rarity, rather than choking on the cloying, overpowering sweetness to be found in much of chick lit.

Murder, Cocaine, Bestiality, Barenaked Ladies, Free Beer and Chicken, and Porno Girls

When I was in college, a band named Free Beer and Chicken was a staple on our teeny-tiny bar circuit (there were three in town that consistently featured live music). It didn't exactly take me in the first time I saw their flier -- I wondered at first whether they meant free chicken wings, or what, then looked more closely at the flier. It did get my attention, though, and I'm sure that many of their crowd that night consisted of broke hippies craving wings (good thing they were a jam band).

Merin Wexler must've been a fan, for her book of short stories is titled The Porno Girl. This time, unfortunately, I was more gullible. I checked it out and took it home and even got most of the way through, more out of boredom than anything else. But it wasn't very good. It wasn't even very naughty. The problem with her stories is that they weren't developed enough. If you've ever written a short story, you'll know that sometimes the idea starts off something like: "I think I'll write a short story about a new mother who finds solace in the local XXX theater." When you sit down and write the thing, though, it's supposed to go further than that. Most of these stories don't. There's the one about the teenaged girl whose friend is trying to help a stranger save her marriage, while the girl's parents' own marriage is falling apart. There's the one about the pregnant newlywed who meets up with her ex-boyfriend again and manages to resist his dubious charms. There's the one about the yuppie who is having another baby so that her nanny will stay.

Only two really stuck with me: "The Closet" and "Helen of Alexandria." The first is about a young girl whose father is manic, and shows up in a sailor hat and rented Hummer, with a bullhorn and a redhead. Like the others, it doesn't yield too much more in execution than in concept, but it's paced well, the characters feel three-dimensional, and it offers something a little more riveting than a collapsing marriage or ambivalent mother. The second is about a teacher at a private girls' school, locked in a battle of wills with a Rate-Your-Students-worthy snowflake. This one had a little more complexity as it also featured a subplot about the teacher trying to find love, and the devastation the teacher felt as the two subplots collided in a way that I'm sure features prominently in the worst nightmares of those who teach.

The rest of them didn't really make me feel anything. I started this book on Friday night and already I can't remember most of them. If only the author had put as much effort into grabby stories as she did into a grabby title.

Marion True: Victim or Villain?

This question was sparked by a New Yorker profile of the recent legal troubles of Marion True, former curator of antiquities at the Getty Museum and current co-defendant on charges of conspiring to buy stolen properties in Italy and Greece. The profile was sympathetic to her, basically taking the view that naivete and following outmoded practices were her worst crimes. But it made me remember the book I'd purchased over the summer, The Medici Conspiracy by Peter Watson and Cecelia Todeschini. I wondered if I'd view her as sympathetically after reading that, so I dusted it off and dug in. About three-quarters of the way through, I re-read the New Yorker profile. I'm still not sure what to think.

To anyone who cares about history, The Medici Conspiracy will be absolutely shocking and not a little depressing. Before reading this book, I thought of tomb robbing as Indiana Jones stuff, stuff that happened mostly in movies, and certainly not in real life anymore. This book definitely proved me wrong. In fact, despite the arrests of many of the players in the worldwide conspiracy to smuggle antiquities out of Italy, restore them, launder them and sell them to high-profile museums and collectors, it's probably happening right now, as I'm typing this.

Furthermore, the looted objects discussed in this book are not small-time. Frescoes from villas, vases by the best potters and painters of ancient times, even a solid-gold funeral wreath: all of these things and more were unearthed by the tombarolos (grave robbers) Giacomo Medici employed. Medici was the kingpin in this conspiracy: his vast network of tombarolos in Italy collected his objects for him (in return for which many were paid an actual salary) and he held them in a warehouse in an unregulated area of Switzerland known as the Freeport. He worked with a network of restorers and antiquities dealers, who helped him sell these antiquities to well-known private collectors and museums. That way, these collectors could maintain their veneer of respectability and still get first-rate objects.

The Getty and the Metropolitan Museum of Art were the two institutions that figured most prominently in the book, but the book will make you suspicious of any antiquity you see anywhere. Furthermore, the book's authors make you care. The last chapter is devoted to the damage done to the archaeological record by this scam. Often, the conspirators would lie about the origin of an object if their illegal dig had been exposed or if an object could fetch more money if it was from a different region. Since we're talking about nearly one million objects, there's no way the conspirators might even agree to tell the truth as part of a plea bargain -- they probably wouldn't be able to. Divorced from their context, the objects have less to say. In a sense, we are all the victims of this scam.

I was reading this book at work yesterday when the president of the board asked me about it. I tried to boil down the conspiracy for him, and he asked the obvious question: why wasn't Marion True more suspicious? Why did everyone settle for the pat explanation that these high-quality objects just magically materialized on the market? There are two simple answers to that question. A sympathetic one would say that Marion True, and her counterparts, were just trusting. Marion True had excellent personal relationships with many of the collectors and dealers in this story, although the New Yorker profile had quotes from her friends showing that she always maintained a certain distance for ethical reasons. A cynical explanation would say that avarice and ambition overtook her and her counterparts: everyone knew exactly what they were doing and didn't care as long as they didn't get caught.

To me, neither one is enough of an explanation. I still don't really understand it. Marion True spent years getting her PhD with the goal of devoting her life to the study of antiquities. Why would she turn around and harm her own discipline? No amount of money or acclaim could ever convince me to do that, and I'm not nearly as influential as she was. Furthermore, it sounds like she had it all. At points, I was quite jealous of her success. Well-regarded in her field, in command of a large budget and a group of underlings, with the opportunity to publish, to curate high-end exhibits, to direct an entire gallery renovation, to travel abroad several times a year -- it's a dream come true to those like me, at the bottom of the profession, whose curatorial duties include answering the phone and spreading salt in the parking lot. Yet, she fucked it all up. Why, I wonder? Was it worth it?

Or did she honestly believe that she was doing nothing wrong? Even the decidedly unsympathetic authors of The Medici Conspiracy note that she was hardly the only curator following these buying practices, just the only one to get in trouble for it. The New Yorker article notes that one problematic practice, buying fragments of vases in an attempt to reconsitute them over time, dates back to the nineteenth century (Medici would exploit this by breaking a vase found whole and releasing the fragments over time, or by using them to sweeten other deals.) Over the years, she advocated for ethics reform, instituted new acquisition policies at the Getty, and generally showed her awareness of the problem. Could she have really been that blind to her involvement in it? Or did she just have a real set of brass balls?

I still don't know. Because of the way their system is set up, her trial in Italy is proceeding slowly, and even at the conclusion of it, it still may be difficult to form a definitive opinion. But in an odd sense, Marion True inspired me. Like I said above, she had it all and she fucked it up. Maybe I, too, could have it all and NOT fuck it up? While I doubt I'll get the Greek villa on my current salary, I am going to shoot for being more than a glorified tour guide and events planner, and shoot for it as hard as I can.

Why I love her: E. Annie Proulx

Since my New Year's Resolution is to blog more often, since the book I'm reading now will take some time to get through, and since I feel like blogging RIGHT NOW, I'm doing another one of these. The second installment in my series (as you may have guessed) is about E. Annie Proulx.

Most people know her from one of two of her works: the short story "Brokeback Mountain" or the novel The Shipping News. I actually didn't like the second much: I couldn't keep track of all the characters and their backstories, although I suspect that maybe it was me, since I can see how it's a good book. The first I loved so much that I refuse to see the movie. Not because I think they wrecked the story, but because I think society wrecked the humanity of it by making jokes about Brokeback this and Brokeback that. The story made me cry, and still does when I think about it. I mean, read it and imagine yourself as one of the main characters and see how much you feel like laughing then.

"Brokeback Mountain" was the story that got me interested in her. Since then, I've read both of her short story collections (I believe there's only two) and her newest novel, That Old Ace in the Hole, as well as The Shipping News. Ace in the Hole was pretty good, but I prefer her short story collections in general. She's a writer of the West the way someone like Willie Morris or Harper Lee was a writer of the South. When you read her short stories, you feel like you're there. You understand the place, and the people, and their relationship. But like them, she doesn't glamorize. A short story like "What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick?", about a beleaguered rancher, will have you suffering sympathetic symptoms of stress. You just want to reach into the story and hand that guy some money to help him fix the impossible situation that he's in: he can't sell his ranch, but he can't keep it running either, he's too old and broken-down to start over and none of his family understands any of this. Even stories that are less about the land still have a lot of the West in them.

Annie Proulx's fiction offers to me exactly what many readers seek: a chance to step outside myself and my own environment in a way that even taking a vacation wouldn't allow me. Reading these stories shows me a different way of life through the eyes of one who's living it and that's "why I love her".

Extremely Great and Incredibly Worth the Wait

During my summer of good books two and a half years ago, one of my friend Sophie's favorite authors was Jonathan Safran Foer, although at the time he'd only written one book, Everything is Illuminated. But she loved him, and used to occasionally refer to him as "her boyfriend". She encouraged me to read Everything is Illuminated, and I got it once, but didn't read it. I even got the movie once and didn't watch it. After reading Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, though, I'll make a point of getting back to it.

This is one of the best books I've read in a while. A lot of the stuff, and certainly most of the fiction, I've been blogging about lately is more fun than anything else. This book has a great sense of fun, but is also fairly ambitious. To peg it as a September 11th novel or as a World War II novel is unfair, although both events play significant roles in the book. So I'll say it's the story of Oskar Schell.

Oskar is a really, really terrific kid. He's nine years old, smart and funny and very passionate about the world. He can be summed up pretty well by the business card he gives out, which reads:

"Oskar Schell: Inventor, Jewelry Designer, Jewelry Fabricator, Amateur Entomologist, Francophile, Vegan, Origamist, Pacifist, Percussionist, Amateur Astronomer, COmputer Consultant, Amateur Archaeologist, Collector of: rare coins, butterflies that died natural deaths, miniature cacti, Beatles memorabilia, semiprecious stones and other things E-mail: Oskar_Schell@hotmail.com, Home phone: private / Cell phone: private, Fax Machine: I don't have a fax yet."

I bet you wish you could spent 300-odd pages with someone like that, too. In this book, Oskar is on a quest, a difficult and important one. His father, with whom he was very close, died on September 11th. He was in the World Trade Center for a meeting and didn't make it out. Oskar's dad was the best dad Oskar could ever have, and Foer is a clever enough writer to show us this rather than tell us, through Oskar's remembrances of the complicated games the two of them shared and the imaginative stories his dad would tell him. Oskar is hanging out in his dad's closet one day, and finds a blue vase containing an envelope, marked "Black", with a key inside. He sets out to discover what this key opens, what he didn't know about his dad. On the advice of a woman at the art store (who notes both the capitalization of the word and the fact that it was written in red ink), he sets out to meet everyone in New York with the surname of Black and to figure out which one his father knew, and what the key opens.

This is one of the most delectable parts of the book. He meets a lot of fascinating people. Elderly Georgia Black has a museum of her husband in her living room, and is delighted to have Oskar visit it. She tells him no one has been to see her in more than a year, and spends a lot of time showing him her husband's baby shoes, his golf clubs, their wedding album, etc. Her husband surprises us (and Oskar) by emerging from the next room and inviting them in to see his museum of her. He meets the recently divorced, shut-ins and widows. He meets a man with a newborn baby and asks if he could pet it. He writes to a convicted murderer. He makes close friends with a former war correspondant. Everyone has a story to tell. Some of them even come to his school play, Hamlet (he plays Yorick).

The other half of the story is told by Oskar's grandparents, who survived World War II and the Dresden bombing and have their own story of loss and redemption to tell. I found myself more captivated by Oskar, although their story was very moving and interesting. Safran Foer plays some games with the text too: sometimes it's strung out, a whole portion of it is covered in red editorial marks, there are photos and drawings to the extent where I imagine his conversations with the editors: "On pages 50-75, I want all those marks to be printed, I didn't send you an early draft by mistake."

It's a beautiful book. It's ambitious, but doesn't try too hard. Nor do you get the sense that Safran Foer is exploiting September 11 in any way. By taking it back down to an individual level, he actually manages to get a fresh approach on a subject that has been dissected relentlessly since it happened. You'll enjoy Oskar, and all of the people that he meets, you'll come to miss his dad too. Ultimately, it's a hopeful and optimistic book, not so much about death as about life. You'll probably cry (and you should be smarter than me, and not bring it to a mechanic's waiting room, especially when you're almost done with it), but you'll come away from it feeling better about the world and all the interesting people it contains.