Booking Through...yeah.

If you're wondering where I've been, well, so am I. Working every night, hanging out with my family, bracing for winter, seeking a better job, reading, playing WoW...all of these places, I guess. And I've neglected my poor blog, using it as more of a "favorites" tab for my links than anything else.

The book I'm on right now is not bad, but it's taking me a while to get through. It's not the kind that sets you on fire, but I did think highly enough of it to reccomend it to a piano-loving co-worker (it's about a child prodigy, and what became of him when he grew up).

So, in the meantime, I give you my thoughts on...

Weeding October 15, 2009
Filed under: Wordpress — --Deb @ 7:06 am



We’re moving in a couple weeks (the first time since I was 9 years old), and I’ve been going through my library of 3000+ books, choosing the books that I could bear to part with and NOT have to pack to move. Which made me wonder…

When’s the last time you weeded out your library? Do you regularly keep it pared down to your reading essentials? Or does it blossom into something out of control the minute you turn your back, like a garden after a Spring rain?

Or do you simply not get rid of books? At all? (This would have described me for most of my life, by the way.)

And–when you DO weed out books from your collection (assuming that you do) …what do you do with them? Throw them away (gasp)? Donate them to a charity or used bookstore? SELL them to a used bookstore? Trade them on Paperback Book Swap or some other exchange program?

Weeding out is hard to do! Oddly, I enjoy doing it for other people. I helped my parents weed out two huge closets in their house this spring, and was astonished by the amount of stuff that went straight in the trash. Directions to the homes of people who'd moved twenty years ago. Newspapers, receipts and other detritus that had gotten stowed in the closet for expendiency's sake prior to a long-passed dinner party. Stuff like that.

But when it comes to my own stuff, I'm much less resolute. Maybe I'll WANT the pictures off that 2007 calendar someday. It was a nice one!

I do all right with books, though. The best defense against drowning in crap books is a good offense, and I'm pretty selective about my purchases. I often try to sell books on amazon.com. I'm willing to re-list them repeatedly, but when all else fails, they generally get donated to the library to be sold. I don't pare down often. Usually what spurs it is the need to clear room for more!

Stale BTT: To Tell the Truth

Wouldn't it figure: for the first time in a month, I feel like doing a Booking Through Thursday topic, and there isn't one. I hope the moderator of that site is OK. Maybe she'll post one up later on today, but for now, I'm going to do last week's, which is as follows:

Would You Lie? October 1, 2009

Suggested by Monibo:

Saw this article (from March) and thought it would make a good BTT confessional question:

Two-thirds of Brits have lied about reading books they haven’t. Have you? Why? What book?

Honestly? I'm too chickenshit to lie about stuff like that. I hear my co-workers doing it on the phone every night: "Last week's concert was phenomenal, wasn't it?" All the while, I'm thinking, " You didn't go, you gave your comp tickets to me, remember?" I don't do that myself, because I'm afraid the patron will want to discuss it. A well-known singer who was popular around 40 years ago recently performed with the orchestra I work for, and I honestly sweat bullets every time I have to talk with someone about that concert, because I can barely conjure up any of his songs.

So it's sort of the same thing with books. In college, of course, I did implicitly "lie" a few times about having done the reading. I don't think there's a degree-holder out there who hasn't. But in casual conversation, I always admit to not having read something. I figure it's better to look like a mere idiot than an idiot and a liar.

Back...with a vengeance!

I suppose the title of this post could apply to both myself (who cleared her $27 debt to the library and is now in good standing again) and to the author of the book I just finished last night.

You all remember Wally Lamb. It's been about 15 years since everyone on the planet was carting around his debut, She's Come Undone, a sad, eloquent novel about a woman's lifelong struggle to deal with a childhood rape, parents' divorce and mother's death and lead a healthy, normal life. His follow-up, This Much I know Is True, came out a year or two later, and was written from the point of view of a man whose twin brother is schizophrenic.

Then, for a long time, nothing. Until now. The Hour I First Believed weighs in at 700+ pages, and has so much in it that it's difficult to even talk about, or summarize. The book spans ten years of real time, with flashbacks ranging as far back as the Civil War. It takes as its themes addiction, mental illness, recovery from trauma, sexual abuse, and the treatment of female prisoners. Like I said, there's a lot in this book.

The story begins with Caelum and Maureen Quirk. The marriage is a do-over for both parties, not only in the sense that they've been married to other people before, but that they have been married to each other before. Maureen is a school nurse and reformed adultress. Caelum is a school teacher, and my initial impression of him was that he was also an asshole. Unpleasant to his wife, unpleasant to the more initially intruguing Velvet Hoon (a student with a troubled past), even not terribly pleasant or responsive to his Aunt Lolly, who basically raised him. My views softened a bit over the course of the book, but I wasn't that far off about him. Caelum and Maureen work together, at an upper-middle-class high school in Colorado, called Columbine.

Familiar events set the plot in motion. On the day of the shootings, Caelum was out of town because his Aunt Lolly had just died. Maureen was in the library, having taken Velvet there to help her re-enroll in high school. Maureen hid in a cabinet, heard the whole thing, and was never the same again. The rest of the book focuses on how she, Caelum and Velvet each worked on putting their lives and relationships back together after that day.

It's hard to say too much about the plot. It encompasses long-past events (a subplot with Caelum's grandmother, a women's prison reformer, that I'm ashamed to say I never really clocked) and current ones. Everything that's happened in the past ten years since Columbine touch Caelum's life in some way: Hurricane Katrina, the Iraq War, September 11th. The book was wonderful. Lamb really knows how to draw readers in: even though I thought Caelum was an asshole, he was at least an INTERESTING asshole, surrounded by interesting people, and that gave the book momentum. He clearly put a great deal of work into the tale, and there is some beautiful plot symmetry. The post-traumatic stress of one of his Iraqi vet students, for example, echoed in his great-grandmother's journal from her stint as a Civil War nurse, and also in his father's alcoholism. Velvet Hoon as a teen writing a short story about her grandfather's stone-cutting work in the cemetery where she used to give blow jobs for cash, then finding peace and happiness working for a sculptor as a young adult.

But it's a lot to wrap one's head around. There was a subplot with some long-buried mild sexual abuse of Caelum that never really developed, and that I could have done without. The ending of the book, as well, hits like a freight train and almost seemed a bit of a cop-out. And I didn't really care for the fact that he gave characters from his previous novels walk-on roles in this one. It seemed a bit unneccesary, too. But overall, it was an excellent, if somber, read.

St. Peter, Don't Call Me, For I Can't Go

I owe my soul to the library fines department!

OK, maybe not quite, but it's a fair bit of money. In my defense, they never told me that one of my books was a seven-day book. I didn't look at the receipt because, well, it just didn't occur to me. Those are ALWAYS marked, and the book in question (the last one I reviewed, actually) has been out for at least a year. It should have been off 7-day status by now. It doesn't explain why I kept the others so long. I guess because I tend to pick my books really impulsively, and often wind up with things that, upon further reflection, I'm not actually interested in reading.

It makes me tempted to quit going to the downtown branch, even though it is glorious. It's so stressful, too. Limited parking. Massive selection. And always, at least one person who's really, really weird. But there's no other convenient destination around me. The branch within easy walking distance has a Spanish-language focus, and their selection of English books is about as good as the selection of Spanish books at most other branches in the system. Everyone says great things about the branch on Elmwood, which is the next closest. But those people must have different tastes than me. I was unimpressed with their selection. Plus, it smells musty and chemical-y in there, like plastic dust jackets offgassing in the hot sun for thirty years. And additionally, their parking sucks even worse than the downtown branch. There's an adorable little branch a couple of miles away -- that's closed to the public due to asbestos issues.

I guess there's nothing for it but to continue hanging on to my quarters, scrape up an extra $30 to pay off my fines, and keep going to the downtown branch. My only other option is to continue to re-read The Poisonwood Bible and Burmese Days forever (I guess I'm in a post-colonial mood lately, go figure.)

The Animus in the Inanimate

For over a year now, I've been trying to get a hold of Geraldine Brooks' People of the Book. I finally got a hold of it, and it was well worth the wait.

Inanimate objects do have lives of their own. They need certain conditions to continue to "live:" generally a temperature of about 68-70 degrees, a relative humidity of about 60%, not too much light, not too many harsh chemicals, just like a person. They have meaning and experience attached to them. Anyone who's ever participated in distributing someone's belongings after the person has died knows this. The jealousy and sniping surrounding your grandmother's silverware didn't originate with the fact that everyone had been using their fingers thus far. The silver represented family dinners long past, their great-grandfather carving the meat thirty years ago, the hopes and dreams of the young couple that received it as a wedding gift and the life they made together. That power of objects is what led me into the museum field. So, of course, I loved this book.

I also enjoy reading any book that depicts the museum field at all. It's kind of an invisible field. I'd imagine conservators feel even more invisible, and must have enjoyed the main character of the book. Hannah Heath is an Australian book conservator with a PhD, an international reputation, and a contentious relationship with her mother. She gets an invitation to work on a very special book: The Sarajevo haggadah, a lushly illuminated 500-year-old Jewish prayer book.

The story of the book unfolds as Hannah's work progresses. Through the examination of a wine and blood stain, we find how the haggadah was saved from the Inquisition. Through the examination of a salt stain, we discover how the family of a Jewish illustrator was not so lucky. By looking at different items found within the book's binding, we learn how the book was put together and lovingly preserved through hundreds of years of unrest and violence.

The characters are powerful, and the story compelling. I highly reccomend this one, and look forward to reading some more by Brooks.

The Best and the Worst

With the nice weather and the sudden rapid increase of mere STUFF in my life, I haven't been as faithful with the BTT's as I normally am. I guess a lot of amateur blogs like mine slow down in the summer months. So I figured I'd tackle two weeks' worth of BTTs at the same time, especially since they go well together:

What’s the worst book you’ve read recently?
(I figure it’s easier than asking your all-time worst, because, well, it’s recent!)

and...

What’s the best book you’ve read recently?

(Tell me you didn’t see this one coming?)

These were hard questions for me, because I've been fortunate in my reads this summer. I've liked almost everything I've actually dived into. But I managed to find a turkey, so I'll start there.

I initially gave Sharlee Dieguez's The Bearded Lady a sort of neutral review, tending a bit towards the negative. The further away from it I get, though, the less I like it. I read a few reviews of it online to help me pinpoint exactly what I disliked about it. One of them hit it on the head: you get way too much of "sourpuss Jessie" as the reviewer called her. The circus is an interesting and vital place, but it's all completely subsumed by Beard Angst.

Sideshows have always interested me, and Dieguez could have done a lot more with the exploitation/freedom aspect of them. One minor character was a "pinhead" and her caretaker. The "pinhead" was facing institutionalization. The caretaker was leading a lonely and bland existence. When they met, and became part of the circus, their lives vastly improved. The caretaker described it as having a sweet little girl that will never grow up. The "pinhead" was well-loved, well-cared for and was able to lead as full a life as her capabilities allowed. The Chinese concubine's alternative to self-exhibition was a (probably short) life of sex slavery. But they were mere background for Jessie's Beard Angst. And Jessie's fantasy sex sequence about her crush kissing the hairy lips above and thinking of the hairy lips below was just laughable.

As for the best book I've read recently? Gosh, that's hard. Lisa Jewell's books are always great fun, and I'm reading a very enjoyable one now, People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks. The Thirteenth Tale was outstanding. The James Herriot books are always nice and cheerful, and offbeat material and shopworn devices were combined to great effect in Life After Genius.

But I'd say my winner is I Thought My Father Was God and Other True Stories. It's an absolutely fascinating book regarding the real experiences of real people. The experiences are wide-ranging. Many involve bizarre, mystic coincidences, such as losing something, and having it turn up thousands of miles away, generations later. Others weren't so much linear "stories" as meditations on life. Some of the ones about death and loss make me cry just thinking of them. But it was a neat project and a neat book. This one gets my vote for the best one I've read recently, just because I can't imagine anyone disliking it.

Another Jewell...with a touch of the mystic

In Friend of the Family, Lisa Jewell delivers more of what keeps me coming back: unique characters, realistic conflicts, and the ultimate happy resolution. This time, as the title of the post implies, she adds a touch of the mystic into the mix.

Here's the rundown: three brothers, Tony, Sean and Ned, shared the perfect upbringing with the perfect parents. Now all in their late 20s and early 30s, though, it seems that their childhood happiness didn't prepare them well for the adult world, and all three are facing a crossroads in their lives.

Tony, the eldest, is a divorced workaholic who's also a bit unsure of where his life is headed. He's with an absolutely wonderful woman that he doesn't love. In the meantime, he's also fallen in love with another woman -- who happens to be Sean's girlfriend. Which brings us to Sean's own dilemma. His first novel hit gold and won every award. Now he's under major pressure to deliver for his second novel. But he's never been in love like this before, with the perfect woman, and the perfect relationship -- until she discovers she's pregnant.

Ned has recently returned from a three-year Australian adventure, leaving behind a girlfriend who's gone slightly crazy, but dogged by his unwillingness to build any sort of settled career. The best he can offer for experience is a few weeks here and there tending bar, opening mail, renting surfboards, things of that nature. His Australian adventure is over and the life he'd left behind in Britain is gone.

Even his own bedroom is gone, but not made over into a sewing room or unrecognizable guest room. Not even merely piled rug to rafters with old clothing and books as mine is. No, much worse -- rented out to an odd young man named Gervase. The boys' mother met him at the pub where she sings and offered him the room. Naturally, this makes the boys quite concerned, especially as Gervase has no discernable form of employment and is even included in family dinners. But, as it turns out, Gervase has something else to offer. Though the boys go out of their way to avoid him, he manages to cop enough alone time with each to use his mystical powers to get to the root of their problems and help them see the solutions to them.

And of course, as most of Jewell's books do, this one has a satisfying ending. Each boy gets out of his rut and on with his life. Each finds happiness, or at least begins to walk the path towards it. It's weird. There are many more "serious" authors whose work begins to wear on me the more I read. I notice too many commonalities among the stories and they all start to blur together and seem to be less the product of a fertile imagination than simple repackaged autobiography. Jewell's books always seem refreshingly original to me, every time.