Four days of photos

Totally an accident, but kind of neat how the bottom two photos have my giant head on Troy's body.

Taken in Fells Point.

From Thursday.

Hello, grain.

On Madison Street.

City Cafe was bustling with readers and people doing work on Sunday.

Downtown.

Vietnam

The Things They Carried
Tim O'Brien
1990

My knowledge of the Vietnam War comes from mostly:

Graham Greene's The Quiet American, which Greene wrote before the U.S. presence in Vietnam was ramped up and everyone but him was distracted by Korea.

Michael Herr's Dispatches, a journalist's memoir of covering the war.

Forrest Gump, which I saw most recently in early fall of '04 in the witness room of the courthouse in downtown Baltimore and which I believe may be playing on a continuous loop in that sad sad room.

The soundtrack from Miss Saigon, which my parents went to see sometime in the '90s, whenever it was the big musical to see.

Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried.

Dispatches and The Things They Carried are the most powerful, with the edge going to The Things They Carried because a journalist can always get out or move around or take a vacation in Saigon.

Stringer Bell pulled that out cause that phone was tapped.

Under the train tracks in Mount Washington.

Outside City Cafe, which you can see in the headlight.

Halloween

Catching up

The Subway Chronicles
Edited by Jacquelin Cangro
2006

The Chronicles and I got off on the wrong foot when the editor, in her introduction, referred several times to "euphemisms" for the New York City subway when I think she meant "metaphors." As far as I know, the subway doesn't require a euphemism. It's not like it's death.

But some of the essays -- all of them about the New York subway, with cameos by the Paris Metro and Moscow's subway -- made up for the intro. Favorites are by Francine Prose ("A Breakup Story"), Robert Lanham ("Straphanger Doppelganger"), Calvin Trillin ("What's the Good Word?"), Colson Whitehead ("Subway) and Jonathan Lethem ("Speak, Hoyt-Schermerhorn). Whitehead and Lethem's pieces were exceprts from other works, though, so I'm not sure they count.

Others were tedious, like one that retraced the author's travels as a child. I read about how he could sit up front by an open window in some trains, and in other trains the window didn't open, but up to four people could sit by it and watch, and so that made it still a good train. And there were different ways to get to Coney Island. That one might have worked better as a shorter piece.

It's hot or miss, but the book provides several perspectives: short-term and longtime New York transplants, young people who grew up in New York and never left (or not for long), and older people who remember a fairly young subway system.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics
Marisha Pessl
2006

This starts out smart in sort of the same way that Mean Girls was smart, only smarter. And then it gets smarter still -- with a bit of a mystery where these seemingly quirky facts come together as something more sinister.

Pessl has does a lot of clever things. For instance, her narrator is a highly intelligent senior in high school who cites sources term paper style throughout the novel. She manages to keep clever from becoming cloying, even though this is clearly a Big Trendy Book.

It's hard to get into the plot without giving too much of the mystery away, but there's a professor father and his daughter who travel around the country as he goes from guest teaching post to guest teaching post and obscure universities. There's a teacher and the popular crowd, known as "the bluebloods" whom she's close to.

And anyway, it's great fun to read.

If you lived here, you could have a picnic whenever you wanted to.

This is out of order, because the one above is from Sunday, and this is from Monday. But I like Sunday's so much more. These trees should get it together. I don't think it's necessary to be leafless yet.

This costume freaks me out every time.

This is Charles. I was by the Rite Aid, and he said, "Take my picture." I tried to take one of us together, but I couldn't get it right.

I took a picture of decay with my Canon at the light rail stop, so I think that makes me edgy. This was taken after I got on the train, before it started moving.

This is from Wednesday. Make sure to put out your cigarette before you get in the elevator.

It's funnel-like.

The distorted door in the background makes this photo for me.

Maybe I could use a paint job. Or a washing. Maybe.

From Greenmount Cemetery, overlooking the city. This is from Saturday.

My favorite thing about this photo is how I cropped it, so I'm not that impressed with it. At least there's still time to take a better one today.

And all I bought was a small butternut squash.

I am the mighty fire hydrant, and I stand apart from my obsolete friends -- the newspaper box and the mailbox. Just try to put a fire out with me. Just try.

The new haircut got a little damaged in the rain between Bella and the bus and the bus and home.

My, what big leaves you have

Hey there, lettuce, it's probably about time to eat you. You're looking a little oversized.

The early fall reading into more Spinoza

Benedict de Spinoza: An Introduction
by Henry E. Allison
1987

The Late Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind
by Rebecca Goldstein
1989

For me, reading philosophy is like Algebra I (OK, philosophy really is part geometry, and it has a lot to do with mathematic principles in general, but speaking personally ...), if I miss a little in the beginning the whole foundation is off and I'm left wondering how I got from there to here. And that's how I felt with Benedict de Spinoza, which is an academic text. (By the way, I finished with a D -- and it was probably a pity D -- in seventh-grade algebra and had to repeat it in eighth grade, and nothing has been so confusing to me since. Also, I have never since spent class drawing pictures of Michael Jordan in pencil on the desk.)

So Goldstein's Spinoza (and Plato, I guess) novel, The Late Summer Passion, if a little didactic was helpful in making things clear. She focuses on the love angle. For Spinoza, an object is good because we love it. We do not love it because it's good. Also, there are no real decisions. Things happen because they are the next logical course in a string of events that go on into eternity. And if you think like that, then life is a dull proposition.

Eva Mueller, a professor of philosophy and our protagonist, does think like Spinoza, and her existence is impersonal. Until she studies Spinoza's The Ethics with a 20-year-old student who likes the human condition and sparks fly and she's all confused.

Then there's a bunch of stuff about World War II. (Eva is German, and a long time ago she had a crazy Jewish lover, so maybe that's why she turned off life. It's also a bit Sophie's Choice. Blond woman, crazy angry Jewish lover, etc.)

We're never told where Eva's university is, but it's pretty clearly set in Ithaca, and I assume it's Cornell cause Rebecca Goldstein is an Ivy League kind of woman. And one night, a distraught Eva goes to the bar at 3 a.m. There are few places in the U.S. where you can go to the bar at 3 a.m., and Google leads me to believe that Ithaca is not one of them (1 a.m. closing time, it seems). So maybe it's not an annoying departure from reality but the book is actually set in another college town famous for its gorges. Yeah, it must be that.

Mother, prostitute. zine editor, performer, Suckdog

Drugs are Nice: A Post-Punk Memoir
by Lisa Crystal Carver
2005

Lisa Carver's had some fucked up things happen to her and she's done some maybe fucked up things, and she writes about them. But she doesn't romanticize them, and she also doesn't dwell on them. And in with all that sad stuff before she had a kid and before she grew up a bit, she had some good times, and she'll tell you about that, too.

As a performer and song-writer, she probably has no talent, but she and her friends still record stuff and still go on the road and tour. And they get popular in the DIY underground. It's inspiring to see people just go out and do something that's fun, even though they don't even know how to do it. Most of us sit around as kids making up songs, sometimes epic songs that last all day, and then grow out of it when we realize they're no good. It takes something to not only not stop, but record and distribute that.

Oh, and for a little bit she's a prostitute (in a brothel) cause she needs the money and she always wanted to do it anyway. Mostly, that goes well, and she has to stop cause she likes her job too much (not the sex but the taking on of several personas).

Drugs are Nice (Don't be fooled by the title, there aren't many drugs. It's taken from the title of one of her songs performed as part of Suckdog.) could be called an autobiography because Carver became well-known as the creator of the zine Rollerderby and had done something besides a lot of drugs pre-memoir, unlike most thirtysomething memoir-ists.

Reading Carver won't make you feel as cheap as reading someone like Augusten Burroughs.

American city

American Pastoral
by Philip Roth
1997

"These deep thinkers were the only people he could not stand to be around for long, these people who'd never manufactured anything or seen anything manufactured."

The Swede, like Updike's Rabbit, is a former star high school athlete. Like Rabbit, he loses a child, though unlike Rabbit, not through the child's death. He's an upper-class Rabbit, though, someone who thinks he's got it under control. And the thing is, even when the Swede doesn't have everything under control and when he knows he doesn't, the he still kind of does.

It doesn't make up a huge part of the story, but as the Swede's life unfolds, so does his the life of his hometown, Newark (the one in N.J.), also the site of The Plot Against America.

The Plot's present-day action (circa World War II) has working- and middle-class Jewish families in the city. By American Pastoral, they've pulled out, with the Swede keeping his glove factory there but moving toward moving that out, too.

So what about Newark? It's a city of 280,00, and I've only seen it from Amtrak. And from there it looks like Wilmington, which pretty much looks like Baltimore, only with an Omaha skyline.

Philip Roth shows me a little bit of what Newark at least once was, with people riding buses and raising families and sometimes hanging on. And he's led me to find a glimpse of what it could be:

A New Arc: A botched city on the cusp of a renaissance (from The Wall Street Journal).
The New City (from Esquire, PDF).

True story

I wanted to link to A.M. Homes' 2004 New Yorker piece on meeting her birth parents, "The Mistress's Daughter," because it was the first of her writing that I read. But almost two years later, I can't find it online. So here she is in December 2004 talking about it on NPR.

An expanded version of The New Yorker piece is due out as a book in April.

Public displays of reading.

This Book will Save Your Life
A.M. Homes
2006

Certain books are awkward to read on the bus: Valley of the Dolls (because the cover is pink and it's Valley of the Dolls), Gone with the Wind (what if people think you're a confederate?) Lorrie Moore's Self-Help (it's not).

Anyway, I didn't read a single page of This Book will Save Your Life on a bus or waiting for a bus, but I did read it on the light rail and had to assure one man that it was a novel and not a cry for help.

Unlike Valley of the Dolls, which is best consumed in your home, This Book is worth the risk.
It's the second book in a row that I've had a hard time putting down. Just try not to look sad when you're reading it.

Let's scrub!

Music to Wash Dishes By: Volume 1
Music by The Hi-Fives, The Queers, Ten-Four and Scared of Chaka
Zine by Dishwasher Pete

Much of Dishwasher Pete's zine is typed, but his intro isn't and it must be said that he has very neat handwriting. But two of the guys in the bands also write, and maybe their handwriting isn't so great, so type is probably best.

I bought the record for Troy. He didn't wash any dishes while listening, but he says he will. I know I would. There are four songs -- along with some inspirational words on the importance of clean dishes to any restaurant -- so if you have a big job (maybe you made a complicated meal or let your dishes pile up for a few days; it's OK, it happens), you might run out of music. Also, if you don't remember records, you have to turn it over after the first two songs. But you could use a break anyway.

The music and zine are a tribute to professional dishwashing, but don't worry, you can totally use them at home, too.

Troy thought the music sounded kind of like the Dead Milkmen. I thought it had a Le Tigre quality, by which I mean one song used the F-word a lot.

A tour de good book

The Accidental
Ali Smith
2005

In the wrong hands, a rotating perspective could be gimmicky, but Ali Smith does well. She rotates the third-person perspective among four family members and the brief first-person accounts of the woman who fleetingly presents themselves in their lives, transforming them.

The best chapters belong to the kids -- 12-year-old Astrid and Magnus, a teenager. While the family is fundamentally unhappy, the siblings have a genuine affection for each other and there's a bit more whimsy surrounding them.

At one point Michael, the stepfather, disintegrates into verse. This is something else that could have gone terribly wrong. It was OK, though. He's a smarmy English professor, though Smith makes him so smarmy that it makes the cliche outrageous.

The mother, Eve, is a bit of a doormat, though she would tell you she just chooses not to be bothered by her husband's smarm.

I read a few reviews after reading the book, and more than one referred to it as a "tour de force." I really can't believe book reviewers think it's OK to do that. Are critics the only people who don't think that phrase has played itself out?

This is near the top of my recommended books for 2006. I'll have it back to the Pratt by Sept. 21.

Birthday reading

Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew who Gave us Modernity
by Rebecca Goldstein
2006

When this book landed in my hands last month, but for the inside flap I couldn't have told you who Baruch Spinoza was. And that can be the best kind of reading -- a random book, this one in the form of a birthday gift, that can lead to further reading. (In this case, though, I'm not sure I'm ready for further reading. I think my understanding of of Spinoza's rationalism has more to do with Rebecca Goldstein's teaching than my intellect.)

If you can really wrap your head around Spinoza, then you can solve the problem of the self and therefore solve the problem of God and evil and death. I am far from there, but Goldstein is an able guide who has made the concept clear. (Can I explain it to you? No. You will have to read the book; I am sorry.)

Spinoza was excommunicated from his Jewish community in 1656, but he was certainly not irreligious:

"All the ceremonies of the superstitious religions, all the slanted versions of their own histories, are founded on the irrational -- and irreligious! -- desire to make God love us in return, and the indulgence in the jealous fantasy that he loves us -- our kind, our people --more than others.

"... Men worship as if it is an arbitrary and exceedingly vain tyrant whom they must placate and flatter, each religion declaring itself more worthy of His favor. This is how all religions distinguish themselves from one another. ... Like children fighting for their parents' attention, they never realiza that everyone's true happiness and blessedness consists solely in the enjoyment of good, not in priding himself that alone he is enjoying that good to the exclusion of others."

Even with centuries of hindsight, though, it is difficult to grasp Spinoza's version of salvation and easy to see why it earned a hostile response from organized religion.

Let's ride

Sometimes people ask me how to ride the bus. I have to admit, I am pretty good at having exact change, and it can be confusing for a first-time rider. The change slot on Baltimore buses isn't where I want it to be. Then, sometimes the stop-requesting mechanism is broken, and if no one more aggressive than you wants your stop, you have to shout, "Next stop, please" in front of all the bus people, who are totally going to make fun of your shouting style once you get off.

But on any given Baltimore City bus with at least a smattering of riders, there is probably at least one person who is talking to -- sometimes screaming at -- no one. Life is not generally easy for this person. Yet, this person somehow gets it together enough to board, ride and exit the bus at the proper time and in the proper manner.

Let this person be an inspiration to you.

The book part of this is something I saw a few weeks ago at Atomic Books: How to Live Well Without Owning a Car.

I appreciate the spirit of the book, and the numbers on the cost of car ownership are persuasive, but I'm not sure a book is necessary. If it helps people realize that it's not so hard to live without a car, then a common-sense book isn't a bad thing.

I don't get the title

The Constant Gardener
John Le Carre
2001

Maryann did an excellent job of breaking in the mass paperback edition of The Constant Gardener. The spine was broken, the covers a bit wrinkled. Physically, it was a pleasure to read. That's maybe 60 percent of the reason I finished it.

At one point, all these characters' computers are wiped out by viruses (planted by the forces of evil, of course), and they all lament the loss of their e-mail, possibly including unread messages. I am willing to believe that some people were using programs like Lotus and Outlook to download their e-mail automatically. But all of them? Especially because some of these people were dealing with sensitive and irreplaceable information.

Also, there is no "constant gardening." Our protagonist had a garden, and there's intermittent talk of it, and freesia are a plot point. But a better title might be The Former Gardener or Mediocre Thriller where the Main Character Likes Plants.

Or maybe it's a metaphor -- even though his wife's dead, he's a constant gardener of her work. Right.

Kafka on the Sho-ore

Kafka on the Shore
Haruki Murakami
2005

The book gets its title from a song one of the characters wrote about 30 years before the book begins. And I want to sing the title to the Smiths' "Girlfriend in a Coma." Of course "Kafka on the Shore" is one syllable short, so I am merely driving myself crazy.

"Kafka" is the name a 15-year-old runaway gives himself, and I'm uncomfortable with such obvious allusions. So, there's the song "Kafka on the Shore," then there's the boy Kafka Tamura, who has nothing to do with the song, oh, except that he does. And, also, "kafka" apparently means "crow," in some language. Czech, maybe?

The story of Kafka the runaway alternates chapters with the story of Nakata, sort of an idiot savant, though that's oversimplifying matters. Nakata, who talks about himself in the third person, can talk to cats (because we all have our talents!) until he can't. Then they intertwine. Of course.

Interspersed is a lot of talk about literary and musical theory. And things get a bit heavy-handed. People have monologues, and I get bored. But not so bored that I didn't want to finish.

No, the other June

Three Junes
Julia Glass
2002

A friend told me to read Three Junes a few years ago, so I can finally cross that one off my list.

In my mind, it was always about three women named June. But it's about three Junes in three different years, so a plot involving three women named June remains up for grabs.

Julia Glass gives us a family from different perspectives -- a husband, one each from two sons and a an outsider. The life of family is hardly just one thing or one way, and you're pivotal experiences may be lived completely differntly by the others involved.

The immigrant man

Brick Lane
by Monica Ali
2003

I meant to be reading The Accidental by Ali Smith, but I went in search of "Ali" instead of "Smith" at the library and found Brick Lane, which I'd vaguely remembered hearing good things about. So next trip, it's to the S's.

It reminds me of White Teeth, though Ali was born in Bangladesh and her focus -- her whole world, really, is the Bangladeshi immigrants. What they have in common is London and the ridiculous (but mostly lovable) major male characters. Though in Ali's book, the ridiculous men are sad and not comedic like Zadie Smith's are. They also both have characters with the last name Iqbal, though Smith's Iqbals are much more prominent in her story.

In Brick Lane, Nazneen arrives in London a young bride in an arranged marriage. She is scared and longs for home. Her husband, Chanu, is much older than she and has been in London for more than a decade. He is always planning on going home and building a house in Dhaka.

Though for many years she barely leaves the apartment complex, Nazneen somehow understands more and accepts more about her new home than her husband seems to. Chanu has hopes (or maybe illusions) that she sees through rather quickly.

The other women in the book seem to be more perceptive about their new homes, too. Maybe it's because they make more connections among themselves than the men do. Or maybe it's because they largely don't have to face the outside world every day and live up to expectations back home.

Gateway drug

The rules at Bertucci's were clear on reading at work: don't. But I worked in the carryout alone many afternoons, and after the lunch rush there were only so many times I could wipe the counter and only so many balls of pizza dough I could prepare for the hostesses to give to kids.

So in between avoiding the cook who seemed to hate me and ringing up pizza orders, I sat (also frowned upon), for sometimes luxurious stretches, and read Kurt Vonnegut books.

Maybe "gorged myself" is more accurate. I started with Cat's Cradle, then Slaughterhouse Five and didn't stop until I'd exhausted the incomplete Kurt Vonnegut collection at the Newtown Square Public Library.

By the time I left Bertucci's at the end of the summer, I'd had my fill for a while but probably would have read just one more if it had been handed to me.

I hadn't known books could be funny and engaging, but also smart and serious and real. Suddenly, I just wanted to spend all my time reading.

Something similar had happened in high school when a friend lent me The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but I didn't go on a Douglas Adams binge after reading it.

It was a year or so after college when I read Kurt Vonnegut again -- a copy of Breakfast of Champions I'd moved with twice after picking it up at used bookstore in Washington. I enjoyed it, but it didn't inspire the fervor my first taste had.

But if Kurt Vonnegut didn't give me a lifelong passion for Kurt Vonnegut, he did give me a lifelong passion for books.

Oh, so geisha aren't fancy hookers

Memoirs of a Geisha
Arthur Golden
1997

In a way, Memoirs of a Geisha reminds me of Gone with the Wind, only less crappy and less racist and whatnot. Oh, and the heroine is way less bratty than Scarlett O'Hara.

But there is a war (World War II) and it ruins an elegant existence (that in this case isn't even quite so elegant to everyone living within it -- no happy slaves in Kyoto).

Because the story opens with Sayuri, the geisha of the title, living in New York City and reflecting on what looks like a happy life, it's not giving anything away to say that things turn out better for her than for Scarlett. They didn't turn out the way I expected, though. (I expected less joy and more acceptance.) After spending 400 pages with her, I really felt she deserved a good outcome.

The old white man series

The Plot Against America
Philip Roth
2004

The premise of The Plot Against America is what if instead of electing Franklin Roosevelt to a third term, Americans had elected isolationist, anti-Semitic Charles Lindbergh president?

I love the concept of what-if-history-were-different books, but the execution can be awful. (See Stephen Fry's Making History, on what if Hitler were never born, for a bad one.) This is Philip Roth, though, and we are in able hands.

The Plot Against America is a story less about the historical concept than about a nation afraid. The Jews are afraid of a U.S. progrom. The rest of the country is afraid of war. They like hearing that the U.S. can stay out of World War II -- this Jew war -- and that their sons won't have to fight and that everything will be fine.

What happens in Philip Roth's World War II isn't even so different from what happened in the real one. In Roth's world, the Jews are targeted and forced to move. In the real history, Japanese-Americans weren't treated so well.

And even in Philip Roth's world, history doesn't get that far off course. Things are terrifying for a lot of people for a few years, but then they get back to normal. The narrator refers to Robert Kennedy's assassination after he wins the California primary in 1968, so I have to believe that Philip Roth's history ends up unfolding just like the real one.

A note on the authors


With the John Updike and the Philip Roth, I've been reading lots of old white men (though Updike wasn't so old when he wrote Rabbit, Run). But there are female and nonwhite and non-American authors in my reading pile, I promise.

Half of a good book

The Eyre Affair
Jasper Fforde
2002

Jasper Fforde has a knack for making the absurd believable. Things unfold at a brisk -- but unrushed -- pace. And then it seems like he got tired of it and just decided to wrap it up as quickly as possible.

Thursday Next is a literary detective, and The Eyre Affair is part detective story, part science fiction, part fun with books. She ends up inside the narrative of Jane Eyre. This is billed as the plot, but this happens in only the last 100 pages or so, and the rest is a lot of build up to that.

Once Thursday is inside Jane Eyre, the book really starts to unravel. Thursday has lines like, "I wondered if Landen had ever loved me as much as Rochester loved Jane."

Sigh.

Back in the real world, Thursday meets up with her Landen (after an overused plot point that would be giving too much away to elaborate on, but it's cliche).

Then everything gets resolved in 18 pages. I feel kind of cheap, really.

The last of Rabbit, or halfway to 50 books

Rabbit at Rest
John Updike
1991

Over four books (about 1,500 pages), you really get to know a guy. And what I took away from Harry Angstrom is that life is long and short, and hard and easy. You kind of float along and things happen to you. Or you might snap out of the floating. Our roles in life are constantly changing. There's not much separating life and death. People get fat. They get pathetic as they age, or they really come into their prime.

Harry's granddaughter is born the same year I was, and he is a man behind the times, or maybe just of his own time. He talks about "queers," isn't quite racist but isn't quite not racist, isn't quite sexist but isn't quite not sexist.

But somehow I've been able to relate more to him than the men at the center of Independence Day and Herzog. And as I move onto other books, I miss him.

A girl and her Docs meet a girl and her guitar

"Both Hands"
Ani DiFranco
circa 1998

Until the annual talent show, I didn't even know that Lisa K. played guitar, but she was more than just marching band piccolo.

She played Ani DiFranco's "Both Hands," and I think that was it. It could have been very good or very bad; I don't remember much except needing to have that song to listen to it over and over and over. Until then, I didn't know music could be like that -- raw and painful and strong.

I bought my first Ani DiFranco CD at the Borders next to Peace A Pizza (ravioli available as a topping, my friend) and Hope's Cookies. Because it was there or whatever the '90s version of FYE was called. I thought Borders was more likely to have it. And they did have it, plus 97 other Ani DiFranco albums.

And I played it and played it and played it (even the spoken word parts). And when Little Plastic Castle came out, I bought it and played it and played it and played it -- along with the other albums I'd bought along the way. I was going to listen to Ani forever and ever and ever.

In college, though, we lost touch a bit. Oh sure, I'd put her on a mix every once in a while, but I didn't hear her every day, and I was certainly skipping the spoken word tracks.

Recently, though, we got reacquainted when I listened to Nick Hornby's Songbook. "You Had Time" might be my "Both Hands" of this decade.

Things really were wrong in the '70s

Rabbit is Rich
John Updike
1981

Harry Angstrom's son is almost as old as Harry was in the first Rabbit book. And that means lots of conflict.

It reminds me of this play a student and teacher wrote for my high school's one-act play festival. It was called Oelvis Oedipus. Young Elvis kills old Elvis, etc. (This followed the success of the previous year's Kung Fu Hamlet, which really was much better.)

In this case, young Elvis does not kill old Elvis, but he'd probably like to. Harry's been far from a perfect father -- maybe he hasn't even been a good father -- but it's hard to understand what Nelson's real beef is.

The daquiris are largely absent in the third book. Harry drinks lots of beer, and gin and tonics, and some brandy, wine and champagne (at a wedding). They get a mention, though, when the Angstroms go to the Caribbean with two other couples. Mostly, though, even there, they all drink pina coladas.

Speaking of the Caribbean, the couples all go down there and then decide to get in a little key-party-style action. Because, you know, it's vacation and it's the '70s, so why wouldn't I sleep with my friend's wife?

Pink drinks

Rabbit Redux
John Updike
1971

Ten years have passed since Rabbit, Run, and Rabbit drinks more. After work he an his dad usually get drinks. Rabbit always orders a daquiri, then another.

Later in the book, a co-worker he's met at a bar (a "negro" bar, my friends -- this is the end of the '60s) tells him it's a lady drink and has him order a whiskey sour. He is also observed drinking beer as the daquiries seem to taper off.

If a man wants to have a drink with some fruit in it, then a man should have a drink with some fruit in it. But two daquiries a day at the same bar almost every day? This is the kind of man Harry Angstrom is.

At the beginning of Rabbit, Run, he doesn't drink at all. He starts with the daquiries at dinner one night, ordering what the women at the table order. Life happens to him. He moves along till he's jolted out of routine.

Rabbit, take one

Rabbit, Run
John Updike
1960

Because of his disappointing stories published in the past few years in magazines, I'd forgotten that John Updike was so good. (If I knew I could get thousands of dollars for a story, I'd probably publish lots of stuff not up to my usual John Updike standards, too.)

Rabbit, Run is maybe the original quarter-life crisis story -- back when you weren't having a quarter-life crisis but were instead simply maintaining a sense of entitlement.

Rabbit is 26, and he married "late" at 23. His 26 seems somehow both so much older and so much younger than my forthcoming 26. He's married. He has a kid and one on the way. But he lives in his hometown and hasn't gotten a start on a career, and there is no college buffer between him and high school. He goes from high school basketball star to family man (sort of) with what seems like nothing in between.

Harry Angstrom is a man haltingly starting on his way in life, and it's hard not see a little something of my own uncertainties in this mid-20th-century adult.

It seemed like a good idea at the time

It's finally time in my reading career to tackle John Updike's Rabbit books.

Not counting the first 175 pages of Rabbit, Run, my Updike reading comprises In the Beauty of the Lilies (a poor man's version of the Rabbit books), some short stories found in various anthologies and some boring short stories published in The New Yorker and Atlantic.

But, collected under one title, these four novels might be the great American novel. I must wait no longer!

Collected under one title, these for novels are also heavy.

Robert Angstrom, as published by Everyman's Library in 1995, is 1,516 pages. But it just seemed simpler to check out one book instead of four -- especially because the four books weren't all on the shelf individually and I wasn't sure which order to go in anyway. (Checking the copyright would have been so hard.)

Simpler maybe, but it is making reading physically taxing.

So here I am, straining the limits of my bag and my shoulder, all in the name of good fiction.

... And it was all a dream

The Club Dumas
Arturo Pervez-Reverte
1993

I think this is Arturo Pervez-Reverte's best-known book (at least it was the first one I'd heard of), but it gets bogged down in all the theory and history of Alexander Dumas and The Three Musketeers. Pervez-Reverte seems almost giddy on those subjects.

It reminded me a bit of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, with it's main character thrown into an alternate world, though not so literally in the case of The Club Dumas.

I spent 300-plus pages getting sucked in (despite my annoyances), only to be disappointed at the end. The reveal was a cop-out.

The Club Dumas and Pervez-Reverte's later Queen of the South have a lot in common: They're both thrillers without being dumb about it, and they both have a main character who's essentially going it alone. But Queen of the South was ultimately more rewarding.

How We are Hungry
By Dave Eggers
2004

Edward is nudging me as I run. Edward is pushing me, bumping into me. All I want is to run but he is yelling and bumping me, trying to bite me. All I want is to run and then jump. I am telling him that if we both just run and jump without bumping or biting we will run faster and jump farther. We will be stronger and do more beautiful things.
From “After I was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned”

In all the irony and footnotes of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and McSweeney's, it gets lost that Dave Eggers is, at his core, a genuine writer. He celebrates the perfection of childhood, and the beauty and pain of adulthood. We are all people and we all feel – rawly, happily, angrily.

Fiction and memoir

The People of Paper
by Salvador Plascencia
2005

Physically, The People of Paper (published by McSweeney's) is beautiful. The writing is at times beautiful, too. But somewhere in the middle, the author breaks into what I think is a memoir of heartbreak. And he mourns and curses his ex-girlfriend, and this plays into the plot but also gets in the way. I did, however, get voyeuristic pleasure from this tangent.

Plascencia writes in the tradition Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but I found him more accessible.

He uses visual gimmicks, such as having multiple columns of type on a page (sometimes in multiple directions). But it's nice to see someone recognize that words are visual, too.

His characters -- like the author himself, it seems -- are in search of a cure for sadness. There is a Baby Nostradamus, a Church of Thieves, a cardinal remembering his first (and last) love. They are fable characters, but they are also, to their core, human. And that is the beauty of Plascencia's first novel.

Art and the Soviet Union

The Dream Life of Sukhanov
by Olga Grushin
2005

In the last third of The Dream Life of Sukhanov, Anatoly Sukhanov's wife, Nina, asks him: "My God, Tolya, don't you remember what it feels like? ... To be in a hurry to live, to dream of overthrowing conventions, to hope to make the world a gift of something beautiful and everlasting? Don't you remember, Tolya? Tolya?"

And it's hard to believe he does or that he even felt like that ever, because this good Soviet citizen is a pragmatist, and in his childhood even there is a glimmer of that pragmatism.

He is an artist by training and a critic by profession. In school, he suppresses his unique artistic style because it does not meet with Soviet approval. As an adult, he suppresses his aesthetic sense for the same reason. He is not a critic so much as a mouthpiece for the Soviet Cultural Ministry.

But as much as he doesn't want to remember, Sukhanov does remember what it's like to dream of overthrowing conventions. And The Dream Life of Sukhanov is the story of memory making itself known. Memory tells him what it felt like and replays the incident that led to his choice of a comfortable life over his art.

As Sukhanov's memory unfolds, it's finally possible to reconcile the child taking delight in a book of Chagall's work with the man editing out of articles references to God.

A current of Communist oppression runs through Dream Life, but it is more about a man whose family orbits one another without forming a unit -- a man near the end of middle age realizing how much and how many people he has betrayed.

Sukhanov is on the verge of trying to make things right or at least acknowledge that he is finally in on the secret, but until his life falls apart, he never quite gets there, hobbled by trivia every time.

'Me and Little Andy": a tragedy by Dolly Parton

In 2002, Dolly Parton briefly seemed to be everywhere and be appreciated, but only in the ironic sense.

My friend, Jason, though is a real fan. At her show at the 9:30 Club in D.C., he screamed out for her to play "Me and Little Andy." He says she not only declined to play it, but seemed surprised that someone would ask for it. (Why, Dolly? Why? It is after all on The Essential Dolly Parton, Volume 2)

He told me this after he played me the song for the first time. We were sitting in some kind of SUV with Texas plates.

In "Me and Little Andy," a girl and her puppy show up on a doorstep late at night. They need a place to stay. The girl has been physically abused. Dolly starts singing in a little-girl voice:

Ain’t ya got no gingerbread
Ain’t ya got no candy
Ain’t ya got an extra bed for me and little andy
Patty cake and bakersman
My mommy ran away again
And we was all alone and didn’t know what else to do
I wonder if you’ll let us stay with you

Giddy up trotty horse, going to the mill
Can we stay all night
If you don’t love us no one will
I promise we won’t cry
London bridge is fallin’ down
My daddy’s drunk again in town
And we was all alone and didn’t what we could do
I wonder if you’ll let us stay with you

She takes the girl and her puppy in. But that night as they sleep (SPOILER ALERT), the both die.

And the song ends hauntingly:

Ain’t ya got no gingerbread
Ain’t ya got no candy
Ain’t ya got an extra bed for me and little (whispers) andy

It's probably weird that after listening to that song, I had it in my head for the rest of the day.

Some of Tulia's best friends are black

Tulia: Race, Cocaine, and Corruption in a Small Texas Town
Nate Blakeslee
2005

Blakeslee, of the Texas Observer, was the first reporter to write in-depth about the arrests on charges of dealing cocaine of 47, mostly black, residents of Tulia, a town of 5,000 on the Texas panhandle. The state had an unbelievably weak case, based on one witness -- an undercover narcotics officer with no corroboration and a spotty employment history. But most of the 47 were convicted after short trials.

The case, as well as the history of the town, is mired in the race and class issues. It was shocking to read about such blatant racism. Aren't people at least supposed to try to hide their prejudices in public and pay lip service to diversity?

Tulia is a thoroughly reported and reconstructed look at the case and its happy resolution four years later. In some places it's bogged down by the legal and procedural details, but mostly Blakeslee excels at explanation.

In addition to being an insightful examination of a social issue, Tulia is a good story with its heroes and villains and people in all their regular old flawed humanity.

Hunger
by Knut Hamsun
1890

Larry Scott -- Baltimore's most famous artist, at least to me -- told me to read Hunger. As I don't know any artists, not many tell me to read books, so when one does, I listen. (I was in a Koffee Therapy, where he is the curator, and he was dropping off the book for the owner, Ric. Say hi to Ric's cappuccino.)

It's a sort of autobiographical starving artist novel, and it reminded me of Crime and Punishment in the sometimes maniacal manner of the narrator.

The unnamed narrator is mostly unlikable. He's not helping his situation any, and I wanted to yell at him that he really should just take the money people were offering. But yelling at a book works as well as yelling at a TV screen.

Paul Auster, in his introduction, "The Art of Hunger," points out that the unnamed narrator's cycle of poverty and hunger, and not his writing, becomes his art. 

You know what? It really is my party and I will cry if I want to

Every time my parents took us to Nifty Fifty's when I was under the age of 11 or so, I would play "It's My Party" by Lesley Gore in the juke box. It was always crowded on Friday and Saturday nights, so usually I'd have to wait awhile before my song came on. Sometimes I would put my money in (I think it was a nickle a song) while we were waiting for a table.

Other songs made it onto the playlist. Once in a while I'd throw in a little Elvis. But I always played "It's my Party." At least once I considered playing it twice.

I didn't seek it out much outside of Nifty Fifty's. (The song is not even from the '50s, so I have to question the authenticity of the entire place, which as a kid I thought had been sitting in suburban Philadelphia, untouched by time, since the 1950s.) But it was the first song I'd ever played on a juke box, so it was mine.

Oldies 98 was my favorite radio station, and I was floored when I heard the sequel, "Judy's Turn to Cry." (Johnny was dancing with Judy at the party, causing the crying of the title, and then later he and party girl made up. So take that, Judy, you man stealing hussy!)

I could relate to our tearful heroine because I've always been a crier. Yeah, party girl is getting dumped, and that's sad, but she's also saying, "Hey, don't be afraid to show that you're sad. I'm not. This, my friends, is my party, and I will cry if I want to."

No. 15

The Thin Place
by Kathryn Davis

Life is everywhere; therefore, death is everywhere.

You should read this book. It's quite good.

'It spins around, and you're around again'

The afternoon my boyfriend broke up with me, my friend Steve took me to lunch and then to a record store by the water, where he told me to buy the Wrens' album Meadowlands. I spent the rest of the day before work listening to it and trying to sleep.

It is intensely sad, so it fit well with my day. Later that week, another friend would give me a Tahiti 80 CD, which is all sunlight and fun, sung in English by French people, and was probably better for me. But that first day, the Wrens were perfect.

Ten tons against me and you've gone.
I put your favorite records on
and sit around.
It spins around,
and you're around again.
Struck dumb while drugs run at how high reeds
cue every memory at half speeds.

The morning, a month later, we got back together, I played him both CDs. Eventually, I bought him Meadowlands.

Something about the sound of these guys with day jobs from New Jersey makes me happy and sad at the same time, and nostalgic for things that never happened to me.

A reading sprint

Cloud Atlas
by David Mitchell

Because it was due back at the library and I had renewed it once (the limit), I read Cloud Atlas in three or four days.

And going from the 1850s to the 1930s to the 1970s to a Korean superstate of the near future to post-apocalyptic Hawaii in half a week has left my brain bouncing around a bit.

Cloud Atlas is eclectic and complex and, at times, slow. But it all comes together, and it's fascinating to see it all unfold over 500 pages.

I brought it back one day late, having finished it about 3 that morning. But the woman at the check-in desk told me I didn't owe any fines and that sometimes there's a one-day grace period. So, let's here it for the Enoch Pratt Free Library Baltimore.

On Zadie Smith

On Beauty

by Zadie Smith

On Beauty is the work of someone very smart. White Teeth is also the work of someone very smart. Autograph Man I skipped.

According to critics and my friends, Zadie Smith came into her own with On Beauty, and I liked it -- I really, really liked it.

But.

There's something about her characters that I can't quite relate to. Maybe somehow that's the point, but it keeps me from quite getting engrossed in a book.

Howard Belsey is a professor at a private East Coast college. His youngest is in high school, the older two in college. He is in his late 50s. His 30-year marriage to KiKi is in trouble. Mostly, his problems are boring.

Howard reminds me of Grady Tripp from Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys. Both are sort-of has-beens who have been working on books with no end in site. But despite Grady's being pathetic and a bit of a dog, I rooted for him. I just want to tell Howard to get it together. Oh, and to stop being boring.

Kiki is the most sympathetic of the characters. She has problems, too. These problems are less boring, maybe because KiKi isn't so consumed with herself.

There's lots of academic politics in On Beauty, and so I couldn't help but think of Jane Smiley's Moo, though On Beauty is not as satirical or as mean.

Smith captures campus life, with all the language that goes along with it, in perfect detail, but it's been done.

Baby-sitters club, revisited

My Aunt Frannie (our neighbor in the first house I lived in) gave me Bobbsey Twins books. My parents gave me Nancy Drew (the originial series, not the sexed up one). I liked them both, especially the Bobbsey Twins, but not nearly as much as The Baby-sitters Club.

Even when I was 8, I knew the Baby-sitters Club was not good literature. I was frustrated with having to read a chapter in every book that described the girls. OK, I get it Mary Ann has neat handwriting, and Claudia is wild and artistic and likes candy, and Dawn eats health food. I wished Ann M. Martin would just have a primer in the front for newcomers.

Yet every time a new book came out (and joy of joys if it was a Super Special), I would read half of it before my parents could even get me out of the bookstore, in this case the Encore Books next to the Shop Rite -- it really was the '80s.

At 8, my baby-sitter was the coolest person I knew. Jeanie had boyfriends and long, straight black hair. She had gone to Australia and was learning how to drive.

My dad was desperate to get me to read "the classics," and every once in a while I'd throw him a bone like The Secret Garden or Little Women. But nothing could make an afternoon like the BSC.

Two of my friends and I even made our own baby-sitters club. It was of course an utter failure.

This librarian is making the journey again.

Sickness and beauty

Veronica
by Mary Gaitskill

It's strange how long ago the AIDS crisis in America seems. Not that it isn't killing people every day, not to mention ruining African nations. But in health class we learned that if you had HIV, you would get sick and die very soon. I remember the figure often given was five to 15 years that someone could live with HIV. Gay men now in their 40s and 50s watched their circle of friends die off.

I imagine that, as a child of the '80s, I read books about the early days of AIDS, much like a child of the '70s might read about preparing for nuclear war with the Soviet Union.

Veronica isn't only about AIDS -- it's about beauty and sickness and strength and memory -- but it's there. And it's there in the '80s and then again in the late '90s.

Alan Hollinghurst's The Swimming Pool Library doesn't mention AIDS and takes place before anyone's heard of it. (It was written in 1989.) But because it's about sex and gay men, with all it's nostalgia, it hurtles toward crisis.

Because of when I was born, I grew up learning that sex can kill you, and it is strange to get inside the head of a character who doesn't know that yet.

In a small Turkish town

Snow
by Orhan Pamuk

"'If only to see themselves as wise and superior and humanistic, they need to think of us as sweet and funny, and convince themselves that they sympathize with the way we are and even love us. But if you put in what I've just said, at least your readers will keep a little room for doubt in their minds.'"

I did think of the characters in Snow as sweet and funny. And I did sympathize with them -- even the political Islamists -- and love them. Then on the last page, someone tells the narrator to write in his book that we shouldn't believe anything he's written.

Snow is one of the few novels that employs meta fiction (and it does so just a little bit, hardly noticeable really) without being clever about it. It turns out that it's not such a bad technique in the right hands.

Pamuk's protagonist, Ka, returns to Turkey for his mother's funeral after years of exile in Germany. Ka goes to a small town, cut off from the rest of the country after a snowstorm, where he is ostensibly researching an article on a series of suicides by devout Muslim girls. A number of people criticize him -- sometimes with hostility -- for being or trying to be Western.

Against the (unmentioned) backdrop of Turkey's official desire for inclusion in the European Union, this presents something of a conflict -- not in the novel so much, although it's a problem for Ka, but in real-life Europe.

Recently, charges that Pamuk had denigrated Turkey were dropped. He wrote last year about facing trial.

"Living as I do in a country that honors its pashas, saints, and policemen at every opportunity but refuses to honor its writers until they have spent years in courts and in prisons, I cannot say I was surprised to be put on trial. I understand why friends smile and say that I am at last 'a real Turkish writer.' But when I uttered the words that landed me in trouble I was not seeking that kind of honor."

'Meaning at random'

The Transit of Venus
by Shirley Hazzard

The Transit of Venus picks up chronologically where The Remains of the Day left off. But this time, war is paranthetical. Around it, there is private grief. Things are left unsaid. People reach middle age. Grief is rewarded.

The cicature of stitching on her gloves was an imprint on his brain. Earrings of pearl stared, white-eyed as fish. There was a streak of flowered scarf, inane, and the collar blue. Grief had a painter's eye, assigning arbitrary meaning at random -- like God.

At 17, getting dumped by my first boyfriend, who was in St. Louis, I stared at a living room couch -- pastels on white. Thinking, "This couch is the same. My life is changing."

Tangled up in Dylan

Kathryn and I memorized "Tangled up in Blue" between Chapel Hill and Pittsburgh sophomore year of college. I was in unrequited love with a Dylan fan, and that fall I was listening to the version off a greatest-hits CD, the bootleg version (where you can hear the buttons of Dylan's jacket clicking against his guitar) and the Indigo Girls' live version. I think Kathryn was more of a "Hurricane" girl, but we had what we had in the Nissan.

By West Virginia, we had it, except for the line, "where I happened to be employed," which on Greatest Hits Volume 3 sounds like "where I [something something] employed." We were particularly fascinated with the extra rhyming here:

I muttered somethin' underneath my breath,
She studied the lines on my face.
I must admit I felt a little uneasy
When she bent down to tie the laces of my shoe,
Tangled up in blue.

A year later I would sing it in hotel room in Austin and imagine I had impressed the four or so people there by knowing all the words. (I got the missing ones from the Indigo Girls.)

These days I hear "Tangled up in Blue" mostly when my iPod shuffles to it. And instead of thinking about a boy from Asheville, I think about a friend who would drive to Pittsburgh on short notice.

I haven't heard from Kathryn in a couple of years, but I know she's in a band, and now that I think about it, she really did sound better than me in that Nissan.

Clones and butlers

The Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro

If I hadn't read Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, I would have never picked up The Remains of the Day. Because isn't The Remains of the Day that British period piece movie that I pretended to like in high school, even though I couldn't get through it, because it seemed like a smart movie to like?

It turns out that movie was Howard's End.

There is a movie version of The Remains of the Day, and it takes place in the 1950s in Britain and looks back on the 1920s, but I have never tried to watch it.

Never Let Me Go is narrated by a clone looking back on her time at the school/instituation where she was raised. The Remains of the Day is narrated by a butler looking back on his years of service to a lord.

Both are able to understand more by leaving an institution they have had little cause to leave before -- the clone because it's time to leave school and care for other clones donating their organs; the butler because a new employer has lent him his car so he can go on a few days' trip. Both have been trained to dehumanize themselves -- the clone to end her life as an organ donor; the butler to serve an employer. And through this denial of their own humanity, both have missed out on love.

When the butler's father, also a butler, dies -- decades before the novel's trip -- the butler barely pauses in his work, unflappability being essential to a dignified butler and attends to a visiting dignitaries foot pain, having the household's cook close his dead father's eyes. When the clone is taking care of an old friend and a lover as they donate organs until "completion," there is no protest other than a fruitless outing to try to have the lover's donations deferred.

The butler thinks it is satisfactory to have given himself over to a life of service because this was in service to someone with the intention of doing great things for the world. He thinks this until he realizes those intentions were misguided, and so that leaves him in the last stage of his life unsure about it meant for him or anyone else.

You can give your life over to money or to power or to escaping your home life at the office, and at the end of your day, what does that get you?

How we remember

Mysterious Skin
by Scott Heim

Two boys share the same trauma. One, Brian, loses those hours from his life until remembering it a decade later. The other, Neil, carries it as a fond memory until grappling with what it really means to be liked.

Heim explores how we remember, but more compelling is how we think about how we feel. For 10 years, Neil remembers being sexually abused by his baseball coached as a series of romantic encounters. And then he realizes that maybe that didn't make him feel so great or so safe.

How do we trust our memories or even how we feel about what we remember?

Let's eat

Julie & Julia
by Julie Powell

Julie Powell decides to work her way through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking (gratingly abbreviated throughout as MtAoFC, presumably by the same person who comes up with all of the U.N.'s acronyms) in one year. Breakdown ensues.

Julie & Julia often seems to be more of a memoir of starting a blog that gets popular than one of a woman turning 30 who finds herself through French cooking. There are lots of quotes from comments on the blog, her posts and her IM conversations.

Powell is a New Yorker originally from Austin, and the book is peppered with New Yorker cliches. Early on (before all the cooking), she describes a "loon" in the subway station who bangs her head against the subway platform. Ha, there are crazy people in subway stations in New York -- crazy New York. (It's probably oversensitive to point out that this "loon" is a severely mentally ill and possibly homeless woman. And shouldn't someone stop her from banging her head? Or at least make sure she hasn't given herself a concussion?)

But as awkward as I found the writing, Powell just one day decided to do something interesting, and it's always fun to read about people's obsessions.

'The Martian Chronicles'

Of course Ray Bradbury wasn't really writing about Mars and space travel, but it's amazing that he had us colonizing Mars in the '90s. I'm not sure whether that says more about how optimistic people were about space travel or how far away the end of the century seemed.

Three Days of TV, one Great Show

I spent the past three days on the couch, getting up only to refill my water glass and to go to bed.

Too sick to read, I watched -- or at least listened to semi-consciously -- a lot of Date My Mom, Made and My Fair Brady (seriously, Adrienne Curry, first winner of America's Next Top Model, shut up). And then there was The Flavor of Love.

I caught only one episode, and until checking I vaguely suspected that, high on Rite Aid brand Nyquil, I had made this show up. Because if I could create a show while taking Nyquil, I think this would be it.

Flava Flav lives in a house with a bunch of women who are too young for him and tries to find true love. In the one I caught, Brigitte Nielsen shows up to help out her old Foofy Foof, described by one BET message board user as a "little burnt up Ninja Turtle." (It's obvious that these two are still love. What they had was real!)

I only wish I had had the strength and good sense to open my eyes.

A young rebel

Finally, I've conquered all 754 pages (not including appendix and index) of Che Guevara, a Revolutionary Life.

Reinaldo Arenas was a Cuban poet and author who, as a gay man and as a writer who smuggled his work out of the country to be published, suffered greatly in Fidel Castro's Cuba. Eventually, he fled Cuba for the United States during the Mariel boat lift and, dying of AIDS-related causes, killed himself in New York in 1980.

When he was 15, Arenas was also a fighter in Castro's rebel Army.

About halfway through Che, Arenas makes his only appearance. Jon Lee Anderson has a paragraph mentioning Arenas and quoting a description from his memoir, Before Night Falls. But Arenas' case speaks to the fact that no one, except maybe Che, knew what the revolution was leading to. There were certainly other guerilla fighters who fled Cuba after Castro took power. People were so unhappy under Fulgencio Batista, though, that they were willing to fight against him, even if it wasn't clear what they were fighting for.

'Scientific researcher'

Che was a doctor, which is important to understanding the beginning part of this quote from Jon Lee Anderson:

But treating individuals' illnesses had never been his real interest; his motivation had always been that of the scientific researcher looking for a cure, a means to prevent; and, as it had been with medicine, so it had become with politics. Searching, crossing solutions off the list of possibilities, as he went -- "reformism, democracy, elections" -- he had found Marx, then Guatemala, then Cuba, and in that baptism of fire, his discovery of "empirical medicine" had led to "scientific truth." That truth, and the cure to man's ills, was Marxism-Leninism, and guerilla warfare was the means to achieve it.

At first, I was admiring Che's post-revolution austerity -- his refusal to draw a large pay check in his ministry positions, his refusal of special treatment for himself and his underlings -- because if he was asking people to live a hard life for the revolution, at least he wasn't asking anyone to do anything he wouldn't. But I'm beginning to think that it was all a show, as though he's living such a modest life that modesty has become a point of pride.

Less than 300 pages to go

Che was married twice. I even knew the second one was named Aleida March but possibly only because some friends have a cat named Aleida. The first one was named Hilda, but I can't remember her last name, and she doesn't count anyway because Che wasn't into her.

Jon Lee Anderson interviewed and obtained notes, diaries, etc., from March for A Revolutionary Life. And he moved his family to Cuba for a few years during his research. As I am barely past the revolution in the book, there hasn't been a lot about March as she is now, but it seems odd that Anderson can just talk to her and she's not under glass in the Museum of the Revolution.

Fun with the Cuban revolution

As I continue the long, hard slog through Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (approaching Page 300), another fact:

Fidel Castro's nom de guerre was Alejandro.

1. Why do people have noms de guerres? Are they just fancy code names, or is there a difference between a code name and a nom de guerre? Because I imagine that a nom de guerre is mostly for fun. "Let's play war. I'll be "Alejandro."

2. Alejandro is part of Castro's real name, so way to be creative, Mr. Revolutionary Leader Turned Dictator.

Losing Book-Itz

After reading Finding Manana, I've been interested in Cuba, so I'm reading Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life by Jon Lee Anderson, which I have had for a few years but hadn't gotten around to. It is thorough: excluding the appendix, notes and bibliography -- 754 pages. Fortunately, there's a lot of context about Latin American politics and economics, so it's more than just a recount of one man's life. But this is no way to get ahead on the reading list.

So, your Che fact of the day: He had bad asthma.

More nonfiction

Finding Manana: A Memoir of Cuban Exodus
By Mirta Ojito

Ojito was 17 when she left Cuba for the United States as part of the Mariel boatlift in 1980. Her book tells the story of her life in Cuba and the beginning of her life in Florida, mixed in with chapters about others, whose actions led to the boatlift that brought 125,000 Cubans to the United States.

It's amazing how little I knew about Cuba before reading this book: 125,000 people left Cuba in, at best, uncomfortable conditions shortly before I was born. I thought paid attention in American history, but I don't remember this. I even took a Latin American studies class in college, but I think we were distracted by Elian Gonzalez and his dolphin friends.

Ojito, a journalist, is evenhanded in her telling and reporting, and, as an exile she is conflicted about her home:

...Seven years after Mariel, I was still limping through life, maimed by my exile condition. I enjoyed the new freedoms, but, paradoxically, missed the restrictions that I had rebelled against in Cuba.

What would Airhen read?

Some good books from last year's reading list:
Nowhere Man by Aleksander Hemon
Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
Rent Girl by Michelle Tea and Lauren McCubbin
Paradise by A.L. Kenedy
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

The first three

First, my official 2006 Book-Itz list

Now the (short) reviews (with the latest read listed first):
1.The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq by George Packer. Nonfiction.
Packer, of The New Yorker, takes an amazingly ideology-free and thoroughly reported look at the lead-up to the war, the war itself and the occupation. From the epilogue: "I came to believe that those in the positions of highest resposibility for Iraq showed a carelessness about human life that amounted to criminal negligence. Swaddled in abstract ideas, convinced of their own righteousness, incapable of self-criticism, indifferent to accountability, they turned a difficult undertaking into a needlessly deadly one. When things went wrong, they found other people to blame. The Iraq war was always winnable; it still is. For that reason, the recklessness of its authors is all the harder to forgive."

2. Made in Detroit: A South of 8 Mile Memoir by Paul Clemens. Nonfiction.
White boy grows up in Detroit, a lonely road, and thinks he comes out with some racial insights. I learned more about Detroit than about race in America, and though that was interesting, I was hoping for more insight on white people and black people and how they live (or don't live) together.

3. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. Fiction.
All the editions of this book were always checked out when I went to borrow it. (See? Baltimore does read.) So I didn't read it till I got it for Christmas. (Thank you, Mom.) It's about clones, but it doesn't matter what it's about because Ishiguro writes like it's effortless and makes it effortless to read. It's got a vague creepiness, and you should read it.