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.