Summer reading - Adam's reviews

Some people are interested in what other people think about my summer reading list. Ok, actually, I was badgering my husband about those books on my list that he was able to make it through (there are lots of books that didn't make the cut for either of us, but he is pickier about what he reads than I am). However, like Jack Aubrey, he can flash out a good thing now and then, given time, so I thought I'd give him a chance. (Or, more to the point, he's grudgingly tolerating me asking him questions about my books, so I'm seizing the chance...)


1) Landsman (Peter Charles Melman).

"This book was satisfying in exactly the way Cold Mountain was not satisfying. The most annoying thing about Cold Mountain was that Charles Frazier's main goal was to write literature, not tell a story. In Landsman, the quality is because of the story told, whereas Cold Mountain feels like Charles Frazier was willing it to be literature, line by line. Landsman gives you what you want without being dumb or cheesy. Cold Mountain has the depth and breadth--it's a bigger novel, whereas Landman is more succinct; it doesn't have the same scope. Still, Cold Mountain *couldn't* give you the ending that you wanted, because Charles Frazier teaches at Carolina, and he's too good for that."

(It should be noted that Adam is an NCSU grad, and likes Cold Mountain only if he doesn't think about a Carolina employee writing it.)

2) In the Company of the Courtesan (Sarah Dunant) Books with dwarf-tossing are at least worth a try. Really, dwarves and hookers--who could really complain?

3) Next (Michael Crichton) If you took 10 books by Crichton and stood them in a pile, Nextwould be a 3 on the Crichton-o-meter, or Crichtometer, if you prefer. Or, put another way, if Jurassic Park=actual novel, Next=Cliff's Notes.

4) The Apprentice (Libby) Understated, surprisingly satisfying, obviously the smartest man in the Bush camp. A good change of pace for your summer reading schedule. You don't want to read it in the winter because everyone in the book is cold.

5) Rendezvous (O'Brian) Who cares about this? If you haven't read the Aubrey/Maturin books, go buy them. Rendez-vous, forsooth. Adam declares that he will finish this when he finishes his 20th read-through of the Jack books.

As for the other books on my list, Adam responded with a scornful, Hell no, he hasn't read them and doesn't plan to. (My apologies to the other authors.)

However, he says that the Epoxy Book by System 3 is scintillating.

[Edited to add that he says I now owe him another night's labor on the boat.]

[Edited to also add that I don't know why the block quote is green. Can anyone tell me how to make it not green?]

Dr. Not-Appearing-in-This-Project

Tomorrow is the first day of my part-time contract--I'm scared to death, but I'm hoping that being a mostly stay-at-home mom will be a good experience.

As Adam says, it's the first day of the rest of my life! AAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!!


I'll keep you posted!

the boat: an apology

I wanted to clear my conscience and get a few things off my chest. More than anything, I wanted to take this moment to apologize to my husband for my lack of faith in his most current effort to live deliberately: the boat. Or, to be more precise, the boat-refurbishing project.

I apologize for calling it a horrible rat-infested (or to be precise) rat-urine soaked waste of time. I acknowledge that buying things off Craigslist on a whim, driving miles out the way to pick them up, and paying (admittedly very small) sums for what you could conceivably be PAID FOR hauling away are all part of the innocent past-time that I have come to know, if not fully appreciate, as you do.

When you got calls from random old geezers with this same strange (to me) obsession, giving you advice about how to salvage the boat with the GIGANTIC hole in the bow by stripping off its outer covering, replacing several wooden parts with ones newly crafted by you in our basement, and covering the whole by a process that somehow involves a stapler, I apologize for vowing to myself that you would take my children on the open water in this contraption over my dead body.

I apologize for continually complaining about once having to help you unload the boat (or shall we say the once and future boat?) from the car by placing my half on my head. I also apologize for continuing to freak out when you told me that this object, which I had already placed on my head, had housed two rat nests in it, you discovered.

I apologize for complaining about the unbelievably loud noises coming from the basement in the night, as our children slept fitfully, suffering from teething pains and requiring frequent rocking and soothing. A bandsaw is, apparently, a useful and necessary device, and I should not have condemned it as universally as I did. I also apologize for my reluctance in holding various wooden things while you ran them through the machine, making some sort of part in fulfillment of the old geezer's advice.

Most of all, I apologize for not understanding that you need a hobby, and that it doesn't matter if it ever pans out or not, and I will stop professing to believe that it won't. So there.

Beach Bums

At long last, here are some of the pictures from the epic Independence Day beach trip. Note: the last picture was taken on the last day, and represents our vacationed-out selves.

Great Expectations

No, keep your shirt on--I'm not pregnant, nor am I trying to get pregnant (just wanted to get that out of the way, in case you were mislead by the title of the post).

No, today I was thinking about how things so often turn out differently than we planned.

For example, after all those years of scraping through math, and trying to find a decent paying job with my English background, I do math for a living. (Take that, Mrs. Bond--you know who you are!)

Similarly, I always thought I'd be one of those parents who played Mozart cds to my unborn child, and would use sign language to my infant, who would grow up to be tri-lingual. Actually, none of those things happened as expected, unless you consider ebonics and Lincoln-county-ese to be additional languages. Still, I continue to be amazed at how many different ways I can be humbled by the fruit of my own freaking loins.

For example, Ginny was a sweet toddler, very well-mannered and compliant (notice I said TODDLER--she's not that compliant anymore). But we were on her like white on rice, always correcting, always redirecting. Dan appears to be part human, part chimpanzee, with a penchant for pulling hair and flinging food. I guess this shouldn't come as any surprise, since his rearing versus Ginny's has been so different: like a Pollock versus a Vermeer. Or if we're being literary, like Dickens versus Austen.

Ginny's teacher told me this week that she alone of all the kids at school knew that the Israelites were fed manna and quail in the wilderness. (Actually, to quote Ginny, they got little pancakes and birds--but that counts, right?) However, from Dan's teacher, I got the note in the photo above, which says "Dan has had a pretty good day. I am having a problem with him tackling the kids and sitting on them."

I think the note speaks for itself. Although I'm not sure I want to know what he's doing on the not-so-good days.

Of course, sometimes things are exactly what we'd expect: for example, the first time my mom read my blog, the first thing she pointed out was a pronoun/antecedent disagreement.

Overall, life doesn't have many surprises, on the macro level. We get born, we live, we reproduce, we die. That's pretty much the way it goes for all of us. But it's the little twists that give us pause and make us reflect--it's the little things that make us realize how far we fall short of our own ideals, and by how much we are capable of surpassing them, without even trying.

Reading (redux)

To return to my former post, I wanted to say that since I wrote about Landsman last night, I have received a number of requests for more information about the book. As Peter Melman's new honorary publicist, all I have to say is--look people, stop being such cheapskates, and go buy the book, for crying out loud. I hate reviews that say things like "If you liked A, you'll like B," as it seems to downplay the originality of B. To me, if you're a thinking person who likes books, you'll like this one. How highly do I recommend it? Let me just say that I respect it to such an extent that I removed the jacket before reading it in the bath. THAT's love. :^)

Before I leave the subject of my summertime reading list, I did want to mention a couple more items that I think are worth sharing:

9) Mr. Emerson's Wife by Amy Belding Brown. Brown explores the imagined life of Lydia Jackson, Emerson's second wife, who gets frisky with Thoreau in this very respectably written little novel. This does come a little closer to the kind of book that gets on Oprah's list, as there is an actual romp in the hayloft, but don't be deterred--it's still a good read, especially if you're obsessed with mid-19th century writers and their world, as I am.

10) Girl With a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier. This is pretty much as close as I got to seeing a movie this year. The opening chapters of this book are its best, but I still recommend it highly...it's one of the few books I think I've read lately that I'd describe as stylistically restrained--actually, The Apprentice would fall into that category as well. I'm not sure if less is always more, but in this case it would seem so.


OK, this will probably doom me to some sort of writerly hell, but I will also tell you about a couple of books to avoid:

1) The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl. Trust me.

2) The Da Vinci Code. I'm pretty much the last person in the whole country to read this book...except, oh yeah, I read it already when I read Angels and Demons in 2006. I guess it pays to pick a formula and go with it. Anyway, the letters to the editor in your local paper about this book were waaay more interesting than the book itself.

3) According to my husband, who wishes to spare the world from the torture of reading Umberto Eco, the most important book to avoid is Baudolino. According to Adam, he actively mourns the hours he spent reading Baudolino. However, The Name of the Rose has been granted a stay of execution--it's not as good as all the unspeakably tedious essays by French postmodernists would have you believe, but it's definitely enjoyable. Actually, now that I come to think about it, at least some of those horrid essays were written by Eco himself. Hmmm.

4) Atlas Shrugged. I refer to my earlier experience:
http://livingdeliberately-amyo.blogspot.com/2008_05_18_archive.html

Baby Daniel has my back on this one.

Happy reading!

Reading

Ok, we're back from the beach once again. When I've recovered sufficiently (and have downloaded the pics), I'll post about that. For now, I'll just set up this little word problem for you: There are two children. One is 3, and one is 1. If the drive from the beach is 4 hours long, and Mommy has only had 1.5 hours of uninterrupted sleep per night for the past 10 days, and an average of only 3 hours of uninterrupted sleep for the past 14 months, how long before she slaps Daddy for making her hold the Nalgene bottle between her knees, because it is too large to fit into the cup holders, which already contain a rotten sippy cup of juice, and a disintegrated paper cup from Moe's? Take your time. I think you can work this one out on your own.

Anyway, in one of my horrific wee hour rocking/nursing sessions, I found myself hazily reflecting on one of life's minor annoyances: the polite fiction of the "summer read," or the "beach novel"--you know, the sort of book that gets put on the front table at Barnes and Noble, the sort of thing that gets breathy reviews on NPR, and tends to make Oprah's book club reading list. It annoys me for two reasons. One, most of the books that are "beach novels" are pure T crap, and those that aren't are defiled by association, which is unfair. The other reason is that nobody can actually read at the beach. For one thing, it's too hot, and in my current reality, would be tantamount to infanticide.

A former coworker once said that his goal was to read 10 good books every year, and see 10 good movies. Since I haven't seen 10 movies in the past 3 years, let alone 10 good ones, I can't really respond to the second part. But I have tried to keep up with my reading, with varied success. Most of it happens in the bathtub or at other undignified moments. But these are some of the books I've read this year:

1. Landsman by Peter Charles Melman. About a Jewish guy during the Civil War--an extraordinary book. Better than Cold Mountain, in my view, and that's saying something. Totally satisfying.

2. In the Company of the Courtesan. About a courtesan (surprise!) and her servant during the 15th century in Venice. Very good read, very well researched, though so plot-driven it may not bear a second read in the near future.

3. Mothers of Invention. This is a set of historical essays on the role of women during the Civil War--also very interesting, especially if you're into that period. (Obviously I am.)

4. Dreams From My Father. I wrote about this already--if you want to know about Barack Obama, you gotta read this. If you love him for his views, you may end up hating his guts for writing better than you ever will.

5. The Heart of Confederate Appalachia. Also a good read, and has more specific information than #3, or at least more information that was new to me. It wasn't exclusively about NC, but did provide lots of information that made it easier to envision life here during that period.

6. Next by Michael Crichton. Predictably disturbing, though rather poorly written, compared to his earlier fiction. This one is about the limits of genetic engineering, and the issue of individual rights. Actually, his notes at the end of the novel are more interesting than the novel itself. I'm thinking he could spare himself a lot of trouble if he'd just write straight-up essays, though his publisher might not be too hot on the idea.

7. The Apprentice by Lewis Libby. You might not think it possible that a senior member of the Bush Administration would be sufficiently literate to not only read but also WRITE a book, but you'd be wrong. This little novel, set in Japan in 1903 (but curiously non-dependent on its setting) is a well-crafted gem.

8. The Rendezvous. If you're into Patrick O'Brian (who wrote the Master and Commander series), this will be a surprise--these stories are nothing like his novels. Very dark, very pessimistic, though humorous at times. Some are excellent, some are too heavy-handed. They're the sort of thing that Stephen Maturin would have written in his later years, if Diana hadn't thrown in the towel and married him.

There are others I'd like to discuss, but I'll have to break for now...hopefully next time I'll have some pictures!