New York City Books

I'm trying to impress a girl. A friend keeps mentioning moving to New York City, and I've been wrestling with buying her a book. There are obviously millions of choices, but I'm aiming for something hip, surprising, and soulful. The choices I've come up with after a little bit of brainstorming are:

• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay by Michael Chabon -- it's well-written, it's bright-eyed, it's fun.
• The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster -- this one is a bit problematic, because I do think that it is a study in existential cool, but at the same time, it could be construed as a bit too formal, abstract, and self-absorbed.
• Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney -- I have a soft spot for this book, because I find the ending moving, even if the description and cover sound and feel like the 1980s. Though I suppose that the out-of-control careening of a young man high on coke wouldn't be that out of place, still, really.
• Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem -- it's good, but I don't think that a detective story is the right purchase here.
• Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin -- Hmm. It's a great book, but I don't think that magical realism -- at least of the Golden Age, patriotic, Republican-speechwriting variety -- is the right choice here, either.

I'll try to think of more later.

Where're ya at?

Or, where am I at? Short answer: having a cold, watching Brokeback Mountain, taking care of cat dying from lung cancer. Geez, that short answer's pretty depressing. On to other topics.

Now seems like a good time to write up a few of the new picture books that OlderKid and I have been enjoying. First let me say a hearty congratulations to Chris Raschka for the Caldecott winner The Hello Goodbye Window. I'm a big fan of Raschka's work (in particular Yo! Yes!) and the new one keeps up his tradition of amazingly vibrant illustrations of interracial relationships. It's a great book for mixed families of course, but also for families of all kinds. I can't give a full review, however, since I've only read this book in a Barnes and Noble, and am currently waiting for a promised signed first edition. (Thanks, Mom!)

Instead, I'll briefly talk about five books that are in heavy rotation in OlderKid's bedtime reading ritual. (Point of clarification: OlderKid is almost 3, so really only Older in a relative sense. Some of these are definitely over his head, but that doesn't seem to bother him.) Traction Man is Here! concerns the adventures of a certain action figure in a hilariously messy British household. His run-ins with various malevolent household objects (the Poisonous Dishcloth, wicked Professor Spade, etc.) are both imaginative and perfectly reasonable. The shifting point-of-view captures exactly the freedoms of children's play. Clara and Asha comes from Caldecott-winner Eric Rohman and concerns a girl's fantasy adventures with a giant flying fish...the artwork treads a narrow line between luminous and twee and just occasionally veers into the latter. From the author-illustrator of the Henry series of books (not, full disclosure, favorites of mine) comes Eddie's Kingdom, a story of a young boy who seeks to heal his divided apartment building through his allegorical drawing of the residents as animals in the Peaceable Kingdom. There are lots of neat visual references here, and the artwork appeals to me intellectually, but I'm still not totally sold on D. B. Johnston's cubist style. Finally, speaking of intellectually satisfying art, there's Paul Zelinsky's retelling of Rumpelstiltskin, not a new book but new to us. The Renaissance style illustrations match perfectly with the vaguely creepy text (why does the King love gold so much? For that matter, why does he have so many rooms in his castle filled with straw?) to create a satisfyingly unsettling read. OlderKid took a little while to warm up to this, but now he asks for it all the time, and has been heard to mutter Rumpelstiltskin's parting retort--"The Devil told you that!"--to himself on several occasions.
On that note--back to Braudel.

Within Reach, my (@#*#

A little suggestion for David.

No reading to report. Saw Jesus is Magic instead. Yeah, sure, opposites humor is funny. But not that funny.

Last Night's Read-Alouds: Paddiwak and Cozy, Clara and Asha, Red is a Dragon, Curious George, The Camel's Lament, Seven Blind Mice

Impending doom

I've been stultified by reading anything, or picking up a book, since my boxes of books are arriving this week, and I have to find a place for them in my apartment. I think 15 boxes are arriving, which means I have to go acquire enough shelf space for about 20 or 25 cubic feet of books. Yikes -- though I will have a great deal to report on bookcase shopping.

Time to get serious

All right, it's halfway through January and I've already been padding my count a little bit. (For the record, I did read Your Three Year Old: Friend or Enemy and it was surprisingly good. Dated, definitely, and a bit like a horoscope in that there were so many descriptions that obviously one of them had to apply to my situation, but refreshingly non-prescriptive.)

It's time to start the book that was the reason Dave and I organized this club in the first place: Braudel's The Structures of Everyday Life. I'll have to give periodic reports on this, since it's not quite a read-it-in-an-hour book. (And, because I can't read macrohistory all the time, I've also started a collection of Roger Angell's essays. What? Pitchers and catchers report in six weeks!)

Last night's read alouds: Eddie's Kingdom, Max and Ruby, The Camel's Lament, Curious George, and Clara and Asha

On being a bad gift-giver

So for Peter's half-birthday (which I have in the past vowed not to celebrate, and which hasn't even happened yet), I got him Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 542 Recipes, and 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen. Then of course I started reading it first, and trying to tell him funny parts of it as I read. Obviously this was/is not appreciated, and it's kind of silly to recap on a blog a book that is essentially a printed version of a blog anyway, so I'll just note it for the count.

Last Night's Read Aloud's: Paul Zelinsky's Rumpelstiltskin, Curious George, Dear Zoo, Eddie's Kingdom, and Seven Blind Mice.

The disappearance of regionalism?

This weekend I finished How We Talk: American Regional English Today, which was completely fascinating. All this time I'd been thinking "spendy" was a neologism created by Joss Whedon, when it is actually a widely-distributed expression in the northwest! And the mysterious Great Northern Vowel Shift is also explained in satisfyingly clear detail. The book slightly disappointed, though, in not having much to say about great swathes of the country, especially places where I've lived extensively, like Northern California, because the accent and vocabulary in those places has become the national standard. I think this is partly wrong--teenagers, in particular, talk in very specific ways in the Bay Area. (Berkeley High School students, even wrote a Slang Dictionary about it). But he's also right, in that a homogenized verbal landscape vocabulary and pronounciation has come to match our cookie-cutter franchise geography. This is a glib critique, I know, but I think it's also a right one. And if I'm correct that linguistic innovation seems to be increasingly commodity-driven--that is, most new phrases and turns of speech come about in relation to consumer products--it seems to make sense that this would be a move enacted uniformly across the nation as a whole. It's easier to market and distribute a product if you can do it the same way in every town, north or south.

Concerning my blind faith in the power of text

[Hurray, I'm not alone in my book club! And I commend David's ambition to read all his unread books. I'd like to think I'll do the same, but I probably have more than 50 of those, so I'm just going to start small.]


Usually I have a pretty sophisticated (if I do say so myself) sense of the power of literature. Reading, and thinking critically about the act and substance of reading, is to me one of the main ways I feel like I'm really a living being and not just a shuffling piece of meat. Books are valuable above and beyond their ordinary content, as articles of my faith that just the act of reading alone somehow will make everyone who does so a better person.

But, in my darker moments (usually experienced while a baby/child is screaming/crying/yelling NONONONONONONo), I have a different, more basic sense of the power of the text. That is, I have complete and utter confidence, despite many, many examples to the contrary, that reading a book about parenting really will make some kind of difference. And in that spirit, I have two books for today, which I'm counting as one, since I kind of skimmed them: Positive Discipline A-Z and How to Talk so Kids Will Listen and Listen so Kids will Talk. These are fine books, if a little overreliant on "family meetings," "knowing glances," and cartoons as a substitute for writing, but the content doesn't really matter. Suffice it to say, I'm not a completely different, magical, Dr. Mama Spock Sears Leach Ferber whoever after a single evening's read. But that doesn't mean I don't still believe. On order from Amazon Marketplace? A little volume called: Your Three Year Old: Friend or Enemy? That one, I think, will be the real deal.

Last Night's Read Aloud: Ruby's Beauty Shop

The 50-Book Challenge

Since I have not read a book today, or this week, I've decided that my first contribution will be simply to write a little bit about the "50-book challenge". There are so many blogs about the "50-book challenge" over the last couple of years, that I will not even link to them all here -- if you Google the "50-book challenge", you will get plenty of them. The fact that it was already dubbed a "meme" by the beginning of 2004 here and here makes me feel considerably behind the curve. In fact, since I've actually read a physical book about the 50-book challenge, I feel even more behind the curve!

However, Sara Nelson must have been amazingly prescient, fast, or both. Her book, So Many Books, So Little Time: A Year of Passionate Reading (2004), despite the rather dowdy cover and title, actually turned out to be an enjoyable collection of essays about the habits, moods, and effects of reading. It also has a lot to say about reading that isn't about numbers or achievement, such as the relationships you form (or destroy) over books, whether with family, friends, or coworkers; the associations and attachments that we develop to books, regardless of their content; and the right book at the right place at the right time.

Nelson is a New York book editor, so she describes a rather book-obsessed existence. She describes many ways that one can become an inveterate reader, for example, carrying around books at all times, and her entire community of friends that revolves around books, or at least that's how she describes them. However, the most winning part of her book is when she acknowledges that her attachment to books is entirely her own, for example when she talks about books with her husband (despite that fact that he rather charmingly says he doesn't read at all), or when her son disagrees with her own book taste (at some amazingly precocious age).

The effect of books on my life is also cropping up, since I've just moved cities, and had to decide what to bring with me. I think I've moved to Seattle for a good amount of time, and so I've shipped 15 boxes of books out here. Now where do I put them in my one-bedroom apartment? What makes me feel extremely guilty is that of the 15 boxes, five are probably truly meaningful, life-changing books, five boxes are of books that I have either sentimental or practical attachments to, and five are boxes of books that I haven't read at all.

So though I applaud the discipline and ambition of the 50-book challenge, I think I may set myself a different challenge. I don't have a problem picking up books, or reading them, it's just that I never feel like I have the time to engage them fully. So perhaps I will try to read, with extreme deliberation and intention, all of those books that I've stockpiling for years, and that I've been dragging around. I'd like to settle down a bit, and fully inhabit my library.

Now, I have to go off and read more for graduate school, but in academic-speak, I will think of how to "operationalize" this later.

Reading and Sleeping

Yesterday's reading was largely affected by the sleep habits of children. I began and got much farther into The Victorian Temper (Jerome Hamilton Buckley, Vintage 1951) than I ever would have thought possible, due to an unexpected carseat nap by YoungerKid. Meanwhile, I meant to begin White Teeth last night, but couldn't, due to OlderKid's inability to stay in bed and go to sleep coupled with his incredible ability to scream at the top of his lungs.

Re: Blink (I'm going to talk about it, but not count it, all right?). I am an extreme sucker for nonfiction pop science books. The Tipping Point left me pretty unimpressed, but I couldn't resist Gladwell's latest anyway. I ended up finding it interesting for the parts about race and perception, and the more general notion that vision is inherently culturally-dictated, contingent, and culpable. A lot of my academic work is about the ways that the Victorians tried to express this same notion. I'm in kind of the smug literary critic position of not being interested in whether this idea is actually true--whether our vision is really culturally-determined and ever-evolving--but being very interested in how we talk about how we think it is true. If that makes any sense.

Last night's read alouds: Olly and Me, Traction Man, Curious George, Hush! (the last of which I blame at least partially for the screaming. It's a little scary to imagine an elephant popping up out of the jungle and roaming around while babies are trying to go to sleep.)

Magical Thinking

[Before I begin this post, I'd like to query whether audiobooks are allowed to count as part of the 50 book total. I have the sneaking suspicion, reinforced by Peter, that they do not. But, since it's the only thing I finished yesterday, I'll mention Blink read by the author, Malcolm Gladwell.]

Both of my books so far have been very "late to the party" kind of reads, and unfortunately that will probably describe most of what I'm reading this year. Having two kids means that I don't get to the "hot" books quickly enough to weigh in when everyone else is, so I'll try to content myself with the pleasure of a measured second opinion.

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell was a book I would have absolutely adored in high school, and this is by no means meant to damn with faint praise. I adored many books in high school that I still think are extremely good books. It's just that it's especially strong with a longing for escape and adventure that dominated my (small-town, nerdy drama club member) existence back then. Susannah Clarke's creation of a fairy world so malevolent and sinister is extremely well done, I think, and the permeability of the world of humans and the world of fairies works perfectly. Also her comedy of manners felt very satisfying to me. I wouldn't agree that she's on the level of Austen, but the meta-literary play was very effective and not at all twee (ahem, The Eyre Affair, I'm glancing in your direction now.) My criticisms? The elemental workings of English magic were talked about a lot, I think, but nowhere did I feel the sense of dark poetry as in Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising series or even Diana Wynne Jones's unjustly overlooked Fire and Hemlock. Clark seemed more clever than these, and yet less substantial. And, I'd like to think about this more, but the character of Stephen Black, the nameless child of an enslaved African mother, came across as anachronistic. I wasn't convinced that his racial consciousness wasn't an entirely modern piece of identity construction.

On to The Curious Incident. I read this one rather quickly, and am now thinking that I missed something. The thing that's curious about the dog in "The Hound of the Baskervilles," (the stated inspiration for this narrative) is that it doesn't bark when one would think it should, if I remember correctly. I wasn't sure how to read that in light of this story. Isn't the main character's act of writing kind of the opposite of this--public expectation is that he will not/cannot participate in social life, and yet he is writing an at least semi-public narrative? And yet, (to return to the question of how books read differently at different points in the reader's life), this book spoke to me deeply as a (relatively) new parent. I thought the way that it captured both the immense joys and painful frustrations of parenting any child, but especially one unsuited for conventional ways of being, was really well-done. The book conveys the paradoxical sense of responsiblity and longing for escape that characterize every parent's life, while always keeping clear the ironclad, lifetime, unbreakable chain connecting a parent and their child, and at the same time still manages to celebrate that fixity. And that's not something I would have ever noticed in high school.

Last night's read aloud: Traction Man, Curious George, The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies

So far

Finished: Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime.

Last Night's Read Aloud: Shoes, Bears, Traction Man, Hush!, Curious George, Dodo Gets Married, The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse, Olly and Me, Alfie's Feet.

The Ground Rules

Here it is, my resolution for 2006. I am going to read at least 50 books, and I'm going to write about them here. Mostly what I'll write about are the books I read when I'm off the clock; that is, not books directly related to my teaching and specific research, though those will inevitably pop in too. And I'm not going to write in detail about picture books that I read aloud, unless they're new to me in 2006, because that would be about 50 books a week. I'll try to list them though, just to remember what I spent most of my evenings doing.