Among the books I read but don't always review are prequels and sequels to books I've previously enjoyed. Often I think well, I should have known better. Rarely am I disappointed enough to feel the need to complain in writing.
Recently, though, I've had a spell of disappointment in my reading diet. I read a prequel to a book I loved and found it was nowhere near as good. I read a self-published first novel by an author who had a good story to tell but needed a good editor. And then I read a sequel to a book I thought had explored some interesting and even important points of view on American politics, to find that the sequel presents only one biased, limited, and--to me at least, disturbing--point of view.
Orson Scott Card's novel Empire was both thought-provoking and a good story, so I could hardly wait to read Hidden Empire when it came out. But I should have waited... forever. Nothing can completely spoil Card's amazing ability to tell a story, but it's hard for me to enjoy a story when I don't like any of the characters. By the end of Hidden Empire I absolutely hated one of the main characters, a man I had liked and admired in Empire. He shoots down all of his former friends on a flimsy ideological pretext and then stands around shaking hands with himself and being held up by the author as a person to admire. Bullshit, Card.
I have always been willing to love Card's fiction (no matter how much of a wacko I think he is in real life), but now he's gone too far trying to turn his fiction into a sermon. I can be patient with that, like when Barbara Kingsolver did it in Prodigal Summer and next turned to writing non-fiction to produce the much better Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. But the sermon Card is trying to preach isn't even a good sermon. It's a parody of the Sermon on the Mount: "blessed are the self-righteous, for they will see their way clear to blowing all their enemies to Kingdom Come." If there's a non-fiction follow-up to that one, count me out.
Stotan! by Chris Crutcher, is a prequel of sorts to Whale Talk, which I think is a terrific book. And the main character in it is a boy named Walker. Seriously, how could I not like this book? And yet I didn't, much. I don't really understand the need to train for a sport until--much less past the point that--it hurts, which is what the "stotans," a cross between a Stoic and a Spartan, do. The parts of the novel about why people are prejudiced and what's the best way to respond to tragedy or treat people of the opposite sex were done better in Whale Talk, as if it is the culmination of Crutcher's ability to work through those issues with some of these same characters.
So why am I complaining about my reading disappointments? I think every once in a while people who talk about books should talk about the books we didn't like much. We all want to talk about the books that make us glad we've read them, but if we never contrast the ones that make us feel we've wasted our time, then we sound like people who are constantly enthusiastic--maybe over stuff that others might find mediocre. So I decided to complain today, as part of my continuing effort to be a fox in the henhouse.
Have you read anything lately that turned out to be a disappointment?
Showing posts with label Barbara Kingsolver. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Barbara Kingsolver. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Book Blogger Appreciation Week Interviews
Jodie: How long have you been blogging? Jeanne: About a year and a half now. I started one winter while I was sitting around recovering from a knee replacement.
Jodie: Can you explain how you came up with the name for your blog ‘Necromancy Never Pays’? Jeanne: It’s an odd name, isn’t it? The name actually inspired me to start the blog; I keep a brief version of the story up on my sidebar, right underneath the title.
Jodie: What has been the biggest challenge you’ve faced while blogging and what’s the best way it’s affected your life? Jeanne: The biggest challenge for me is finding the time to write at least 2-3 times each week, and to get around to visiting other book blogs at least once a month. I have a husband with a very full-time job, two part-time jobs of my own (one requiring a two-hour commute twice a week), two busy teenagers, and a house full of animals. But the best way blogging has affected my life is that I’ve become at least a peripheral part of some interesting conversations; part-time jobs can be very isolating, so the book blog world has become a part of my intellectual community. Also I got better classes this year because last fall I sent my department head a link to my post about what it’s like to leave a class of first-year students with no real prospects of ever seeing them again, and he took special pains to work out a year-long schedule for me with some upper-level courses!
Jodie: How technological are you and what’s your favourite piece of technology/techy tool (apart from blogs but including domestic appliances)? Jeanne: I have very little technical expertise, and don’t even like kitchen gadgets much. I like ipods; does that count?
Jodie: Do you have a favourite community building event or group in the book blogging world? Jeanne: No because I’ve been too cautious about committing my time and energy so far. I like reading responses to the Weekly Geeks question the best of anything. Do you have a suggestion—because that might help! I feel a bit like the character of Will Barrett in Walker Percy’s novel The Last Gentleman, who was paralyzed by too much possibility.
Jodie: You seem like a pretty big poetry fan – what do you like best about poetry? Jeanne: I like that moment when you read a line or two and think “I’ve felt that, but couldn’t articulate it until now…”
Jodie: Who is your all time favourite author, the one you’d queue all night to talk to for five minutes? Jeanne: Hmm, this question assumes a live author. I guess it would have to be Jasper Fforde, who wrote The Eyre Affair. I thought about Barbara Kingsolver, but she comes across as very earnest. I once met Ruth Ozeki and felt that she summarily dismissed me as an interesting person because of the way I make jokes when nervous. I can’t see Fforde doing that—or if he wasn’t as fascinating in person as he is in print, we could always have a game of croquet.
Jodie: You read around quite a bit, just wondering if you have a favourite genre or if you don’t why you enjoy reading a little bit of everything. Jeanne: My favorite genre is satire, especially 18th-century ironic personal panegyric (blame by praise of an individual). But I aspire to be a Renaissance woman. The only genre I really don’t care for is horror. I don’t like to be scared, especially not by made-up stories.
Jodie: Can you speak a little bit about why you’re so passionate about public libraries in Ohio? Jeanne: Because I’m an American, and free public libraries are one of the foundations of our system of democracy. As John Adams said, “Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people.” This is carved above the door of my local library.
Jodie: Finally what book/s do you wish more people were reading right now? If you were in charge of the world for an hour what piece of literature would you make it law to read because you think it would do the world good? Jeanne: I’m willing to wish that more people would read Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale or her new novel The Year of the Flood (which is being published September 22) because I think more of us should think about the dangers she exaggerates for effect. (Also I worry that some of the dangers we thought were exaggerated in The Handmaid’s Tale have come perilously close to true.) But I’d never be willing to make a law about reading. You can’t force someone to learn; most people just resist more stubbornly if you try.
Here are my questions for Jodie:
Jeanne: What gave you the incentive to start your blog? Has it given you a reputation for gazing at other peoples’ bookshelves when you’re invited to their houses?
Jeanne: Which book has affected you or changed your life the most?
Jeanne: What is your least favourite book or genre, and why?
Jeanne: You read poetry when you were unemployed for a while, and say it gave you optimism. Do you think this would work for anyone else, or is it a very personal reaction?
Jeanne: Are you a writer? If so, what kinds of project(s) are you working on? If not, what kind of book would you wish to have written?
Jeanne: Why do you like reading challenges? How do you choose the ones you participate in?
Jeanne: What author would you most like to ask a question of, and what would that question be?
Jeanne: You collect bookmarks—what do you like about them?
Jeanne: Who would you vote for as the worst villain in fiction, and what would be your criteria?
Jeanne: If you could only read books by one author for six months of your life, which author would you pick?
I hope you'll take a virtual hop "across the pond" to check out Jodie's blog (Bookgazing) now that you've gotten to know her a little bit by seeing how she answered my questions!
Monday, September 14, 2009
(Re)Cycler
I just read (Re)Cycler by Lauren McLaughlin, the sequel to Cycler, which is a novel so original on the subject of gender identity that I'm teaching it for the second time this fall in my sophomore-level class on "Relationships and Dialogues." (See my review of Cycler.) (Re)Cycler follows some of the main characters from the small New England town of Cycler to New York City after their graduation from High School.
The slightly older characters of (Re)Cycler have fewer questions about sexual identity, so the premise of the sequel is a little less fraught, but it does offer some amusing viewpoints on gender stereotypes, as in this dialogue between Jack and a guy he's met in a bar who keeps a chart of which girls he's had sex with and then traded with his male friends:
"Just because a girl's no good for you doesn't mean she's no good for your friends."
My stomach turns over. "That's your philosophy?" I say.
"It's not a philosophy," he says.
"No," I say. "You're right. Truth, justice and the American way is a philosophy. Live and let live is a philosophy. Never bring dog meat to the party? That's not a very good philosophy."
"Jesus," he says. "Do you cry at the opera too?"
"What?"
"I hate to break it to you," he says. "But you sound like a girl."
Part of the comedy of this dialogue lies in the fact that, for the better part of each month, the speaker who is accused of sounding "like a girl" IS physically a girl, although he is physically a boy at the time this conversation takes place.
Later, when Jack recounts the conversation to his girlfriend Ramie, the following dialogue ensues:
"Why are guys like that? Why do they think it's cool to be mean to girls?"
I shake my head. "Beats me."
"Thank God you're not a guy."
"I know," I say. "This one dude, Alvarez, actually referred to girls as dog meat. Wait. What do you mean I'm not a guy?"
"You're deeply not a guy," she says.
"How am I not a guy?"
"Duh," she says. "There is nothing guylike about you."
"Excuse me?" I say.
She looks right at me with those dark eyes. "Jack, please. Trust me. You're not a guy."
"Do you mean I'm not a perverted girl-trading jerk, but I'm still, like, a man?"
She looks at me with narrowed eyes.
"Wait a minute," I say. "You have to think about this?"
"Jack," she says. "Stop being so conventional. Jeeze."
But Jack isn't the only one.
Pretty much all of the characters in this novel seem overly conventional when it comes to gender roles. Since the novel is set in contemporary Brooklyn, a girl being criticized for dressing in gray clothes that look androgynous is incongruous, as are some of the sexual stereotypes presented to Jack and his female alter ego, Jill:
"Once, this guy named Brett stole her wallet when she refused to give him a b.j. He justified said action by claiming it was 'false advertising' for her to let him pay for dinner, and he was merely getting a refund.
The weirdest part about that story...is that Natalie concluded, after the shock wore off, that he sort of had a point.
'I did let him pay for dinner,' she says. 'I didn't even pretend to reach for the check.'
My inability to comprehend any part of this twisted tale is, according to Natalie, damning evidence that I am operating under a 'naive paradigm,' which I should reconsider if I'm going to have any success operating in the treacherous waters of the New York dating scene. When I protest that the world can't possibly be as brutish as she describes, she reminds me that we've met today to discuss a guy who, until recently, used to trade girls with his friends."
At this point, the novel buys into (yes, literally) the no-longer-shocking equation of dating with sex for money (e.g. prostitution) without offering any new ideas about how dating should proceed in the 21st century.
It's hard to believe that it takes until the end of this second novel for it to even begin to occur to Jill--and Jack--that her bisexual love interest Tommy could be the answer to all their dating problems.
But this is YA literature, and it deals with how it feels to be young and trying to sort out who you love from who you're attracted to. In hindsight, yeah, it's easy. But when you're still living through it, it can be as hard as Jack's leaving Jill's brand-new boots beside a trashcan in a Brooklyn alley probably seemed to her the morning after.
I'm glad that adult writers like Lauren McLaughlin are writing novels about how hard it is to sort out adolescent feelings in a world where gender stereotypes are changing. Even if some of it seems dated before the novel can even be published, many of the adolescents I know are reassured to read that some of what they're going through has been experienced by other people; that they're not alone.
Did you read a book (or two) that made you feel less alone as an adolescent? Like millions of other preadolescent girls, I was grateful for the character of Margaret in Judy Blume's Are you There God? It's Me Margaret, and Barbara Kingsolver's absurdly tall teenage girl with unfashionable shoes (Codi in Animal Dreams) helped me get through the last of my absurdly tall and mostly unfashionable adolescence.
The slightly older characters of (Re)Cycler have fewer questions about sexual identity, so the premise of the sequel is a little less fraught, but it does offer some amusing viewpoints on gender stereotypes, as in this dialogue between Jack and a guy he's met in a bar who keeps a chart of which girls he's had sex with and then traded with his male friends:
"Just because a girl's no good for you doesn't mean she's no good for your friends."
My stomach turns over. "That's your philosophy?" I say.
"It's not a philosophy," he says.
"No," I say. "You're right. Truth, justice and the American way is a philosophy. Live and let live is a philosophy. Never bring dog meat to the party? That's not a very good philosophy."
"Jesus," he says. "Do you cry at the opera too?"
"What?"
"I hate to break it to you," he says. "But you sound like a girl."
Part of the comedy of this dialogue lies in the fact that, for the better part of each month, the speaker who is accused of sounding "like a girl" IS physically a girl, although he is physically a boy at the time this conversation takes place.
Later, when Jack recounts the conversation to his girlfriend Ramie, the following dialogue ensues:
"Why are guys like that? Why do they think it's cool to be mean to girls?"
I shake my head. "Beats me."
"Thank God you're not a guy."
"I know," I say. "This one dude, Alvarez, actually referred to girls as dog meat. Wait. What do you mean I'm not a guy?"
"You're deeply not a guy," she says.
"How am I not a guy?"
"Duh," she says. "There is nothing guylike about you."
"Excuse me?" I say.
She looks right at me with those dark eyes. "Jack, please. Trust me. You're not a guy."
"Do you mean I'm not a perverted girl-trading jerk, but I'm still, like, a man?"
She looks at me with narrowed eyes.
"Wait a minute," I say. "You have to think about this?"
"Jack," she says. "Stop being so conventional. Jeeze."
But Jack isn't the only one.
Pretty much all of the characters in this novel seem overly conventional when it comes to gender roles. Since the novel is set in contemporary Brooklyn, a girl being criticized for dressing in gray clothes that look androgynous is incongruous, as are some of the sexual stereotypes presented to Jack and his female alter ego, Jill:
"Once, this guy named Brett stole her wallet when she refused to give him a b.j. He justified said action by claiming it was 'false advertising' for her to let him pay for dinner, and he was merely getting a refund.
The weirdest part about that story...is that Natalie concluded, after the shock wore off, that he sort of had a point.
'I did let him pay for dinner,' she says. 'I didn't even pretend to reach for the check.'
My inability to comprehend any part of this twisted tale is, according to Natalie, damning evidence that I am operating under a 'naive paradigm,' which I should reconsider if I'm going to have any success operating in the treacherous waters of the New York dating scene. When I protest that the world can't possibly be as brutish as she describes, she reminds me that we've met today to discuss a guy who, until recently, used to trade girls with his friends."
At this point, the novel buys into (yes, literally) the no-longer-shocking equation of dating with sex for money (e.g. prostitution) without offering any new ideas about how dating should proceed in the 21st century.
It's hard to believe that it takes until the end of this second novel for it to even begin to occur to Jill--and Jack--that her bisexual love interest Tommy could be the answer to all their dating problems.
But this is YA literature, and it deals with how it feels to be young and trying to sort out who you love from who you're attracted to. In hindsight, yeah, it's easy. But when you're still living through it, it can be as hard as Jack's leaving Jill's brand-new boots beside a trashcan in a Brooklyn alley probably seemed to her the morning after.
I'm glad that adult writers like Lauren McLaughlin are writing novels about how hard it is to sort out adolescent feelings in a world where gender stereotypes are changing. Even if some of it seems dated before the novel can even be published, many of the adolescents I know are reassured to read that some of what they're going through has been experienced by other people; that they're not alone.
Did you read a book (or two) that made you feel less alone as an adolescent? Like millions of other preadolescent girls, I was grateful for the character of Margaret in Judy Blume's Are you There God? It's Me Margaret, and Barbara Kingsolver's absurdly tall teenage girl with unfashionable shoes (Codi in Animal Dreams) helped me get through the last of my absurdly tall and mostly unfashionable adolescence.
Friday, September 11, 2009
The One-Eyed Monster
In the course of thinking about September 11, 2001, it occurred to me that I can now access almost any kind of news anytime I want. This wasn't true 8 years ago. I had a kindergartener and a third grader, and we lived the way Barbara Kingsolver describes in her essay "The One-Eyed Monster, and Why I Don't Let Him In" (collected in her volume Small Wonder). The monster, as she describes it, is "the screen that most people happily host in their living rooms." A TV.
We have a TV, and we got cable when my daughter was in first grade because her public school teacher required (yes, REQUIRED) her to watch the Olympic Games that fall. We get about 12 channels, I think, and mostly use the TV, which is downstairs, to watch DVDs. I've never understood having to watch something at a certain time. Like Kingsolver, I don't know "what many public figures look like....and in some cases I may not know quite how to pronounce their names." Also like her "I know the vulnerability of my own psyche well enough to avoid certain films that are no doubt instructive and artful but will nevertheless insert violent images into my brain that I'll regret for many years. Obviously, I read verbal accounts of violence and construct from them my own mental pictures, but for whatever reason, these self-created images rarely have the same power as external ones to invade my mind and randomly, recurrently, savage my sense of wellbeing."
I never saw, for instance, a person leaping from one of the twin towers. I read about it. But as far as I know, it wasn't replayed after that day. Even someone who doesn't usually watch TV might have watched some of the coverage that day, but I had a kindergartener. He was upset by hearing the news reports on the radio, let alone being exposed to the images on TV, and he wasn't leaving my side, not being a child who took a nap. He had missed kindergarten because when he woke up with a rash, I took him to his pediatrician, and about 9:15 am, the nurse came into the exam room to tell us that the rash was a mild case of chicken pox. I was unbelieving. "He had the vaccine for chicken pox," I told her, just as another nurse came in and told us something about a plane hitting a building in New York. We finished at the pediatrician and I took him to a big box store to buy soothing oatmeal bath for the itchiness. It was the quietest store I'd ever been in. No one spoke, except for my 5-year-old merrily chattering away.
The rest of the day was like that, and most of the rest of the week. I couldn't go anywhere because I had a child who was contagious with chicken pox. I didn't talk to any adults except my husband at the end of each day. So for me, the events of 8 years ago have always seemed a little unreal. I don't have the same kind of fears that many Americans do because I never saw the monster. I was not left, as Kingsolver says some people are, "so overtaken and stupefied by the tragedies of the world that we don't have any time or energy left for those closer to home."
A "day of service" can be a good thing, but it does strike me as an inadequate memorial. So many of us are overloaded with all the services we provide already that all we can feel is guilty about not taking on another impossible load. "On Veteran's Day we watch a movie," my children told me as they went off to High School this morning, "but we don't do anything for September 11."
Do you do anything? Or are we still too "overtaken and stupefied"?
We have a TV, and we got cable when my daughter was in first grade because her public school teacher required (yes, REQUIRED) her to watch the Olympic Games that fall. We get about 12 channels, I think, and mostly use the TV, which is downstairs, to watch DVDs. I've never understood having to watch something at a certain time. Like Kingsolver, I don't know "what many public figures look like....and in some cases I may not know quite how to pronounce their names." Also like her "I know the vulnerability of my own psyche well enough to avoid certain films that are no doubt instructive and artful but will nevertheless insert violent images into my brain that I'll regret for many years. Obviously, I read verbal accounts of violence and construct from them my own mental pictures, but for whatever reason, these self-created images rarely have the same power as external ones to invade my mind and randomly, recurrently, savage my sense of wellbeing."
I never saw, for instance, a person leaping from one of the twin towers. I read about it. But as far as I know, it wasn't replayed after that day. Even someone who doesn't usually watch TV might have watched some of the coverage that day, but I had a kindergartener. He was upset by hearing the news reports on the radio, let alone being exposed to the images on TV, and he wasn't leaving my side, not being a child who took a nap. He had missed kindergarten because when he woke up with a rash, I took him to his pediatrician, and about 9:15 am, the nurse came into the exam room to tell us that the rash was a mild case of chicken pox. I was unbelieving. "He had the vaccine for chicken pox," I told her, just as another nurse came in and told us something about a plane hitting a building in New York. We finished at the pediatrician and I took him to a big box store to buy soothing oatmeal bath for the itchiness. It was the quietest store I'd ever been in. No one spoke, except for my 5-year-old merrily chattering away.
The rest of the day was like that, and most of the rest of the week. I couldn't go anywhere because I had a child who was contagious with chicken pox. I didn't talk to any adults except my husband at the end of each day. So for me, the events of 8 years ago have always seemed a little unreal. I don't have the same kind of fears that many Americans do because I never saw the monster. I was not left, as Kingsolver says some people are, "so overtaken and stupefied by the tragedies of the world that we don't have any time or energy left for those closer to home."
A "day of service" can be a good thing, but it does strike me as an inadequate memorial. So many of us are overloaded with all the services we provide already that all we can feel is guilty about not taking on another impossible load. "On Veteran's Day we watch a movie," my children told me as they went off to High School this morning, "but we don't do anything for September 11."
Do you do anything? Or are we still too "overtaken and stupefied"?
Friday, February 27, 2009
Kitten on the Keys
Getting a new kitten always requires a major overhaul of the way we live. One of the things it required this time was that I first move and then entirely get rid of the aquarium our hermit crabs have been living in for the past few years, as the kitten was not only occasionally napping on it (as in this photo), but also using it as a staging area from which to assault the top of the china cabinet and, hanging next to it, the bird cage.As I was dismantling the aquarium and putting the crabs in a smaller terrarium that will fit on a shelf in our bathroom, I was thinking about Barbara Kingsolver's title essay for her volume High Tide in Tucson, and how she brings home a crab from the beach and makes a nice little home for it "on our kitchen counter right next to the coffeepot." When I find a hermit crab at the beach, it's the kind that can't live out of water, or it only wants the kind of food it's already used to, or it doesn't like the colorful variety of shells I provide and goes around naked until I find it one morning, motionless and stinking. Kingsolver's crab, however, evidently thrives and recreates a crab celebration of high tide in its new home while eating her garbage.
Okay. Maybe Kingsolver is a lot more relaxed about pets than I am, or maybe it's just that she doesn't have cats. If she had ever had a kitten, it would have spent part of the day lying on her laptop and she wouldn't have been able to write as much. At least not without getting her fingers batted for wiggling.
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Interview With the Non-Necromancer
Anna at Diary of An Eccentric was kind enough to interview me about books this week, in the process of passing along the "Interviewing Other Bloggers Meme" (she got her questions from Serena at Savvy Verse and Wit, and she formulated her own questions for me and also Christine at She Reads Books and Marie at Boston Bibliophile).
Anna: Out of all the books you've read, which one affected you the most, and why?
Jeanne: Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. I read it when it first came out, in 1986, and it made quite an impression on me. I was 26 years old, at the height of my fertility, and an adamant supporter of the pro-choice movement ever since an experience with a high school friend whose "religious" parents would have quite literally kicked her out of the house for being pregnant, except that she had a miscarriage before all of her friends could give her the money we'd pooled to get her an abortion. I had never so clearly connected being forced to carry a baby with women's rights and with what was happening with the Taliban in Afghanistan until I read the passage in which Offred has her picture taken by a group of Japanese tourists and tells them yes, she is "happy" (because she has already had her daughter, husband, mother, and best friend taken away and she has been beaten and terrified into submission). Later I came to appreciate The Handmaid's Tale for its deft weaving of the rights guaranteed by the United States Bill of Rights into the fabric of the fiction, but at first reading, it was the visceral aspect that got me. Offred is a womb with legs, nothing more.
Anna: Everyone always asks for book recommendations, but what is one book you think people should avoid at all costs?
Jeanne: Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer. To me, it is the epitome of a novelist's misguided attempt to write nonfiction thinly disguised as fiction. It is an environmentalist argument that she made much better in her (later) nonfiction book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. I love most of Kingsolver's novels, but she really needs to guard against her tendency to try to preach in her fiction.
Anna: What is the first book you remember reading?
Jeanne: Happy Birthday to You! by Dr. Seuss. My parents read this to me every year on my birthday--still will, if we're together. So I memorized it very young and could "read" it before anything else. One of my favorite parts was always when the animals would stand on their tiptoes because it was such an honor to be "the tallest of all-est." I have always been taller than almost everyone else, so I liked thinking that was a good thing.
Anna: When I'm browsing books, sometimes I come across a title that hits me. I don't always read the book, but the title amuses me or gets to me in some way. What's your favorite book title? Have you read the book? (Ex: The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things. I probably won't ever read this book, but I chuckle every time I see the title.)
Jeanne: If I have to pick just one, it will have to be another YA title, one that I chuckle at every time I go to a bookstore: One of Those Hideous Books Where the Mother Dies. I haven't read it because my daughter skimmed through it in the store once and told me it wasn't really worth reading. What a great title, though!
Anna: What's the one book you love and wish you'd written?
Jeanne: Whoa! I'm going to take this in the spirit of "what book do you think it's even remotely possible you could have been in the right spirit to be able to write if you were a million times cleverer and more patient than you are?" And the answer is: Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Okay, yeah, I know. It's presumption to even think it. But it's the way I wish I could write, if I could write fiction at all, which I can't. If I had written something like that, I would have just strutted around the rest of my life crowing like Peter Pan: "Oh, the Cleverness of Me!" But really, I'm too earnest.
And that's my interview. If you would like me to interview you about books and what you think of them and all, leave me a comment with your contact information. If you would just like to comment on my opinions, well that's okay, too.
Anna: Out of all the books you've read, which one affected you the most, and why?
Jeanne: Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. I read it when it first came out, in 1986, and it made quite an impression on me. I was 26 years old, at the height of my fertility, and an adamant supporter of the pro-choice movement ever since an experience with a high school friend whose "religious" parents would have quite literally kicked her out of the house for being pregnant, except that she had a miscarriage before all of her friends could give her the money we'd pooled to get her an abortion. I had never so clearly connected being forced to carry a baby with women's rights and with what was happening with the Taliban in Afghanistan until I read the passage in which Offred has her picture taken by a group of Japanese tourists and tells them yes, she is "happy" (because she has already had her daughter, husband, mother, and best friend taken away and she has been beaten and terrified into submission). Later I came to appreciate The Handmaid's Tale for its deft weaving of the rights guaranteed by the United States Bill of Rights into the fabric of the fiction, but at first reading, it was the visceral aspect that got me. Offred is a womb with legs, nothing more.
Anna: Everyone always asks for book recommendations, but what is one book you think people should avoid at all costs?
Jeanne: Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer. To me, it is the epitome of a novelist's misguided attempt to write nonfiction thinly disguised as fiction. It is an environmentalist argument that she made much better in her (later) nonfiction book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. I love most of Kingsolver's novels, but she really needs to guard against her tendency to try to preach in her fiction.
Anna: What is the first book you remember reading?
Jeanne: Happy Birthday to You! by Dr. Seuss. My parents read this to me every year on my birthday--still will, if we're together. So I memorized it very young and could "read" it before anything else. One of my favorite parts was always when the animals would stand on their tiptoes because it was such an honor to be "the tallest of all-est." I have always been taller than almost everyone else, so I liked thinking that was a good thing.
Anna: When I'm browsing books, sometimes I come across a title that hits me. I don't always read the book, but the title amuses me or gets to me in some way. What's your favorite book title? Have you read the book? (Ex: The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things. I probably won't ever read this book, but I chuckle every time I see the title.)
Jeanne: If I have to pick just one, it will have to be another YA title, one that I chuckle at every time I go to a bookstore: One of Those Hideous Books Where the Mother Dies. I haven't read it because my daughter skimmed through it in the store once and told me it wasn't really worth reading. What a great title, though!
Anna: What's the one book you love and wish you'd written?
Jeanne: Whoa! I'm going to take this in the spirit of "what book do you think it's even remotely possible you could have been in the right spirit to be able to write if you were a million times cleverer and more patient than you are?" And the answer is: Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Okay, yeah, I know. It's presumption to even think it. But it's the way I wish I could write, if I could write fiction at all, which I can't. If I had written something like that, I would have just strutted around the rest of my life crowing like Peter Pan: "Oh, the Cleverness of Me!" But really, I'm too earnest.
And that's my interview. If you would like me to interview you about books and what you think of them and all, leave me a comment with your contact information. If you would just like to comment on my opinions, well that's okay, too.
Saturday, August 2, 2008
Beginnings
Scott Westerfeld (scottwesterfeld.com) has a recent post about beginnings, and SFP at Pages Turned has a recent post about endings. And they've gotten me thinking about how I choose books. Most often, of course, it's because I read the first paragraph and get hooked. When I started thinking about the beginnings that hooked me most quickly, I decided to share some of my favorites, the ones that stick in my memory:
C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.
William Goldman, The Princess Bride
This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.
John Scalzi, Old Man's War
I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I visited my wife's grave. Then I joined the army.
Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression "As pretty as an airport."
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest. I'd half-awaken. He'd stick his skull under my nose and purr, stinking of urine and blood. Some nights he kneaded my bare chest with his front paws, powerfully, arching his back, as if sharpening his claws, or pummeling a mother for milk. And some mornings I'd wake in daylight to find my body covered with paw prints in blood; I looked as though I'd been painted with roses.
Roald Dahl, Matilda
It's a funny thing about mothers and fathers. Even when their own child is the most disgusting little blister you could ever imagine, they still think that he or she is wonderful.
Some parents go further. They become so blinded by adoration they manage to convince themselves their child has qualities of genius.
Well, there is nothing very wrong with all this. It's the way of the world. It is only when the parents begin telling us about the brilliance of their own revolting offspring that we start shouting, "Bring us a basin! We're going to be sick!"
Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair
My father had a face that could stop a clock. I don't mean that he was ugly or anything; it was a phrase the ChronoGuard used to describe someone who had the power to reduce time to an ultraslow trickle. Dad had been a colonel in the ChronoGuard and kept his work very quiet. So quiet, in fact, that we didn't know he had gone rogue at all until his timekeeping buddies raided our house one morning clutching a Seize & Eradication order open-dated at both ends and demanding to know where and when he was.
Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees
I have been afraid of putting air in a tire ever since I saw a tractor tire blow up and throw Newt Hardbine's father over the top of the Standard Oil sign. I'm not lying. He got stuck up there. About nineteen people congregated during the time it took for Norman Strick to walk up to the Courthouse and blow the whistle for the volunteer fire department. They eventually did come with the ladder and haul him down, and he wasn't dead but lost his hearing and in many other ways was never the same afterward. They said he overfilled the tire.
Walker Percy, Love In the Ruins
Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world I came to myself in a grove of young pines and the question came to me: has it happened at last?
Two more hours should tell the story. One way or the other. Either I am right and a catastrophe will occur, or it won't and I'm crazy. In either case the outlook is not so good.
Reynolds Price, Kate Vaiden
The best thing about my life up to here is, nobody believes it. I stopped trying to make people hear it long ago, and I'm nothing but a real middle-sized white woman that has kept on going with strong eyes and teeth for fifty-seven years. You can touch me; I answer. But it got to where I felt like the first woman landed from Pluto--people asking how I lasted through all I claimed and could still count to three, me telling the truth with an effort to smile and then watching them doubt it. So I've kept quiet for years.
These are some of my favorites, from memory (although I did look them up to get the words right). Tell me some of your favorite beginnings.
C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.
William Goldman, The Princess Bride
This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.
John Scalzi, Old Man's War
I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I visited my wife's grave. Then I joined the army.
Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression "As pretty as an airport."
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest. I'd half-awaken. He'd stick his skull under my nose and purr, stinking of urine and blood. Some nights he kneaded my bare chest with his front paws, powerfully, arching his back, as if sharpening his claws, or pummeling a mother for milk. And some mornings I'd wake in daylight to find my body covered with paw prints in blood; I looked as though I'd been painted with roses.
Roald Dahl, Matilda
It's a funny thing about mothers and fathers. Even when their own child is the most disgusting little blister you could ever imagine, they still think that he or she is wonderful.
Some parents go further. They become so blinded by adoration they manage to convince themselves their child has qualities of genius.
Well, there is nothing very wrong with all this. It's the way of the world. It is only when the parents begin telling us about the brilliance of their own revolting offspring that we start shouting, "Bring us a basin! We're going to be sick!"
Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair
My father had a face that could stop a clock. I don't mean that he was ugly or anything; it was a phrase the ChronoGuard used to describe someone who had the power to reduce time to an ultraslow trickle. Dad had been a colonel in the ChronoGuard and kept his work very quiet. So quiet, in fact, that we didn't know he had gone rogue at all until his timekeeping buddies raided our house one morning clutching a Seize & Eradication order open-dated at both ends and demanding to know where and when he was.
Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees
I have been afraid of putting air in a tire ever since I saw a tractor tire blow up and throw Newt Hardbine's father over the top of the Standard Oil sign. I'm not lying. He got stuck up there. About nineteen people congregated during the time it took for Norman Strick to walk up to the Courthouse and blow the whistle for the volunteer fire department. They eventually did come with the ladder and haul him down, and he wasn't dead but lost his hearing and in many other ways was never the same afterward. They said he overfilled the tire.
Walker Percy, Love In the Ruins
Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world I came to myself in a grove of young pines and the question came to me: has it happened at last?
Two more hours should tell the story. One way or the other. Either I am right and a catastrophe will occur, or it won't and I'm crazy. In either case the outlook is not so good.
Reynolds Price, Kate Vaiden
The best thing about my life up to here is, nobody believes it. I stopped trying to make people hear it long ago, and I'm nothing but a real middle-sized white woman that has kept on going with strong eyes and teeth for fifty-seven years. You can touch me; I answer. But it got to where I felt like the first woman landed from Pluto--people asking how I lasted through all I claimed and could still count to three, me telling the truth with an effort to smile and then watching them doubt it. So I've kept quiet for years.
These are some of my favorites, from memory (although I did look them up to get the words right). Tell me some of your favorite beginnings.
Monday, July 21, 2008
Beach Reading
We have been goofing off in a big way. We went to the beach in South Carolina with a group of college friends and some relatives, and we all shared a couple of houses and several seafood dinners. I told my kids that they may be the only kids in Ohio who go crabbing more often than they go fishing--which is to say, once every two years. There were so many people to talk to and so much ocean to splash in and so many sand castles to build that I got very little reading done. We built a sand Bastille on July 14 and watched the waves storm it.
One afternoon I went back out to the beach with a book. We usually go out in the morning and come back in for lunch, because I have fair-skinned children. But the fair of skin were inside drawing pictures and watching YouTube videos, so I went out in the noonday sun ("do as I say, kids, not as I do"). As I walked towards the surf with my book and chair, I noticed a woman holding a copy of Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer. So I asked her if she was enjoying it, and she said she hadn't started it yet. "I didn't like the ending," I told her.
"Well, maybe I won't start it then," she said.
I was nonplussed. I'd hate for anyone to judge Barbara Kingsolver novels by that one, and I do think the ending is significantly flawed. But did I mean to make her give up the effort entirely? I suspect the woman found it on a shelf in her rented beach house.
It's possible that you shouldn't ever read anything you find on a beach house bookshelf. Usually they're books that someone read and left, which tells you about all you need to know. Unless, of course, the other people who rent beach houses don't reread books. There's probably a reason that the book shelf in our house was below the television.
But I like what Michael Chabon says about the short story in his essay "Trickster in a Suit of Light," included in his volume Maps and Legends:
"Entertainment has a bad name. Serious people learn to mistrust and even to revile it. The word wears spandex, pasties, a leisure suit studded with blinking lights. It gives off a whiff of Coppertone and dripping Creamsicle.... But maybe these intelligent and serious people, my faithful straw men, are wrong. Maybe the reason for the junkiness of so much of what pretends to entertain us is that we have accepted--indeed, we have helped to articulate--such a narrow, debased concept of entertainment....Therefore I would like to propose expanding our definition of entertainment to encompass everything pleasurable that arises from the encounter of an attentive mind with a page of literature."
Except that I might quibble with the "attentive mind" part. I sometimes take pleasure from reading with about three-quarters of my attention on the book, and the other quarter on watching a child play or the waves crash on the shore. I have fond memories of books that I associate with what I was doing at the time--there's an entire series I read while nursing my firstborn, and often she and I have a soundtrack for a certain book after reading it once while listening to music (and yes, the soundtrack is sometimes replaced by the movie soundtrack).
Chabon points out that "the undoubted satisfactions that come from reading science fiction or mystery stories are to be enjoyed only in childhood or youth, or by the adult reader only as "guilty pleasures" (a phrase I loathe)." Of course, he's writing an essay, which is a serious form and suited to such statements. Many bloggers disagree that SF and mysteries are pleasures that you should feel guilty about. Certainly I disagree. And yet that does not detract from Chabon's point, which is that short story writers need to break away from "the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story." That's what worked yesterday. Tomorrow we need more experimentation between "the boundary lines, the margins, the secret shelves between the sections in the bookstore."
And when writers start playing around with those margins and borders, then maybe we'll get more good short stories, which are (like essays), good beach reading.
One afternoon I went back out to the beach with a book. We usually go out in the morning and come back in for lunch, because I have fair-skinned children. But the fair of skin were inside drawing pictures and watching YouTube videos, so I went out in the noonday sun ("do as I say, kids, not as I do"). As I walked towards the surf with my book and chair, I noticed a woman holding a copy of Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer. So I asked her if she was enjoying it, and she said she hadn't started it yet. "I didn't like the ending," I told her.
"Well, maybe I won't start it then," she said.
I was nonplussed. I'd hate for anyone to judge Barbara Kingsolver novels by that one, and I do think the ending is significantly flawed. But did I mean to make her give up the effort entirely? I suspect the woman found it on a shelf in her rented beach house.
It's possible that you shouldn't ever read anything you find on a beach house bookshelf. Usually they're books that someone read and left, which tells you about all you need to know. Unless, of course, the other people who rent beach houses don't reread books. There's probably a reason that the book shelf in our house was below the television.
But I like what Michael Chabon says about the short story in his essay "Trickster in a Suit of Light," included in his volume Maps and Legends:
"Entertainment has a bad name. Serious people learn to mistrust and even to revile it. The word wears spandex, pasties, a leisure suit studded with blinking lights. It gives off a whiff of Coppertone and dripping Creamsicle.... But maybe these intelligent and serious people, my faithful straw men, are wrong. Maybe the reason for the junkiness of so much of what pretends to entertain us is that we have accepted--indeed, we have helped to articulate--such a narrow, debased concept of entertainment....Therefore I would like to propose expanding our definition of entertainment to encompass everything pleasurable that arises from the encounter of an attentive mind with a page of literature."
Except that I might quibble with the "attentive mind" part. I sometimes take pleasure from reading with about three-quarters of my attention on the book, and the other quarter on watching a child play or the waves crash on the shore. I have fond memories of books that I associate with what I was doing at the time--there's an entire series I read while nursing my firstborn, and often she and I have a soundtrack for a certain book after reading it once while listening to music (and yes, the soundtrack is sometimes replaced by the movie soundtrack).
Chabon points out that "the undoubted satisfactions that come from reading science fiction or mystery stories are to be enjoyed only in childhood or youth, or by the adult reader only as "guilty pleasures" (a phrase I loathe)." Of course, he's writing an essay, which is a serious form and suited to such statements. Many bloggers disagree that SF and mysteries are pleasures that you should feel guilty about. Certainly I disagree. And yet that does not detract from Chabon's point, which is that short story writers need to break away from "the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story." That's what worked yesterday. Tomorrow we need more experimentation between "the boundary lines, the margins, the secret shelves between the sections in the bookstore."
And when writers start playing around with those margins and borders, then maybe we'll get more good short stories, which are (like essays), good beach reading.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Favorite Books
When I go to a party and someone asks what I "do" and I tell them some variation on "I have a PhD in English and try not to waste it entirely," there are two categories of response. One is "oh, I'll have to watch my grammar." I laugh politely at that one. The other is "oh, I never have time to read." I like that one a little better because it gives me a way to say that we make time for what we can't do without.
My favorite response to the what do you "do" answer came when I was still in graduate school. The man who eventually married our friend Miriam said to me "what are you studying in grad school?" I said "English." There was a pause. "Haven't you learned it yet?" he said.
So what do you do when someone asks what your "favorite" book is??? I have various strategies for answering such a question, including picking six off the top of my head, as I did for my blogger profile: Animal Dreams, Love In the Ruins, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, The Lord of the Rings, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Princess Bride.
A strategy that makes more sense is to pick two or three favorites from a specific genre--favorite science fiction books: Stranger in a Strange Land, The Door Into Ocean, Ender's Game.
My favorite way to answer this question now is a strategy I borrowed from my friend Lemming's Christmas letter. She and her husband used to recommend their favorite book of the year. This narrows down the selections to a manageable level, plus you can buy the favorite book of the year for everyone on your list. My favorite book of this past year is Boomsday.
Of course, this strategy necessarily privileges contemporary literature. How can we include favorites from the past? Usually I don't try. There's no need to repeat what thousands of high school English teachers have said before me: To Kill a Mockingbird is a great book. One of the purposes of telling other people what your favorite books are is to get them to read those books.
With that purpose in mind, tell me what your favorite books are. I'm the person you know who is most likely to read them.
My favorite response to the what do you "do" answer came when I was still in graduate school. The man who eventually married our friend Miriam said to me "what are you studying in grad school?" I said "English." There was a pause. "Haven't you learned it yet?" he said.
So what do you do when someone asks what your "favorite" book is??? I have various strategies for answering such a question, including picking six off the top of my head, as I did for my blogger profile: Animal Dreams, Love In the Ruins, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, The Lord of the Rings, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Princess Bride.
A strategy that makes more sense is to pick two or three favorites from a specific genre--favorite science fiction books: Stranger in a Strange Land, The Door Into Ocean, Ender's Game.
My favorite way to answer this question now is a strategy I borrowed from my friend Lemming's Christmas letter. She and her husband used to recommend their favorite book of the year. This narrows down the selections to a manageable level, plus you can buy the favorite book of the year for everyone on your list. My favorite book of this past year is Boomsday.
Of course, this strategy necessarily privileges contemporary literature. How can we include favorites from the past? Usually I don't try. There's no need to repeat what thousands of high school English teachers have said before me: To Kill a Mockingbird is a great book. One of the purposes of telling other people what your favorite books are is to get them to read those books.
With that purpose in mind, tell me what your favorite books are. I'm the person you know who is most likely to read them.
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Books about Food
Over the past year I read Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and then Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food. As a mother and a commuter, I am squarely in the middle of their target audience. The Kingsolver book is easier to read and has more compelling arguments, at least for me. The Pollan books remind me of an older book with the same advice, Richard Watson's The Philosopher's Diet (and to a lesser extent, Martha Beck's The Joy Diet). My favorite part of The Omnivore's Dilemma is the second section, especially the chapter on "Big Organic" and the one entitled "Slaughter: In a Glass Abattoir." Here is a section from "Big Organic:
What better way to test the outer limits of the word "organic" than by dining on a springtime delicacy that had been grown according to organic rules on a farm six thousand miles (and two seasons) away, picked, packed, and chilled on Monday, flown by jet to Los Angeles Tuesday, trucked north to a Whole Foods regional distribution center, then put on sale in Berkeley by Thursday, to be steamed, by me, Sunday night?
The newer book, In Defense of Food, argues that we need to think more about foods and less about nutrients. It includes a list of rules like "don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food" (which actually convinced my almost-12-year-old to give up gogurt) and "avoid food products containing ingredients that are unfamiliar, unpronounceable, more than five in number, or that include high-fructose corn syrup" (which has made my 14-year-old unduly proud of her consumption of cheddar bunnies). There's also another rule that I particularly enjoyed, as a commuter: "don't get your fuel from the same place your car does."
The Kingsolver book, though, is absolutely fanatical. It's like an argument where you exaggerate to see if the most absurd example will still hold true...and it does. There's no way I'm going to be able to even plant my own garden, much less raise chickens and turkeys, and even though I'm lactose intolerant, like Kingsolver and her oldest daughter, I'm not going to be embarking upon cheese-making anytime soon (she describes a process for making cheese without lactose, which must be what Kraft does too--check out their labels). But I am entirely convinced by her argument, which is that if we all ate more local food in season, the world would be a better place.
For me, this is just going back to doing what my mother taught me. She remembers choosing a watermelon from the field, cracking it open, and then picking another one if it wasn't ripe enough. She has always shopped at farmer's markets and been very careful about where she buys her meat.
Since, like Kingsolver, I have more free time for preparing food in the summer, I subscribed to a CSA last summer, and my family got to taste food they'd never tried before (boy was it good timing with the movie Ratatouille--we kept making versions of the dish and attempting to make it layer so it looked pretty). Since darn few of us are writers or tenured college teachers, we can't do the kind of picking and cooking in August that Kingsolver describes as necessary for year-round local eating. But her pre-prepared January meals sound lovely:
The blanched, frozen vegetables needed only a brief steaming to be table-ready, and the dried vegetables were easy to throw into the Crock-Pot with the chicken stock we made and froze after every roasted bird. For several full-steam-ahead weeks last summer in countless different ways, we'd made dinner ahead.
My favorite chapter of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is the one entitled "You Can't Run Away on Harvest Day." It is a thoughtful argument for raising livestock, especially heirloom varieties:
Animal harvest is at least not gratuitous, as part of a plan involving labor and recompense. We raise these creatures for a reason. Such premeditation may be presumed unkind, but without it our gentle domestic beasts in their picturesque shapes, colors, and finely tuned purposes would never have had the distinction of existing. To envision a vegan version of civilization, start by erasing from all time the Three Little Pigs, the boy who cried wolf, Charlotte's Web, the golden calf, Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Next, erase civilization, brought to you by the people who learned to domesticate animals. Finally, rewrite our evolutionary history, since Homo sapiens became the species we are by means of regular binges of carnivory.
See what I mean about how she always pushes the argument further, towards absurdity? She had me at Charlotte's Web!
What better way to test the outer limits of the word "organic" than by dining on a springtime delicacy that had been grown according to organic rules on a farm six thousand miles (and two seasons) away, picked, packed, and chilled on Monday, flown by jet to Los Angeles Tuesday, trucked north to a Whole Foods regional distribution center, then put on sale in Berkeley by Thursday, to be steamed, by me, Sunday night?
The newer book, In Defense of Food, argues that we need to think more about foods and less about nutrients. It includes a list of rules like "don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food" (which actually convinced my almost-12-year-old to give up gogurt) and "avoid food products containing ingredients that are unfamiliar, unpronounceable, more than five in number, or that include high-fructose corn syrup" (which has made my 14-year-old unduly proud of her consumption of cheddar bunnies). There's also another rule that I particularly enjoyed, as a commuter: "don't get your fuel from the same place your car does."
The Kingsolver book, though, is absolutely fanatical. It's like an argument where you exaggerate to see if the most absurd example will still hold true...and it does. There's no way I'm going to be able to even plant my own garden, much less raise chickens and turkeys, and even though I'm lactose intolerant, like Kingsolver and her oldest daughter, I'm not going to be embarking upon cheese-making anytime soon (she describes a process for making cheese without lactose, which must be what Kraft does too--check out their labels). But I am entirely convinced by her argument, which is that if we all ate more local food in season, the world would be a better place.
For me, this is just going back to doing what my mother taught me. She remembers choosing a watermelon from the field, cracking it open, and then picking another one if it wasn't ripe enough. She has always shopped at farmer's markets and been very careful about where she buys her meat.
Since, like Kingsolver, I have more free time for preparing food in the summer, I subscribed to a CSA last summer, and my family got to taste food they'd never tried before (boy was it good timing with the movie Ratatouille--we kept making versions of the dish and attempting to make it layer so it looked pretty). Since darn few of us are writers or tenured college teachers, we can't do the kind of picking and cooking in August that Kingsolver describes as necessary for year-round local eating. But her pre-prepared January meals sound lovely:
The blanched, frozen vegetables needed only a brief steaming to be table-ready, and the dried vegetables were easy to throw into the Crock-Pot with the chicken stock we made and froze after every roasted bird. For several full-steam-ahead weeks last summer in countless different ways, we'd made dinner ahead.
My favorite chapter of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is the one entitled "You Can't Run Away on Harvest Day." It is a thoughtful argument for raising livestock, especially heirloom varieties:
Animal harvest is at least not gratuitous, as part of a plan involving labor and recompense. We raise these creatures for a reason. Such premeditation may be presumed unkind, but without it our gentle domestic beasts in their picturesque shapes, colors, and finely tuned purposes would never have had the distinction of existing. To envision a vegan version of civilization, start by erasing from all time the Three Little Pigs, the boy who cried wolf, Charlotte's Web, the golden calf, Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Next, erase civilization, brought to you by the people who learned to domesticate animals. Finally, rewrite our evolutionary history, since Homo sapiens became the species we are by means of regular binges of carnivory.
See what I mean about how she always pushes the argument further, towards absurdity? She had me at Charlotte's Web!
Friday, February 8, 2008
Dreams
It often takes half an hour for everyone at our house to tell about their dreams in the morning, especially because we observe my mother's rule and don't tell a dream before breakfast unless we want it to come true. Eleanor has vivid and extraordinary dreams, so almost every morning she comes out of her bedroom and says "last night I had the strangest dream" (and Ron and I can rarely resist breaking into song and continuing "...I ever had before...").
At any rate, with such extensive interest in dreams at our house, we have had the opportunity to test an idea I read in fiction years ago and found intuitively true:
Pay attention to your dreams: when you go on a trip, in your dreams you will still be home. Then after you've come home you'll dream of where you were. It's a kind of jet lag of the consciousness." (Animal Dreams, by Barbara Kingsolver, p. 9)
With all the telling of dreams in the morning at our house, we've actually found this to be true.
Further on in the novel, a character says "people dream about what they do when they're awake." But even though one of Eleanor's friends keeps showing her a book that purports to tell what different objects in dreams symbolize, it's impossible for us to figure out what some of the crazy dreams that are told after breakfast could possibly have to do with the events of our lives, especially in February.
At any rate, with such extensive interest in dreams at our house, we have had the opportunity to test an idea I read in fiction years ago and found intuitively true:
Pay attention to your dreams: when you go on a trip, in your dreams you will still be home. Then after you've come home you'll dream of where you were. It's a kind of jet lag of the consciousness." (Animal Dreams, by Barbara Kingsolver, p. 9)
With all the telling of dreams in the morning at our house, we've actually found this to be true.
Further on in the novel, a character says "people dream about what they do when they're awake." But even though one of Eleanor's friends keeps showing her a book that purports to tell what different objects in dreams symbolize, it's impossible for us to figure out what some of the crazy dreams that are told after breakfast could possibly have to do with the events of our lives, especially in February.
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