I have this bad habit of testing out entirely new lives inside my head every time I am exposed to new people and places, no matter how mundane. When I take a walk in my neighborhood, I imagine living in the two-story colonial on the corner, rather than in our single-story ranch. Would the traffic be noisy? Would our cats be safe? Would I hate running up and the down the stairs all day? What would our mortgage payments be? And before I know it, I’m calculating interest rates in my head for a house down the street from where I live.
Television—especially reality television—is prime fodder for such mental journeys. For example, if Queer Eye for the Straight Guy features an artist living in Las Vegas, I begin to imagine living in Las Vegas. What are the real estate values like? If we sold our house, could be buy something much bigger there? It might even have a swimming pool, which would definitely be necessary in the desert. What if I was an artist? Could I have a studio attached to the house? And on and on, until I remind myself that it reaches 120 degrees there all summer. And I once again realize that my own life suits me much better.
Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping by Paco Underhill gave me a whole new life to imagine for a few days. It got pretty bad. Usually my mental wanderings snap back after a few minutes, but because it took many days to read the book, I was living another life in my head for much longer than usual.
The premise of the book is quite interesting; I’m always fascinated by inquiries into psychological behaviors that pertain to everyday life. Underhill explains the physioligical and psychological factors that determine how shoppers choose what to buy and what not to buy. Based on years of research, he explains how everything from right-handedness to signage, to gender, affects store design and its efficacy.
The part that got my mind drifting, however, was how this information was gathered. Underhill is the founder of a company called Envirosell, which researches these shopping issues for large retailers. Envirosell hires agents to skulk around in stores for hours and hours, making notes on consumer behavior and trailing particular shoppers to record things like how many products she touches before choosing one, or whether she reads the signage, or what she does with her stroller while in the store.
Once I read this, I wanted to be an agent. I began imagining myself, clipboard in hand, melting into the racks of clothing as I followed a group of teenaged girls. I saw myself watching video footage of old ladies choosing aspirin in a drugstore aisle. I imagined working out of my home and flying to stores around the country to spend all week in a mall. Or maybe I would move to New York and be based out of their corporate offices, working on reports that synthesize all the data. My brain was getting out of hand.
In the end, I lost interest as the second half of the book began to bore me with its repetitiveness (as most of these pop-psychology books do). Underhill began using the same examples over and over to prove an only slightly different point. I skipped the chapter on online shopping altogether, as this book was written in 1999. And by the time I got to Part IV, the last thing I wanted to do was watch people shop all day. Underhill had simply bored the urge right out of me. I rushed through the rest of the book and put it away, leaving my mind free to imagine living in Paris as an expatriate novelist, or maybe in Wyoming as a cowgirl.
It is simply understood that Patricia MacLachlan is a brilliant writer. Able to convey so much in so few words, MacLachlan’s spare prose almost reads like poetry. Sarah Plain and Tall is no less than an American treasure for sure, as are her other well-known titles. But it is The Facts and Fictions of Minna Pratt, a book you almost never hear about, that is my favorite of hers. When I read it for the first time in my twenties, I felt that Patricia MacLachlan wrote this book for me.
Minna Pratt is an eleven-year-old cellist (“She has never thought of herself as a ‘cellist’; until this moment she has only played the cello”) who plays with a youth string quartet at the conservatory. I saw so much of myself in Minna: quiet, thoughtful, wishing. Not like most of today’s protagonists of primary-grade literature who more ‘spunky’ than unsure (Junie B Jones and the like).
The other aspect of Minna that drew me to her was her relationship with her music. There is nothing in Minna’s life that cannot be related in some way to the music they are making at the conservatory.
“There are times, more often lately, that Minna feels she knows Mozart better than she knows herself. Mozart is everywhere, like the wind. She catches on of his phrases in her teacher’s voice, in the rhythms of the jump rope rhymes when the neighborhood children play. One morning, early, the garbage men outside bang their way into the Hunt Quartet, causing Minna to sit straight up in bed, wide awake.”
One of the things Minna yearns for is to be able to play with vibrato, something her friend and violist Lucas already can do. As any musician knows, vibrato is a skill that is acquired through practice and perseverance. To Minna, however, it represents a longing and a sign of something bigger—something that she herself does not yet understand, but what we readers recognize as growing up. I don’t know why this struck such a chord with me, but I can remember a time when I had no vibrato. There truly does seem to be something so childlike and innocent about that time. I feel as if having the vibrato really was a step toward adulthood. What MacLachlan uses as the metaphor for coming of age seems so poignantly true to me.
The house is still when Minna wakes in the night. But it is not dark. Moonlight streams in the window. It falls across her bed and onto the rug, and touches the mirror on the wall. For a while Minna watches it. Then, suddenly, she leans over the edge of the bed to touch her cello, lying by her bed like a sleep-over guest. She plucks a string. Slowly she sits up, sliding out from under the covers. She picks up her cello and bow and pulls a wooden chair over into her closet. She adjusts her end pin and tightens her bow. She pulls the light cord so that the light goes on above her. She begins to play, very softly at first, then a bit louder. Minna smiles at the new rich sound. She turns to watch her hand, vibrating on the strings. Finally, after a while, she stops, sitting silently in the lighted closet. She reaches up and turns off the light. She lays the cello by the bed again, the bow across it and slips back under the covers. For a moment she doesn’t move. She lies there staring at the moonlight. She looks at the clock on her night table. Twelve thirty. She hesitates, then picks up the phone and dials.
E and I try to take at least one Big Trip every year. In 2003, we spent a week at the national parks in eastern California: Sequoia, King’s Canyon, and Yosemite.
Sequoia and King’s Canyon are connected, so we stayed in a park lodge and visited both. Besides the many splendid vistas we hiked through, we also saw the biggest Sequoia redwood tree alive, drove through the redwood tree with a tunnel in the trunk, and we toured one of the marble caves that dot the area. In Yosemite, we climbed Half Dome (eight hours straight up, four hours straight down. E still calls it the Renee Death March), stayed at the Ahwahnee Hotel for one night, and camped at Bridalveil Creek.
One of the most memorable activities on this trip, however, took place upon our arrival at Yosemite mid-week. We had reserved a private fly-fishing tour guide for an afternoon. Neither of us had ever fly-fished before, so we thought we would take advantage of the many creeks and rivers in Yosemite, as well as the expertise of a guide to help us out.
We met our guide at the Wawona Hotel on the south end of the park, where we spent an hour learning about the fly fishing rig, how to tie a few knots, and then casting. When we felt comfortable with all that, we climbed in the car and headed into the woods. Our guide knew all the nooks and crannies of the area, of course, and led us to a secluded spot on the bank of a creek far from the main road. Just being in Yosemite, in such a beautiful spot with no one around for miles, was worth the price of the guide alone. But (bonus!) he also helped us tie flies and free snags, and gave us tips on where to cast and how to entice the fish. Can’t beat that for value.
We didn’t catch any fish that afternoon, but I had not expected to on our first fly-fishing attempt anyway. It didn’t matter one bit. Just being there, learning a new skill, and spending a day in the woods amid the sounds of a gurgling creek made the day perfect.
That Christmas, E gave me a complete fly-fishing rig for my own. I had practically forgotten everything I learned by then, so I acquired a copy of Fly Fishing: A Trailside Guide by John Merwin from a bookcrosser. As far as I can tell, being no expert, the book is full of great information. Almost every page features diagrams and pictures of everything discussed, from flies to knots, to waders. The instructions are clear and the advice seems sound. Scattered throughout the pages are boxes containing extra tips that are dead on, even for a novice like me. One of the first is, “Worst thing to lose: car keys! Where are yours?” Such practical-mindedness is surely a sign of a thoughtful guide.
Before I begin, I would like to confess publicly that though A Well-Ordered Thing: Dmitrii Mendeleev and the Shadow of the Periodic Table by Michael D. Gordin occupies a special spot on my bookcase and in my heart, I have not read it. Nor is it likely that I ever will. I do apologize—it’s just not a subject that calls out to me, and you will admit, it’s not exactly light reading.
Why, then, do I even own this book? Because it was written by one of my best friends from college, Mike Gordin. Mike was one of my “blockmates” at Harvard, which meant that we, along with four other friends, signed up as a group to enter the upperclass housing lottery. While freshmen all live in dorms inside Harvard Yard, with roommates assigned prior to arrival, the remaining three years are spent within one of the upperclass “Houses,” a system based largely on the Oxford College model.
At the end of freshman year, everyone enters the housing lottery to determine which House will be your home and social center for the next three years. This House selection is assigned randomly now, but at the time, we were still allowed to at least choose our top four preferences, without ranking them as was done even before our time. To ensure that we could live in the same House as our friends, we were allowed to form blocking groups of up to ten people and enter the lottery as a single entity. (Many of these rules have since changed; we are so glad it happened after we graduated.)
Our blocking group consisted of me, my best friend and roommate M, and four of our male friends. The six of us were like family for three years; we ate our meals together, we gathered in the guy’s “quad” room to watch TV and movies, we patronized each other’s artistic performances, and we went to parties together.
Even then, we could all tell that Mike was a little different, and destined for greatness. For one thing, he was obviously smarter than all of us combined. He not only excelled in every one of his classes and extracurricular activities, but somehow, he was so knowledgeable that he knew everything about our classes and activities, too. And no matter which board game we played, Mike’s team always won. Not just Trivial Pursuit—even that game called “Encore,” where the task is to sing songs with a given word in the lyrics. We almost got to the point where he had to be his own team, otherwise it wouldn’t be fair to the rest of us.
Of course, Mike stayed at Harvard to get his Masters and Ph.D., was hired by Princeton immediately afterward as an assistant professor of history, then spent two years as a Fellow back at Harvard, and published a book about Russian history and science (after learning Russian and traveling to Russia several times to do research) all before he was even thirty years old. But what impresses me most about my friend is that he’s a completely well-adjusted, socially dynamic, and just plain fun guy. He makes people laugh and can hold a conversation on any subject. He’s perfect at parties.
I don’t get to see Mike that often now that we are living on opposite sides of the country. But I am keeping an eye on his literary output, and you can be sure that I will own every one of the books he writes. I may even read his next one due out in December.
"A man is the history of his breaths and thoughts, acts, atoms and wounds, love, indifference, and dislike; also of his race and nation, the soil that fed him and his forebears, the stones and sands of his familiar places, long-silenced battles and struggles of conscience, of the smiles of girls and the slow utterance of old women, of accidents and the gradual action of inexorable law, of all this and something else too, a single flame which in every way obeys the laws that pertain to Fire itself, and yet is lit and put out from one moment to the next, and can never be relumed in the whole waste of time to come."
I I used to drive a gorgeous, spunky little burgundy Miata (the car salesman called the color ‘merlot’) that I adored. In 1998 The car was still fairly new to me and I was eager to show it off, so when I was asked if I wanted to drive the Grand Marshal vehicle in the Mountain View Chinese New Year Parade, I jumped at the chance. The Grand Marshal that year was Jessica Yu, the filmmaker who had won the academy award for best documentary the previous year. She was from neighboring Palo Alto, so everyone welcomed this local success story.
On the day of the parade, Jessica sat on the shelf behind the seats and waved as I drove as slowly as I could at the tail of the parade. It was just the two of us in the car, and when we waited or were stopped, we chatted a bit. I remember her being vivacious and friendly, and I felt that familiar pang of being in a completely different social stratum from someone you might have otherwise had a connection with. It was the knowledge that I would never meet her again, but would continue to hear about her work and remember this moment, while she would probably never think of me again.
II But this story is not about Jessica Yu. It is about one of my favorite books, The Soloist by Mark Salzman. I found this book in the Mountain View Public Library, and most likely checked it out because it was so obviously a book about music. It turned out, however, to be one of the most moving and thought-provoking novels I have ever read. I bought a copy soon after I returned the first one to the library.
The Soloist is about a cellist, Renne Sundheimer, who has lost the musical spark that had once made him known as a teen prodigy, hailed by some as having the potential to become the greatest cellist who ever lived. He finds himself making a modest living by teaching cello, but his mind is preoccupied with finding that spark within himself again.
Renne’s life changes dramatically when he accepts, against his better judgment, a nine-year-old boy as a student, and then gets chosen to sit on the jury of a murder trial involving the death of a Buddhist monk. These two events are the catalysts of Renne’s journey to turn outward from his own suffering, in order to find the man, and the musician, within.
III A few years later, I read Mark Salzman's Lying Awake. While I did not much care for the book, I was floored by last sentence of the author biography on the jacket flap:
“He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, filmmaker Jessica Yu.”
IV There was a buzz in the air on the exhibit floor of the 2002 California Library Association Conference. The keynote speaker, Mark Salzman, had just finished his speech and was on his way down to sign books. I was caught unprepared for this, and had to buy another copy of The Soloist before I got in line for the autographing. All around me, librarians were exclaiming about what an amazing speaker Mark Salzman was. I overheard one woman behind me say dreamily, “He might be the best speaker I have ever heard. He was just so moving and so funny, I had tears in my eyes the entire time. Even while I was laughing.” She paused, then added, “and he’s so handsome too.” I mentally slapped myself for missing his speech.
When it was my turn, I took up more than my share of time and told Mark Salzman the story of the Chinese New Year Parade and his wife from all those years ago. We had a good laugh, and for once I felt like I had something interesting to say to an author. I also felt, once again, that same missed connection that I had felt with Jessica Yu.
Since I began blogging a few months ago, I have, in the back of my mind, also been thinking about podcasts. I always just sort of assumed that my own creative output would follow the path that technology followed: first the book, then the blog, and then the podcast (video podcasts are beyond my abilities… for now). Until recently, however, I had not come up with any ideas for what kind of content my inevitable podcast would deliver. But I have finally hit upon another one of my grand, and perhaps ill-conceived, schemes that I shall herewith name:
Renee’s Audio Book Club
This is where I need YOUR participation. In an audio way.
My idea is to produce an audio montage of readers talking about a single book, and I have chosen Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro as the very first audio book club selection. To this end, I have set up a voicemail phone number through Yahoo (isn’t technology astounding?). So, if you have anything at all to say about Never Let Me Go, please call (415) 992-8622 and leave me a message!
Tell me whatever you want about the novel. Tell me what you liked, what you disliked, or just your reactions. What made you think? What images or words stuck with you? Read me passages from the book. Tell me your name, or not (if you do leave your name, I will credit and thank you in the audio production). Feel free to be creative. This is all new to me, so I don’t really know what to expect. Hopefully, something fun and interesting, something that is distinctly the product of a community of booklovers, will result.
I doubt the production of the podcast will come together all that quickly (I have some technical issues to figure out as I go), so you’ll have plenty of time to read the book if you haven’t already. The voicemail will be active for some time, and I have posted the phone number on the sidebar for easy reference. There may be updates there as well—I’m just flying by the seat of my pants, here.
Please comment or email me (or leave a voicemail!) if you have any suggestions or ideas—I’d love to hear your feedback. Thank you in advance for participating in my crazy audio project. I am excited about hearing all your thoughts on Never Let Me Go. I myself am smack in the middle of it and am immensely enjoying the read. It’s one the rare books that I constantly think about and long to get back to while I’m doing other things.
It was, coincidentally, during my fanatical baking period a few years ago that my cousin LL enrolled in culinary school. She studied at the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco, and I lived the chef’s life vicariously through her stories.
While being a chef was never among my career aspirations (too many horror stories about the hours, the stress, and the personalities involved, not to mention my own lack of talent), being a pastry chef nevertheless still held that romantic glow. Not that it would ever happen.
That year for my birthday, LL went to the campus bookstore and bought another copy of one of her textbooks titled, The Professional Pastry Chef by Bo Friberg. She then took the book to class and asked Chef Friberg himself to sign it for me.
When she presented me with this gift, I was ecstatic. She had just given me a ten-pound book, 1154 pages of dense text with small sections of color photos, and still I loved it. In it were twenty chapters covering the hows and whys of making every basic pastry and bread you would ever need, including doughs, cakes, individual pastries, mousses, soufflés, frozen desserts, and sugar works.
I opened to page one and began reading the textbook straight through, like a novel. It was pretty heavy, both literally and figuratively, and I never finished. All that text did get a bit tiresome. I also never made any of the recipes in the book—they were all devised for restaurant use, so the quantities were just overwhelming.
While I will probably never use The Professional Pastry Chef in any practical way other than as a weight for pressing dough, it is still comforting to have this huge reference text on my shelf should I ever need it. I also like the reminder that there are those who have worked for, and have acquired, the wondrous skills necessary to make every single thing in this book: the most delicious foods on earth.
I was surprised just now to find this Frommer’s Guide to Chicago still on my bookshelf—I thought I had purged all Frommer’s products from my home years ago. I guess it was tucked all the way on one side of a shelf, hiding from me. But I have found it, and it will go straight to the recycling bin once I’m done writing about it.
Every year, Frommer’s prints a guidebook specifically for the attendees of BEA. It’s basically a regular Frommer’s Guide to whichever city is hosting the convention, with an advertisement about their booth on the back cover and some extra convention information. Every registrant gets one, and I used to look forward to receiving a brand new travel guide for a different exciting city every year. Until 2004.
That year, E traveled with me to Chicago for the convention. Even though it was not exactly a vacation, I still spent way too much time reading all the restaurant recommendations and imagining us eating in each place. I finally singled out a restaurant that sounded perfect: a tapas eatery called Café Iberico that was within walking distance of our hotel.
Thus it came to pass that, after getting up at 5:00 in the morning to catch a plane from Oakland to Chicago, traveling with our luggage directly to the convention center to wait in line for an hour to get a seat for Bill Clinton’s keynote speech then waiting again afterward for another hour to catch a cab and checking into our hotel, we found ourselves with Frommer’s Guide en route to what I had already built up in my head as the meal of the year.
And so it was that when we arrived at the restaurant’s address, I was somewhat distressed to find no restaurant.
We walked up and down the street. We double-checked the Frommer’s. We looked down the side streets. We asked a lone pedestrian hurrying along in the dark, quiet neighborhood. No restaurant. After half an hour, the truth was painfully clear: Frommer’s had made a big mistake. And I was mad.
Maybe if it had been just this one transgression, I could have forgiven Frommer’s. I might have even been able to overlook the other faulty address I found in the very same guidebook. But my trouble with Frommer’s goes back much farther. I have used several editions in various cities, and have always found it difficult to navigate and frustrating to get the information I need out of it.
The Frommer’s Guides are divided by topic, such as lodging, dining, and attractions. Within these chapters, there are subdivisions by neighborhood. So far so good (unless you are not familiar with the neighborhoods, and which tourist is?). Now, take the dining chapter, which is of course the most important one: there is a separate detail map for each of the neighborhoods, but the maps are not grouped together at the beginning of the chapter. They are interspersed throughout the chapter, but not necessarily on the first page of each neighborhood section either. The neighborhood descriptions do not list the page number where its map might be found, so it always takes at least a few page flips to even find a map. And here’s the most infuriating part. Each map features numbered markers for its restaurants. They are numbered geographically; the restaurant in the bottom left corner is #1, and the numbers increase as you move up the page. So, I have found the spot on the map where my hotel is. I notice that restaurant #23 is close by. Which restaurant is #23? I look to the side where the names of the restaurants are listed—alphabetically. It takes me about a minute to find #23, because now that the restaurants are alphabetical, the numbers are randomized. Now I know the name of restaurant #23, so I have to find the text section in the book for that neighborhood, and then find the restaurant listed alphabetically there to read about it. But you know, #24 is also close to the hotel too… another five minutes wasted flipping around in the book.
All, in the end, for the wrong address.
That evening in Chicago, after eating in the least offensive restaurant we passed that was still open, we returned to the hotel to ask the concierge about Café Iberico. Sure enough, the correct address was completely different from the information in Frommer’s, though it was still in the neighborhood. So the next night, we tried again with much success. It really was an excellent restaurant.
During the four months of my career in the music industry back in 2000, when I worked as the manager of a recording studio in Oakland, I was living in a studio apartment by Lake Merritt. The apartment had a separate kitchen with decent square footage, but it was extremely narrow and the appliances were similarly petite, and not exactly top-of-the-line. It was in this apartment that I reached the pinnacle of my baking life.
In that little hallway of a kitchen, where the oven thermostat was often 25 to 50 degrees off, I produced desserts for a number of occasions involving many guests: my cousin’s bridal shower (lavender cookies, chocolate tart, raspberry-chocolate “kisses”), several birthday parties (chocolate layer cake, lemon tart, coconut layer cake), Christmas candy boxes for all my friends, and a few dessert parties in my own apartment.
At that time, I had a friend, MB, who was also baking hobbyist. When we saw each other, “What have you baked lately?” was always our first question. So when, two months into my tenure at the recording studio, I began to hate my job, MB joked that I should quit and open a bakery.
Here’s an interesting aspect of human nature: when you really hate your job, every other job in the world sounds like heaven. At that moment, opening a bakery seemed like a completely rational idea.
I bought the only book I could find on the subject, The Baker’s Trade by Zachary Y. Schat, and read the entire book from cover to cover. It is actually a great reference, giving an overview to the business and covering the financial and logistical details of start-up, operations, and growth. However, the following is the most important piece of information in the entire book:
Running a bakery means getting up at 3:00am every morning.
While this information was steeping in my brain, a series of events at work led to my rather sudden resignation. Before I knew it, I was considering a completely new opportunity with Shen’s Books, which I ultimately took, and the bakery idea fell by the wayside. My baking habit has also fallen off, though I do like to challenge myself with a fancy dessert every so often.
Now that I look back, opening a bakery seems like a preposterous idea. There’s no way I could have gotten up that early every day. I kept the book, though, just in case.
"When life demands more of people than they demand of life-- as is ordinarily the case-- the result is a resentment of life that is almost as deap-seated as the fear of death. Indeed, the resentment of life and the fear of death are virtually synonymous. Does it follow, then, that the more people ask of living, the less their fear of dying?"
The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant by Mavis Gallant
One Book You've Been Meaning To Read
“The mystery of what a couple is, exactly, is almost the only true mystery left to us, and when we have come to the end of it there will be no more need for literature—or for love, for that matter.” –Mavis Gallant
Julian Barnes quotes Mavis Gallant in the half-chapter of his A History of the World in 10½ Chapters. This odd chapter-slash-essay, titled “Parenthesis,” is a sort of authorial aside, a sleepy nighttime discourse on the grand subject of love, completely out of place from the rest of the book. It does make some sense, though: how can you have a history of the world without mentioning love?
I have reread “Parenthesis” many times. It is one of the few literary essays I have read that speaks directly on the subject of love, and it is both thought-provoking and moving because the narrator offers as evidence his own love for his wife in addition to the more intellectual ramblings and literary quotations. The Mavis Gallant quote has been stuck in my consciousness for the ten or fifteen years since I first read the book, but until recently, I didn’t think to look for more of her writing.
When I finally tried to search for Gallant’s writings, I discovered that she is a Canadian writer, and that most of her work is now out of print in the US, despite having her short stories published in The New Yorker regularly. On Amazon, I read countless raving reviews of her stories. One reviewer wrote,
“Her writing is magical on so many levels that I'll only mention a couple of them: the consistency and the sublime richness of her prose - it's like really rich fudge, a phrase or two of one of the 15+ stories is often enough for one sitting; the hauntingly subtle rendering of European life; the authority and command of her voice - there is no doubt in my mind that Mavis Gallant was put on this earth to write fiction as her job, and she writes like she knows it.”
On Wikipedia, a critic is cited as saying, “Mavis Gallant's fiction is among the finest ever written by a Canadian.”
Wow—I had never even heard of her outside the Julian Barnes book. I decided to get my hands on some Mavis Gallant… but I didn’t want to buy from Amazon Canada and have it shipped, so I went to my bookcrossing friends and asked if anyone had some Mavis Gallant to trade. Sure enough, a very generous Canadian bookcrosser (screen name crazybooklady) traded me two Mavis Gallant books for two of my Frederic Crews books. A few weeks later, The End of the World and Other Stories and The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant arrived in my mailbox.
Here’s the embarrassing part: this was a year and a half ago. Both books are still sitting on my shelf, unread. I must get on this.
I am on page 389 of The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. It’s taking me a while to get through it, not only because it’s 522 pages long, but somehow it just hasn’t grabbed me the way I expected it to.
The first time I heard about The Book Thief was at a Northern California Children’s Bookseller Association meeting at Hicklebee’s in San Jose back in March. It was book share night, everyone’s favorite part of the meetings. Valerie Lewis, owner of Hicklebee’s and an author in her own right, chose The Book Thief as her share as the best new book this season. She was especially enthusiastic because Zusak had just visited Hicklebee’s the day before as part of a panel discussion called “Teen Authors,” and gave a great talk.
Due to the unfortunate misnomer of that “Teen Author” event, I was, until five minutes ago, convinced that Mark Zusak was himself a teenager. I just looked him up online and discovered otherwise.
I think that belief might have colored my reading of the book.
I had been all prepared to rave about the impressive literary skills of such a young person (not that Zusak isn’t young—30 is, well, younger than me). However, I realize now that I have been reading with one foot on each side of the shore, as it were. While I wanted to be impressed, I might have been subconsciously eager to find immaturity in the prose and in the handling of the subject matter, which is by no means light.
I don’t know what happens in the end, but so far The Book Thief is the story of a German girl and her foster family during WWII, as they watch the progression of the fascist state, the persecution of the Jews, and the approach of enemy fire. I think I am relieved to know that this book, narrated by Death and taking place during one of the darkest periods of human history, was not written by a teenager. I can now enjoy the many unusual literary mechanisms and turns of phrase that Zusak employs without worrying about some eighteen-year-old trying too hard (there is such a fine line between cutting-edge literary devices and trying too hard). I’m afraid I might have judging the prose a bit too harshly in that light.
The Book Thief has already won huge critical acclaim, including Hicklebee’s own Book of the Year award and many Australian honors. I feel like I haven’t been giving the book its due, so I promise to tackle the remainder of the book with relish, and stop worrying.
I am going to go above and beyond the scope of this question (also known as cheating) and say that there is in fact an entire genre of books I wish had never been written. Jay Leno’s If Roast Beef Could Fly is by no means the first, most popular, or most indicative of the quality of this entire class of books, but I have chosen it as my scapegoat because the cover is such an eyesore and the title is so dumb that you couldn’t possibly bring yourself to disagree with me. The genre I am speaking of so harshly is Celebrity-Authored Children’s Books.
At first, I had trouble with this question. I consider myself a highly tolerant person who believes wholeheartedly in the freedom of speech. So, while I may not have enjoyed reading particular books, I have not consequently wished that they had never been written at all. There is a huge difference between not wanting to read a book oneself and wishing that others could not read it either.
I tried to think of books that changed the world for the worse. Maybe the world would have been better off without those. Mein Kampf? Mao’s Little Red Book? Unfortunately, my knowledge of history is insufficient to make an educated choice in this arena. I thought of more recent offenses: anything by Ann Coulter, or maybe that book I accidentally stumbled across on Amazon and that has traumatized me ever since, Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed! But my sense of civic duty does not permit me to wipe our world free of these ideas, no matter how idiotic they seem to me.
That’s when I had my epiphany. If all the children’s books written by celebrities suddenly disappeared from the world, there would be no negative consequences! Celebrities have no trouble being seen or heard anyway. They would still have all the freedom of speech they currently enjoy, with no ill effects.
On the plus side, we would no longer be in danger of these hastily written, terribly-illustrated works of drivel falling into the hands of our impressionable children. In addition, our children would not be taught that people who are famous should exploit their name recognition for a few easy bucks from fanatical suckers who will buy anything with a famous name on it. They would be shielded from the cruel ways of the world, where wealth and talent are confused for one and the same, at least for a little while longer—until they turn on the television.
One of the problems with participating in online book discussions is that you discover all sorts of wonderful books you might not have heard about or considered reading before. For instance, Les’ description of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood makes me want to read it now, even though I have never been interested in true crime books, and reading about a gruesome murder doesn’t sound appealing at all. But still, it sounds so good…
Yes, it is a problem. I recently took a cursory inventory of the books on my shelf that I have not read yet, and it approached 100. I can’t believe I own a hundred books that I haven’t read, not to mention those that I want to read but haven’t acquired yet. Like In Cold Blood.
A few years ago, I came across a forum post on bookcrossing.com in which a member raved about Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. She said it was the best book she had read in years, and that it was so exciting and gripping that she could hardly put it down. Several other members wrote in agreement. I don’t know why this particular post struck a chord with me, but I decided that I needed to read this book immediately.
The Shadow of the Wind is a book about books, so I can see why people feel so strongly about it. It is about a young man who finds a mysterious book entitled “The Shadow of the Wind” by a man named Julian Carax. This book that he reads in one evening is so compelling to him that he sets out to find the author’s other works, only to discover that someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book Carax has ever written. I didn’t read The Shadow of the Wind in one evening, but it was still one of the best books I read that year because of its darned good plot: mysterious, suspenseful, emotional, romantic, and exciting.
The book I was reading and the book the fictional character read seemed to have a lot in common. They shared the same title, the same enthralling effect upon the reader. They even shared similar structural attributes, if not the same premise:
The novel told the story of a man in search of his read father, whom he never knew and whose existence was only revealed to him by his mother on her deathbed. The story of that quest became a ghostly odyssey in which the protagonist struggled to recover his lost youth, and in which a shadow of a cursed love slowly surfaced to haunt him until his last breath. As it unfolded, the structure of the story began to remind me of one of those Russian dolls that contain innumerable ever-smaller dolls within. Step by step the narrative split into a thousand stories, as if it had entered a gallery of mirrors, its identity fragmented into endless reflections.
“The Shadow of the Wind” had such a profound effect upon the characters in The Shadow of the Wind that I wish it really existed to read. But I wonder: both the real and the fictional books are so full of mirrors and self-references, perhaps they are one and the same after all.
I’m not interested in the many theories of time travel from a scientific point of view, although I do enjoy thinking about the various fictional possibilities. I don’t really believe that time travel is possible in real life. I didn’t even know I had a Thing about time travel until I sawthe movie Donnie Darko, and I spent more than a few hours online the day afterward reading about how the movie plot folded over on itself and working out the timeline of the events in the movie. It was then that I realized that I always seem to choose movies and books that incorporate time travel into the plot. Suddenly, many things became clear, including my Quantum Leap obsession in high school and why I even read The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger in the first place.
I acquired my advance copy of The Time Traveler’s Wife at BEA in 2003. While most publishers print their advances of upcoming books as paperback versions featuring the final jacket art, MacAdams/Cage does not. Every one of MacAdams/Cage’s upcoming titles is printed with a solid colored paper cover, sporting the most basic information about each book in the same standard font. Title, author, release date. The back of the jacket offers standard advertising blurb copy. These are the least attractive advances you will find on the entire convention floor. I always scan them all and read the back covers, but I rarely take one. I know I won’t read them— the covers are so sad. I did, however, put The Time Traveler’s Wife with its plain, rough, dusky blue cover in my totebag. Later that afternoon, I sank into a chair at the food court with my albatross of a totebag. I was supposed to meet my friends soon, but my feet had convinced my legs that we didn’t need to walk down any more aisles just one more time. I had a few minutes, so I poked my head in the totebag to find something to pass the time. Why did I choose the plain blue cover of The Time Traveler’s Wife? My only explanation is that my arm simply acted reflexively at the words “time traveler” in the title.
It took me about five pages to even understand what was going on in the book, but when I did, that was it. There would be no television, no conversations, no personal interaction with me for a few days, until I devoured the book completely.
If you are unfamiliar with the premise of The Time Traveler’s Wife, I will just say that it is a love story between Henry, a man who travels through time involuntarily, and Claire, a woman who doesn’t. This is a premise that could go so very wrong, but Niffenegger writes it perfectly. The point of view alternates between Henry and Claire. Chronological storytelling is not a given, but each detail about the characters and the events of their lives is revealed to the reader at exactly the right moment, creating the perfect blend of romance, suspense, and disquiet.
The final chapters of this book are devastating. Like one who travels back and forth through time, the reader knows and expects the inevitable ending to arrive at some point, but the full emotional impact is still so unexpected. I cried nonstop through the last five or six chapters, clutching a wad of tissues and taking great heaving gasps of air at one point. I have never read a book that so strongly affected me that way before or since.
The Time Traveler’s Wife is unquestionably one of my favorite books because not only did touch every emotional nerve in my body throughout the entire 300-plus pages, but it stimulated my intellectual interest as well with its not-quite-chronological time-traveling telling of the story. My brain had a field day with constantly puzzling out where and when is Henry now—what does he know, has this or that happened yet? Time travel is so much fun, and Niffenegger was somehow able to weave it into the most beautiful and heart-wrenching love story I’ve ever read.
Anyone who has read David Sedaris has a "Where Was I When I Read Me Talk Pretty Someday and Laughed Out Loud Making a Fool of Myself" story. I was in a Vietnamese restaurant in Oakland eating a bowl of pho by myself.
That winter, I ate at the same restaurant and ordered the same bowl of noodles every Monday evening. I was singing with a chamber choir that rehearsed in Oakland, so rather than go home for dinner, I grabbed dinner on the way from work. Every Monday: me, my bowl of pho, and a book.
It was in that Vietnamese restaurant that I read my favorite essay in the entire book, “I’ll Eat What He’s Wearing.” Just the opening paragraphs had me guffawing out loud. My eyes teared up, and it had nothing to do with the hot sauce. The husband and wife who owned the restaurant and by this point would wave me to any table I wanted and would say, “long time no see,” if I missed a week, looked at me askance with worry.
We’re in Paris, eating dinner in a nice restaurant, and my father is telling a story. “So,” he says. “I found this brown something-or-other in my suitcase, and I started chewing on it, thinking that maybe it was part of a cookie.”
“Had you packed any cookies?” my friend Maja asks.
My father considers this an irrelevant question and brushes it off, saying, “Not that I know of, but that’s not the point.”
“So you found this thing in your suitcase, and your first instinct was to put it in your mouth?”
“Well, yes,” he says. “Sure I did. But the thing is…”
He continues the story, but aside from my sisters and me, his audience is snagged on what would strike any sane adult as a considerable stumbling block.
I have heard that Me Talk Pretty One Day is Sedaris’ funniest book. I believe it. Almost every essay is laugh-out-loud hilarious. I think David Sedaris has mastered the art of self-deprecating humor. (“A year after my graduation from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a terrible mistake was made and I was offered a position teaching a writing workshop.”) He turns every detail describing his life and his family, every mundane event, into a three-act comic opera. Or a three-ring circus.
I knew that it was queer to sing in front of someone, but greater than my discomfort was the hope that he might recognize what I thought of as my great talent, the one musical trick I was able to pull off. I started in on an a cappella version of the latest Oscar Mayer commercial, hoping he might join in once the spirit moved him. It looked bad, I knew, but in order to sustain the proper mood, I needed to disregard his company and sing the way I did at home alone in my bedroom, my eyes shut tight and my hands dangling like pointless, empty gloves.
I sang that my bologna had a first name.
I added that my bologna had a second name.
And concluded: Oh, I love to eat it every day
And if you ask me why, I’ll say
Thaaaat Os-carrr May-errr has a way, with B-Oooo-L-Oooo-G-N-A
I reached the end of my tune thinking he might take this as an opportunity to applaud or maybe even apologize for underestimating me. Mild amusement would have been an acceptable response. But instead, he held up his hands, as if to stop an advancing car. “Hey, guy,” he said. “You can hold it right there. I’m not into that scene.”
There are two ways one can go when choosing a book to bring to a desert island. There’s the practical route that many have chosen: How to Get Off A Desert Island, How to Live Comfortably for the Rest of Your Life on a Desert Island, etc. It seems like this might be a good idea, but I have given it some thought and have come to the conclusion that while books may be good for learning how to garden, how to frame pictures, or even how to write songs, they may not actually be of any use in getting rescued from a desert island.
The other school of thought that many more have followed is the LAB (Long-Ass Book) approach. War and Peace and Moby Dick have been popular choices. I believe that given only the remote possibility of being rescued (I’ve seen Lost, thank you), having a REALLY long book is the way to go. My choice is Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. The whole thing.
OK, I understand that it might be cheating a little bit because In Search of Lost Time is actually six volumes (or seven, depending on how you count), but it does come packaged in the handsome boxed set with a slip case that can be lifted in one hand and used for cracking the coconut in the other. Shouldn’t that count for something?
Of course, I haven’t read any of In Search of Lost Time before, so I can’t be sure that I would enjoy it. However, I couldn’t very well take a book I had already read, could I? Besides, I think Proust is a pretty safe bet, though, as far as LABs go. Many of the authors I admire have either cited Proust in their work or as a great influence upon it. And anyone who can find such pleasure in a single madeleine has got to be a kindred soul.
Which reminds me: I must ask the cruise director: there’s no limit to the number of cookies I can bring, is there?
I can count the number of books I’ve read more than once on one hand. The last time I can remember rereading a book on purpose was in high school, when my friends and I were crazy about Richard Bach, Robert Fulghum, and Jude Deveraux. I specify “on purpose” because I did recently reread half of Ian McEwan’s Atonement before realizing that the déjà vu was due to the fact that I had read it before. I had forgotten entirely, and the whole thing was only vaguely familiar. Still, I dropped it like a hot potato.
Now that I think about it, there is something almost compulsive about my refusal to read books more than once. I have a notoriously bad memory and after a few months I completely forget the details of almost all the books I read—including my favorites. Yet I still will not reread them.
I wish I was more of a re-reader. From what I’ve heard, people who reread their favorite books seem to have a much closer relationship with them. They often describe their books as “old friends.” I love my books—all of my many, many books—but we just don’t talk anymore. It's like we've drifted apart. I would love to find something new in each rereading or see myself reflected differently in them as I change.
The closest I have ever come to this long-term-evolution-of-a-book relationship was with the children’s novel, The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster. It was one of my favorite books growing up. I loved the tollbooth that transported Milo to such wonderful lands as Dictionopolis and Digitopolis. I loved the wordplay and the crazy pun-ridden characters that filled the pages: Tock the watchdog, the Princesses Rhyme and Reason, and the island called Conclusions, which can only be accessed by jumping.
Of course, I had only read The Phantom Tollbooth once—until I was in college and I took a liking to a certain young man, N. I noticed that N had, on his dorm room bookshelf, a copy of The Phantom Tollbooth. It must have been fate! When I told him that I, too, had loved that book as a kid, he offered to read it aloud to me. Complete with voices, he advertised.
So every evening for three weeks, we would curl up on the sofa in his dorm room and he would read a chapter, complete with voices. I will readily admit that reading a children’s book had the added benefit of spending a lot of time with him, but there is something about a book read aloud that warms the heart and brings people closer together. I’m sure that was his plan.
N and I broke up long ago, but we are still good friends. Good thing too—I am glad I can still look back at that time and think of The Phantom Tollbooth with the fondest of memories.
“RESULTS ARE NOT GUARANTEED, BUT IF NOT PERFECTLY SATISFIED, YOUR WASTED TIME WILL BE REFUNDED.” –tollbooth disclaimer
I just realized that Lesley has tagged me for the One Book Meme going around. Luckily it requires a single book answer to each question, so I can still stick to the Renee’s Book of the Day format—it will simply take nine days to complete the game!
One Book That Changed Your Life
I’ve been racking my brain for books that changed my life, and the problem, of course, is that many if not all books have changed me in some small way. But I was looking for The Big One, a book that made me a different person, that visibly pushed me in a new direction, that changed the course of my life. I thought for a while that there might not be one single book that held the honor—after all, wouldn’t I readily remember it if there was? But finally, a memory came back to me and I knew this was The One.
It was 1993. I was in the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge wandering aimlessly, probably waiting for someone or between classes. I came upon the store’s small alcove of children’s books and I began looking at the picture books displayed on a table, running my fingers across the wide, smooth expanses of their hard covers. I picked up a book called My Father’s Hands by Joanne Ryder and illustrated by Mark Graham because it had such a warm and touching image on the cover, and I began to read.
In the five minutes it took to finish reading the book, something very small that had been lodged in a fold of my brain began to grow. This feeling expanded until it was as big as the sky, a vast span of blue and green and yellow inside my head. I turned back to the beginning of the book and read it again, studying each illustration as if the answers to all of life’s questions were etched there.
a girl watches her father as he tends a garden--as well as its wiggling, sliding, bumbling and graceful creatures. He opens his cupped, earth-encrusted hands to reveal a "pink circle of worm," a beetle "shining in gold armor" and a praying mantis "so light, so bold, so strange." The father wordlessly conveys his enthusiasm to his daughter, who narrates: "I bend closer, knowing that nothing within my father's hands will harm me." Graham's oil paintings, scumbled beneath a dewy veil of early summer light, perfectly match the intimacy of Ryder's text. (Publisher’s Weekly)
My Father’s Hands was never a bestseller or award-winner, but it was the first picture book that I saw with an adult’s eyes, and I felt it nudge my soul. I began to hang out in the children’s sections of bookstores while my friends browsed fiction or history. However, I was a music major and made no connection between my hobby and my future.
That summer, I worked for a small record company in Boston that produced children’s music. The following summer, I interned at Storyopolis, a new children’s entertainment production company in Los Angeles. Besides the production company, Storyopolis also included a children’s book store and illustration gallery. I found myself spending more time in the bookstore than in the production offices.
When I graduated from college, I had many rejections and no job, so my plan was to move in with my parents in northern California while looking for a job in movie or music production in Los Angeles. In the meantime, I took a part time job at The Linden Tree, a children’s bookstore near my parents’ house. Two days later, it became a full time job. I never moved to Los Angeles.
When I saw Chip Kidd: Book One in the Rizzoli catalog, I knew I had to own this book. The publisher’s description reads:
"Described as the closest thing to a rock star in graphic design today (USA Today), Chip Kidd is universally recognized as an American master of contemporary book design. At the forefront of a revolution in publishing, Kidd's iconic covers, with their inventive marriage of type and found images, have influenced an entire generation of design practitioners in many fields.
Chip Kidd: Book One collects all of his book covers and designs for the first time, as well as hundreds of developmental sketches and concepts — annotated by Kidd and by many of the best-selling authors he's worked with over the years. The result is an important contribution to the design canon today as well as a visually dazzling (and often hilarious) insider's look at the design and publishing process. The book also showcases Kidd's work with comics and graphic novels, including his collaborations with leading artists and writers in the field. Featured are projects for DC Comics, including Batman and Superman, as well as Kidd's award-winning exploration of the art of Charles M. Schulz. Chip Kidd: Book One is sure to enthrall design aficionados, book lovers, pop-culture fanatics, comics fans, and design students."
I have not always been a rabid fan of Chip Kidd’s, but for as long as I can remember, I have always based my reading choices and literary expectations on the visual and tactile impressions a book made upon me. In short, I judge books by their covers.
This is no joke. It’s an almost clinical problem. My friends may recommend the greatest works of literature, but if I don’t like the cover, or if the volume is in bad shape, I don’t enjoy the book. I have also been known to buy books because I liked the title or the feel of the matte coating on the cover. The trade paperback is the best thing that ever happened to me.
After many years of admiring and collecting books with great covers, I began to realize that many of the covers were designed by the same person: Chip Kidd. I started checking the designer of all the books I read, and I saw his name appear again and again.
It’s probably no coincidence that I enjoy modern art, modern literature, and Chip Kidd’s work. In fact, many of the books I’ve written about already were designed by Kidd, including Murakami’s book covers in the American market. I think this might explain my Murakami obsession…
I have read every word of the first half of Chip Kidd: Book One so far, and have flipped through the rest to look at the pictures. Just seeing the covers reproduced in this weighty coffee-table book gives me such pleasure, but I also love the anecdotes and secondary materials that Kidd includes with each cover.
What I could not believe was the sheer quantity of bestselling books Kidd has designed the covers for. This guy is what, 40 years old? Here is a very short list of Kidd-designed covers for some bestselling books that anyone who hangs out in bookstores is sure to picture in their mind just from reading the titles.
The books we publish may not be meant for the mass market , but they sure are beautiful and welcome to some. Our hope is that children of these cultures will appreciate finding a book in the library that they can relate to, while those not familiar with the culture may learn something new.
Many Ideas Open the Way is a bilingual book of proverbs from the Hmong culture that features amazing photographic illustrations by Randy Snook. Here is the photo and text from page 6:
Whether you eat or not, at least hold a spoon; whether you laugh or not, at least smile. Noj tsis noj kuj tuav diav. Luag tsis luag kuj ntxi hniav.
I have this bad habit of testing out entirely new lives inside my head every time I am exposed to new people and places, no matter how mundane. When I take a walk in my neighborhood, I imagine living in the two-story colonial on the corner, rather than in our single-story ranch. Would the traffic be noisy? Would our cats be safe? Would I hate running up and the down the stairs all day? What would our mortgage payments be? And before I know it, I’m calculating interest rates in my head for a house down the street from where I live.
feed me
