My favorite reads in 2008 December 12, 2008

This year I started keeping a reading diary, on the advice of friend and mentor Wayde Compton. Wayde likes to keep a reading diary so that he remembers all the books he’s read; he also suggested that it encourages him to make more careful reading choices. After a whole year of keeping track of the books I read, I agree with Wayde that keeping an annotated reading list keeps me from squandering my reading time. For my bad reading habits, see Internet Procrastination and Hello, Supermarket Magazine Aisle! For the best of my reading of 2008, see below. Note that these are not necessarily books that were written in 2008; they’re a just a happy mix of the best fiction and nonfiction and poetry that I read this year, so far. I’ve read 28 and 3/4 books this year; I’m hoping to make it at least to 30 by Dec. 31; I have a transcontinental and transatlantic flight between now and then, plus almost two solid weeks of holiday, PLUS a huge pile of books I’m just chomping at the bit to devour.

So, the list of favorites, in chronological order of my reading:

1. David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green (2006). I have a softness for coming-of-age stories, and I loved this book so much. It is my absolute favorite this year, and also one of the first books I read in 2008, so it cast its shadow over everything that followed. Mitchell makes the political and cultural moment — early 1980s England — so tangible that it is almost its own character.

2. Steven Galloway’s The Cellist of Sarajevo (2008). Steven Galloway was one of the writing mentors in the writing program I participated in this year. This is a tight little book with large, arching themes. The cellist who played Albinoni’s Adagio every day for 22 days to honor each of 22 people killed by a bomb while waiting in a bread line is only a minor character in Galloway’s book, a fine thread that connects the stories of three fictional individuals in Sarajevo during the siege. All three stories are engaging and compelling. Ideas that propel all three stories: that we have the choice in each individual moment how to respond to a situation, whether to hate or to embrace our basic humanness. That we are only as good as our everyday actions, and that if we succumb to hatred in the small instances then we have already lost. The trick is to turn away from hating others. So excellent.

3. Christian Bök’s Eunoia (2001). This book is magical: clever, funny, beautiful. The bulk of the little book comprises five chapters, each a long prose poem, each of which only use a single vowel. It needs to be read aloud to appreciate the rolling cadences of single-vowel sentences. So melodic. And yet, coherent, despite the oddity of it. “Books form cocoons of comfort — tombs to hold bookworms.”

4. Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007). Chabon criss-crosses traditional genre boundaries in this hard-boiled detective historical sci fi noir novel about a fictional community of Jews who were permitted to settle — temporarily — in Alaska in 1948, but whose lease on American soil is about to expire, at which point they will be evicted from their Sitka homes. The language is witty and sharp and playful; young girls walk through the streets with arms braided together, “as clannish as schools of philosophy”; a dead man is described as someone  who “read a book with footnotes once.”

5. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005). I haven’t read any other Ishiguro… yet… but after reading this book, I will. The story and writing drew me in with its haunting, confessional intimacy as Kathy narrates the story of her coming-of-age. Not until almost the end of the book did I realize how deeply embedded I had become in Kathy’s perspective: I was discovering the truth behind her childhood mysteries along with her, as she was discovering them. I was surprised at myself when I cried at the end; I hadn’t realized quite how invested I had become in the characters.

6. Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog (2008 in English translation by Alison Anderson; 2007 in the original French). I already posted once about this book in this venue. I loved the intellectualism of it, the humour, the quirky characters. The two main characters are also the narrators: Renee the concierge who assumes a stodgy, stereotypical facade while hiding her delight with Tolstoy, classical music, film, philosophy, and precocious 12-year old Paloma who plans to burn down her family’s apartment and commit suicide on her 13th birthday. I fell for Renee and Paloma, and graceful, gentle Monsieur Ota, who befriends both when he moves into the posh apartment building. I read bits of it to everyone around me, like this one, which follows Paloma’s description of her mother and another woman in a lingerie shop, tussling over a pair of lacey undies, which they are both grabbing onto and refusing to let go, while having a polite conversation over the top of the fancy underwear sale rack:

“But let’s get back to the interesting movement: two women in full possession of their mental capacities who suddenly become totally unfamiliar with a part of their body. It results in a very odd spectacle: as if there were a break in reality, a black hole opening up in space-time, like in a real sci-fi novel. A negative movement, a sort of hollow gesture, in a way.
So I said to myself, if you can pretend to ignore the fact that you’ve got a right hand, what else can you pretend to ignore? Can you have a negative heart, a hollow soul?”

These are not the only books I loved this year, but they are the ones I loved the best. If you read them, let me know what you think.

Sugar that’s hard to swallow December 8, 2008

This morning I took a bus downtown instead of riding directly to work so that I could go to the downtown public library. I love our public library. It is modeled after the acropolis, and it is beautiful and full of books. I went to the library to retrieve a book on the history of sugar by Elizabeth Abbott.

The reason I wanted to read this book is because this weekend I watched Amazing Grace, a (mediocre) movie (on DVD) about the eventual abolition of the British Empire’s slave trade, directed by Michael Apted of the incredible Up series of films (7 Up, 14 Up, etc.). Still, despite the general mediocrity, the movie was worth seeing, and not just because it featured actors with fabulous names like Sylvestra Le Touzel, Ioan Gruffudd and Benedict Cumberbatch. (Benedict Cumberbatch!!!!!!!). Now, where was I? Oh, yes, so even though I didn’t love the writing or acting in the movie, I was fascinated by the story about the political struggle, over 15 years, to end the British slave trade.

One of the characters in the story, a young abolitionist woman, doesn’t take sugar in her tea to protest the slave trade. That sparked a whole series of ideas for me:

• imagine if this character could see how much sugar we (ahem, I) eat now;
• sugar was such a luxury item then that if one was to boycott sugar, it would more or less just be to boycott sugar from tea (or so it seemed, from the script); and
• I wonder what the politics and ethics of sugar production are now.

So I decided to look up information on the sugar trade and on modern slavery — especially because in the conversation my friends and I had after watching the movie, someone mentioned that they read that there are more slaves in the world today than at any other time in history. I have requested Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy by Kevin Bales from the library — we’ll see how long it takes to reach my turn to read it — and I await with baited breath and a sense of impending horror.

And then in looking for information on the sugar trade, Elizabeth Abbott’s book popped up. Very timely: if I had been searching for a book like this even just one year ago, I don’t think I would have found one. It’s a 2008 book, a Canadian author and press, and a book about sugar, both in terms of its role in history and in health. I can’t wait to read it.

I expect that I may be so disgusted that I’ll elect to renounce sugar forever.

Just a teaspoon of self-interest in a cup of moral indignation, no?

On being vs. not being a mother November 28, 2008

I’m writing a book about mothers and children and ideology and communities and political development. All these things. I find the writing process torturous and wonderful and boring and fun and everything else you might imagine, but right now I’m feeling really inspired by a book that I’m reading: The Maternal is Political: Women Writers at the Intersection of Motherhood and Social Change, edited by Shari MacDonald Strong.

The book is a series of essays, by and large written by fairly well-known women, like Anna Quindlen, Cindy Sheehan, Nancy Pelosi, Benazir Bhutto, etc. My favorite essays are the ones where mothers and children are in dialogue, where the women are negotiating what to say to simple questions with complicated answers. Like the white American woman living in India whose daughter asks her whether she is truly the most beautiful girl in the world. Since so many of the Indian people she meets pinch her cheeks and tell her that.

I think my favorite story so far, and I’m about half-way through the book, is by Nina Gaby, whose name is unfamiliar to me. She writes about going to a Vermont synagogue with her somewhat sullen 13-year old daughter. At the end of the piece, the daughter, now 16, writes an essay for a Rotary Club award, but won’t show her parents and doesn’t allow them to come to the reading of the essays. All she will tell them is that she’s writing about the Four-Way Test, “a famous schema that the Rotarians use to evaluate ethical decision-making.” She comes home and tells her parents that her friend won, and she placed second:

“Her cell phone rings, and she drops her essay notes on the table before running off. My husband grabs the paper.

“Will you look at this?” He holds up her still-childish scrawl.

What if Bush had Used the Four-Point Plan Before Invading Iraq?

It is the title of her essay. Below it are the points of the test:

Is it the TRUTH?
Is it FAIR to all concerned?
Will it build GOODWILL and BETTER FRIENDSHIPS?
Will it be BENEFICIAL to all concerned?”

Perhaps this little excerpt lacks enough context for you to feel it, but I get little shivers from that. And that makes me think about how I am so strongly affected by the stories of children becoming political, of children growing into the adults who will shape the future of society and the health of the planet. I am intellectually engaged by the stories, but also deeply moved. And yet, I am someone who has decided not to have my own children, not because of concerns around overpopulation, or because I don’t want to sacrifice my body to child-bearing (there are ways around that), but because I don’t want to sacrifice my freedom to child-rearing.

I’ve lived in communal houses with parents and children, and I have seen the joys and the struggles. My friend T. maintains that I can’t possibly understand the power of love between a parent and child, and she’s right, but I’ve decided that I’m willing to give that up, not experience that particular power in my lifetime. I still get joy from my close relationships with other people’s children, and if it can’t ever be the same, well, I’m OK with that.

Reading stories about children and mothers, though, and feeling the shivers travel down my spine like the slick dart of an eel through murky waters, I do wonder how someone who loves children as I do has become someone who at the same time embraces the sweet pleasures of a child-free adulthood.