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18 March 2007 Michael Cunningham This
novel is neither long nor difficult; it took me longer than it should have to
read because my eyes kept rolling back in my head. Was it the over-the-top, trying-too-hard
writing (“the potted aloe plants on either side of the black glass
doors seem astonished to be there”)?
The revelation, meant to be the novel’s shocking climax, that a
little boy in the 1940s named Richie is the same person as the grown man in the
1990s named Richard? The way the
unhappiness of the postwar American housewife requires no explanation—she’s
a postwar American housewife, so of course she’s living a life of Quiet
Desperation with a Problem That Has No Name?
The way Virginia Woolf has nothing to do
with the rest of the book, except that she too is unhappy in her comfortable
life? It’s too bad, because
I’ve liked Cunningham’s short stories and personal essays when
I’ve encountered them. But, come
on: Making every one of your characters gay, either openly or secretly, was a
tired idea long before the late 1990s. Sigrid Nunez I judged
this book by its cover. A 1970s palette of burnt orange and avocado, a
William Eggleston photo of two young women in an intensely pensive moment on
a couch—there’s no way I wasn’t taking this one home. I
remembered the author’s name from Naked
Sleeper ten years ago, and this new novel turned out to be similarly
intelligent and quietly engrossing. The narrator is the college roommate of a
privileged woman who, bearing more than a passing resemblance to Kathy Boudin, allies herself with the radical movements of the
1960s and gets drawn into life-altering violence. The lives of the two women
meet and diverge several times over the following decades, and their stories
are satisfying for their unpredictability. Diane Johnson Now,
here’s a charming little delight that never tries to be more than it
is—and an example of a misleading cover. I passed over this book many times because
it looked to me like an Olivia Goldsmith-type farce making light of divorce,
and that didn’t seem fun at all.
Of course, it’s a huge bestseller so it must have been finding
plenty of readers who—unless they were misled—are either less
judgmental or more astute than I. Come
to think of it, I’ve never actually read Olivia Goldsmith so maybe
I’m misjudging her, too.
Francine Prose got me to read this book; she included it in Reading Like a Writer on her august
list of books to be read immediately, alongside Middlemarch and Paradise
Lost, and I figured I’d pick the low-hanging fruit first. It’s the story of Californian Isabel Prose’s Reading Like a Writer offers good advice even if you only want to be a better reader.
Slow down, for starters. The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History Jonathan Franzen Why does
everyone hate Jonathan Franzen so much? His revelry
in his failures and shortcomings—knowing he can use them to charm the
reader with his candor and self-deprecating wit, while keeping a certain
distance—would make him a lousy boyfriend, but his intelligent and
perceptive essays are delicious. Turbulent Souls: A Catholic
Son’s Return to His Jewish Family Stephen Dubner Florence
Greenglass and Solomon Dubner
were both born Jewish in the early 20th century, and both were
both drawn to Catholicism as teens.
When they met and married they reinvented themselves as devout
Catholics Veronica and Paul Dubner and raised their
eight children on a diet of Christianity, hard work and health food in
upstate Note:
Like Dubner himself, his book is undergoing an
identity makeover in mid-life. Nine years after its initial publication,
it’s being re-released as “Choosing My Religion: A Memoir of a
Family Beyond Belief”—a catchy if somewhat misleading title, with
a snappy new cover to match. Perhaps it’s just an attempt to ride the
wave of Freakonomics’
popularity (Dubner was the writing half of its
authorial team), but this book deserves new attention. Passionate Minds: The Great Love Affair of the
Enlightenment, Featuring the Scientist Emilie du Chatelet, the Poet Voltaire,
Sword Fights, Book Burnings, Assorted Kings, Seditious Verse, and the Birth
of the Modern World David Bodanis I
hope this fad of breathless, paragraph-length
subtitles is over soon and we can put the “subtle” back in
“subtitle.” Once I finished reading the cover and got to the book
I enjoyed it for its humanization of the well-known Voltaire and his
undeservedly obscure lover, Emilie du Chatelet. Mme. du Chatelet, an astronomer and mathematician who apparently
laid the groundwork for Einstein’s E=MC2, chafed at her
upper-class early 18th century French life and was rescued when
she met Voltaire, a man who could appreciate and challenge her. Society at this time and place being what
the way it was, her marriage to someone else was no impediment to her living
with Voltaire, and they began a passionate partnership, thinking and writing
together. Bodanis
does an excellent job of bringing history to life and showing us that human
nature hasn’t changed much over the centuries—the lover’s
spats of these remarkable people could have been pulled from this
morning’s advice columns. Voltaire’s ego, hypochondria, and
troublemaking doomed their liaison, and then Emilie’s
accidental pregnancy at the age of 42 killed her—but they had front-row
seats at one of the most exciting times ever to be alive, and they made
history. Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as
Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting
Butcher in Bill Buford What did I
just say about the subtitles? I guess they do make my job easier. Anyway, as
if Kitchen Confidential
weren’t enough to put me off my feed, this book’s tales of
obnoxious chefs and health code violations has killed my appetite. If I ever go to a restaurant again I will
see it with new eyes. Or half-closed
ones. The
Trouble with Diversity Walter Benn Michaels Michaels’
point that we as a society get exercised about racial and cultural diversity
while ignoring economic injustice is certainly well taken. But I think he misses some other points,
such as when he insists that deafness is a medical, not cultural issue, or
doesn’t see that prejudices of groups against outsiders are not only
cultural but racial as well. I think he’s also missing the importance
of linguistic diversity for its own sake, not acknowledging that something of
value is lost when a language disappears. In general, he favors rational and
economic explanations and downplays the importance of culture. But a rational voice on these subjects is
refreshing and sorely needed, reminding us that including poor people as
representatives of “diversity” is doing them no favors—what
they really need is to no longer be poor. Grayson Lynn Cox By the
author of Swimming to Antarctica,
this little anecdote about the author’s encounter with a baby whale has
some beautiful descriptions of swimming and of ocean life. The
Family That Couldn’t Sleep: A Medical Mystery D.T. Max Prions, the
mysterious substances behind mad cow disease, are responsible for several
strange disorders, perhaps the strangest and most horrifying being fatal
familial insomnia. Most of the
sufferers of this hereditary disease are members of an Italian family. The disease usually strikes the victim in
middle age, when he or she loses the ability to sleep and eventually goes mad
and dies, aware all the while of what is happening. Max ties together the
family’s story with that of prions—where
they might have come from and how they were discovered. Human mistakes led to
their gaining a foothold, but humans may be able to defeat them. We can only hope. History Lessons for Girls Aurelie Sheehan I
think I accidentally read a YA novel. It was shelved in the adult section of
the library. Misfit Alison Glass moves
to a Strange
Piece of What begins
as an eerily fascinating story about a woman investigating her attack on a
bicycling trip in |
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