May 2019 books read

  • Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History – Dan Flores, 2016.
  • Lincoln in the Bardo – George Saunders, 2017. Quotes pulled, post tbd.
  • The Book of Delights – Ross Gay, 2019.
  • Whoredom in Kimmage: Irish Women Coming of Age  – Rosemary Mahoney, 1993 (later subtitle changed to The Private Lives of Irish Women).
  • Annihilation – Jeff VanderMeer, 2014. I saw the movie when it came out and then read the book (March 2018) but I had completely forgotten the experience of reading it. The Forbes Far-Out Film group watched the movie and so I picked up the book (again); it took me a while to remember I’d already read it, but the biologist’s nickname of “ghost bird” (love that!) and the Crawler generating text in the “tower” woke up the memory. I still prefer the movie but enjoyed the book enough this time that I’ll plan on reading at least the second in the Southern Reach trilogy.
  • Silence – Shūsaku Endō, 1966; translated by William Johnston. Quotes pulled, post tbd.
  • Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams – Matthew Walker, 2017. Oh man oh man. I read William Dement’s The Promise of Sleep shortly after it came out in 1999, and it got me to change my behavior to truly prioritize sleep; the content of this book makes that one look like a mild argument in favor. Unfortunately some of the writing is a little cutesy, but my annoyance at that was totally drowned out by the galvanizing message that enough sleep daily is critical to every part of our physical and mental health. One of the few books I’ve been recommending to everyone!

The Book of Delights – Ross Gay, 2019

It may have been through Gretchen Rubin that I first heard of this book, but it’s been popping up everywhere. I loved these “essayettes”! So many delightful little and large observations on pleasures to be found in the everyday. His existence as a black man in America informs the book in fascinating ways but it’s also universal, an embrace of the world as it is in all its flawed beauty without sugar-coating. Very funny too; one of my favorite stories is of a TSA worker who is so impressed that Ross is being flown somewhere to “read palms.” I love that he wanted to do one essay per day but gave up on that goal and ended up with about 100 for the year—easygoing in the best way, not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, and still succeeding in savoring and sharing so many experiences.

He’s great with images like “A fly, its wings hauling all the light in the room” and with pile-on sentences that romp around an idea:

It is a sweet correction this computer keeps making, turning pawpaw into papaw, which means, for those of you not from this neck of the woods, papa or grandpa, which a pawpaw grove can feel like, especially standing inside of it midday, when the light limns the big leaves like stained glass and suddenly you’re inside something ancient and protective.

But what I have learned is the worry one might have about one’s child, perhaps most especially one’s black or brown child, speaking “improper” English, wearing “improper” colors, having “improper” etiquette, or displaying “improper” tastes, which, in the case of my dad and I, really meant behaving in the style or manner of black people, the idea of black people, which really meant one’s black or brown child being perceived as the idea of black people, the prospect of which, for my father, thought I never heard him say it plainly, must have been a terror.

He extrapolates wonderful metaphors from the natural world:

…It has occurred to me that among other things—the trees and the mushrooms have shown me this—joy is the mostly invisible, the underground union between us, you and me, which is, among other things, the great fact of our lives and the lives of everyone and thing we love going away. If we sink a spoon into that fact, into the duff between us, we will find it teeming. It will look like all the books ever written. It will look like all the nerves in a body. We might call it sorrow, but we might call it a union, one that, once we notice it, once we bring it into the light, might become flowers and food. Might be joy.

And if I think I’m in a hurry, or think I ought to be, and quickly walk by to peek at the beds, the teeny bindweed sprouts will sing out to me, “Stay in the garden! Stay in the garden!” And I often oblige, despite my obligations, getting back on my hands and knees, my thumb and forefinger caressing the emergent things free, all of us rooting around for the light.

I particularly enjoyed the chapter on loitering, and its lovely synonyms “linger, loaf, laze, lounge, lollygag, dawdle, amble, saunter, meander, putter, dillydally, and mosey“:

…another of the synonyms for loitering, which I wrote as delight: taking one’s time. For while the previous list of synonyms allude to time, taking one’s time makes it kind of plain, for the crime of loitering, the idea of it, is about ownership of one’s own time, which must be, sometimes, wrested from the assumed owners of it, who are not you, back to the rightful, who is.

Gay will read at the Juniper Institute next month, and I hope to go!

Whoredom in Kimmage: Irish Women Coming of Age – Rosemary Mahoney, 1993

Irish Writers selection. I was hooked on the first page, Mahoney’s story of working for Lillian Hellman one summer: “I was as ornery at seventeen as Lillian Hellman was at seventy-three.” A very well-written book but ultimately somewhat infuriating to read (the topic, not the book itself).

In this book I learned about

[Francis MacNamara’s] speech was slow and drawling, and there was a great sense of confidentiality in everything he said, for he spoke with his head inclined toward his listener, and often, when shifting the direction of his ideas, he said softly and urgently, “But come here to me,” which was the Irish was of saying, ‘Listen carefully and keep this between us.” Francis sighed heavily when he spoke, as though he had been too long deprived of fresh air.

The conversational competition [in the pub] was fierce and reached far beyond that evening. It was a matter of intellectual hierarchy, who fit where, who was sharpest and most knowledgeable, and who, therefore, deserved the greatest share of attention.

It delighted me that a lone woman could stand at the side of the road and put out her thumb without trepidation. To me, hitching was a bygone freedom, and that I was able to do it here contributed to my feeling that Ireland lay just beyond the corrupting reach of the modern world.

There seemed to be no conventional concept of time here, no concept of having made a promise or a commitment, and they showed not the slightest embarrassment or remorse over their tardiness. Too, the Irish were always delighted to put things off to a later date, even the most pleasurable things—vacations, parties, picnics. Procrastination, indecision, and stalling were symptoms of a chronic national disease that seemed related to a deeper fear of allowing themselves any expectations at all, and I thought it was as a result of this fear that the Irish appeared so deceptively supple and easygoing.

“Sigh sios agus do scith a ligean! Nil aon tintean mar do thintean fhein! La bhrea buiochas le Dia!” Sit down and rest yourself! There’s no fireplace like your own fireplace! It’s a fine day, thank God! These were the platitudinous sayings that people flung out with bold authority when their Irish was rusty or incomplete. The habit was known as the cupla focail, the few words.

Rosemary volunteers with teenagers and is asked her age. She’s already said “thirty” three times before this exchange:

“Rose! I’m askin’ ya how old are ya?”
“I’m thirty, Una,” I said.
Una brought her face around to look at mine again. She was utterly puzzled. Abandoning all pretense at a whisper, she screeched, “What are ya sayin’ to me, Rose?”
Karen, two seats away, saw the problem. “She said she’s torty, Una. Are ya feckin’ deaf?”
“Torty!” Una exclaimed. “Shite! Older dan me mudder.”

“Are you from Dorchester, Massachusets?”
“Very close,” I said and kept walking.
“I have friends and relatives in Dorchester,” he said, following behind me.
“I know,” I said.
“How do you know?”
“Every Irish person has friends and relatives in Dorchester.”
At this the man laughed loudly and gave me a friendly slug on the arm. The ease with which Irish people laid their hands on strangers always impressed me.

Subsequent encounter with another guy:

He spoke as though he had known me for years—the way many Irish people speak to strangers with an ease born of a presupposed universal understanding, as though we were all passing through life together, as though my plight couldn’t possibly be any better or worse than his and therefore I couldn’t possibly reject him.

Though fundamentally at odds, religion and superstition served the same ordering, protecting purpose, and in Ireland the two seemed particularly intertwined.

I saw then that … as a foreigner I was beyond his rural purview. That was what [Mick Pat] and the other villagers appreciated about me: I didn’t have to obey their rules, didn’t have to be watched or reined in. I could live alone in a creepy castle without annoying local sensibilities and without being termed mad or brash. Mick Pat had never asked me whether I had a husband or children. I had come from across the ocean and so was exempt from the question.

As I made my way back into the castle I had a powerful feeling of déjà vu. The evening’s familiar display [of shouting conflict] had recalled an entire habit of existence, a vehement, mistrustful, precipitate way of relating that I had witnessed in Ireland but that I had also grown up with and was part of whether I liked it or not.

Greeted with “Lovely morning” on a cool, drizzly day:

I checked his face to see if he was kidding, though I should have known he wasn’t. The Irish always thought this sort of day was beautiful. As long as there was no wind, the rain wasn’t too hard, and the temperature wasn’t too low, the day was beautiful.

Coyote America – Dan Flores, 2016

In this book I learned about

  • “Species cleansing” (eradication, e.g. of rats)
  • Mouse invasion in 1927 Kern County (California), after coyotes and hawks had been eliminated, which “left highways grossly slick, and ultimately undriveable, after traffic flattened unbelievable swarms of mice”
  • Scapegoating coyotes after the wolves were gone
  • The Coyote’s Lament (Disney, 1961)

Legendary federal coyote nemesis Stanley Young characterized the animal as the Biological Survey’s most frustrating opponent, an enemy members of the agency actually lumped in with fascism as a threat to the American Way.

Most predators are either solitary or social, not both. But like us, the coyote gets to have it both ways.

Coyote power: surviving by one’s intelligence and wits when others cannot; embracing existence in a mad, dancing, laughing, sympathetic expression of pure joy at evading the grimmest of fates; exulting in sheer aliveness; recognizing our shortcomings with rueful chagrin. These are the values Old Man America has embodied for thousands of years.

In my view the coyote’s howl is the original national anthem of North America … [but] The coyote’s cry, for many Americans riveted by the sound, did not intone the ballad of the continent—America’s ancient native song—that some of us hear today. …

A sense that so much about North America was strange and frightening and that we ought to terraform and remake it extended to every element of continental ecology, from grasses to animals of all kinds. But in truth, almost no other creature reaped the whirlwind of condescension and hostility toward “alien” American nature in quite the way coyotes did. We campaigned to erase those “manic, lunatic” howls for all time and good riddance. And even as evidence mounted of the wrongheadedness and futility of that course, we spent more than half a century in furious pursuit of it.

Chemists and researchers in the Eradication Methods Laboratory [making strychnine and other poisons in huge volume], with government jobs and benefits, presumably realized the American Dream in the 1920s, buying houses, automobiles, radios, and washing machines, all the latest technologies of the decade. Their products, meanwhile, destroyed America’s wild animals, the foundations of an ecology that 20,000 years of evolution had perfected, as if their victims were of no consequence whatsoever.

[Ernest Thompson] Seton has taken his licks across the years as a fellow traveler of the “Nature Faker” writers of the early twentieth century … One critic of Seton’s book Animals I Have Known even wrote, sarcastically, that its proper title ought to have been Animals I Alone Have Known.

The average coyote litter size is 5.7 pups, but that number can range from as low as 2 to as high as 19. The reason for such variability is that coyotes possess an autogenic trait that allows them to assess the ecological possibilities around them. If not persecuted, they saturate a landscape to carrying capacity, then usually have small litters that produce only a couple of surviving pups. But if they sense a suppressed coyote population relative to available resources, they give birth to very large littlers. The coyote’s yipping howl … has several functions, one very important one of which is to assess the size of the surrounding coyote population.

[Olaus] Murie knew that once, in his Yellowstone research, his brother had stood rapt, watching a coyote trot along a trail with a sprig of sagebrush in its mouth. At repeated intervals it had tossed the sprig joyously into the air, caught it, then trotted on. Why had so many in the [Bureau of Biological Survey], without any science to back them up, so hated an animal that took that kind of pleasure in being alive in the world? Why had they encouraged hatred for coyotes among the public? It was not an attitude or a culture Olaus cared to be associated with. He ended up leaving the bureau for the Wilderness Society.

“Biocentrism” in one sense was actually evolutionary. It implied yet another extension of the circle of ethical treatment that had begun long ago in human affairs, when we first moved beyond kinship and our own genetics and granted rights to others outside our families.

.Acme’s overconfidence rivaled that of the Coyote. In these classic cartoons the promise of the technological fix took the form of Acme Jet-Propelled Roller Skates, an Acme Batman Outfit, Acme Leg Muscle Vitamins, and the Acme Burmese Tiger Trap, so many mad-genius devices of pursuit that today an online poster … totals up more than one hundred of them. In iconic, American style, Wile E. trusted every one of those contraptions naively, optimistically, wonderfully. A corporation offers it for sale? Then of course it’s going to work!

April 2019 books read

  • We Need to Talk About Kevin – Lionel Shriver, 2003.
  • The Aeneid – Virgil, 19 BCE; Robert Fitzgerald translation, 1983. Quotes pulled, post tbd.
  • The Uncommercial Traveller – Charles Dickens, 1869. I read this on my phone over the course of about a year and a half, continuing in my Dickens/phone tradition. A mish-mosh of essays, which worked well to read in fragments (I’ve since started Our Mutual Friend and I’ve already forgotten who’s who!)—some sentimental, some funny, some perceptive.
  • The Bullet Journal Method: Track the Past, Order the Present, Design the Future – Ryder Carroll, 2018. I enjoyed it very much and might try the method at some point—probably not before I retire. It sounds like a lot of work to ramp up but potentially rewarding. Currently I use very small notebooks (no spine) that fit in my purse, just for running notes, and plan/list separately; I can see the advantage of combining them.
  • Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape – Lauret Savoy, 2015.
  • The Islandman – Tomas O’Crohan, 1929; Robin Flower translation, 1937.
  • Skippy Dies – Paul Murray, 2010. Quotes pulled, post tbd.
  • Assassin’s Apprentice – Robin Hobb, 1995. I saw rave reviews and I’m glad I read it—will go on to the next in the series eventually. Wonderful dog characters.

We Need to Talk About Kevin – Lionel Shriver, 2003

Read for the Far Out Film group in conjunction with the film—which was a tour-de-force in translating an unreliable narrator to a medium where I wouldn’t have thought that was possible. I enjoyed the writing very much but ultimately felt like the subject matter was ill-chosen/misleading. And the narrator is so much like Shriver in her outrageousness, snark, judgementalness, and general willingness to be dislikable! I flagged a bunch of passages that I’m not quoting because they don’t stick outside of the context of the whole book. A little bit of hate-reading in a way, and this is one of the few books where I used downward-pointing flags (passages remarkable for how much I dislike them) as well as my usual upward-pointing (something I want to look up) and horizontal (passages I find delightful or interesting).

Short quotes

  • The ob-gyn “offered up postnatal depression like a present, as if simply being told that you are unhappy is supposed to cheer you up.”
  • “For Celia, her whole surround was animate, and each tapioca lump had a dense, nauseating little soul.”
  • “How vital, the hard glass interface of that [TV] screen. Viewers don’t want those shows spilling willy-nilly into their homes, any more than they want other people’s sewage to overflow from their toilets.”
  • “Myself, after having not a child but this particular one, I couldn’t see how anyone could claim to love children in the generic any more that anyone could credibly claim to love people in a sufficiently sweeping sense as to embrace Pol Pot, Don Rickles, and an upstairs neighbor who does 2,000 jumping jacks at three in the morning.”

Shriver was critiqued for making her protagonist Armenian; it did feel glued-on, especially in that the main way she indicates it is by name-checking various dishes: sarma, lahmajoon, “sesame-topped ziloogs” (can’t figure out what this is?), katah. The window-dressing aspect was confirmed for me when I looked up madagh, expecting to find a dish (the context is “an incident now mythic in my family involving madagh scraped off the ceiling with a broom”), but it’s a ritual event that includes various kinds of food.

Longer quotes

That coy expression “you’re eating for two now, dear,” is all by way of goading that your very dinner is no longer a private affair; indeed, as the land of the free has grown increasingly coercive, the inference seems to run that “you’re eating for us now,” for 200-some million meddlers, any one of whose prerogative it is to object should you ever be in the mood for a jelly donut and not a full meal with whole grains and leafy vegetables that covers all five major food groups. The right to boss pregnant women around was surely on its way into the Constitution.

I was connected to the world by a multitude of threads, you by a few sturdy guide ropes. It was the same with patriotism: You loved the idea of the United States so much more powerfully than the country itself, and it was thanks to your embrace of the American aspiration that you could overlook the fact that your fellow Yankee parents were lining up overnight outside FAO Schwartz with thermoses of chowder to buy a limited release of Nintendo. In the particular dwells the tawdry. In the conceptual dwells the grand, the transcendent, the everlasting. Earthly countries and single malignant little boys can go to hell; the idea of countries and the idea of sons triumph for eternity.

The last thing we want to admit is that the forbidden fruit on which we have been gnawing since reaching the magic age of twenty-one is the same mealy Golden Delicious that we stuff into our children’s lunch boxes. The last thing we want to admit is that the bickering of the playground perfectly presages the machinations of the boardroom, that our social hierarchies are merely an extension of who got picked first for the kickball team, and that grown-ups still get divided into bullies and fatties and crybabies.

The truth [about drugs]—that we hadn’t cleaned out the medicine cabinet, but we’d both tried a variety of recreational drugs, and not only in the sixties but up to a year before he was born; that better living through chemistry had driven neither of us to an asylum or even to an emergency room; and that these gleeful carnival rides on the mental midway were far more the source of nostalgia than remorse—was unacceptable.

The Islandman – Tomas O’Crohan, 1929; Robin Flower translation, 1937

Irish Writers Book Group selection, a bonus on top of Skippy Dies because the copies came in late.  A sort-of memoir of life on the Blaskets, islands off the coast of Ireland, by a farmer-turned-writer born in 1856. Mildly interesting but weirdly detached and full of gaps (he marries and has 10 children, but only one sentence about his family, after a child dies). This Irish Times review sums up the tedium by calling him a “Blasket bore.” The funniest/strangest strand is about his nemesis, a poet who keeps interrupting his farming to declaim his verse for hours and insist that O’Crohan write it down. Bonus: people are always sticking their hands “under their oxters” (armpits).

Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape – Lauret Savoy, 2015

Nature and Environment book group selection. I very much enjoyed most of it—it’s a little scattered—but I didn’t have my post-it flags with me as I read it (note to self about how important that is) so didn’t mark my usual notable passages. The prologue haunted me throughout: Savoy (who teaches at Mount Holyoke, so is local) stands on the ice of a pond, reflecting how it captures time: “The recent past lies beneath me in these marcescent leaves, plucked and blown here by January’s heavy winds. Inches away, they are out of reach.” Her rootedness in/exile from California, her love of place names, her perspective as a person of color on the land ethic (fascinating take on Aldo Leopold)… I would like to read it again!

March 2019 books read

  • Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love – Dani Shapiro, 2019. I read it because Gretchen Rubin picked it for a podcast book group – but I haven’t yet listened to the podcast episode! A completely compelling book on a topic that has personal interest to me. And wow, she keeps mentioning how people insist she doesn’t look Jewish, but since there are no photos I had no idea how much so until I looked her up after reading.
  • Bachelor Nation: Inside the World of America’s Favorite Guilty Pleasure – Amy Kaufman, 2018. I have a soft spot for reality TV and have watched a couple of episodes of Bachelor/Bachelorette, but reading about it is actually more up my alley. This was good-not-great.
  • Reading the Forested Landscape: A Natural History of New England – Tom Wessels, 1997. Nature and Environment selection. I wasn’t able to make it to the group meeting and read it quickly, so no quotes pulled, but I very much enjoyed it. Tom Wessels is a legend around here—I haven’t been able to attend one of his talks or walks yet because they fill up so quickly! This is a useful and interesting primer on recognizing evidence of what’s happened in a section of forest, from fire to clear-cutting, long after the events. The illustrations throughout the chapters help identify specifics but I wish at least some had been in color. Makes me want to go back to the Harvard Forest, which is not that far from us (Petersham) and has a teaching trail showing some of these features.
  • Invested: How Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger Taught Me to Master My Mind, My Emotions, and My Money (with a Little Help from My Dad) – Danielle Town, 2018. A potentially mildly-good book ruined by howlers at the beginning that could really hurt financially naive people. I may write up more details at some point.
  • The Sea, the Sea – Iris Murdoch, 1970.
  • La Belle Sauvage – Philip Pullman, 2017. I so loved revisiting Lyra’s world, and Malcolm is a great character—this book doesn’t really stand on its own without His Dark Materials, but I’m eager to read the rest of the trilogy when it comes out and then re-read HDM.
  • Sharp Objects – Gilliam Flynn, 2006. I really enjoyed Gone Girl, but this… UGH! I finished it because I wanted to know what happened, but I kind of wish I hadn’t. Gratuitously disturbing but also entirely preposterous, which is sort of a saving grace I suppose. Oh, and unlike GG the “twist” ending was pretty obvious.
  • Death in Venice – Thomas Mann, 1924. Great Books selection.

Death in Venice – Thomas Mann, 1924

Another Great Books selection I had always wanted to read, and wow, it is indeed amazing. I tried a couple of translations: Kenneth Burke’s and H. T. Lowe-Porter’s. I noted some interesting differences:

  • Burke translates “schwermütig-enthusiastischen Dichters” as “the heavy-hearted, enthusiastic poet,” which HTLP has as “melancholy and susceptible” (apparently the poet referred to is August von Platen-Hallermünde).
  • In Aschenbach’s dream of ancient rites, Burke uses “the foreign god” vs HTLP’s “the stranger god.”

And one of the most haunting passages, after Aschenbach visits the barber:

  • Burke: “It was raining sparsely and at intervals, but the air was damp, thick, and filled with the smell of things rotting. All around him he heard a fluttering, pattering, and swishing; and under the fever of his cosmetics it seemed to him as though evil wind-spirits were haunting the place, impure seabirds which rooted and gnawed at the food of the condemned and befouled it with their droppings. For the sultriness destroyed his appetite, and the fancy suggested itself that the foods were poisoned with contaminating substances.”
  • HTLP: “It rained a little now and then, the air was heavy and turbid and smelt of decay. Aschenbach, with fevered cheeks beneath the rouge, seemed to hear rushing and flapping sounds in his ears, as though storm-spirits were abroad—unhallowed ocean harpies who follow those devoted to destruction, snatch away and defile their viands. For the heat took away his appetite and thus he was haunted with the idea that his food was infected.”

Other quotes

  • Aschenbach’s longing to travel: “Desire projected itself visually: his fancy, not quite yet lulled since morning, imagined the marvels and terrors of the manifold earth. He saw. He beheld a landscape, a tropical marshland…”
  • “His love of the ocean had profound sources: the hard-worked artist’s longing for rest, his yearning to seek refuge from the thronging manifold shapes of his fancy in the bosom of the simple and vast; and another yearning, opposed to his art and perhaps for that very reason a lure, for the unorganized, the immeasurable, the eternal—in short, for nothingness. He whose preoccupation is with excellence yearns fervently to find rest in perfection; and is not nothingness a form of perfection?”
  • Keeping the epidemic a secret: “So Aschenbach felt a dark contentment with what was taking place, under cover of the authorities, in the dirty alleys of Venice. This wicked secret of the city was welded with his own secret, and he too was involved in keeping it hidden.”