January Wrap-Up

Hello, everyone. I have good news for you! I finished another book—Zeitoun by Dave Eggers—and I am currently halfway through Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, which is stunning. He is an incredible storyteller!

Zeitoun is a nonfiction book about how Hurricane Katrina changed one family’s life. The story focuses mostly on the husband and wife of the family, who split up before the storm, the wife taking the kids and fleeing to Baton Rouge, while the husband stays to keep an eye on their many properties and work sites. I have had pretty intense emotional reactions to all the Eggers’ books I’ve read—A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, You Shall Know Our Velocity, and What is the What—but not so much with this one. Instead of making me feel sort of manic-depressive, this book just made me feel angry. It clearly brings to light the infuriating inefficiency of our government’s response to this natural disaster and highlights the difficulties of struggling against bureaucracy. The injustices suffered by this family, which happen ON TOP OF the loss of their home, their office building, and many of the properties they managed, as well as the emotional strain of the disaster, are mind-blowing. And there are no apologies in this book. You just know that this story is one of thousands out there about how the mistakes that our government made in the wake of Hurricane Katrina severely impacted the lives and well-being of New Orleans residents.

It was a quick read; I finished in a few days, and it goes down easy. Perhaps that is one of Eggers’ greatest strengths—he writes clearly and to the point. It’s easy to be sucked into the story, dragged along for the ride.

I like Love in the Time of Cholera much better. For one thing, he uses words I don’t know, but can often glean from the context, which makes me happy. Sometimes I need to look them up, which is good too because then I know what they mean. But it doesn’t feel clunky or overly academic. Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a gifted storyteller whose novels are epic with each paragraph containing a lifetime of events. It moves along quickly, and the story’s focus shifts easily between multiple characters and sometimes there are these great little story/parables that fall in there, and I have to read them a few times just because they are so beautiful. Like this:

He did not live to see his own glory. When he recognized in himself the irreversible symptoms that he had seen and pitied in others, he did not attempt a useless struggle but withdrew from the world so as not to infect anyone else. Locked in a utility room at Misericordia Hospital, deaf to the calls of his colleagues and the pleas of his family, removed from the horror of the plague victims dying on the floor in the packed corridors, he wrote a letter of feverish love to his wife and children, a letter of gratitude for his existence in which he revealed how much and with how much fervor he had loved life. It was a farewell of twenty heartrending pages in which the progress of the disease could be observed in the deteriorating script, and it was not necessary to know the writer to realize that he had signed his name with his last breath. In accordance with his instructions, his ashen body was mingled with others in the communal cemetery and was not seen by anyone who loved him.

Wow. Dude can seriously write.

Anyhow, things are OK, or whatever. Sort of intense and epic, actually, but hopefully everything will calm down soon, and in the meantime I can just finish up Love in the Time of Cholera, which is making me remember why I LOVE TO READ, and then it’s on to Marilynne Robinson’s Home because you can just never have too much Christian fiction floating around in your head, yeah?

The World and Its Spinning

OK, so I’ve finished my first book of the new year. I wasn’t sure I was going to make it, but I had reserved this book from the library several months ago, it finally came in, and then suddenly I only had five more days until it was due back, so I pushed through and read it. Yay! Whatever works!

Anyway, the book is Colum McCann’s Let The Great World Spin, which won the National Book Award last year for fiction. The reason I picked it up is because an old professor of mine said it was good, and he was right. It is one of the best books I’ve read in awhile.

The novel is composed of multiple vignettes told from the perspective of several different characters. At first I thought the different sections were completely unrelated, but it becomes clear that each character in the story is somehow related to the overall events, which are laid out in the first story and involve an Irish immigrant monk living in the projects in the Bronx, his brother, and the prostitutes he helps. Although the events of that story impact all the other stories told in the book, the one event that provides an axis for the rest of the events to spin around is Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk between the two towers of the World Trade Center in 1974. Not all the characters in the story witness this event, but they are all affected by it somehow, either directly or indirectly.

I guess the most amazing thing about this novel to me is the idea of trying to capture the entire world in one book, which seems to be what McCann aims to do. By centering the book around one specific event and seeing it through the eyes of multiple people, you can’t help but draw comparisons between the worlds that each character lives in. Everyone is caught up in their own life—their past and their current perceptions—and for a brief moment all those lives intersect, before everyone goes hurtling through time and space into their separate futures.

I don’t really feel like I’m doing this book justice at all because I enjoyed reading it, and I was able to sit quietly and read for several hours before realizing that any time had passed at all, which is highly unusual for me, but I think I am a little rusty to this whole blogging thing, so you’ll have to forgive me. I don’t know what else to say about this book. It’s messy and full of love and death and grief and sex and birth and drugs and wonder. It’s heartbreaking without being sentimental, and it reminds me of how many different ways there are to live. Sometimes it feels like there are no rules involved in being human; there are too many possibilities, too many desires, too many situations for it to ever be simple. We all make mistakes and some of us regret them, but there is beauty to be found in every life, despite.

Up next is Dave Egger’s new novel Zeitoun. I will tell you how it goes.

New Year’s Resolution

Hey – remember me? I used to write on this blog every time I read a new book or zine or had something to share about reading or writing? Yeah? OK.

See, here’s the thing. I started this blog in part to keep track of everything I was reading and making, and also to motivate me to read more. And here’s the other thing: moving to Portland, while it is a very literary city, has somehow caused my reading to take a nose dive. I’m busy putting together zines and helping plan the zine symposium and reading comics and zines, but there hasn’t been much time for book reading. Of course, I could do way more to set aside the time to do it, but for some reason, in the past few months, my attention span has shrunk to incredible proportions. I decided awhile ago not to beat myself up for it. I am happy. Happier than I’ve been in a very long time. And that’s what matters, right?

I do miss reading, though. I miss being sucked into another world, learning about myself through other people and their experiences. Connecting to other readers through books, and finding authors that tell me things about myself I never knew. So listen, this is what I’m going to do. This blog is on my list of New Year’s Resolutions. I’m going to try. Really. I promise. I’ve never killed a blog unintentionally, and I don’t plan to start now.

And as I get my feet back on the ground and my head back into books—do you have any suggestions? What’s the best thing you’ve read this year?

It is hot, and I am busy.

Heyo. I’m not dead, I swear. It’s just that things have been eating up all of my time, like the Portland Zine Symposium, which happened last weekend, and it was awesome and exhausting and informative, and now it is over, thank god. My roommate and I stayed up to do a 24-hour zine the weekend before, holed up in a comics store near our house with a dozen or so other zinesters, and the rest of the week I played catch up on my sleep and tried to coordinate all the donations that were coming in for the symposium and get the programs made and help the organizers move things around and drop things off and fold and staple and copy, and yes. 

It is strange to live in a city with other zinesters, where it is a part of the culture and you can go to a place to see lots of people making zines everyday. Weird to meet the people behind the distros and zines that I’ve been reading/ordering from for years. Zine kids aren’t usually that used to talking with people in social settings. We are much better at writing down our words and then editing them and sharing them, and so zine symposiums/fairs/conventions are normally fairly awkward events, but I find it sort of endearing and awesome.

And so zines have taken over my life, although I haven’t written a new one in awhile, and I am sort of ready to do that maybe, once things calm down and this heat wave passes, and all the things that are new in my life have sort of lost a little bit of their sheen and I can turn my attention elsewhere.

And if you’re wondering how I’m doing with Infinite Jest, let’s just say that I have a long ways to go to catch up. Aie.

Nothing new

I was just sitting here when it all of a sudden occurred to me that I have a blog I’ve been neglecting for awhile. And then I looked back at my last entry, which was a full twenty days ago. That has to be a record.

In my defense, I’ve been traveling quite a bit, and I haven’t been at home in about 2.5 weeks now, so things have been a little hectic. I haven’t really been reading, either, although I’ve been trying to get a head start on Infinite Jest so that I can keep up with the infinite summer people as they read the book. I’m on page 105 now, which is sad, sad, sad, considering how long ago I started.

Alas. It is what it is. And I have nothing more to say. I will update later, perhaps when I do have something more substantial to report. In the meantime, it’s summer. Drink a beer or a ginger ale, and go sit out on the porch for a bit.

I knew true love and I knew passion

OK, so reading isn’t really priority #1 around here anymore, and neither is writing, come to think of it, but I did manage to finish a book today, which was a light read, if not depressing. It’s the autobiography of The Eel’s lead singer/songwriter Mark Oliver Everett, known as E. 

It’s called Things the Grandchildren Should Know, and it’s not particularly well-written. It sort of reminded me of a zine, in a way, and I doubt the thing would have ever been published if he weren’t so famous. But nonetheless, it’s sort of inspiring to hear him talk about the way that music helped him survive a pretty turbulent life. 

E has a rough childhood, a practically nonexistent relationship with his father who he eventually comes home to find dead, a sister who eventually commits suicide, and a mother who gets cancer. By the end of the book, he is the only member left of his immediate family, and he claims that his drive to produce music was the one passion he had that kept him alive and going. Listening to his songs through this lens makes them a little more amazing to me, and it is certainly humbling to think of how lonely it must be to have the people who were there to witness your childhood, raise you, take care of you, and help you develop into an adult all die before you are middle-aged. I can’t really imagine.

One thing I will say about E is that his intentions, at least portrayed in his book, certainly seem pure. Although he does bask somewhat in “fame” for awhile, he eventually realizes that’s not what he wants, and for many of his albums, he fights to maintain creative control over what he puts out. In fact, he ends up getting ditched over and over by managers and record labels because of his desired autonomy over his music. 

Anyhow, I’m heading back to the east coast for about in month in TWO DAYS, and I have about five thousand things to do before I leave, which is sort of stressing me out. I think I’m going to only take one  book back with me: David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. It’s a hefty book to haul a grand total of 6,000 miles, but I’m pretty sure it’s time.

For the foreseeable future anyway

I’m not really sure what phase I’ve entered here with my reading, but I’ve wandered off the literature path lately, and that’s OK with me. I just finished reading There Are No Children Here, by Alex Kotlowitz. It’s a nonfiction book about two children growing up in one of the Chicago housing projects in the 80s. And as you might expect, it’s terribly heartbreaking and sad. It was also engaging and super easy to read. The subject matter was dark and gave me nightmares a few times, but it was told clearly and succinctly. I really admire Alex Kotlowitz and his style of journalism. I’d like to read a few more of his books. And as a sidenote, I do feel that watching The Wire made it easier to understand what was going on in this book. 

It’s incredible to me how dangerous poverty can be, how dangerous it can be to live in these United States. We are supposedly a first-world country, and yet some of our citizens, our youngest citizens, live in conditions that are both traumatic and horrifying. There are places in this country where children witness murder on a regular basis. Where death and oppression are rampant from a young age. And there are very few resources out there to help do anything to make the situation better. It blows my mind the amount of courage, stamina, and resolve it takes just to grow up in a situation like the one described in this book.

Anyhow, I’m onto another easy-to-read book now called Things the Grandchildren Should Know by Mark Oliver Everett, the lead singer/songwriter for The Eels. I just read the first chapter, and it’s fast and reads like a zine. It’s a light read, something to kill the time before I get to what I’d really like to do this summer…. which is this. It’s an online book club that is hoping to get through David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest this summer. We will see. 

Also on my reading list: a re-read of Mrs. Dalloway. C’est tout.

On beauty and growing up

I’ve been reading Zadie Smith’s On Beauty for the past few days, and I finished it last night, and I loved it. And I’ve been dreading writing this post because I don’t really know why I loved it so much. It was just one of those books that pulls you into the story so fast and makes you feel like you’re hovering over the lives of the people involved for the length of time that the book goes on, and it’s engaging and funny and sad, and then it’s over. 

The book is basically a novel about a family whose father is a professor at a prestigious university. His wife isn’t so much an intellectual, but a strong, confident woman who is admired and embraced by the academic community. They have three kids—the oldest is a born-again Christian son, the middle child is an ambitious, intellectual perfectionist daughter, and the youngest is a charismatic teenager who denies his upper middle class upbringing, claiming instead to have grown up in the rougher parts of Boston to fit in with a group of Haitian protestors he befriends.

There are love affairs and academic squabbles and struggles to find racial and cultural identities. There are arguments between liberals and conservatives, artists and intellectuals, cynics and idealists. There are multiple ruminations on beauty and all its various forms, limitations, expectations. It’s the story of people, with problems, who see them but can’t really do anything about it. And the people who love them anyway. It’s about family dynamics and what it means to be a brother, sister, mother, father. It is an exploration of life through the microcosm of one family, and for awhile you, the reader, feel that you are one of them, the Belseys, navigating your way through a not-so-clear future in various stages of development. There are bits and pieces that are subtle and brief, but ring true to my experience, and so it goes. I’m still not sure I completely understand the ending, and there’s a lot here to unpack and break down, but I’m not sure I’m ready to do that yet. 

I do know, though, that there are scenes depicted in this novel, reactions to situations, quotations, that will stick with me as I grow up, trying to figure it out.

Debriefed

I finished Beloved yesterday, drinking coffee on our porch which is now covered in plants before my roommates woke up. It is a book to be savored, not rushed through, and I’m glad I was able to take the time to do that. As a sidenote, I realized that I never mentioned that I read Hard-Boiled Wonderland And the End of the World by Haruki Murakami. I put a hold on it awhile ago and when it came in, I picked it up and forgot about it for weeks. I ended up having to read the book in about three days before it was due back to the library, and so I don’t have much to say about it. It didn’t make that much of an impact on me, and I kept confusing it with Briefing for a Descent into Hell because both books involved detailed observations of otherworldly beasts, strangely enough. It was part sci-fi, part fantasy, and I thought it did raise some interesting questions about the way that people operate and how the soul is both our saving grace and our downfall. 

Yadda yadda, back to Beloved. Beyond the sentences and the way the novel is constructed, so that we are given pieces of information slowly, from all different perspectives, the entire story being masterfully withheld from us for most of the book, the ideas that tie the book together are complicated and extreme. Many of the characters, especially Sethe struggle to find a way to live in their present-day lives after experiencing some of the most tragic, heartbreaking injustices imaginable. Middle ground is hard to reach.

I can’t really do this book justice here without breaking it down completely, following the themes through, which I don’t have time to do, so I’ll just tell you this. Mother’s day is on Sunday, and I’ve been thinking quite a bit about what it means to be a mother, and a parent in general. In the novel, Sethe struggles with what this means in a life where she is prevented from being a mother. She grows up without a mother and has no way of knowing what a mother should be, which she readily admits while giving birth to her baby Denver. And of course, the event that hangs at the crux of this whole novel—when Sethe kills her baby Beloved by cutting her throat with a handsaw in order to keep her from being recaptured by the white men—is ultimately an act of love. A mother’s wish for her child to be safe, protected from the hardships she has known her whole life. 

This idea of making the world better for our children, giving them opportunities that we didn’t have, helping them succeed is something universal and powerful. It’s deeply rooted in stories like these from This American Life, here and here.

There’s something else I wanted to say, about identity. The way that we see the characters in the book discovering themselves, in life-altering ways that don’t happen when people know freedom their whole lives. When Baby Suggs, Sethe’s mother-in-law, is bought freedom by her son Halle and is given a house of her own, it is only then, gardening in her yard that she first has a sense of identity. Of herself as her self. And this is after she has lived almost her whole life. It’s something that Denver also experiences late, when she is eighteen. Although Denver is born free, she is also chained by the love of her mother, who warns her of the evils outside of their house, scaring Denver into staying put until desperation forces her out. 

Love taken to an extreme is dangerous, and when terrible, cruel things happen, the reactions to them are often terrible and cruel as well, often unintentionally. 

I want to write more, about Paul D and his ability to make women cry. About Stamp Paid and his decision to tell Paul D about Sethe’s past. About the community of freed slaves that forms to support those with the heaviest stories to tell and the capability of that group for forgiveness, acceptance, to bend their minds towards understanding even in the most tragic of circumstances. I’d like to write about Beloved, how she is full of anger and hatred and how she is the one completely destructive character in the novel, and about Amy, who helps Sethe deliver her baby and tends her wounds when she is dying in the woods. But of course, there’s no time. So I will just say to you, read this book. It’s one of the books that makes you question why you should ever write another word because really, when novels like this already exist, what’s the point? 

And if you’ve already read the book and want to hear Toni Morrison talk about it, here’s an mp3 of a BBC podcast where she does just that. Very interesting.

Re-reading, re-remembering

Beloved is a masterpiece. Every single page amazes me. I open it up for a second, not planning to read and fifteen minutes later I realize I’m still sitting there, enraptured with her words, the sentences strung together, the painful images playing out in my head. It’s absorbing in a way that few books are, and soulful. It’s a combination of poetry and prose, it mixes the concrete with the abstract, it reveals the plot in a carefully stitched together patchwork of memories. It switches from one character’s point-of-view to the other naturally, seamlessly, picking up where it left off without feeling fragmented. Each chapter starts with a sentence, strong and revealing. Here, I’ll show you some:

Denver’s secrets were sweet.

Rainwater held on to pine needles for dear life and Beloved could not take her eyes off Sethe.

and my personal favorite:

Beloved was shining and Paul D didn’t like it.

Gorgeous, right?

Beloved was shining and Paul D didn’t like it. Women did what strawberry plants did before they shot out their thin vines: the quality of the green changed. Then the vine threads came, then the buds. By the time the white petals died and the mint-colored berry poked out, the leaf shine was gilded tight and waxy. That’s how Beloved looked—gilded and shining.

This book is simultaneously a horror story, a suspense novel, a historical narrative, a biography. It’s a sublime combination of the supernatural and the real, in a way that is completely believable and totally chilling. It’s painful to read, but impossible to put down. In the foreword, Morrison writes

I wanted the reader to be kidnapped, thrown ruthlessly into an alien environment as the first step into a shared experience with the book’s population—just as the characters were snatched from one place to another, from any place to any other, without preparation or defense.

Bravo.

This is my second time through this book. The first was a few years back, over a New Year’s vacation spent cleaning out and fixing a flooded condo with my dad. The second time through is just as much, if not more, enjoyable, and I am taking my time with this, savoring the words, letting them simmer, and still being blown away page after page. Toni Morrison is a genius. Genius, genius.