The RedMolly Picayune-Democrat

Pick nine, only nine

From the NYT Lede blog:

The president of Chile, Michelle Bachelet, is trying to encourage more of her citizenry to read books by giving boxes of as many as nine books to 400,000 poor families, according to The Economist. The big question, of course, is which nine books, exactly? The London-based weekly newsmagazine said Chile’s selected titles, like “The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger and “Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka, were “unexceptionable fare.”

How about you? If you had to fill a box with nine books that everyone ought to have, what would they be? What if you had to pick just one work of literature?

Wow. Nine and only nine. What a concept! Should one go for the lofty and cerebral? The literary and timeless? The uproariously funny?

Here's my stab at a list, which I'm sure I'll revise mentally many many times, especially immediately after posting it:

1. Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond does an excellent job of explaining European world dominance and historical patterns from a science-based, non-racist perspective... and is a lively good read to boot. Really, if I could get the ideas from only one book widely disseminated planet-wide, it would have to be this one.
2. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez goes all over the place in a gorgeous, profane, heartbreakingly beautiful sprawl, yet is tightly written enough that not one word, one spectral appearance is wasted.
3. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath is really more like "the one book people should read so they can really Understand My Unique Temperament," but, yeah. 'S good.
4. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. Some people have complained that this book is depressing; I would argue, rather, that the truth (about the selfish nature of our evolutionary impulses) will set us free.
5. How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman, because everybody should know about cooking and enjoying good food. (Also now available in a vegetarian version! Because meatless can be delicious, oh yes it can, and that's quite enough from the peanut gallery, Mr. Beloved Sweetie.)
6. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams in a convenient omnibus edition containing all five novels in the series. Who else could deal with life's philosophical quandaries so deftly, and with such a deliciously absurd British flair?
7. Gardner's Art Through the Ages in the edition and binding of your choice. 'Cause nobody loves a philistine.
8. Material World by Peter Menzel, for an appreciation of the similarities and differences throughout the human family. Also, looking at the photos of the possessions of the family in bullet-riddled Sarajevo makes your own too-small, cluttered, even funny-smelling surroundings seem positively palatial in comparison. Also, what you learn from this book is that the contentedest-looking people in the whole world live in Iceland.
9. The Oxford English Dictionary, or at least one of its sturdy smaller siblings, such as the American Heritage Dictionary (my favorite: pretty pictures!). Precision in word choice is the beginning of precision in understanding. Or something.

And you? I'm so tempted to tag here, despite my fear of calling anyone out by name, but rest assured that this is one in upon which I most heartily encourage y'all to weigh.

Also: I have joined the Powell's Partner Program (P-P-P-hat!) and am now linking to their inventory items exclusively in new posts. I'll go back and update the old ones someday, maybe, if I get time and the inclination, so probably not. Anyway, just remember that you can keep two hapless unschooled children from being completely unprepared for the future... as long as you Shop Pic-Dem (tm)!

Here we go, WriMo

Signed up once again for National Novel Writing Month. Am full aware that this signing up has no chance of resulting in a brand-new 50K-word novel, but am hopeful that it will help motivate me to add substantial chunks to one or more existing novels.

(In case you can't tell, The Book is giving me fits again. I'm thinking it may need to be knocked off its pedestal for a while so I can dwell on other, potentially easier to write projects. Like the unnamed changeling story... that one's pretty fun.)

Also: yesterday I bought--and read in full by bedtime--Graham Joyce's The Facts of Life. A wonderful novel, inexplicably shelved in the fantasy section despite having little in the way of fantastical element (yeah, there are ghosts... but where aren't there ghosts?), proving once again that it's a rare and precious male author who can write female characters well. The blurb on the back, though, is wholly misleading. It makes it sound as though the book is the story of a young boy growing up in a crazy spirit-touched family, which it is, in part; but there's no single outstanding protagonist, and the boy is in large part a foil for the complex family dynamics going on around him. The book is also the story of Joyce's hometown of Coventry, its destruction in the Blitz and its by-half-measures and ultimately unfulfilling rebuilding. The city itself serves as a metaphor for the family at the heart of the story, torn apart and changed by war yet firmly resilient in the face of destruction and shifting moral values. Awesome book (and winner of the 2003 World Fantasy Award... rock on, Graham!), super-highly recommended.

Also also: while Karan was here last week, she helped me (well, she forced me just a little bit) to completely reorganize and re-store all my stamps. Which resulted in me making some cards the other day, for the first time since we moved; which resulted in my feeling happy, creatively satisfied and motivated to make more cards. Thanks, Karan! You rock! (And Jim says he's going to put up my shelves today, perhaps. We shall see.)

In which one book is finished, another begun

The boys got back from Colorado Wednesday night--it was un-freakin'-believable how much I missed them--and while Jim and I were waiting at the airport for the cutest little unaccompanied minors in Portland, I finished Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Cziksasome'nwhattheheck. I'm the original anti-selfhelpbook girl (except GTD! GTD is not a book! It's a lifestyle! Join us... join us...), but this book sounded interesting when I first heard about it from Stacy Julian a million and a half years ago, and in the last several months it just kept popping up in conversations and on blogs and whatnot until I finally felt helpless to resist and compelled to purchase it.

So. Anyway. IANAP (I am not a psychologist), but I think Czickasawzallmighty might be onto something here. His basic argument is that those times when we are the most genuinely happy are not those when we are necessarily "relaxing" (boy, does he have a bone to pick with TV), but when we are engaged in an activity that stretches us to the limits of our capabilities and which absorbs us to the point that there's no room for negative thoughts (which he calls "psychic entropy") to leak in.

This corresponds pretty closely with what I've been thinking about as far as GSH (Getting Sh*t Handled, if'n you missed it the first time around--the "art" and "science" of using GTD principles to fight depression). Essentially, I've found that if I stay busy enough and always have a task or activity ready for any level of energy, there's not much opportunity to dwell on self-fulfilling bad thoughts. If I have only 10 minutes to spare, I can usually knock out 3 to 5 things on my to-do list (funny how they always take half as long as I anticipate), and the boost of having Gotten Things Done usually propels me onward and upward to a new Thing To Get Done.

So I started a new book, one which I bought oh untold zillions of ages ago. You know how sometimes you buy a book and then when you have time to read, you look at that book and you think "oh, no, that's a GOOD book; I'm going to save it for when I have time to REALLY read; I think I'll re-read this three-year-old copy of Cook's Illustrated instead"? (Please tell me I'm not the only person who does this. Regularly.)

Anyway, I decided to just pick up the book and read it, and the book is March by Geraldine Brooks. And the first 68 pages--all I've read so far--are already the saddest damn thing I've read in years. But not sad in a falling-off-the-GSH-wagon kind of way. Sad in two ways: both, of course, in an enormously affecting way, because the character of March and the events he describes are so true-to-life and heartrending, and sad because I could write thirty-seven hours a day from now until 2083 and not have the literary talent in my whole body that Geraldine Brooks has in her little finger.

But that didn't stop me from sending off the first 28 pages of (yet another!) possible novel (it's OK; I wrote it last year) to the esteemed azureavian, who seemed to like it OK. Thaaaaanks, Rachel. I'm going to try to get another chunk hammered out in the next few days. I kinda dig the story.

(Also: my current light bedtime reading: The Oxford Illustrated History of Greece and the Hellenistic World. Wanna hear about Thucydides?)

Doris Lessing: best response ever

Is that not exactly the perfect response to discovering one has won the Nobel Prize for Literature?

This was a bookatarian weekend, since we had houseguests who love and appreciate the Powell's phenomenon. We went to the Burnside store on Saturday and--wonder of wonders!--I didn't buy anything. But I made up for that yesterday when we went to the Hawthorne store and I bought

• The Best Science and Nature Writing 2007 (because I'm going to be a science writer when I grow up. Look for writeups on some of these articles soon, maybe. Also, this is the only one I bought that wasn't either used or on sale. Such virtue! Buy that girl another book.)
• Walter Wangerin Jr.'s The Book of the Dun Cow (because I've been hearing for some time that I should read it; it's 25 years old and won the National Book Award when it was published... who knew?)
• Elaine Pagels' The Origin of Satan (Jac bought it too! We'll have to compare notes, once she chews through the roughly 37 other books she bought this weekend, ha ha ha. Pagels is one of my favorite authors on religious history.)
• Donald Antrim's Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World (picked up because I liked the cover and then purchased because it had both laudatory blurbs from the SF Chron, the NYT and the New Yorker and a passionately-written shelf tag, and plus I just dig funny books)

Thereby bringing my unread-books total to, erm, roughly 370 or so. But we're getting rid of satellite TV so I'll be able to get more reading done at night. (The evil glow-box! It sucks me in! Must... watch... "We Are The '80s!" Must... watch... every single freakin' midnight-or-later showing of "Ferris Bueller!")

Also, I joined a book group--"Women Reading Women." We're alternating between full-length novels and short stories, all by--natch--women. First novel: Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop. Starting off nice and light and accessible, don't you think?

Bitter disappointment and the hope of recompense

It was a sickeningly sunny Saturday, and I wanted to go outside. Specifically, I wanted to go outside and read my book.

But duty called, and I could not succumb to the call of the (not very) wild.

"I will work and work," I said to myself, "and I will finish those things which must be done, and then I will reward myself by going outside and lounging in the cool green grass (well, I'd actually like to be insulated from the grass proper by a nice insect-proof blanket) and reading a book and perhaps even falling asleep."

(If you read the blog this weekend, you know this already.)

So: I cranked out my tasks accordingly, took a shower (for, Dear Reader, I was frightfully stinky), dried my hair, applied only the tiniest titch of makeup so as to make myself fit for public consumption, put on a cunning flared denim skirt that seemed to offer the perfect blend of unfettered lounging and necessary modesty, found my book, dusted off my book, rounded up the troops, discovered Jim didn't know where his keys were, offered to drive since I knew where my keys were, and headed out the door. We drove up to Washington Park and rounded the corner to the "Elephant Playground" (so called by my kids because it is directly next to the old Elephant House; in reality, I think it's called something like the Lions Club Playground; at any rate, it is a terrific playground).

And my heart sank. For the entire playground, being located in this famously lushly forested park*, was mired in deep deep shadow. There would be no lying in the sun for me here.

Jim suggested going somewhere else. I thought it would be (a) silly to drive around trying to find a sunny park, and (b) mean to not let the kids go to their favoritest park in all of Portland just because Mama wants to pretend she's lounging on the shore at Capri. So, spirit somewhat dimmed, I went to fetch my book from the back seat.

It wasn't there.

It wasn't in the front seat. It wasn't in the back of the car. It was, I realized with a sickening jolt, still sitting on the dining room table at our house where I had set it down to retrieve my keys from the pegboard where, being a conscientious person, I always always hang them.

Yes, it was petty; but yes, it was all I could do not to cry a little bit. I think a tear may have welled up despite my best efforts.

You would really have to know just how awful of a mood I'd been in for days, and how much I was looking forward to that hour of blissful reading, and how it had dangled jujube-like before me as I worked my little tailfeathers off, to understand why I would react so frankly childishly.

But there was nothing to be done, and so I attempted to make do with the iPod (for which the only "headphones" available were the six-inch-corded earbuds that came with Jim's phone). It was a poor, poor second place.

So today, while Jim goes and gets two new tires for the BLT (we had a spectacular blowout on the freeway yesterday... that's another story), I'm going to repair to Powell's all. by. my. lonesome. And sell some books, and have their value added to the card I've had since before we moved to Portland, and then buy some books to add to the ever-growing To Be Read pile. And then maybe I'll walk over to Jamison Square and read one of them in the remarkably persistent sunshine.

Today's 20-Word Review:
Absurdistan, Gary Shteyngart
Vulgar, profane, hilarious. Confederacy of Dunces meets Still Life with Woodpecker in post-Soviet Russia. Plus: white men rap!

*but not Forest Park. That's a whole 'nother place, and a damned fine one.

Reading outdoors

Jim was just up here wondering why, despite my plethora of deadlines, I'm not getting much work done.

"I'm disconsolate," I said. "It's a beautiful day and I want to go to the bookstore and I have to stay inside and work."

He went downstairs in search of food, and/or to get away from Round 5,000,387 of my continual crankiness, and I returned to dicking around online wasting time.

Then I stumbled on this post from the NYT City Room blog about the pure pleasure, nearly exclusive to the summer months, of reading outdoors. And now that nagging urge has turned into a full-blown craving. I want to go outside and settle down on the grass somewhere with a blanket--since we no longer have grass at our house, it will have to be in some park-like environment--and read. Preferably one of the chunky tempting works of nonfiction steadily accumulating next to my bed, such as The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450-1800. (It is, natch, research for The Book.) Or Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud, which is such an awe-inspiringly comprehensive and well- (though densely-) written book that I can only read it in wee titches here and there.

So it's currently 11:41 Newman Standard Time. I am going to do my penultimatest (because my ultimatest is a goal to which I dare not aspire) to finish up these things I gotta do by 2:15. (Fifteen minutes of wiggle room. Will it be enough?) And then, FSM willing and the creek don't rise, I will repair to an outdoor space and do some outdoor reading. Maybe to the Jamison Square fountains downtown, though probably not, because too many people, ecch. (N.B.: Jim, apparently no longer so annoyed by my crankiness that he must avoid the room entirely, is suggesting that we go to "Elephant Park," the playground at Washington Park, instead. Fine by me. And Powell's is right on the way.)

Do you like to read outside? What's your favorite reading spot, outdoors or otherwise? And what are you reading right now? 

Look, look; I'm a book

Which book am I? (via Imperceptibility)

You're Catch-22!
by Joseph Heller
Incredibly witty and funny, you have a taste for irony in all that you see. It seems that life has put you in perpetually untenable situations, and your sense of humor is all that gets you through them. These experiences have also made you an ardent pacifist, though you present your message with tongue sewn into cheek. You could coin a phrase that replaces the word "paradox" for millions of people.
Take the Book Quiz at the Blue Pyramid.

This was a good quiz 'cause it didn't have very many questions and apparently has 64 different answers. Tell me which book you are, and I'll tell you if I agree or not.

Oh, and the phrase to replace the word "paradox" is "argle-bargle." I expect to hear people dropping it into conversation posthaste.

Heresy! Travesty! Also: analogy

So HarperCollins, the publisher of the Little House books (the Laura Ingalls Wilder series, for the unfortunately uninitiated) has decided to "modernize" them. Apparently, Kids Today are so thoroughly enslaved by Pokemon and Club Penguin and cell phones and glittery eyeshadow for five-year-olds that they can no longer enjoy the rich language and gentle pacing of these stories as they were originally written. Hence, the books are being repackaged as "adventure" stories--and foremost among these changes is the decision to strip out the beautiful artwork by Garth Williams. And the tag line for the books at their Web site is now "Little House. Big Adventure."

Can I get a "Bleah?" Hello? The Little House books are not about adventure--though there's certainly plenty of it in them. They're not about wily streetwise kids negotiating their way through a world they never made. They're not about survival against all odds (though, once again, there's plenty of that sprinkled throughout as well). They're about something a little more genuine: the lives of young people during a specific--and fascinating--period in history. One of the strengths of the books is their wealth of authentic detail... in fact, the loving descriptions of farm chores, housework and especially those amazing mouth-watering meals in Farmer Boy* are what have enraptured Fisher and Rhys during each bedtime chapter.

The books are also about character. Not the bone-crushingly dull sort of character that's hammered into kids' heads by far too many children's books, or by the twee morals tagged on to the end of every worthless cartoon episode. Real character: the sort that is shaped over time, that bends but does not break, that is revealed equally by what is undone and unsaid. Laura doesn't have to tell us four thousand times "And then the family worked very hard together and everything was OK." She shows it--as the sisters and their parents nurse each other through malaria, as they tighten their belts and grind seed wheat for flour during a long bitter winter, as she sews shirt after horrible shirt to save money to send Mary to a college for the blind.

This kind of message doesn't need to be dumbed down. It doesn't need to be abridged (which, to their credit, HarperCollins is not doing to the original books--but has already done to the subsequent series dealing with the lives of Laura's mother, grandmother and great-grandmother). It doesn't need to be stuffed into a shiny Internet-ready package complete with online games and sweepstakes and "Which Little House Girl Are You?" quizzes.

Fortunately, the last time I was in the bookstore, there were still copies of the old-fashioned, super-boring, non-turbocharged Garth Williams-illustrated books available. I'll just need to make sure and pick up copies of the ones we don't already have (alas, my childhood copies were read into tatters long ago) before they're gone forever.

Oh, yeah. Analogies. I tried one out on Fisher yesterday ("Hat is to head as glove is to what?") and for the next half hour or so, the relationships were flying fast and furious as Fisher, Rhys Jim and I came up with our own variations. Fisher especially liked being shown how to write them in official SAT-style notation. Rhys is still working on the concept. (Fisher: "Biology: living things :: geology : ? " Rhys: "Cup is for measuring and a chair is for...")

*OMG, the Wilder farm is an actual museum site where you can go on tours and do workshops and see historical re-enactments and stuff. We are so going on an upstate NY road trip.

Books, snow, tea, boxes

I may have mentioned here once or twice before my deep and abiding love for the written word. No?

Well, in the last week, while in Boulder and DC, I read five books in seven days. Three novels: Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass and The Subtle Knife (the first two books in the very-much-not-just-for-children His Dark Materials series) and China Mieville's Perdido Street Station (not to be missed by anyone who likes dark, evocative, downright creepy writing and appreciates a lushly described setting that's as much a character as any other in the book). On the non-fiction front, Diane Ackerman's poetic, though occasionally inaccurate (I read too much science) A Natural History of the Senses and Richard Dawkins' majestic The Selfish Gene (which I'm not sure how I'd gone for so long without reading). I now believe that anyone who participates in blogmemes should be required to read The Selfish Gene, at least the part where Dawkins coins and explicates the word "memes."

Next up: Geraldine Brooks' March. I read the first page and a half out loud to my mom, reveling in the gorgeous sad language, then put it away so I could read it later in a slow-savoring mode rather than gorging the whole thing down in a single giant up-til-three gollup. Anyone else read it already? It's the story of Mr. March, the father in Little Women, away on the battlefields of the Civil War. And it won the Pulitzer, and I've been meaning to increase my litsnob quotient by reading each year's Pulitzer, Booker and National Book Critics award-winning novels, and though I've made no progress so far on that front, this seems a solid place to start. And I loved Little Women on all four or five or six readings.

Snow? Tea? Boxes? It's an inexplicably cold and snowy day, which will wreak havoc on Fisher's class' planned field trip to the chicken farm. Snowy days are perfect for curling up with a cup of tea and a good book--but alas, what I'm supposed to be doing with books these days is not reading them, but packing them into an endless series of banker's boxes so that they can be transported to storage, there to languish until we move.

So far I've emptied out one bookshelf (the four-shelf, crammed-two-deep one beside my bed) and filled five boxes with lovely, beautiful, spectrum-spanning books. They wait patiently, spines up, arrayed to maximize space without crunching their margins or wrinkling their jackets (those few that have jackets--how I hate hardcovers!).

I miss them already.

A bookish blogmeme

I saw this on Becky's blog All At Sea, and then checked Amy's blog The English Geek and saw she'd done it too. So, naturally, I'll have to play! Just thinking about writing about books makes me feel all excited 'n' fluttery. I think I'd better run to the bathroom and freshen my cup of coffee before I embark on this quasi-literary adventure.

And while I'm at it, I'm tagging Lori, Rachel, Melissa (c'mon, Melissa, you need to post something!) and Martin. Or, er, um, anyone else who wants to play. Post yer thoughts and link to 'em here!

Real quick, now, before we get to the memeification: the RKQOTD:
The scene: I'm looking at pictures of Baby Augie with Fisher; Jim's looking over my shoulder. Me: Doesn't Joe look proud? Jim: I don't know what he's so proud about; all he had to do was... (trailing off) Fisher: Fertilize the egg.

Questions, Answers and Tangential Musings about Books, after the jump.