Review: Room

Room by Emma Donoghue
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was a very delicate subject matter to capture and convey, and deciding to tell the story through the voice of a child was brilliant. Just the right mix of the child’s understanding of the world and the overheard voices of adults to flesh the story out perfectly. Extremely well written.

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I like this!

Just finished reading “Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture” by Ariel Levy. I totally think you should read it too! It perfectly captures a lot of my inherent uneasiness with the way that everyone from my friends to total strangers to popular media tell me I (and every other women out there) am supposed to be performing my sexuality. It talks not only about the objectification of women, and how that’s harmful to men AND women, but it also talks about the commodification of sex, and how that hurts everyone. Particularly enjoyed this passage: (bolding mine)

If we were to acknowledge that sexuality is personal and unique, it would become unwieldy. Making sexiness into something simple, quantifiable makes it easier to explain and to market. If you remove the human factor from sex and make it about stuff—big fake boobs, bleached blonde hair, long nails, poles, thongs—then you can sell it. Suddenly, sex requires shopping; you need plastic surgery, peroxide, a manicure, a mall. What is really out of commercial control is that you still can’t bottle attraction.

Anyway, if you’re needing some “Yeah, see that’s what *I* thought!” reinforcement about your decision not to wear a pair of Playboy bunny track pants and get your tits out for Girls Gone Wild, this is the book that will do it for you. And far from rejecting or demonizing healthy sexuality, this book reinforces that women should have sex when and if it brings them pleasure to do so, not for any of the other myriad reasons we’re told or expected to perform sexually.

Loved it! You should read it! Let me know if you want to borrow it!

Ten Years and One Afternoon

I was conversing with a friend recently about how some books need to wait for the right time in your life to be read. You can try to read them any old time, but until you’re ready to pick up what they’re putting down, then you are just not going to, well, pick it up. You have to be in the right place to receive whatever message is there to be had.

Such is the case with Paulo Coehlo’s “Veronika Decides to Die” for me. I remember reading a review of this book in a magazine when it first came out, and thinking “I have to have that book. That book sounds amazing.” And I ordered it right away, and when it came, I started reading it, and then put it away in irritation and confusion. The book came out in 1998 and I have it in hardback, so that means I bought it close to then. ’99 probably, or early 2000. And so, for the next ten years that book sat on my bookshelf. It followed me through two or maybe even three moves. It was a book I always intended to pick up again. And today I did. “I am going to give that book another try.” I thought. And so I started again, and then I devoured it all in one sitting. So, now is apparently the right time for that book, for me.

The synopsis I read at the time talked about a character who decides that her life is meaningless and empty, the world is horrible and she is powerless to change it. So she decides to die. She overdoses on sleeping pills, but wakes up in a mental hospital, where she’s told that she’s done irreversible damage to her heart, and has only five days to live.

And the thought of that story appealed to me at the time, because I was intensely depressed and found most everything totally meaningless and the world totally hateful.*

But when I started reading it back then, the message was not what I wanted it to be. I wanted more darkness and despair. More proof that everything sucked as much as I thought it did. Not a lesson in how to change your life if your life feels empty. And so I abandoned it, because taking responsibility for making my life what I wanted it to be was not a thing I was ready for.

But today that message resonated with me, and I enjoyed someone telling it to me, very much. There is a lot of truth to the main theme of the book, which is that if your life feels meaningless and monotonous and full of restrictions, it’s because you’ve purposely constructed it that way, in order to feel safe. So you have to make a choice – safety and stagnation, or taking risks and feeling alive. And I think that for me every day is different. Today maybe I will take some risks, tomorrow I might curl up in the bottom of my closet with a blanket over my head. But knowing that life itself is not a stagnant, meaningless thing and that sometimes I strip the meaning from my life intentionally, because meaning is scary, is a good reminder.

I particularly loved this passage:

As she was walking down the corridors, lit by the same faint light as in the ward, Veronika realized that it was too late: She could no longer control her fear.

I must get a grip on myself. I’m the kind of person who sticks to any decision she makes, who always sees things through.

It’s true that in her life she had seen many things through to their ultimate consequences, but only unimportant things, like prolonging a quarrel that could easily have been resolved with an apology, or not phoning a man she was in love with simply because she thought the relationship would lead nowhere. She was intransigent about the easy things, as if trying to prove to herself how strong and indifferent she was, when in fact she was just a fragile woman who had never been an outstanding student, never excelled at school sports, and had never succeeded in keeping the peace at home.

She had overcome her minor defects only to be defeated by matters of fundamental importance. She had managed to appear utterly independent when she was, in fact, desperately in need of company. When she entered a room everyone would turn to look at her, but she almost always ended the night alone, in the convent, watching a TV that she hadn’t even bothered to have properly tuned. She gave all her friends the impression that she was a woman to be envied, and she expended most of her energy in trying to behave in accordance with the image she had created of herself.

Because of that she had never had enough energy to be herself, a person who, like everyone else in the world, needed other people in order to be happy. But other people were so difficult. They reacted in unpredictable ways, they surrounded themselves with defensive walls, they behaved just as she did, pretending they didn’t care about anything. When someone more open to life appeared, they either rejected them outright or made them suffer, consigning them to being inferior, ingenuous.

She might have impressed a lot of people with her strength and determination, but where had it left her? In the void. Utterly alone. In Villete. In the anteroom of death.

Veronika’s remorse over her attempted suicide resurfaced, and she firmly pushed it away again.

So anyway, I really enjoyed the book, and it had some good life lessons for me, in the place I am at right now, blah blah blah. And I was looking up when the book was published in order to accurately report just how long I had procrastinated finishing it, and then I saw that it’s been made into a movie, with Sarah Freaking Michelle Gellar as Veronika! And it’s going to be released in 2010 sometime, apparently, and here is the trailer for it!

And I am very excited as it seems to have a lady director! And I think that will add something to it. So now I am very curious to see the movie, and very glad that I finished the book. It was a quick read, just took me ten years and one afternoon.

*If you think that sounds like me now, you’re not quite wrong and you’re not quite right. Now I struggle with feelings like that, but back then I just lived them as pure truths. I realize I often sound very depressed when I write, but honestly, I am not that much. I just think about serious things, and serious things sound… well, depressing to some people. I almost never blog  ”Holy shit my day was amazing and life is the bomb-fucking-diggity!” even though I frequently feel that way, because, well, who the hell wants to read that? Nobody. That’s just some tiresome shit right there.

Kharma

Picked up a book at Left Bank this week that is completely rocking my socks. Daniil Kharms’ “Today I Wrote Nothing”

Kharms (1905–1942) is described as the first Russian microfiction writer, and that alone is intriguing. He was part of a group of other artists and writers (the OBERIU) who were fascinated with the mundane and the absurd, and in most cases I do believe they thought those things were the same. His fiction is short, plain and startling. Since starting to read the book I’ve pretty much wanted to buy a copy for everyone I know and force them to sit down and read it while I watch them. It’s one of those books that almost hurts to be read alone, since every other page makes you want to read it out loud to someone. (The dogs don’t care much for absurdist Russian microfiction, it turns out.)

Anyway, since I’ve been all Kharms-infatuated this week, I was trying to find links for some friends so that they could read what I was rhapsodizing about – but it’s no good. The translation in this volume (by Matvei Yankelevich) is vastly superior to anything I could find elsewhere online. The translation in some cases changes the entire tenor of the passages, and I can’t recommend anything I’ve found online. You really have to have the book.

One of my favorite exchanges so far is from his story “The Old Woman” about (you guessed it) an old woman who comes uninvited into the narrator’s apartment and promptly dies. The narrator doesn’t know what to do about this, and leaves the apartment to get drunk with a friend who has no idea what’s going on. Perhaps feeling his friend out about what to do, he has this conversation with him:

“What is your attitude towards dead people?” I asked Sakerdon Mikhailovich.

“Absolutely negative.” said Sakerdon Mikhailovich. “I’m afraid of them.”

“Yeah I can’t stand dead people either,” I said. “Were I to bump into a dead person, and if he wasn’t a relative, I’d probably kick him.”

“One shouldn’t kick dead people,” said Sakerdon Mikhailovich.

“I would give him a boot right in the muzzle,” I said. “I just can’t stand dead people and children.”

Which is an insane conversation, and yet is also something I feel like I’ve overheard my friends saying at the bar. Anyway, all I can say is that his writing is exhilarating, and inspirational, and it makes me feel fresh and clean in my brains. You probably need to read this.

If I Strep for You, Will You Strep for Me?

OK so day two of being home with what I can only assume is strep throat. (Thanks again Dave, you fuck.)

I can only assume it’s strep because I refuse to call my doctor about it. For two reasons, at least.

One of which reasons is fuck doctors, they’re always wrong and assholish, and my primary care physician is way out in West County. Guess what I don’t feel like doing with the sorest throat this side of the Grand Canyon, and swollen glands? If you said “Drive some random, fucked-up, roundabout non-40 way to west fucking county to see some bitch doctor who’s probably going to misdiagnose you with an anal fissure?” you win. (I would also have accepted “Spend 45 minutes on the phone with your doctor’s cunty staff where they question all your symptoms and tell you things that you know for a fact are medically untrue?”)

The second reason is that the treatment for strep (characterized by a sudden severe sore throat, usually presenting with a fever and w/o regular symptoms of a head cold) is antibiotics. But whether you take them or not, strep subsides on its own within 3-7 days. I don’t want to take any antibiotics, and knowing that I can cut out the whole “dealing with cunty staff/driving to WC” part of this equation means: fuck a bunch of calling my doctor. I don’t want to take any antibiotics anyway, so I am skipping the whole modern medicine scene.

That said, I am just waiting around to get better, and bored out of my mind. I watched two movies yesterday that had been on my Tivo since we had free HBO back in January. One of them was Juno, and one of them was Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium. Both of them were fair to middlin’   movies, and both featured Jason Bateman. Way to be ubiquitous, Jason Bateman.

Juno was OK I guess. For some reason, since everyone made such a big deal about her use of language in the movie I expected to notice it more, but I didn’t notice it at all. Which means that either everyone else made too big a fuss over it, or I talk like that in my head. It had some very nice moments in it, and kept my interest, which I think is the intent of movies. I thought that the mis-characterization of abortion protesters as these innocent, naive kids from your high school who say things like “bornded” and only kind of mildy rebuke women walking into clinics was practically crimianlly negligent, but then again I have actually worked at an abortion clinic and walked through those protesters, so it’s not surprising that would tweak my buttons.

Perv Alert

Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium was obviously not geared at my demographic, and as such it had several moments which either lost my interest or made me feel uncomfortable. When that mother discovered Jason Bateman (a total stranger) together with her son in her son’s bedroom, playing dress up with the door closed… um, well, you could just tell that this was a kids’s movie by the fact that she didn’t mace him and call the cops.

Then in one of the last scenes of the the film, Natalie Portman gives up her dream of running the emporium, and takes a job playing piano in a hotel lobby or somewhere. Since she spent most of the film looking like this:

I was excited to see her looking very sleek and sexy all in black with slicked-back hair and red lipstick.

Until I realized that being styled this way was supposed to represent all the bad, bad trappings of being adult and un-magical, and that in keeping with the spirit of the film I should much prefer Natalie look like this:

(Which shows how in tune with her childlike side she is! It’s a new look I am going to call hyper-unsexualized!)  Than like this: (not a scene from the movie)

Naturally I felt somewhat conflicted.

I’ve also been reading a little bit, although I have to admit that I fall asleep pretty quickly when I lay down to read. I’ve been sticking my head in Richard Dawkin’s The God Delusion, which I actually haven’t read yet, even though I bought it the week it was released. I’ve been having a problem reading non-fiction for the last year or so, especially when I agree at the outset with whatever the author is discussing. I mean, I am already an atheist, so do I need to read his whole book on how I should be an atheist? I accept the premise, I am not sure what else I am supposed to glean here.

Same thing with a lot of the political books that have come out lately. I get it, right wing fundies are assholes, Bush was a bad man, Cheney is a corrupt motherfuck. Do I have to read your whole deal to get the details, or can I just stipulate that I agree?

I know, I know, I need facts and to be better informed. And I will totally buy the stuff to support the authors. It’s just hard to make myself read a whole book on a topic I totally agree with when I started. Like a lecture on night being darker than day, I am not sure why I have to sit through it, exactly. Is this GenX Interwebs addict ADD rearing its misshappen head at me?

Anyway, rounding out day 2 of being at home and I am bored, bored bored. Going to work tomorrow no matter what, and going out drinking tomorrow night too. Alcohol kills bacteria, and I hear tequila is particularly good at it.

Death by Doyle

I am currently drowning in a sea of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle-related stories, both film and written word.

A few months ago my marvelous Tivo started recording a show on PBS each weekend. It was “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” featuring Jeremy Brett as Holmes and David Burke as Watson. The series began in the mid-1980′s, and was pretty well done for the small budget it must have had at the time.

Jeremy Brett is an insanely energetic and curiously appealing Holmes, really bringing the detective’s most Asperger’s-like traits to life. You don’t like him, you admire him, you adore him, you find him irritating, you can’t look away.

His thin, pale Holmes is so focused and yet so inter-personally flawed, so intelligent and cold, it’s wonderful to watch. His snobby, dismissive hand gestures and sneering attitude toward everything  he encounters had me transfixed. (My own particular weakness fondness  for emotionally-unavailable geniuses notwithstanding.) His self-pitied moaning about the ennui of his existence, which he needs both cocaine and morphine to enliven, aroused my empathy.

I found myself remembering the stories (sans cocaine/morphine somehow) from reading them when I was younger (the one with the asp who climbs down the rope and returns at the sound of whistle being a horrifying favorite) and being fascinated all over again.

And so I kept watching . It was always a lazy weekend treat to drowse in front of the TV listening to Holmes castigate poor Watson for his shortsighted dunderheadedness.

David Burke played an adorable Watson, too. He was so happy! So willing to be pleased and impressed by everything! He was never angry or sullen or jealous, only willing to help and ready to play Holme’s foil. Charming.

The series ends with Holmes death at Reichenbach Falls, and then picks up in 1986 with his resurrection for “The Return of Sherlock Holmes.” This time a new actor  (Edward Hardwicke) plays Watson, and I was prepared not to like him so much, because he didn’t seem as happy—but after a few episodes he seems to have picked up that naive joy so characteristic to perennial second-fiddle Watson.

I didn’t think about the series much, just enjoyed it when Tivo picked it up.

Then after Christmas I was in Borders and ran across this book “Arthur & George” by Julian Barnes. I’d read Barnes’ “England, England” many a year ago, and remembered liking it, and it was $4.99 hardback, so what the heck. I had trouble getting into it, the first quarter of the book explains in great disconnected detail the lives of two young boys— lives which have no common thread running between them—which made me wonder why I was supposed to care about either of them. The “Arthur” in the title is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Holmes series, and “George” was some son of a vicar no one ever heard of.

After a while it became more interesting, and in the end I was quite fascinated with the story. (No spoilers, but it’s a true-life tale of Doyle getting involved with a case of criminal injustice, which directly impacted the creation of the British Courts of Appeal. Let me know if you want to borrow it, it’s quite good.)  When I was done I  read the afterword. (Which, had it been the foreword would have made me much more interested in the book from the beginning) It said that all correspondence and newspaper articles quoted in the text were taken verbatim from the original stories/documents. Anyway, it was a great peek inside the mind of Doyle, and made me even more resolved to go get the collected Sherlock Holmes to re-read.

Books acquired Saturday (Dear Publisher: “Sherlock Holmes, The Complete Collected Stories and Novels, Volume 1″—  with the “Volume 1″ in teeeeeny-tiny type on the spine— is a ridiculous title. How each book “complete” if it’s one of a two-volume set? Luckily I noticed that the second copy of the book was smaller than the first and picked them both up, or I would have been mightily pissed when I got home.) And I’ve been happily devouring them ever since. Several things struck me:

1. How language evolves. “But Holmes! You can’t be serious!” I ejaculated. Seriously, Watson ejaculates at some point in almost every story.
   
2. How authors of that time period didn’t dumb-down their texts for their audiences. Liberal usage of $5 words and frequent un-translated German and French quotations show me that Sir Doyle expected a certain level of education from his audience, and that if they didn’t have it, they should reach up to his level of understanding, not expect him to shove his writing down to theirs.

I am now all caught up in this world of Victorian manners and language, which I think suited my personality much better than the era I was mistakenly born in. (Though I do quite approve of all the sanitation and antibiotics we have, don’t get me wrong.) Still only 1/3 of the way through Volume I and a whole Volume II to go after that. In addition, for the last week I’ve taken to reading at night instead of watching TV, and it’s really very cuddly up in here, with the dogs laying all over me and candles burning. It makes the long, stupid winter nights somehow less of a complete waste of time.

Two other notes. Jeremy Brett played Mr. Freddy Eynsford-Hill in the Audrey Hepburn film of My Fair Lady. And though I know a lot of popular TV & film characters would later be based on Holmes, the one who currently most reminds me of him in all his mannerisms is Sheldon on “The Big Bang Theory.”

Anyway, check out the PBS series if you have time, it’s quite charming.

Parse if you Dare!

This anti-fan letter was so wonderfully constructed that I had to comment on it. That second line is pure poetry. Plus my favorite in letters, Totally ranDom Capitalization. It’s almost as if the capitalization carries its own hidden message, too. Lowercase “neil” and “gaiman” but uppercase “Batman” and “Writing” and of course “Fuck You.” Overall a pretty awesome letter.

Neil Gaiman’s Journal
I hope this reaches neil himself. Never have i ever known of anyone as full of himself as well as shit, than you. Now another milestone in your over-hyped career, Writing Batman. Not only are you under the impression you can write, but write batman? Fuck You. You Tried before and it sucked. It was just gaiman… With Batman in it. Fuck You.

If I’d known that Secret Origins of Batman Villains #1 had made that much of an impression on people, I would have… actually, probably not done anything different, really. I was rather fond of it.

If you think you won’t like the Batman comic I’ll write, probably you’d be best off not reading it. It’ll just be a two part Batman comic, you can save your money. Although if you’d bother to write me a letter like that you might buy it just to prove to yourself that you hate it as much as you know you’re going to…

I can’t imagine having to deal with the public regarding things I’ve written and/or otherwise created. Am far to sensitive and don’t know if I could carry the weight of the skin I’d have to develop.

Book Review: “The Book of Lost Things”

Just finished reading John Connolly’s The Book of Lost Things. I’d heard about/read about this book when it came out and meant to pick it up, but never did. Two years later and I saw it on sale at the local Borders, so it became mine.

I liked the description of the book:

High in his attic bedroom, twelve-year-old David mourns the death of his mother, with only the books on his shelf for company. But those books have begun to whisper to him in the darkness. Angry and alone, he takes refuge in his imagination and soon finds that reality and fantasy have begun to meld. While his family falls apart around him, David is violently propelled into a world that is a strange reflection of his own — populated by heroes and monsters and ruled by a faded king who keeps his secrets in a mysterious book, The Book of Lost Things.

but even more I liked the cover art, so simple but twisted, intricate and decorative but somehow also malevolent. Good job cover artist, whoever you are. Crap, now I am going to have to go look that up, aren’t I?

Anyway, picked it up on Thursday evening and dove in on Friday, it’s a short but intense read. I couldn’t decide if I appreciated the author’s somewhat choppy style; the writing was at times a bit staccato, reminding me of books written for children, though this book wasn’t something I would ever give to a child in my care. It was the story of a child, sure, and it was about things that typically happen in children’s stories, OK. But the dark and twisted violence in this story (though probably closer to the murky musings of an actual child than most modern fairy tales) isn’t something I’d want to insert into the fevered imagination of a child or even pre-teen. Way too many people tortured, burned alive, eaten and mangled for my comfort. The monsters here were way too close to home, serial killers, amoral entities who would destroy you as soon as talk to you – it was too realistic for fantasy. Not to say it wasn’t good – it was good. Just not a children’s book.

I guess I am still muddling over in my head what kind of book it WAS, exactly. The extreme, pervasive violence makes it inappropriate (in my mind at least) for children, the aforementioned choppy writing and overly obvious climax/dénouement make it a little simplistic for adults… but nevertheless I really, really enjoyed it. So perhaps it’s a fairy tale for me. Realistic enough to keep me horrified, comforting and childish enough in its predictability to remind me of a time when I thought things were going to turn out right if only I consistently Tried Hard and Did the Right Thing.

Not perfect, but what is? I am going to give it a “Slender Tampon” rating.

Edit: The cover artist is Robert Ryan, his charming work can be seen here http://www.misterrob.co.uk/

Edit again: And… that just became birthday self-gift #2

Still in the Dark

Feh. I just read the most depressing book. And I don’t even know why it was so soul-sucking, because everyone sort of lived HEA, but by making unwelcome sacrifices. True love with an unbearable price, and full of death, and horror and loss and grief. Double-feh. And I have been in a serious brain-candy mood with reading lately, I want easy-to-read, non-intellectual fodder that captures my emotions – not heavy non-fiction, or heavy fiction for that matter. Sweep me away and let me stop thinking for a bit. This was not what I bargained for.

I am going to go back and re-read all my Christine Feehan “Dark” series books, because I know what’s coming, and I know her writing, and I know that they will satisfy my urge not to think and to just pretend someone’s going to come and sweep me away, eventually. Because her human heroines seem familiar to me, and her?Carpathian heros are what women would love in a man, and never get. And I don’t even care if it sounds anti-feminist. How unimaginably lovely to?be given powers, eternal life, true love, mind-blowing sex, a man who cherishes you, a man with immense strength and honor and wisdom. And so he’s bossy. But he can’t do anything but make you happy – so he can’t be too bad. She’s constructed the ultimate female fantasy IMHO. And actually I bet there aren’t too many men who would object to having an immensely powerful partner, dedicated to caring for them – so maybe it’s not about gender, but about the universal desire to be parented, adored, coddled, loved, protected, seen and understood.?(at least for those of us who weren’t parented or understood the first time around, we’re always looking it seems.)

Continue reading »

Book reviews are back!

I had misplaced there, since they date back to the chickshow era, and I was looking for the HTML files and they were all in Flash format cuz I was Flash-happy back then. Anyway, I got them up here and added a new review for Anansi Boys. Do we think this marks the day that I begin to regularly update my reviews?

Nah, me neither. But it will be semi-regular from now on, hopefully. :)

Machete Season

I bought the book that is mentioned below on my lunch break today, after reading about another book called “Machete Season” that has just been published, on the same topic. I really don’t want to read this book. But I think I need to read it, I need to know and understand what happened. Because if I am not going to succumb to the American way of averting our eyes from the ugliness, then I guess I have to read things that make me sick and sad and horrified.

I don’t know yet if I am going to read Machete Season or not. That may be too much, and in some ways seems almost to be glorifying these people, and what they did? Maybe “glorifying” is too strong a word, but giving them a voice, does that humanize them and help us understand, or does it just take away some of the stigma that these “people” should rightly be subject to? I don’t know. Will post updates as I read. If I can read it. I think this book may also detail the events on which “Hotel Rwanda” was based. So I may rent that and watch it too.