Stay of Execution

Book Blurbs

One more thing about Unhooked Generation.  Here is the blurb that Naomi Wolf contributed, prominently featured on the front cover. 

Every man and woman under forty who yearns for a happy, committed relationship must read Jillian Straus's shocking and persuasive exploration of love and love lost among the 'Unhooked Generation'.  This book will give readers the 'aha!' of recognition they have been waiting for.  Unmissable.

Are you kidding me, Naomi?  The other blurbs are all by cheesy self-help book authors who are presumably represented by the same agent or published by the same publisher, and are therefore obligated to say something nice and pump up their own "expert" status at the same time.  But Naomi Wolf?  I would think she has the clout and personal integrity to say "no thanks" to a request to give a blurb.  The most flattering thing I can imagine is that she gave the blurb without reading the book.  But that's not particularly flattering.  Or she owed someone a BIG favor. 

I've written before about blurbs and my disillusionment with them.  Still, I'm shocked and dismayed when I see an over-the-top blurb on a book that's crappy.  I want to believe.  I'm going to have to get skeptical.  I don't want to be skeptical.  Sigh. 

Book Review: Unhooked Generation

Remember how I set up a secret dating blog way back when? I don't think I have more than five readers on that site but a publicist found me and sent me the book "Unhooked Generation," presumably hoping I would blog about it.  I was flattered, and dutifully read it, and will blog about it.  I will blog about it here rather than on the secret blog because nobody reads the secret blog and I like writing about books here.   

It's a bad book.  But it's not useless.  I'm actually fairly ambivalent about the book, and it's hard to explain why.  Because it's clearly bad.  It's poorly written, it's sloppy and anecdotal, it substitutes bizarre capitalization for analysis or identification of real trends (e.g. the 7 "Evil Influences", or "The Inadvertent Effects of Feminism").  The author imagines herself to be descriptive and evocative when she is formulaic and tangential.  Her method when introducing a new person, usually a friend of hers, sometimes a stranger she interviewed for the book, is to tell us what the person looks like.  This is done in an invariably flattering and very superficial way, and provides us no information that might give us a sense of character.  And since these characters are introduced for a small anecdote, we don't need to remember them for all that long, and since they're never depicted in scenes it doesn't matter what they look like.  Knowing that someone had "skin the color of rose petals" (Really!  I wondered -- what color rose petals?) or is "a coquettish and cool blonde with soft laugh lines," turns out not to be useful or interesting at all.  It's maddening.  I kept thinking, how does a book like this get published?  It's anecdotal, personal, unscientific, tangential, vague.  She's either stating the obvious or conjecturing and generalizing about dating from her personal experiences, the dating life of her friends, and a few episodes of Sex and the City.  Seriously.  Where do I sign up for my book deal?  I can do that. 

And yet.  Is it all bathwater, or is there a baby in there?  I'm not sure.  This is a superficial, anecdotal book posing as social science.  It's clearly not that.  But she says that those of us who are unmarried and looking for love are doing some things wrong.  And she's right about some of those things.  And to the extent she got me thinking about them I think that's good. 

Thrushes in Autumn

And, you know, whoever has once in his life caught perch or has seen the migrating of the thrushes in autumn, watched how they float in flocks over the village on bright, cool days, he will never be a real townsman, and he will have a yearning for freedom to the day of his death.

-- Anton Chekhov, in Gooseberries
(a story I found otherwise not terribly compelling, although that surely marks me as an ignorant and undiscerning reader)

How My Books Are Sorted

David Weinberger is wondering how people sort their books.  My books have gone through several iterations of organization but right now they are sorted this way:

Cookbooks are in the kitchen.  Phone books, and misc. reference (e.g. hikes in Maine, birds) downstairs, on the shelf with the pens, scotch tape, and take-out food menus. 

Reference books about writing, and nonfiction books I consult from time to time (Writer's Market, Coaching the Mental Game) are on my desk downstairs. 

Magazines: in the little den off the kitchen where the dog sleeps.  The stack grows.  I should admit defeat and toss the unread ones.

Living room: my roommate's bookshelf contains her CDs, her books, and a few of mine.  The books I chose to put down here are those that seemed like they might be nice to to page through and look at while in the living room.  They include some big picture books (the atlas, The Art of Illumination, two volume set of guide to wildflowers of the US, Envisioning Information, high school yearbook, a couple of children's picture books) and also books that can be opened up and dipped into briefly: short story collections, Grimm's fairy tales, collected letters of John Steinbeck, poetry of MacLeish, Rumi, Rilke, Neruda.  Because it might be nice to read a poem or a story while you're down here waiting for something else to happen. 

At the top of the stairs: the big bookcase holds my collection.  Books are arranged by size and shape, and are stuffed in somewhat hither and yon.  They are loosely grouped by topic -- nonfiction on the bottom shelf, "classics" or "serious literature" on the middle shelf, alphabetically, and then "modern fiction" or books that I've read but haven't decided whether to keep or not, or haven't yet read, on the top shelf.  Occasionally I'll swap a book for another one because I think the change will make things look more interesting.  I won't buy another bookshelf, and don't wish to get rid of more books, so I squeeze things in without regard to category.  (Just finished Gone With the Wind, which should be on the second shelf, but there's no room for it, so on the third shelf it goes until I get rid of something from the second shelf.  I think I'll get rid of the tiresome Anais Nin, although that doesn't make enough room.)   

Outside of my bedroom, in the hall by the window, I have a couple of apple crates that I've turned into bookshelves, with houseplants on top.  There are photo albums there, a thesaurus, a couple of children's books, and a bizarre collection of other books.  Persepolis and Maus are there, plus some memoirs (Lamott and Tobias Wolff), and then miscellaneous nonfiction books.  Maybe the organizing principle is that thes are more "private" than the books on the bookshelf at the top of the stairs.  There are books about meditation, buddhism, sex, astrology, and a lifetime reading plan.  There's a history of Portland, Maine and a book about insects.  It's not clear why the books that are there are there.  But that's where they are.   I think it's a repository for books I'm not sure whether to keep, although Lamott and Wolff don't belong there if that's the case.  It makes no sense. 

In my bedroom: the bookshelf is for journals, and a few books about writing.  Piled on the floor next to the bookshelf are the books that are "on deck" -- that I intend to read very soon.  There are about 12 books there.  The truth is I rarely start my next book from that pile.  But the pile represents my good intentions about those books.  I'm going to read them very soon.  On the floor next to my bed are the books I am currently reading or don't want to admit that I have abandoned.  There are currently three there.  On my bedside table are two books that I have abandoned but am pretending to still be reading.  It is my practice to read a book as I am falling asleep and then tuck it under the empty pillow beside me until the next night.  That's how some of the books that I am reading ended up on the floor -- they got knocked out from under my pillow.  Since I just finished Gone With the Wind I am going to pick up one of the books that wound up under my bed and finish that one up next.

I Confess to Unfashionable Tastes

Although I know that saying this will keep me from ever being invited into the circle of Literati, I am underwhelmed by Mary Gaitskill's book of short stories, Bad Behavior.  I'll try one of her novels, and maybe that will work for me.  She's a good writer, I'll acknowledge that.  But I don't like her characters, and I find the landscape bleak and depressing, and when I'm done with the stories they don't really stay with me.  They're supposed to be haunting and razor sharp and all that.  Everyone raves about her.  I'm not getting it.  I will have to try one of her novels instead.  Then maybe I can join the smart people who think she's Seriously Good.  I know I'm wrong, and admitting this reveals my pedestrian tastes.  But I cannot tell a lie. 

I'm enjoying Gone With The Wind, which is also unfashionable to admit.  Although the prose is overwritten and purple, the book is very scene-driven and visual, and there's a momentum that keeps you turning pages.  One thing Mitchell does very well is create dozens of very memorable characters.  I'm 100 pages in or so, and I can name at least 12 characters with distinct personalities and identities.  That's pretty hard to do.  Dickens does it well, too, although sometimes I mix people up in his books.  Not many authors do a good job with so many characters.

More than 10 years ago in a writing class at college I read a short story I've remembered for years, but I forgot the author and title.  And on Monday my writing teacher handed it out to us, and I read it with the delight of rediscovery.  It's so very good.  It's "White Angel," by Michael Cunningham.  (You can find it in the Best American Short Stories of 1989.)  Michael Cunningham has been on my radar for years but I haven't gotten around to reading him yet.  He's just been bumped up toward the top of the reading list.

What I'm Reading These Days

Just finished Operating Instructions, which I loved because I love Anne Lamott and because I was hanging out with Baby Lucy.  Am now reading Listening To Prozac, and last night just started "Unhooked Generation," a book that a publicist sent me hoping I would blog about it.  And I will, when I'm finished.  I am finding Listening to Prozac quite interesting, in its exploration of personality and self and various forms of depression and the things that pharmacology can do versus what therapy can do.  I know that everyone else read it about 10 years ago.  I just never got around to it.  I'd like to read an updated version.  Peter Kramer is a smart man. 

I'm reading it a little too fast, I think, so the concepts don't have time to absorb and his level of specificity is hard for me.  He keeps using terms that he introduced in the last chapter but that I can't quite remember the meanings of, so I'm lost in a sea of dysthymia and dysphoria and MAOIs and imipramine and ipronaizid and kindling and rapid cycling and rejection sensitivity.  But I'm too engaged to go back and check which is which so I put my head down and push through hoping that context will remind me or I'll get the gist without focusing on the details.  I'm not sure that's the best way to read this book.  Certainly I'm missing things.  But I find it a very interesting book, that raises great questions about the idea of the self.  I've watched loved ones disappear into depression, and come back with the help of antidepressants -- Prozac and others.  I guess everyone has. 

Well Knock Me Over With A Feather

I hosted book group today, and it was my job to lead the discussion and my privilege to choose the book we'll read for next time.  I wanted us to continue a theme of books that let us talk about women protagonists navigating social class and money issues.  I gave the group a choice of two books: Thackeray's Vanity Fair and Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind.  This book group is somewhat snooty, although the book snobbery is mostly the product of two or three people with extremely rarefied taste in books.  The rest of us gab happily about Harry Potter or science fiction or mysteries we like with undisguised enthusiasm.  But there is certainly a strong bias toward Literature and away from Popular in the book group.  So I was pretty sure we'd end up reading Thackeray. 

But the group picked Gone With the Wind.  Only one of us hadn't read it, and she was very interested in it.  The rest of us had all read it when we were 12 (even our eldest member, who's about 70).  We all have strong memories of the book, though none of us had read it critically.  The group favors women authors, although we don't limit ourselves to them when we choose what to read, and I think that tipped the scales.  And, people admitted guiltily, the prospect of reading a page-turner, bodice-ripper romantic drama sounds appealing.  Thackeray will wait.   

All Requests: Shame of A Nation

I dropped the ball on the All Requests, but will be getting back to the unaddressed ones shortly.  Jane asked me what I think of Shame of A Nation.  I'm 150 pages into it, actively reading it (but only before I fall asleep).  It's good.  Years ago I read Savage Inequalities.  From what I remember of Savage Inequalities, this is essentially the same book.   At least I come away with the same dread and sadness about public education as I did way back when I read that book.

It's hard to comment about the quality of the book as distinct from the importance of the message.  And the message is a hard one to look at without flinching.  I don't want to believe this is how our schools are.  But Kozol comes off, at least to me, as fairly credible, even though his bias and his  frustration and his sense of missionary zeal also come through strongly.  My conclusion is that he's come to his zeal from a fairly extensive history of interviews, visits, and explorations.  The part of me that doesn't want to believe him looks for a way to critique him for only seeing or telling us the things that make his case.  But ultimately I don't think that works.  I trust him, somehow.  Even though I can see his agenda.  He's there, sitting in these classrooms, and I'm not.  He keeps going there, and he keeps reporting on what he sees, and it's breaking his heart and he's telling his story into the wind, it must seem like, but he keeps doing it.  And partly just because of that, I find him pretty trustworthy. 

I don't often read nonfiction, for all of my good intentions.  If I do, it tends to be focused on character -- a memoir or a story of an event.  It's hard for me to stick with books about policy issues or global situations.  I don't think my mind is very good at abstractions.  I'm reading this book as one of several nonfiction books touching on the theme of "poverty."   We're considering several as the book for incoming first year students at the college to read.  Is this the best one?  I don't think so, but I'm not sure how to tell or how to decide.  I think the book we choose should be global in focus, not just focused on the US.   Right now, my first choice is Mountains Beyond Mountains, because it addresses global issues, and because it raises some controversial and compelling questions even while it inspires.  (And, for me, it rewards my interest in character by giving a narrator who is skeptical of the hero/charismatic leader, and I think that makes it a very good read, as well as being the container for an important message.)

On the other hand, this book is good.  It's important.  It's especially important for the students who get into an elite college, and who might be the most likely to believe in a meritocracy, to hear about their peers who didn't have the same opportunities.  I read Savage Inequalities in college -- I think my roommate was assigned it for a class and it was lying around, and I picked it up to procrastinate from a science problem set.  And although I had gone to a public school and thought I knew about the real world better than all the prep school kids around me, I realized as I read the book that my public school was wonderful, amazing, and totally different from the experience of kids all over the country.  It took me down a lot of notches, in a good way.  I may end up rooting for it by the time I finish it.   

Books Worth Keeping

Here's a picture of my bookshelf worth of journals.  I've kept journals since 1985 or so.  I decided to take pictures of some of them, and share them with you in this photo album.  No, silly, you're not supposed to try to read them, just to see what they look like.  Some are scrawled and messy.  Some are dense and tidy.  Some are mostly pictures I drew and bits of paper clipped in.  Some are spare and desperate.  Some are embellished and controlled.  They vary in their subject matter, too, although sailing, friends, what's stressing me out, and the opposite sex are frequently mentioned. 

Self-Discipline

I made a decision sometime in college to try hard not to be a person who accumulates books.  This is difficult for me, because I read a lot and people give me books and I buy books.  (I am also trying not to be a person who buys books, but this one is hard for me.)  Checking books out of the library is a good solution.  As is giving a lot of books away, pretty regularly.  Anyway, I feel that I am succeeding in my quest.  This is a picture of my bookshelf.  It is not my only bookshelf, but the other one contains only journals and diaries, things written by me, which I don't mind accumulating.  Besides the books pictured here, I have about 10 books from law school in the basement, and about 15 other books -- an atlas, dictionary, some art books, and the pile of books at my bedside that I'm currently reading or about to read.  So, I'm not doing as well as I could, but I'm doing a pretty good job.  I think this is a reasonable number of books to own.  I hope not to own more than this number of books ever.  I'll have to get rid of a bunch of these particular books, which aren't especially worthy, and eventually I'll replace them with books I never want to get rid of.  But I want to limit the size of my collection.  There is no virtue in owning books.  Repeat after me.  There is no virtue in owning books.  It is hard for me to remember sometimes, but there is really no virtue in owning books.  Nope.