Month: April 2010

Vehicular and Authorial Romance

I am a car nut. Specifically, a muscle car nut.  I hung out w/car nuts in high school and they brainwashed me into believing that late 60s muscle cars were the only cool cars that existed. 70s were ok, (and closer to our price range), but the coolest guys had the 60s muscle and raced it on the strip. The man I married got noticed because he drove a 60s muscle car. Because of him (among others), I have been exposed to other beautiful vehicles, and the joys and pains involved in restoring old iron to street-worthy condition. So when a new-favorite author writes a book about his love for an old truck that he’s in the process of restoring… well, that’s just a book with my name on it, isn’t it?

Truck: A Love Story is a year in the life of Michael Perry. A rather eventful year, in which he commits to restoring his old International pickup truck, growing a garden, and (unexpectedly) to a woman he wants to marry. It’s also the year that his book (I think Population 485, but could have been Coop) hits the big time and he must travel to support it through radio interviews and book-signings.

The reason I like Perry so much is this: he’s a master at observing ordinary life and finding something extraordinary to say about it. He’s not the first, or the greatest, or the most famous writer to make a living doing this – he’s just my most recent discovery in this area. Also, his humility: he’s conscious of the fact that he is indeed no one special, and his life is not all that special either. Except that it is his life, and therefore special to him.  What he writes about is not terribly significant in the details, only in his awareness of it – how one lives it with purpose and joy, appreciating the miracle of waking up and finding someone or something to love. Even if all we have is Mom and an old pickup.

Gives me hope to read of men with humility, sensitivity, wit, and a thing for old trucks. And did I mention, a musician as well? Because I would like all of those things in one package, thank you.

reading roadblocks of my own making

I have a confession to make.

No, I’m not confessing that I was full of crap when I said I’d write every day – you can see that for yourself.

No, you also know I’m a big slacker and skip work whenever I think I can get away with it. And stay up past midnight when I swore I would start getting to bed earlier.

The real confession is this: I’ve been pissed off at a book for a week.

It’s childish and ridiculous, I know this.  It’s not the book’s fault I have to review it. Or that I hadn’t finished the review yet (didn’t even start until the day it was due). I chose the gig, I even chose the book. But I’m blaming the book anyway.

I am a procrastinator from waaaaaaay back.  Certainly when it comes to writing, some kind of pressure is necessary – and that pressure is rarely internal. So the deadline is my frienemy (frenemy?). I hate it, but can’t accomplish much without it. Much like having a job – don’t like it, can’t keep a roof over my head without it (anyone who has a solution to this one, please pass it along!).

For the first time, I received a review copy a month before the review was due.  I picked it up two weeks ago and lied told myself I’d read it, get it done early and for once not email the review just before midnight on the due date. No one is surprised that the story did not unfold in quite that manner.

I read 95% of it (short stories, so it wasn’t technically necessary for me to read every story to review it adequately) more than a week ago – and then just carried it around with me, not reading it. And since I hadn’t finished it – and hadn’t written the review – I really couldn’t read anything else. I’ve been busy this last week (luckily) and watched a lot of Hulu and DVDs. But each night as I went to bed, I would find myself grumbling (in my head – I haven’t gone so far as to actually yell at the book out loud) that I couldn’t read any of the dozen books sitting on the shelf. Each night, they looked better and more interesting than the night before. Torture, thy name is unread books.

Last night, after work, I read the last four stories, finished my review of Best European Fiction 2010, and emailed it – and the joy was quite out of proportion with the product, let me assure you. I practically danced to my two (!) stacks of unread books and grabbed The Madonnas of Leningrad and started reading – after midnight, naturally.

And it was wonderful. Finished it an hour ago. Granted, it was only 228 pages, and I did take the day off. Still – it’s good to be free!

Chaos – it’s not just a state of mind

I’m pretty sure I got Chaos; Making a New Science by James Gleick from the library because my friend rhapsodized about its wonders – and I’m a sucker for a good David vs. Goliath story. I will admit, it took me awhile to finish this book. The narrative was decent, but I would often get bogged down in the science and crave more lyrical pastures.  Chaos was also around while I was riding The Wheel of Time, so it was renewed a half-dozen times before I finally finished it (no one lining up to read this one). Gleick wrote this book in 1988(ish) and the edition I read is a 20th anniversary edition. For the book, he spoke to many of the early scientific explorers as well as those who dragged the ideas out of obscurity.

Chaos theory is the discipline that brought us the idea that ‘a butterfly flapping its wings can cause storms half the world away’. Now, anyone who knows me (in person or on the interwebs) knows that science is not my area. I love to learn new things, and I find the world a fascinating place, but I’m much more interested in the story of things than the details of atoms or vectors or whatever.  I took the require science classes in both high school & college (took a psychology class for my lab requirement) and ran back to my humanities courses.

I was going to try to summarize the basics of chaos theory – but I’ve decided to spare us all from such folly (and my ego can’t take the beating that will come from the mistakes I’ll surely commit to print).  If you are interested, there is good information here and here, and of course, you could read the book like I did. But here are some of the ideas I took from the book.

______________________________________________________________________________

1) A never-repeating but not unpredictable pattern is inherent in the design of nature.

As a person with poetic leanings, I love this idea – and it’s not just an idea, but indeed a fact! So much of the world around us can be predicted with these short little equations that even I could understand, but can result in the myriad of living things all over this planet. The equations are simple, but initial conditions have a huge effect on outcome (a relatively new thing to the scientific world, apparently, but seems pretty obvious to me).

2) Complete understanding is not required to predict outcomes.

It seems that, for decades, engineers have been designing airplanes without understand why they were able to achieve liftoff, or how turbulence would affect them (comforting, yes?). And before that, the turbulence of rivers/streams/oceans was also a mystery to the scientific community.  Equations were built by trying to account for every single possible variable, and it was assumed that if you could not account for everything, you could not predict anything. And since no one had been able to grasp every single variable which influenced – say – cloud formation, predicting the weather (or examining turbulence) was deemed impossible and therefore largely ignored as an area of continuing study. If you were building an airplane, you built a prototype and spent a lot of time in wind tunnels testing it (ok, I feel a little better).

Of course, in our personal lives, this should already have been obvious (though not scientifically proven).  I don’t understand exactly why I’ve been having difficulty getting up in the morning, but that doesn’t mean I can’t predict that I will have that same difficulty next week.  But (at least in the empirical plane), science has found a way to predict turbulence and weather without understanding each piece of the puzzle individually.

_______________________________________________________________________________

Narratively, the most interesting part of the book (for me) was the fact that many different people had stumbled upon chaos in their scientific pursuits, but either ignored it as a coincidence, or were not taken seriously by their peers and ignored. The early guys who understood that they’d found something interesting were in disparate disciplines and it wasn’t until decades had passed that they discovered each other, and realized how wide-ranging this phenomenon truly was. And I love it when the little guy proves the establishment wrong.

Also – the pictures are stunning. The visual representations of the Mandelbrot equations and whatnot (I don’t remember all the names) are incredible. And I love that math created them – beauty in unexpected places.

I’m glad I read the book.  I know that some of the science has sunk into my (thankfully) subconscious understanding of the world. But it also reinforced my first love – literature – as the place I belong.

Fangirl post: Barbara Kingsolver

I’m not much of a ‘best-seller’ reader anymore.

I used to be – I’ve read every Dean Koontz/Stephen King/John Grisham/Piers Anthony novel up to about 1997 or so.  Then I went back to school and became a book snob. I discovered writers that could blow my mind while entertaining it, and soon those books cranked out by writers once a year started to feel tired and formulaic.  I’ve got absolutely nothing against those books, and some of them are still on my shelf as favorites (The Stand, Lightning, etc).

But not all ‘best-sellers’ are formulaic and predictable.  A super-favorite author of mine – Barbara Kingsolver – also happens to be a big seller (which gives me hope for the world).  I can’t believe that I have barely mentioned her here before now. Maybe that is partly because she hasn’t had a new novel in YEARS, and I’ve re-read her stuff a million times already.

Lucky for all of us, her skills have not diminished in the passing years.  The Lacuna is everything one expects in a Kingsolver novel – fantastic writing, interesting themes, full-bodied characters and a striking moral core. To quote Judy Krueger (fellow Kingsolver fan and bookbrowse.com reviewer) – I love her “because she is a woman of heart and mind who is unafraid of using her mind to reveal her heart.”

I had put The Lacuna on hold at the library before it was even released (I have no desire to own hardbacks, and no way I was waiting for the paperback ). I think there was something like 67 holds on the book before they’d even received their first copy, so it was quite some time before I received that happy little email saying the book was waiting for me. Unfortunately, that email came when I was in the middle of re-reading The Wheel of Time series – 10, 500 pages (thank you, Wikipedia) of kick-ass fantasy adventure.

I picked up the book, but continued with my series.  I would look at Lacuna on my bookcase and think “I should really take that back, I’m not going to get to it before my three weeks is up.” But I didn’t, I just left it there as I burned through more Jordan.  Finally, I received that dreaded email – “the following item is due in three days, please return.” I tried to renew it, but of course there were 100 people behind me waiting for their turn, so I could not.

Suddenly, the thought of returning the book was unbearable. “No! I haven’t read it yet. You can’t have it back.” I think no one but Barbara Kingsolver could have distracted me from The Wheel of Time.  I decided right then that I’d finish it in the three days left to me (lucky for me, it was a weekend). And I’m so glad I did.

Harrison Sheppard is a lonely, virtually parent-less boy who keeps journals to have someone to talk to, even if only himself.  His life is split between Mexico and America, where he runs into famous people (such as Frida Kahlo and Leon Trotsky) and scary circumstances (like food riots and McCarthy-ites), but never feels at home anywhere.  Kingsolver shows us the world through his boyhood imagination, youthful enthusiasm, and adult disillusionment.  Her writing, as always, is lush and her world almost visible between those black dots on the page.

Now, if I’d bothered to write about this book soon after I’d read it, I’d have much more to say about it. But I didn’t – and I’m old, so the details fade. The book is fantastic, go read it. ‘Nuff said.

Bad blogger! very bad!

You all know that I’ve been less than faithful about blogging regularly – and it should be clear that I am reading all the freakin’ time, even though I’m rarely blogging about it.  So maybe today’s embarrassment will come as no surprise to all two of you, but it was quite a slap in the face for me.

I looked at the list of books On The Shelf and discovered that I have read all of them, every single one.  Some of them months ago. One of them, twice already! Shameful and slacker-like and thoroughly unacceptable for a girl who says she wants to be writing more.

So, in the interest of kicking my own ass and maybe building better habits, I am going to write about at least one of those on-the-shelf books every day until I’ve written about all of them. Then try to get through the list of one/two/three dozen books I’ve read in addition to these (it’s been a slow month or two).

Today’s Book: The Children’s Book by A. S. Byatt

This book was a first for me in a couple of ways. It was my first A.S. Byatt book (Booker-prize-winning author of 10+ books), and my very first (paid!) book review subject for BookBrowse.com. You can read some of that review at the link above (though you need a subscription to read all of it).

Thankfully, I liked the book.  But I didn’t love the book. It got rave reviews in lots of places, and I certainly am not here to rebut those claims – the book is fabulously written and really held my interest for most of it.  I was just let-down by the ending. And not so much what happened at the end, but the quality of the writing at the end.  And maybe I was expecting too much or missing what she was trying to do, but I don’t think so.

Most of the book focuses on the inner lives of several children in England, the generation that grew up to fight in WWI. And I loved all of it.  Then the kids grow up… and suddenly we see a lot less about what’s going on inside them, more plot-driven stuff instead.  So – in my mind – what could have been an incredible book became just a good book from that point on. It’s likely that most people wouldn’t be bothered by that at all – and many would see it as a step in the right direction. To each his own, I like to see what makes people tick.

For each book I review, I also have to do a write-up on something in the book that I found interesting, or wanted to know more about as a result of reading the book. And, since one of the main characters is a potter’s apprentice, doing ‘pottery as art’, I did a side-bar on the Studio Pottery movement of the time (the book is full of great historical references to all kinds of cool stuff).

I was completely stressed out about it. I wasn’t too worried about the review itself (I’ve been writing about books and getting As for quite some time), but everything about the side-bar worried me. Was it interesting to anyone else? Is my research thorough enough? I can’t find anything to say, are pictures good? What if they hate it and don’t ask me back for another review?

Turns out, pictures are good, my research was fine, and the side-bar is not intended to be a torture device. Both Davina and Lucia (the brains and wits behind BookBrowse.com) are very nice people who don’t wield nasty red pens or detention slips.  And they did indeed ask me back (I’m starting my fifth book for them as soon as I finish this).  I relax a little bit more each time the dreaded side-bar question comes up.  Maybe someday I’ll consider myself a journalist.