The Year of Unfinished Books

So, you ask, why didn’t Weezie post much this year? Apparently because I couldn’t manage to finish a book. Oh, I started plenty of fantastic books. To wit, here are the books I began to read in 2007 (in no particular order):

• The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini
• The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, Michael Chabon
• You Suck, Christopher Moore
• Absurdistan, Gary Shteyngart
• Saturday, Ian McEwan
• The Nasty Bits, Tony Bourdain
• The New York Trilogy, Paul Auster
• I Like You, Amy Sedaris
• Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant (Confessions of Cooking for One and Dining Alone), Jenni Ferrari-Adler, ed.
• Native Guard, Natasha Tretheway (I almost finished this one, and I’m sure I will soon. If a collection of poetry can be described as a “page-turner,” this Pulitzer Prize winner is it. I promise I’ll post on it early next year.)
• The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan (I’m in the middle of this one, and I just might finish it, although probably not until 2008.)

A diverse collection of books, but not a clunker among them, I would venture. So why didn’t I finish any of them? Who the hell knows. Adult-onset ADD? The fact that I picked up my life and moved it to California? And then took the California bar exam? And discovered that going out on a date was (often, but not always) more fun than staying home alone and reading a book? In any event, a resolution for 2008 is to actually read – beginning to end – more books. “More” being relative, of course. Two would be more than one. One being the number of books I finished in 2007. And what a great one it was: The Raw Shark Texts, by BGB rock star Steven Hall. The book has been blogged to death, so I won’t say any more than this – if it captured my attention sufficiently to finish it, it must be an amazing, just-can’t-put-it-down read.

Since we’re in list-making mode, I thought I would put one together. I did manage to listen to quite a lot of great music in 2007, so here’s my list of my 10 favorite albums of the year:

• Andrew Bird, Armchair Apocrypha
• The Arcade Fire, Neon Bible
• Earlimart, Mentor Tormentor
• The Fratellis, Costello Music
• Radiohead, In Rainbows
• The Shins, Wincing the Night Away
• Sondre Lerche, Phantom Punch
• Spoon, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
• Bruce Springsteen, Magic
• Amy Winehouse, Back to Black

Compare my list to the list of the best 25 albums of the year as voted by listeners of the NPR program “All Things Considered.” Am I a cliché of a demographic or what? On the other hand, compare it to the list of the 20 best albums of 2007 compiled by friend-of-BGB Frank, who could never be called cliché.

Anyway, thanks Tim, for keeping the blog so interesting and timely and fun. I promise there will be more reading – and posting – by Weezie in 2008.

Steven Hall in San Francisco

Last week I went to a reading in San Francisco by Steven Hall, author of the much-blogged-about, already-destined-for-the-movie-screen, absolutely original novel “The Raw Shark Texts.” In the interest of full disclosure, I must confess at the outset of my post (as I have already confessed to Mrs. Cayenne) that I have a ridiculous schoolgirl crush on Mr. Hall. So there. Keep that in mind as you read on.

Having never been to a reading before – much less blogged about one – I’m not sure where to start or what to say. Hall read from three chapters in the book, which, when heard together, tell their own short story of sorts. He started with the opening to Chapter 4, which finds Eric sitting on the beach waving/saluting to Clio, who is out in the ocean snorkeling, topless (or, more accurately, “continentally tits out”). Here’s an amusing part of Chapter 4 that he read:

Actually, here’s something important about Clio; when she says ‘tits’ she sounds smart and sexy and 21st-century – ‘There’s no point fucking around with these things, Eric’ – the way some women, and I suppose some guys effortlessly can. When I say ‘tits,’ though, I sound like a sleazy tabloid journalist.

“Tits out” may be my new favorite phrase. The other parts he read were from a later section of the same chapter, when Eric and Clio talk about how “It’s tiring not knowing people, isn’t it?”; Chapter 1, when he first comes out of unconsciousness, and then when he meets Dr. Randle for the first time and she tells him that he had a girlfriend named Clio and that she’s dead; and Chapter 13, when he gets a mysterious call on his cell phone, and after listening to static for a few moments, blurts out, “Clio?”

After the reading, Hall took a few questions (the crowd was light, and not all that talkative). I asked what I explained was probably a “very American, not particularly intellectual” question – “What’s so funny/odd about the cat being named Ian?” Hall laughed, and said that he gets that question a lot in the States. Apparently “Ian” is a very plain, geeky name in the UK, and there is in fact a soap opera character by that name who he says is very “un-catlike.” The crowd collectively decided that the equivalent cat name in the US would be something like “Bob” or “Fred.”

In response to another of my questions (really, everyone else was being lame), Hall told us that one of his favorite things about the book is the “character” of Ian. He has no role at all in developing the plot, but he has such a presence, and he really becomes as much a character as any other. Hall wowed the very artsy Haight-Ashbury crowd (and the very un-artsy me) with the diversity of his talents – he’s sculpted, painted, photographed, made short films, written and produced plays, and he’s at work on his next novel. Which he’s basically writing in his head. Which is the way he wrote TRST (as he stared out the window on his hour-long-each-way train commute to his last day job.) (“What do I have to show for my daily train commute,” I began to wonder.) Only this time, Hall admits he’s making a few more notes – which are mostly doodles on a large sketchpad. Wow. (You’re getting a crush on him now, too, aren’t you? Admit it.)

At the book signing table, I revealed my identity as the West Coast BGB correspondent. Hall was very gracious about the “quite nice things” the BGB’ers have said about him and the book. He laughed about the kitten-blood edition and half a dozen other versions of the book that have landed on the Cayenne family doorstep. When he saw that my copy of the book didn’t have its dust jacket on (because the jacket would get all mangled on my train commute, what with the constant in-and-out of the tote bag), he decided that it needed some cover art to relieve the stark whiteness. So now it looks like this:

Hall also gave me a supply of these to leave around in un-space:

There is a special severed-kitten-tail version on the back of the calling card just for DJ Cayenne:

I’m going to wait for someone else to post on the book itself. But I will say that I found it to be one of the most original, gripping, masterfully constructed, beautifully written books I’ve read in quite a long time. Hall has a gift for understanding and translating into words what it feels like to think and remember and dream and love and imagine. Here’s an example:

What a difference a day makes, twenty-four little hours. Staring into space myself, I found the light floaty scrap of tune rising up out of the back of my mind as I chewed. It made me think about how, in the dark places of yourself, thinking machines you never get near enough to see are constantly building things and running their own secretive programmes all of their own. Maybe you get a snippet of what’s going on back there, like this fragment of a song drifting its way into the light, or a phrase, or an image, or maybe just a mood, a wash of content or a bleak draining of colour that floods your chest and your stomach more than it ever finds its way into the bright halogen chrome of your mind.

If you don’t already have a copy of TRST, let DJC know – he may have some free copies left!

The History of Love 3

I agree with Nitro that this book was too much like Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (which I finished just before starting The History of Love) for me to rave about it without reservation. That said, I really liked it. Leo Gursky is one of the most poignant characters I’ve encountered in a long time. His complete lack of any appreciation of his enormous talent, his fierce loyalty to and grumpy affection for his sole friend, Bruno, his fatalistic but sad acceptance of his lonely march towards death, and his undying love for Alma, make it impossible not to feel an overwhelming tenderness for him. I guess it’s ok ’cause I’m a girl, but I did not feel DJ’s urge to put a fake jacket over the book, even as I sat in the Delta Crown Room bawling as I finished it.

Saturday — What Am I Missing?

I recently started to read Saturday by Ian McEwan, but I had to stop. I got about 12 pages in and had a strong urge to throw the book in the C&O Canal (I happened to be sitting on the bank of the canal on an absolutely specatular, uncharacteristically cool summer day in Washington, DC when I began the book). I found the writing to be stilted, inelegant, and sometimes just plain bad. One example: “They cross towards the far corner of the square, and with his advantage of height and in his curious mood, he not only watches them, but watches over them, supervising their progress with the remote posessivenes of a god” — Awful sentence. Another: “As he glides across [the bedroom] with almost comic facility. . .” — what the hell is “comic facility”?

I understand that others LOVE this book! What am I missing? I suppose I’m willing to be persuaded that I need to give it another shot. (If anyone wants to borrow it, I did not throw the book in the canal — I schlepped it home in my suitcase.)

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close — yea, that book again

OK, so I’m late to this party, but I finally read ELIC (I had no choice but to read it given the inclusion of it on nearly every BGB “top” list from 2005) and I thought I’d use the occasion to write my first post in ages.

First, I come out as “indifferent” on the gimmicks like the pictures and the flipbook. They didn’t irritate me or detract from my enjoyment of the book, but in my opinion they didn’t add anything, either.

Next, I think that JSF did a masterful job of tackling the subject of 9/11 in a somewhat oblique way. (Whether he needed to be so oblique is a question I raise later in the post.) By including the story of the grandmother and grandfather — indeed, by having them tell their own story in various ways, such as through the letters never sent — JSF explores in depth the experience of surviving and coping with life after an unspeakably horrible event like 9/11 but without addressing that (possibly taboo) subject too directly. I found it interesting that the characters who survived the Dresden fire-bombing talk at great length (and sometimes in gory detail) about that day, but the characters who survived 9/11 talk about that day only occasionally and in the vaguest way. In fact, it’s the 9-year-old who, in his precocious but achingly childlike way, most directly deals with it. I suppose this is another device JSF uses to diffuse the impact of his treatment of the subject: no grown-ups talking about it.

So, in the end, where does this leave us? Will it be OK to write about 9/11 more directly in fifty years? Would it have been OK for JSF to do that now and not use the various buffering devices? Can we really understand what it was like to experience and survive 9/11 by hearing tales told by survivors of a long-ago wartime tragedy? Will the young people who lived through 9/11 but who lost family and friends someday be as fucked-up as Oskar’s grandparents? What will it take for them not to be? Wouldn’t talking about it, rather than avoiding the subject, help? (Mrs. Cayenne might want to comment on that.) I have no answers to those questions, but I thought ELIC was a fantastic book for getting me to think about them so intently.

Weezie’s “Best of” List

“Weezie? Who the hell is that?” you ask? Yea, um, ok, I didn’t read so many books last year. (I was busy movin’ on up to the de-lux apartment.) But I did read a few, notwithstanding the lack of any posts. So here’s my “best of” list:

1. The Tender Bar

Yup, that’s it. As far as I remember, everything else I read was, as DJ C says, “meh.” But if you haven’t read The Tender Bar, run, don’t walk, over to your bookshelf and get started.

Happy 2006. Hope to share some posts with you this year. Maybe I can even get George to join us. . .

ATL Spellbound: The Results (and a Quiz)

The 35th Annual Atlanta Open Orthographic Meet (“The Bee”) has passed into the annals of history, and another winner has taken home a stein engraved with a word that 99.998% of us have never heard of. Unfortunately, although the babygotbooks bloggers apparently represent the cultural and intellectual elite, none of us walked away from the meet clutching that coveted tankard.

Before I recount the details of this year’s competition, a bit of history. First held in 1971, the Bee began as a small, informal gathering of self-proclaimed spelling nerds at the legendary Stein Club. The Bee caught on, and spellers young and old enjoyed 30 consecutive years at the Stein Club. In 2001, after the bulldozers of Atlanta’s urban renewal razed the Stein Club (R.I.P.), The Bee moved to another historic pub, Manuel’s Tavern. [An interesting bit of bar trivia: Back in 1956, Manuel Maloof – a three-term CEO of DeKalb County and the “Godfather of Georgia Democratic Politics” – opened Manuel’s Tavern. At that time DeKalb County was still dry, so Maloof chose a location just over the border in Fulton County, as close as he could get to his beloved DeKalb and still serve beer.] The 2005 Bee was the fifth at Manuel’s, and drew a sizeable crowd of eager spellers.

Three of our bloggers competed in The Bee this year: Dr. J, DJ Cayenne, and Weezie. Although “penuts” was not among the words challenging the competitors, several food-related words were included – blanch, macedoine, vichysoisse, and paillard. Animals were another popular theme, with such words as rhinoceros, oryx, hellgrammite, beviss, and baudrons. (Running for your dictionary yet?) Not to be outdone by the fauna, the flora were well represented by nectar, detritus, rye, pipsissewa, marram, and chytrid.

Our bloggers should be proud. Dr. J displayed some impressive spelling prowess, scoring a perfect 20 in the first round, and advancing to the third round. Weezie gave a solid performance, spelling 19 of 20 correct in the first round. Weezie stumbled in round two, however, and failed to move on. DJ Cayenne make a respectable showing, with a score of 16 in round one – not high enough to advance, but definitely qualifying him for “spelling nerd” status. As nerdy as we may be, however, we must give spelling props to the winner of The Bee, Nancy Nethery, who correctly spelled 37 of 53 words.

Just to make things interesting, instead of simply listing all the words in this year’s Bee, I thought I would set up our own blogger challenge – match the word to the definition. Sometime next week I’ll post the correct results, and you can see how well you scored. Take the Quiz here.