Unbookening Returns From Its Jaunt In The Wilderness

Bought 2 books
Checked 8 books out of the library
Got 9 books to review

Gave away 15 books
Returned 15 books to the library
Gave one to my mom

(If you're new: What is unbookening?)

I assumed when I started tracking the books that were flowing in and out of my life, that I would get to a magical status point in which I would not buy too many books, nor would I get too many. For a lot of reasons, that has not happened. There is an obvious metaphor I could make here but I won't.

Nevertheless, I should start publishing this list again. I think it really does make me consider whether I need that $1 used book sale in my life (more than just to look, anyway), and I am probably moving house next year, so the fewer the better. I'm not going to get all ambitious and claim I'm good at getting rid of books I don't need, I still think there are far worse vices.

For one thing, I tried this a few weeks ago and nothing came of it, but I think I will make a better effort to borrow books from friends before buying them. I know a fair amount of bibliophiles (local and far-flung-but-will-mail) and as long as they don't mind, maybe we can help each other, especially when it comes to classics. This is a fine idea unless you are stubborn and don't like asking for help even when you need it. Lord knows we don't know anyone like that around here.

From Ireland to BROOKLYN

It's hard to describe a book as a "book club book" without it being interpreted as a slight in some way. Colm Tóibín's BROOKLYN struck me as a good book for a group discussion because my reaction to its ending ranged from "What the..." to "No wait, this is perfect," and I couldn't decide what side I was on.

The book transports the young Eilis Lacey from Ireland to Brooklyn in the middle of last century in search of a job, a diaspora I frankly hadn't been all that aware of despite being a little Irish. (Eilis herself is a little lost to world events, given her befuddlement when a bookseller refers to the fact that her Jewish professor, who has sent Eilis for some study aids, lost his whole family in World War II. "Why would anyone want to kill that man?" he asks.) Stepping out from under the shadow of her confident sister Rose, Eilis follows her brothers into emigration for work, then as BROOKLYN continues becomes a figure of self-actualization more than a journey narrative.

Despite the 50-to-60-year difference between us, Eilis' life isn't all that different from mine: She lives with roommates, goes to work every day in a job that she hopes will lead to the job she really wants (as a bookkeeper for the department store where she's a clerk), worries about her mother without having much influence over her. The major difference between us is the number of parental figures who govern her life: The local priest, who first found her the job, keeps tabs on her even at social dances, her supervisor at the store tries to give her clothing advice, and her nosy live-in landlord Mrs. Kehoe makes cutting comments about her every move. Her first radical act of separation from them is dating a boy who is (horrors!) not Irish, but Bay Ridge Italian, a fact she even has to hide from her judgy roommates.

That amount of social protection seems like overkill for Eilis, a serious and quiet girl, until the end of BROOKLYN when she finds herself without those safeguards. No spoilers, but I was surprised by the way she acted in a couple of instances. Not that Tóibín is suggesting that that para-parental haze was good for her, but... maybe it wasn't bad, necessarily? Those figures (Father Flood, Mrs. Kehoe, etc.) have much more influence on her than her own mother, who is both a tragic and infuriating figure; that struck me as strangely modern as well. The book challenged my expectations as historical fiction per se, but I don't know if that's because of the ending (again... no spoilers), or because I could so easily picture the store she was walking to, or that the white immigrant American experience is so often framed as a 19th century tale with an early happy ending.

Reading on the Road: The Ma, I'm on TV edition

Watch out D.C.! This weekend Regular Commenter Elizabeth and I are going to the Rally to Restore Sanity And/Or Fear.

I'm lugging Josh Karlen's LOST LUSTRE and Henry James' THE AMBASSADORS with me, and if I finish those I'm going to start Joanna Smith Rakoff's A FORTUNATE AGE, which I have wanted to read since seeing her at the Brooklyn Book Festival.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez has a new book out (a collection of speeches called I DIDN'T COME TO GIVE A SPEECH) and is finishing a new novel. Yes!!! He totally couldn't stay away!

When you find a stranger in the alps

It's cool, I'll just reinstitute my book ban after I buy this.

Arundhati Roy may be arrested in India for speaking out in favor of Kashmiri independence.

I went to see "Easy A" last weekend and movie wasteland or no movie wasteland I enjoyed it more than I expected.

A tidbit for the reading-oriented: The plot is a retelling or reframing of THE SCARLET LETTER -- the Hester Prynne figure being Olive Penderghast (Emma Stone), whose opening transgression is telling her best friend she slept with a (fictional) date. Olive's class in school is reading THE SCARLET LETTER and there's a running joke about her fellow students watching the movie instead of reading the book. Olive jokes to the camera that if viewers are not going to read the book they should rent "the old version" -- I think the 1926 Lillian Gish version, judging by clips we see in "Easy A" -- and not the Demi Moore adaptation because it deviates too much from the book. Later, her English teacher (Thomas Haden Church, who is very funny and underused) jokes about the number of papers he's getting about how Hester Prynne takes a lot of baths -- apparently a feature of the Moore version (really?), although he knows and gets Olive to admit that she actually read the book.

I haven't seen the 1995 Roland Joffé version they're talking about, but I knew it won a couple of Razzies and, given that I wasn't suggested or made to watch it when we studied THE SCARLET LETTER, suspected it might not be of the best caliber. There's also a case file on it in Nathan Rabin's new book MY YEAR OF FLOPS (if I may so shamelessly plug) in which he calls it a "beautiful, idiotic dream" and writes, "It seems apt that a novel about infidelity should inspire one of the least faithful literary adaptations in American film."

You'd think high school cheating would have evolved by now from the hoary days of my youth. (The popularity of Cliff's Notes, for example, given how obvious they look, has been always a mystery to me... as the sort of smug A student who would never use them.) At the rate of adaptation we're on today, English teachers of the future should hope every movie made from a book for the next 30 years is unfaithful enough to prompt such blunders as Olive's classmates are prone. But that's a terrifying future; in adaptation I always hope, as this blog's string of disappointed movie reviews can testify. It won't stop the cheaters anyway; they'll only find another workaround.

Mark Zuckerberg: Possesed of a sense of humor?

On "The Social Network" to Business Insider:



"Every single shirt or fleece that I had in the movie was a shirt or fleece that I own."

I think his criticism is flawed, but still: points.

Justin Bieber dramatic reading

That's Canadian actor Gordon Pinsent, who you might remember opposite Julie Christie in 2007's "Away From Her," stepping into a Canadian comedy show called "This Hour Has 22 Minutes." Let it also be noted that Bieber's memoir's full title is JUSTIN BIEBER: FIRST STEP 2 FOREVER: MY STORY. Two colons. Good lord.


Dedicated to Coworker Grace, whose relationship with Mr. Bieber is... complicated.

BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES character dies

Thanks, NY1, for scaring the bejesus out of me when on a routine coffee break I heard "author of BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES." But it is not Tom Wolfe whom we celebrate but Burton Roberts, a former judge in the Bronx who was the inspiration for Myron Kovitsky. (Or, Morgan Freeman in the movie version.) A World War II vet who attended NYU and Cornell, Roberts was also one of the defense lawyers in the Amadou Diallo case, that's right, defense.

Jhumpa Lahiri's next project

I could probably do a Things I Learned on Twitter every day (see: yesterday), but here's today's: Via Todd VanDerWerff, author Jhumpa Lahiri (THE NAMESAKE, UNACCUSTOMED EARTH) is a story consultant on this season of HBO's therapist series "In Treatment."

According to the Boston Globe, she is consulting on the episodes featuring Irrfan Khan (who appeared in the Mira Nair adaptation of "The Namesake" as Gogol's father, and was the police inspector in "Slumdog Millionaire") playing "a recent widower who has just moved to New York from India after being forced to retire... liv[ing] unhappily with his Americanized son and his American daughter-in-law." Definitely Lahiri territory. I don't have HBO, but if you do, you should tune in for that.

No, seriously, you're all fired.

No one saw fit to tell me Garrison Keillor has a daily podcast where he talks about writers' birthdays and reads poetry? On the bright side, I have a new great way to start my work day.

What Sarah Palin makes in her speeches?

NEWSFLASH: Kanye West just admitted on Twitter to getting mixed up
about his "double en-tundras." This delights me almost as much as when
people misspell "voila" and end their sentences with, "Stringed
instrument tuned a fifth lower than the violin!"

Takahashi continues: "So after Ryan O'Neal has slaved away to become a lawyer, they never give the audience any idea what kind of work he does. All we know is he joins this top law firm and pulls in a salary that would make anyone envious. He lives in a fancy Manhattan high-rise with a doorman out front, joins a WASP sports club, and plays squash with his yuppie friends. That's all we know."
Takahashi drinks his water.
"So what happens after that?" Mari asks.
Takahashi looks upward, recalling the plot. "Happy ending. The two live happily ever after. Love conquers all. It's like: we used to be miserable, but now everything's great. They drive a shiny new Jaguar, he plays squash, and sometimes in winter they throw snowballs. Meanwhile, the father who disowned Ryan O'Neal comes down with diabetes, cirrhosis of the liver and Meniere's disease and dies a lonely, miserable death."
"I don't get it. What's so good about a story like that?"
Takahashi cocks his head. "Hmm, what did I like about it? I can't remember. I had stuff to do, so I didn't watch the last part very closely."

--Haruki Murakami, AFTER DARK

Adam Levin's rule for writing

Chicagoist: What’s one thing about writing that’s really impossible to teach?
Adam Levin: How to sit well. I get these killer students, these talented, hardworking, every-teacher's-dream-type students, and I go, "Write perfect sentences over and over until you arrive at a story," and they do it. I tell them, "Never be boring," and they cease to ever be boring. But then I'll say, "Hey, my back hurts really badly and it's probably gonna hurt for the rest of my life because during the first ten-or-so years that I devoted to writing fiction, I sat all hunched over the keyboard for hours on end every day, so please don't sit like that, okay? Make yourself sit up straight when you work or, at the very least, get up and stretch every twenty minutes," and they give me this look like, "Stretch? What are a stretch?"