January 2005 Books

January 1, 2005
Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer

A book of short stories I received from my mom for Christmas. I liked the voice very much even though a couple of the stories seemed very similar to one another; they weren’t connected but they seemed to have the same cast of characters with different names. Maybe it was just me.

January 2, 2005
America’s Best Short Stories 2004 (ed. Lorrie Moore)

Also a Christmas gift. I’ve read this compilation every year for a couple of years now and love it very much, as a rule. None of the stories have really stuck with me so far…there are a couple in the other collections that I’ve re-read several times but I had to flip through this one to remind myself what was in it. I liked every story pretty well while I was reading it. I wish I could write short stories.

January 2, 2005
Shopgirl by Steve Martin

I read this over a big bowl of oatmeal. I liked that there wasn’t much of a plot but was just about a short segment of various characters’ lives. Because I am totally self-obsessed, I found myself wondering how an outside observer would describe me in a short novel. Probably not as nicely as Steve Martin describes Mirabelle. Chubby girls with fuzzy hair hardly ever get described as nicely as thin girls with smooth hair, have you ever noticed that?

January 2, 2005
Orlando by Virginia Woolf

I suspect I am not really smart enough to understand this book, but I enjoyed it very much and since I read solely for pleasure (unless it’s like, iPod instructions or something) I don’t care. I felt a little out of breath while I was reading this: so much was happening! The words just washed over me like light from a stained glass window.

January 5, 2005
The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

I’d like to give a big shout out to housemate J’s bookshelf, which has been sustaining me the last couple of days until all my holds show up at the library. Everyone’s read this book and it is a good one when you are feeling mucus-full and damp and chilly. I can’t read it without thinking of the filmstrip we watched at Gifted when I was a kid, though. What if I don’t get my books tomorrow, though? What will I read then? The only thing left on J’s bookshelf is Brief Interviews With Hideous Men and I don’t want that to get in the way of reading all my awesome library holds when they get here. I am worried. Maybe I will just watch a DVD tonight after I get back from dinner instead of reading an improving book, as is my practice at that hour.

January 9, 2005
The Slightly True Story of Cedar B. Hartley (Who Planned To Live An Unusual Life) by Martine Murray

This book is set in Australia and so it involves words like “fair dinkum” and “footy” and “chook.” It also involves acrobatics and traumatic brain injury and a cute boy and sadness and a lost father and a dog called Stinky. It is excellent for all these reasons but mostly for sentences like this one: “She wants to chew the fat, as my Uncle John would say. That means you linger on details, you chomp right through the facts and get to the bone, the nitty-gritty gristly chewy sense of things, the gooey core, the center of the messy weave of feelings that bury into your skin and wrap you up. Not that you can ever hit that center, but if you hover around it for a while you can get some sort of blurry view of it .”

Anyway, everyone put this book on hold at your local library and pick it up on your way home from Saturday errands and read it in bed when it’s snowing outside and all will be well with you in your world for a couple of hours, I promise you.

January 12, 2005
Pink Think: Becoming A Woman In Many Uneasy Lessons by Lynn Peril

By the end of this book I was seriously annoyed every time the author used the phrase “pink think,” which Is defined as “a set of ideas and attitudes about what constitutes proper female behavior; a groupthink that was consciously or not consciously or not adhered to by advice writers, manufacturers of toys and other consumer products, experts in many walks of life, and the public at large, particularly during the years spanning the mid-twentieth century—but enduring even into the twenty-first century.” Okay. This was published in 2002 but read as very nineties to me, like remember when you first read BUST and you were all like “Wow! Those fifties advice manuals and social hygiene movies are kah-ray-zee, man!” and it was all very pop culture-y and you just couldn’t believe what people used to have to do in home ec in the sixties and so on and so forth. Some of the examples…and indeed, this book really comes across as a compendium of kah-ray-zee examples of “pink think,” whatever the hell that really is. The thing is, anything having to do with the construction of gender is automatically interesting to me but I’d sure like to read a book about similar sorts of things focusing on the eighties to today, you know? I mean, we get it, the fifties were insane We get it.

January 12, 2005
The Dogs of Babel by Carolyn Parkhurst
I just tore through this after finishing the above textbook-to-intro-to-women’s-studies thing. It is very engrossing and very sad. I’m not much of a dog person but this book made me wonder if maybe I should be.

January 16, 2005
The Fat Girl’s Guide To Life by Wendy Shanker

This is pretty similar to a book I read back in the late nineties and by which I felt very empowered at the time: a self-described Fat Girl goes through the ins and out of dieting and gaining/losing weight and comes to the conclusion that maybe fatness or thinness is really probably genetic and that being fit is more important than adhering to arbitrary fashion standards and so on and so forth. A lot of what Wendy (I feel, for some reason, that I get to refer to her by her first name) talks about is very familiar, as I imagine it would be to any woman who has ever struggled with weight or body image issues…which would be almost everyone in the industrialized world, yes? I noticed, as I read, that I started to feel like maybe it’s okay that I am the size and shape and weight that I am…and immediately I thought that, I would think, “But you’re still fat and unattractive and no one will ever love you,” and, uh, what’s that about? And then I went to Anthropologie with my mom and I exchanged a skirt for a smaller size (and it had been marked down even more from when I bought it, if you can imagine such a thing) and I told that fact to the woman ringing up my purchases about eight times, I just couldn’t stop myself from cackling about how something was too small for me. And I wondered if maybe I had betrayed the membership of the Fat Chick Underground or something.

January 20, 2005
The Flight of the Iguana by David Quammen.

This book is all about David Quammen. David Quammen turns forty. David Quammen is arachnophobic. David Quammen is conflicted about the paths his life has taken. I’d been under the impression that this was a collection of articles about various funny things in nature…and it sort of is, but it’s also a lot about David Quammen. I think I prefer more biology. That the articles were mostly written in the eighties was obvious to me in the weirdest ways: he mentioned going to see Peggy Sue Got Married at the dollar theater, for example. The articles about Central American refugees were written very topically, if that makes sense; I don’t know enough about the history to know much about what’s happened since then but it was a little chilling to read about that in the context of it’s being current events at the moment it was written. Did that make sense? No? Don’t worry, I have a couple more of his books on my library hold list so no doubt I’ll get a chance to mangle some more David Quammen-related prose.

January 21, 2005
A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Re-Examined As A Grotesque Crippling Disease And Other Cultural Revelations by Cintra Wilson.

I don’t know why I put this on my library hold list or why I read it in two quick sittings or what the whole point is. Is this book about the nineties? Leo DiCaprio? The difficulties inherent to trying to secure a book deal? Focused, practiced rage? I don’t know. I don’t know why I read it.

January 26, 2005
Unlocking The Air by Ursula K.LeGuin

I am embarrassed that it’s taken me so long to read this, when it’s quite short and doesn’t have too many hard words in it. I don’t know what the problem is. I blame wireless internet and Netflix. Anyway, UKLeG is the only science fiction I read…and I’m not totally convinced that she should even really be considered science fiction, but regardless of her genre, she’s one of my favorite authors ever in the world since I read The Dispossessed in tenth grade and I still maintain that The Birthday of the World is very very close to the perfect collection of short stories to me. Ms. LeGuin, if you are reading this, call me! Love you! Anyway, this was an older selection of stories and I found a couple of them difficult to get through, but the collection ended up on a really strong note with a version of “Sleeping Beauty” I liked so much I read it again as soon as I finished it. So, boogie on down, I guess. I think I need to institute a ban on internet at home or something because it’s almost the end of the month and I don’t feel like I’ve read much. Fortunately I just picked up several books at the library so I’m good to go for the next week or so.

January 26, 2005
The Sleepover Artist by Thomas Beller

I finished this on the stroke of midnight, so to speak, so I’m going to count it for that day. Anyway, I picked this up because many years ago I read Thomas Beller’s Seduction Theory, a collection of stories so amazingly and devastatingly wonderful that I kind of want to lay down on the floor and cry every time I read them. Actually, I should say I wanted to lay down on the floor and cry, because yesterday I checked my bookshelves and just as I’d suspected, the book was nowhere to be found. I am very disappointed and want to know whether someone borrowed and didn’t return or if they got lost in the move or what. Anyway, this new collection is about Alex Fader, who shows up in several stories in Seduction Theory and on whom it is fair to say I have quite a literary-character crush. On the Alex in Seduction Theory, I mean. The Alex in The Sleepover Artist is not quite as crush-worthy, I am disappointed to report. I kept reading the stories about him and wondering when my Alex was going to show up, and why I didn’t recognize the Alex in the new stories. I kind of feel like I knew Alex in high school or something and thought he was the greatest and and then I just caught up with him a couple of weeks ago and was like, “I thought this guy was cool?” You know? Sigh. You are awesome, old Alex! Maybe if I write a story about you I will get to see the real you again. Anyway, Sleepover Artist schmeepover artist, but I command you to immediately procure yourself a copy of Seduction Theory and cancel all your other plans so you can read it uninterrupted, perhaps with a nice cheese plate or something.

January 27, 2005
The M Word: Writers on Same-Sex Marriage edited by  Kathy Pories

I read this because Wendy from Pound has an essay and I wanted to read some more stuff she’s written. I don’t know if it’s journally loyalty or just because it’s a good piece, but I think I liked hers the best of the collection. All the essays were very good though, in a preaching-to-the-choir sort of way. I excel in preaching to the choir, and I very much enjoy being part of this particular choir being preached to, so that was fine. I read this on the bus and at the gym today and it was very compact and thoughtful and made me want to stay on the recumbent bike for ten more minutes. I’m sure all the contributors would be thrilled to hear that.

January 29, 2005
The Boilerplate Rhino by David Quammen

QUAMMEN! Quammen Quammen Quammen! To be fair, this Quammen-riffic set of essays was much heavier on the natural history and palpably less Quammenphilic than The Flight of the Iguana. As such I enjoyed it very much and very much wished I had his job: to write 3000 words a month about durian fruit, or rattlesnakes, or dark matter, or spiders. Except I don’t think I would enjoy being on a deadline. Okay, how about this: someone pays me to travel the world and poke my nose into various field stations with various scientists and somehow connect natural phenomena with instances of note in my own life. That would be sweet. Also, of all the essays in this collection, the one that’s stuck with me was the one about slime molds and Alan Turing, for those of you playing along at home.


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