April 2006 Books

April 2, 2006
The Highest Tide

Based on the facts that this book involves the discovery of an Archeteuthis squid, is set on the Puget Sound, and was read by me in just one day, you’d think I’d really liked it, right? You would be wrong. There’s nothing really bad going on here, but really, nothing good is either. I don’t buy any of the characters and their relationships seem arbitrary and sort of penciled in, somehow. The thirteen-year-old isn’t written like a thirteen-year-old at all, in my opinion, totally random dialing of a 1-900 number to ask a phone sex operator about what girls are like down there notwithstanding. The story is supposedly all about the Sound, and about a boy who loves the Sound, but I don’t really get that the Sound is much of a player, if that makes sense. Maybe it’s a sort of distant writing style, but it came off to me as a little fake somehow…like maybe the author did a lot of research on marine biology but doesn’t really care that much about it. (Which is weird because his bio says he lives right in Olympia, where the story is set, and I still can’t tell why no one and nothing seems to be connected to the place). I am also none too pleased with the crazy-but-beautiful-girl schtick, and the whole cult-member thing (really!) also seemed to have no place. So, yeah, no. Sorry, The Highest Tide. You’d think I’d have liked you better.

April 9, 2006
The Best American Science And Nature Writing 2005 edited by Jonathan Weiner

This was a Christmas gift I just got around to reading…I was a little wary of opening it, actually, since the last time I read this compendium, it must have have been for 2004, I was sorely disappointed by the unreadability of almost every piece. This was quite different in a very enjoyable way. I enjoyed the bioethical and philosophical bent of many of the pieces, and I was especially interested in the articles on critical incident debriefing in the aftermath of September 11 as well as Malcolm Gladwell’s piece on The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit and changing perceptions and treatments of trauma over the last several decades. The story of the creation of first handheld mechanical calculator in Buchenwald was almost literally breathtaking to me…I didn’t understand the description of how it worked and it was pretty much impossible for me to even visualize what it looked like physically, but the plot was great. The tone of that story reminded me, for some reason, of hanging out in a dorm room in about 1994 as my friend Rob gave me a lecture about Feynman, wearing only a towel…that same sense of “This is just so cool, everyone should know about this.”

April 10, 2006
Long Way Round: Chasing Shadows Across The World by Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman

I think I saw this at a bookstore and I was lured into putting it on my hold list by the fact that Ewan McGregor is hot like fire. I could care less about motorcycles, but, hey, a trip around most of the world with your best friend is kind of cool. Several things were interesting in this account: McGregor’s musings on his fame and the effect it had on the trip, the dual-perspective format, and the unpretentious writing style. It’s a very straightforward narrative: I went here and I did this and we saw that and one time this funny thing happened and I missed my family and we saw some great stuff. None of the writer-ish posturing you get sometimes in travelogues (Mr. Theroux, I am looking in your direction) or travel blogs, where it’s like, “I made my way along the deserted mountain pass in deepest Tibet under the gibbous moon, with only some yak butter tea to sustain me and a scrap of blurred, ancient map given to me by a lama as he lay gasping on his deathbed my only guide…and in so doing, I came face to face with my very soul” sort of jive. This was plain and simple and a good fast read. Even if I don’t much care for motorcycles.

April 15, 2006
The New Single Woman by Kay E. Trimberger

I felt a little weird checking this out of the library, as if I were wearing some scarlet L for Loser or something. It’s about…hold your breath, here…single women, and it’s written in a semi-scholarly, semi-pop-sociology style that was very distracting for me. Trimberger does the whole qualitative thing by essentially rounding up some single women in, like, her neighborhood, and interviewing them, and then rounding them up again nine years later, if they haven’t become un-single, and talking to them some more. N = 46, which drove me ever so slightly crazy, because I am all about qualitative methods, really and truly. In my office I am known as the qualitative freak, the one who will patiently transcribe mountains of verbatim quotes from participants in order to “honor their voices”…and even I was all “Can we get a histogram or something up in here?” So there’s that…oh, also, Trimberger writes fairly extensively about her own experience and sort of extrapolates from it to the wider single-woman population, which, well, I just don’t know about that. Methodology aside, the insights garnered from the interviews themselves are good; I was particularly struck by the realization that most of us will be single for at least part of our lives if not almost all (like me). The thoughts on the importance of friendship networks and communities really struck home for me as well. The stuff about being a single mother was interesting to me (as the daughter of a single mother) but also made me really really really glad that I have no biological clock to speak of because damn that sounds hard. Anyway, when I wasn’t fussing to myself about data collection methods I did enjoy this book, I have to say, and it has certainly given me a lot to think about.

April 17, 2006
Runaway by Alice Munro

Since my nice big glut of Munro-lovin’ last month I have been thinking about her new (to me) set of stories, so when I happened to be at the U Bookstore selling some books I picked this up for cheap with my store credit and pretty much swallowed it whole. I am going to need to re-read this several times…already I can’t wait to do so. Layers, so many delicately dense and delicious layers. I sound like I’m describing a particularly toothsome baklava or something. I stand by my description!

April 19, 2006
Four Ways To Forgiveness by Ursula K. LeGuin

I picked this up out of my bookshelf the other day when I was done with one book and hadn’t yet procured my book club book that I’m supposed to be reading and didn’t want to get into anything too heavy beforehand. I probably read this last year because I read it pretty much every year, sometimes multiple times per year. I started at the third story in the suite, just fooling around, and ended up reading all four, just for love’s and familiarity’s and comfort’s sake. (I predict I will be re-reading Always Coming Home again pretty soon, as I get closer to leaving for NZ.) One phrase that has stayed with me this time: “The politics of the flesh are the roots of power.”

April 25, 2006
My Name Is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok

This month’s book club selection, which…well, golly. I was expecting something a little different, since I’d seen the theater adaptation of The Chosen (also by Potok) several years ago and loved it. This was…this was a little boring, actually, and I don’t know how that can even be true because it’s all about really interesting things: coming of age, assimilation versus isolation, art, friendship, religion, rebellion. All those are really interesting topics, right? So why was I forcing myself through this, and why did nothing really make sense, and why did I feel like every character have a thin layer of shellac over him or her? Asher Lev’s mother gets sick. So? Asher Lev has a friendship with Yudel Krinsky. Eh? Asher Lev is a Jew and Jews don’t paint crucifixions! And? You know? I said at book club that there are stage directions but not much story: people walk here and there and occasionally they say things and every now and then there is a description of a person or a place or a thing, but that’s it. Not too resonant for me; I didn’t believe a word of what anyone said or did in this book.

April 26, 2006
The Consumer’s Guide To Effective Environmental Choices: Practical Advice From The Union Of Concerned Scientists by Michael Brower and Warren Leon

I put this on my hold list after reading about it in Grist. It’s written with a very helpful perspective: that individuals as well as corporations and governments make choices in their consumer lives that can affect the environment on many different levels. Their thing is that if you’re driving fifty miles round trip to commute every day, worrying about stuff like whether you use paper or plastic bags at the grocery store doesn’t make much sense. It talks a lot about the interaction between the micro and the macro, although of course it doesn’t really use those words…the little things (paper vs. plastic) vs. the big things (SUV vs. the bus vs. a bike) on the individual level as well as on the larger level (sprawl legislation, corporate anti-pollution incentives). It also gives very helpful advice concerning the main areas of environmental impact individuals, families, and communities can influence and doesn’t forget to address the larger macro issues in terms of advocacy, which I think is just as useful as ten tables of comparative refrigerator efficiency ratings. The epilogue, which traces the relationships of Americans to the consumer world from Thoreau to the present day, (well, the late 90s) is kind of brilliant, too. I found the lengthy appendices sort of math-heavy and difficult to process, but all y’all stats wonks will love the comparative risk assessment algorithm. The weirdest thing about this book is that it came out in 1998 so it does read as sort of naively hopeful, knowing what we know now about how bad the 2000s would be in terms of Healthy Forests and Clear Skies. Still, it’s a really nice mix of pragmatism and idealism, which I found strangely comforting, given the larger reasons for which this book was written.

April 28, 2006
The Lost Garden by Helen Humphreys

This is set in 1941 and centers on a woman who joins the Women’s Land Army in rural Devon, which I was pretty excited about, but I wasn’t a chapter in before I knew this was going to be rough going. I finished it anyway because I had a long bus ride but man. Nothing in this book made sense, the characters had none, there was no sense of time or place, and the love interest thing was flat and ridiculous. I sort of cringed my way through the entire thing.