Favorite Bookstores for Christmas Shopping

Books are my favorite Christmas presents, both for giving and getting. For me, the best part of Christmas day is lounging in front of the tree after all the fuss is over, stacking up the books, and flipping through each one, imagining the fun of reading them all. Add a crackling fire and a hot buttered rum, and I am in Christmas heaven. This year, the books I am giving as gifts came from three places: 1) Amazon: I am a big amazon.com shopper because it is convenient, inexpensive, and they ship for free. But I am not a good on-line browser, so I use amazon to buy specific books for specific people. Hubby's Christmas books came from amazon, because he gave me a list of what he wanted. 2) Powell's: One of the very best things about living in Portland is Powell's. So every Christmas I make at least a couple of visits to the City of Books. I go there to browse for books for local friends for whom I do not have a particular book in mind. I got a present for my boss from Powell's. 3) Second Hand Prose: The Friends of the Oregon City Public Library runs my favorite used bookstore, Second Hand Prose (in the Oregon City Antique Mall). I was there to day and very excited to find that they have doubled the space and the inventory. They meet all my requirements for used books: good selection, especially of literary fiction; excellent, clean condition and mostly donated, not ex-library editions; and low prices, with most hardbacks at $2 and most paperbacks at $1. Immediate family members are getting books from S.H.P. because I think they would like a big stack of books to read through the winter. Now I must get to wrapping!

12 Days Until Christmas

Review of the Day: Scratch Beginnings

Fresh out of college, Adam Shepard set out with $25, a sleeping bag, and the clothes on his back to prove that the American Dream is alive and well. Shepard was concerned by the pessimistic attitude of many of his friends – an attitude he thought was fostered by the popular but gloomy Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America and Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, both by Barbara Ehrenreich.

He wanted to learn for himself whether it is still possible to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. Using the same “undercover” approach as Ehrenreich, Shepard got off the train in Charleston with his meager possessions and a down-and-out cover story that did not involve a college degree. He also had the goal of obtaining a car, a place to live with furniture, $2,500 in savings, and career-advancing opportunities (either through school or business) by the end of one year. Scratch Beginnings chronicles this adventure from Shepard’s first night in a homeless shelter, through job searches, setbacks, conflict, and accomplishment.

There is no denying that this is an adventure tale. Yes, Shepherd addresses weighty issues, but he is not a sociologist and his book is not a policy polemic. This is the story of one young man’s year spent building a decent life from scratch. His hands-on approach to experiencing and then explaining things for himself brings to mind bygone explorers or early journalists like Mark Twain. It would be easy to pick on Shepard’s premise and poke holes in his arguments. But Shepard is quick to acknowledge this his is just one man’s story, not a comprehensive analysis of poverty in America. And he admits that his experience was made easier because he was not encumbered by children, addiction, or mental illness.

To fault the book for not providing scholarly economic analysis is to intentionally ignore its value and deny its charm. In fact, Shepard’s few attempts to address larger policy issues are the weak spots in the book. The book is not political – Shepard goes out of his way to disavow any particular political affiliation or ideology. But his lack of political clarity shows in the fuzzy thinking apparent in his few policy suggestions. A couple of his ideas – like why raising the minimum wage will not help poor people – show some original thought. But others, such as, “Affordable housing needs additional support from both the legislative and executive branches at the federal and state level” are political pablum, demonstrating neither insight nor innovation.

Fortunately, Shepard keeps his policy suggests to a minimum. He concentrates on explaining the personal lessons he learned from finding and keeping a difficult job as a house mover, making the most of difficult living accommodations, and denying himself easy and immediate pleasures in order to save his money and energy for a better future. These lessons range from the amusing (“Broccoli Au Gratin” is the best flavor of Rice-A-Roni and a one dollar box is enough for two meals) to the avuncular:

We adjust. That’s what we do. We seize the opportunities that are given to us, and we adjust to make up for what is kept from us. In some cases, . . . we don’t have a choice. We embrace change or we fight it off. In the end, they say, change makes us stronger. Even if we deny the change and retreat back to the norm, the experience has helped us to grow and understand what is on the other side, and it has given us the freedom to make more informed decisions in the future

The appeal of all Shepard’s lessons is that he culled them from his own experience; he did not learn them on a theoretical level from a college seminar or a self-help book, he lived them. He accepted advice from other men at the shelter about how to look for work and get a job. He learned the skills of house moving from the men he worked with. There were times when Shepard’s credulity and open-eyed wonder show him to still be a little wet behind the ears, but that is a big part of the appeal of his book – these life-lessons seem fresh coming from him because they were fresh to him.

In the end, Shepard learned from observing the people around him just how difficult life can be, what a difference culture and upbringing can make in a person’s life, and that personal responsibility is the key to achieving goals. As he explained:

All the while, we have to be more focused, keeping our eye on what we really want to do with our lives: move up. Or not. We’re either on a mission or keeping our flight grounded. Either way, we are the pilots.

Scratch Beginnings is exuberant and refreshing, especially when Shepard sticks with describing his own experiences and impressions. Shepard’s was a brash experiment and its very undertaking proves his premise: the American Dream is still kicking.

OTHER REVIEWS

Book Psmith
Internet Review of Books

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13 Days Until Christmas

More on The English Major

The IRB published my review of The English Major by Jim Harrison on the IRB blog. Sort of a teaser for the full length review (by another reviewer) they are going to run in the January issue.

14 Days Until Christmas

Book Notes: The Emperor's Children

Hmmmmmm . . . . I am about halfway through The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud and what had been a dawning recognition is now glaring in my mind: This book is a re-written, Americanized version of Iris Murdoch's 1970-ish novel, A Fairly Honourable Defeat. At first, I noted that the pompous patriarch character was writing a major book on philosophy, just like the patriarch in AFHD. Then the the sinister, manipulative character struck me as being just like the Bad Guy in Murdoch's novel. After that, many other parallels fell into place: two gay couples struggling with an unequal relationship, two floundering college dropouts, two stalwart matrons, etc. This must be intentional. The parallels are too close. Messud even calls one of the characters Julius, like the evil manipulator in AFHD. I am going to have to Google this and try to learn the back story.

15 Days Until Christmas

Book Notes: Scratch Beginnings

I finished reading one friend's book, Creating a Class by Mitch Stevens, but before I took the time to write a review (which I will because I was fascinated by his thesis), I got sucked into Scratch Beginnings by Adam Shepard. Shepard wrote this book about his "experiment" with the American Dream. Put off by the pessimism of his college friends, he set off with $25 cash and the clothes he wore and gave himself a year to become a contributing member of society, with a car, a place to live, cash in the bank, and the prospects for advancing his career. I was so taken with Shepard's brash adventure and his exuberant book that I am writing a longer than usual review and plan to submit it to The Internet Review of Books for its January edition. Now back to drafting a review of Mitch's book.

16 Days Until Christmas

Anthony Burgess List Revisited

I overhauled my Anthony Burgess list. It was one of my earliest posts -- made when I did not know what I was doing. Now all the links should work.


This is the list of Burgess's favorite 99 novels published in English between 1939 and 1989. He wrote a book called, aptly enough, 99 Novels: The Best in English since 1939, compiling his list and explaining his choices. I have not read Burgess's book yet, but based on those novels from his list that I have read so far, I find his choices to be excellent reads.

This is one list that I want to make an effort to finish.

17 Days Until Christmas

Cookbook of the Day: The Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook

American foodies owe a debt of gratitude to Alice Waters. She is the patron saint of California cooking, or new American cooking, or whatever you want to call it. She’s the one who gave us goat cheese croutons, roasted beets, mache, and so many other now-ubiquitous dishes. “Former Chez Panisse chef” is just as much a brand name as the brand named meats and produce she serves at her restaurant.

For those reasons, I actually read The Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook cover to cover, the way one reads an MFK Fisher book – to get an understanding of the cook’s philosophy as well as recipes. Both women write in a formal style and have strong ideas about ingredients, preparation, presentation, and consumption. Unfortunately, Water’s writing is more spare, perhaps as befits a patron saint, and lacks the pithy humor that leavens Fisher’s books. Reading her prose is more like learning a lesson than being entertained.

Which may be why this book struck me as an essential book for someone who wanted to learn to be a restaurant chef, but not particularly useful for someone cooking at home. Most of the menus require some final preparation of the next dish after the preceding one has been served – possible in a restaurant, but not much fun at a dinner party if the cook wants to eat with the guests.

The individual dishes are also complicated or labor-intensive, causing me to often think as I read, “I’d eat that if someone made it for me.” Waters is particularly fond of leg of lamb, lobsters, and quail and her recipes for these show the difficulty in preparing them at home. First, most of the lamb recipes call for spit-roasting the leg of lamb. She even explains how to build a spit. In my spit-deficient kitchen, those recipes are not possible.

Second, while I find a steamed lobster to be a wonderful treat on a special occasion, Waters takes the fun out of it with instructions to semi-cook a lobster, then remove the meat and make a fumet with the shells – a process involving roasting the shells, making the broth, putting the shells in a blender, then straining the whole thing through a fine sieve – then finish cooking the lobster. Whew!

Finally, quail do not usually show up on my dinner table, but if they did, I do not think I’d have the dedication to follow Walter’s recipes. In most of her quail recipes she gives similar instructions: “Marinate the quail in a cool place overnight . . . turning the quail four to five times during this time.” No little boney bird is worth losing a night of sleep.

Reading this Menu Cookbook made me want to spring for dinner at Chez Panisse, but it did not make me want to don an apron and start cooking.

18 Days Until Christmas

Book Notes: Light in August

I enjoyed Light in August much more than As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury, both which I had read in college. I did not know if that is because Light in August is the more accessible of these three Faulkner novels, or if I am just a better reader than I was 20 years ago. So I reread The Sound and the Fury this year (see here) to make an adult comparison. It is a masterpiece, that's for sure. But my personal preference is still for Light in August.

19 Days Until Christmas

It is Saturday, after all.

20 Days Until Christmas

Review of the Day: Whitethorn Woods

Instead of her usual saga, Maeve Binchy presents Whitethorn Woods as a collection of paired short stories sandwiched between sections of unifying narrative. The stories all involve people somehow connected with the Irish town of Rossmore and St. Anne’s Well located in the nearby Whitethorn Woods. Pilgrims visit the well and its shrine to ask St. Anne (the mother of the Virgin Mary) for help in all sorts of matters, but particularly regarding marriage and children.

Each story is told in two parts, from the perspective of two different narrators. The characters in all the stories are intertwined – sometimes substantially, sometimes only tangentially. Lengthy sections at the beginning, middle, and end involve the local priest and his family and tie the book together, as does the debate over building a by-pass through the Woods and tearing down the shrine.

Like Binchy’s other books, this is not a thrill-a-minute page turner. But the characters are well-formed and their stories are deftly told. A good read.

More Poetry

Poetry is in the air. Last week I was trumpeting my friend Kirsten's poetry Writers' Dojo; this week I am congratulating my friend Cat Wood (not her real name, but who am I to blow her cover?) for winning Third Place in the haiku division of the Sante Fe Reporter's "Santa Fe Writes '08" contest. The description itself is poetry.

21 Days Until Christmas

Review: In Hovering Flight

The characters in Joyce Hinnefeld’s first novel, In Hovering Flight, fall into two teams that could be called “the Artists” and “the Suits.” The Artists include the heroine, Addie Sturmer Kavanagh, an avid birder, artist, and environmental activist; her husband Tom, a literature-loving ornithology professor; their daughter Scarlet, a poet; Addie’s two best friends; and various supporters, fans, and hangers-on. The Suits include Addie’s archenemy, a big-shot land developer; corporations; Republican Senators; publishers; college administrators; and the like.

All these characters come into play, directly or through recollection, as Addie’s loved ones gather to mourn her recent death and consider her dying wishes, some of which are unorthodox or even illegal.

Hinnefeld’s writing is elegant and she tells an emotionally complex, multi-layered tale. The problem is that the Artists are all good and the Suits are all bad. Sure, there is some variation and even tension among the Artists themselves. There is the acknowledgement that Addie’s “moral superiority” puts off her loved ones; that some of her ardor may stem from untreated depression rather than healthy concern; and that her fellow activists may be too extreme. But the Artists are fundamentally right in their interests and outlook. The Suits (none fleshed out as characters) range from evil fiends to buffoons. There is absolutely no question about which team we are expected to root for.

Just as the issues are clear to Hinnefeld, team membership is as well. There is no crossover, except as object lessons. For example, the scientific side of Tom’s profession and character is shown in poor contrast to Tom as a writer, musician, and lover of bird songs. Likewise, although Scarlet’s first love Bobby suffers adolescent tragedy, it is his involvement with corporate America that brings him close to death – both slowly with alcohol and quickly with an office in the World Trade Center on 9/11. Bobby is redeemed only when he abandons the world of the Suits and returns to the Artists’ fold.

Hinnefeld means well, that is clear. In Hovering Flight is an earnest novel dealing with heavy subjects (cancer, death, environmental degradation, art, infidelity, autism, motherhood, and suicide, for instance). But Hinnefeld offers no sugar to help the medicine go down. The book is devoid of any humor: there are no jokes, quips, or even wry observations. The book takes itself too seriously and comes across as the same sort of smug, self-righteous lecture Addie herself was wont to give.

OTHER REVIEWS

Internet Review of Books
Fresh Ink Books

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Christmas Idea of the Day: Blog Advent Calendar

A new picture posted every day to count down the days to Christmas.

Blog Changes

Time to spiff up the blog. Gone is the list of "Books on my iPod" because it was taking up space but was not particularly significant. In its place is a list of links to "My Book Reviews" to make it easier to find reviews. Also, I am in the process of changing links so that they open in a new page. The idea is to make it easier to look at other pages, but get back to Rose City Reader. This is a work in progress, but it will get done eventually. Finally, I got rid of a couple of extra gadgets that did not work well or mean much.

Christmas Wishes of the Day

Christmas Thought of the Day

Thanksgiving is the gateway to Christmas, so my favorite time of the year has now officially started! Time for some thematic blogging.

Of course, Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol is a long-standing tradition. I have it and his other "Christmas Stories" ready to go on my iPod, since I am in a Dickens mood lately.

But now I am going to add The Man Who Invented Christmas by Les Standiford to my holiday reading list, thanks to a great review by Ruth Douillette over on the Internet Review of Books. Standiford has written a mini-biography of Dickens, focusing on the circumstances surrounding Dickens's self-publication of A Christmas Carol. Sounds great!

Review: The Magnificent Ambersons

The Magnificent Ambersons, Booth Tarkinton's 1919 Pulitzer Prize winner, is one of those books that I enjoyed more than I thought I would. I was afraid it was going to be heavy and dull, and it certainly wasn't. Still, it was not a favorite of mine.

It moved right along through the story of the demise of the once-prominent Amberson family and the growth of their Midwestern town into an industrial city. However, it moved along at such a clip, and with so little thematic subtlety, that it seemed like a book for young adults.

I'm not saying that Tarkington should have handled his themes with the heavy hand of Henry James, but a little of Edith Wharton's nuance or F. Scott Fitzgerald's precision would have added depth to the tale.

OTHER REVIEWS

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Gobble! Gobble!

Writers' Dojo

A message from my dear friend Kirsten Rian, who is an artist, poet, musician, and all-around wonderful person:

Hi poetry lovers. Wanted to let you know about a new project I’m really excited about. Writers' Dojo is an online literary journal of which I was asked to be the poetry editor. Published by some astoundingly creative and soulful folks, I feel very, very lucky to be part of it all. has been a lot of focus and work on the part of our team and we are now up and running. Still in beta mode and still with a few kinks to work out, the publication was launched at Wordstock. Here’s my latest blog. You can also see the fiction, non fiction, and poetry sections of the site.

Some amazing writers and voices in the nw literary community have been mobilized around this project. Feels good to have it up and available to the world! Happy thanksgiving to you all.

K

Notes re West With the Night

West With the Night is Beryl Markham's compelling memoir of growing up in British East Africa. She is best known for flying solo from England to North America and she ends her book with this story. But the rest is about running wild on her father's farm as a child, learning to hunt and having lion-centered adventures; becoming a professional horse trainer at 17; and her life as a bush pilot in Africa between the wars. The audio version was particularly enjoyable. According to ListOfBests, I am now finished with 11% of the Modern Library's list of Top 100 Non-Fiction Books of the 20th Century.

Review of the Day: The Islands of Divine Music

 

The Islands of Divine Music is delightful find. This first novel by John Addiego tells the multi-generational tale of the Verbicaro family from their immigration to America through the turbulent highlights of the 20th Century.

The Verbicaro family grows out of the rubble of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, with all the vitality and tumult of their adopted city. After the first generation starts a demolition company, the second generation gets in on the ground floor of the WWII Bay Area building boom.

The family business provides a structure for the family as well as the narrative of the book. That family structure is badly damaged by the Vietnam War, leading to a final adventure that tests the faith and love of the third generation of Verbicaros.

The book is dense with historic and family details, but is still as emotionally effervescent and essentially joyful as the extended family it portrays.

Book Frustration! Friends Can Help

In anticipation of a pre-Thanksgiving house move, I packed all 800+ books on my TBR shelves and took them to the new house. Now our move is delayed until January because renovations are taking longer than planned (which we should have planned), so I do not have access to the books I want to read. I am not entirely without TBR books, because I have all those that have come to the house since I packed the shelves. I've been to a couple of library book sales, received a few review copies from publishers and LibraryThing, and even gathered a handful of books by author friends. So I have books to read. But I usually like books to mellow on the shelves for a while, waiting to read one until it percolates up to the top of my consciousness for one reason or other. I feel trapped and rushed having to read the books available from this relatively small pool. I think I will concentrate on Books by Friends. That is a short list and I can finish them by the end of the year: Creating a Class: College Admissions and the Education of Elites by Mitchell Stevens: Mitch is a sociology professor at NYU (at least until January when he moves to Stanford) who has written a insider's guide to elite college admissions. I am about halfway through this book and find it fascinating. The Top Ten Myths of American Health Care: A Citizen's Guide by Sally Pipes: Sally is the President of Pacific Research Institute, a free-market think tank in San Francisco, and author of Miracle Cure: How to Solve America's Health-Care Crisis and Why Canada Isn't the Answer. Water the Bamboo by Greg Bell: Greg is a former lawyer, now a "speaker, trainer and facilitator" who works with companies and organizations to improve relationships and communication. His book is subtitled "21 Strategies for Extraordinary Results in Your Profession or Team."

Review: Wide Sargasso Sea

I am perfectly ambivalent about Wide Sargasso Sea. Every reaction I had to the book is balanced by its opposite reaction:

• The moody, languid prose captured the tropical setting: I longed for a more direct narrative. 
• The switches in perspective deepened the relationships among the characters: it was frustratingly difficult to track who was saying what and when they were saying it. 
• The themes of madness, alcoholism, cruelty, and love were fascinating: the characters were all horrible and it was awful to watch them destroy themselves and each other. 
• The connection between the heroine and the insane wife in Jane Eyre is an inspired literary device; the tie-in with Jane Eyre is a manipulative gimmick. 

See what I mean? Everything I like about the book, I dislike about the book. Equipoise. But it made it to both the Modern Library and Radcliffe lists of best novels of the 20th century, so the half of me that disliked the book is at least pleased to have accomplished two tasks.

OTHER REVIEWS

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Review: Little Green Men

After the famous host of a Sunday morning talk show, and Washington uber-insider, is abducted (twice) by space aliens, he becomes the pariah of the Beltway but the celebrity leader of three million UFO believers.

This set up in the hands of America's funniest political satirist is sure to be entertaining. And it is. Little Green Men is fun and funny and goes down like a bomb pop on the first hot day of summer.

My only problem with Buckley's books is that they are never as good as the first one I read. That is, I think that whichever one someone reads first will be that person's favorite, because it is so surprising to read a clever, really funny, contemporary satirical novel. The first one sticks with you. So, for me, while I find all his books to be entertaining, none will compare with Thank You for Smoking, which made me laugh out loud from cover to cover.

As a side note, it will be interesting to see if Buckley's literary star rises or falls after the kerfuffle caused by his (rather lukewarm) endorsement of Obama. He enjoyed a following among right-wingers because of his famously conservative last name and willingness to shatter some progressive icons in his books. But he may now have gotten the attention of some liberal readers.

Hmmmmmm . . . perhaps there was a method to his madness?

More on JSM

The New Yorker might not have the cache of The Internet Review of Books [insert emoticon of choice], but its recent review of Richard Reeve's John Stuart Mill biography is worth reading. In fact, Adam Gopnik does such a good job with the review, it would be easy to skip the book. Gopnik, author of the must-read Paris to the Moon, is clearly a fan of JSM. His review is less a critique of Reeve's book as a summary. He hits all the highlights of Mill's life and does it with wit and grace -- two qualities in short supply in Reeve's dense tome.

Review: The Photograph

The Photograph begins when a youngish widower finds an old photograph of his dead wife on a picnic with friends.  He becomes obsessively interested in her in a way he never was when she was alive.  Through his search to learn about his wife, we learn about the two of them, as well as her family and circle of friends.

As with every Penelope Lively book I've read, I was really wrapped up in this story.  The characters were fully formed, with interesting lives and complicated relationships.  In contrast, the dead woman at the center of the tale is indistinct, defined neither by occupation nor personality.  Cath is most remembered for being pretty in a purely decorative way -- more than one character describes her as being like a vase of flowers.  Cath's vague character is a useful literary device for developing the other characters and their stories.  She is a foil for the others.

But this device led (for me anyway) to an unsatisfactorily pat ending, as one by one the characters learn Cath's secret and begin to cope with her death.  Looking back from the end, it just did not seem likely that no one in her life understood her enough to realize the one thing that was the most important to her.

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Review of the Day: The English Major

For newcomers to Jim Harrison’s work, The English Major is a delightful introduction to the fiction of this sometimes overlooked American treasure. Fans will enjoy another boisterous romp along Harrison’s literary highway, although the particularly jaded among them may find the themes getting a bit tread worn.

When Cliff and Vivian split after a long marriage, sixty-something Cliff heads off on a mind-clearing road trip inspired by a childhood map of the United States, while Vivian stays in Michigan launching her real estate career with the sale of his family farm. Along his journey, Cliff falls into an affair with a former student, reconnects with his big shot son in San Francisco, visits an old buddy at a snake farm, and undertakes his magnum opus of renaming all the states and birds.

The pages are filled with Harrison’s usual wit; curmudgeony charm; and musings on food, liquor, round bottoms, favorite dogs, and just how square peg loners can adjust to living in round hole society.


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The Scarlet Letter

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Review: The Winter of Frankie Machine

Three quarters of the way through The Winter of Frankie Machine, I was ready to give it up. The protagonist, a former Mob hitman turned bait shop owner, was trying to figure out who had put the hit on him by reminiscing about every job he’d done over the past 40-odd years. This long walk down Mafia Memory Lane read like the author’s box of index card notes on “Great Gangster Scenes.” It was entertaining, but without narrative cohesion – like watching a Sopranos highlights reel.

Luckily, in the last quarter, Winslow gets back to the actual plot of the story. He ties many (by no means all) of the threads together and wraps the whole thing up in an exciting finale. He managed to salvage the book for me, but just barely. Winslow’s world-weary killer-with-a-heart-of-gold protagonist made a great hero. His muscular writing style has just enough wry amusement to give the story a little edge, without being too cheeky. It’s just too bad that the plot was cobbled together.

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Review: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

I want to like Annie Dillard, I really do.  I think the world is a better place because Annie Dillard thinks and writes in it.

But . . . the bugs.  Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is chock-o-block with looking at, thinking about, and describing bugs.  Some other creatures too, both larger and smaller than bugs, but mostly bugs.

As much as I appreciate the conclusions Dillard draws about the natural world and the nature of God, her minute observations about critters and plants could barely hold my attention.   I took pious pleasure in finishing the book, like I had done something that, while a little boring, had its interesting moments and made me a better person – kind of like going to church.

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TRIAL: It Gets Better!

The judge awarded $3 million in punitive damages at our hearing yesterday morning, so the total amount of the judgment is over $4,550,000 – we are pretty sure that is the largest trial win in a sex abuse case in Oregon, and the largest in any personal injury case in Marion County. True, the guy doesn’t have million to pay the judgment, or anywhere close, but he can pay a little bit of it. And because he cannot discharge this kind of judgment in bankruptcy, it will dog him for 20 years. The best part was that the judge gave him quite a lecture! Told him he was a monster and should be in prison. And my client was there to hear it, which did her a world of good. And we made the news!

List of the Day: Book Club

Although I read a LOT, I have never been in a book club until this past year or so. I've enjoyed the experience greatly because the gals in my club are fun, interesting, and make a point of reading the books. We get into some great discussions. All of us were brought in by another member, but no one really knew more than one or two other people before joining. It has been a lot of fun to develop new friendships as well as enjoy a shared pastime. We do not have a theme or work from any pre-fab list of books. The set up is that we rotate hosting responsibilities, the hostess tries to cook (or at least serve) a dinner that is related to the book somehow, and the hostess picks the next book. So, for instance, the gal before me picked A Thousand Splendid Suns, I cooked Afghan food, and then I followed that disturbing book about wife abuse by choosing The Bone People, a disturbing book about child abuse. Luckily, our books aren't always so grim. In the past year, we've read the following: Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky Leap of Faith by Queen Noor The Feast of Love by Charles Baxter A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini The Bone People by Keri Hulme (reviewed here) The History of Love by Nicole Krauss Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver Next up is Loving Frank by Nancy Horan. I have that one teed up on my iPod to start as soon as I finish the 2007 National Book Award winner, Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson.

Review: John Stewart Mill

John Stuart Mill was a philosophical piñata. Break open his mind and it would be chock-a-block full, with treats enough for everyone, no matter their political ideology. Of course, it would be impossible to piece it all back together again.

But Richard Reeves’s goal in his new Mill biography is not to make a coherent whole out of Mill’s economic and political philosophy. In John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand, Reeves sets out to make Mill contemporarily relevant to modern political liberals. Reeves acknowledges that bits and pieces—some quite large—do not fit this paradigm, but he does his best to cram as much of Mill as he can into the mold he wants to use.

Born in 1806, Mill turned out to be a child prodigy. His father James home-schooled him relentlessly, so that by the time he was 12 he knew Latin and Greek. He undertook “a complete course in political economy” at 13, and published his first substantive essays when he was 16. At 17, Mill followed his father professionally by joining him at the East India Company, ultimately succeeding his father as Examiner at India House.

Mill also followed his father philosophically, becoming an ardent Utilitarian in his youth, influenced by his father’s friend Jeremy Bentham. Mill went on to tinker with the Utilitarian “greatest happiness principle,” arguing that qualitative differences in forms of happiness need to be considered in analyzing what would produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. Mill argued that intellectual and moral pursuits brought true happiness in a way that entertainment and amusements could not, explaining:

It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question.

Mill’s own happiness centered on Harriet Taylor, his one true love, possibly his mistress, and ultimately his wife. Harriet influenced Mill’s philosophic development, primarily by fostering his interest in causes near and dear to her, such as women’s rights. She helped him with his work, and her influence can be seen in many of his best-known books, including Principles of Political Economy, On Liberty, and The Subjection of Women. The latter, published after Harriet’s death, earned Mill the title of the Father of British Feminism.

There was a lot going on in Mill’s mind and career. After leaving India House, he focused on his writing. Later, he served a term in Parliament. He was an avid traveler, hiker, and botanist, dividing his time between England and his adopted France, where he had a house in Avignon.

Reeves’s efforts at corralling this massive amount of information about Mill raises a minor, but nagging, problem with the book—the lack of visual breaks in the text. Reeves uses no page breaks, subheadings, or any other indication of a change of subject. In chapters fifty or sixty pages long, covering multiple subjects, it is daunting to face nothing but dense text. For example, in the 58-page chapter titled “A Short, Bad Parliament (1865-8),” Reeves covers Mill’s involvement in causes as diverse as Irish land reform, the secret ballot, cooperative ownership of business, Jamaican governance, and women’s suffrage, without any visual transition. There is no hint of where to take a break. At 487 pages, the book is long, but not so long that a few double spaces between topics would not be welcomed.

A twenty-first century examination of Mill’s writing and actions is a worthwhile, if daunting, undertaking. There is no question but that evaluating Mill’s wide-ranging, nuanced, often anachronistic, and sometimes contradictory thinking makes for heavy sledding. But not content to simply examine Mill’s work, Reeves goes one step further, perhaps one step too far, to try to find a hook that will make Mill appealing to a modern audience. There is enough in Mill’s thinking to catch the attention of political animals of every stripe, from free traders to die-hard Marxists. As Reeves explains:

Politically, Mill has been claimed, and continues to be claimed, by pretty much everyone, from the ethical socialist left to the lasses faire, libertarian right—and at various points by every major political party.

Faced with this hodgepodge of thinking impossible to fit into a modern-day political cubbyhole, Reeves engages in a little semantic sleight of hand to make his point. He uses political labels such as “conservative,” “liberal,” “radical,” and “progressive” as if they have always had the same meaning from Mill’s day to ours. By consistently labeling Mill as a liberal, with progressive ideas, sometimes undertaking radical causes, Reeves positions Mill as a hero of the modern left.

But Mill’s liberal ideology was often closer to the “classic liberalism” of Milton Friedman and others of a libertarian bent. The progressive causes Mill pursued were often the opposite of what today’s progressives would support, whereas conservative notions of Mill’s time would be championed by today’s liberals. For example, Mill’s liberal agenda stressed greater freedom for companies to industrialize, while the conservatives in opposition “railed against the rise of cities [and] industry” and called for “worship of nature and proper acknowledgement of the value of the human spirit.”

For readers new to Mill—and there are many—a straightforward analysis of how the various aspects of Mill’s philosophy square with contemporary political and economic thought would be valuable. However, because in the century or more following Mill’s death in 1873, “Mill’s intellectual stock fell, and his radicalism was covered over with dust,” Reeves needed an angle to try to renew interest in Mill’s life and works. By trying to make Mill a standard bearer for modern liberalism, Reeves may indeed appeal to a broader audience, but he contributes less to solid scholarship.

Nonetheless, Victorian Firebrand adds much to an overall analysis of Mill’s philosophy and is as good a starting point as any for a contemporary study of this prolific writer and controversial thinker.

NOTE

First published in the October 2008 issue of the Internet Review of Books.

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Author of the Day: Michael Crichton

He was the master of using fiction to discuss hot topics and was feisty enough to go after politically correct taboo subjects. He was at the top of his game, so his passing is a real loss. R.I.P. His novels: The Andromeda Strain (1969) The Terminal Man (1972) The Great Train Robbery (1975) Eaters of the Dead (1976) Congo (1980) Sphere (1987) Jurassic Park (1990) Rising Sun (1992) Disclosure (1994) The Lost World (1995) Airframe (1996) Timeline (1999) Prey (2002) State Of Fear (2004) Next (2006)

Review of the Day: Abbeville

Abbeville is a short, well-written novel built on a solid structure, but it should be twice as long to do justice to the story John Fuller attempts. The book tells the parallel stories of the narrator’s attempt to rebuild his life after the bursting of the dot-com bubble and his grandfather’s own boom and bust struggle in the Great Depression.

The grandfather’s story predominates and involves several complex subplots. The central theme to the story is the conflict between the grandfather’s desire to succeed and his perceived duty to help people. This themes plays out primarily in the relationship between the grandfather and his younger brother, whose wastrel ways result in the grandfather’s financial and social downfall.

Unfortunately, there is not enough flesh on the bones. Both the plot and the characters are too sparsely drawn to make them compelling. For example, the key act that culminates in the grandfather’s ruin is described so cryptically, in just one brief sentence, that the reader must speculate about why what happened happened. At least one key storyline just ends with no explanation other than that people often disappeared during the Great Depression. Other story lines simply fizzle out.

Without details, the characters and their relationships are flat and stiff. The tension between the brothers is described so sparingly that it is difficult to fully understand the relationship, let alone to care about it. The grandfather comes off as less a noble man sacrificing for his internal sense of honor as an unsympathetic, thick headed martyr. The narrator never rises above a character sketch of a concerned but clueless father.

It could be that Fuller was trying for a style as strong, clean, and minimalist as his rural Michigan setting. But the result reads more like an outline than a finished novel.


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TRIAL: We Won! And Won Big!

The jury awarded over $1.5 million in compensatory damages to my client, finding that she was sexually abused by her stepfather when she was 12 to 14 years old. The abuse was "especially pernicious" (in the words of our expert witness) because it involved cross-dressing, bondage, and a nylons fetish. The jury also determined that my client is entitled to punitive damages. By agreement of the parties, the judge will decide the amount of punitive damages after a hearing on the 10th. Look for updates here after the hearing. This is a huge win for my client on many levels, not only because it is one of the largest jury verdicts for a case of this kind in Oregon. She is now 24 years old and has finally been vindicated for what she suffered through. She is ready to move forward with her life. This trial was the most satisfying thing I have done as a lawyer. The best part was watching my client grow stronger as the trial progressed and to see her face when the judge read the verdict.

IN TRIAL: be back soon

100th Book of the Year!

Much to my surprise, I figured out that I have read 100 books already this year. I usually read about 100 in a whole year, so I am not sure why I am ahead of the game this year. A big part of it has to do with listening to more audiobooks, I know. After over ten years of working at home, I started working in a law firm again. Even though my commute is only about 15 minutes each way, that half an hour a day listening to a book adds up. Also, because I have been listening in the car more, I got in the habit of listening while I putter around the house making dinner and doing chores. So it could be the audiobooks. It could also be that I am not working actively on any major lists right now. After I finished the Modern Library list, I have been reading more randomly. It's not that the books I have been choosing are all light reading -- I've gone through Moby Dick and that very dense biography of John Stuart Mill in the past month alone -- but I haven't been wading through Theodore Dreiser or Henry James. Whatever the reason, I have enjoyed my 100 books of 2008 and look forward to three more months of reading before the end of the year. My 100th book? Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) by Jerome K. Jerome. Part of my 19th Century reading jag. It's sort of a cross between Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and a P. G. Wodehouse novel.

Even better!

Bookforum.com just added my John Stuart Mill review to their system of telling people about things they might want to read. It's in the "monsters" paragraph at the top of the page right now, but here is the permanent link. How exciting!

I'm moving up!

My stock as a book geek is rising! My review of Richard Reeve's new biography of John Stuart Mill is the top review in the current edition of the Internet Review of Books. I'll post the review here when I get a chance.

List of the Day: Vacation Books

Oh, it is hard to come home from vacation! How nice it was to spend two weeks away from work, doing nothing but peeping at leaves, avoiding headlines, taking in the New England vibe, and reading the kinds of books that I store up for such trips:

Kane and Able by Jeffery Archer;

The Glass Lake by Maeve Binchy;

A Drink Before the War by Dennis Lehane;

Absolute Zero by Chuck Logan;

To the Hilt by Dick Francis; and

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler.

These were all good yarns; all entertaining. Perfect for vacation.

Review: How Far Can You Go?

How Far Can You Go? by David Lodge is a fascinating, anthropological novel following the lives and religious development of a group of English Catholics from their days in a college church group in the 1950s, through the tumultuous years of the sexual revolution.

The friends question their religious tenant and traditions as they face marriage, families, religious callings, sexual identity, and mortality. At the same time, the Catholic Church wrestled with Vatican II, the battle over contraception, internal reform efforts, and the charismatic movement.

The title jokingly refers to the question the young Catholic men asked their priests about “How far can you go with a girl?” But more substantively, the book asks how far the Catholic Church can alter its rituals and adapt to modern mores and still remain the Catholic Church. Or how far individuals can abandon their religious customs and personalize their faith and still remain Catholics or even Christians. On a different level, the title refers to how far a novelist narrator can insert himself into the story and still count the book as a novel.

This is an absolutely intriguing novel. It won the Costa (Whitbread) Award for best novel in 1980. Anthony Burgess included the book in his list of the best 99 novels since 1939. Catholics (whether they lived through the changes depicted or came along after), other Christians, and general readers interested in religious cultures should find it mesmerizing.

Review: Crescent City

Crescent City by Belva Plain has all the makings of a great historic saga: Jewish immigrants flee the poverty and persecution of 19th Century Europe for a life of luxury in the religiously tolerant boomtown of antebellum New Orleans; families are torn apart over the slavery issue and fight on opposite sides of the Civil War; there are loveless marriages, adulterous affairs, hoop skirts, burning plantations, and even blockage runners.

Unfortunately, the book is still boring. It only skims the surface of the major events of the plot and the conflicts the characters face. It lacks the emotional depth and pure entertainment of the classic Gone with the Wind. It lacks the details of the really good historic epics, like John Jakes’s Kent Family Chronicles. It lacks the smutty thrill of a good bodice ripper like that 1970s gem, The Flame and the Flower by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss.

Despite being over 500 pages long, Crescent City comes up short.

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Review: Thomas Paine

In Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations, Craig Nelson taught me that Thomas Paine was the Forrest Gump of the Enlightenment.  He bumbled along through life, usually with no money, no real job, or no home of his own.  Yet he was involved in the most important events, and with the most notable figures, of the Eighteenth Century.

Paine (then Pain) spent his first 37 years in England when, separated from his wife, bankrupt, and fired from his job, he decided to go to America.   It was then that he precipitously met the most famous American in Europe, Benjamin Franklin, who became his lifelong friend and his immediate benefactor by providing him letters of introduction.

Arriving in America in 1774 with his cache of Franklin letters, Paine was a delegate at the first Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.   He began another lifelong friendship, this time with George Washington.  While struggling along as a magazine writer and editor, he wrote Common Sense, which sparked the American Revolution. Although he did not fight in the Revolution, he was often at the front lines with Washington, and his line, “These are the times that try men’s souls” was the troops’ rallying cry.

Following American independence, Paine did not hold office like many of the other Founding Fathers.  But he was sent to France to represent America in negotiating peace with Britain.  He wrote Rights of Man, which sparked the French Revolution and was a world-wide best seller.   It also earned Paine, in abstentia, a British death sentence for sedition.

During the French Revolution, Paine was elected to the French National Assembly, where he was the only member to vote against beheading Louis XVI.  He got himself crosswise with Robespierre and was thrown into prison, destined for the guillotine, when the tide turned against Robespierre and American diplomacy got him released.

While waiting in France until it was safe to sail to America, Paine wrote The Age of Reason.  He also provided military advice to Napoleon Bonaparte about how to invade Britain.  He returned to America upon the invitation Thomas Jefferson.

Nelson does a good job with the story of Paine’s life and adventures.   His “grand theme” gets a little attenuated towards the end as he tried to tie everything together.  But overall this is an entertaining overview of this omnipresent at the revolution Founding Father.

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Review: The Right Stuff

The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe is my favorite book about astronauts. Of course, it is the only book about astronauts that I will ever read, so that isn't the strongest praise. But it is perfect for a general reader like me looking for an entertaining history of America's early space program.

Wolfe definitely keeps the tale interesting. He focuses on the personal, rather than the technical and administrative, aspects of the Mercury space program and the first seven astronauts involved. He follows the seven through their early careers, mostly as test pilots, through each of their turns in a Mercury capsule.

The most remarkable part of the story is the connection Wolfe makes between fighter jet pilots and astronauts. Having grown up in the NASA age, I did not know that the Air Force had a competing rocket program (a program that managed to send pilots several miles into space and then have them actually land the aircraft back on earth) before it was scuttled in favor of NASA's moon missions.

The only drawback of the book is Wolfe's Gonzo journalism style, which much have been refreshing and bold back in 1979. Now, the hipper-than-thou tone is a little tired and can get exasperating.

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Review: Restless

 

Restless by William Boyd is one of the rare novels that is enjoyable from the opening quote to the final paragraph. The story goes back and forth between the cloak-and-dagger world of WWII British espionage and the “contemporary” (1976) relationship between a mother and her daughter.

The premise is that a proper English grandmother, tucked away in a tiny Oxfordshire village, puttering in her garden, gives her daughter a manuscript she wrote, which reveals that she had been a British spy. From there, the story of her life as an intelligence agent develops along with the daughter’s completely new understanding of the person her mother is.

While it has its exciting bits, it is not a heart-racing thriller. Instead, gets into the minds of the characters to look at what it was like to have once been a spy, then live a normal life, and what it would be like to learn that your parent had been a spy with an adventurous life no one knew anything about. Fascinating.

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NOTES

The audio book version was particularly entertaining because the woman who read did remarkably well on the accents. She had to portray characters with a variety of English and American accents, as well as Irish, Scottish, French, German, Russian, Mexican, and Iranian. She did an incredible job.

Review: The Adventures of Augie March

The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow won the National Book Award in 1964.

The story follows the life of the eponymous hero from childhood in Chicago, through a sojourn in Mexico with a zany huntress, to life on the seas in the Merchant Marines. Full of Bellow's over-the-top characters and riddled with discourses on Big Ideas, Augie is a great American hero. Bellow is a treasure.


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Review: The Shell Seekers

The Shell Seekers by Rosamunde Pilcher is a plot-driven family saga centered around Penelope Sterne, daughter of an artist and mother of three unlikable adult children (well, two are outright unlikable; one is supposed to be admirable but is singularly off-putting). Penelope, now 64 and suffering from a weak ticker, putters in her English garden, ponders her past, and considers how and when to dispose of the few of her father’s now-valuable art works in her possession.

The story moves right along at a bracing clip, through lengthy detours into Penelope’s childhood in Cornwall, Britain’s WWII home front, and the younger daughter’s sojourn in Ibiza. It is an enjoyable read, well-deserving of its decades of popularity.

Only in retrospect does the novel disappoint. The main weakness is a lack of character development. The characters spring fully-formed onto the page. The “good” people are all generous, hard-working, independent, and bluntly forthright. (They are also startlingly unsentimental.) The “bad” folks are greedy, vain, self-centered, and silly. None of them change, either individually or in relation to the others. When the narrative reaches its chronologically natural ending, resolution of the various threads is brusquely efficient, but not convincing or satisfying.

Overall, it is an entertaining but unfulfilling read.

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NOTES

The Shell Seekers is on the BBC's Big Read list.  

Review: Hard Times

Hard Times by Charles Dickens is one of the many Victorian Era classics that I had never gotten around to reading. But thanks to an audio version new on the shelf of my library branch, it made it to the top of my TBR pile.

In equal parts good old fashioned storytelling and outdated social criticism, Hard Times is the tale of the Gradgrind family and their struggle to reconcile the rational, fact-based side of life with the emotional and imaginative side. Thomas Gradgrind, Sr. is proud of his “system” of raising children – his own and those in the school he runs – to know and depend only on facts, with no “wondering” or amusement. The ultimate failure of his system leads to the final showdown and resolution of the story.

Dickens packed the book (first published in installments in 1854) full of his usual extraordinary characters. These really came to life in the audio version. Along with some Victorian moralizing, he mixed in plenty of humor and even a little intrigue and adventure. None of the characters are particularly likeable, perhaps especially to a modern reader with less sympathy for the outmoded social constraints under which the characters labor, but they all get their just deserts – for good or ill – in the end. Despite its age, Hard Times remains thoroughly entertaining.

Review: The Assistant

The Assistant by Bernard Malamud is the moving story of an Italian-American stranger who works his way into the lives of an immigrant Jewish shopkeeper and his family.

Malamud perfectly portrays the grinding worries of running a mom-and-pop grocery, but also brings out bigger themes such as the importance of education and an individual’s ability to overcome bigotry. Focusing on the value of loyalty, repentance, and personal responsibility, it is a story of the redemptive power of love and forgiveness. Four stars.

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Review: Havoc in its Third Year

Havoc in Its Third Year by Ronan Bennett is a mystery and a morality play and a historical novel all rolled into one.

In 1630, John Brigge is the coroner and one of the Governors in an unnamed Northern England town. When he is called into town from his family and farm on the other side of the desolate moor, he finds not only a woman accused of murdering her newborn son, but political upheaval as law-and-order extremists use fiery oratory and public torture to consolidate their power.

There are times when the implicit comparison to modern times is a little heavy handed, but, in general, the author avoids preaching by focusing on human ambiguity rather than human hypocrisy. Whether the final ending is hard-heartedly cynical or comfortingly realistic is up for debate.

Review: On Chesil Beach

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan is a perfectly crafted tragedy that describes the way a life can go so easily astray. Through the eyes of the omniscient narrator, we watch the excruciating, awkward wedding night of Florence and Edward who, in 1962, are too freighted with history to breach the cusp of the sexual revolution. The consequences are heartbreaking.

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