*** Oswald Wynd – The Ginger Tree

I really like the basic story (in 1903, Scottish girl goes to China to gets married, has affair, ends up alone to make her own way in Japan) and the central character (initially naive, somewhat conservative, slowly overcoming her upbringing and dealing with prejudices of race, class, and sex), but they’re not realized as well as I’d like in this book. Mary reads too much sometimes as the wish fulfillment of a person in the 70s (the book was written in 77) thinking about a young woman in 1903 — Mary’s evolution from naive girl to proto-feminist is a little too pat, and her insights benefit a little too much from 70s hindsight (or, in some cases, that hindsight is used to make an ironic joke, as when Mary inveighs against the horrible sound of the gramophone and wonders how any true music lover could want one). However, as the book goes on and Mary matures it’s as though the author matures with her — she becomes a more solid and real-feeling character and less of a cardboard cutout. By the end, she’s become interesting and unusual enough to miss her when she’s gone.

 

**** Patrick O’Brian – Master and Commander
**** Patrick O’Brian – Post Captain
*** David Foster Wallace – Girl with Curious Hair

Yes, I’ve started rereading the Aubrey books. They’re just as good the second time, plus the additional pleasure of seeing previews of future people and events (oh look! it’s Pullings! etc).

Girl with Curious Hair is an interesting read for the DFWophile. There’s a lot of good stuff in there, but I feel like it’s still a little unformed. I consider his peak to be “A Supposedly Fun Thing…” and “Infinite Jest” and you can see him here playing with some of the things that would appear in those (e.g. reader annoyance, his very particular ways of rendering dialogue, certain obsessions with media, consumption, etc) but not doing it quite as well. The book’s novella “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” is a particular example of this. It is very DFWian in its way, but ultimately doesn’t really work (for me anyway) — it gets to seem a bit boring and annoying and pointless and sometimes tediously metafictional. In my opinion, DFW mastered these kinds of things in his best writing, but he was always in danger of falling into one or another of these traps, even later on. In Girl with Curious Hair, you see him working out some of his techniques, and you get a flavor of his later mastery, but with a lot of fail.

The book did however lead me to come across this enlightening insight into DFW, found here:

It wasn’t until Marshall Boswell’s Understanding David Foster Wallace was released did any critical work begin to focus upon the importance of Westward to DFW’s direction. On pages 16 and 17 of his publication, Boswell revealed that DFW had used the phrase ‘cynicism and naivete’ in Westward, in his essay E Unibus Pluram, and in Infinite Jest. Boswell wrote that Wallace ‘does not merely join cynicism and naivete: rather, he employs cynicism – here figured as sophisticated self-reflexive irony – to recover a learned form of heartfelt naivete, his work’s ultimate mode and what the work “really means,” a mode that Wallace equates with the “really human.” ‘

that rings true. There were some other good links there and here.

 

The only thing I read in August was Infinite Jest and, as usual (this was my 5th or 6th reading), I am full of things to say about it about halfway through and then have nothing when I’m done. The problem is the book is too big for even any aspect of it to be summarized with some kind of blog post. My thinking always gets away from me until I’m left with a bunch of half-formed ideas that tail off into various tangents. I have about 3/4 of an essay around here somewhere about it from this time, which I will try to get into shape. But so anyway, I love IJ, I loved it as much this time as I do every time I read it.

 

*** Matthew Amster-Burton – Hungry Monkey
***** All I really read in July was Infinite Jest (Hungry Monkey was mostly June). Half-written blog posts about it abound. But I’ve been pacing myself and am still working on it.

Hungry Monkey is subtitled “a food-loving father’s quest to raise an adventurous eater” which pretty much sums it up. It’s funny in places, the daughter, Iris, is certainly cute, and some of the recipes and food tips sound pretty good. But the book is, by the end, insufferably twee, and it’s not very well written. M.A-B. is going for a sort of jokey informality which often comes off forced. And, of course, much of the book is undermined by the fact that Iris is, like most kids, not, in fact, an adventurous eater. The last couple of chapters involve M.A-B. making lobster and then sushi, neither of which Iris actually eats. So what we get is some stories about him making food interspersed with cute things Iris said. MFK Fisher meets Dr. Spock this is not. Still, the book’s mode of thinking is helpful for parents who want to share cooking with their kids. We will probably try some of M.A-B.’s tips and recipes with Nora.

 

**** Neal Stephenson - Anathem
*** Eric Garcia - Anonymous Rex
***** Patrick O’Brian - The Commodore
*** Natsuo Kirino - Real World

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Anathem was a birthday present last year, and it made the perfect jury duty book. I hauled that thing (1000 or so pages) to the courthouse every day for three days, and sat in that (very nice, airy, light-filled) room with it until it was done. I like big books and even finished all three of Stephenson’s baroque cycle, so I was looking forward to this one. On the other hand, I’ve had my issues with Stephenson, so, you know.

Anyway, the book is pretty much “The Name of the Rose” meets “Idiocracy” meets “The Urth of the New Sun”. It’s got the first’s (more or less) monastery setting and rambling philoso-religious dialogues (which are an excuse for the author, whether Eco or Stephenson, to show off lots of library time), the second’s humorously stupid future (some 3000 years in the future and the masses still walk around wearing sports jerseys and drinking “sugared beverages” from gigantic plastic cups), and the third’s assault of words you don’t understand (in Stephenson’s case, because he made them up; in Wolfe’s, because they are archaic dictionary words no one actually uses any more).

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Now with stars (out of 5)!
*** Rachel Dewoskin - Foreign Babes in Beijing
**** Timothy Mo - Sour Sweet
*** Nordhoff and Hall - Mutiny on the Bounty

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I can’t decide if today’s Comics Curmudgeon is a better takedown of the Family Circus or of Jorge Luis Borges. Either way, hilarity ensues.

 

Norma Field - In the Realm of a Dying Emperor
Philip Pullman, editor - Detective Stories

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John Barnes - Caesar’s Bicycle
May Sarton - I Knew a Phoenix
Iris Murdoch - The Green Knight

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G.G. Fickling - Honey West
Roger Lowenstein - When Genius Failed
Roger Lowenstein - Origins of the Crash

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David Foster Wallace - Consider the Lobster
Gopnik, Meltzoff, & Kuhl - The Scientist in the Crib (again)
Morag Joss - Fearful Symmetry
Akimitsu Takagi - The Informer
Qiu Xiaolong - A Loyal Character Dancer
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Lise Eliot - What's Going On In There?
Michael Lewis - Liar's Poker
Iain M. Banks - Use of Weapons
Henry Chang - Chinatown Beat
Ken MacLeod - Newton's Wake
China Mieville - Perdido Street Station
Patrick O'Brian - Caesar
Patrick O'Brian - Hussein
Jon Fasman - The Geographer's Library

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Elizabeth Moon - Sporting Chance
Alexander Kent - Sloop of War
Siegel & Hartzell - Parenting from the Inside Out
Andrew Martin - The Blackpool Highflyer: A Jim Stringer Mystery
Eiji Yoshikawa - Musashi: The Way of the Samurai

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Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon
James Ellroy, editor - The Best American Mystery Stories 2002
Matthew Lewis - The Monk
Gopnik, Meltzoff, & Kuhl - The Scientist in the Crib

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Cryptonomicon is essentially two stories, one set during WWII and one set in modern times (1999), with the earlier story rotating through the viewpoints of multiple characters (bobby shaftoe, lawrence waterhouse, and goto dengo) and the later one focusing on randy waterhouse. I've read it once or twice before and enjoyed it, but this time I'm finding that, though I like most of the WWII story, the modern one just seems pretty bad, occasionally offensively so.

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Harvey Karp - The Happiest Baby on the Block
Jim Piper - Get the Picture? the Movie Lover's Guide to Watching Films
Elizabeth Moon - Hunting Party
John Gottman - Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child
Robin McKinley - Sunshine
Iain Banks - Against a Dark Background
Sloane Crosley - I Was Told There'd Be Cake
Henning Mankell - One Step Behind

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David Foster Wallace hanged himself last night. His wife came home and found him.

I loved his writing, and it's always been fairly obvious it came from a dark place, however hilarious it often was. I don't want to make any grand cliches about the great writer of our generation or whatever, but he could be epic and very very specific at the same time, in a way that is uncommon. I felt like he had a very good handle on what it's like to be alive at this particular moment in history; and so the fact that he chose to no longer be alive now hits especially hard.

Alan Moore - Watchmen
Lawrence Block (editor) - The Best American Mystery Stories 2001
Sam Taylor - The Amnesiac
Michael Chabon - The Yiddish Policemen's Union
David Weber - The Honor of the Queen
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Banana Yoshimoto - Lizard
Elizabeth Kostova - The Historian
Thomas Perry - The Butcher's Boy
Seicho Matsumoto = The Voice and Other Stories

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