letters and sodas: booknotes

After reading Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan back in May, I ended up checking out three John Green books from the library, wanting to read more of him, thinking I liked his literary voice. Looking for Alaska was OK: hugely readable but also a bit over-dramatic/too much of an “issues” book for me. I liked the offbeat humor of An Abundance of Katherines more. Paper Towns, though, is far and away my favorite of John Green’s solo works. The plot has some similarities to Looking for Alaska: smart/nerdy guy falls for crazy/unpredictable/smart/hot girl, but Paper Towns is laugh-out-loud funny in a way that Looking for Alaska only occasionally is, manages to be suspenseful and exciting without being melodramatic, and is also very much a self-consciously smart book: there’s a whole lot of Walt Whitman in these pages.

Because the story’s a mystery, complete with clues that the characters have to follow, it’s hard to say much about the plot without saying too much, but: Quentin Jacobsen, aka Q, is a well-adjusted high-school senior. (His parents are both therapists, so he thinks about well-adjustedness more than you might expect.) He’s smart, he’s well-behaved, he’s content with his daily routines: he has a perfect attendance record at school. But he’s also totally in love with his neighbor, Margo Roth Spiegelman: they’ve known each other since age two, and were friends as kids, but now she’s popular and he’s not and so they don’t have occasion to hang out much, until she shows up at his bedroom window at midnight and talks him into accompanying her on a late-night revenge adventure (her boyfriend’s been cheating on her with her best friend). Margo is simultaneously pushy/awful/selfish and really great; hilarity ensues, and then Margo disappears. She’s left home before, so no one’s too concerned at first, but days pass and she doesn’t come home and Q begins to worry.

I like how Q learns about himself and about friendship as the book progresses: how he realizes he’s not as much of a scaredy-cat as he and others might have thought, and how he realizes that other people are, well, people, with as much of an inner life as he has. I like how he reads Leaves of Grass—first just looking for clues, but then really reading it, thinking about the world and multiplicities of voices and multiplicities of metaphors and how the way we choose to see the world shapes us. I like the unabashed lyricism this book sometimes has, like when Q, talking about someone who died, says this:

I always thought of it like you said, that all the strings inside him broke. But there are a thousand ways to look at it: maybe the strings break, or maybe our ships sink, or maybe we’re grass—our roots so interdependent that no one is dead as long as someone is alive. We don’t suffer from a shortage of metaphors, is what I mean. But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters. If you choose the strings, then you’re imagining a world in which you can become irreparably broken. If you choose the grass, you’re saying that we are all infinitely interconnected, that we can use these root systems not only to understand one another but to become one another. The metaphors have implications. Do you know what I mean? (p 301)

I’m currently catching up on back issues of The New Yorker—I’m not quite sure how I got behind: I used to always be caught up! I used to see people reading old issues on the train and think, “really, you’re just reading that now?” But it’s OK: I don’t feel (too) bad about the fact that I’m just now reading the Summer Fiction issue (June 14 & 21). I like short stories, or at least, I think of myself as liking short stories, but somehow I don’t actually read that many of them in book form: at any given moment I’m much more likely to be reading a novel, or a book of poems, or maybe a book of essays. But that’s where The New Yorker comes in, except that I often find the short stories in its pages to be, well, semi-memorable at best. This may partly be a function of the fact that I don’t tend to write about those stories here, or to discuss them with anyone else—and what I read but don’t write or talk about, I tend to forget. But I’m starting to think it might also be about the subject matter. I’m generally just not that interested in short fiction about middle-aged people who are privileged, heterosexual, and/or having marital difficulties or career trouble. And I feel like The New Yorker‘s fiction section has a lot of that. Not that there aren’t other kinds of stories represented as well, and not that I don’t sometimes appreciate a style or phrase in those stories, or even the way the plot unfolds. But unless something formally quirky or interesting or fun is happening, it’s probably not going to resonate with me. Also, I think I like short shorts, or even just short-ish shorts, best of all short stories.

Which is why a two page story by Jonathan Safran Foer called “Here We Aren’t, So Quickly” made me pause when I started reading it and made me smile when I kept going. Here’s how it start: “I was not good at drawing faces. I was just joking most of the time. I was not decisive in changing rooms or anywhere. I was so late because I was looking for flowers.” And it continues like that, except with some paragraphs being all “You” statements, and some being a mix of “I” and “You” and some being “We.” (There are some “They” sentences at the end, and some that don’t even start with a pronoun—but not very many of those, comparatively speaking.) I love it, the pace of it, the length of it, the way it tells a story through all the accumulation of these insignificant-seeming bits and pieces, how it traces the line of the speaker’s life through love/marriage/parenthood/boredom but does so in an unexpected way.

You can only read the whole story on The New Yorker‘s website if you have a subscription to the magazine, but someone else liked this story enough to type the whole thing out: here it is in its entirety.

Colin Singleton has just graduated from high school, but he worries he’s already past his peak: he was a child prodigy, but doesn’t really know what he’s good at, aside from learning languages and remembering facts and anagramming phrases, and he fears he won’t actually amount to anything. And to make things worse he just got dumped a girl named Katherine. Which might not sound like the end of the world, but it’s the nineteenth time he’s been dumped by a girl named Katherine, because girls named Katherine are the only ones he ever dates, and he always gets dumped. So Colin’s at a bit of a crisis point. But the answer, sometimes, is just a change of scenery: so instead of learning Sanskrit over the summer (as his dad suggests), he lets his best/only friend, Hassan, talk him into a road trip. Except they only get from Chicago to Tennessee. There, in a middle-of-nowhere town called Gutshot, they meet a girl who’s about their age and her mom, who likes them right away and promptly offers them summer jobs working on an oral history project she’s just starting to put together. Humor and romance and Eureka moments ensue, plus footnotes, plus math: Colin comes up with and tries to perfect a “Theorem of Underlying Katherine Predictability,” a function that will let him graph his nineteen relationships with Katherines but will also predict, in any relationship, who’s going to dump whom and when.

I like how John Green writes—this book is funny, and Colin’s utter different-ness is often used to humorous effect, like:

“I’m behind on my reading,” Colin explained.
“Behind on your reading? All you do is read,” Lindsey said.
“I’ve been way behind because I’ve worked so hard on the Theorem and because of oral historianing. I try to read four hundred pages a day—ever since I was seven.” (p 109)

But there are lyrical bits, too, especially at the end, as Colin learns that connections between people, not just ideas, matter, and realizes that storytelling is sometimes a more useful skill than math.

It is summer, which means mountains of vegetables from my CSA farm share are filling my fridge every week. I was behind on cooking and eating all these veggies for a few week, but the other day I decided to have a great big fridge clean-out, in which I threw out everything that was past salvaging and stopped feeling guilty about it. Now that I’m not totally overwhelmed by veg—I still have a lot but it’s all sorted and organized and I have a list on the fridge telling me what I have —I am remembering how good Farmer John’s Cookbook is for CSA season. It’s full of veggie-centric recipes, and I’ve managed to find a few lately that are pleasingly simple, not boring but “I already have all the ingredients in the house.” Recent highlights: Last weekend Megan and I had dinner together and cooked the kohlrabi hash, which is gingery and surprising and great, even if the grating of the kohlrabi can be tedious. Last week at home I made “summer squash with a crispy cornmeal coating”: normally any recipes for breading and frying things seem like too much work, but this was simple and delicious and a perfect side dish. The other day I made some “broccoli with Asian-style dressing,” which is to say with vinegar and soy sauce and toasted sesame oil and garlic and ginger and peanut oil. And last night I made the Swiss chard with pine nuts and raisins and my boyfriend made us some cheeseburgers, and that plus white whine was the perfect summer dinner. Next up: curried rice and cucumber salad with walnuts and raisins.

Meanwhile, in non-vegetable-related news, a few recent conversations at work have been making me think about books/reading/how we choose what we read. Conversation one: someone was saying something about 1984, and how he felt surprised by how many details of the book had stayed with him through the decades, and then mentioned he’d recently reread Catch-22, another book whose details had stuck in his head since he first read it at age 15, and which surprised him on re-reading by being even better than he remembered it—and he’d remembered it as being quite good. (This made me wonder if I should also re-read Catch-22, which I only read because I had to read it for a college class. I liked it, but maybe I’d like it more now?) Another person in the room chimed in with, “wow, I don’t know when I last read a novel,” which prompted the Catch-22 reader and I both to say “you should!” Though of course, well, maybe he shouldn’t. If reading intelligent non-fiction (which I think is what this person reads: my impression is that his choices lean more towards the business/tech side of things than to general interest or history, though I might be wrong there) is what brings him joy, well, then, have at it, right? I might see something like Pull: The Power of the Semantic Web to Transform Your Business sitting on the sidewalk and pass it by (I *did* see it and pass it by the other day, actually, though not without briefly considering picking it up), but that doesn’t mean someone shouldn’t be reading it.

Conversation two: I was carrying To Say Nothing of the Dog in my hand on the way into the office one morning, and someone asked what I was reading. When I explained it, he said, possibly just matter-of-factly, or possibly a little dismissively, “oh, genre fiction,” then asked how I’d heard about it. So I said I’d heard about another book by the author on a book blog I read, to which his response was to ask if I read a lot of book blogs, to which my response was “yeah, I guess.” At which point he advised me to follow my own instincts. Which made me laugh, because of course I do, and I imagine most people who read book blogs do. It’s exciting to find out about promising-sounding books from blogs, sometimes especially exciting if the book is outside of my usual reading interests and therefore probably not something I would have discovered all on my own. But there are still lots of books I read about/hear about, whether on book blogs or elsewhere, that I have absolutely no interest in picking up—and I don’t see how reading book blogs is any different from reading the NY Times Book Review or book reviews in the New Yorker or Publishers Weekly (which I used to LOVE flipping through when Megan worked at Scholastic and would bring home old copies from the office). And of course, there are still times when I pick up a book just because it catches my eye, not because I’ve heard about it—or its author—anywhere.

All of which is to say: I sure do like having an ever-growing and ever-eclectic reading list. It’s exciting to me—and I’m OK with the fact that I’ll never read everything I want to read. (My boyfriend and I talk about this periodically. He tends to worry about whether a given book is worth his time, whereas I don’t really think about that. I mean, I guess I do think about it: there are, as I’ve said, books I’m entirely uninterested in ever reading. But once I hit the point of deciding that a given book might be interesting or fun, then I read it when it seems like I’m in the right mood for it.) What about you? How do you choose your books? Do you think reading book blogs has changed what you read?

November 15, 1940: Coventry Cathedral is full of smoke and rubble, and Ned Henry is looking for the bishop’s bird stump, which is a Victorian vase, which he needs to find because Lady Schrapnell, who is rebuilding the cathedral in time for the 125th anniversary of its destruction, wants to know exactly what was in it when it burned, so she can reproduce it all, every last bit. Ned’s been on twelve “drops” from the 21st century into the past in the last week, and it seems he’s suffering from time-lag, though of course he doesn’t realize it (“Time-lag victims never think they’re time-lagged,” he says, as he worries about whether one if his companions is time-lagged and how he’ll get this companion to acknowledge it.) Ned’s pulled back to 21st-century Oxford to recover, but realizes Lady Schrapnell will never let him rest. So he’s sent off to the Victorian era to recuperate … but also to sort out a bit of a problem that another time-traveling historian has started.

I haven’t read Three Men in a Boat, which informs the structure (and humor) of this book, but even so, I found it very funny. Here’s Ned, talking about his upcoming trip to the past: note that a tendency toward the maudlin is one of time-lag’s symptoms:

The Victorian era. Long dreamy afternoons boating on the Thames and playing croquet on emerald lawns with girls in white frocks and fluttering hair ribbons. And later, tea under the willow tree, served in delicate Sèvres cups by bowing butlers, anxious to minister to one’s every whim, and those same girls, reading aloud from a slim volume of poetry, their voices floating like flower petals on the scented air. “All in the golden afternoon, where Childhood’s dreams are twined, In Memory’s mystic band—” (pp 29-30)

It’s not just funny though: there are also satisfying descriptions of Oxford, of the Thames and the Charwell and Christ Church, England in June, boats on the river, and an English bulldog—a very funny English bulldog who snorts and snores and walks crooked. There’s a lot of pondering about how history works/how the world works. And there’s a time-travel/mystery/suspense plot that’s exciting enough that, once I got into it, I really didn’t want to put the book down, because I was having so much fun keeping up with all the misunderstandings and misadventures and twists.

“Every time I travel,” this book starts, “I feel a very slight feeling of dread at the moment of departure, a dread sometimes shaded with a soft shiver of elation. Because I know that any trip brings with it the possibility of death—or of sex (both highly improbable of course, yet not to be excluded altogether.” But the narrator’s travels are often more ordinary: he’s always bringing himself with him, after all. What’s more, he runs into people he knows, talks about small-town European gossip, carries his usual routines around, in modified form. (In Tokyo: “Although it was pastis time, we contented ourselves with a green tea” (p 9).) He moves from airport to hotel to shop to café, but sometimes seems more focused on the in-between, on the global all-places/no-place, than on the specificities of where he is: “You arrive in Tokyo the way you arrive in Bastia, from the sky. The plane flies in a long arc above the bay and aligns with the runway to touch down. Seen from above, at four thousand feet, there isn’t much difference between the Pacific and the Mediterranean.” (p 7). There are times when he does experience scenes/events/people that are peculiar to a place that isn’t home, but he’s often flip or critical: at the On Matsuri in Nara all he says is “too bad it’s raining, huh?”; in the same chapter he meets a Japanese woman who admires his work, but he just talks (to the reader, not her!) about how bad her French is—never mind that clearly he’s not managing to speak to her in Japanese. This all could get old quickly, and kind of does, but then there are passages like this, which I like a whole lot:

In Hanoi, the traffic punctuates each hour of the day and almost every hour of the night. The noise of car horns never stops in the streets, it forms a permanent background noise like an uninterrupted murmur that you could almost forget if it didn’t keep coming back at you, it being precisely the function of horns to attract attention, to signal and warn, to drown each other out, outhonk one another. Thousands of horns blow without a moment’s silence on the streets, shrill and loud, sharp and repetitive, insistent, some quick and piercing, fired off nearby in impatient salvoes, others remote, lost, muted by their distance, mainly from mopeds and motorcycles, but also from cars and taxis, tarpaulined trucks and three-wheeled vehicles, buses and vans and sometimes even—lost in the middle of an intersection, hardly audible in the surrounding turmoil— the delicate and isolated tinkle of a bicycle bell. (pp 58-59)

At the end, though, I found myself underwhelmed/glad to be done with reading this. Maybe I just wasn’t in the right mood; maybe I just read this at the wrong moment. I kept wanting to like this book more than I actually did; there were moments of interest, but not enough of them.

Miles Halter leaves Florida at the start of his junior year: he’s headed for the Alabama boarding school that his father also attended, but it’s not really out of tradition that he’s going, and it’s not that he’s had a particularly traumatic high school experience thus far. I mean, he’s a nerd, and doesn’t really have any friends, but he’s been basically OK with that. Except not really. Miles loves reading biographies, and is especially fond of learning people’s last words, and one set of last words attributed to Rabelais, “I go to seek a Great Perhaps,” resonates with him. Miles senses that there’s a “Great Perhaps” out there and hopes that attending Culver Creek might help him start to find it.

So: he shows up at boarding school, ends up with an unpopular but smart and friendly roommate, and finds himself in a circle of friends that includes said roommate (Chip, aka the Colonel), a guy named Takumi, a girl named Lara, and centrally, a girl named Alaska, the Alaska of the title, who’s smart and hot and funny and who, clearly, quickly becomes the object of Miles’s fantasies and affection, even though she’s dating a college kid. So we have these kids, and we have their normal lives at school, but it’s clear from the back cover copy and from the way the story itself is structured—divided into a “before” and an “after”—that some big event is going to upset the ordinariness of high school life. Which it does, leaving Miles and his friends struggling to figure out the how and the why of what exactly happened.

This was kind of a guilty pleasure book for me: it’s not badly written but it’s not super-literary either, and there are plot points that are overly obvious/that make you wonder why Miles, who at one point notes that his “general social strategy” consists of “listening quietly,” didn’t pick up on them sooner. And it’s easy to find fault with the characters, how it feels like you don’t really get to know some of them (what does Takumi like, other than hip-hop? what is Lara like, other than pretty and quiet and Romanian?)—although partly that’s to do with the first-person narration, too: Miles really doesn’t get to know Lara very well, even though he briefly dates her, so neither do we. But mostly I was too busy reading this book quickly over the course of two days to quibble with it much, and I’m still looking forward to reading more John Green.