Read a Good Book Recently?

Living away from the excited states, I find that books are ever more important. That may not be true; I’ve always found books to be absolutely essential, regardless of where I lived. My father would come home and find me, as a teenager, on the couch on a summer Saturday, exactly where he had last seen me when he left for work that morning, and say, ‘Are you still reading?’ He kept on saying that to me, all his long life.

So, it’s probably not true that books are more important up here on the fringes of contemporary living, but it feels like it anyway. I read two or three books a week and mostly they are books provided for me by the Point Roberts Library, via its mother institution, the Whatcom County Library. Bless you all at this insufficiently honored civic institution. On Fridays, I order up the books I want via the internet, and on Wednesday at noon (the library is open only three days a week, and the delivery of books only on Wednesday), I see what they have sent me to read next.

This has been my pattern for years here, but there is now a big change, I guess as a result of the financial chaos we are experiencing. I used to put a book on my list and see that I was maybe number 2 or 3 on the list if it was a very recent and very popular book. Nowadays, when I put a book on my list, I am more likely to be number 13 or even number 48, as I was the other day. I guess a lot of book buying is discretionary. Of course, I’ve considered it that for years, so I can’t complain that others have figured it out as well. So next year, I may be working on reading older books for which there is less demand.

In honor of books, here, in no particular order, is my list of ‘Best Books I Read in 2008.’ Very few of them were published in 2008, but I don’t see why that should matter. A good book is worth knowing about any year.

1. Calamities of Exile, by Lawrence Weschler. This is a non-fiction work, in which Weschler introduces the reader to (as I recall) five people who have lived in exile and explores what it has meant to them. The thing about this book that is most important is that it is by Lawrence Weschler. Everything he writes is terrific, so I’d recommend not only this book, but anything else you run into by him. (I started to write, I also really liked ‘Vermeer in Bosnia,’ but then I thought about ‘Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders,’ and there was no going back. Just read anything by Weschler and you’ll be smarter than you were before you read it.)
2. Kristin Lavransdattar, by Sigrid Undset. I first read this novel when I was about 14, and I’ve read it probably four more times since then. Undset received the Nobel Prize for Literature in the 30’s, I think, and re-reading it this time is part of my off-and-on attempt to read at least one work by everyone who has ever gotten the Nobel Literature award. I don’t plan to re-read Faulkner, though.
3. Those Troublesome Young Men, by Lynn Olson. The ‘young men’ in question were those who supported Winston Churchill’s re-rise to power in the U.K. in 1939. It’s interesting to read about all the political finagling that got him to head the war effort and the country.
4. Oblomov, by Ivan Goncharov. Another re-read (but the first time) of an old novel. I first read it in grad school, and I liked it even more this time. About a man who can’t stay awake long enough to get engaged in life, and the friends who try to pull him into it. If you’ve occasionally imagined spending much of your life in bed, this is the book for you.
5. Lush Life, by Richard Price. Nobody writes contemporary urban crime stuff better than Price. I first ran into him with a novel called Clockers, later made into a less successful film. His ability to write dialogue is amazing; he also wrote some of the scripts for the later seasons of The Wire, and it showed.
6. The Brief Wonderful Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz. Oscar Wao has some things in common with Oblomov, except he’s a guy who would sort of like to become engaged but is repeatedly pushed away. Diaz is a terrific, relatively new writer from the Carribean.
7. Hotel de Dream, by Edmund White. I’m not normally a big Edmund White fan, but I liked this a lot; perhaps because it is an imagined novel starring Stephen Crane, whose writing I do like a lot. Strange, exotic book.
8. Moth smoke and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, both by Mohsin Hamid. A new Pakistani/U.S. educated novelist, Hamid tells strange and compelling stories. I think what I particularly like about these is the way his familiarity with American sensibilities is interwoven with his understanding of Pakistani sensibilities. The novels appear in a midground, unlike a lot of English-language novels by immigrants, which are often very here or very there. This one's there, but you read it through here.
9. A Free Life, by Ha Jin. Another immigrant writer, all of whose work I like a lot. His novels are more typically very there, but this one is very here.
10. Common Carriers, by John McPhee. McPhee, like Weschler, a New Yorker writer, tells me just exactly all the things I wanted to know about the things I didn’t even know I wanted to know about. This book is about how things get places: ships, barges, trains, trucks, common carriers of all sorts.
11. Game Control, by Lionel Shriver. Shriver is perhaps an acquired taste, but I’ve acquired it. This novel is about academics and NGO do-gooders in Africa, and is smart and funny and painful, as I might equally describe any of her novels.
12. Angel of Grozny, by Asne Sierstad. Sierstad wrote The Bookseller of Kabul several years ago, about Afghanistan under the Taliban, a very revelatory book. In this next outing, she writes of her experiences as a journalist during the Chechen war. It’s grim reading, but it certainly gives one some insight into how much we don’t know about what’s going on around the world.
13. The Muses Are Heard, by Truman Capote. In 1961, I assigned this book as the text for my Comp classes at UCLA, and I thought it was time to see whether it held up. It does: Capote was a careful observer and terrific writer. You want to know how to describe something, read this book. This was also Capote’s first entry into journalism, accompanying a touring company of Porgy and Bess in its non-State Department sponsored performances in Russia at the height of the Cold War (the early 1950’s), when both the Russians and the American performers were highly concerned about what to say about the U.S.’s ‘Negro Problem.’

Apples, Tulips, and Reservoirs

What an extraordinary book is The Botany of Desire (by Michael Pollan). I have been sitting on the porch reading it, off and on, these past few days. If you are a fan of books that tell you a great many new things about subjects you thought you already knew about, it is a book you, too, might be very pleased by. I’ve only read half of it so far, but even if the second half is an absolute dud, the first half will have been plenty worth it. It is divided into four parts; the first deals with the human desire for sweetness and looks into the nature of the apple. Part two ponders the human love of beauty, focusing on tulips. Part III elucidates intoxication and marijuana, and Part IV, control and the potato. As an apple grower and tulip grower, myself (though on a very small scale, of course), I thought I knew quite a lot about both. Wrong. I’ve never grown marijuana, but I grew up in Idaho, ‘The Land of Potatoes,’ as every license plate told me, so I think I’m genetically knowledgeable about potatoes, but we will see. The book is part science, part literature, part personal observation, part general wonder, and the best parts of all of them.

It is a summer kind of book, slow, leisurely, wondering, and wandering. And we are having a lovely summer right now, with three weeks or more of no rain, 70+ degree days, the slightest hint of clouds now and then for entertainment. I sit outdoors, reading, and feel the air barely moving about me, as if it were delicately marking the edges between me and itself: this is Judy, this is air.

The sun means that flowers are flourishing, including the mallows (picture above) that appeared in our garden this year, certainly an illustration of the botany of desire if I needed one. There are five of these volunteers (brought, I imagine, by the birds), and ranging from five to eight feet tall. Their seed output will presumably be prodigious and perhaps next year, the entire garden will be mallows (which look to be related to hollyhocks but are not: instead, they are related to hibiscus).

But all this lovely summer/no rain means that we are starting into drought status, the brown lawn areas confirming it. We are supposed to use water sprinklers only on even days or odd days, I can’t remember which, largely because I don’t own a water sprinkler. If things get watered, I must stand there and make it happen, hose in hand. So watering is rather minimal. The mallows seem indifferent.

It seems so ironic that each summer brings water shortages in a land with so much rain. But the rain is all year except now: July and August. And if you don’t have much time without rain, then it doesn’t pay to build big reservoirs. Reservoirs here are small relative to the population using them and it is always a crisis of sorts in the summer. If these rainless days start to extend to a longer period due to global warming, then the crisis will be a real one. But for now…more like a possible problem than a crisis.

However, the Sunshine Coast Regional District (sort of the equivalent of a county government in the U.S.) takes the water supply very seriously. A year or so ago, they realized that with the significant increase of population here on the coast, the water supply was going to be seriously inadequate. Building new reservoirs: very, very expensive. So, in an act of what seemed to be extraordinary thoughtfulness and political courage, the District instituted a program through which the District paid for two, new, very low-volume flush toilets for every house, and paid for the installation as well. It’s an expensive program, but the District reasons that the amount of money saved by NOT having to build a new reservoir will more than pay for it. An Australian company supplies the toilets at low cost in order to have real data about how much water savings their use provides. Because flushing is a household’s major water use, it makes sense to reduce use in ways that don’t depend upon voluntary efforts.

It is nice to have somebody actually thinking about and working to solve a problem. The District reps will probably not go into history like Johnny Appleseed distributing his apple seeds, or ever be featured in a book like The Botany of Desire, the subject being toilets and all, but I salute their courage and foresight, especially during these days of no rain.

Horizontal Thinking

“The only thing I am certain of is that starting to write at this stage of my life seems presumptuous. It appears that we old folk, as the hour to pack our bags fast approaches, feel almost without exception that we have something important to say.”

--From The Sister: A Novel of Emily Dickinson, by Paola Kaufmann, 2003.

So that’s what this writing is all about? Or maybe not, since I didn’t just start writing at this (late) stage in my life. Reading is more what it’s about than writing, I think. And reading seems to take on a different quality when you get to that aforementioned late stage of life. Maybe it’s only true of English majors (maybe it’s only true of me, how would I know?), but there seems a strange compulsion to re-read all the books that I once read and remember liking. It’s not so much that I remember the books themselves, and maybe that’s why one turns to reading them again: to see if one still likes them.

After I moved up here, I reread all of Dickens, Thackeray, George Moore, and Elizabeth Gaskell, and some of Trollope (the other 40 Trollope novels I read for the first time). I reread some Dostoyevsky, some Tolstoy, all of The Jewel in the Crown series, and who knows what else. I just finished reading Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov, which I last read in 1960, just before I read Italo Svevo’s Confession’s of Zeno, thus linking the two books in my mind forever. Zeno is a man who can’t quit smoking no matter how hard he tries (as I recall), and Oblomov is a man who can’t bring himself to get out of bed, no matter how hard he tries, indeed, no matter how hard his friends try.

Fortunately, I quit smoking 30 years ago, so I probably can pass on re-reading Zeno, but I now find myself somewhat in the position of Oblomov, so the re-read may have been helpful. Oblomov is a world class chooser to do nothing because it’s all too much effort for the paltry rewards the world has to offer. He cannot see the point of all that striving. He may be like a man who retired very early. He may be like the Buddha.

Both Ed and I have noted that not having to be someplace in the morning tends to result in one staying in bed quite a lot longer. At first, we attributed this to the darkness of winter: why get up when it’s still dark? But then spring would come and we were still abed in the light, even if not necessarily asleep. Like Oblomov, I find I can do a world of thinking while horizontally positioned. Indeed, I can plan the entire remainder of the day, should I get up to actually have such a day. It comforts me to think that I don’t spend all this time in bed asleep. I am sure it comforted Ilya Oblomov, as well.

The thing about the book is that I remember it as only about Oblomov staying in bed, but that is not all there is to it. It’s not that he gets up eventually and becomes an industrious and productive human being, but that he finds a way of life that supports his staying in bed. And though he dies early of a stroke, his days up until that time are absolutely satisfying to him and to those around him. His friends have gone off to have another kind of life and they too are satisfied with their busy-ness. So, it seems that the book is more about ‘everybody has to find his own way,’ than it is about ‘everybody ought to stay busy to be happy.”

This morning, when I wandered out into the living room around 9:30 a.m. (90 minutes after the goal for arising), I said to Ed, ‘Ah, what is going to become of me? I considered just waiting and getting up tomorrow at 8 o’clock.” His reply: “I believe we are people who know the importance of a goal, how to set one, and how to decide when a goal might best be at least temporarily overridden." I think Oblomov would have drunk to that.

Rural Reading

A friend wrote to me today about the closing of the Brentwood Dutton’s bookstore, probably the last great independent bookstore in greater Los Angeles. We used to live just down the street from Dutton’s when we lived in L.A., and it was a truly great bookstore, the kind they’re always talking about having on every street corner in New York, Paris and London. You knew the owner, you knew the clerks, they knew all the books, they liked to talk about them, and they had interesting things to say. Its loss is enormous, I know, to all those who were continuing to buy and look there, but it was probably inevitable given the times.

When we moved to the Northwest, I decided to shed my book purchasing habits. In moving, we left behind walls of books for the patrons of the Salvation Army and the Good Will. It almost killed Ed, but I felt it was part of a new life to stop acquiring books. From now on, I said, I’ll depend upon libraries.

But then I washed up first in Roberts Creek, B.C., and a few years later in Point Roberts, WA, and both places had libraries smaller than most of the houses I’d lived in over the past 40 years. Furthermore, their tiny spaces, even though lovingly maintained, were not hosting a wonderful collection of The Great Books, which I had intended to re-read during the up-coming quiet time of retirement. The Roberts Creek (B.C.) library had some interesting possibilities for me because it stocked Canadian writers, of course, and like any American reader, I knew nothing about them. Margaret Atwood and Leonard Cohen were pretty much the extent of my Canadian literary experience. Discovering any number of other Canadian writers was made possible by that little library: Jane Urquhart, Alice Munroe, Rohinton Mistry, Barbara Gowdy, Michael Ondaatje, Wayson Choy, Jann Martell, the novels of Michael Ignatieff, Rona Murray, Gail Anderson-Dargatz, Sharon Butala, and Allison Wearing are but a few of those authors that charmed and educated me.

In Point Roberts, the library was somewhat larger but much narrower in scope as I had already read many of the books they kept. Despite my commitment to no more book buying, I found myself acquiring via second hand book stores all the works of Anthony Trollope (40+ books, many of them in the 600-800 page range). If I was going to buy books to read, at least it wouldn’t be random and they’d supply a lot of reading. I started that collection at Dutton’s bookstore, because at that time I was still flying back and forth to Los Angeles on a fairly regular basis. Later, I discovered used book stores in Vancouver and even in the next town up the coast from Roberts Creek in B.C. When visiting our children, I’d try their used bookstores and slowly I acquired them all, with the final ten or so titles being supplied by my oldest daughter who sells books on the Internet and who had come by--from some sister soul’s library--a complete set of Trollope. I don’t really have to depend on libraries now because, having read all the Trollope novels, I can simply read them again. From my perspective, to be tired of Trollope is to be tired of trees, and of life itself.

But the Internet rescued me from that potentially too steady diet of Trollope, because now the Point Roberts library will get me anything I want via the net. It’s as good as Dutton’s ever was: it’s a lot cheaper, the books don’t forever occupy space in my house (just in my head), and, except to pick up the books, I don’t even have to leave home. I just log on at my convenience, look up the books I want and put them on a list by Sunday, and by Wednesday at noon, they are in my local library and thence in my hand. Similarly, in B.C., I’ve been upgraded to internet access to all the books in the Metropolitan Vancouver region. And there, I can even get books from one library and return them to another.

What an amazing resource a library is. My guess is that it is little used by most people in urban areas. They just order books up from Amazon or Chapters or whatever is still selling retail at the mall. Of course, if people don’t buy books, the Dutton’s of this world aren’t going to last. Yet, there are still plenty of people who really can’t afford books and for them the public library is everything. I seriously doubt that, if Carnegie had not convinced the public a century+ ago that every community ought to have a public library, libraries would have been independently brought into existence. Can you imagine the electorate voting on whether it would be a good idea to spend a bunch of money to put books in a building so people can read them? I don’t hear a ‘yes!’ vote coming out of that election. Indeed, the counties are continually paring down hours and services just because libraries aren’t much of a priority anymore.

I’m profoundly grateful they are there though. And I’m especially grateful to the Point Roberts library and to the Gibson’s, B.C., library. Here’s a pitch coming. Most libraries have some kind of group loosely attached to them, usually called ‘Friends of the Library.’ They help to raise extra funds for the library to do a little more than the government funds them for. Next time you are feeling in a charitable mood, give something to them. You’ll be pleased that you did on that day when you give up buying books and throw yourself on the kind and generous mercy of the library near you.

Starting a Blog

So exactly how is it that you are supposed to 'get the whole picture'? At the moment, my guess is the whole picture is available only when you are at the end of the picture. Thus, the closer you are to the end (point in time), the 'wholer' picture you get. It doesn't make it a better picture; in fact, it may make your heart break. If you are interested in a 1500 page elucidation of this conclusion, I suggest you read "Kristin Lavransdatter" (Sigrid Undset, 1923).

Starting a blog: First of all, I just saw that Google would let me do it. If Google will let me do it, perhaps I should do it. Then, Google wants me to name the blog. What possible name could it have? I don't want my name on it, so maybe a cliche or common phrase? 'Get the Whole Picture' came to mind because I am indeed reading 'Kristin Lavransdatter' this past two weeks. It's about a couple of people who can never get past themselves in order to see the whole picture, or even a picture bigger than themselves. It's about narcissm and disorder and early sorrow and the long decline therefrom. I first read it when I was in high school and engaging in the standard narcissm of that age; I read it again in the late 60's, when a generation and then some were figuring out yet a more expansive narcissm than we had previously imagined. And now I read it again (in my 70's) and only now see a 'wholer' picture. It's an amazing character study. Give that woman a Nobel Prize for literature for character study: oh, they did, in 1928.

And for a completely unrelated photo,



http://www.flickr.com/photos/albaum/2273462938/in/photostream/