Update

So it turns out the books were here the whole time! There was just one more box in the car that I didn't know about. Lesson learned: when your husband is doing back to back night shifts in his first year of residency in the ER, and he tells you he finished bringing the boxes up, you might want to double check that story.


All the books are here on my shelf now, and I am glad. 

Great! Except...

I'm trying not to, but I'm having a little bit of a hard time not feeling sad tonight. As I opened my boxes of books and arranged them on my shelves, I kept leaving the top left position free, saving it for the books I use most frequently, books on writing and, because of the project I'm working on at the moment, books on Virginia Woolf. Guess which box seems to have been lost in transit? That's right; it's the most important books that don't seem to have made the journey with me. 

This is particularly frustrating because while we were staying at my friend's place before moving in here, I saw the boxes of books I'd shipped and suspected that at least one was missing. I remembered sending 9, I thought, and there were only 7 there. But, there was not space to be unpacking all those boxes in her house, so I just left them until now. I sent them through a small Postal Annex in Portland, so I can easily call to complain, but it's been a month. What good will it do? What other options are there? 

It will be okay, I know. But I am just a little bit sad. 

What to read next?

Right now I'm finishing up re-reading The Waves, and also making my way slowly but surely through a crossover academic/spiritual text called In the Company of Rilke: Why a 20th Century Visionary Poet Speaks so Eloquently to 21st Century Readers. But I'm going to be done with The Waves soon and I'll need to pick up another novel. As I desperately need to save money, it's got to be one of the books I acquired from a friend who was downsizing. So here are the contenders:

Cat's Cradle, by Vonnegut: Obviously, a classic. And I'm pretty sure I haven't read it yet. Read and totally loved Slaughterhouse 5, so I'm definitely going to read this book at some point, if not absolutely next.

Two novels by Kathy Acker: Blood and Guts in High School, and Empire of the Senseless: These seem pretty weird indeed. The description on the back of the first one starts like this: "Janey lived in the locked room. Twice a day the Persian slave trader came in and taught her to be a whore. Otherwise there was nothing." It says Acker's work has been described as everything from "post-punk porn to post-punk feminism." At least we all agree it's "post-punk," whatever that is. The other one is some post-apocalyptic thing about a pirate and a part-robot part-human. Okay guys, I'm really not sure about these ones... anybody got any support for Kathy Acker they want to share?

Into Thin Air by Jon Kakauer: This best-selling piece of narrative nonfiction describes Krakauer's "ill-fated expedition" climbing Mt. Everest. It's supposed to be good, right? And I'm getting more into nonfiction these days, so maybe I should give this one a go.

Okay, friends, I need your advice. What should I read next??

A House Without Books...

So, as I mentioned, I’ve recently moved across the country, and have been busy arranging things and making our new little place a home. (It’s NYC, so I mean “little” quite literally). Most of my things are here around me now, which feels good, but I’m still missing my books. I shipped them media mail to a friend, and have yet to lug them down her stairs, into my car, across the borough, and up my own 3 flights of stairs. But tomorrow is the day for that, and I am excited. It will be so good to have my old friends back home with me.  

I have been thinking about my books since I last saw them, wondering if all arrived safely, reciting their titles in my head. As you may have gathered from reading my blog, I’m a Buddhist, and so I try not to be attached to material things, but books are hard for me. I still think about the ones I had to leave behind and sell when I lived in London, Copenhagen, and Bangkok. Some of them I’ve bought again, others I just call up in my memory now and then, gazing at their covers with my mind, flipping through their pages. It’s funny, but I can remember what many of them looked and felt like, often just as well as what was inside their pages. I am re-reading Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, now, but the old, yellowed copy with the crumbling cover, with the watercolor picture of waves on it, that I borrowed from Dee in Bangkok, is never far from my thoughts, nor is the grass in the park in which I so often read then.  

Why am I so attached to my books? Why does a house not feel like a home without cobbled together bits of paper with words on them strewn about it? My friend Jessica had a good explanation for it. She said it’s because the books on our shelves are our trophies. I had never thought of it that way before, but she’s right, don’t you think? When I look at that copy of The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, or that big honkin Ulysses up there on my shelf (or think of them, far across Brooklyn, in their boxes) I feel a sense of pride knowing that I have read that, and a sense of accomplishment, a box I have ticked off. Even the small, thin books tell a story beyond what is in their pages: they tell a story about me, who I am, what I know and what I have thought about. I guess that’s another reason I like to see my books around me: they remind me who I am, what I know that I’ve forgotten, what wisdom was once imparted to me, that could be picked up again any moment by opening the pages, or even just by looking at a spine.

Julie & Julia, Powell

Julie & Julia

Julie Powell

2005

USA

            Having seen the movie before reading the memoir, I was surprised to find that Julie Powell paints herself as an insecure, judgmental crazy woman who constantly throws hissy fits and collapses on the dirty floor. On the one hand this presentation might seem “honest,” or “brave,” since after all it does avoid the memoir-trap of presenting oneself as “better,” or more put-together than one actually is. On the other hand, though, it seems to go too far in the other direction. Truth be told, I just didn’t always buy it. The voice feels constrained by its negativity; Powell wants us to think she’s tough, yet the concern for how others will view her undermines that assertion. For example, Powell avoids talking about her success for the most part, and when she does discuss the interviews and press she starts to get because of her blog, she is dismissive and off-hand, focusing on the tedious parts of doing TV interviews, only for very brief instants expressing any kind of happiness or excitement about the fame that seems to be coming her way. She seems not to want to piss the other jealous bitches off - she knows only too well how annoying it is when someone other than you has a reason to be happy – so she pretends that she doesn’t really care about any of it, and the interviewers and journalists asking her questions, she says, are pretty stupid, anyway.

 Which is fine, I guess. And understandable, because Powell lives in New York, and because while people here crave success and attention, they also know that others may not be 100% psyched for them if they achieve it, so they’d better not get too (openly) happy about it. In fact, they’d better not get too happy in general, because everything will of course come crashing down again at any moment. So instead of getting our hopes up we pretend a toughness that may or may not really be there; in Powell’s case, she tells us out how disgusted she is by the word “joy,” a point that’s obviously meant to prove she’s not naïve and silly enough to actually believe in such a thing. For me, this is the problem with Julie & Julia: Powell admires Julia Child for the exact qualities she herself either does not have or cannot express – joy, hope, wild abandonment of societal opinion, glee. While Powell’s depiction of herself might be “honest,” I don’t think it’s completely true. I don’t think she’s quite brave enough to really tell the truth here, and while I don’t think it makes for a great memoir, I do think it’s completely understandable. For me, too cynicism is often more comfortable than hope. 

            The premise of Julie & Julia is unique and interesting – a dissatisfied secretary cooks her way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking in one year while blogging about it. There are a few heartwarming moments, some funny moments, and a lot of relatable moments. While Powell is very good at describing her disgusting kitchen covered in dirty dishes and kitty litter, her descriptions of the tastes and textures of the food are less evocative. The best parts of the book are the infrequent interludes in which Powell fictionalizes brief episodes of Julia’s life, giving us a hint of what the iconic chef was like. Nora Ephron, who wrote and directed the movie version, obviously agrees with me. The movie reverses the focus of the book, staying primarily with Julia Child, played by Meryl Streep, and her husband Paul, in their post-war Paris apartment as Julia goes to cooking school, becomes a chef, and eventually writes MtAoFC. Amy Adams, as Julie Powell, is sweeter, cuter, funnier, and less foulmouthed than the book Julie, all of which makes for a more enjoyable experience.

             

            If I supposedly value honesty so much, I should put in a disclaimer here. We all come to books with our own needs and desires and hang-ups and I, like everyone else, read through the lens of whatever else is going on in my life. Right now, I have just moved back to New York City after five years away. Given my circumstances, it’s probably no big surprise that I’m troubled by the portrait of an angry, hostile woman in a callous, dirty city. Getting to know Julie Powell brought me uncomfortably close to the reasons I ran away from New York the first time around. While I was away I seem to have calmed down a bit, and the angry demon that used to consume me is sleeping, for now, but the truth is that I’m completely terrified that all that sadness and desperation will come rushing right back now that I’m back in the big bad city. Powell’s memoir made it harder for me to pretend I wasn’t feeling those fears.  

I could leave. But as it’s love that’s brought me here, I’m going to stay. I could fall into cynicism and despair, but as I want to have a happy life I’m going to keep on doing the hard thing, which is choosing hope again and again, a thousand times a day. Like reminding myself that Julie & Julia was written in another time. 2005 is a long time ago, not just for me, but for all of us. Our old concerns about money and status and power just don’t seem as important now that we’ve seen how easily they can be taken away, and how much we have to depend on each other when that happens. I won’t go so far as to say that snark is “dead,” but it’s dead to me, and because of that this book feels like a relic of some dark, uncivilized past. It’s true that I live in New York again, but at least I don’t live there anymore.

The Golden Compass, Pullman

The Golden Compass (USA)/Northern Lights (UK)

Philip Pullman

1995   

UK

“There is a curious prophecy about this child: she is destined to bring about the end of destiny. But she must do so without knowing what she is doing, as if it were her nature and not her destiny to do it.”

I’ve been talking like a crazy person lately. Ever since I started reading The Golden Compass, the first in the His Dark Materials series by Philip Pullman (thanks for the recommendation Turner and Josh!). Apparently, it’s fine to talk about quidditch, or Edward and Jacob or whoever, as though they’re real things, but start talking about Dust and daemons, and people start to look at you funny. Which is not fair, because The Golden Compass is a really good book, and definitely up there with Harry Potter in terms of depth of subject matter, if not description.

I’ll admit I had a little trouble getting into this book at first. I guess it started too “en medias res” for me, too much in the middle of things, because I didn’t know what a daemon was, or what the Retiring Room was, or tokay, or any of it. But soon I figured it out, and my engrossment progressed quickly from there. Like Rowling, Pullman explores ideas that should be of importance to everyone, from a 14 year old to a 49 year old. But he does so in a way that’s more subtle than Rowling’s, and thus open to more ambiguity and complexity. Whereas Rowling uses the figure of Dumbledore to give Harry hints about meanings of everything, all of the adult characters in Pullman’s text are fraught with moral complications; none can be completely trusted. This may be a fight between the forces of good and evil, but what is good and what is evil here is a lot harder to figure out – and that is precisely the dilemma for the rough-and-tumble female heroine, Lyra. While Lyra has to go through serious physical trauma in the novel, the moral dilemmas prove to be more troubling. There is no Dumbledore to tell Lyra that she really must trust the Master of her college, in spite of seeing him try to poison someone – she has to decide all of that on her own.

            

One can’t really talk about the novel without reference to two things – daemons, and Dust. First, a daemon is kind of like a spirit animal. I don’t know about you but there was a period of time in college when my friends and I liked nothing better than to discuss what our spirit animals might be. For some, it was easy – mine would be a cat, my friend Pfeif’s, a squirrel. For others it was a lot harder; many animals worked and we could imagine it going a lot of ways. A daemon is kind of like a spirit animal, except that it’s an actual animal that goes with you everywhere, speaks, and basically acts as your emotional support for life. It can change its form until you reach  puberty, at which time it takes the shape in which it will remain for the rest of your life. In The Golden Compass every human has a daemon; they are so crucial to being human, in fact, that they are referred to several times (by Lyra, in her own thoughts, it seems worth pointing out) as humans’ ‘souls’. Whether or not a person can remain a person, if separated from his or her daemon, is one of the central questions of the text.

The second major issue involves something referred to as “Dust.” Dust is far more mysterious, in the world of The Golden Compass, than daemons, because it is a new phenomenon. Neither readers nor Lyra really has any idea what it might be until the final third of the book, when its discovery is explained. In a fitting echo of Blake, Pullman has Lord Asriel, a scientist, and Lyra’s father, call Dust “a physical proof that something happen[s] when innocence change[s] into experience.” Asriel compares Dust to “original sin,” or “greed,” and yet it’s still not really clear what it is. It’s a physical substance that can only be seen through a scientific process, but which makes it possible to see into other worlds. Lord Asriel wants to use it to build a bridge through the Northern Lights to the alternate universe he can see on the other side. Whether this is a good idea – whether or not the price of knowledge is too high – is a question we continue to ask ourselves, and which continues to harbor grave and exciting consequences to this day. Questioning the meaning of life via the effects and benefits of science, i.e. human’s changes to the “natural” order of things - it doesn’t get much deeper than that.

What I loved about this book was the way the author used physical (albeit magical or fantastical) objects –daemons, Dust – to talk about metaphysical questions – is this the only world that exists? What is a soul? And more. One thing I did not love, though, was the times when Pullman seemed to get a teensy bit lazy in his imaginings. If he took the trouble to come up with something as cool as panserbjørne, or armored bears, it seems like he could come up with something better than simply switching “gypsies” to “gyptians.” “Svalbard” is a real place in the North, but “Bolvanger” is made up. WHY, Philip Pullman? Why?

Other than that, though, great book. I’ll definitely be picking up the next one.

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