The Know-It-All - A.J. Jacobs

This was a piece of fun I'd been putting off for a long time. In case you missed it, A.J. Jacobs, worried that the frivolity and pop culture-focus of his New York life (and of his job at Esquire) had placed him on a path of ever-increasing stupidity, spent 2002 reading cover-to-cover through the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Half-almanac, half-confessional memoir, this book records Jacobs's education and epiphanies, interlaced with his year's worth of office antics, family gatherings, and seemingly fruitless attempts to conceive a child with his wife, Julie. Along the way, he also mingles at a Mensa conference, interviews Alex Trebek, takes a speed-reading seminar, and wonders whether any of this was a good idea in the first place. Predictably, his daily hours of reading begin to color the rest of his life:

Dundatree
This the Britannica defines as "the mythical country where large-footed dictators come from." Huh. That's a strange concept, I think to myself. I've never even heard of it.

The reason I've never heard of Dundatree is that...I dreamed it. I read so much that it's invaded my sleep. I can't escape those endless descriptions and dates, that little ten-point Times font text, the fancy gold embossing, not even when I close my eyes. And now I'm making up my own facts, which I'm worried I'll confuse with actual facts. (p. 66)

Although it took me a few years to get around to reading this, the concept appealed to me the first time I heard about it. Reading the encyclopedia is the sort of thing I would do. I haven't done it, naturally, but as a child I could spend a few hours at a time perusing a volume or two of the (1987?) World Book. Another thing I had in common with Jacobs - I'm sure I spent a good portion of my childhood with an over-inflated concept of my own intelligence. (Actually, it didn't start out that way. For the longest time, I thought that breezing through school with perfect marks without cracking a book was supposed to be the norm, and that I just had the unusual luck of being surrounded by imbeciles. Then I figured it out. And relished it. A lot.) Still, a good part of me would like nothing better than actually to be smarter than I ever imagined myself to be.

A few more telling (and bookish) excerpts:

• "The United Nations defines a book as a text that is at least forty-nine pages long." (p. 26)
  
  
• "Rene Descartes had a fetish for women with crossed eyes." (p. 55)
  
  
• "I like this image of Ezekiel and the scroll as a snack." (p. 89)
  
  
• "I like the story of how Marie de Gournay - a French intellectual at the time - fainted from excitement when she read Montaigne's work for the first time. She fainted from reading. What a great image. We've become far too jaded. I've been intrigued, bored, titillated, annoyed, amazed, but I've never even come close to fainting while reading any book." (p. 210)
  
  
• "I tell them they can write anywhere. If you have a job at the Gap, steal a few minutes and write some lines in the sweater section. No excuses. Hugh Lofting wrote Dr. Doolittle while in the trenches of World War I. Amid exploding grenades and gas masks and rats, he created a lovely little story about talking animals that he sent home to amuse his children. Be like Hugh. Write everywhere." (p. 334)
  

2007 Wrap-Up

Final Count for 2007: 54

• The Good Husband of Zebra Drive - Alexander McCall Smith
• Love Over Scotland - Alexander McCall Smith
• The Church in the Marketplace - George Carey
• I Like You - Hospitality Under the Influence - Amy Sedaris
• Heavenly Date and Other Flirtations - Alexander McCall Smith
• The Monsters of Templeton - Lauren Groff
• Dream Angus - Alexander McCall Smith
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - J.K. Rowling
• First Among Sequels - Jasper Fforde
• The View From Saturday - E.L. Konigsburg
• The Cat Who Had 60 Whiskers - Lilian Jackson Braun
• Men and Cartoons - Jonathan Lethem
• Me Talk Pretty One Day - David Sedaris
• The Mysterious Affair at Styles - Agatha Christie
• Wise Blood - Flannery O'Connor
• Portrait in Sepia - Isabel Allende
• Summerland - Michael Chabon
• A Bell for Adano - John Hersey
• Matilda - Roald Dahl
• Wicked - Gregory Maguire
• The Mysterious Affair at Styles - Agatha Christie
• Howard's End - E.M. Forster
• On Beauty - Zadie Smith
• The Top Ten - ed. J. Peder Zane
• Moby Dick - Herman Melville
• The Bad Beginning - Lemony Snicket
• Bridge to Terabithia - Katherine Paterson
• The Labors of Hercules - Agatha Christie
• The Brinkmanship of Galahad Threepwood - P.G. Wodehouse
• The Life of Pi - Yann Martel
• Down and Out in Paris and London - George Orwell
• The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
• Whale Rider - Witi Ihimaera
• The Razor's Edge - W. Somerset Maugham
• Blue Shoes and Happiness - Alexander McCall Smith
• The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana - Umberto Eco
• Funny In Farsi - Firoozeh Dumas
• Remarkable Reads; 34 Writers and Their Adventures in Reading - J. Peder Zane, ed.
• What Do You Care What Other People Think? - Richard Feynman
• The House of Mirth - Edith Wharton
• Carry On, Jeeves - P.G. Wodehouse
• The Fourth Bear - Jasper Fforde
• Around the World in Eighty Days - Jules Verne
• The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life - Steve Leveen
• The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson
• Selected Early Stories - John Updike
• Death of a Snob - M.C. Beaton
• No Plot? No Problem! A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days - Chris Baty
• Isabel's Bed - Elinor Lipman
• Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman - Richard Feynman
• The Big Over Easy - Jasper Fforde
• Eldest - Christopher Paolini
• Mansfield Park - Jane Austen
• The Last Gentleman - Walker Percy

Decades Challenge

My whole reason for being here is to boost my reading life with some added structure, and to that end, I've decided to participate in some reading challenges this year. 3M's Decades Challenge was a natural first choice. You can read all about it at the challenge site, but here's my proposed list (subject to change):

• 1991: Possession - A.S. Byatt
• 1989: A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
• 1975: A Month of Sundays - John Updike
• 1964: In Cold Blood - Truman Capote
• 1955: A Gift from the Sea - Anne Morrow Lindbergh
• 1947: Galileo (American Version) - Bertolt Brecht
• 1938: Our Town - Thornton Wilder
• 1925: The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
  
• 1915: Of Human Bondage - W. Somerset Maugham
• 1906: The Man of Property - John Galsworthy
• 1891: The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
• 1881: Portrait of a Lady - Henry James
  
• 1875: The Way We Live Now - Anthony Trollope
  
• 1866: Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
• 1859: A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
• 1842: Dead Souls - Nikolai Gogol
• 1839: The Charterhouse of Parma - Stendhal
• 1827: Vivian Grey - Benjamin Disraeli
  
• 1818: Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus - Mary Shelley
• 1795: Lady Susan - Jane Austen
• Others TBD
  

Can the fishes see it's snowing?

I'm fairly certain that I was never a child. I feel more convinced of that when I read A Child's Christmas in Wales. Wonder, magic - they seem foreign to me, rather than nostalgic. I don't regret it - I don't pine for the youth I didn't live - but I do feel the gap in my own experience, as though I lack a great chunk of the vocabulary of human life.

My mother says I sprung from the womb aged 40. That would imply that I'm still growing into my soul. That's an odd thought.

I would sit among festoons and Chinese lanterns and nibble dates and try to make a model man-o'-war, following the Instructions for Little Engineers, and produce what might be mistaken for a sea-going tram car.
- Dylan Thomas, on Christmas Afternoon

I'm collecting favorite Christmas stories, essays, and texts. My list is short so far, but in addition to Wales it includes

• "Xmas and Christmas - A Lost Chapter from Herodotus" by C.S. Lewis. Published in God in the Dock, though I'm not certain of the original source. A classical anthropological expose on the 50-day Exmas Rush.
• "Six to Eight Black Men" by David Sedaris, in Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. A cleaner, more joyous, alternative to the (nonetheless hillarious) Santaland Diaries. Listening to the author's reading of this is one of my own personal holiday traditions.
  

Always open to more suggestions to add to the collection.

Love Over Scotland - Alexander McCall Smith

"I cannot afford to have a romance with a pirate, she said to herself. Not at my stage of life. I just cannot."

Penance

Forgive me blogger, for I have sinned.

I have been curing too much, and reading too little.

I'm working on a resolution to this conflict. In the meantime, my penance: identify and share ten new (possibly) literary quotations.

1. I object to being told that I am saving daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind... At the back of the Daylight Saving scheme, I detect the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy, and wise in spite of themselves. - Robertson Davies, The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks, 1947
   
   
2. Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking. - Albert Einstein
   
   
3. By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece. - G.K. Chesterton
   
   
4. I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them. - H.L. Mencken
   
   
5. All truly wise thoughts have been thoughts already thousands of times. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
   
   
6. Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment. - Norman Mailer (1923-2007)
   
   
7. A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. - Thomas Mann
   
   
8. Astronomy's much more fun when you're not an astronomer. - Brian May
   
   
9. One cannot review a bad book without showing off. - W. H. Auden
   
   
10. All movements go too far. - Bertrand Russell

Inspired again by housekeeping

"I live in my house as I live inside my skin; I know more beautiful, more ample, more sturdy, and more picturesque skins; but it would seem to me unnatural to exchange them for mine." – Primo Levi

Another cross post.

A Room of One's Own

Note: I've been neglectful lately, since I've been keeping busy curing my apartment. But I've missed being here. I started making a to-do list at work this morning, and the only think that came to mind was "I need book time." I couldn't think of anything else until I wrote that one down.

I was fascinated and inspired by last Friday’s post at Apartment Therapy: San Francicso linking to this recent Guardian photo feature. The Guardian photographed around 35 studies of top contemporary writers including A.S. Byatt, Seamus Heaney, and Mark Haddon, then had the writers provide the commentary.

Observation is the power of the artist, particularly of the writer; and reliable self-observation is the power in its highest form. It’s not surprising, then, that this collection of writings should include insights of rare quality into personal style. Which should be interesting to all of us now cultivating our own spaces.

Some interesting things I noticed:

• Nearly every room featured includes red as either the primary or primary accent color (See Graham Swift's study in the photo).
  

• Unsurprisingly, many of the writers professed an antithapy for computers, so technology is rarely in great evidence. One surprising exception is Diana Athill, who, at nearly 90, expressed a pragmatic affection for the backspace key (“In one's late-80s one rather loses touch with one's extremities.”)
  

• The spaces are very real, very lived-in, very believable. Few are fastidiously tidy or exceptionally cluttered. And attitudes to clutter vary:

I just need to know where everything is before I go in search of things in my own head, and every time I look up from my desk it helps to see order, which is why the room is so crazily tidy. - Andrew O’Hagan

I don't mind working in a bit of clutter. It's your head that has to be clear. -Beryl Bainbridge

I always think of myself as a tidy sort, but this photo gives the lie to that. There is, however, method in the seeming chaos. Trust me. -Ian Rankin

From the “Know Thyself” Files

I envy people who have the ability to surround themselves with interesting things - beautiful little whichwhats that a burglar might want to steal, or amusingly whimsical doodahs, or thingummies full of secret personal significance. But it's not something that I can do, and it's no use pretending. - Michael Frayn

The objects in the room are in a way a metaphor of my mind. They are brightly coloured, or transparent, and are about intricate patterns and structures. ... Snails, towers, DNA. I like spirals. It looks like clutter but it's a kind of order. - AS Byatt

The computer desk is an ugly, ancient thing - but I don't suppose I'll ever replace it. I've written 13 books on it. And I'm the kind of person who can feel sentimental affection for a teak plank. - Rose Tremain

Roominess is my one requirement, I would happily write on a roller-rink. - Joshua Ferris

I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded. - Seamus Heaney

Only when I saw this photograph did I realise that it looks like a primary school library. … My best days do seem like a distillation of all that was best about school. Write a story! Paint a picture! Write a poem! Make a print! And my life always feels a little empty if I'm not learning something new (it's the piano at the moment). - Mark Haddon

How I envy writers who can work on aeroplanes or in hotel rooms. On the run I can produce an article or a book review, or even a film script, but for fiction I must have my own desk, my own wall with my own postcards pinned to it, and my own window not to look out of. - John Banville

Photo Credit: The Guardian.

A meme? Moi?

Hey, look, Sylvia posted a meme a couple of days ago that actually got me curious enough to do it (that Sylvia is pretty inspiring this week). Rules: Search Amazon for your own name and pick your favorite cover.

Del Pantano brought back a lot of hits, mostly comprising Spanish-language horror novels (swamp monsters, wouldn't you know). But I liked the design of this one best:

Searching on my real first name brought up mostly genre romance, but I thought this was pretty:

I know what a search on my full name would return - I share my name with the title character of a series of Nancy Drew-like mysteries published in the 1940s and '50s, now mostly out of print. I like this, because it makes me reasonably Google-proof. I've never read any of them, but they're on the list for as soon as I find a library that shelves them.

More Places to Keep Books

Sylvia posted a link to this stunning gallery of bibliophilic pin-ups from around the globe. Of the libraries pictured, I've only had the pleasure of visiting those in New York and Boston, but it got me thinking on the possibility of embarking on a library tour - you know, a sort of bookstore tourism for the grandiose. I say it's got potential.

My favorite shot was this one, from the Hague:

But my all time favorite library interior? This one, from East Hill University, my alma mater (wish I could find bigger shots):

Fair warning: I've been exploring the Chicagoland libraries, and there are going to be a lot more pictures where these came from.

The Only Thing More Boring than the Last Two Days...

...would be a book about the last two days. I've hit upon a title for my first novel: The Killer Mosquitoes of Findlay, Ohio. I don't know what it will be about yet, but stay tuned.

Since talking about coffee shops is almost like talking about books, kudos to the folks at Coffee Amici for making a trying business trip a lot more bearable. They make one mean iced latte. Seriously, I was really impressed.

Also, on the long drive to and from this trip, I got in my first big chunk of audiobooking since starting my heavenly ten-minute commute. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell gets a lot more compelling after the first third or so. Started out too fairy-tale for my liking, but now it's good stuff.

Has this ever happened to you?

http://www.unshelved.com/archive.aspx?strip=20060226

Rhetorical question.

Summer Reading Redux

A brief rundown of the salient selections from this summer's out time:

Me Talk Pretty One Day - David Sedaris - I was getting overwhelmed by the moving thing and wanted something to laugh at. The first half was boring. The second half was good. It's disturbing how funny such messed up people can be. Moving myself this summer, I loved the parts when he was working for the Marxist moving company in New York. A quote on brooding on poetry:

If a dead poet on the other side of the world could describe my feelings with such precision, I had to accept with humility that my love was not exceptional, that I had invented nothing, that everyone falls in love in more or less the same manner.

The View from Saturday - E.L. Konigsburg - Mom the Librarian recommends children's literature on a regular basis. This one was great. I loved every single character. My Sister the Blond Artist and I listened to it on the drive from Rustingham to Chicago.

First Among Sequels - Jasper Fforde - I'm afraid this franchise may be spent. Pity, because it was so much fun. This one is set in 2002, around 15 years after Something Rotten.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - J.K. Rowling - Way fun. Fast paced. Nice work, Jo! I also thought the Order of the Phoenix movie was quite well done - they finally found the adaptation code. Good thing, too, since that book had, what, 6,000 pages?

Return to Bloggerland

I've been away for the last three months or so, busy with real life - specifically, executing my long-anticipated relocation from Selfimportantville to the environs of lovely Chicago! Been here about a month and getting all settled in and unpacked and establilshed in the new job and all that, and now I'm so eager to get back to writing! I'll be back soon to talk about this summer's reading, the urban and suburban library systems (swoon), and all things bookish.

So thrilled to be here!

Summerland - Michael Chabon

Premise: The characters of North American folklore inhabit a parallel world where they spend most of their time playing baseball.

Plot: Three children from Puget Sound travel to fairy-land in a flying Saab in an attempt to save the universe from Satan.

No, seriously. Avert the apocalypse before the bottom of the ninth. Aided by a Sasquatch, when necessary.

I think this is a children's book, but I'm not quite sure. It was too forgettable in the beginning - so much so that when my mind wandered and I lost track of the plot, I rarely bothered to reorient. Perhaps I would have enjoyed more of it if I'd been paying more attention, but sometimes you have to make the book responsible for that. It did get better, worthwhile even, but no thrills or chills.

A deep-seated passion for baseball would likely help the reader along here. I can't claim to have that. In principle, I like the game well enough, but the excesses of Selfimportantville fans have kind of turned me off generally. Or maybe I just like to blame things on Selfimportantvillains.

A Place to Keep Books

I spent several days last week in Chicago, bathing in twentieth-century architecture. I stayed in a place practically next door to the downtown Harold Washington Library Center at State and Congress. My photos don't start do it justice.

Breathtaking. Like almost everything else in town.

Only Connect (Part 2)

My Howard's End essay has been going nowhere for far too long, so I'll settle for a quote list instead.

You use the intellect, but you no longer care about it. That I call stupidity.

Ah yes--she had been a good woman--she had been steady. He chose the word deliberately. To him steadiness included all praise.

"Don't brood too much," she wrote to Helen, "on the superiority of the unseen to the seen. It's true, but to brood on it is mediaeval. Our business is not to contrast the two, but to reconcile them."

It is the little things one bungles at. The big, real ones are nothing when they come.

The businessman who assumes that this life is everything, and the mystic who asserts that it is nothing, fail, on this side and on that, to hit the truth.

‘Nothing matters,’ the Schegels had said in the past, ‘except one’s self-respect and that of one’s friends.’ When the time came, other things mattered terribly.

The importance of human beings has been vastly overrated by specialists.

Fabulous Phrases from (Mediocre) Books, Vol. 1

"...emerging dirigible technology..."

-Summerland, Michael Chabon

World Lupus Day, 2007

I'm reading Flannery O'Connor this month (review to come shortly) in honor of tomorrow's fourth annual observance of World Lupus Day. O'Connor died of complications from Systemic Lupus in 1964 at age 39. I've found that most people have heard of lupus, but very few know anything about it. Here are a few facts:

• Lupus is an autoimmune disease that can affect literally every organ group.


• More people in the United states have lupus than have AIDS, cystic fibrosis, multiple sclerosis, sickle-cell anemia and cerebral palsy, combined.


• Most patients are diagnosed between the ages of 15 and 45, and 90% are women.


• Because symptoms are highly variable and often mimic those of other conditions, lupus diagnosis is difficult. Many patients wait 4-8 years after initial symptoms appear before receiving a diagnosis.


• The severity of lupus symptoms varies widely from patient to patient; in severe cases complications can still be fatal.


• There is currently no cure for lupus, and there have been no major treatment advances in the past 50 years.

Learn more at http://www.lupus.org/.

We're off to flee the lizard, the horrible lizard with claws...

Wicked, by Gregory Maguire

Synopsis: The life story of the Wicked Witch of the West (of Oz), told under the premise that Baum's version of the story was mythologized propaganda originating from supporters of the tyrant Wizard.

Surprising - that's the best word. Given the premise, I expected it to be more...farcical, I suppose. But Maguire was more imaginative than that.

Slow to start - the first third wasn't engaging at all. But the rest of the story is human, with parts even verging on the literary. No work of genius, of course, but it left me intrigued, which is an interesting feeling.