oprah and pulitzer agreed

In preparation for book club this evening I revamped our list of maybes. Every couple months I have everyone send me a couple of picks that they are interested in reading and then put them on our 'maybe' list. Then at the end of each meeting we pick from that list. We try to give everyone an equal chance to have their picks read. I think only MB gets shafted here and that is because she is a political addict sometimes, and the rest of the time will read whatever, so us loudmouths take over. So - to MB - I am sorry you get shafted.

My picks come from an amalgam of sources. What I happen to see in the book store, what I read about in the book reviews, what has been nominated for a big prize, and sometimes stuff suggested from Good Reads or Amazon.

Now here's the kicker. I disagree with critics ALL the time. Not a little, a lot - a whole lot. I am not happy with the folks who said that The Savage Detectives (last month's book club read) is awesome. Because it was not. It was well written, yes. But it was also convoluted and it became work to read it. To me, great literature should be well written and feel effortless to read. If I have to make myself read a book, then it does not go up there as a great book in my book.

Try as I might to pretend that critics will not shape my choices I still look on the Pulitzer site for book ideas, even though they are the same people who gave Doubt a prize over The Clean House! A travesty I tell you! I try to tell myself that it is never a waste of time to read a book, but then I read Ghosts by Banville and I realized - I will never get that time back. I could have been reading Zadie Smith or Jeanette Winterson.

Yet I cannot stop myself. I fall victim to the mindset that if the powers that be say something is good then I must partake. Lemming. It is a lemming mentality. I try to fight it, but I always go back. I wish I had a perfect tailor made hpmelon oracle for recommendations.

'Oh oracle, I am in the mood for something witty and irreverent, with a soupcon of danger. What do you recommend?'

Nice.

just a speck

Is anyone out there anymore? I know I have been absent. I keep thinking its time to let this little experiment go. Sending these words out into the electronic cosmos. But I keep it here for some reason. I remember telling a friend who recently started their own blog, that the reason I did it was to force me to formulate my opinions in a clearer way. Nothing helps me do that better than writing them down with the knowledge that someone else will read it and will want it to make sense.

I recently finished reading Weight: The Myth of Atlas & Heracles. Of all our book club reads, we discussed this the least. I am not sure why. It may have had to do with the fact the we had not all seen each other in quite a while and so our usual chit chat went on for much longer. I don't think it was from lack of discussion material the book gave us. I read this book at a time where I am not feeling myself. Thoughts are clicking around in my head and not settling easily these days. I am not holding up the world, but a little mystified about how to navigate it. Winterson's book is brief, funny, witty, and graceful. She accomplishes a lot with an economy of words. She tickles at ideas without being heavy handed. How we bear our burdens, how we take on burdens we could just let go of, how to relinquish control with grace, grace under pressure, what we learn from consequences, how little we understand patience. All these thoughts reel through this book. Maybe they just reel through me and I am superimposing them.

I realize, rereading what I have wrote, that I used the word 'grace' multiple times. When I was little grace was a word for princesses, in my teen years it was about trying to find God. It seems to me now that grace is what Atlas did. He held the world carefully so that we would not fall off, and in this book, when it was time to walk away, he did so, without looking back, and without causing so much as a tremor on this ball of blue spinning through the universe.

terra infirma

Our book club had one of our best book discussions last night. The book for this month was The Ground Beneath Her Feet by Salman Rushdie. His writing is complex and lush and his mastery of words is mind boggling. It is the first time in our little book club that we all unequivocally loved the book, and that we all were in awe of the words; so much so that we had to keep reading passages out loud. Rushdie uses words in such a sculpted, meaningful way. A beautiful read. I highly recommend it.

The passage I read was his goodbye to India.

"India, I have swum in your warm waters and run laughing in your high mountain meadows. Oh, why must everything I say end up sounding like a filmi gana, a goddamn cheap Bollywood song? Very well then: I have walked your filthy streets, India, I have ached in my bones from the illness engendered by your germs. I have eaten your independent salt and drunk your nauseatingly sugary roadside tea. For many years your malaria mosquitoes would bite me wherever I went, and in deserts and summers around the world I was stung by cool Kashmiri bees. India, my terra infirma, my maelstrom, my cornucopia, my crowd. India, my too muchness, my everything at once, my Hug-me, my fable, my mother, my father, my first great truth. It may be that I am not worthy of you, for I have been imperfect, I confess. I may not comprehend what you are becoming, what perhaps you already are, but I am old enough to say that this new self of yours is an entity I no longer want, or need, to understand.
India, fount of my imagination, source of my savagery, breaker of my heart.
Goodbye."

Another wonderful passage read by G was, in reference to rock and roll and the Vietnam War.

"That's when I really fell in love with rock...

It was not just saying fuck you Uncle Sam, or give peace a chance, or I feel like I'm fixin' to die, or even making patriotic noises, zap zap zappin' the Cong. Rather, it was making love in a combat zone, insisting on the remembrance of beauty and innocence in a time of death and guilt; it privileged life over death and asked life to take its chance, let's dance, honey honey, in the street, on the phone, and we'll have fun fun fun on the eve of destruction....

The soldiers are singing these songs as they die. But this is not the way soldiers used to sing, marching into battle bellowing hymns, kidding themselves they had god on their side; these aren't patriotic-bullshit, get-yourself-up-for-it songs. These kids are using singing, instead, as an affirmation of what's natural and true, singing against the unnatural lie of war. Using song as a banner of their doomed youth. Not morituri te salutant, but morituri say up yours, Jack, those about to die give you the fucking finger."

Go read it.

milky white sea

We had the first meeting of our new book club last night. We actually talked about the book for a solid amount of time, before thematic elements in the book sent us into a political rant/tailspin, which dominated the last chunk of our discussion. It was a most enjoyable evening.

We read Blindness. I thought the book was well worth the read and rich in allegory. It also proved to be a solid jump off point for discussion, which is, of course, very helpful in a book club. I recommend the book, but be warned, the images and situations are incredibly disturbing and there were moments that dominated my thoughts for a while after reading them.

That's all I have to say on that, as I am all talked out on this one.