18) Do You Like Women? Read This Book.

Book Read: Half the Sky
Author(s): Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
Pages: 294

For the sake of context, I will precede this review by saying when it comes to aid, I think Westerners should fuck off.
The reason: Two years ago, I spent eight months in Ghana working for a Canadian NGO called Journalists for Human Rights. I lived in Accra, the capital city, which also happens to be the hive for most major local and international NGOs in West Africa. And yes, I had a wonderful time and made some solid friendships, but I also learned that most Western notions of aid are fairly ridiculous. Most Ghanaians I met told me they felt Westerners were on holiday under the guise of volunteerism, living in luxurious conditions while working at orphanages and NGOs and radio stations, doing work that would ultimately not be sustainable because they'd leave after a few months.

With a lot of foreigners I spoke to, volunteering was sort of an ego thing---who doesn't want to be a "hero" roughing it in the big bad African bush? (Accra, like most African cities, is of course much more developed than most media reports would have you believe.) It seemed to be a case of glamour over goodwill. Most Ghanaians were right. And this is a microcosm of what happens when Western forces attempt to intervene in third world countries on a larger scale. At best, it's a short-term solution. At worst, we leave with things in shambles. A few Westerners have managed to create some lasting changes (Stephen Lewis and his work with AIDS, Jimmy Carter and his tireless---and fairly successful---attempts to wipe out guinea worm) but for the most part, I left my time in Ghana feeling like local solutions must be effected by local people.

The authors of Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity For Women Worldwide (who actually know what they're talking about) echo these feelings. Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn are Pulitzer Prize winning journalists who spent years in China covering human rights abuses. (They're also married.) Kristof in particular has devoted his career as a New York Times Op-Ed columnist to exploring women's issues all over the world. Half the Sky shares stories of women Kristof and WuDunn met during their travels all over the world, with the purpose of sharing their struggle and the importance of female education.

All of the women the two journalists spoke with faced extraordinary challenges, and not all of these stories have happy endings. Some will make you blanch (like the young woman who is forced to abandon her children in a Thai brothel, or a woman who is ostracized from her village in the Congo because she was raped and developed a fistula, which is basically when a woman's vaginal and anal tissues are so torn that urine and feces run nonstop down her legs.) Some are incredible---like the group of women who took mob justice in their own hands and murdered a known rapist, killer and druglord in a public courtroom.

But most of all, many of the stories are purely and wholly inspirational. I hate that word---"inspirational." It brings to mind Richard Simmons, or Dr. Phil. It's used to describe well-to-do celebrities who visit villages ruined by typhoons in smock shirts and Wayfarers.

That's not inspirational, my dear friends. Inspirational is a Burundi woman who went from having no say in her household's income to growing an entire farm's worth of crops, contributing food and wealth to her neighbourhood and giving handouts to her husband. Inspirational is Angeline from Zimbabwe, who grew up not having enough money to buy underwear to wear to school and ended up becoming the executive director of the NGO that funded the remainder of her schooling. Or the soft-spoken Afghan woman who risked death over and over to start a chain of girl's schools at a time when female education was banned by the Taliban. These were the stories that made me sneak into an airplane bathroom and cry silently to myself---the ones of the women who succeeded quietly and humbly to change their surroundings. Inspirational is having nothing and defying the odds, the law, your culture, your religion, and more often than not, your own family, in order to do what you think is right.

That's the best part of Half the Sky---these women did what they did because they had to. They had no interest in being celebrated, or being heroes. They simply could not remain silent and continue living in the situations they were given---and so they changed them. The book will inspire you to do something, anything---and thankfully, WuDunn and Kristof do not lecture, but instead give some options for ways that you can help if you feel inclined.

Off the soapbox now, with one more point: I loved this book, and I hate pretty much everything. Really. I'll lend it to you. Read it.

17) Marisha Pessl's "Literary Pyrotechnics"

Book Read: Special Topics in Calamity Physics
Author: Marisha Pessl
Pages: 514
Method of Acquisition: Harrison was over one night. We were pre-drinking some lousy wine left over from my wedding (Vat #7, if I recall correctly.) She passed me Special Topics ("I liked it! I want it back!" she said) and What is the What? ("Blegh. Just keep it," she said.)
As I Write This Hasty Blog, I Am Listening To: The Wind Whistles.

Blue van Meer is a reclusive, brilliant teenager who moves to a mountain town in North Carolina with her eccentric, mysterious literary giant of a dad. She develops a strange and instant connection with her beautiful, mysterious English teacher Hannah Schneider, who invites her to her own personal version of the Algonquin Table with a quirky cabal of kids she quickly dubs "The Bluebloods." The events that follow are rendered in joyfully reference-laden language (every chapter is named after a Great Novel and references to both high and low culture are sprinkled through the narrative like blueberries on cornflakes, and yet the story never feels dated---an impressive achievement in itself.) I found that mentally I needed to be firing on all cylinders in order to unearth the intriguing plot---this is a novel where truly nothing is as it seems. Although the end of the book is a little unsatisfying (MAYBE SPOILER ALERT: After nearly 400 pages of buildup, I was expecting some bigger revelations about two of the book's key characters) the journey is rich and delightful, and you'll linger over some of the book's more humorous and elegant passages for long minutes, wishing you had the same ability to turn a phrase so cleverly.


I've reached my word limit, and I think this was kind of a sucky review in terms of letting you know what you're in for, so I will let a passage from Pessl's tome speak for itself. Here, Blue describes her childhood crush on her dad's gardener, Andreo. Here, you will see an example of the embedded referencing that takes place throughout the novel (using both real and invented books by experts.) You can see how it would be exhausting, but it's also wholly unique and kick-starts the reader into wakefulness.

His name was Andreo Verduga, and he was the most beautiful creature I'd ever seen (see "Panther," Glorious Predators of the Natural World, Goodwin, 1987.) He was tan, with black hair, gypsy eyes, and from what I could deduce from my upstairs bedroom window, a torso smooth as a river rock. He was from Peru. He wore heavy cologne and spoke in the language of an old-fashioned telegram.
HOW DO YOU DO STOP NICE DAY STOP WHERE IS HOSE STOP.


It's cute, right? Special Topics is for all the weirdo, bookish girls who wore the wrong clothes in high school, and the pale boys who made fun of the jocks but still secretly wished they had more friends. This book will make your fine hearts sing.

This Slow Tomato's Gonna KETCHUP!

I realized if I keep writing these long essay-style reviews and boring you to death, I will never get caught up on the hideous backlog that trails me around this apartment like my cats when I forget to feed them. It's a prison of expectations, people, and I'm getting locked in by FAILURE. So I decided it would be best to do bunch of mini-reviews in order to play catchup. I decided I would limit myself to five sentences per book - a bit like Ten Word Reviews, but more long-winded, completely unedited, and emphatically BLARGH-y. I hope to have them all posted by Thursday. There will be an update about where I'm at, reading-wise, at the end of the last mini-review, because I know you're hanging on tenterhooks in WAIT. OKAY. LET'S DO THIS.

16) Life Is A...Highway?



Book Read: The Road
Author: Cormac McCarthy
Pages: 287
Favorite Line: "You're kind of weirded out, aren't you?"

I won't bore you with a plot summary (you can Google it) but everyone I know who has read this has loved it. I suppose, in regards to The Road, love isn't the right word. As you trudge bleakly through McCarthy's ruined, ashy landscape full of cannibals and people blinded by their own need, his twisting, broken, glittering prose will hypnotize and save you. His similes float up to the surface of this black, gory mess like bits of carrion, and bring you to the surface, fortifying you just as you reach the brink of your own horror and despair as a reader. It doesn't matter if the forthcoming movie adaptation doesn't work, because The Road is one of those very specific reading experiences that will be burnt into my brain forever.

15) The Twentieth Century, I Have Delivered It

Book Read: From Hell

Author/Illustrator: Alan Moore, Eddie Campbell
Pages: 590 (incl. Appendix)

When I was sixteen, my dad got laid off from his job. He and my mom took our family's collective savings and took myself and my three brothers on a trip to Europe: Paris, London and Scotland. It was one of the best trips of my life. To visit such amazing cities at an age where cynicism has not yet clouded the perceptions and everything is still wild and lovely was incredible. The trip was also a little desperate, I think, because of the circumstances surrounding our hasty departure. It was with this mindset that we embarked on a Jack the Ripper tour of Whitechapel in London at about the halfway point of the trip. Our guide was a short, white bearded Beefeater with an encyclopedic knowledge of 19th century London. He would finish each story and beckon us onward with a guttural spitty noise he made with his throat, sort of a "HRRRRCT!" sound. "Let's go down this street, shall we? Hrrrrcht!!" he would say, and the enthralled, disgusted crowd would follow. We finished the tour at the Ten Bells tavern where my brother got a taste of his first-ever English pint.

The bar is immortalized in From Hell, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's amazing graphic novel about the Jack the Ripper murders. Ten years later, as I read the novel and came upon the bar's first appearance, I was struck by how closely it resembled the bar I had had the good fortune to visit on that heady, terrifying, breathtaking trip. The entire novel throbs---sometimes literally---with this vividness. It's a perfect combination of dramatic license and historical fact, showcasing the true breadth of Moore's obsession with metaphysics, the moribund, and his talent for storylines that weave and snake around each other and collide over and over with awful, brilliant power.

Most of us know bits and pieces of the story of Jack the Ripper and some may be familiar with the multiple theories devised by "Ripperologists" about who the killer actually was. Moore has followed the theory raised in Stephen Knight's Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution that labels Sir William Gull, Queen Victoria's surgeon, as the killer.

Moore's Gull is a hulking, eloquent madman who worships art, nature and the occult (as attested by his alleged ties to the Freemason), a delicate soul who also happens to believe that his bloodlust is dictated by the gods themselves. He is a brute and a misogynistic monster. His lonely death in a madhouse---where his spirit moves through space and time, vaporizing and becoming, he believes, exalted---moved me to tears. He is the perfect Alan Moore villain---a man caught up in the misery of his time, held prostrate and completely helpless by his obsessions.

Of course, the story isn't just about Gull --- it is about the dour police inspector who returns to Whitechapel to attempt to solve the murders, only to resign from the police force in complete disillusionment. It is about the five prostitutes who fall victim to Gull's Liston knife. Moore's characterizations of these women, full of sickness and struggle, give them dignity. But again, as with all of Moore's writing, the story and characters become part of a larger understanding, a foreshadowing of what horrors are yet to come. The denseness of characterization, English history, backstory, the birth of Hitler, war, the soullessness of the future---it is overwhelming. So wisely, Moore and Campbell break the story up with panels of blackness and silence, and it's here that the story simmers with dread:



I don't know much about comic book artists, so I don't really know how to talk about the illustration above. I can say that Eddie Campbell's art is profoundly moving, and deeply disturbing. I have never seen anything like it, and to be honest, I'm not sure that I want to again. Blood has never appeared bloodless, so precise. His rough pen and ink scratches are almost painful to the eye. You feel he is taking you deep into the filth of Whitechapel---into its dirt, its despair, the consumptive, syphilitic heart. Moore usually does these stories that swirl with colour and life (the exploding flora and vitality of Swamp Thing come to mind) but this unusual match serves his style and the subject matter perfectly.

I can understand why From Hell hasn't gotten as much interest as, say, Watchmen or V for Vendetta . Although the subject matter in all three books is equally dense and rich, From Hell is a diseased, bleak and sprawling beast, graphic and unrelenting. It's a long, slogging read at times. But it is brilliant and meticulously researched, and I suspect that in its melancholy, its myth and conjecture, you may find a gleaming kernel of truth, and that is what makes the work rewarding.

14) The White Tiger is...Just Fine

Book Read: The White Tiger

Author:Aravind Adiga

Pages: 276


I really wanted to like The White Tiger. I have enjoyed a lot of work by Indian writers (Vikram Seth, Arundhati Roy, Rohinton Mistry, Hari Kunzru, Anita Rau Badami, Jhumpa Lahiri) and Adiga is of Indian descent, he won a Booker Prize, and lots of Indian writers have won Booker Prizes and other important literary awards, and the people who judge these sort of awards generally seem to know what they're doing, and so I bowed my head and bought the book.

The White Tiger certainly isn't bad. The narrator, Balram, relates his story through a series of letters to the Chinese premier Wen Jiabo, who is expected to visit India to learn about the new entrepreneurial class. Balram grew up in what Adiga calls "The Darkness" - a rural town called Laxmangarh - the son of a rickshaw puller. His father's pitiful death spurs Balram to learn how to drive, and through his ambition and charm, he manages to secure a post in Delhi ("The Light") as the driver of the son of a wealthy landowner from his village. It's here that the novel's sharpness unfolds and we see the bitterness and deceitful behaviour shared by both the upper and lower class characters. We also see Delhi - the new India - through Balram's eyes. He mentions "hospitals with lobbies as clean as five-star hotels" and provides lingering, loving descriptions of newly-built strip malls. Adiga wants us to know that India isn't all back roads, landfills and poverty - the country is growing.

The expanse of the country also matches Balram's rising ambition, and his loyalty to his wealthy but spineless boss begins to quaver beneath his own desire for Money and Power. The novel's conclusion won't be a surprise (it's revealed early on in the book) but the gradual course of Balram's changing personality may be.

I feel like this novel will be taught in classrooms and passed around overeducated, underemployed, middle-class North Americans (of which I include myself) who will be impressed and charmed at this "gritty depiction" of modern India. When The White Tiger is compared to the magical realism by Salman Rushdie or the romantic, damp family tales of Anita Rau Badami, it does come across as a little rawer, a bit more unflinching. But I also agree with the Guardian's first review of the novel, which pointed out that there are so many alternative Indias, uncontacted and unheard. Adiga's viewpoint is a very particular one---it should not be considered the ultimate truth.

A confession here, and a diversion: I found myself praising the book to others even as it became more and more milquetoast and less spectacular than I wanted it to be. With each successive page turn, I read frantically, groping for something better: better writer, a sharper wit and conclusions that were a little more revelatory. Now that I'm done, I feel a bit like a fraud.

Adiga has also been criticized in the press for being an Oxford-educated upper middle-class journalist; what does he know about being a poor, paan-chewing driver in Delhi? I'm of the view that this is irrelevant. The story is convincing. And authenticity isn't really Adiga's problem. For a novel that has been labelled as at least partially satirical, The White Tiger isn't very funny or particularly acerbic---and that is a problem. It was actually a bit tasteless, not in the sense of being uncouth, but rather because mostly it sat bland and dull on my tongue, like uncooked bread. Where's my fucking spice?

With that being said, a few parts work. It's genuninely agonizing to witness Balram's employer become more vulnerable and stupid in his eyes. In the same way, it's sad (but also vaguely interesting) to watch the deterioration of his character (or is it a strengthening?) His dubbing of a sleazy fellow driver "Vitiligo-Lips" is funny the first four or five times it's mentioned, and I also enjoyed every time the drivers brought up their favorite local periodical, Murder Weekly.

Overall, though, I wasn't attached to any character enough to care about their well-being or demise. Even Balram, who at least had the benefit of being interesting, became tedious until the novel's final, decisive act. I actually found myself skipping his repeated proclamations of enterpreneurial skill and ominous foreshadowing to Mr. Jiabo. I found myself wishing there had been more ACTION and less nostalgic blather - more little shocks to rouse the reader out of a bit of a stupor.

I ultimately feel the success of The White Tiger is due in part to the Slumdog Millionaire-ization of popular North American culture at the moment. Any story about downtrodden people in the Third World seems to get our attention, tug our strings, prod that little bruise of white guilt. Such stories are entertaining, certainly---but do they deserve all these accolades? Haven't we already seen these ideas paraded before us, and done better?

Roundup Time

Books read and blogged:

JPod - Douglas Coupland
Running With Scissors - Augsten Burroughs
I'm With the Band - Pamela Des Barres
DaCapo Best Music Writing 2008 - Various
Helpless - Barbara Gowdy
House of Meetings - Martin Amis
Three Day Road - Joseph Boyden
Flight - Sherman Alexie
Twilight - Stephanie Meyer
The Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion
Heart-Shaped Box - Joe Hill
George Elliot Clarke - I & I
Cintra Wilson - Colors Insulting to Nature

Books read, blog entries pending:

* Michael Azerrad - Our Band Could Be Your Life
* John Steinbeck - Cannery Row
* Chinua Achebe - Anthills of the Savannah
* Aravind Adiga - The White Tiger
* Alan Moore - V for Vendetta
Cormac McCarthy - The Road
Danny Sugerman - Wonderland Avenue

Total Books read thus far:

20

Books left to read by January 2010 (to meet goal, ostensibly)

80

Amount of books I need to read per month to make this goal:

13 (roughly)

Amount of books I probably will read per month, realistically:

Depending on the month (and my job status) 0-15


Books I'm super keen on reading in the future:

Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy
From Hell - Alan Moore
Fool - Christopher Moore
Columbine - Dave Cullen
Special Topics in Calamity Physics - Marisha Pessl
The Drive-In - Joe R. Landsdale
Starved for Science - Robert Paarlberg
Rashomon - Akutagawa Ryanosuke
Miles: The Autobiography - Miles Davis


Books I am not so hot on reading but feel weirdly obligated to read anyway because I know their long-term effects will be important and I WILL LEARN TO ENJOY THEM:

What is the What - Dave Eggers
The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon
Look, Homeward Angel - Thomas Mann
New Moon - Stephanie Meyer (yes. I HAVE TO.)
Where Angels Fear to Tread - Joseph Conrad
Too Fat to Fish - Artie Lange
The Kindly Ones - Jonathan Littell
One of the Obama biographies


Books that I will under no circumstances read this year because they are too large and will make me feel bad about myself (but I would like to try them sometime):

Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon
Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
Johnathan Strange and Mr. Norrell - Susanna What's her last name

People who seem to be into the blog despite my infrequent posting:

Around 10. This is actually more than I expected. Thanks guys!

People who seem to be secretly competing with me but are not saying this outright (judging by some sly, friendly but slightly edgy and always persistent lines of questioning)

25

If you're one of these, good on ya. Keep going, and keep telling me what you're reading and how long it took you, in your slightly detached, bored-seeming but still weirdly intense emails. It's funny. I support your efforts.

Keep on keepin' on, you all!!!

What Number Am I On Now?

I don't even know! Things have been busy, kids. I got married and then we had a honeymoon. Before that there were all of these getting-married type things that you need to worry about (karaoke machine! tequila!) But one of the blog's two regular readers (and an actual, real journalist) Mr. Brendan Kennedy mentioned that he'd be happy when all the wedding shit was over "so you can start blogging again." His words have haunted - HAUNTED - me. And as it happens, when you drive across Eastern Canada for your honeymoon, you have a lot of time to think about your life, think about what's wrong with it, and read books to distract yourself from these things. I've got four new reviews coming up, fools. This be review the first:


Colors Insulting To Nature
by Cintra Wilson

Pages: 346
How: My friend Harrison, she of rock-bandery, puckish attitude and impeccable taste in music and writers, brought it over. Thanks M.


So I was wary about this book when I first started, and that was due almost entirely to one quote on the back cover. "The Dorothy Parker of the Cyber Age!" gushed the San Francisco Chronicle. Errr.....really? Yeech. Another one that threw me for a loop was in the first few pages, where one reviewer chimed in that Wilson was the "female David Foster Wallace." Ergh. The last time I heard these kind of accolade-amalgams thrown about was when Jonathan Safran Foer first appeared. And I fucking hate Jonathan Safran Foer. Say what you want about my level of insight or whatever, but you can't argue that Everything Is Illuminated is kind of a gigantic pain in the ass that I still do not believe is worth the work. Plus, dude is like, what? Thirty? Shut up.

Anyway, that's how I felt when I started Colors Insulting To Nature;it was going to be work. I was going to have to work to pay attention so I could get the grand payoff. Sometimes you have to do this with certain writers. Everyone has different levels of tolerance---as you guys know, Martin Amis' latest had me grinding my teeth at various junctures. Some friends have told me they really had to slog to get to the creamy centers of Infinite Jest (and no, I'm not there yet) or Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman. For much of Colors, I felt like Wilson was settling into her very specific stylistic voice---or maybe it was just me needing to get used to it.

You see, Wilson used to write for Salon. (She might still write for them, but I haven't seen her around there for awhile.) If you go by her website and mini-bio/interview at the back of Colors, she used to write a lot about celebrities, culture and related ideas. Her first book was the hilariously-titled A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Re-Examined As A Grotesque Crippling Disease and Other Revelations. The woman can clearly speak with authority about fame, image and the ridiculous possibilities that lie therein. And that is exactly what Colors deals with.

The story is about young Liza Normal, born to the impossibly-named Peppy Normal - a failed showgirl who is on a hell-worn, lifelong attempt to recapture her dreams of celebrity. Most notably (and most important to the novel's development) is her revival production of "The Sound of Music" at a worn down playhouse attached to the family home. A ragtag summer stock troupe of children form the cast, including Peppy's own two kids, Liza and Ned (whose complete and total shrinkage from society results in his character's development as a reclusive but wholly successful outsider artist, in one of the novel's more obvious ironies.) This was my favorite part of the book - the time-honoured musical becomes delightfully twisted with a cast of queers, weirdoes, perfect stage children, deviants and Liza Normal. Liza's relentless and dogged pursuit of fame is hatched during this production and continues through the novel through a series of loosely-linked, bizarre and hilarious incidents (and a healthy amount of inspiration from Lisa Lisa and the Cult Jam.)

Wilson's writing is so loaded - with cultural references, with zippy dialogue and with her occasional attempts to hijack the narrative with authorial asides - that it's hard to explain here. That's not the best part either. The best part is seeing Liza go from one humiliation to the next (a near-rape at a high school party, a sex romp with a drug dealer, attempts at acting, acid-fuelled sublets with a San Francisco elven cult, rehab, and - at the novel's climax - the transformation of her basement apartment into an inferno) and see Liza reinvent herself into a Wendy O. Williams-inspired punker, a hippie, a coke queen, and finally a Vegas S & M showgirl - and emerge triumphant.

Wilson's true accomplishment here appears in her creation of a character who, despite being likeable and relateable, is also so fucking ridiculous that you can't help but laugh at her. She's effectively erradicated pathos from Liza's story by making the character so fucking determined to be FAMOUS - the ultimate parasitical disease. The fact that she remains intact by the novel's completion is a miracle. The fact that the novel somehow remains readable and delightful is a triumph. If you can get past the loaded prose, Colors Insulting to Nature is a brilliant tribute to ego-fuelled girlhood, fame-whoredom, drug mayhem, and yes - even wisdom.