BookishCook

The Joy of Reading

meg33 — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 17:03:34 +0000

Let’s face it – I’m not a great critic, nor a great writer, nor even a great reader these days. And, maybe that’s ok. I like to read, and I like to write about what I read. Today, I made one of those joyous reading connections that I love, and just wanted to share it with …whomever. I have been reading, and enjoying, “36 Arguments for the Existence of God,” a smart, sweet novel featuring the “atheist with a soul” Cass Seltzer who has become famous for his book “The Varieties of Religious Illusion.” The book features a truly suspenseful debate at the end – when Cass faces off against a right-wing neo-con apologist for faith in a packed Harvard auditorium. That’s where I am right now, and I fear Cass is going to be destroyed as being the famous intellectual was for him a rather accidental happening, one in which he can’t quite believe and a role he is having trouble really inhabiting. When we don’t really mean what we are or what we do is when life gets dangerous, I think. Anyway, at the library, I just happened to pick up “The Angels of Our Better Natures” by Steven Pinker. It’s about the fact that violence has declined, even though it doesn’t seem that way if you watch or listen to any news stations. I’m very early into the book, but enjoying his engaging style. Surprisingly, in the preface to Pinker’s book, I came across a pair of words, new to me, that had occurred earlier in Goldstein’s book: “endogen0us and exogenous”, meaning influenced, respectively, from the inside and the outside. Or, in Pinker’s words: explaining forces for change, “Social scientists distinguish between ‘endogenous’ variables — those that are inside the system, where they may be affected by the very phenomenon they are trying to explain–from ‘exogenous’ ones – those that are set inmotion by forces from the outside.” (preface, xxiii). Then, in Goldstein’s book, she mentions her “partner, Steve Pinker.” I am just delighted to be reading both their books right now. What fun!

On “The Marriage Plot”

meg33 — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 22:48:38 +0000

I was looking forward to this one, having liked “Middlesex,” and of course, the story of an English major, incurably romantic, floundering headlong into life, did resonate for me. I had read the same books as she, struggled with the same incomprehensible jargon in certain classes, written similar papers, wondered what to do with my degree – so I felt some affinity for the heroine. Alas, the idea of the marriage plot as a plot element, was slighted by other concerns (mostly anatomical, I think) of the author. The study of the manic-depressive, Leonard, is certainly well done, and might have made a better book with that as its main purpose (I was almost reminded of Nathan from “Sophie’s Choice”). I wanted more thinking, examining, shifting perspectives on marriage as a plot element. Instead, it gets an unearned mention toward the end of the book, something Mitchell remembers he and Emily discussing, a discussion which the reader was never privy to, and which comes across as a tacked-on nod to the book’s title, with little real meaning. Eugenides can write and some things were good – the parental relationships, Leonard’s mental state, the classroom scenes. But on the whole, I was disappointed.

Murakami’s latest

meg33 — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 18:44:04 +0000

I had heard vaguely that Haruki Murakami had a new book out and when a Thanksgiving guest (thanks, Bonnie!) showed up with it, I started to read a few pages to see if it would interest me – and it did! I got through nine chapters before I had to surrender the book and now can’t wait to get hold of it. 1Q84 – has all of Murakami’s strengths – the minimalist, yet brilliant prose (sly and hypnotic); meticulous control of events for some mysterious purpose that keeps the pages turning; a bemused everyman narrator; enigmatic, yet well-realized women characters. According to the publisher, it is a “mind-bending ode to Orwell’s 1984,” but I haven’t gotten far enough along to verify anything but the mind-bending part. I’m sure I read an excerpt in the New Yorker (Town of Cats) recently and didn’t much care for it, now set within it’s proper context, I am thrilled with the novel’s potential.

My experience with Murakami goes back to a fascinating New Yorker story which I still think of: Sleep, from 1992- in which a housewife stays up all night, every night, reading and re-reading Anna Karenina. By not sleeping, she seems to get outside of time, to achieve the impossible – by cheating sleep, perhaps she is cheating death? – an attempt that ends in defeated delirium, of course. When I received the Complete New Yorker as a gift, one of the first things I did was to try to track down that story; I had a suspicion that the author must be Murakami, and I was right!

I believe I have read most of his short stories and a few of his novels, plus his nonfiction book about the Tokyo gas attacks (Underground) and a New Yorker article about him. I don’t think I’ve read The Wild Sheep Chase, so maybe I’ll move it to the top of my queue. I know I read Norwegian Wood, and I think I read Sputnik Sweetheart and the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Kafka on the Shore sounds familiar, but I’m not sure. I think I need a better method for my personal bibliography!

Two a day

meg33 — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 20:40:18 +0000

Mr. J informs me that it is a bad time to apply for jobs since it is the end of the quarter; also, the holiday weekend looms, so no interviews are likely to be scheduled. Still, I got onto Craigslist this morning and immediately found an interesting temporary position. I would love a temp job, despite lack of needed benefits. The job was so new it wasn’t even on the company website which made applying more tricky; however, I fired off an email with resume, then got an email back which allowed me to register on their site, which I did. They had my resume saved, so I just had to append a cover letter and fill out my profile. It’s a legal assistant job, so that makes it even more exciting to me. Then, I jumped back onto Craigslist for another go, and clicked on an operations/research job. Operations was my first good job; I love back office and research work; why wouldn’t I look for that again? Even better, I got an email back asking me to take an online test, which I did. This is something new, but seems like an efficient way to screen applicants. I certainly didn’t ace the math questions; I can do math, just not super fast at it. Not really sure how I did…but, it’s a numbers game, and I did my two a day.

Mrs. Jobseeker

meg33 — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 14:17:59 +0000

Well, that’s me. I finished my paralegal course, which I loved, and am now trying to format some coherent explanation of what I’ve been doing for the last 20 years that might lead a prospective employer to give me a callback. The psychology of jobsearching is interesting. The highs and lows are possibly more intense than normal. For example, last Friday, I worked all day and sent out 6 applications. I seem to average 30 minutes to 1 1/2 hours per application. I felt pretty excited by what I had accomplished; but, really, there is no accomplishment without a job or at least a response. The lack of response is disheartening. Sending hearfelt letters and a summary of my life out into the void daily starts to feel like a lonely, sad pursuit. By Monday morning, I felt pretty deflated. Who would want to hire me? I finally managed to send out a couple of email for jobs found on Craigslist.

Here are the stats for today:

Mr. Jobseeker – 6 applications

Mrs. Jobseeker – 2 applications

Baby Jobseeker – 2 applications.

Heidigger and a Hippo

meg33 — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 23:24:13 +0000

The authors, Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein, also wrote Plato and a Platypus walk into a Bar - both books are about understanding and exploring philosophy through jokes. Heidigger is more specifically about exploring what philosophy has to say about death and the hereafter. The style is just a little too corny for me, and I got really sick of their imaginary straight man, the so-called “Daryl,” who asks dumb questions and is terrified of death. Still, some of the jokes and New Yorker cartoons are really funny, and I was able to glean a little philosophy from the pages. For instance, I don’t think I ever heard of Ernest Becker whose Pulitzer Prize winning work, The Denial of Death, explores how the objective knowledge of our own mortality doesn’t stop us from inventing ways to avoid dealing with it through what Becker called “immortality systems.” Per Becker, the problem with these culturally-sponsored immortality systems is that we invest ourselves in them to the extent that we have to defend them against other culture’s immortality systems; in addition, he says they don’t actually save us from what Cathcart and Klein describe as two sides of the same coin: the “life is meaningless-and-then-you -die problem…or its flip side, the anxiety of facing a life that is finite and can never satisfy our yearning for infinity.” Becker’s advice is to face up to the angst as a way out of this conundrum, drawing on Soren Kierkegaard’s contention that “angst is our ultimate teacher.” Avoiding angst by being detached, being hyper-busy, or trying to “be someone” are dead ends. To quote C and K again, “It’s only when we’re willing to let go of all of our illusions and admit that we are lost and helpless and terrified that we will be free of ourselves and our false securities and ready for what Kierkegaard calls ‘the leap of faith.’ (Not quite sure what is meant by this.) The chapter on Schopenhauer seemed vague or at least I am vague on what Schopenhauer was saying about death, but Heidigger seems to be saying that we need to confront death without illusion in order to live authentically – similar to Kierkegaard and ultimately, Becker, I think. Was Heidigger an existentialist, too? I think so, since the chapter on Heidigger (or, Heidi, as they call him) leads directly to Sartre. As my muddled description indicates, this book is fun and accessible, but doesn’t give you a solid foundation in philosophy – obviously! Maybe it will help as a way to start thinking about some of these writers and their works…we shall see. I’ll try to summarize the existentialists in another post.

More horrors of the 20th century

meg33 — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 01:20:56 +0000

After listening to the Teaching Company course on the History of Hitler’s Empire, I felt somewhat enlightened on how the Nazis came to power, even somewhat on why. I understood as well the reasoning behind Hitler’s seemingly incomprehensible attack on the Soviet Union (hadn’t he heard of Napoleon?). Since he was ideologically driven, he was obsesssed with crushing the s0-called Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy. With Britain weakened after Dunkirk and America not yet in the war, he turned his attention East, which was his main goal anyway. His racial theories caused him to denigrate the “mongrel” Russians and have the confidence that his army could be in Moscow before winter struck (rather than diminish German moral about the effectiveness of the “lightning war,” or blitzkrieg, he issued only summer uniforms to the troops entering Russia). Interestingly, if he had been less ideological, he might have won many Russians, fed up with Stalin’s ruthless tyranny, to join his forces. Instead, he managed to unite the Russians against the German advance. In City of Thieves, a novel by David Benioff, we learn what the Russian resistance meant. “You have never been so hungry; you have never been so cold” begins this compelling, breathtaking novel. I was in an agony of suspense as the mismatched protagonists are sent on an absurd errand by a corrupt Soviet Colonel. Tragedy and comedy intermingle to devasting effect. I have read many “quest” novels, most in the science fiction or fantasy genre, where on one level you know that the good guys are going to win, no matter how many giant spiders are on the move. This had the elements of a fantasy novel, backed by the horror of the truth. As Stalin abandoned Leningrad, thousands died of starvation, tainting the waters of the Neva with the stench of death. There were cannibals. On the other side were the Einsatzgroupen, the Nazi death squads. This is no fantasy novel.

Hedgehogs and philosophers

meg33 — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 22:11:22 +0000

A cat may look at a queen, and a lowly Parisienne concierge may revere Tolstoy, read St. Augustine and Schopenhauer, and look down on the wealthy, but mostly vapid denizens of the apartment building where she lives and works. The concept is heavily belabored, to the point where you are tired of the ‘diamond in the rough’ theme. Manuela, the cleaning woman, is another “natural aristocrat,” whose boots her employers are not fit to wipe. Ho hum. Then along comes the fabulously wealthy Japanese filmmaker, whose films our heroine, Renee, has seen and appreciated, who shares her love of Tolstoy, and who sees through her immediately, as an almost instant bond is formed. Renee seems oddly terrified of being discovered to be intelligent, maybe it’s a French class thing? The link between the cats, hers named Leo, his Kitty and Levin, is rather clever, but otherwise I didn’t believe a word of it. LIkewise the rapidly formed friendship between these two and the suicidal pre-teen, Paloma, who has decided that, based on the adults around her, life is not worth living and is plotting to kill herself on her 13th birthday. This was a good plot twist and kept me reading many rather pointless diary entries of Paloma. Everything is on the surface and hammered home without, it must be said, elegance. This is unfortunate as there were many good things about the book, including the ending. Maybe there were some translation issues?

October Highlights from the New Yorker

meg33 — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 03:04:54 +0000

In the October 25th issue, I was engrossed in Ian Frazier’s article about the invading Asian carp that are (apparently) poised to ruin the Great Lakes. Frazier is always good, even if the news of invasive species leaves one slightly depressed. The “Letter from California” about the noise pollution caused by leaf-blowers in an upscale neighborhood was amusing, but also relevant to all neighborhoods where people obsessively blow their leaves around, on peaceful Saturday afternoons when you’re trying to read out on the porch. This was a good issue; I even liked the fiction (“The Tree Line, Kansas 1934″). The keeper for me though was the review of a new translation of Giacomo Leopardi’s poetry, very depressing, apparently, but also beautifully written. The October 4th issue had Nancy Franklin’s review of Sorkin’s movie, The Social Network. The article about John Cage was interesting. October 18th had an insightful piece about the tea party movement’s admiration for Glenn Beck (scary) and the roots of his and their philosophy (even scarier), plus an excellent overview by Adam Gopnik of Adam Smith biographies, pointing out some interesting facts about Smith and capitalism (not so laissez faire as he is often portrayed). The October 11th issue (the Money Issue as it happens) had another great money-themed story by Alice Munro, Corrie, plus a funny piece by Nora Ephron about a near inheritance.

Cookbooks and dot.coms

meg33 — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 16:11:24 +0000

I was hoping to like Allegra Goodman’s latest, The Cookbook Collector. After all, I enjoyed Kaatterskill Falls a few years back. As with many recent reads, this one sacrifices the true story for a lot of fluff and tortuous tie-ins. Probably the publisher thought cookbook collecting would not be so compelling, and encouraged a whole plotline about the dot.com bust in the late nineties, dragging in coast-to-coast business intrique and love triangles, as well as a whacky Jewish sect of mystics, and, of course, 9/11 (better books that touch on this topic are out there – Netherland, for one, and The Emperor’s Children). The best parts of this book are centered around the mysterious collector, his secret love (rather unimaginatively revealed) and the bookstore owner, George, who happens to be 16 years older than his love-interest, the not quite believable waif, Jess. I rather resent the unearned reference to Emma and the blurb on the back that awards “the mantle of Jane Austen” to Goodman. Sorry, but no. And, if the two sisters plotline is an attempt at recreating Sense and Sensibility, it didn’t work.