Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson

I am quite thankful to be done with this maddening, suffocating, revolting book. I only finished it because I had to read it for a class, and if I hadn't vowed to read fifty books I probably wouldn't have read the whole thing then, either. Here is the plot as best as it can be described: A massive and maniacal person known only as the Dog-Woman fishes a baby out of the Thames and names it Jordan. They live through the rule of Cromwell and Jordan imagines some really dumb crap and tries to pass it off as a narrative. At the end, there is a hastily tacked-on epilogue which tries to introduce a couple of new modern characters and convince us that they are the reincarnations of Jordan and the Dog-Woman, and that that is somehow interesting or innovative.

The whole thing is full of metaphors beat senselessly into the ground:

He called me Jess because that is the name of the hood which restrains the falcon.

Palpable anti-male bias:

5. Men deem themselves weighty and women light. Therefore it is simple to tie a stone round their necks and drown them should they become too troublesome.

6. Men are best left in groups by themselves where they will entirely wear themselves out in drunkenness and competition. While this is taking place a woman may carry on with her own life unhindered.

And a whole bunch of forced images and vignettes that have no connection to any plotline whatsoever, and are only justified through the use of tired and half-baked metaphysical garbage:

OBJECTS 1: A woman looks into her bag and recognizes none of her belongings. She hurries home. But where is home? She follows the address written in her purse. She has never seen this house before and who are those ugly children wrecking the garden? Inside a fat man is waiting for his supper. She shoots him. At the trial she says she had never seen him before. He was her husband.

Winterson is insulting me by placing that last line there; I knew it was her husband. Read the whole thing again but leave off the last line--isn't that much better? Writers like Winterson spend so much time being clever that they come off as if they think they are much more clever than you. And then there's the recycled time is not linear ideas, the liberal self-righteousness, the flat characters, the Faulkner-lite trading off of point of view. This book prides itself on being about ideas, but if these ideas didn't get worn out in the twentieth century, surely Winterson has killed them.

Do not read this book.

Suddenly We Didn't Want To Die by Elton Mackin

Memoirs of a World War I Marine.

There is a thrill in hunting men. It's a greater sport than hunting rabbits anytime -- rabbits can't shoot back at you or call your bet.... War is just a high-class type of poker. That's why some fellows learn to like the game. 'Kill or be killed' just means you play for keeps.

+ Interesting It's a pretty sweet story. I mean, it sucks because it's depressing. It's a war and all. But it's really interesting. And the "chapters" are just little tales of specific memories, only 1-5 pages long. Good for my ADD.

- Narrative Mackin refers to himself in the third person as "Slim." He tells a lot of personal stories that way. However, he sometimes switches to "I" or "we." It's confusing. Also, I don't really understand "humility."

+ Woohoo It's cool that he mentions the legendary 38th Battalion "Rock of the Marne" because my brother was in that division in Iraq. I even have a 38th Infantry t-shirt.

Overall B Considering I had to read this for class, it was pretty good.

Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom

I purchased Tuesdays with Morrie at the height of its popularity, while I was in an airport bookshop. I was waiting on a connecting flight, and felt kind of stupid putting a $1.50 pack of gum on my checkcard. For whatever reason, I did not read the book during my flight. (I was probably too busy eating peanuts and drinking watered- down ginger ale.) In fact, I did not read it for many years.

Earlier this evening I was sitting in my easychair, staring at the wall, trying to determine what I should read next; when a stack of books toppled over, and a few of them fell off the bookshelf. Of those mutinous books that made it to the floor, Tuesdays with Morrie was the only one that I had yet to read. I took it as a sign.

When sportswriter Mitch Albom found out that his college mentor had contracted amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (often referred to as Lou Gehrig's Disease), it had been sixteen years since he had last seen the man. He began visiting Morrie every week and discussing topics with him, such as, marriage, family, regrets, forgiveness, and death. The book is a written record of these informal interviews.

While Albom is a good writer, it is not his prose that makes this book shine, but the words of Morrie Schwartz that Albom dutifully transcribed. Morrie's thoughts and witty aphorisms were what kept me eagerly turning each page. They were entertaining, insightful, often poignant, and always candid. While discussing the fear that many people have of aging, Morrie states, "Aging is not just decay, you know. It's growth. It's more than the negative that you're going to die, it's also the positive that you understand you're going to die, and that your live a better life because of it."

Each chapter of the book focuses on a different Tuesday, a different topic. Sandwiched between each chapter, Albom spends a page or two reminiscing about the earlier experiences that he shared with his professor, most of which took place during Albom's time as a college student at Brandeis. Although brief, these reminiscences provide important context for the Tuesday interviews.

At pocket size and only 200 pages, the book is a quick read. But Tuesdays with Morrie's size belies its literary and emotional stature. Simply put, the book is powerful.

Since its initial publication, Tuesdays with Morrie has been read by millions of people, has been made into a feature film, and has earned the somewhat nebulous title of "modern classic." I realize that I am about a decade late in reading this book. Given Morrie's penchant for aphorisms, I think the best way to address my severe tardiness is simply, "Better late than never."

The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton

I am going to give away the big sort-of secret in this book, because I believe that it is a.) crucial to explaining the plot, and b.) quite obvious, quite early.

The Man Who Was Thursday is about a man named Gabriel Syme, who is a poet recruited by the London police into an undercover unit designed to combat intellectual threats to the government, specifically "anarchists," by which Chesterton means not quite what we would mean, but a wide-ranging group of intellectuals whose ideologies are closest to nihilism. Through Syme's cleverness, he successfully masquerades as an anarchist and is elected to the worldwide council of anarchists, of which there are seven, each named after a day of the week. Syme is Thursday, and the group is led by the intimidating and mysterious Sunday. If you think the fact that anarchists have an organization is funny, well, that's the sort of humor you're getting with this book.

Thing is, as the book develops, you find out one by one that all six of the "Sabbatarians," excluding Sunday, are policemen in the same unit tracking each other. I think that's a really funny twist, and it's certainly a funny book. When Syme's fellow anarchists explain why the former Thursday must be replaced, this is what they say:

As you know, his death was as self-denying as his life, for he died through his faith in a hygenic mixture of chalk and water as a substitute for milk, which beverage he regarded as barbaric, and involving cruelty to the cow.

These sorts of nihilistic and existentialist philosophies are the butt of Thursday's extended joke. Chesterton "claimed afterwards that he wrote this book as an unusual affirmation that goodness and right were at the heart of every aspect of the world," according to Wikipedia--at the heart of the book is an affirmation of the great order of God that rules over chaos. "Chaos is dull," Syme says, trying to argue with an anarchist and fellow poet that order and lawfulness are the most poetic things in the universe.

This book is only around 150 pages, but it's packed very tightly with a lot of ideas. Despite its philosophizing, its humor makes much of it a very light book, and some of the more "adventurous" scenes would make an awfully good film--there's even a car chase. But the book's final chapters, in which Syme seems to exit the reality of London and enter the fantastic and surreal world of Sunday's grand estate, and where the book's overt Christian themes are the most evident, that are the most impressive.

I would like to film this book, casting Cary Elwes as Gabriel Syme. If you are a movie producer, please e-mail me.

Magnetic Los Angeles by Greg Hise

This book starts off with promise. Greg Hise, an Associate Professor of Urban History at USC, has some interesting and original ideas regarding suburbanization. The introduction is very solid, if only it were indicative of the rest of the book.

The arguments that were a crucial part of the introduction never fully materialize throughout the book. In the first few pages of Magnetic Los Angeles, Hise states that historians often perpetuate the all-too-common stereotypes about suburbs. He argues that terms such as "urban sprawl" are inadequate in describing the complex processes of suburbanization. Furthermore, Hise asserts that people were not simply moving out to the suburbs to get away from downtown, but that many were, in fact, following jobs out to the suburbs.

The problem is that not only does Hise choose Los Angeles as his case study, but he actually tries to argue that it is similar to the rest of the United States. Los Angeles is really unlike any other city in North America; and its development was unique as well. Unlike most other cities, Los Angeles does not have a well-defined, cohesive downtown area. Instead, there are three or four areas out of which the city spread. Los Angeles was also unique in that it had large aeronautical development companies on its outskirts, and shipping yards on its coast. Most other cities do not share this good, economic and geographic fortune.

The main problem with Magnetic Los Angeles is that it lacks focus. The book feels like a cobbling together of already-publishing articles (this very well may be the case). Sometimes whole chapters felt out of place. Hise spends thirty pages discussing migrant workers and their homes, but does nothing to place this chapter within the context of the rest of the book.

Basically, Hise set out to refute a specific argument. He wanted to disprove the idea that suburbanization was chaotic, and that people moved to the suburbs simplu as a way of escaping to better housing. Hise was somewhat successful in making his case within the confines of L.A. However, I was thoroughly unconvinced that this was the case in most American cities.

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

Little known fact: In Costa Rica, blogger.com is in spanish. I am exhausted from travel, nervous about studying abroad, and very confused by this book, but I will try to write a review as best I can.

This book was confusing, to say the least. It involved a 15-year old runaway escaping from an ominous prophecy straight from Oedipus imposed on him by his own father, an old man who can talk to cats, souls leaving bodies, souls entering dreams, bodies entering dreams, souls... dreaming.. bodies? I couldn't shake the feeling that this entire book was a metaphor, but for what, I have no idea. Perhaps some of the more tricky bits would make more sense if I had a background in Japanese cultural history; I get the feeling that a lot of the strange characters and elements of Murakami's story would mean more to a reader from his own country.

Murakami is an excellent writer, and completely lets his reader get inside the head of the main character, the incredibly intelligent, 15-year old Kafka Tamura (an assumed name). I really got a sense of Kafka's wandering consciousness, and some of the things that he speculated about the state of his own subconscious nearly made my head spin. Kafka on the Shore is written in a style similar to Jonathon Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated, where alternating chapters tell different story lines, the secondary story line beginning in the past and eventually converging with the present.

I really enjoyed this book, it was an incredibly well told story, but one that is so densely packed with metaphor and symbolism, that it would take much more effort than I can offer to extract any greater meaning from it.

Randy's Books 2010

1) Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction by J.D. Salinger 

2) Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger 

3) To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right by Joyce Lee Malcolm 

4) Lochner v. New York: Economic Regulation on Trial by Paul Kens 

5) Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger 

6) The Death Penalty: An American History by Stuart Banner 

7) Let's Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice by Paul Butler 

  8) Brown v. Board of Education: Caste, Culture and the Constitution by Robert J. Cottrol, Raymond T. Diamond and Leland B. Ware 

9) The Known World by Edward P. Jones 

  10) Reconstructing the Fourth Amendment: A History of Search and Seizure, 1789-1868 by Andrew E. Taslitz 

11) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce 

 12) Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke 

  13) The Intruders: Unreasonable Searches and Seizures from King John to John Ashcroft by Samuel Dash 

14) I am America (And So Can You!) by Stephen Colbert 

 15) The Red Lily by Anatole France 

 16) Othello by William Shakespeare 

 17) Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy 

 18) The Death of Superman by Dan Jurgens, et al. 

 19) Civil War: A Marvel comics Event by Mark Millar, et al. 

 20) Kick-Ass by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr. 

 21) Love in the time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez 

  22) The Problems of Jurisprudence by Richard A. Posner 

23) Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis 

 24) U.S.! by Chris Bachelder 

 25) The Good Apprentice by Iris Murdoch 

 26) Identity Crisis by Brad Meltzer, et al. 

 27) Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault 

 28) The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe 

 29) The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan 

 30) Dance, Dance, Dance by Haruki Murakami 

 31) The Essential Holmes: Selections from the Letters, Speeches, Judicial Opinions, and Other Writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. By Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.; Edited by Richard Posner 

 32) The Nature of the Judicial Process by Benjamin Cardozo 

 33) The Ages of American Law by Grant Gilmore 

 34) How Lawyers Lose Their Way: A Profession Fails its Creative Minds by Jean Stefancic and Richard Delgado 

 35) Armeggedon in Retrospect by Kurt Vonnegut

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

Of all the books I've read this year, the prose in this one is probably the most striking:

They are in the botanical garden, near the Cathedral of All Saints. She sees one tear and leans forward and licks it, taking it into her mouth. As she has taken the blood from his hand when he cut himself cooking for her. Blood. Tear. He feels that everything is missing from his body, feels he contains smoke.

That's one of many passages that stood out to me. The metaphors, as the best ones do, always seem to describe the way one feels with a precision that you never knew existed. I've felt like I've "contain[ed] smoke," but until I read that passage I didn't know how to describe it.

Still, this is the kind of book my girlfriend would hate. There's not much in the way of a plot--It opens as a young nurse, Hana, tends for a badly burned man with no name in an Italian villa ruined by World War II. Later she and "the English Patient" are joined by Caravaggio, a thief she knew in her youth, and Kip, a young Indian sapper (a person who finds and defuses bombs for the military.) That's about it. There are flashbacks--oh so many flashbacks--and they seem to double back on themselves, in the way that the English Patient's flashback narrative might touch upon an event in brief, and then a chapter later double back and go through the entire thing again, revealing new details. Narratives are chopped up and sprinkled through the book piecemeal with little regard to chronology. There is nothing really remarkable about the beginning or the end that make them recognizable as such.

Normally, these kind of things don't bother me much. But I, like Elaine screaming "just die already!," find them a little grating and confusing in this novel. I feel like to be completely appreciated it needs more patience than I was willing to give it, because the characters really aren't engaging enough to make me want to read with a fine tooth comb, so to speak.

I have to write a paper on this book by the end of this month, though, so maybe I'll come to understand it a little better.

Meagan's Books 2009

1. American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld

2. Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell

3. Skinny Bitch by Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin

4. Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

5. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

6. The Tales of Beedle the Bard by J.K. Rowling

7. Beautiful Boy by David Sheff

8. The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta

9. Holidays on Ice by David Sedaris

10. The Places in Between by Rory Stewart

11. Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris

12. Tweak by Nic Sheff

13. The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin

14. The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi

15. Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons

16. Louder Than Words by Jenny McCarthy

17. Stolen Innocence by Elissa Wall

18. Escape by Carolyn Jessop

19. The Heretic's Daughter by Kathleen Kent

20. The Year of Fog by Michelle Richmond

21. Happens Every Day by Isabel Gillies

22. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling

23. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling

24. The Host by Stephanie Meyer

25. The Associate by John Grisham

26. Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz

27. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer

28. Handle With Care by Jodi Picoult

29. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers

30. The White Queen by Philippa Gregory

31. In the Woods by Tana French

32. The Best American Nonrequired Reading, edited by Dave Eggers

33. Are You There Vodka? It's Me Chelsea by Chelsea Handler

34. South of Broad by Pat Conroy

35. The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown

36. Living Dead in Dallas by Charlaine Harris

37. Along for the Ride by Sarah Dessen

38. Resilience by Elizabeth Edwards
39. Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert; translation by Allan Russell

"She still was not happy, she never had been. What caused this inadequacy in her life? Why did everything she leaned on instantaneously decay?" - Gustave Flaubert

M. Bovary runs along the same lines as many books claimed by feminism as the "early stages of enlightenment." Kate Chopin's "The Awakening", Emily Brontè's "Wuthering Heights", and Thomas Hardy's "Return of the Native" all all into this category. They are all about artistic women discontent with with "simple" husbands. They all seek passionate love and feel they will find freedom in this, but they inevitablely find just the opposite.

Madame claimed to know and yearn so much for love yet she can't see it in its most basic form. How does M. Bovary presume so much superiority over her husband in the area? Can she not see that his quite but consistent admiration of her is love in its greatest form? He is content with her, and happy at each breath she takes. Why could this not be enough?

M. Bovary is truly blind to her own selfishness. She never realizes that she is the destructive force in her life. Bad luck is not following her around, she is dragging it kicking and screaming. She also seems to feel a great deal of pity for herself, and expects others to as well. Shouldn't people know what she wants from them without her constantly having to ask for it or explain it? (Attention Ladies!) I think this novel is horribly sad because it is so often repeated.

I found Charles' passionate and desolate reactions in the very end to be most ironic.

"For I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content" Phil 4:11