#8 The Great Derangement:

The Great Derangement by Matt Taibbi. Everything I said about Smells Like Dead Elephants? Goes for this book too. Taibbi's pissed off. He made some interesting points about the appeals of mass religion, and it freaked me out to see him slowly slipping into the fundamentalist mindset. I have no idea how he spent so long living a double life and yet maintaining enough perspective to pull aside the curtain. An interesting read, but it's difficult, especially if you're still feeling that Obama giddiness. Maybe wait for it to wear off naturally before reading this book.

#7 I Was Told There'd Be Cake

I Was Told There'd Be Cake by Sloane Crosley. A book of memoirs by a twenty-something New Yorker. It was interesting, but three weeks later I can't remember too much about it. A fun read for the afternoon, but not something you absolutely NEED to read.

#6 Cold Comfort Farm

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Foster. What can I say? I finished the last page and turned to the first. Pragmatic, light, sly, and funny as hell. Just a gem of a book. Sorry, I can't be more coherent than that. *shrugs*

#5 I Capture the Castle

I Capture the Castle is not what I expected from the author of "101 Dalmatians." Cassandra Mortmain wants to become a writer. However, she has to deal with her family: sullen sister Rose, washed-up father James, and sensible-with-a-dash-of-crazy stepmother Topaz. James wrote a book, but unfortunately hasn't written anything else for 10 years and the family is rapidly running out of money while living in a rented castle. Despite this myriad of obstacles, Cassandra gets hold of a journal and begins to write. One of her best lines: "I have just remarked to Rose that our situation is really rather romantic, two girls in this strange and lonely house. She replied that she saw nothing romantic about being shut up in a crumbling ruin surrounded by a sea of mud."

Cassandra is an utterly charming narrator. With every chapter beginning with an explanation of how she has time to write, she tells the story of her sister's courtship of the new wealthy landlords and her father's gradual intellectual reawakening. Cassandra is so sensible you forget she is only 17, until she falls in love. And then you remember. Hoo boy, do you remember. I have to say, Smith PERFECTLY captures the longing and overly dramatic sensibilities of a literate 17 year old girl. Falling in love at that age is all pain and longing and dizzying joy and Smith allows Cassandra to experience all of it without becoming annoying. And seriously, I've read my old journals. The fact that she made teenage love bearable, let alone compelling, is pretty damn impressive.

The characters are well-developed, if sometimes a bit cliched. My favorite (other than Cassandra herself) is Topaz, a woman who lives up (or down?) to her name. Mini diversion here. I live in New Mexico, and we have what is called a "Santa Fe type." The women wear cowboy boots with broomstick skirts, practically drip turquoise and silver Indian jewelry and drive Subarus. The men wear Teva sandals and stringy pony tails, are deeply, deeply tanned, and hit on young women. They are a common and instantly recognizable sight in New Mexico. Now don't get me wrong, I see the attractions of a red broomstick skirt, but... Do other regions have these? Not Santa Fe in particular, but New Agey, sanctimonious types? But, back to the book: Topaz in a 1930's English Santa Fe type. She likes to wander about naked in the woods and she'll randomly spot nonsense about the beauty of nature. But her affectations covers a deeply sensible and pragmatic woman who keeps the deeply dysfunctional Mortmain family together. She's utterly charming and scatty and my second favorite character this year.

Although I loved Topaz, the writing, the characters, the ending, really everything about the book, I'm not putting this in the reread pile. There are certain books that I just fall in love with, finishing them only to turn back to page one so as to prolong the experience. This book reminded me a bit too much of my adolescence to comfortably revisit it soon. But I'm keeping it in case I ever find myself in the company of a lovesick preteen or teenager.

Update

OK, so I've fallen a bit behind. I'm now up to book 9 I think, so I'm going to try to get those up today or tomorrow. The professor I TA for had her baby a few weeks early, so I got swamped.

status quo

I’ve read five new books in the past 2 weeks (since December 29th). Unfortunately, I don’t think this rate will continue as school starts on Wednesday, so I’m taking the opportunity to post the books I hope to read in the next couple weeks:

The God Delusion
American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau (I hated Thoreau in high school and college, man. HATED HIM. Also not so fond of Emerson or any of the other Transcendentalists. Except Walt Whitman. When the rest of the American Lit survey class were bitching about Hawthorne's use of the passive voice, I'd read Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,/ Missing me one place search another,/ I stop somewhere waiting for you. Still one of my absolute favorites.)
Cold Comfort Farm
The Savage Detectives
I Capture the Castle
Them: Adventures with Extremists
Infinite Jest (yeah, I'm not even kidding myself with this one. You could teach an entire CLASS on this novel, and I'm going to finish it in the next two weeks? But, I WANT to read this. I've read all of his other work and I love David Foster Wallace. His death made the world less...everyhing, really. However, 1100 pages? Infinite Jest is going to stay on this list for awhile.)

Seeing as I'm taking three graduate courses and starting up the TA position again, I really don't know if I'll get to these anytime soon. But, the goal is to read 100 books this year. And the only way that's going to happen is if I stop watching so much TV and start reading more books. *sighs*

#3 and # 4: Blink and One Bullet Away

These two books really shouldn’t go together: a marine’s account of the initial Iraq and a book on snap judgments. But, I read them at the same time and liked it, so now everyone has to suffer.

Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell, is pretty well known by this point. It’s a book about snap judgments: how we make them, why we make them, and when they’re a good idea (more often than you’d think). Gladwell delves a bit into the biochemical reactions that occur during split second blink moments but spends more time explaining what happens during these moments. It seems counterintuitive that a person’s snapshot judgment can beat scientific analysis, but that’s what happens in the very first example. Months of scientific analysis deemed a statue genuine: after a single glance, experts said it was a fake. And the really cool thing? These experts didn’t know why it was a fake; they just knew. Now, in today’s results driven society, that type of thinking isn’t really encouraged. More facts equals better decisions is almost the rallying cry of our Google happy age. But in so many scenarios, that’s just not the case. Gladwell devotes a large section of Blink to attempting to explain when to trust your first impression (speed dating is good!) and when not to (maybe facing your accuser not always the best way to go in court cases). However, in the end he admits that there is no hard and fast rule about when to/when not to trust your snap judgment and advise us to, well, use our best judgment.

This is an aside from the book, but it’s interesting enough that I want to write about it anyway. In Blink, Gladwell discusses a researcher who has learned to read marriages to the point that he can predict whether a marriage will last based on only fifteen minutes of observation. First of all, DUDE. I want to learn how to do that! What a gift that would be to a marriage and family therapist (which is what I am currently attending grad school for). But, the more I think about it, the more ambivalent I become. Yes, it would be nice to know ahead of time whether a marriage would work or not. But, if you were able to see this, what then? I mean, do you say to your clients, “You know, the way you roll your eyes at each other signifies a deep level of contempt. This isn’t going to work out, so give up now.” While that is the quick and honest route, I’m really uncomfortable with that type of pronouncement. People can change. This is the underpinning of MFT, of cognitive behavioral therapy, of psychoanalytic therapy, of all therapy, of all people who work with people. People can change. Our behavior is not predetermined. So the idea that you can predict the events of someone’s life after 15 minutes? Pisses me off. Even if it’s true, damnit.

One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer by Nathaniel Fick is, as the title implies, an account of a marine officer. Nate Fick graduated college and instead of going to business school joined the Marines. He did so for a lot of reasons: an attraction to the Corps honor and courage, a desire to test himself, a desire to live instead of talk about living. I don’t have the book in front of me so I’m not going to go into details, but the upshot of it is that after boot camp and officer training he ended up in Iraq as a lieutenant in the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion during the first push of Operation Freedom. Evan Wright’s series of embedded articles for Rolling Stone, the book Generation Kill and the HBO miniseries by the same name were all based off of Wright’s experiences in Fick’s platoon. (For the record, all of the above are excellent reading/viewing. For sheer immediacy, I prefer the articles, but the book is also very good, even if a bit more scattershot. The miniseries, directed by The Wire’s David Simon, is amazingly realistic and unflinching, like all of Simon’s work.) The book is interesting to view as a course in idealism: Fick joins the Corps for truth, justice and the American way. However, as Iraq happens, his view of the Corps and the American military system becomes increasingly jaded and pessimistic. It’s painful to so clearly experience the grinding away of someone’s ideals and illusions, especially someone as articulate and thoughtful as Fick.

Very interesting, but wtf does this have to do with Blink, I hear you cry (yes, my formative years consisted of British novelists and Monty Python. Why do you ask?) During his training, Fick talks at length about the seemingly insane and petty attention to detail demanded by the Marines. He wrote thousands of reports, spent ages learning how to wear his belt correctly, and assessed maps and technical reports till his eyes bled. Why? So these actions became ingrained in his subconscious to the point that drop the man in a war zone and sixty seconds later he could give you a detailed report of the scenario, three options to deal with it, and four ways to carry out each of those options. As I read the book, it seemed like every exercise Fick detailed was formulated to make something second nature. Why do you do pushups if your belt isn't perfectly centered? Because if your belt is awry in combat, your gun will be pulled out of reach. Why are officers forced to write thousands of situational reports in school but never once they're in combat? So they start thinking in terms of objectives and alternatives.

Besides this whole retraining of the subconcious, I also noticed another fucntion of Blink within the narrative. A large part of Fick's exasperation with the Marine Corps was that the Battalion went to war with the whole chain of command in the field. Decisions had to be run up and down that chain of command every time. As such, the general would issue an order that made sense at the time (or not. Fick is pretty generous in seeing the good intentions behind each order, while Wright relays soldierss views on orders. To say the least, their views are not so flattering), but by the time that order reached the men charged with enacting it, the situation had changed. The order made no sense or put the troops in harm's way.One of the things Fick learned in officer training was that a good somewhat informed decision made now is nearly always better than a great and exhaustively researched decision made in 48 hours. This statement sums up Blink in, well, the blink of an eye.

Yeah, that was corny, sorry. I think the point of writing these two reviews together is to say that sometimes books change the way you see the world. Blink changed me; One Bullet Away highlighted that change in blinding neon letters.

#2: Smells Like Dead Elephants

Smells Like Dead Elephants by Matt Taibbi

Matt Taibbi is an angry man. He's pissed off that our government has been suborned by special interests, angry that fundamentalists have so much say in our government, and infuriated that Michael Jackson exists. I find myself in two minds about this book. On the one hand, Taibbi's pretty obviously biased and in the past, I've always been wary of journalists who obviously have an agenda.

On the other hand, Taibbi is so angry at our fucked up society that it's almost transcendental. He's mad at everyone: Republicans, Democrats, liberals, conservatives, stupid people, smart people, everyone. There's something pure about his misanthropy because it seems to come from a deep belief in humanity's capacity to be better. And it's his constant disappointment that seems to anger him so much. If he really didn't believe in people, he wouldn't be nearly so angry at them all the time, and he wouldn't be such an interesting author.

It's interesting, Taibbi doesn't take aim at the obvious people. He interviews Cindy Sheehan and rather than dismissing her as a rabblerouser (as most liberals/thinky people seem to), is genuinely sympathetic to her and details the way she and her pain have been co-opted by both sides. Taibbi was with Sean Penn during the aftermath of Katrina, another incident that has been widely mocked, and Taibbi doesn't milk the incident for cheap laughs.

On the other hand, Taibbi has plenty of vitriol for worthier targets: "[Former representative Tom] DeLay moves through the aisles like some kind of balding succubus." And again, it's this venom that makes the book interesting. Because Taibbi is angry, but he's not angry at everyone. He's mad at the hypocrites, mad at the people who have a duty and have failed, mad at the people who look at tragedy and ask, "What's in it for me?" His sheer fury at the gall of these people is a shot of adrenalin. I found myself pissed off at Congress. I even ( no lie) wrote a letter to my Congressman asking him to explain his vote. And even if it won't do any good, goddamn it, I'm angry. I'm angry that Katrina happened and people died. I'm angry that Cindy Sheehan's son died in a pointless war. I'm angry that our government is for sale. And I have Matt Taibbi to thank.