Grab your bag and grab your coat
Tell the ones that need to know
We are headed north
This is going to be my last post on Invincible Summer, because I am switching over to tumblr. It's not really a big deal, everything is going to be pretty similar (even the background!), but it is making me kind of sad. A few months ago when I decided to start writing on here again I went back and re-read a bunch of my old posts. A lot of them are pretty painful to read, but it is kind of cool to have documentation about what was going on that I felt was worthy of writing about over the course of the past three years. I started out, and remain, kind of ambivalent about the whole having-a-blog thing, but I like writing things for my friends to read so I guess I'll just keep doing it.
I can't believe this thing has existed for three years.
Anyway, I am switching over because most of the blogs I read now are on tumblr and it is just easier to keep track of things this way. I probably would have done it sooner but it has taken me a while to figure out how to set everything up in a way that I like. A lot of tumblrs are pretty multimedia based and not very good for long blocks of text, so finding a good layout took forever. It turns out I am pretty picky about that kind of thing, which I wasn't really aware of before. I still don't like the way the archives work, and I'm still figuring out how comments are going to work, but I think it's going to be good. Oh, and I changed the name.
Here is the new thing. Come visit.
4.02.2010
Cannonball - Book 18
Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp
I was going to start reading Their Eyes Were Watching God on the bus yesterday but the prose was difficult and I was having trouble focusing, so I started this instead. I picked it up because someone on the Slate podcast (it was either Meghan O'Roarke or Katie Roiphe) I listened to about The Night of the Gun recommended Drinking: A Love Story as an example of a memoir that was a little more insightful about the motivations and emotional implications of addiction, so I picked it up.
It's a good book. It didn't have the same level of drama or insanity that The Night of the Gun had (there are no guns at all in Knapp's story, for one), but I found it more compelling, somehow. Knapp is a different kind of addict than Carr. Carr did crazy things and his life visible began to desintegrate; he lost his job, he was arrested multiple times, he engaged in some pretty significant criminal activity. Despite being a serious alcoholic for 20 years Knapp always managed to at least keep up the appearance that she had her life together. She continued to succeed professionally the entire time she is drinking and very few people, except those she was very close to, even knew she had a problem. That is just more interesting to me for some reason. I guess it is because anyone can just go crazy and screw up their lives but only a very specific kind of person can get blackout drunk almost daily for two decades and still maintain the appearance that nothing is wrong.
Page count: 254
Up next: The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
I was going to start reading Their Eyes Were Watching God on the bus yesterday but the prose was difficult and I was having trouble focusing, so I started this instead. I picked it up because someone on the Slate podcast (it was either Meghan O'Roarke or Katie Roiphe) I listened to about The Night of the Gun recommended Drinking: A Love Story as an example of a memoir that was a little more insightful about the motivations and emotional implications of addiction, so I picked it up.
It's a good book. It didn't have the same level of drama or insanity that The Night of the Gun had (there are no guns at all in Knapp's story, for one), but I found it more compelling, somehow. Knapp is a different kind of addict than Carr. Carr did crazy things and his life visible began to desintegrate; he lost his job, he was arrested multiple times, he engaged in some pretty significant criminal activity. Despite being a serious alcoholic for 20 years Knapp always managed to at least keep up the appearance that she had her life together. She continued to succeed professionally the entire time she is drinking and very few people, except those she was very close to, even knew she had a problem. That is just more interesting to me for some reason. I guess it is because anyone can just go crazy and screw up their lives but only a very specific kind of person can get blackout drunk almost daily for two decades and still maintain the appearance that nothing is wrong.
Page count: 254
Up next: The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
4.01.2010
Cannonball - Book 17
With Love and Squalor: 14 Writers Respond to the Work of J.D. Salinger edited by Kip Kotzen and Thomas Beller
This book was pretty uneven, quality-wise. There are a few essays that I really loved--Amy Sohn's "Franny and Amy" and Thomas Beller's "The Salnger Weather" were standouts--but overall the bad outweighed the good. Maybe the problem is that, while I like Salinger, I have never been able to understand people who looooooove Salinger. I wanted to, I really did. When I read The Catcher in the Rye for the first time in grade nine I guess I was expecting it to change my life or something, because that is what everyone said would happen, and instead it just turned out to be a novel I more or less enjoyed. Maybe I didn't read closely enough, or maybe I was not feeling sufficiently alienated. I don't know.
So, the essays were a little hit or miss. Whatever. The part of the book I really want to talk about is the writing in the margins. Here are some things I know about the person who wrote in the margins of this book: 1) She has good penmanship (in a feminine, curly way, so I am going to assume the comment writer is a woman), and 2) She is an asshole.
I don't know who this woman is, but I hate her. First of all, she was writing in a library book, which is uncool. And second, she was writing stupid, snarky bullshit that wasn't even about the content of the essays. For example: she circled the word 'demise' on page 20, and wrote in the margin "terrible word choice--it's a legal euphemism for the death of a sovereign--as in "demise of the Crown". Worst person ever, right? For one thing, she is using a completely outdated definition of the word 'demise' (yeah, I looked it up), and even if she were right I have no idea why she would have felt the need to write a correction in the margins of a book that doesn't even belong to her. Is she just showing off for future borrowers? Her handwriting is all over the book and she never writes a single interesting thing. She is just arguing semantics with no one in particular. It is obnoxious as hell.
Page count: 194
Up next:Their Eyes Their Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp
This book was pretty uneven, quality-wise. There are a few essays that I really loved--Amy Sohn's "Franny and Amy" and Thomas Beller's "The Salnger Weather" were standouts--but overall the bad outweighed the good. Maybe the problem is that, while I like Salinger, I have never been able to understand people who looooooove Salinger. I wanted to, I really did. When I read The Catcher in the Rye for the first time in grade nine I guess I was expecting it to change my life or something, because that is what everyone said would happen, and instead it just turned out to be a novel I more or less enjoyed. Maybe I didn't read closely enough, or maybe I was not feeling sufficiently alienated. I don't know.
So, the essays were a little hit or miss. Whatever. The part of the book I really want to talk about is the writing in the margins. Here are some things I know about the person who wrote in the margins of this book: 1) She has good penmanship (in a feminine, curly way, so I am going to assume the comment writer is a woman), and 2) She is an asshole.
I don't know who this woman is, but I hate her. First of all, she was writing in a library book, which is uncool. And second, she was writing stupid, snarky bullshit that wasn't even about the content of the essays. For example: she circled the word 'demise' on page 20, and wrote in the margin "terrible word choice--it's a legal euphemism for the death of a sovereign--as in "demise of the Crown". Worst person ever, right? For one thing, she is using a completely outdated definition of the word 'demise' (yeah, I looked it up), and even if she were right I have no idea why she would have felt the need to write a correction in the margins of a book that doesn't even belong to her. Is she just showing off for future borrowers? Her handwriting is all over the book and she never writes a single interesting thing. She is just arguing semantics with no one in particular. It is obnoxious as hell.
Page count: 194
Up next:
3.27.2010
Cannonball - Book 16
The Night of the Gun by David Carr
Another memoir. I know. I have been going memoir crazy. This one is no story-of-a-fun-loving-Mormon-girl-trying-to-make-it-on-her-own-in-New-York-City though. This one has darkness in its heart. It has intravenous drug use and multiple arrests and domestic violence and and babies in harms way and all kinds of other nightmarish things. In the words of Hunter S. Thompson, frequently quoted by my father: "Bad craziness".
This is not the kind of thing I would normally pick up, as I am someone who tries to avoid bad craziness in all it's many forms. But the guy lived to write about it, so I knew it wouldn't end to badly, and when you are reading two books a week for a whole year sometimes you need to branch out a bit. Life can't be all pop culture criticism and murder mysteries all the time, unfortunately. And drug addiction kind of fascinates me.
The Night of the Gun offers a twist on the traditional addiction memoir formula. Carr did not just write down his memories of being an cocaine addict and alcoholic, in part because, unsurprisingly. he actually remembers very little. Instead he uses his skills as a reporter (he writes for the New York Times now) to thoroughly investigate and document that time of his life. He goes through government documents and police reports, newspaper clippings (mostly of his own writing), and conducts interviews on video with anyone he could find who knew him while he was an addict. It's an interesting premise, with pretty significant strengths and weaknesses.
I admire Carr's courage. It would not have been easy to listen to his old friends recount stories of what an destructive asshole he was. (And he really was one. He not only does drugs, but deals, and fights, and beats his girlfriends, and neglects his children. He was scum, basically.) And he is incredibly honest about all of it, even the stuff that makes him look really bad. He writes, for the most part, with humour and without sentiment (except when he is talking about his family, at which point he becomes downright sappy) so that the book, even in its most unpleasant moments, is incredibly readable.
Despite all of that, I am not sure whether I really liked the book or not. For a while after I finished it I couldn't really figure out what it was that had rubbed me a little bit the wrong way, until I listened to a discussion about the book on Slate's Audio Book Club*. They made the point that, while Carr does a great job getting the facts of his story straight, the book is pretty lacking in any actual insight about his experiences. The discusses his addiction like it is just a fact of life, a given, and does provide much information about how he got there in the first place. The describes, or rather relates his ex-girlfriends' descriptions, of the domestic abuse he committed, but never delves into why he did it, other than the fact that he was drunk or high at the time. It is a little irritating, to spend so much time reading about Carr and then to realize how little of himself he has actually revealed.
The second half drags a little bit. Eventually Carr gets sober, becomes a single parent to his twin daughters, gets back into journalism and becomes very successful, and gets married. It is touching certainly, but Carr does not write about it as compellingly as he does the coke-fueled trips on private planes and the drug deals nearly-gone-wrong. It was nice, during the insanity and misery of the book's first half, to know that second half was there though. I don't know if I could have stuck it out through all the bad craziness without that reassurance.
Page count: 400
Up next: With Love and Squalor edited by Kip Kotzen and Thomas Beller
*Slate does some kind of the best podcasting around, by the way. Top notch. And there are a ton of them.
Another memoir. I know. I have been going memoir crazy. This one is no story-of-a-fun-loving-Mormon-girl-trying-to-make-it-on-her-own-in-New-York-City though. This one has darkness in its heart. It has intravenous drug use and multiple arrests and domestic violence and and babies in harms way and all kinds of other nightmarish things. In the words of Hunter S. Thompson, frequently quoted by my father: "Bad craziness".
This is not the kind of thing I would normally pick up, as I am someone who tries to avoid bad craziness in all it's many forms. But the guy lived to write about it, so I knew it wouldn't end to badly, and when you are reading two books a week for a whole year sometimes you need to branch out a bit. Life can't be all pop culture criticism and murder mysteries all the time, unfortunately. And drug addiction kind of fascinates me.
The Night of the Gun offers a twist on the traditional addiction memoir formula. Carr did not just write down his memories of being an cocaine addict and alcoholic, in part because, unsurprisingly. he actually remembers very little. Instead he uses his skills as a reporter (he writes for the New York Times now) to thoroughly investigate and document that time of his life. He goes through government documents and police reports, newspaper clippings (mostly of his own writing), and conducts interviews on video with anyone he could find who knew him while he was an addict. It's an interesting premise, with pretty significant strengths and weaknesses.
I admire Carr's courage. It would not have been easy to listen to his old friends recount stories of what an destructive asshole he was. (And he really was one. He not only does drugs, but deals, and fights, and beats his girlfriends, and neglects his children. He was scum, basically.) And he is incredibly honest about all of it, even the stuff that makes him look really bad. He writes, for the most part, with humour and without sentiment (except when he is talking about his family, at which point he becomes downright sappy) so that the book, even in its most unpleasant moments, is incredibly readable.
Despite all of that, I am not sure whether I really liked the book or not. For a while after I finished it I couldn't really figure out what it was that had rubbed me a little bit the wrong way, until I listened to a discussion about the book on Slate's Audio Book Club*. They made the point that, while Carr does a great job getting the facts of his story straight, the book is pretty lacking in any actual insight about his experiences. The discusses his addiction like it is just a fact of life, a given, and does provide much information about how he got there in the first place. The describes, or rather relates his ex-girlfriends' descriptions, of the domestic abuse he committed, but never delves into why he did it, other than the fact that he was drunk or high at the time. It is a little irritating, to spend so much time reading about Carr and then to realize how little of himself he has actually revealed.
The second half drags a little bit. Eventually Carr gets sober, becomes a single parent to his twin daughters, gets back into journalism and becomes very successful, and gets married. It is touching certainly, but Carr does not write about it as compellingly as he does the coke-fueled trips on private planes and the drug deals nearly-gone-wrong. It was nice, during the insanity and misery of the book's first half, to know that second half was there though. I don't know if I could have stuck it out through all the bad craziness without that reassurance.
Page count: 400
Up next: With Love and Squalor edited by Kip Kotzen and Thomas Beller
*Slate does some kind of the best podcasting around, by the way. Top notch. And there are a ton of them.
3.26.2010
Cannonball - Book 15
The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance by Elna Baker
I just don't get the whole religion thing. And by "the whole religion thing" I really just mean "religion, generally speaking". I don't get it at all. There are parts of it that make sense to me. I can understand wanting to believe in some kind of higher power, and even actually believing in one. And I can understand wanting some kind of explanation of the unexplainable. I don't understand all the bizarre rules and restrictions though. I know that not all religions have crazy rules, but a lot of them do. Mormonisn definitely does.
No drinking, no drugs, no caffeine, no swearing, no sex before marriage (actually, according to Elna Baker, no being aroused before marriage). Those are the main ones. Pretty standard, I guess, within the stricter Christian religions.
TNYRMSHD is about Elna Baker living in New York trying to navigate all the rules. I really liked it. I liked Baker's writing and I liked her. But I also found it incredibly frustrating at times because the rules do not make any sense to me at all, and a lot of the time is seemed like they didn't make sense to Baker either. She breaks almost all of them (or pushes them to the furthest and most liberal stretches of there interpretations), at one point or another. Except for the drug one. She remains kind of tangled up in it all, though. The reason she sticks with it is because of her family, and because she really does believe in, and has a relationship with, God. He-with-a-capital-H is a positive force in her life. I get that, and am even kind of envious of that, but it's unfortunate the the God thing comes a long with so much arbitrary bullshit, you know?
Anyway. This was a good book. You would like it, I bet. And if you read it then we can talk about it for real. So read it, okay?
Or, at the very least, listen to this TSOYA interview Elna Baker did. She's funny. I bet you will end up having kind of a crush on her.
Page count: 272
Up next: The Night of the Gun by David Carr
I just don't get the whole religion thing. And by "the whole religion thing" I really just mean "religion, generally speaking". I don't get it at all. There are parts of it that make sense to me. I can understand wanting to believe in some kind of higher power, and even actually believing in one. And I can understand wanting some kind of explanation of the unexplainable. I don't understand all the bizarre rules and restrictions though. I know that not all religions have crazy rules, but a lot of them do. Mormonisn definitely does.
No drinking, no drugs, no caffeine, no swearing, no sex before marriage (actually, according to Elna Baker, no being aroused before marriage). Those are the main ones. Pretty standard, I guess, within the stricter Christian religions.
TNYRMSHD is about Elna Baker living in New York trying to navigate all the rules. I really liked it. I liked Baker's writing and I liked her. But I also found it incredibly frustrating at times because the rules do not make any sense to me at all, and a lot of the time is seemed like they didn't make sense to Baker either. She breaks almost all of them (or pushes them to the furthest and most liberal stretches of there interpretations), at one point or another. Except for the drug one. She remains kind of tangled up in it all, though. The reason she sticks with it is because of her family, and because she really does believe in, and has a relationship with, God. He-with-a-capital-H is a positive force in her life. I get that, and am even kind of envious of that, but it's unfortunate the the God thing comes a long with so much arbitrary bullshit, you know?
Anyway. This was a good book. You would like it, I bet. And if you read it then we can talk about it for real. So read it, okay?
Or, at the very least, listen to this TSOYA interview Elna Baker did. She's funny. I bet you will end up having kind of a crush on her.
Page count: 272
Up next: The Night of the Gun by David Carr
Cannonball - Book 14
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby is one of those books that I feel like I should have read ages ago, or at the very least, I should have had been more familiar with the specifics of the story. Like, Hamlet or The Catcher in the Rye or the Bible or something. They get referenced so much in cultural conversation that, even if you've never read them page for page, you at least have a pretty good gist of what they are about.
Here are the things I knew going in:
-There is a guy named Gatsby and he is in love with Daisy
-There is some sort of class/wealth element that I was pretty unclear about
-Something about Gatsby being a self-made man
That's about it. I wasn't actually wrong about any of it, but the picture is pretty vague. After reading the book, though, I'm actually not surprised at how little I knew about the plot going in to it. The plot isn't really the point. This is one of those books that is about theme.
I know, right? Ugh. The Powers That Be could probably revoke my right to study English for saying this, but books about theme are pretty much the worst... Actually, that may be a little unfair. Let me rephrase: books that focus entirely on theme at the expense of a good plot and interesting characters are pretty much the worst. I just have no patience for them. They are boring.
The Great Gatsby is walking a pretty fine line, because it's plot is borderline ridiculous and almost every single character is a terrible person. If it were not for the narrator, who may or may not be named Nick, I cannot remember, reading this book would have been a terrible nightmare. Thankfully, I liked Nick (I am just going to keep calling him that because I am typing this while the internet is down and I already returned the book to the library) a lot. At the very beginning of the book he describes himself as someone who does not pass judgment on other people, and he sticks to that, which is admirable. If I had been hanging out with those people I would have been judging the hell out of them all the time, because they are shallow and uncaring and just generally awful.
I'm saying all of this stuff about unlikable characters like it is a flaw in Fitzgerald's writing, but it isn't. It's kind if the point of the book actually. Fitzgerald is trying to make a point about class and society and America and I guess he does a pretty good job of making it. It's just not a point I am particularly interested in. The book is so fundamentally American, and so concerned with a specific place and time, that I feel like it has nothing to do with me. I'm glad I read it--I liked Nick, there were certain passages that I thought were great, and it is one of the books that you kind of just have to read at some point--but I can't imagine wanting to revisit it any time soon.
Page count: 153
Up next: The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance by Elna Baker
The Great Gatsby is one of those books that I feel like I should have read ages ago, or at the very least, I should have had been more familiar with the specifics of the story. Like, Hamlet or The Catcher in the Rye or the Bible or something. They get referenced so much in cultural conversation that, even if you've never read them page for page, you at least have a pretty good gist of what they are about.
Here are the things I knew going in:
-There is a guy named Gatsby and he is in love with Daisy
-There is some sort of class/wealth element that I was pretty unclear about
-Something about Gatsby being a self-made man
That's about it. I wasn't actually wrong about any of it, but the picture is pretty vague. After reading the book, though, I'm actually not surprised at how little I knew about the plot going in to it. The plot isn't really the point. This is one of those books that is about theme.
I know, right? Ugh. The Powers That Be could probably revoke my right to study English for saying this, but books about theme are pretty much the worst... Actually, that may be a little unfair. Let me rephrase: books that focus entirely on theme at the expense of a good plot and interesting characters are pretty much the worst. I just have no patience for them. They are boring.
The Great Gatsby is walking a pretty fine line, because it's plot is borderline ridiculous and almost every single character is a terrible person. If it were not for the narrator, who may or may not be named Nick, I cannot remember, reading this book would have been a terrible nightmare. Thankfully, I liked Nick (I am just going to keep calling him that because I am typing this while the internet is down and I already returned the book to the library) a lot. At the very beginning of the book he describes himself as someone who does not pass judgment on other people, and he sticks to that, which is admirable. If I had been hanging out with those people I would have been judging the hell out of them all the time, because they are shallow and uncaring and just generally awful.
I'm saying all of this stuff about unlikable characters like it is a flaw in Fitzgerald's writing, but it isn't. It's kind if the point of the book actually. Fitzgerald is trying to make a point about class and society and America and I guess he does a pretty good job of making it. It's just not a point I am particularly interested in. The book is so fundamentally American, and so concerned with a specific place and time, that I feel like it has nothing to do with me. I'm glad I read it--I liked Nick, there were certain passages that I thought were great, and it is one of the books that you kind of just have to read at some point--but I can't imagine wanting to revisit it any time soon.
Page count: 153
Up next: The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance by Elna Baker
#128 - What About Them?
I'm all about them
I am no longer behind on my reading, but I am getting very behind on my writing. Which is annoying. So by the end of the day today I vow to write posts for books 14-16.
I'm totally going to do it... as soon as I watch the new episode of Community.
I am no longer behind on my reading, but I am getting very behind on my writing. Which is annoying. So by the end of the day today I vow to write posts for books 14-16.
I'm totally going to do it... as soon as I watch the new episode of Community.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)