Natalie's Reading Journal

I've read several books since last I updated this thing. Maybe I'll get around to writing about them eventually. The most recent was Pride and Prejudice, which I finished yesterday, and, though I'm not going to write at any length about the book itself, I must say this:

I am totally in love with Mr. Darcy. Seriously, can I have one? I want one.

Darcyyyyyyyyy.

Preacher: Vols. 1-9
by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon
a bunch of pages
Begun: Well, I read the first one a couple weeks ago, but I didn't read the second until this last weekend.
Finished: 8-21-05
From The Big Haul?: Some of it.

I don't have time to write anything much about it, so I'll just say two things:

1. This is really good. Unless you have serious issues with the violent or the profane, you should read it.
2. Cassidy rocks my world. He always has and always will, and dude, I was so sad at the shit that happened with him in--what was it?--volume 6? Something like that. Anyway, he is the coolest. He is quite possibly my favorite character in any comic booky thing I've ever read, although Morpheus is really trying hard to hold on to that title.

Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx
by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
404 pp.
Begun: either 8-15-05 or 8-16-05; can't remember which
Finished: 8-19-05
From The Big Haul?: No.

On Monday, I was in a bookstore with my neighbor, Jinx. (I really don't know how I manage to find my way into them so often. Bookstores, that is. Not neighbors.) She bought, on my suggestion (read: strong prodding), White Teeth, by Zadie Smith, and Everything is Illuminated, by Jonathan Safran Foer. Needless to say, if you haven't read these, you probably should. I mean, it's not guaranteed you'll enjoy them. You might be a robot with no love for or interest in the human race.

I bought two books mentioned by Nick Hornby in The Polysyllabic Spree: Random Family and Hard Times. Of all those he wrote about, these two plagued me most, and I really, really wanted them. Possibly when I finish the latter, I'll be totally depressed and overcome by a vision of poverty spanning two centuries and continents. That'll be fun.

Random Family is one of those books that made me miserable in a really good way. It wasn't just pointless, unfocused upset; rather, it was very thought-provoking, and the thoughts it's provoking are unhappy ones. But necessary! Yesterday, when I was telling someone about this book (as I've done with, I think, every person I've seen in the last two days, save one), the someone told me I shouldn't read such books. Why? Because I will be assigned so much depressing reading material over the course of my education that there's no need for me to seek upsetting stuff on my own.

Um. No.

The depressing books I'm likely to read over the course of my education will be primarily fiction. And, even for someone who gets as thoroughly absorbed into fictional worlds as do I, there is a big difference between reading a novel about poor people in the Bronx getting pregnant, dealing drugs, and going to jail and reading a nonfictional account of the same. There were a lot of occasions in this book where I'd have loved to tell myself this stuff wasn't really happening to the characters I came to love. Like when Cesar accidentally shoots his best friend in the head. That sucked. It also sucked when he went into hiding. It also sucked when the police found him, and when he got sentenced to ten years for manslaughter.

Ah, but Natalie, do you think people who shoot their best friends in the head, even accidentally, ought to go unpunished? Just because he didn't mean to doesn't bring the poor, now-brainless man back to life. No, it doesn't. But sending him to jail doesn't bring the best friend back to life, either. For the last month, I've been thinking a lot about the role of incarceration in society, about the reasons we lock people up, about when it's right, if it's ever right. I'm not saying there aren't people who are dangerous and who should be prevented from hurting others, but even if locking them up is necessary, I'm not sure that makes it right. An odd distinction, perhaps. And I'm definitely at that point in my thoughts on the subject where there are few statements I'd be comfortable making and standing by. "Sending nonviolent drug offenders to jail is fucked-up and a really poor idea" is one of them, but this is nothing new or special. It's a lot harder to weigh the pros and cons of incarceration in situations where there actually are pros. But it seems like such a waste. Here's something else on the subject I believe firmly: whether or not sending criminals to jail is right or good for society or whatever, our focus on incarceration, rather than on rehabilitation or, much, much better yet, actually paying attention to all of the issues of poverty and trying, in earnest, to combat them with better education, not just for the kids growing up in the ghetto, but also for their parents who will then maybe be able to present some sort of example to their kids other than the ones depicted in this book of early pregnancy, pervasive drug use, and near-ubiquitous physical and sexual abuse. How can people get so angry at welfare recipients for sapping away their tax dollars (which is an interestingly uninformed perception for several reasons, foremost among them that, hi, THAT'S NOT WHERE MOST OF YOUR MONEY IS GOING, YOU STUPID, STUPID PEOPLE) while remaining so unwilling to do anything that might help prevent today's welfare kids from turning into tomorrow's welfare adults.

Oh, right, it's harder to fix big problems than to throw eighteen-year-olds in prison. Besides, who cares about them, anyway, apart from their families? And it's not like they vote.

I wish that ignoring problems wasn't such an easy way of dealing with them. Because, for people like me, for most Americans, it's so simple to forget that poverty is such a huge problem in this country, that so many kids are growing up in horrible conditions they will likely never escape and will go on to raise their kids in said conditions. And the only time poverty really rears its ugly head in the mainstream consciousness is when we hear about this robbery or that drug kingpin or the drive-by that killed four kids, and then how many of the people who are watching the news think about the insidious damage of poverty? I'm guessing, like, five. None of whom is normally me. Mostly, I tune it out. Those who don't tune it out are probably imagining the dealer or murderer as the ruthless, violent man he might well be without bothering to remember that, to quote a fantasy novel, "he had been a boy, once; a boy with a dog."

It's upsetting.

I'm rambling.

In my last entry, I quoted a tongue-in-cheek passage in which the nouveaux riches were described as having "only the least important element of richness. That being money." Reading Random Family, though, I realized that it's true! Or, at least, it can be. One of the characters, Boy George, is an extremely successful heroin dealer. He makes hundreds of thousands of dollars a week; he owns some obscene number of cars, among them a Benz with $50,000 of James Bond-esque additions. But as I was reading, I realized that, no matter how successful and how rich Boy George got, in some ways, my broke college friends would always be richer. And I'm not talking about the richness that comes of feeding your soul with knowledge or anything silly like that; I mean that they're richer because, presented with $100,000, they wouldn't blow it in a weekend. Because the money they make, even if it's minimum wage, is not paid them in cash. I mean, when you're making $400,000 a week in cash, even without coming from a culture of "spend it if you've got it," what are the chances you're going to save that money? Shortly before his arrest, Boy George actually does start investing some of his money. But my point is, it was a bit of a revelation to me to realize that there's a lot more to being rich than making large amounts of money. How much you spend, obviously, matters. How you acquire the money matters--for Boy George, a long prison term is inevitable. That, or death. So I guess he lucked out.

I found Boy George's prison lifestyle really interesting. I realize that the following, along with most of the preceding, is wholly unoriginal, but I'm going to say it anyway: Boy George doesn't do as good a job as society as a whole at fucking over the people from his neighborhood, but he makes a valiant effort. Putting aside those who went to prison on account of their involvement with him--working in his mills, or "participating in a narcotics conspiracy"--how many South Bronx families must have been torn apart or damaged by Boy George's "Obsession" heroin? How many babies had no diapers? How many kids had no food? It seems so unfair that people who are in a crappy situation because of a huge societal problem end up furthering the problem and hurting each other.

The book made me think of this NPR segment, about another book I'd like to read: A Shadow in the City. It's about a man who worked as an undercover narcotics officer for 23 years. That clip is an interview with the author of the book, and he actually speaks out in favor of drug legalization. Anyway, it's good; you should listen to it. As long as I'm linking NPR segments, here's an interview with the author of Random Family.

I've been talking about Cesar and Boy George, but they are less central to the book than their girlfriends, Coco and Jessica (respectively). We meet Jessica when she's about fourteen. Coco comes into the book a little later; as she's younger than Jessica, though, I think she's thirteen or fourteen when her story begins. And, at the beginning, I winced at their poor decisions and said, very loudly, to the book, "Use a condom! PLEASE use a condom! Dammit." But I have such a different perspective, don't I? It's like Nick Hornby said: "the future as Coco and Jessica and the fathers of their children see it really isn't worth the price of a condom, and they're right." When Jessica and Coco are beaten up by various boyfriends, I want so much for them to react the way upper-middle-class kids like me were taught one should, but it never even occurs to them to leave their abusers, much less turn them in. Sometimes, they blame the abuse on themselves. But they grew up watching their mothers get smacked around, so what else are they supposed to know? (This is not to suggest that domestic violence is nonexistent among upper-middle-class families, just less prevalent. The number of women in this book whose boyfriends beat them up far, far outnumbers those whose boyfriends don't.)

Anyway, what I was going to say was that, at the beginning of the book, I cringed for Jessica and Coco, but as it went on, I knew what to expect from them, and I didn't fault them for it (well, occasionally I did; when Jessica basically chose to ignore her two-year-old daughter's sexual abuse, I thought that was pretty not okay), but I also didn't get as upset. It seemed unlikely that their future would be anything but more of the same. What really hurt was seeing their kids go the same route, especially in the moments when it looked like they might not. Mercedes, Coco's oldest daughter, goes to a camp where she meets people who and experiences things which simple aren't part of her normal world. When her mother arrives to pick her up, she tells her that she wants to become a doctor. But Coco, seeing Mercedes run around happy at the camp, while glad that her daughter is happy, is sad that her daughter is happy in a different world, one Coco just couldn't be a part of. And Mercedes notices her mother's reaction, and she spurns Camp Ramapo and starts talking about all the stuff she loved like it was no fun at all, and she just... goes back emotionally as well as physically. This isn't all bad--I've been talking about these people's lives as if they're one big interrupted stretch of bleakness, and they're not; there are wonderful times, too. But overall, I would much rather Mercedes went to medical school than dropped out of high school, had five kids, and shuffled them between rat-infested apartments.

And Pearl, Coco's sickly fourth child, loved preschool! She was in the Head Start program, and she liked it, and she was doing really well, and they kicked her out because of her medical issues. (Interestingly, only after that would doctors pay any attention to Coco's insistence that Pearl had ongoing health problems, which is INSANE given that she was born something like three months premature and had severe asthma from birth. How could a doctor doubt that this child would be prone to sickness?) When Mercedes gets sent to some lame-ass behavioral something or other on account of her "attitude problems," she actually tries to make progress. She tells the counseling lady from the Ice Planet of Not Giving a Shit that she doesn't know how to control her anger, and the woman just brushes her off and tells her all that will be handled in her anger management class. Goddamn, when an adolescent admits weakness, the least you could do is make eye contact and tell her it's okay, and it's good that she wants to change. I don't know anything, and even I know that! On the occasions when the kids don't suffer because of their family, they suffer because the stupid fucking outreach programs that are supposed to be helping them are half-assed and give up on them as soon as it's clear that one can't just tell a kid something and have everything miraculously get better.

In one letter to Mercedes, an imprisoned Cesar tells his daughter, "They made me pay the consequences when I did wrong, but not one ever tried to show me a solution or identify the cause." I don't think the problems in this book could be more succinctly summarized.

How I Became Stupid
by Martin Page
160 pp.
Begun: 8-15-05
Finished: 8-15-05
From The Big Haul?: Yes.

What a fun book! (I do believe "fun" is my new favorite adjective.) Quick read, thoroughly enjoyable. I wish I'd known it was a French book; I'd have gotten it in French. It would be easy enough, and it had a fair amount of idiomatic expressions. It would be good for me. Well, if I happen on a copy of Comment je suis devenu stupide, I'll pick it up.

This book is about a young man named Antoine who has always felt burdened by his intelligence and, indeed, always has been. He suffers from analysis paralysis, he's totally impractical, and he's really fucking weird--he steals shampoo by the blob in a small box. He just isn't really part of society. Well, he decides he wants to join the human race. After failing miserably in his attempt to become an alcoholic, he resolves instead to become stupid.

What makes his attempts at stupidity so charming is how earnest he is about it, and how pure he remains, even as he methodically corrupts himself. Toward the end of the book, he receives a package in the mail: it's Flaubert's Collected Letters. He leaps back from it, horrified. Why? Because it's such a strong tie to his former, thinking self--it was one of his favorite books. And anyone who has such a visceral reaction to Flaubert's letters... well, I just read that passage and thought he was the sweetest failure of all time.

He's such an idealist! I love it. Before beginning his journey into the world of the credit card and blank stare, Antoine is sometimes cynical, sure, but he's cynical in that idealist's way, about specifics, not as a way of life. And he's the same way in his attempts at stupidity and apathy: he manages them spectacularly in specific instances, but he just can't quite be idiotic and uncaring all the time.

It's a delightful book. He has these four friends who I loved. I especially loved Aaslee, his best friend who, due to baby food that was tested on him in his infancy which had far too much phosphorous in it on account of a factory slip-up, glows in the dark and speaks only in verse. Every character Antoine encounters is bizarre and at least a little bit wonderful--Vlad the kindly wrestler, Professor Astanavis, Léonard the alcoholic, the dating agency woman who's as bitter as she is talkative, Clémence, the suicidal mummy-woman in the hospital... they're all so neat! There's writerly happiness even in the saddest of them, if that makes any sense. Even if it doesn't, it's true. And the things that happen to him are just as weirdly and randomly delightful, like becoming rich on account of spilling coffee on his keyboard. The book is every bit as sweet as Antoine, I guess. Its last scene is wholly unnecessary, but it's so lovely, I wouldn't want it gone. It was what I'd been wanting to see since the beginning; how nice that the author gave it to me, even though the story didn't require its inclusion.

Antoine is fundamentally happy, I think. Even when he's unhappy and seeing all of the world's ugliness, he sees a lot of beauty, too. And when he tries to become stupid to avoid the unhappiness, he loses all of his real happiness. And then, of course, he comes back to it.

Oh, whoops.

Spoiler!

( Quotations )

The Polysyllabic Spree
by Nick Hornby
140 pp.
Begun: 8-13-05
Finished: 8-15-05
From The Big Haul?: Yes.

The Polysyllabic Spree is a collection of Nick Hornby's monthly articles on his reading experiences for the Believer, which I know is connected in some way to McSweeney's, which makes me inclined to like it in that uninformed way. "It" being the Believer, that is, not The Polysyllabic Spree, which I like in an entirely informed way. It's wonderful. It's fun and light and honest and clever and makes me remember why I was That Kid Who Reads All The Time and gives me solace of the I Am Not Alone variety. No, Natalie, it reassures me, I am alone neither in my near-religious relationship with books nor in my inability to be quite the book-zombie some seem, sucking up Derrida and asking for more. (Well, who knows? Maybe I'd be a Derrida-sucker. I've never read a word of his work. I'm guessing, however, that I wouldn't be.)

Point is, The Polysyllabic Spree is great, Nick Hornby is great, books are great, and I have never had so much fun reading about reading except maybe the first time I read Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman, and that book is a rollicking good time.

I am wondering, though: what makes a literary novel? In Nick Hornby's reckoning, it seems to be any book characterized by 1) a convoluted narrative style that poorly represents people's actual thought processes, and 2) his dislike. It's so complicated! No, I'm not being sarcastic; it really does seem excessively complicated to me. Books called "classics," apart from, I don't know, Hemingway and Steinbeck, are probably going to be labeled literary novels, right? Because they're special and fancy? Is Lolita a literary novel? That sounds right.

Actually, the whole term sounds ridiculous to me, but maybe I'm just being uncultured and uneducated here.

So... Lolita? A literary novel? How about anything Dickens ever wrote? Hornby loves Dickens, so much so, in fact, that I went out and bought a copy of Hard Times and am going to give him a second chance (at this point, it's got to be more like a third or fourth chance, but whatever). I picked Hard Times because Hornby quoted the schoolteacher at the beginning who says that one must never cover a room in wallpaper with horses on it because one does not see horses trotting up and down walls in the real world, and I found that thoroughly amusing. I also picked Hard Times because it was shorter than David Copperfield. Anyhow, is Dickens literary? I can't imagine someone saying he wasn't. Is "literary" synonymous with "respected"? What on earth is this all about?

It's time for some Wilde, I think: "There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all." Why on earth must some books be called literary and others not?

The danger of reading a book about books, of course, is that it entices one to spend more money on books (for example, Hard Times). Some books Nick Hornby's made me want to read:

We're In Trouble, Chris Coake
David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
Hard Times, Charles Dickens
Anything by Roddy Doyle (I've been meaning to read something of his for years; I think I have a copy of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha somewhere.)
Father and Son, Edmund Gosse
What Narcissism Means To Me, Tony Hoagland
Random Family, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc (bought this one)
The Fortress of Solitude, Jonathan Lethem
George and Sam, Charlotte Moore
How to Breathe Underwater, Julie Orringer
Franny and Zooey, J.D. Salinger (another author I need to give another chance, although, frankly, the thought makes me die a little inside. I hated Catcher in the Rye that much. And more.)
True Notebooks, Mark Salzman
Y: The Last Man, some comic book authors whose names I didn't jot down
Anything by Tobias Wolff (again, I've been meaning to for so long)

( And now, for a lot of fantastic quotations )