The Spare Room by Helen Garner

Wow, this is an amazing book. It's a quick and easy read but profoundly beautiful and an unflinching look at death and the process of dying. Garner manages to convey the despair and slow loss of hope without being melodramatic or sentimental. The point of view is from a friend of a terminal cancer victim who has come to stay in her spare room while undergoing alternative treatments.

I don't want to say too much about the plot. It's short and compelling - a perfect afternoon book. I found it on the Guardian's list of the best unread books of the decade. It would make a great book club book because it would be excellent to discuss. I'm not quite to the age where this sort of thing is happening in my circle of friends, but it will. No escaping death and all that.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

I am posting this because it is taking me forever to read. Only very rarely do books take me long to read, but I am getting bored of this one and finding it pretentious and want to slap the old woman. Ok, ok, the bit about the last film with her husband made me tear up, but I have pmt and cry at anything.

I will update as events warrant.

update 7 Feb: almost done. It's gotten better; there are fewer parts where I'm rolling my eyes and doing the blah-blah-blah hand motion.

final update: ...and then it got worse again. The ending was deeply unsatisfying and had the "it was all a dream" feel to it.

Smile or Die by Barbara Ehrenreich

I went to go see Barbara Ehrenreich speak at Conway Hall on the myth and tyranny of positive thinking a few weeks ago. I bought her book, Smile or Die. I hadn't known that the positive thinking movement was a reaction to Calvinism in the US but was more familiar with her examples including: the banking industry, mega-churches and pretty much everyone who appears on Oprah and from her own personal experience, the support available to breast cancer victims. All that is well and good, but it's the last chapter in her book is what brings it all together. It applies what she's written to everyday life - as she explains, she is not against happiness or joy or any of those types of things, she just wants them to be genuine and not a result of a deluded mindset. Her suggestion is to deal with life realistically. Coming at this point it time, it almost seems radical.

I've been thinking about this a while, ever since I read War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges. Most of that book is about war, of course, but somewhere in it he says that we have a choice between happiness and meaning. I'm not sure I buy that, but it got me thinking about happiness and this ever present imperative to be happy. Not just to be happy, but to be happy at all times with every other feeling a personal, devastating failure.

My conclusion was "Fuck that". In particular, "Fuck happiness" or perhaps this propensity for people to work themselves senseless to achieve it. I think if you'd like a permanent state of happiness, take the full frontal lobotomy. Personally, I like the description of happiness in Ambrose Bierce's short story Haita the Shepherd. It's transient and not to be looked at directly, simply taken for what it is and appreciated.

A kinder, gentler take on happiness and the pursuit thereof is in this essay by Amy Bloom who finishes by saying :

"The real problem with happiness is neither its pursuers nor their books; it’s happiness itself. Happiness is like beauty: part of its glory lies in its transience. It is deep but often brief (as Frost would have it), and much great prose and poetry make note of this. Frank Kermode wrote, “It seems there is a sort of calamity built into the texture of life.” To hold happiness is to hold the understanding that the world passes away from us, that the petals fall and the beloved dies. No amount of mockery, no amount of fashionable scowling will keep any of us from knowing and savoring the pleasure of the sun on our faces or save us from the adult understanding that it cannot last forever."

Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

I'm not sure about Everything is Illuminated. It took me ages to read - I would forget about it and ended up reading it over a few months. This is unusual; my tendency is to plow through even the worst books. I don't think it was a bad book though.

The structure of the book is slightly tiresome, a bit too clever. I found the main narrator irritating and thought the prose in his bits lacked consistency, like Foer got tired of writing in that voice and gave up towards the end.

The story itself is ok and I think bears rereading at some point. It's one of those books that might be better the second time because I know how to approach it. My friend and I talked briefly about it, she couldn't remember the plot but did remember how annoying she found it. Not exactly a recommendation to read it if you haven't. (Neither one of us liked Cloud Atlas either - this reminded me of that in the "too clever by half" sense.)

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In other news, my New Year's Resolution is to write down every book I read this year. We'll see how long that lasts.

Things I've read since New Year's more or less

Working backwards but grouping similar things together with a bit of randomness thrown in for good measure.

The Day of the Jack Russell and Mystery Man by Bateman
He's really Colin Bateman, but his marketing has dropped his first name, so now he's just Bateman. Stupid. However, it's easy enough to get over because the books are fun and the protagonist (never named) is not a type of character I've met before. These are crime fiction books and the Mystery Man, the protagonist, runs a crime fiction bookshop while being a somewhat unwilling private detective on the side, using the tools he's gleaned from reading his stock. I might misspeak - he seems to stock what he's read, ie most of the genre.

They're both normal size books but with huge amounts of whitespace and a seriously large font, so make very very quick reading. On some pages, the rate limiting step is turning the page. Read Mystery Man first and if you like it, go to the jack russell one. I read these because I was bored and came across Bateman while browsing something, I forget what. I liked his book Divorcing Jack, but like these better.

The next two books I bought for my husband for Christmas. They were from Boing Boing's fiction gift guide.

Counting Heads by David Marusek
This was set in a very well realised world, completely plausible(ish, I mean, of course, ok, not exactly "completely"). The plot is good and fast paced, but it serves to explore social issues that arise from the technology of the time. However, it does this without being preachy and in a gripping way, so is forgiven.

I really liked this book, but think that had more to do in the world in which it's set than anything else. I did quite like a few of the characters but none were terribly engaging. The sequel, Mind Over Ship, might be better or it might be worse; neither will be a surprise and we have it on order. It was the book Boing Boing recommended but I'm not a huge fan of starting in the middle of series. I did that with Hyperion by Dan Simmons; started with The Fall of Hyperion, which I loved but then didn't get on too well with Hyperion as I already knew all of the salient points.

Boneshaker by Cherie Priest
I didn't like this a lot. Also, it was written in brown ink (!!!) on off-white paper. I'm too old for that.

(There are more books below, I can't fill up space talking about this book, sorry.)








I thought I'd give Christopher Brookmyre another chance, so ordered his latest.

Pandaemonium by Christopher Brookmyre
The plot itself was clever and would have made a good short story. The portrayal of the sixth formers was spot-on, although what do I know? I'm a middle aged mother of two who needs a pair of strong glasses to see back that far. The book was shite.

Unless Jane comes back (the grandmother from All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses an Eye), I'm not reading him anymore. Or if I stumble across something new and it gets halfway decent reviews, I suppose.



I went to a Barbara Ehrenreich talk last week and bought her book Smile or Die. I am going to read that after I finish Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer.

William Gibson, Spook Country

What a relief to read Spook Country. I've had a bit of a bad run lately book-wise and this was much needed. It's a quietly fun, intelligent book with what I think of as calm writing and a lack of pretension. It was entertaining, certainly, in the Michael Chabon sense of the word.

There are three centers to the story: Hollis Henry, writing a piece on locative art and more for the mysterious Node magazine; Tito, part of a family of spies originally from Cuba, trained from birth and working for their grandfather's benefactor; and Brown and Millgrim, a spook of some sort and his Volapuk-speaking, Rize-addicted hostage. The plot is driven by the search for a mysterious container and its contents.

Gibson assumes his readers aren't idiots and doesn't feel the need to show his research as far too many writers are wont to do. For example, he introduces Santeria, a Cuban religion, and gives us enough information to give depth to Tito, but does not spend pages telling us how much he has learned about it. It is as if he trusts us to read about it ourselves if we would like to know more. (It's interesting. I might.) As a result, the book is more graceful and light than it would have been with a less-confident author who needed to show his work.

After reading this, I was taken with the possibilities of how the story could have been told. The basic, stripped down plot could have been used by a spy writer for a post Cold War novel. Or perhaps, varying a point or two, someone could have written a novel along the lines of PopCo by Scarlett Thomas (which I liked, pretty much). I like this version; the writing is insightful and clever but without being weighty or too worthy.

There are certainly more novels to be had from the characters in the book, something along the lines of "The Adventures of Hollis and Reg" or follow a member of Tito's extended family. I would love to catch up with them in a few years' time.

Nancy Milford, Savage Beauty

Edna St Vincent Millay is my favorite poet. I can still remember reading a sonnet of hers in a friend's American literature textbook and immediately going out to buy her Collected Poems. Her poems resonate with me and I've never outgrown them - does anyone outgrow love, sex, longing, desire or death?

Nancy Milford's biography of Millay, Savage Beauty, is amazing. Norma Ellis (née Millay), Millay's sister and executor, allowed Milford complete access to all correspondence, notebooks, diaries and estate as well as shared her own memories of Millay and her family. Milford also interviewed surviving friends and persuaded them to share their letters with her. A large part of the book is original texts and remembrances from friends and Norma. Milford adds enough details and explanations to glue it all together coherently. Any indiscretions are treated with fairness and a respect for the poet but nothing obvious is held back, except for the three things Norma mentions she destroyed: an indiscreet letter returned to Millay, an ivory dildo which "Norma admitted was difficult to burn", and a set of pornographic photographs of Millay and her husband. The result is that I feel like I knew Edna St Vincent Millay from birth to death as an intimate friend would.

Millay was the poet of the Jazz Age, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923. She is best know for her poem "First Fig":

My candle burns at both ends
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends -
It gives a lovely light!

Her poetry is stunning and fearless, defiant and remorseless. A wicked wit runs through it, skewering herself, those she loved and those who loved her. It recognises the sadness in betrayal and death but never succumbs to sentimentality.

She was a New Woman, a bohemian in the 1920's and her life is even more interesting than her art. Millay was married. Her husband supported her in every endeavor she undertook, from writing to managing lovers including a longstanding affair with a younger man to an addiction to alcohol and morphine. It makes for fascinating reading and gave me a new perspective on her poetry.

I highly recommend this book if you are a fan. I would guess that Milford's biography of Zelda Fitzgerald is also excellent. And if you have never experienced Millay's poetry, have a look and maybe you will fall in love with her as I did.