Worried

I worry about myself and my ability to remember things.  I have always had a bad memory, made worse by the fact that my brain spent a few years floating around in chemo.  I love reading, obviously.  But sometimes it feels like I'm barely retaining what I read.  I don't know if this is a problem particular to me, or a problem shared by other voracious readers.  I'm especially flummoxed by the current book I'm reading, Henning Mankell's Pyramid.  I bought this from Daedalus Books at a reduced price a few weeks ago.  Small bits and pieces of it are jumping out at me as I read it - mere hints of deja vu.  However, I wouldn't be able to honestly tell you whether I'd read it or not.  I went on to Good Reads today to log it as a "current read" and was told that I had read and posted about it in March 2009.

So...here I am, wondering what to do with this information.  I'm going to go ahead and blame it upon the repetitive nature of the crime / detective genre, rather than on complete memory loss.  I think most of these detective stories (they are my guilty pleasure and favorite quick read) are so similar that they sometimes all blend into one.

Well, I guess I will still go ahead and finish reading Pyramid, especially since I don't remember how it ends.

Vanished

I read a really fascinating story today about a young woman named Barbara Follett.  She was a published and accomplished author at the age of 13 (in the mid-1920s).  She was hailed by the New York Times and H.L. Mencken for her extraordinary talent and "almost unbearably beautiful" style of writing.  She would have likely had an amazing career if it were not for the misfortunes that fell upon her as she entered her twenties.  The abandonment of her father and the immediate need to quit school in order to work to support her mother meant she had to postpone her dreams of writing.  In 1939, she walked out after a nasty quarrel with her husband and vanished.  She was never seen or heard from again and her body was never found.  She was 26.

Here is an excerpt from a letter she wrote a friend about her heartache:

“My dreams are going through their death flurries,” she wrote that June. “I thought they were all safely buried, but sometimes they stir in their grave, making my heartstrings twinge. I mean no particular dream, you understand, but the whole radiant flock of them together—with their rainbow wings, iridescent, bright, soaring, glorious, sublime. They are dying before the steel javelins and arrows of a world of Time and Money.”

Thoughts for a Monday...

"Why do we get out of bed?" Mitch wondered.  "Is there any feeling better than being in bed?  What could possibly feel better than this?  What is going to happen in the course of my day that will be an improvement over lying on something very soft, underneath something very warm, wearing only underwear, doing absolutely nothing, all by myself?"  Every day, Mitch awoke to this line of reasoning.  Every day, the first move he made outside his sheets immediately destroyed the only flawless part of his existence.

- Chuck Klosterman, Downtown Owl

Wish I wrote that...

I was clumsy, easily distracted; I was "always in a dream."  [He] dug out the form of this hapless personality for me; out of perversity, defiantly, I felt myself pouring into it and setting hard.  I wasn't pretty or charming or malleable.  I went around with a suffering face.  I read my book with my fingers in my ears.

- Tessa Hadley, "Clever Girl"
Published in The New Yorker on 6 June 2011

Overqualified

I've been on a book buying binge rather than a book reading binge this summer.  I blame it on my new laptop and the discovery of a game called "Cake Mania."  However, I did read and then re-read a wonderfully intoxicating short book called Overqualified by Joey Comeau.

Literally five minutes after reading an excerpt from this book in the 2010 version of Best American Nonrequired Reading, I had purchased Comeau's book online.  At first I thought it was just a collection of off-beat and humorous cover letters; actual cover letters written by Comeau and sent to various companies.

"Dear Goodyear,

I'd like a job, please.  You probably don't hire strangers.  I used to climb mountains of your tires in my grandfather's salvage yard.  My name's Joey Comeau.  There.  Now we aren't strangers anymore."

What I didn't realize was how revealing, bittersweet and wry these letters would also be.  Comeau wrote the book after a devastating drunk driving accident killed his younger brother.  This is revealed throughout the narrative of the letters, as well as the pain that Comeau experiences as his life continues to move on.  Family, regrets, uncertainty of the future, love, childhood...it's all in this book, in 95 short and truly sweet pages.

Favorite Passage
Dear Nintendo,

Thank you for taking the time to consider my resume.  I am writing to apply for the position of game designer.  We have a chance here to help children experience games that are more true to life than ever before.  Computer graphics have improved and improved and improved, and some day soon we're going to have to ask ourselves where we can go next in our search for realism.

We need virtual pet games where you clean and feed and love your furry little friend, but where that car still comes out of nowhere so smoothly, a god of aerodynamics and passenger safety.  Where your mother says, "Good thing we kept this."  And she takes a shoe box down from your closet.  Where you hear your father's quiet joke that night, when he thinks you are asleep.

We need an airport simulator, where the planes carry your whole family from A to B, job to job, and dad still drinks in the shower when you have to pee.  Your older sister still comes home at three in the morning and wakes you up so she can sit on the edge of your bed and cry.  Where you try to make friends faster at each new school, so you tell jokes even though you don't know anybody and nobody gets them.  Everybody says you're the weird new kid.  So at the next school you don't say anything at all and then you're the weird quiet kid.  The plane touches down and you all lean forward in your seats because of inertia, and again and again someone says, "I hate to fly."

We need a new Mario game where you rescue the princess in the first ten minutes, and for the rest of the game you try to push down that sick feeling in your stomach telling you she's "damaged goods," a concept-detailed again and again in the profoundly sex-negative instruction booklet, and when Luigi makes a crack about her and Bowser, you break his nose and immediately regret it. Peach asks you, in the quiet of her mushroom castle bedroom, "Do you still love me?" and you pretend to be asleep.  You press the A button rhythmically, to control your breath, to keep it even.

Yours, 

Joey Comeau

And one more short excerpt...
It's Joey, not Joe or Joseph.  My grandfather was Joe Comeau, and Joseph is my mother's name for me, but I have always been Joey.  I worry sometimes that it's a childish name. Would a "Joe" tell jokes in bed, perform puppet shows after sex, and give every body part a different high-pitched voice?  It seems unlikely.  The names we choose for ourselves aren't meaningless.  They're self-fulfilling prophecies.

So, I'm Joey and I will never be Joe.  When my grandfather died, I lost my chance to know him as anything more than a kiss on the cheek and a drive to the video store.   

Let's play catch up

I'm a delinquent blogger.  I've read SIXTEEN books since my last post in March.  Twelve since class ended in late April alone.  I was pretty serious when I decided to go on a reading rampage between the end of spring semester and the beginning of summer school.  It's helped that I've had some lazy weekends spent sweating out the sun on my balcony and a few nights of nothing on the old tv.  I guess maybe I'll recap just a few of the last ones I read.

Little Bee - Chris Cleave.  I was really excited to read this book because the copy on the book jacket promised a powerful, searing piece of art.  And I really am a fan of the cover art itself.  It started off strong.  I really loved the story - chapters alternating between the voice of a young Nigerian refugee and an American young mother/widow.  The downfall for me was that I just felt really sad at the end of reading it.  I was like, "Oh, I don't really want it to end that way."  And then my enjoyment of reading it was dampened by that feeling.

A Voyage Long and Strange - Tony Horwitz.  I am very much obsessed with Tony Horwitz after reading his book Confederates in the Attic.  He combines two things I love: travel writing and history.  For this book, Horwitz writes eloquently about all of the visitors, explorers and settlers of North America that came before the well-remembered Plymouth landing.  This leads us into histories of Vikings arriving, living and then leaving Canada / Maine; detailed adventures of Conquistadores like Cortez and Coronado.  It was amazing to me how much of the United States had actually been visited and explored before the whiteys from England came over.  But since we're Americans, we like to rewrite our history to have us as the explorers/pilgrims/adventurers in a new and unknown land.  This book gave me a really good understanding of the complicated relationship that the early explorers had with the Indians.  It seems that by the time the Pilgrims arrived, the Indians already knew plenty about the outsiders' propensity to kill with disease and violence.  I can't wait to get all of his books - I'm hooked.  You can read an excerpt from the prologue here.

A Gate at the Stairs - Lorrie Moore.  I wanted to love this book.  I really did.  Lorrie Moore has written some of my favorite short stories; stories that make me turn dog-ear the pages and wish that I had written something as striking.  However, this book almost seemed like it was written by a different author than the one I so fondly remember.  It nicely captured the feeling of post-9/11 life for a drifting college student in the middle of the Midwest.  The big themes were there: love, war, self-deception...it was not a bad book.  I thought some of the characters were interesting and it was well-written - it just didn't do anything for me, really.  It took almost half the book for me to even feel like something was happening.  Then towards the end more things started happening but truthfully, it was all slightly depressing.  I didn't even dog-ear a page until almost the very end, and that was for something that just made me chuckle.  "If we were still English," said my father, "we'd be drinking more and driving on the wrong side of the road - pretty much what people do on the Fourth of July anyway."

Reminiscing

At my parent's house this weekend, my mom pulled out my massive collection of Berenstain Bears books to offer up to my nephew.  My brother exclaimed that they were some of the most awful books to have to read out loud, in some part due to the not-so-blatant sexist remarks made by Papa Bear to Brother Bear (about Sister Bear's baseball hitting ability).  I did not remember this myself, but it wouldn't be too strange.  Some children's books are really strange when you re-read them as adults.  Or just really pretty dull and trite (I'm looking at you Baby Sitters Club). 

I think my most favorite books as a little kid were the Mr. Men and Little Miss series done by British author Roger Hargreaves.  That's why I was so freaking excited when my mom called to tell me that Google was celebrating Mr. Hargreaves' birthday with Mr. Men and Little Miss themed mastheads.  I've been amusing myself all afternoon by hitting the 'refresh' button.  I decided to share my favorites below.

Thanks to Mr. Bump, Mr. Messy, Mr. Rush and Little Miss Tiny for making Monday a little less excrutiating.