Dear Everyone, Thanks

Since I posted the link on this blog, the Village Library project has acquired $640 in donations. I could NOT be happier about this. I can’t see the list of donors until the grant is fully funded, but I’m assuming that people who read this (and I know a lot of my readers are also my friends) are almost entirely responsible for this unprecedentedly awesome progress–so THANK YOU. Emir, whose pictures I cannot resist posting, also thanks you. Keep spreading the word: if the grant is fully funded by the time I go home for Christmas, I can handle all the details of shipping during my visit and have the library up and running within weeks of my return.

I can’t wait to have my students write book reports, the best (or worst) of which I will surely be posting here. My attempts at having them write more/more creatively have resulted in amazing sentences such as “If I had a million dollars, I would certainly not become a drug dealer” and “If I met Barack Obama, I would ask him if he has ever danced with wolves.” I don’t even know what they’ll do when we collectively blow their minds with Where the Wild Things Are.

House of Sand and Fog, by Andre Dubus

It’s really rare for me not to finish a book. In childhood, I probably started and abandoned a dozen of my brother’s Matt Christopher books, which rested in a convenient basket in front of the toilet, but generally I’m pretty motivated to see things through, if only so I can feel comfortable with my judgments. Especially now that my alleged “pattern of breaking the rules” (Peace Corps safety restrictions are on par only with those for the infant children of diplomats) has confined me to my mile-long, one-road, frosted-over, food-desert village for my third out of eight months in country… these days I’d finish Mein Kampf if I had it.

Thus, the fact that I couldn’t get through more than a fourth of House of Sand and Fog should be enough of an inducement for you to never, ever read it. It looked appealing at first; I remembered that there was a Jennifer Connelly movie made out of it, the cover wears a big silver seal advertising that it was a finalist for the National Book Award, and reviews on the back state both that it’s “the work of a writer who is the real thing” and, not to be bested, that “House of Sand and Fog is one of the best American novels I’ve ever read.” Well, you know, they’re just critics, and words are just words. Sometimes words are just really bad words. Like these.

Page 24: “I see her and she has no longer fifty years, but twenty-five, and again, I desire to be with her in the fashion a man is supposed to be with his wife.” This is exactly the kind of heinously awkward “ethnic” sentence that contemporary literature should be developed enough to avoid. I know traditions are different, but no one in any culture is this much of a douche in his inner monologue.

Page 40: “I went through my suitcase for the least wrinkled clothes there, which were a new pair of jeans and a white blouse with horizontal pleats in the front. Just before I left I thumbed some blush onto my cheeks that were pale from no sleep. My eyes looked sunken and I brought them out with black eyeliner.” Do not fear, this is a different narrator than the Irani ex-colonel who desires to be with his wife along a certain fashion. But as this narrator is not Stacey from the Baby-Sitters Club, I take offense to the presence of this paragraph in a novel deemed “the real thing.”

Page 67: “It was a porno I grabbed from the adult section and slipped in with two PG-13s. But when I put in the videocassette and heard the electric moan of the recorder pulling the tape along I was already wet.” Here Andre Dubus is doing that thing, most clear in poetry, where writers put associative words in proximity but in unfamiliar contexts. However, “electric moan” is a little much, especially about a VCR.

Page 94, during a sex scene: “I was sixteen all over again, Ma gone shopping, Dad at work, plenty of time before we get caught.” Oh, is this a country song?

I’m noticing that three out of these four excerpts have to do with sex. And I guess it is hard to write about sex well. But it’s really not that hard. That’s what she said!

Plainsong, by Kent Haruf

So there’s this blurb on the cover of Plainsong by Kent Haruf, and it’s pretty effusive: “a novel so foursquare, so delicate and lovely, that it has the power to exalt the reader,” it says. I read it and thought, well, that’s a nice sentence even if it is a bit much. The word “foursquare” is evocative and rare enough to be striking, and it balances out the lightness of the next two adjectives. And then I realized I was mentally reviewing a review, a concept much like the concept of the “stapler-er” (a stapler that, instead of staples, has mini-staplers) that two of my friends and I invented while doing exactly what people who invent stapler-ers tend to do at 3 in the morning.

I really like this book. To continue to use the words of this reviewer (whose name is Verlyn Klinkenborg and who, a bit emotionally, titled his Times review “The Sheltering Sky”) Plainsong does have a certain exalty power. It’s set in the Midwest and its characters are simple, honest-souled people, and its writing is sparse and word-to-word unemotional enough (and occasionally really great, although Haruf is not quite skilled enough to hide his efforts) to balance out the Where the Heart Is factor of setting a heartachey, hopeful story about a pregnant girl in a small town. And although I vowed from childhood to never live in an American non-urban area, I really love stories about small towns when they’re right: Carson McCullers, Sherwood Anderson, Flannery O’Connor.

But, unfortunately, so does Hallmark. There was a Hallmark Movie Event or some shit made out of this book in 2004, and I am sure that the movie is a big piece of schmaltz that crosses the line from “exalt” to “inspire.” Which is a big line. As a rule, I really can’t deal with anything meant to be inspirational because of my giant heart of coal, but I am not immune to minor feelings of exaltation brought on by books like Gilead and Peace Like a River, and it made me think that the difference between “exalt” and “inspire” in this case lies completely in the ability of words to do things that movies still can’t. If you read Plainsong you will only very occasionally feel like you are supposed to have heartstrings—“Now the older boy had one hand stretched above his brother’s head as if he hoped to shove something away and save them both”—and you’ll mostly be enjoying sentences as simple as the first one: “Here was this man Tom Guthrie in Holt standing at the back window in the kitchen of his house smoking cigarettes and looking out over the back lot where the sun was just coming up.”

Garlic and Sapphires, by Ruth Reichl

I really like the fact that food porn has become a Thing. Recipe books, blogs, anything with glossy mouthwatering pictures of the kind of food that people update their Facebook status about—I’m into it (the food, not the statuses: even less, the people who “like” or comment “Yumm!!!” on someone’s announcement that they’re making bacon-coddled pumpkin-zucchini truffle oil whatever; for me it’s on Annoyance Par with girls that post “I love my sweet boyfriend ” for all the world to vomit over). But anyway I used to read the dining section of the Times first no matter what the headlines were, and it would be truly embarrassing if anyone were to know exactly how many hours I have spent looking up various food items on Wikipedia (Mexican desserts… so intricately sugary). But it was not until a few months ago, when I found myself ravenously going at a bowl of bland homemade applesauce while reading about “the simple luxury of a large yellow potato mashed with lots of butter and fresh truffles, another an abundance of porcini sauteed with clarified butter, sprinkled with bits of rock salt and a small shower of herbs”—that I realized just how bad my involvement with food porn had become.

That  sentence came from Ruth Reichl’s Garlic and Sapphires, the stupidly titled account of her tenure as the food critic at the New York Times. On the front cover, there’s a review from the Washington Post that states, “Reading Ruth Reichl on food is as good as eating it.” And as someone who has spent many a night eating care-package granola bars while reading about “ethereal linguine topped with slender shavings of white truffle,” I can say that that is almost true.

Anything that I could possibly say about this book is not as important as making it clear that this book may be a food porn pinnacle. “All around me waiters were carving ducks fragrant with five-spice powder and drizzling caramel sauce over slices of poached foie gras. They were spooning creamed morels over asparagus the color of newly sprouted grass and dolloping roasted apricot tarts with just-chuned ice cream.” I can’t even write any more of this because it’s literally making me salivate (and I am having difficulty restraining myself from making food/porn jokes about wetness and putting things in one’s mouth).

Just trust me. If you, like me, are a partially closeted fatass whose favorite issue of the New Yorker is the yearly food one, I would give this book a permanent place under the mattress.

Maniac Magee, by Jerry Spinelli

I was recently telling my boyfriend that I think I was probably most rational when I was a kid, and he said, immediately, “Sure. Everyone was. And becoming an adult is getting that back again.” Which is something that I’d never thought about in those terms, but I think that may be a true statement–and why, again and again, I’ll read or reread a book that’s won the Newbery Medal and feel like nothing better has ever been written. And although I’m not quite a reference book for mature behavior, I think that children’s books are incredibly mature and honest about the world in a way that books about adults can’t be. Maybe it’s because these stories are aimed at a group that hasn’t ever read a book review or taken a class on literature—kids’ tastes are more completely their own than they’ll ever be again—or the fact that kids are, if not forced, at least regularly urged to read, which might make them the best audience of all—but when these books are good they’re good. I spent last evening eating cinnamon toast for dinner and reading Maniac Magee (which won its Newbery in 1991) and I’m not sure if wine and Don Delillo could have possibly made me happier. And I really miss wine.

There’s Jerry Spinelli’s style, which is exuberant and sandlotty: “It was a hot day in August. So hot, if you were packing candy, you had soup in your pocket by two o’clock. So hot, the dogs were tripping on their own tongues.” He tells stories exactly how you want to hear them, with a child or a wacky-grandpa’s touch of gleeful exaggeration. But the story of Maniac Magee is really the thing.

It’s about this kid whose parents die, whose uncle and aunt neglect him, and one day he rips out of the school play and runs “out the side door and into the starry, sweet, onion-grass-smelling night.” He comes to this town in Pennsylvania that’s divided into the black East End and the white West End and, living with the deer in the town zoo, begins to turn into a legend. He runs all day on the rail (the rail) of the train tracks. He shows up everywhere, intercepting a varsity touchdown pass with one hand, striding nonchalantly into Old Man Finsterwald’s backyard, untying the legendary Cobble’s Knot—and when a black family takes him in, he starts ruffling feathers around town. People start harassing his family, so he leaves, and, homeless again, makes friends with a burned-out ex-pitcher named Grayson. Grayson teaches him how to play baseball, and Maniac teaches him how to read, and Grayson moves into the baseball equipment room where Maniac’s been crashing and they make a home, with a hot plate and a Christmas tree and all that—and then Grayson dies, and Maniac takes off running again. And so on. Eventually he forces the town to somewhat of a racial reconciliation.

The story is lightly drawn enough so that you don’t realize why this story is so affecting. You don’t think about the fact that Maniac’s heart is more extraordinary than his kid-legendary feats, or that the reason why Maniac is so curiously free is that he has such strange, wonderful priorities: to not burden anyone, to help people who need it, to eat Butterscotch Krimpets, to refuse to care about anything that doesn’t make sense to him. I really, really love this book. If you still have it around, reread it.

The Village Library Project

To entice you to read this post, I present you with a picture of my little host brother Emir. He just turned 3 and, as his only activities are crying, screaming, laughing, kissing people on the cheek, and pulling down his pants, he is both my favorite and least favorite person in this country. This project is my attempt to save him and my host siblings (and the rest of my village) from the life of subsistence farming and alcoholism that awaits them.

So here’s a little slice of Kyrgyzstandard life. Students here don’t receive homework, are never tested, and there is not a single teacher in my school who has ever written an essay, even in college. I’ve been adamant about assigning homework, though, and my usual assignment is “Write 5 sentences about this thing/using this tense/finishing these thoughts.” Doing this, I noticed how often students would write sentences using the phrase “read interesting books.” “Yesterday I read interesting books,” they say. “Tomorrow I am going to read interesting books.”

But I’ve never seen a Kyrgyz person read a book. Not on 8-hour minibus rides. Not at home. There just aren’t any books here.

The Kyrgyz teacher I work with, who is one of the most perceptive, funny, and wonderful people I’ve ever met, absolutely loves to read. She devoured the copy of Harry Potter I gave her and made ten pages of idiom translations from the book (her example sentences on “troll boogers” were particularly nice). We talk often about reading, and how much her entire interest in learning stemmed from having access to books as a child. Our kids so clearly crave stories: they’re obsessed with Korean soap operas, with Twilight, with Russian Big Brother. Because there is not a single element of creativity in their schooling, and Kyrgyz villagers don’t speak about abstract thoughts, these are the only outlets they have for their imagination. And every day they write sentences about “reading interesting books.” They have no idea what doing so would be like, but I can’t help but think that they want to. Knowing that I would be absolutely different and much worse off had I not spent my whole life with a book in hand, I have been thinking ever since I got here about how I could give these kids access to books.

With my little brother, I’ve put together a project. I’m starting a lending library in my village that will hopefully function as a community center and small business (if it succeeds, it will be the only business in town besides farming and vodka vendors). If you read this blog, you understand how important reading is. If you are inclined, I’d be really happy if you looked at the project page. You can donate, and of course that would be amazing—if all the people who read this blog donated $5, I’d have the full amount of money to start this library after just one day—but I’d also love any leads about organizations that might be sympathetic to projects of this nature. I have all the English-language books I need; the money is for shipping, chairs, dictionaries, and Russian-language novels for the adults to read. If the link doesn’t work, try copying and pasting this:

https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=donate.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=307-169

On a related note to that $5 thing, I had fast internet access yesterday for the first time in months, and I looked at the stats for this blog. I feel really lucky that people are reading this. Thank you for reading this, right now! It makes me want to make these posts more mature and more like actual book reviews, but I’ve always been incapable of concealing things and hopefully dilettantism equals charm.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith

I’m not sure if I have shared the degree to which I reread books. It’s embarrassing. I think I’ve read all the Harry Potters about, I don’t know, two hundred times. I think I’ve read The Namesake even more times than that. This is mainly due to the fact that I read obscenely and incorrectly fast and thus have somewhat of a need to reread things as well as a desire to—there are always details I missed the first time. Naturally, the books that I have reread the most are the ones whose details I have loved the most.

And no book’s details can compare to those in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I devoured this book the first time I read it. Telling the story of a poor Irish family in turn-of-the-century New York, it is plainly and wonderfully rich; published in the forties and written earlier than that, it’s demure and totally frank in that Cheaper by the Dozen, All-of-a-Kind Family way. I missed this book so much that I got my mother to send it to me in Kyrgyzstan, and it’s weirdly been a comfort. The main character Francie is an oldest child who loves to read, tries to write, and has to grow up to meet the circumstances of her life, and I might not have realized until typing that last sentence how much I used to identify with her as a kid. There’s just a lot of straightforward strength in the characters in this book, and I guess it makes sense that I still love it; I wrote my college thesis on contemporary immigrant literature and this book is just a decades-old version of that, with that good old whitewash factor that draws me to watch The Christmas Story for half a day every Christmas when it comes on TBS.

“She walked back home down Graham Avenue, the Ghetto street. She was excited by the filled pushcarts—each a little store in itself—the bargaining, emotional Jews and the peculiar smells of the neighborhood; baked stuffed fish, sour rye bread fresh from the oven, and something that smelled like honey boiling. She stared at the bearded men in their alpaca skull caps and silkolene coats and wondered what made their eyes so small and fierce. She looked into tiny hole-in-the-wall shops and smelled the dress fabrics arranged in disorder on the tables. She noticed the feather beds bellying out of windows, clothes of Oriental-bright colors drying on the fire-escapes and the half-naked children playing in the gutters.”

It’s just so nice to read! I really am not into “wholesome” as a value, but I really can’t think of a book that’s so rich as well as so purely, honestly wholesome. If you have by chance never read this book, I’d do it.

Alias Grace, by Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood is not for everyone.

For as smoothly crafted as her books are—they’re hard for me to look through for excerpts because they’re such slow-building, densely packed little worlds—and how undeniably great of a writer she is, I’d venture to say that there aren’t too many men who love Margaret Atwood. I’d say to really love Margaret Atwood, to have your soul really hooked by her, you have to be either a) a staunch feminist b) a Canadian c) a poetry lover d) a historian e) a politically involved speculator about the end of the world f) a naturalist or maybe just g) someone who drinks large mugs of tea all the time… and thinks.

Yet she’s one of the best writers of our time. There’s this thing about contemporary women writers, serious ones—this slight particular tinge of awareness, vulnerability and aggression in their perspective which is absent from the self-assured works of their established male counterparts. I’m thinking of Atwood, Alice Munro, Lorrie Moore, Lydia Davis—you couldn’t read their work and think a man wrote it. And I get the feeling that that puts people off.

Let me try to find some examples, from Alias Grace, Atwood’s 1996 novel about a mid-nineteenth-century farmhouse murder. The book is about Grace Marks, the imprisoned suspect, and the doctor who tries to break through her amnesia; the book is really about memory and history and storytelling as extremely unstable methods of knowing the truth. It’s good, really good, but to go along with the theme, there are a lot of discomfiting bits that leave you feeling a little weird.

In particular, how she uses images of the body: “Miss Lydia places him on a tongue-coloured settee.” When Grace’s mother is pregnant: “I said What is in there, another mouth to feed, and my mother smiled sadly and I had a picture of an enormous mouth, on a head like the flying angel heads from the gravestones, but with teeth and all, eating away at my mother from the inside.” After a friend has an abortion: “Her dress was all damp, and clinging to her like a wet bandage.” About the doctor’s landlady: “Nipples small and pink like the snouts of animals, of rabbits or mice perhaps; or the almost-red of ripening currants; or the scaly brown of acorn caps.”

Acorn cap nipples. Really. There is no lack of hippie in me, but I mean, this is a forceful perspective if I’ve ever seen one.

Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins

So, I really liked The Hunger Games and Catching Fire, its sequel. I like the idea of America collapsing in some industrial apocalypse and being separated into numbered districts that all have to pay tribute to a Capitol—tribute in the form of goods as well as children who have to train as psychotic gladiators and fight to their death in a rigged and televised arena. Katniss, the main character, is super tough and occasionally unpleasant, which I like. I think I’ve been into ideas of this sort ever since I read The Girl Who Owned a City or whatever that awesome book is called—and I think the world has been into ideas of this sort ever since the story of the Minotaur was written—and of course the whole children-graphically-murdering-each-other thing really ups the ante.

And after reading Mockingjay, the third book, I am still impressed by the sheer violence in this series. In this book, all the districts have rebelled and are fighting the Capitol. The battle scenes in which they try to breach the city, in their dusty vagueness and complete reliance on technology, seem unnervingly similar to (what I imagine to be) scenes from America’s current overseas conflicts. And I like that these books are very clear about the psychological damage that comes from going hungry.

What I am not impressed by is how much the writing sucks in this book! Did I just completely miss it in the first two? I think probably I did–I recently received a comment on my Twilight post that made me realize just how fully my memory sucks. I am embarrassed and sorry at how my brain works sometimes, and even in my fully callous element I shouldn’t be forgetting important details like which schools offered me scholarships, or the terrible writing of Suzanne Collins. For example: “Real or not real? I am on fire. A creature as unquenchable as the sun.” Also, “I shrug to communicate that my hair length’s a matter of complete indifference to me.”

Also this: “They can fatten me up. They can give me a full body polish, dress me up, and make me beautiful again. They can design dream weapons that come to life in my hands, but they will never again brainwash me into the necessity of using them. I no longer feel any allegiance to these monsters called human beings, despise [sic] being one myself.”

Like I said, I like these books a lot, but this writing style is just absurd sometimes. Very “Middle School Anime Lover Uses the Thesaurus for the First Time.” Also, for a book with a 1.2 million first-run printing, shouldn’t the copy editing be just a little sharper?

The Omnivore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollan

In my former life as a person who ate green vegetables, I was all about the local thing. Charlottesville, where I went to college, kind of grooms you that way: there’s a farm profiled extensively in The Omnivore’s Dilemma that supplies all the good restaurants in town, there’s a restaurant called The Local, the only grocery store within walking distance from me was a vegetarian store called Integral Yoga, and, of course, the food’s just fucking amazing so in the end I got hooked on the taste as well as the ideas. And it’s obviously catching on if it’s made its way to Houston—there are not too many local or organic places in town, but Jesus, there’s this one drink they make at the best place that has tequila and lavender and a jalapeno-infused simple syrup ice cube… oh God.

I think Michael Pollan is a fantastic nonfiction writer and The Omnivore’s Dilemma is an absolutely readable, informative and fascinating book about the contortions our food economy has gone through to become the industrial monster that it is today. The details are best told, well, in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and I think the whole White House-vegetable-garden-trend-piece media season has educated the public well enough about the issues at stake. But in case you didn’t know, a Chicken McNugget has thirty-eight ingredients, including butane, and the farm industry is kind of disgustingly wasteful, and it takes 1.3 gallons of oil to produce 4,500 calories of fast food, and most of we eat is reconstituted corn. Etc etc. Here’s the thing. I’ve never needed much to make me a food believer. Although I am not overly watchful of my health, and for example once found both a day-old Egg McMuffin and a PBR in my purse during class, this issue seems really simple to me: real food tastes better.

Until I started climbing up the Ultimate Local Agro Crag in Kyrgyzstan, a challenge in which I start every meal by pulling something out of the ground, the maximum number of ingredients in my food is usually about four, and I’m currently existing on oatmeal, yogurt, and butter because eating seasonally is a lot less fancy in a Central Asian winter. I have certainly enjoyed this opportunity to learn how to cook completely from scratch, and the produce itself (when available) is unmatchable. But many things are ironic about this situation, including the price issue. In America, a lot of debate centers on how local and organic food is expensive; here, it’s the opposite. There is only one grocery store in country as big as your average Kroger, and very few people (or volunteers) have the access or the money to buy these glamorous, transport mile-laden products. Michael Pollan talks a lot about the “true cost” of industrial food products, and I agree with him, but you see an infinitely more basic idea of “true cost” when you live with a family that can’t afford anything that comes in a package.

I have also learned an interesting lesson about eating meat thoughtfully, which I will admit I absolutely never did in the States. Kyrgyzstan is all about sheep slaughtering for special occasions. They make this dish called “besh barmak” (translated, “five fingers”)—it’s a boiled sheep with salt and mush noodles, over which melted sheep fat broth is poured, and everyone eats it with their hands out of a communal bowl. The taste is both foul and boring, but it’s a very honored, traditional dish here, and I really respect the knowledge that Kyrgyz people have of the death of an animal. So when I read the sentence in Pollan’s book—“Now it was all a matter of doing well by the animal, which meant making the best use of its meat by preparing it thoughtfully and feeding it to people who would appreciate it—“ I had to pause. I’m going to give this one to you, Kyrgyzstan. I hate on your food culture all the time because so much of it involves congealed sheep fat in my face all the time, but you really do justice to the animal here—in every way except for taste.

So I think The Omnivore’s Dilemma is an extremely important and relevant book to anyone taking part in the American food system. However, as I am currently not doing so, I will be content respecting America for what its dominance and greed brings to my pantry, fantasizing about arugula and brie and considering how many years of my life I would give up for a Chipotle carnitas burrito to appear on my desk (the answer is… many).