The Complete Booker Challenge 2011

Sweet!  Trying again for the Booker Challenge (and add to my Booker Project).  I plan to start with the “Pix-a-Mix of Six” level:

The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch
The Sea by John Banville (which I think is coming out as a movie this year, so I should read it)
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
The Bone People by Keri Hulme (the new Penguin Ink cover is awesome)

If I finish those I’ll bump up the goal to “The Booker’s Dozen” (pefect opportunity to read Possession again).

Bye, bye 2010! Recapping the reading

2010 was a crazy year what with the stress of trying nearly the whole year to sell my house.  In my attempt to “declutter” and “stage” my house for potential buyers I wound up packing up books that I was intending to read!  More stress!

According to Goodreads stats (far more accurate than my count-your-reading-journal-pages method), I read 91 books this year , 9 more than last year, but I only read 28,809 pages compared with 29,709 pages last year.  This probably reflects my attempts to infuse a little young adult into my reading repertoire.  I had intended to try and break the 100 book barrier but the craziness of December put the kibosh on that.  If I had to choose my favorite book from the year it would be a tie between Jasper Fforde’s Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffron (an author I have an obvious favorable bias towards) and Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak; I read both at the beginning of the year and they are still with me.  Least favorite book was Vixen; it wasn’t so bad I wanted to light it on fire, but it really got under my skin with the cliches and seemingly poor research.

I participated in a few challenges this year.  The Women Unbound Challenge was the one I completed, even reading one book beyond what I’d planned.  Sadly, I didn’t get the Complete Booker Challenge 2010 finished; I got three of six Booker-winning novels read but just never got to the other three (I did read one Booker short-list, so not a complete bust).  I’m going to have to think on the future of challenges in 2011.

My Nostalgia Project stalled out with its initial subject – Flowers in the Attic.  Too intense.  The Booker Project and Newbery Project are coming along swimmingly, the Newbery especially, but the Best American Project had to go on hold when I had to pack all my Best American books in order to how the house.  I didn’t make much reading progress on the Nobel Project but I did acquire more books to help me in the endeavor (and I can’t quite decide with Vargas Llosa to read…too many good choices there).

In honor of the International Year of Chemistry in 2011, I started a blog specifically for reading chemistry-related books (readingchemistry.blogspot.com).  I cross-posted a few science/chemistry posts from this blog and will probably continue to cross-post in the future.

This year I also made my first foray into requesting review copies…which added a whole new level of stress because now I feel obligated to read and finish the book I’ve requested.  Thank goodness I didn’t go nuts and ask for many more review copies – packing and moving has gotten me far, far behind on the ones I have right now!

That’s it for 2010 – bye, bye and so long!

The Finkler Question

Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question was awarded the Man Booker Prize for 2010 (my money was on Emma Donoghue’s Room, since that was the only shortlisted title I managed to read before the winner was announced).  I was going to read the winning book anyway but I got really interested when everyone said The Finkler Question was a “humourous” novel and it is rare when a humorous novel wins a major award.  I fired up the nook, downloaded, and started reading.

The Finkler Question is very comical at the beginning, if not funny “ha-ha” – the character of Julian Treslove is more like a caricature than a character.  He is morose (sort-of), a professional failure as an arts presenter at the BBC, tends to become hopelessly involved with women whose names begin with “J” and who leave him when they can’t stand the moroseness anymore, and is obsessed with his friend, Sam Finkler, who is Jewish (also a pop culture philosopher and kind-of a jerk for most of the book).  In fact, Julian is so obsessed with Finkler and his Jewishness that he refers to anyone/anything that is Jewish as “Finklers”/”Finklerish”, presumably because Sam Finkler is the first Jew he met.  Julian and Sam were roommates at school and one of their teachers was Libor Sevcik who has remained a good friend (incidentally, Libor is also Jewish).

The book opens with Julian getting mugged in front of a violin shop after having dinner with Libor and Sam, who are both recently widowed.  Julian then becomes obsessed with the idea that the mugger called him a “Jew” (it’s unclear what the mugger actually said but, given Julian’s obsession with Sam and “Finklers”, there is a crazy sequence where Julian reasons through all the possibilities of what the mugger could have said, ending with “Jew”; everyone else thinks he’s being irrational).  Many of Julian’s scenes involve some moment of hilarity, usually with his line of reasoning, except that it seems socially awkward to laugh at them.  For instance, Julian thinks over his affair with Tyler, Sam’s late wife, who, as a convert to Judaism, was more observant of religious practice than Sam; Julian thinks less about the fact that Tyler is a friend’s wife, but more about the fact that she practices the Jewish faith.  Later, Julian quibbles over the act of circumcision with reasoning that seems farcical but, in reality, there are serious questions about the necessity of circumcision in the general population and whether it constitutes mutilation, diminishes sexual gratification, etc.  I wanted to laugh, because Julian sounded so silly, but it felt wrong to do so.

The Finkler Question surrounds the characters with politically-charged current events, particularly that of attitudes toward the state of Israel.  Sam joins a group of politically active Jews who oppose actions taken by the state of Israel; they eventually name themselves the ASHamed Jews, which is ridiculous-sounding (and then you realise that Sam only joined the group to keep his name out there as a pop culture philosopher).  A new museum of Jewish history in the UK is the target of anti-Semitic attitudes.  An old friend of Libor’s asks for his help after her grandson is severely injured by a hate crime.  In between Julian’s oddities there are serious issues to consider.

While I really enjoyed Jacobson’s writing and the ideas he raised in the book, I felt the end was wanting.  It just petered out.  The strongest sections of the book occurred when Julian was wrestling with his obsession about Judaism and those who practice.  When the narrative moved away from that thread, the book wasn’t nearly as interesting.  I really think this is because I, as the reader, and Julian are both in the same boat when it comes to the concept of Judaism: we are both outsiders looking in.  I know a little bit about Jewish religious observances but not a great deal about the whys and wheretofores of the religion.  While Julian and his goofy quibblings were funny, the larger questions of religion in The Finkler Question didn’t strike me as laugh-out-loud.

Room

What if a single room and its contents were your entire world, the only thing you had ever known?  Only a television and the occasional “Sunday treat” provide information about the outside world – but you don’t know that a world exists outside your door.  You only interact with your mother and she with some shadowy figure called Old Nick.

This is the world of five-year-old Jack and his mother, Ma, in Emma Donoghue’s Booker-shortlisted Room.  Jack narrates the book and he’s very articulate for a young child.  All the furniture in the room has a proper name – Chair, Bed, Wardrobe – and a gender.  For Jack, everything in Room is his world and everything on the television is make-believe or Outer Space (the channels are “planets”).  Ma is trying to raise Jack in as close to what the outside world would consider “normal” as she can get: she tries to get healthy food to eat, limits sweets and television time, teaches him math and reading, keeps them moving through imaginative exercise.  Between the lines of Jack’s childlike narration is the very dark figure of Old Nick and it takes no time at all for the reader to determine that Ma has been kidnapped, held against her will, raped repeatedly, and the kidnapper/rapist has fathered Jack.  Sinister stuff indeed.

Donoghue does a remarkable job keeping Jack’s narrative voice going throughout the novel.  He is the child of a young mother and they are both observant of the pop culture delivered through the television; current popstars like Lady Gaga are name checked, Ma and Jack dance to music videos, Jack is a great friend of Dora, and Oprah makes several appearances throughout the book.  Jack’s view of the world – Room – is so sharply defined that he eventually has some trouble assimilating new information.

One of the things I found so interesting was the shift in attitude that I had to make as a reader at the beginning of the novel.  I would assume that a child cooped up in a single room would be intellectually behindhand and Jack and Ma wouldn’t make for interesting reading.  Well, Jack’s opening narration changed all that and Donoghue gave Ma a wonderful way of making everything either a game or a teaching moment; very ingenious.  It was a way of saying a mother would do anything for her child, even setting aside her own fears and depression.  Later in the book, the outside world had to make the same shift in attitude that I had in order to accept Jack and Ma.

I appreciated the subtle play on the myth of Danae from Greek mythology, especially since there are several references to God’s face (the sun) through the skylight.  Ma does keep knowledge of Jack’s father from him, inferring instead that Jack came from heaven in a parallel with Zeus’s golden rain in Danae’s lonely chamber.  Eventually, Jack is instrumental in bringing Old Nick down, also a parallel with the outcome predcited by the Oracle in the myth.  I do also love Old Nick’s name, a chilling intersection of jolly Old St. Nick, bringing presents, and Old Scratch, the devil.

I have yet to read Donoghue’s Slammerkin but I can definitely say that it’s in the TBR now.

The Satanic Verses

I started reading Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses last September for BiblioBrat‘s Banned Books Challenge.  I started reading during the last week of the challenge, which was busy, busy, busy on its own, so I only got about 150 pages read before October took over and The Satanic Verses wound up at the bottom of the reading pile.  Now that September has returned, bringing with it Banned Books Week and the news that some crazy people want to burn Korans to punish Islamic fundamentalists ( because that’s totally going to show them ), it was appropriate for me to fish The Satanic Verses back out of the pile and finish it off.

Rushdie fully expects the reader to suspend belief right from the last line of the first paragraph:

Just before dawn one winter’s morning, New Year’s Day, or thereabouts, two real, full-grown, living men fell from a great height, twenty-nine thousand and two feet, towards the English Channel, without benefit of parachutes or wings, out of a clear sky. (p 3)

Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha are the miraculous sole survivors of an act of terrorism and wash up on the beach of England.  Each begins to display characteristics representative of an otherworldly being – one displays a halo, the other a pair of horns – setting off a story of acceptance and forgiveness interspersed with commentary on tolerance, faith/doubt, megalomania, and identity.  Gibreel and Saladin form the frame narrative as we learn each man’s history and as they try to piece their lives back together in the wonderfully titled section “Ellowen Deeowen”.  Gibreel (as the incarnation of the archangel Gibreel) develops visions of the prophet Mahound at the time of his revelations in Jalilia (an interpretation of the life of Muhammed in Mecca) as well as those of a modern Indian peasant girl, Ayesha, who moves an entire village to walk to Mecca – through the Arabian Sea – based on the belief in her revelations from the archangel.

There are many character and narrative threads in The Satanic Verses and they don’t all start to come together until late in the novel.  This is a novel to be savored and pondered with wonderfully evocative imagery.  There are also many “doubles” in this novel – two Hinds, two Mishals, two or three Ayeshas (depending on how you count), Gibreel himself and Gibreel the archangel, and a Salman (who might mirror the author depending on how you look at it) – so you must also read The Satanic Verses closely.

This is a controversial novel, there is no getting around that.  When the prophet Mahound issues a proclamation from the archangel that women are to be sequestered, a madam comes up with the idea to have her twelve girls take on the personalities of Mahound’s twelve wives; the brothel receives a boost in business from the scheme but the brothel is eventually shut down and the prostitutes and collaborators are executed.  Because the novel uses the life of Muhammed as a basis, the idea that prostitutes are imitating the Prophet’s wives can be offensive to some.  Do you want to know what I think?  Those people don’t have to read The Satanic Verses, same as people who don’t like to see novels about the life of Jesus Christ that depict him doing un-Christlike things don’t have to read those.  A novel isn’t real, just like any historical novel using the Tudors as basis isn’t any more real just because it uses King Henry VIII as a main character.  Some events will be made up for storytelling purposes.  No one is forcing you to read it.

The novel also brings the issue of faith and doubt to the fore with the visions of Mahound and Ayesha the peasant.  How is someone believable when he or she claims to be the mouth of the archangel and brings revelations from God?  What do you do when the prophet suddenly retracts a previous statement, claiming it came from an “evil” source?  This is the controversy over the so-called Satanic Verses, a sura attributed to Muhammed that affirmed prayer to three old female polytheistic deities from the regions around Mecca but later retracted as the work of Shaitan (the devil).  Since the archangel only reveals information to a prophet, never to anyone else, how do we know if the revealments are the actual Will of God?  It requires faith, same as the village that follows Ayesha the peasant on a pilgrimage to Mecca, on foot, through the Arabian Sea; Ayesha affirms that the sea will part for them and the faithful will walk across the seabed; there are believers and there are doubters.  Like Doubting Thomas of the New Testament, does one need proof of the Divine to make the leap of faith?

The Satanic Verses is much more than just a book that pushes buttons for the sake of pushing buttons.  If those buttons set you off, then perhaps you ought not to read this book.  If you do read, look beyond those hot-buttons for the journey of Gibreel and Saladin; it’s a crazy ride and, ultimately, a very satisfying one.

Troubles

I started reading Troubles when the shortlist for the “Lost” Man Booker Prize was announced in March.  The Siege of Krishnapur is on my longlist TBR as part of my Booker Project/Challenge but Troubles is the first book in JG Farrell’s Empire trilogy so I was interested in reading Troubles before Siege (the final book is The Singapore Grip).

Conveniently for me, Troubles won the “Lost” Booker Prize so I got to read my first Booker winner of the year.

Troubles follows the story of Major Brendan Archer and his interaction with an Anglo-Irish family, the Spencers, at their decaying estate/hotel, the Majestic, around the beginning of the “Troubles” in Ireland.

(“Troubles” is such an innocuous word, like a guerrilla-style war for Irish home-rule is the same as a bothersome neighbor who neglects to return the leaf blower.)

Archer comes to the Majestic to claim the hand of his fiancee, Angela Spencer, and winds up embroiled in the idiosyncratic way of life at the old estate.  It’s a bit like a Waugh novel, the decaying Anglo-Irish aristocracy is a major focus of Troubles, combined with a Wodehouse farce – the cadre of elderly English maiden aunts and widows who permanently inhabit the Majestic lend a comic aspect to post-World War I/pre-civil war Ireland.  The rapidly multiplying horde of cats inhabiting the Majestic – they steadily take over the upper floors and varying rooms of the hotel causing guests to change rooms – are also a source of hilarity (to the reader) when the cats venture out to vex the hotel’s human inhabitants.  Archer also becomes fascinated with the aloof Sarah Devlin, a resident of nearby Kilnalough, as the relationship between the English and the Irish rapidly deteriorates.

JG Farrell’s writing is wonderful and very much worth savoring.  The majority of the plot in Troubles moves very slowly (the whole action of the book takes places over eighteen months to two years) so there is plenty of time for Farrell to develop the characters of Archer, Spencer, Ripon, Sarah, and all the others…only the expected character development doesn’t seem to occur.  The only character we start to fully understand is the Major and we see all the other characters through his eyes; I really only recall one or two scenes where Archer is not present so it was so fun to read a book that really stayed with one character’s perspective (the few point-of-view breaks were almost anecdotal in nature so they really didn’t interrupt my reading).  Farrell even provides the reader with the newspaper articles Archer reads so we always stay with Archer’s perspective and body of knowledge. 

If I didn’t know Farrell wrote Troubles in the 1960s (a time where the “Troubles” were heating up in Ireland again) I would have thought the original publication was in the 1920s.  There is a very real-time feeling to the novel, the feeling of uncertainty, that you don’t quite know who’s a “Shinner” (Sinn Fein), if you will make it home to dinner in one piece.  That is the best kind of historical novel – when you can’t tell the setting was reconstructed from research – and I love it.

Lazy Saturdays are necessary!

I had a lazy (but busy!) Saturday morning.  The weather is all sorts of Iowa crazy – humid with pop-up thunderstorms, tornado watches, and flood watches – so that means it must be time for the Iowa Arts Fest!  There seemed to be more booths this year than previous and any sort of art or handcraft you can think of was represented.  Painting, drawing, ceramics, photography, metalsmithing, jewelery, basket-weaveing, furniture-making, stained-glass, someone who “paints” with thread, and the guy who makes wind-chimes out of found objects (I can’t decide if it was kitchy or just junk).  I’ve never been able to afford anything I like at the Arts Fest in previous years but I found something I wanted this year:

Aren’t they cool?  A guy in Kalona, IA, makes trays, lazy Susans, salt-and-pepper shakers, trivets, etc., with this inlaid wood technique.  These were noted to be trivets but they’re a little small, in my opinion, so I want to use them as oversize coasters.  I really liked the irregular chevron pattern and the little bits of reddish wood that pop.  Additionally, they were affordable.  Yay!

On the way back to the car I stopped at Dick Blick (to indulge my love of colored pens and pencils) then swung by the yarn store to pick up the Addi turbo needle I ordered (I needed a 32-inch #7US circular).

Then I hit the library.  I checked out books:

All kids’ books this time around.  Dear Mr. Henshaw is one of the few Beverly Cleary books I never read – it also won the Newbery so it’s for my Newbery Project as well as A Gathering of Days.  I’ve been thinking about reading the “Series of Unfortunate Events” so I picked up The Bad Beginning.

And then in the library basement they were having the Friends of the Library sale.  Now, Day 1 of the library sale is ALWAYS on a Friday so if there was anything super good I certainly missed it since I, and a good portion of the adult population, was working.  Day 2 is not without its merits, however, because all adult books are half off.  Check it:

The Life of Pi, Empire Falls, House of Sand and Fog, and Sula all for TWO DOLLARS.  Yup, adult paperbacks are fifty cents each on the second day of the sale.  So it’s worth missing out on the first choice stuff on Friday.  The Life of Pi is a deaccessioned library book (from the library itself) and the library stickers are under the plastic covering the book; I don’t think I’ll be able to get them off.

It’s also extra-discount week at the bookstore so I made a small, preliminary purchase (technically last night) to get me started:

The Siege of Krishnapur and The Singapore Grip are the next two JG Farrell books I need to read (I’m reading Troubles right now); Siege will also count toward my Booker Project and Challenge.  I also got the very pretty two-volume Rabbit novels (one and two) set.  I’ve only ever read Rabbit, Run – and it wasn’t so pleasant since it was for high school English – so the four-books-in-two looked appealing.

I was also conned into buying by the merch manager seduced by this ridiculously cute, and very true to life, Cat Companion Journal by Jeffrey Brown.  The front and back illustrations are reproduced in color and there are more cartoons throughout.  For the record, my cats have done probably everything depicted in the cartoons.

Hooray for new books!

PS: The Iowa Arts Fest thoughts remind me that I will miss the Iowa Sheep and Wool Festival in Adel, IA, next weekend because it’s my niece’s baptism.  I’d love to be able to visit a fiber festival just once although it does sound like a hay fever festival for the sinuses but I’d be willing to deal for some good wool.

PPS edit: I just had an exhausting shift at the bookstore.  So much for my lazy Saturday.

Vote for the "Lost" Booker!

The Man Booker Prize is awarding a special prize for novels that were “lost” in the shuffle when the Booker Prize rules changed in 1971.  That year the award went from a retrospective award to one given to novels published during that year – many novels published in 1970 became ineligible for the award or were never submitted for consideration.

A panel of judges created a shortlist of six books from the many novels were lost to consideration and the public will vote to determine the winner.  The six novels are:

• The Birds on the Trees by Nina Bawden (this seems to be the only title not currently available in the US)
• Troubles by J G Farrell
• The Bay of Noon by Shirley Hazzard
• Fire From Heaven by Mary Renault
• The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark
• The Vivisector by Patrick White
 
The reading public will determine the winner – cast your vote for the winning “Lost” Booker Winner here before April 23!  The winner will be announced on May 19.

I definitely won’t get all six novels read before the deadline but I do have Troubles and I’m going to read as much of that one as I can (also I totally want The Vivisector because the cover art is awesome).