Keeping up with Sarah

books

So on Saturday night, while everyone else I knew in SF was getting their post-apocalypse on, I was home, platforms kicked off, in my flannel pjs, two dogs next to me in bed with the nearest sci fi book from Shabbir's pile. It was Bruce Sterling's The Zenith Angle. I had no idea what it was about but he'd written a few other amusing books so I figured it would be good. The first chapter reads like an business management class treatise. I was astonished with how boring it was. I dropped that one like a hot rock and passed out.

I'm still book free in the fiction world. Nonfiction wise I'm reading, slowly, Crucial Conversations, which is the best book about communicating I've ever read. Like all things that are true, it's not complex or hokey, but it forced to address some errors in my communication style. Notably I FAILED the "are you a good communicator" test, which probably means I'd get flying colors as a litigator. And it points out something that I do, and that I see everyone else around me do, we make up stories about why people say or do the things we do without bothering to ask them why. We do it instantaneously and then conclude, "He was doing that to hurt me! He was being purposefully [insert negative unpleasantness here]." This book is great for me at work, esp because most of my work mates are long distance so communications are limited to non-facial means. It taught me to be clearer and more precise as well as to keep an open mind. And I'm not done with it yet. I need to read the rest. Because I'm trying to apply it I can only read a page or two at a time.

The other book I'm reading is Carol Dweck's book, Mindset, which my friend Po Bronson wrote about in New York magazine. This book is also very hard to read because I see how I've changed across my life from someone who took risks and like challenges to someone who likes rewards and ease. I'm motivating myself to change that and embrace risk, effort and failure because it is ultimately more intellectually challenging. It's made me enjoy my job more because I am embracing correcting the things I perceived as wrong but beyond my control, and I'm attempting to take on bigger challenges just because they're challenging. It makes going to work more fun.

What I'm reading...

goodreads.com

Rashomon

I suppose my New Year Resolution is to read more. Seems like, I suppose from my list of books on the side, I'm an avid reader, and in my heart of hearts I am an avid reader. But between child and work, I don't have a lot of time for reading. I find myself listening to books on Ipod while doing chores or knitting, trying to maximize my very limited free time.

Then I went to San Francisco and spent a lovely day with a friend at Osento and then browsed a bookstore where I said, "Oh, I'd love to read so many of these, but it's a waste of time to buy them, I don't have time to read." And then prompty bought two books that called to me in a deep way.

I am just about finished with the first one, "Rashomon and 17 Other Stories" by Ryunosuke Akutagawa. I bought it because...guess..it's so obvious....Haruki Murakami wrote the introduction. Considering the difficulty I've had at getting around all the themes in his work, reading a bit of the Japanese literature classics seemed reasonable.

I liked it enough to keep reading every night after I should have gone to sleep, cutting into my precious sleeping hours. The story Rashomon is haunting, and the backdrop of the samurai period gone to seed is creepy and unlike anything I'd previously thought about Japan. We just saw Memoirs of a Geisha, I know, not even slightly realistic and so poorly written, oy veh! That world is so picture perfect so story book, and yet I now realize that it is very much the image of early 20th century of Japan I carry in my head. It was a strong contrast to Rashomon, the horrible story of the poor stealing from the dead, within a collapsing architectural folly, so to speak, of the Edo period. My favorite story in the book however, was The Hell Screen, with its heavy sarcasm, and completely implied plot. Besides being exceptionally well crafted, the theme, that Hell is here on earth, has been in my mind since I heard the This American Life story on the Bishop Carlton Pearson.

"The story of Reverend Carlton Pearson, a renowned evangelical pastor in Tulsa, Oklahoma, who cast aside the idea of hell, and with it, everything he'd worked for over his entire life. Carlton Pearson's church, Higher Dimensions, was once one of the biggest in the city, drawing crowds of 5,000 people every Sunday. But several years ago, scandal engulfed the Reverend. He didn't have an affair. He didn't embezzle lots of money. His sin was something that to a lot of people is far worse ... he stopped believing in hell. "

Well, sort of, he stopped believing that hell is anywhere but here on earth, Akutagawa's point in 1918.

I am quickly reminded that literature and art are the best ways to expand your mind: I can travel in both place and time.

I am also humbled by my complete lack of knowledge of Japanese history and I need to do some reading.

(The other book, by the way, was Murakami's latest, "Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman." Surprise, surprise.)

Po Bronson's Book: Why Do I Love These People

"Absolutely marvelous ... consoling ... a decent, heartening, kind and healing book to read -- and give. The integrity of Bronson's prose style as well as the incredible sweetness of those he writes about give him 24-karat credibility."
- Washington Post

That sounds like Po. My friend wrote a book and I haven't read it yet. He has written several books, the first was called Bombadiers and it came out several years ago. He used to work on Wall Street, and he understood it and the craziness of the people in it, and it's a great, fun novel to read. But then he got famous for another book, What Should I Do With My Life, which was on the bestsellers list and featured in the opening scenes of Bewitched, and that wasn't a paid spot by the way. That book isn't fiction, it's the story of a number of people who have had to make serious life decisions and they all chose different paths. My favorite story in that book is about the guy who was the reincarnation of a Tibetan Llama and decided to emigrate to the US and work in fast food instead. In other words, just because destiny chooses you doesn't mean you have to choose that destiny.

He's got a new book called "Why Do I Love These People," which he researched for two years. He interviewed families in all their quirky forms and came up with this book. I think it's ironic that he's friends with the author of Urban Tribes the anti-family family book. Po Bronson is a great human being. He's sincere, thoughtful and genuine.

Buy and read this book for several reasons:
1) If you're sick of the fictionalization of reality television, this book will be the antidote.
2) If you want to read something sincere and well thought out, Po's the guy for you.
3) Support the small world theory, and buy the book of a friend of a friend (you/me/Po) and then tell all your friends your reading your "friends" book.
4) And lastly because of the great description from our local paper, above.

Here's an interview with him that describes his reasons for writing the book.

Harukai Murakami and Neil Gaiman

I just read Sputnik Sweetheart by Murakami and Anansi Boys by Gaiman back to back. I'm a big fan of both authors. I've read all of Gaiman's work going back to the much celebrated Sandman comic books and I've been tearing through Murakami's as I get my hands on them. I'm struck by how similar they are, and yet the quality of the literature is strikingly different. Gaiman's novels, in particular the best of them, American Gods, weaves between realism and fantasy to make ordinary events and myth come together. Generally there are appealing everyman main characters who are drawn into a magical world where they help prevent some sort of disaster. It's a little formulaic, and the best parts are the descriptions of the mythical characters in reality. One of my favorite characters from Sandman is an ancient Egyptian god who goes into the travel business when people no longer worship him. He's spectacularly successful. That's a fun kind of combination of myth and reality where your own travel agent might just be a deposed god making the best of eternity.

Murakami similarily works in between our world and some magical world, though Gaiman's "real world" seems much more solid reality than Murakami's and Gaiman's fantastical world is also more solid, but not necessarily more vivid. Murakami's main characters are often, or at least of the three of his books I've read, Everymen, who to varying degrees become entwined in a magical world. In Sputnik Sweetheart the Everyman narrator observes the after effects of someone else's crossing into a magical world. In Wind-Up Bird Chronicle the Everyman main character crosses himself, as he does in Kafka By the Shore.

Murakami is working with Big Themes, you know those things they do in serious literature. Some of his themes, as I've been able to figure them out are:
1) The West (Europe/U.S.) is a different reality for the Japanese than Japan.
2) Past wrong-doings haunt the future. (Think WWII and its impact which is a recurring motif, and completely fascinating for the stories in of themselves.)
3) What we perceive is only a tiny part of what is out there or how we interact with things.
4) The ultimate evil is believing in nothing.

I particularly like his use of the last one. He makes really unappealing, seemingly inoccuous characters horribly evil in barely explicable, inhumane ways. In WUBC the horrible evil is so inoccuous a favorite cat is named after it. In KBTS the banal, "my dad the jerk" turns out to be true so much more so than we could ever have complained of in our own teenage days, and is more so than the teenage main character ever realizes (eats the souls of cats for his flute?!)

Gaiman's stories stick to your bones. You can ruminate over his writing later and find more depth to it, but Anansi Boys is the weakest of his pickings. American Gods is substantially better, but I go back and re-read The Sandman books every now and then, and I don't ever expect to pick up either American Gods nor Anansi Boys yet again.

Murakami describes characters enough to make them individuals while in Anansi boys there is very little known about the side characters so that they seem to be merely descriptions to a director, "Find a Daisy who looks like she is very moral." I am sure that I'd recognize Kafka if I met him, but Daisy is merely a character trait in hundreds of police and FBI employees.

The biggest weakness of Gaiman's latest is highlighted by Murakami's strength: the narrative flow to describe things so that the words vanish and pictures appear. Murakami can describe whistling opera while making spaghetti so that you forget that you're not actually sitting in the kitchen watching it done. And then add to that the depth of the themes, the importance and the opacity of them, and you have a much more engaging work than Gaiman's latest.

Clearly they are authors of two different camps. Gaiman's a comic book writer who dabbles in fantasy fiction, while Murakami is a "serious novelist." I don't see the two has being worlds apart (haha - get it!) and I think Gaiman could easily improve his writing if he spent a little more time making the descriptions descriptive.

I'm looking forward to finishing Norwegian Wood. I've been interrupted in my recent attempt to read it because my dog decided it was a very good book and ate each page after he read them. Unfortunately I can't get him to tell me what happens. I'm no Nakata, or perhaps I should ask a cat. I'll have to go get it out of the library, and hide it from the dog.

Kafka By the Shore

Haruki Murakami's book Kafka by the Shore has been named the best fiction book fo 2005 by The New York Times Book Review. I just finished it last night and I'm as perplexed by it as I was by The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles. I think I need Cliff Notes. What's happening to my brain that I can't understand these things?

Haruki Murakami

Also in the November 21st New Yorker, Haruki Murakami has a new piece, "The Year of Spaghetti." I haven't read it yet, but I'm so excited to so. The man's obsessed with spaghetti. He could be me.

Here is an interview with him after the publication of The Wind Up Bird Chronicle.

Is Woody Allen the Original Steve Martin?

From The New Yorker, November 21, 2005, "Above the Law, Below the Box Springs:"
"The State Police in Amarillo are a crackerjack group, and members not only must be physically impressive but must pass a rigorous written exam. Boggs had failed the written test twice, first being unable to explicate Wittgenstein to the desk sergeant's satisfaction, then mistranslating Ovid. It was a mark of his dedication that Boggs received tutoring, and his final thesis on Jane Austen remains a classic among the motorcycle police who patrol Amarillo's highways."

Hillarious.

Do you think that Woody Allen read Martin's pieces in the New Yorker and thought, "He's stealing my shtick!" Did he read "Cruel Shoes" and think, I already did this! Or does he laugh and say, "Brilliant! Fucking Brilliant!"

And I'm just not alone in finding this particular passage scintilating. Alas it's not on the web. Find the issue.

Don't Bother

If you read above the 5th grade level and keep up with current affairs, don't bother to read The Kite Runner.  A fictionalized, light weight version of the horrors of war and religions extremism, the plot is paper thin and entirely predictable.  The writing is average, with the descriptive strength relying entirely upon the exoticism of Afghanistan to Americans, riding the tide of South Asian novel popularity.  The only reason this isn't appropriate for children is that it describes rape and stoning, otherwise it's comparable intellectually to The Island of The Blue Dolphins.   

The most haunting story

Take a look at this early version of Peter Pan.