I'd Better Get Reading

I saw these lists mentioned on Janet Reid's blog, and I just had to check them out for myself. They're completely arbitrary, of course, but fun just the same. And they remind me of a bunch of titles that I'd like to get from the library.

75 Books Every Woman Should Read

(I've read 15 of these)

and

75 Books Every Man Should Read

(I've read 15 of these, too.)


Let me know your tallies.

2008 Round Up, Part 3--creative input

Okay, this is really the last post about 2008. I'm a number guy and a list-maker (mildly compulsive, perhaps...), so the end of the year is great time for tallies. I keep track of how many books, movies, and plays I take in every year, which I look on as sort of creative compost for the mind.

Here's how I did in 2008:

Movies watched: 46 (my goal was 52, but I coached my daughter's travel soccer team this year, which meant I coached about 20 games and ran about 40 practices. All that time has to come from somewhere.)

Favorites: Slumdog Millionaire, No Country for Old Men, Juno.

I had a goal of reading a handful of screenplays, but came up empty on that one.


Plays (and readings of plays) watched: 14. (In the old days, before kids, I might see 75 plays and readings in a year, but that's not possible anymore. Plus, this year, I intentionally dialed back some of my playgoing--I just needed a break (my goal was only 12). This year, I'd like to see a lot more. Luckily I have a StageSource membership, which gets me access to free tickets, because, to be honest, I can't afford to buy tickets to plays very often (see previous post on income).

Favorites: An Ocean of Air by Rough & Tumble, and the Rhombus plays in the Six Views Festival we put on.


Plays read: 9. (my goal was 4. Which I know is very unimpressive, but I've been more into reading books than plays lately.)

Favorite: August: Osage County by Tracy Letts. Intense, high-energy, and obviously theatrical. Reading Doubt by John Patrick Shanley was a big disappointment for me--it just seemed so theatrically uninteresting, and though the stakes are high, part of me felt like it's getting done a lot because it's really cheap to stage (small cast, no set). (Heresy, I'm sure.)

Books read: 29. (my goal was 24. I'm a slow reader, sad to say. And busy with a lot of stuff (see above).)

Favorites:

• The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
• The Blind Side by Michael Lewis
• Into the Wild and Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
• The New Kings of Non-Fiction edited by Ira Glass
• Life as We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer
• Master and Comander by Patrick O'Brian
• Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson
• Seedfolks by Paul Fleischman

I know that's an excessively long list of favorites (especially since I only read 29 books) but I liked all of these a lot. It helps that Tracy reads more than twice as much as I do, and knows what I like, so she filters out the other stuff. And I've gotten terrific recommendations from friends.

So that's a bunch of the stuff that went into my head. I'm curious to see what will come out in 2009.

What I'm Reading: Writers Workshop in a Book

I got Writers Workshop in a Book entirely because I love the Fear of Finishing essay by Mark Childress and wanted to see if the other essays in the book would be as helpful. They were.

I know some readers have been disappointed because they thought this was going to be a sort of step-by-step instruction book about how to write. It's nothing at all like that. Instead, it's a collection of essays by writers who have been around for a while, and are willing to talk about things as specific as point of view or writing historical fiction, or as general as anxiety about writing your second book (from Amy Tan).

For me, this was all like sitting around the couch with a bunch of mentors and just listening to what they had to say. It helped me keep plunging ahead with my own second novel. I have a feeling this will be a book that I'll go back to again.

I'm especially jealous of my friend Jessica, who is planning to attend the workshop in the flesh next month. Maybe someday I'll get there (these things just aren't practical when you've got kids). An added treat for me was the afterword, by Oakley Hall, where he talks about how the workshop actually got started. It's the kind of grassroots venture that I'd love to start myself someday. Maybe on the east coast. With a big huge garden, where the writers and I can plant and pick organic produce, and maybe a theatre for workshopping plays. Maybe.

Why I Want to Live on a Farm (and why I probably won't)

Well, it doesn't really have to be a farm. Just a nice place in the country with a huge garden, that will let us grow most of our own food. Farming implies actually working to sell food to other people, and I don't know if I really want to go that far.

I've gardened for years, and in Roxbury I helped manage two local community gardens. Last year, we moved to a pleasant condo in Brookline for various (good) reasons. We have no yard, just a tiny bit of flower space out front. No garden. No community garden within a logical distance. Our old garden isn't much more than a mile away, but I'd need to drive there much of the time, and commuting by car to one's garden seems perverse to me.

All this pastoral longing is in part thanks to Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which I just finished reading. She and her family moved from Arizona to a family farm in Virginia. Once there, they decided to attempt to eat only food grown locally, for an entire year. They grew vegetables in their garden, raised chickens and turkeys, and bought other produce from local farmers (and gave up bananas and citrus). As she describes their year, Kingsolver writes a lot about the many problems with our current industrial food supply, our unhealthy American food culture (or lack thereof), and her deep ties to farming and family.

It's one of those books, where you feel like they're just the perfect family, living in a little eden. Of course, they have money to help pull this off (she's a bestselling writer and he's a professor) and already owned the land. They seem so content, you can't help but want to go buy some whole milk (not ultra-pasteurized) and a few other ingredients, and make some cheese in your kitchen. (I really am going to do this this summer, I swear.)

The stuff about food really hits home for us, because our family has been working hard to eat much healthier over the past nine months or so, going mostly vegan and cutting out most processed foods. We bought a CSA (community supported agriculture) share, for local, organic produce. And it's been working.

Kingsolver's book covers some of the same ground as Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma, which was a more compelling book for me. Kingsolver tends to wander, and I started her book with the thought that this year of eating locally would be a fresh adventure for her and her family. But they'd already been on the journey for a while, so it lacks a crisp sense of discovery.

For an outsider's trip to a simple life, it's worth reading Better Off by Erick Brende, about an MIT grad and his wife who give up the modern life and go to live in an Amish-like community. Or if you want an intense connection with the land and a different way of looking at the connection between farming, farms, and nature, I'd suggest Wendell Berry or David Kline's Great Possessions: An Amish Farmer's Journal.

We've been known to suddenly pull up stakes and change our lives, but I don't think it'll happen this time. The need for racial diversity and the necessity of the right special needs school program for our son will keep us in place for many years. Plus, Tracy loves her job (and her short commute). Still, I'll always have that tension of wanting to live closer to the land. Maybe someday we'll retire to a small farm somewhere (or a house in the country with a big garden) (near the ocean) (or Paris).

Regardless of where we live, it's essential for us, and for America as a whole, to come to grips with the fact that our industrialized agriculture system is unhealthy for all of us. Small sustainable farms produce better quality food, use less oil, enhance the environment, help bolster our communities, and empower our citizens. With current agricultural policies, our government is actively undermining family farms and enriching large corporate agricultural concerns. The result is an epidemic of obesity and rising environmental hazards from pesticides, fertilizer and topsoil runoff, and irresponsible use of antibiotics and genetically modified organisms. A huge of amount of oil is used to ship all those bananas and off-season produce from countries half a world away to our local Stop and Shop. Buying local (as much as possible, and eating produce that's in season), like Barbara Kingsolver, is a good way to make at least a little bit of a difference.

Why I'm a Slow Reader

I'm trying to be a good writer of various flavors (good novelist, good playwright, good screenwriter). So I work pretty hard at the writing. And, in order to get better, I also need to read a bunch of books and watch a bunch of plays and movies. I love books, but I'm so slow at getting through them, it makes me crazy. It's taken me almost two weeks to get through P.G. Wodehouse's, Big Money, a book that should take about two sittings at most.

So, this morning, I was thinking about where my time goes. Here's what yesterday looked like:

6am – 8:40am. Get up. Walk dog 1 mile. Cook breakfast for kids and me. Get son ready for school. Wash dishes. Walk son to school, see teachers, drop off camera in classroom, walk home, walk dog into town and back to get local newspaper.

8:40-9:10am. Make soup for dinner and get it in fridge.

9:10am – 12:20pm. Write. Finish soup making.

12:20-2pm. Check e-mails. Call wife. Walk dog. Eat lunch (while making way slowly through Sunday NY Times). Shower. Start bread in bread machine. Pack snack for son. Drive to school.

2pm-5pm. Take son to dance class. Chat with other mom there. Read (here’s my reading time) for 20-30 minutes (this is a lot for me). Go home. Prep for dinner. Make hot dogs for son. Help son with his homework. Call to find where daughter's gone. Prep to take kids to soccer. Take dog out quickly. Drive daughter to soccer.

5pm – 7pm. While daughter is at soccer: Go buy flowers for son's class’s garden. Buy OJ. Play with son at playground until soccer is over (do this with my book in hand and manage to read 3 pages). Drive back home.

7pm – 8:20pm: finish cooking dinner. Eat dinner with family. Walk dog again (we don’t have a yard). Tuck son in to bed.

8:20pm – 10:45pm: answer e-mails (including write letter of recommendation, agree to possibly blurb a book, grant permission for staged reading of a play, etc.), look at funny juggling video on YouTube (4 minutes). Help wife find papers for son's summer camp. Think about watching a movie, but update my Tornado Siren web site instead. Check statcounter for my web sites for the 100^th time and skim a few blogs by friends. Consider blogging but can’t think of anything. Watch twenty minutes of The Daily Show on line. Dog out for final pee.

10:45-11pm: Read book. Fall asleep on couch.

Okay. Well, I guess that’s why I don’t read as many books as I’d like.

So today, it was rainy and I realized that the third chapter of my new novel is a complete waste of space, and I'm not sure how I want to replace it. Sitting still and noodling is the hardest part of writing for me. Which is why first drafts come easy, because it's just a matter of keeping the fingers moving. Later on, it requires actual thought and finesse. Turns out that P.G. Wodehouse was just what I needed (since plot and humor are something that this third chapter needs a lot more of). So I sat down for an hour or two and finished. It felt good (and Wodehouse is always good for some laughs). Nice work if you can get it, huh?


Here's a fine quote for a cold rainy day:

Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he's supposed to be doing at the moment.
Robert Benchley

What I'm Reading: Digging to America

When I was going to New York and back two weeks ago, the bus rides gave me some precious uninterrupted reading time, and I read all of Anne Tyler's Digging to America. I got turned on to Tyler by Nick Hornby. (That could almost make it sound like Nick is a pal and we sit around drinking beer and watching World Cup matches together. Sadly, untrue. He's just one of my favorite writers, and I've read a couple interviews.)

Digging to America at first felt a lot like Breathing Lessons (for which she won the Pulitzer), but quickly diverged. She's so good at drawing her characters and the small essential dramas of their lives. In some ways not much happens in her books (I usually hate books like this), but there really are a lot of tiny conflicts going on within and between her characters in this proscribed, somewhat domestic realm that they inhabit. And she has a sense of humor. She's definitely a writer that I read and say, "I want to figure out how to write like that." It's a lot harder than it looks.

This particular book was useful for me, too, because the book I'm currently writing is sort of based in domestic realism (much more so than anything I've ever written), and also deals with race and adoption. We have very different takes on these things, but it was helpful for me to see how she handles it all. Digging to America shifts 3rd person POV to a different character in just about every chapter, which was intriguing, though it didn't always work for me. This was especially problematic late in the book, where suddenly we're seeing through the eyes of a child, which I found annoying because I wanted to have more insights into what was happening. (I don't imagine Ms. Tyler is worried what I think.)

I should probably reread this one, to look more carefully at how she pulls it off, but I think I'll read The Accidental Tourist instead. (After I get through the pile of P.G. Wodehouse from the library, and Anna Karenina (honest), and two new Michael Pollan books that I got for my birthday.)

What I'm Reading: The Hidden Wound

I've read Wendell Berry's The Hidden Wound before, and I'm positive that I'll read it again. Berry, well known for his poetry and writing about the land and the environment, tackles race in this extended essay, originally written in 1970, with an afterword added in 1988. He writes gracefully about how race and the legacy of slavery has affected our entire nation, and him personally.

He's especially interested in how slavery set up an unhealthy relationship between whites and the land and the labor associated with maintaining (and loving) the land on which we depend for our existence. This concept of the degradation of essential tasks by the wealthy and powerful, has modern political resonance in the current struggles over illegal immigration and the constant refrain that "illegals do the work that Americans won't." I'm sure that Wendell Berry has written elsewhere, and more recently, about this, but The Hidden Wound will get you thinking about it. (As well as lots of other things--it got me thinking a lot about what exactly constitutes community and the power of neighborhoods.)

Here are a few quotes that I marked:

"I am a good deal more grieved by what I am afraid will be the racism of the future than I am about that of the past. The past may to some extent be understood, and it is our obligation to do that, but it cannot be corrected. There is, I am sure, such a thing as a sense of guilt about historical wrongs, but I have the strongest doubts about the usefulness of a guilty conscience as a motivation; a man, I think, can be much more dependably motivated by a sense of what would be desirable than by a sense of what has been deplorable. The historical pressures upon race relations in this country tend always to push toward two complementary dangers: that, to whites, ancestral guilt will seem an adequate motive; that, to blacks, ancestral bondage will seem an adequate distinction."

and:

"The essential cultural discrimination is not between having and not having or haves and have-nots, but between the superfluous and the indespensable. Wisdom, it seems to me, is always poised upon the knowledge of minimums; it might be thought to be the art of minimums."

If I could I'd just cut and paste the whole book here, so everyone could read it. But you'll just have to get a copy for yourself.

What I'm Reading: The Omnivore's Dilemma

I thoroughly enjoyed The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. He's been one of my favorite writers, ever since I read A Place of My Own, some years ago. And I stumble across stories by him in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, often quite by accident, and then look at the byline to see who this talented writer is, and there's Pollan again.

The book has the distinct danger of making you annoying to your spouse/partner/children, because you'll be reading along and feel compelled to share a fact about how industrial corn production has wormed its way into nearly every aspect of the American diet. I know my 12-year-old daughter cringes when we go the store, and I inspect the ingredients, calling out, "Yep, there's corn in this, too."

Pollan is an immensely fun writer, because he enjoys learning about this stuff, and he's skilled at taking the reader along on the journey, not just through the facts, but through feedlots, and chicken slaughtering, and mushroom hunting. He takes a close look at the industrialization of food production (which depends heavily and crazily on corn), large scale organic farming, and then at a sustainable farming operation, and then around a meal that he assembles using his hunting and gathering skills (relying heavily on the skills of others).

For our family, this book seems perfectly timed, since we've been making huge dietary changes around here since Halloween, cutting out animal products and most refined and processed foods. We were doing it for health reasons, but this books adds an entirely new level of justification. Not that Pollan is saying you should become a vegan. Not at all. He's saying that we owe it to ourselves to become more conscious about what we actually put in our mouths, and the effects that its creation is having on us, our culture, and our planet.

My only disappointment is that in the final wrap-up, he focuses on the extreme distance between the industrialized food he and his family consumes and the meal that he makes through hunting and gathering, without mentioning enough of the sustainable farm that he'd visited. (That section made me want to go out and buy some land and start farming. Tomorrow.) We spent so much time with Pollan through this book, I wanted a stronger sense of whether all this had actually managed to change his day-to-day buying and eating habits. But those are really minor points.

(Also, don't miss a terrific essay Pollan wrote for the NY Times in January, Unhappy Meals, about what we really should eat. Really, it's the answer to what was bugging me about the end of his book. It should be included as an addendum to every copy of The Omnivore's Dilemma.)