Citizen Reader

A memoir for the Anglophiles.

It hasn't been all doom and gloom around here as far as nonfiction reading is concerned. In the last few weeks there have been several bright spots in my reading, and one of them was Michael Frayn's memoir My Father's Fortune: A Life.

Frayn is a British playwright and novelist, although I have never read any of his plays or novels. In fact, why I requested this book from the library on one of my regular browses through the new nonfiction releases in the catalog, I'll never know. I think I was aware he's British, and so, of course, I might be interested in his book.

Frayn recounts the life of his father, Tom Frayn, from birth to death. (Making this a blend of biography and memoir, although the majority of the book is told from Frayn's point of view as a child growing up in his father's household.) And he does a really nice job of showing how even the ordinary life of a British salesman and father, is anything but ordinary.

My favorite parts of the book actually came in the beginning, with Frayn describing his father's life as the beloved baby of the family, growing up among family members who were all either completely or almost completely deaf. The circumstances in which his father grew up certainly gave me pause:

 "My grandparents' house had four rooms, apart from the kitchen, and according to the 1901 census there were two other couples also living there. Presumably each of these couples occupied one of the rooms. So my grandparents and their four teenage children must have been living in the two remaining rooms. Two adults and four adolescents in two rooms--and all ten residents, presumably, sharing the kitchen...And now here's the new baby chucking his food under the table and screaming his lungs out, with his nappies being boiled on the copper...In the morning everyone trying to get their breakfast, and hot water for shaving, and their clothes pressed and ready for work.* All of them wanting the one lavatory, which at that time was presumably a privy in the back garden." (pp. 13-14.)

Really. Just PICTURE all that. It is a credit to Frayn's writing that he makes it easy to picture.

And the whole book is like that. It's a great picture of life in Great Britain, life in the lower middle class trying to cling to respectability, life as a child in England during World War II, and life as a family member in any number of relationships (as father, as son, as nephew, etc.). It's a great book, and I had to stop several times while I was reading it and just savor it. That, to me, is one of the marks of a very fine book indeed.

*Boiling nappies on the stove AND still having to press your clothes. Christ, I can barely make it in life even with disposable diapers and wrinkle-free shirts. People were made of sterner stuff then.

Motherhood discovered.

I learned this while reading Catherine Harper's memoir A Double Life: Discovering Motherhood: if I even want to entertain the thought of ever trying to have another baby, I have to stop reading books about pregnancy and childbirth RIGHT NOW.

There aren't any gory details in Harper's account, which is a very thoughtful and readable memoir about the experience of having a baby and becoming a mother. (It's also the winner of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize, which I've never heard of, but hey, it's good to know; and is published by one of my favorite publishers, the University of Nebraska Press/Bison Books.) The bulk of the narrative involves Harper's coping with the changes pregnancy makes to a woman's body, then there's a lengthy chapter on her labor experience, and she concludes with some insights about learning to care for and raise her new daughter. However, the two parts that really made this book stand out (in my opinion) were the very beginning and the very end. In her first few chapters, Harper describes how even the decision to try to become pregnant changes your relationship dynamic (in other books this is either the entire focus of the book, as there are many books in which couples struggle with infertility, or is ignored if the narrative starts with the author's experience of being pregnant). But her concluding chapter really makes the book special:

"After playgroup that morning, after I had sat in that basement--which up to that point had been a fulfilling, companionable place to spend a few social hours--after I had listened to the endless litany of where Cheerios were on sale, what brand of diapers worked better on which gender, how many activities a particular nine-month old baby could accomplish in one day, how expertly another's 'swimming' lessons were going, why one mother took such pride in not finding the time to shower, or how another hadn't put her baby down for a nap ever...after the storm of all that nothing, I found myself undone...

My friends from pregnancy had all returned to work or moved out of the city. I was alone, and I understood for the first time, with absolute clarity, why women went mad...

...I understood more specifically that what was hard about mothering my baby wasn't really the sleeplessness, the poop, the spit-up, the mess at mealtimes, the carrying, or the soothing. Nor was it her generally noisy, demanding nature. These things were challenging but in the end they were the simplest things about having a child. What finally unwound me was the repetitive, isolated nature of these chores. I did the same things, over and over and over. I did them alone, without company or conversation. Once they were done, they had to be done again. And when I went out to be with other mothers, we talked about nothing else..." (pp. 213-214.)

Please excuse the lengthy quoting, but I wanted to give a flavor of how great Harper is at discussing (to my mind, anyway) one of the greatest challenges of motherhood: how to be interested in and raise children without talking and thinking ONLY about children. It's a nuanced point, and it's not made very often. Kudos to Harper for making it here.

100 Best-ish Nonfiction Titles: Sports

Two categories left in our exploration of Time magazine's 100 Best Nonfiction Titles list: today Sports, next time, War. YAY!*

So here's what Time had to say about the Sports category:

Ball Four, by Jim Bouton
The Sweet Science, by A.J. Liebling

Well, this is another category where Time didn't wear itself out suggesting titles. I've not read either of them, although I do like Liebling and the Ball Four book, first published in 1970 as an "inside story" about baseball, sounds pretty interesting. As long as they were going to have a sports category, I'm surprised they only listed two books, but hey, to each their own. It's a bit tricky to list what I think are the best Sports books--I already mentioned at least one in the Biography section (Pistol, by Mark Kriegel).

Seabiscuit: An American Legend, by Laura Hillenbrand. Yes, I know pretty much everyone has read this book already. But it's that rarest of rare nonfiction books: one that lives up to the hype. Anyone who likes a good underdog story will enjoy Hillenbrand's historical narrative about Seabiscuit, the little knobby-kneed horse that could.

The Ticket Out: Darryl Strawberry and the Boys of Crenshaw, by Michael Sokolove. A heartbreaking book about baseball players who make it, against all odds, to the big leagues, and then still suffer from things like drug addiction and not knowing how to handle success and money.

Scoreboard, Baby: A Story of College Football, Crime, and Complicity, by Ken Armstrong and Nick Perry. A particularly timely read, in light of the Penn State scandal; this is an eye-opening read about exactly how much violence and criminality people are willing to allow in their college sports program culture (warning: it's a lot, including rape, savage beatings, and shootings). The authors, journalists both, focus primarily on the University of Washington football team.

I thought about listing The Blind Side, by Michael Lewis, but I think Michael Sokolove's book covers much the same ground (impoverished youth making it through sports--spoiler alert: Darryl Strawberry's life story and struggles with drug addiction will make you cry) without as much sentimentality, and is a superior read, although I do feel The Blind Side is a very good book.

*Not yay, war; yay, we're almost done. Although I may still do a couple of lists of Investigative, Travel, and True Crime: three huge categories Time ignored, for whatever reason. I guess I can see leaving out Investigative and True Crime, but Travel? Come on.

Still not over London.

I ate up Peter Ackroyd's London Under: The Secret History Beneath the Streets with a spoon.

Well, not literally. But it was a slim little book that I enjoyed very much, about one of my very favorite cities in the world. Ackroyd relates short histories and anecdotes about the messy and historical business under London's streets: its sewers, buried rivers, water pipes, tunnels, and the Underground (to name just a few of his topics). At around 200 pages with generously spaced text, it was the perfect little morsel to get me through a couple of days when I couldn't find much else I wanted to read.

It's not perfect; it ends rather abruptly and it moves from subject to subject without much rhyme or reason, but if you're at all interested in urban planning, history, or London itself I think you'd find this book very interesting:

"The sewers of early medieval London were the streams and rivers that ran down to the Thames. Cess-pits, lined with brick or stone, were also in common use and were cleansed weekly or fortnightly by urban workers known as 'gong-fermers.' In 1326 one of them, 'Richard the Raker,' fell into his own cess-pit and suffocated 'monstrously in his own excrement.' The first pipes to carry waste, in an underground drainage system, were introduced to London in the thirteenth century during the reign of Henry III." (p. 80.)

Okay, that's not a pleasant image. But Ackroyd most definitely has painted an image. And that's what blows my mind about London, and other really old cities. 1326! Just imagine. I want to keep imagining--and that's why I'm going to look into another of Ackroyd's history books: London: A Biography.

100 Best-ish Nonfiction Titles: Self-Help

An end is in sight for our consideration of the Time 100 Best Nonfiction Titles, I promise. The Time category list proceeded alphabetically, so the way I see it, all we've got left is Self-Help/Instructional, Sports, and War (they also include Social History, but we covered that in our History section). I'm not crazy about any of these categories, thinking Self-Help is largely too personal to apply "best of" honors to, and I feel like I listed some of the best Sports books under Biography. War, likewise, seemed more a part of History to me. But I already punked out on the Nonfiction Novel and Political lists, so I'm going to woman up and finish out with these categories.

Here's the Self-Help/Instruction titles Time listed:

The Big Book, Alcoholics Anonymous
The Elements of Style, E. B. White and William Strunk, Jr.

Well, at least this is a list that has brevity going for it. But I just get a chuckle out of any list that pairs these two books in the same category. I've been lucky enough not to need The Big Book*, but I have read parts of The Elements of Style and should read it again. It is a great little book for writers.

Now, best self-help. I fully believe in the category; I once taught a class on the reading interests of adults and I told the students not to laugh at self-help, as everyone will need a self-help book of some kind someday. Really. It's a universal. But, as noted previously, Self-Help tends to be very personal. There's definitely benchmark titles in the field: Dale Carnegie's How To Win Friends and Influence People; Stephen Covey's The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People; John Gray's Men Are from Mars, Women are from Venus; anything by Geneen Roth or Wayne Dyer, etc. Those tend to leave me cold. So I'm just going to list a couple of books I've found very informational in my own life, and leave it at that.

The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need, by Andrew Tobias. Personal finance affects everyone, and even if you don't plan on becoming a big-time investor (or you don't have much to invest), Tobias's very understandable and often quite funny (which is necessary; books like this are a real snooze if the author doesn't have a sense of humor) guide can really help you get your mind around money basics. College graduates (if not high school) should be given the latest edition of this guide as a graduation present.

Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition. Everyone needs a dictionary, and don't give me any shit about using dictionary.com. Your computer isn't always on, or at least it shouldn't be, and neither should your smart phone. I use my dictionary ALL the time, for spelling help, pronunciation (Mr. CR and I had a heated discussion about the pronunciation of the word "secreted" the other day--I won't keep you in suspense, I won), hyphenation, etc. The other day my dad called and wanted to know the definition of "hubris." I love my dictionary. It's one of the few things in the world that I know how to use and never lets me down.

*Sometimes the spirt is willing but the flesh is weak: My standard physical reaction to anything more than two beers is to pass out, only to wake myself up with copious vomiting 6 to 12 hours later. At least it made me a cheap date, if not the life of the party.

The cool customer strikes again.

You know I am a Joan Didion fan.

So of course I have been waiting for her latest memoir, Blue Nights, for some time. And, as much as you can't be disappointed by the terribly sad story of a mother losing her only daughter when said daughter is only 39 years old (and little more than a year after the same author lost her husband), I was not disappointed.

Didion won the National Book Award for her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, which was about the death of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, and her grief in its aftermath. It's one of my favorite books of all time, and in it, she tells the concurrent story of the health struggles of their adopted daughter, Quintana Roo, who entered the hospital with pneumonia shortly before Dunne's death, and would eventually spend nearly two years in and out of hospital intensive care units with increasingly severe health problems. Quintana died in 2005, and in this memoir Didion revives her most powerful memories about her, while circling around the topic of her own aging and increasing frailty.

The title of this post comes from a line in The Year of Magical Thinking, when one of the medical personnel at the hospital where Dunne was taken and eventually pronounced dead describes her as a "cool customer." This is, in fact, what I love about Didion: even at her saddest, when dealing with the most personal and devastating of losses, she is never, ever sentimental. By this I don't mean that she doesn't care. Anything but. Consider this anecdote, a memory of Quintana walking to school when they lived in California, told from both John's and Joan's point of view (actually, this is a bit of a cheat, since it's the text John wrote down from his wedding toast to Quintana, but it's Didion who saved the text and has decided where to put it in her story):

"So I'd [John] take Q to school, and she'd walk down this steep hill. All the kids wore uniforms--Quintana wore a plaid jumper and a white sweater, and her hair--she was a towhead in that Malibu sun--her hair was in a a ponytail. I would watch her disappear down that hill, the Pacific a great big blue background, and it was as beautiful as anything I'd ever seen. So I said to Joan, 'You got to see this, babe.' The next morning Joan came with us, and when she saw Q disappear down that hill she began to cry." (p. 29.)

I love everything about that story. I love how it shows the depth of love for Quintana that both her parents had, but how their reactions to her beauty and the beauty of the situation differed. At the risk of sounding sexist, I think that right there is the essence of the difference between the experience of being a father and of being a mother.*

The next part I'll quote IS Didion's writing, about the title of the book:

"In certain latitudes there comes a span of time approaching and following the summer solstice, some weeks in all, when the twilights turn long and blue...During the blue nights you think the end of day will never come. AS the blue nights draw to a close (and they will, and they do) you experience an actual chill, an apprehension of illness, at the moment you first notice: the blue light is going, the days are already shortening, the summer is gone. This book is called 'Blue Nights' because at the time I began it I found my mind turning increasingly to illness, to the end of promise, the dwindling of the days, the inevitability of the fading, the dying of the brightness. Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning." (p. 4.)

It's a beautiful book. I've done a horrible job of describing it, but you can read some much better reviews of it here and here. You should also know that it's a short read, but a draining one: don't read it when you're already emotionally fragile (I did, and it led to some crying, which I try to avoid now, because it makes my eyes so tired the next day).

 *I could explore this subject endlessly but this post is already too long.

100 Best-ish Nonfiction Titles: Science

Okay, we're going to finish up our alternative take on the Time 100 Best Nonfiction list if it kills me. Today's a big category, but at least it's one I understand: Science.

Now when I say I understand, I mean I understand it as a category. I emphatically don't understand science (or math) as a concept; if I did I'd be a lot more successful.* What I find annoying about science is that someone can explain it to me all they want, even fairly graspable concepts like electricity, and a minute later I'll have forgotten EVERY SINGLE THING about the explanation. It's like the Men in Black came through with their mind-wipey thing. Mr. CR says this is what I do when I'm not interested in something--in goes in one ear and out the other without making any sort of impression. So whether it is a question of being intellectually deficient or just uninterested, you'd think this would be a category I wouldn't enjoy.

But I do. When I find a good, readable, understandable, and yes, the most overused word of all, compelling science book, I really really love it. So I'm excited to discuss this one. Now, here are the books Time listed:

A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking
Coming of Age in Samoa, by Margaret Mead
The Double Helix, by James Watson
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer**, by Siddhartha Mukherjee
The Lives of a Cell, by Alice Park
The Naked Ape, by Desmond Morris
On Human Nature, by Edward O. Wilson
The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins
Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas Kuhn

This is a poor list, in my opinion, and one that is skewed too heavily to the biological and "soft" sciences (particularly the Margaret Mead--I might argue about anthropology being a true "science"--and I say that as someone with a degree in library "science," so I know how broad labels can be). Of course the Hawking title is there, although it reminds me of something I read once that posited that that book was the most bought and least read book in the world, which seems to me about right. There's nothing really wrong with the titles themselves, particularly if you want to read books that have proved controversial--like the Morris and Dawkins books (I'm a bit suprised that Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb isn't listed here, as it was also hugely controversial), and some of them are quite good. But let's see what we can come up with:

The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA, by James Watson. This is an EXCELLENT choice. If you read only one science book in your life, make it this one. Not only is it a fantastic discussion of the discovery of the structure of DNA and the birth of the study of genetics as we know it, but Watson as an author is not only good at explaining the science, he's also like your favorite chatty cousin who always knows the best gossip on everyone and isn't afraid to share. Regardless of how you feel about his treatment of women scientists (did he and Crick rip off their colleague Rosalind Franklin's research?), it's a fascinating read.

Pushing the Limits: New Adventures in Engineering, by Henry Petroski. It would behoove everyone to know a little something about engineering as an applied science, and Petroski makes the topic exciting (yes, exciting!) in this consideration of engineers pushing the envelope.

The Last Sorcerers: The Path from Alchemy to the Periodic Table, by Richard Morris. Very readable history of science/chemistry.

An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain, by Diane Ackerman. I'm not a Diane Ackerman fan myself but I've known lots of very smart mathy and sciencey people who enjoy her, so I thought she deserved a place on the list. This is one of her more well-known titles, about the brain (which is always a fascinating subject to read about, I think).

Fallout, by Jim Ottaviani, with Suspended in Language (about physicist Niels Bohr) being a close second. This is a graphic novel about the development of the atomic bomb, and it is quite possibly the best science book I've read. Ottaviani is a super talent.

Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures, by Carl Zimmer. Quite possibly the most memorable science (or any genre, for that matter) title I have ever read. Parasites are fascinating, although their ick factor is high. But they're most definitely here to stay and their lives are entwined with ours, so it's important to know about them, and Zimmer is a fantastic science author.

Prime Obsession Bernhard Riemann & the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics, by John Derbyshire. I think there should be at least one math book on this list, and frankly, this is the only one I've ever finished. I tried Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity by David Foster Wallace, but it was beyond me. Like, it didn't even feel like it was in English, beyond me.

I was a little surprised there wasn't anything by Stephen Jay Gould, Carl Sagan, Dava Sobel, Jonathan Weiner, or Michio Kaku on the Time list, frankly, they're big names in the field. And both of our lists are remiss in the fields of astrophysics/space exploration--do you have any titles in that area or others that you could suggest?

*I often worked the Friday night shift at the public library, and when proud parents would tell me how advanced their children were in reading, I always wanted to say, "You know where that gets you? That's right--working behind a public service desk at 8 p.m. on a Friday night. I'd encourage your child in math, if I were you."

Trash to treasure.

Maureen Stanton's Killer Stuff and Tons of Money: Seeking History and Hidden Gems in Flea-Market America is just the sort of nonfiction I enjoy. It's on a subject I find interesting (antiques), although I would never go searching for or browse the shelves on that subject. It's investigative--Stanton spent years getting to know an antiques dealer named Curt Avery, even helping him set up his booth and sell (as well as watching him buy) at numerous antique shows. It's an interesting little book.

Avery's been a dealer for thirty years (he started before he was a teenager), and Stanton describes his struggle to make it out of the middle leagues of dealers and join the big players at the most prestigious sales. What's truly humbling about this narrative is how good Avery is at his work--how much he knows about both history and the objects he buys and sells--and how hard it still is for him to make a living. (His wife works a job that covers their health insurance--of course; the only way anyone can make it America, make sure at least one spouse has a job with insurance benefits). The book is both an interesting treatise on buying and selling, and a good character profile of a dealer who seems both honest and principled (two characteristics which also often seem to conspire to keep him from getting rich).

Jessa Crispin at Bookslut didn't seem to like the book much, and I'm not sure why. We found it quite a good read around here (Mr. CR read the whole thing too, and wanted to talk about it--a very rare confluence of events for Mr. CR and nonfiction). I do think at least part of the appeal of the story was watching someone do what they love, even if wasn't lucrative:

"Once, I asked Curt Avery if, after nearly twenty years, he was still having fun selling antiques. 'It seems like you are,' I said. After a long pause, he replied, 'Jeepers. It's a hard question because it's yes and no. Part of the reason I do this is because I love the stuff.' He paused. "There are days when everything is for sale, and the next day you want to jump off a bridge, but I can't imagine getting out of it. I'm too obsessed with it, to be honest with you.'" (p. 269.)

Know anyone who compulsively watches Antiques Roadshow? They might enjoy this book.

A nice atmospheric read.

Although I didn't re-read Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes for Halloween this year, I did read a YA novel that had kind of a nice autumn atmosphere. (Although it's atmosphere is decidedly not "nice"; it's both a bit scary and very sad, I just mean that the author did a nice job giving it an "autumnal" feel.)

I don't know where I heard about Patrick Ness's A Monster Calls, but I'm really glad I brought it home. It's a fascinating little book (which is actually based on an idea by YA author Siobhan Dowd, who died before she could write it into a story) and it's beautifully illustrated by Jim Kay. It's set in Great Britain, and it's about a boy named Conor who has more than a few problems. His mother is sick, he's getting picked on in school, his father's left him and his mother to start a new family in America, and the grandmother he dislikes is about to come stay with him and his mother to help out. If that weren't enough, a monster comes for him. This is how the book starts:

"The monster showed up just after midnight. As they do."

"A monster, Conor thought. A real, honest-to-goodness monster. In real, waking life. Not in a dream, but here, at his window. Come to get him.

But Conor didn't run.

In fact, he found he wasn't even frightened.

All he could feel, all he had felt since the monster revealed itself, was a growing disappointment.

Because this wasn't the monster he was expecting.

'So come and get me then,' he said." (p. 9.)

It's an interesting book, the illustrations are beautiful, and it can be read in about an hour or so. I'd recommend it.

100 Best-ish Nonfiction Titles: Ideas

The next category to consider on the old Time 100 Best Nonfiction list is something they call "Ideas." The books are as follows:

The Closing of the American Mind, by Allan Bloom
The End of History and the Last Man, by Francis Fukuyama
Godel, Escher, Bach, by Douglas Hofstadter
The Hero with a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell
Imagined Communities, by Benedict Anderson
The Nature and Destiny of Man, by Reinhold Niebuhr
Orientalism, by Edward Said
Syntactic Structures, by Noam Chomsky
A Theory of Justice, by John Rawls
Understanding Media, by Marshall McLuhan
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig

Now here's a list that really put me to shame: I've read a total of two of them, and I didn't really understand those. And again I'm a bit stymied by the category: it seems almost like philosophy, but the Bloom title seems more like cultural criticism or current affairs, while Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance seems like kind of a lightweight compared to the rest. Maybe I'm wrong on that, but I don't really know what the Time editors were shooting for here. And I out-and-out laughed at the idea of making it through the Chomsky and the Niebuhr: not likely in this lifetime (for me, anyway). Although I should read the Joseph Campbell and McLuhan titles; I've always wanted to.

So again I'm forced to cobble a few choices into a category I don't understand. I'm not a huge philosophy reader, and if I'm looking for Ideas books I tend to go to a category that I think of as "Making Sense..." (As in, Making Sense...of ourselves; Making Sense...of each other; Making Sense...of our culture, etc.) Others have sometimes labeled these books Big Think, or Bright Ideas, or many other names. I suppose we could all be honest and call them "NF Books That Don't Really Fit Anywhere Else," but that wouldn't be as catchy. Another thing I find interesting about this category is that many of these types of books are emphatically NOT narrative...but people read them recreationally (or not really based on subject) anyway. But that's a different fight for a different day: "Why I hate the term narrative nonfiction" (and the tangential argument "Why I hate the term sure bet"). For now? My Ideas list:

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, by Malcolm Gladwell. Of course it's become totally cliche now, to read a Malcolm Gladwell title, but you really should read this one anyway. It's an interesting read, about how sometimes an attention to detail can have a larger effect on the big picture than you might think, and it's an important title to know, because like Roger Putnam's Bowling Alone, it's been cited ad nauseum in other books and reviews.

The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart, by Bill Bishop. An interesting look at how Americans are sorting themselves into communities where everyone looks like each other. Kind of the anti-melting pot scenario, if you will. An interesting topic and a well-written book. Perhaps this one should be Investigative instead, but it felt more like an academic book you could actually understand than it did a work of journalism.

You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, by Jaron Lanier. I'd never heard of him before, but evidently Jaron Lanier is a big name in the study of artificial intelligence. That made it much more interesting to read this book (although I'd like to read it again and see if I could understand more of it), cautioning about where we're headed with the technology we choose and use.

The Wars We Inherit: Military Life, Gender Violence, and Memory, by Lori E. Amy. I reviewed this one a while ago; it knocked me over. Full of interesting questions about violence, gender roles, family dynamics, and how we treat one another not only in our families but in the larger world.

Anything by John Kenneth Galbraith; I find him fascinating. (And no, as long as we're on the subject of economics, I will not be suggesting Freakonomics, I think Steven Levitt plays fast and loose with his research.)

Two other authors who come to mind are Jacques Barzun and Christopher Lasch, but I've honestly never made it all the way through any of their works.

And that's all I've got? Ideas? Ideas on Ideas books? Anyone?

You'll notice my list is decidedly less intellectual than Time's. That'll happen. I suppose some Michel Foucault should be on it somewhere, for one thing. But I never did manage to cultivate an appreciation for Michel Foucault, even in college. (Fun true story to prove how dumb I am: the one class for which I was supposed to read Foucault was an introductory library school class, and my professor kept referring to monographs. And I always thought, what the fuck are you talking about? Even after I'd looked it up and knew it meant book I still got sidetracked EVERY SINGLE TIME the prof said "mongraph," with this on a loop in my brain: "Why are you saying monograph? Couldn't you just say book? Or scholarly book, just to change it up sometimes?" It struck me as so stupid, you go for 18-22 years with everyone calling them books, and all of a sudden you're supposed to call them monographs. And by the time I was done thinking about it, he'd be done explaining Foucault and I would have missed it. Sigh.)

The road to hell as paved with good intentions.

I really struggled with what to title today's post. "What a fucking waste"? "War is just so completely stupid"? "Finally a war book that points out the military shit is largely beside the point"? Read Peter Van Buren's spectacularly depressing memoir We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, and you'll see why it would have made me think all of those things.

Van Buren was a State Department worker who was sent to Iraq to head up an ePRT--an "embedded Provincial Reconstruction Team." He lived there for a year, and details, in short chapters that can be read whenever you have a spare few minutes, a multitude of the stupid things he saw while there. He hits all the high points of our illustrious American liberation in Iraq: how we knocked out sewage and water treatment and electricity plants without ever building them up again; how we dropped our little Green Zone headquarters right on top of Saddam's old headquarters, nicely illustrating the whole ordeal was just a regime change, and not for the better ("Conveniently for Iraqis, the overlords might have changed but the address had not. The place you went to visit political prisoners who opposed Saddam was still the place you went to look for relatives who opposed the Americans"--p. 155); how we spent millions and billions of dollars on less than nothing, with State Dept. and military types alone handing it out willy-nilly, with no research or follow-up, simply to meet their own made-up objectives. Christ. Consider:

"Kids were always hanging around everywhere; few attended school in rural areas, and those who did went only half days because boys and girls were not allowed to go to class together as they had been under the mostly secular Saddam regime. The new Islamic Iraq we midwifed in 2003 couldn't afford to double the number of schools, so it was girls in the mornings and boys in the afternoons." (p. 83.)

That bit annoyed me but it was actually pretty innocuous; there are much more damning chapters about agriculture specialists who didn't know anything about agriculture, military types who were looking for any kind of activity that included women so they could just throw money at it and hit their "making the lives of women better" objectives, and constant, constant waste. It's an eye-opening read, if you can stand it.

100 Best-ish Nonfiction Titles: History

Big category today, everyone, not least because the Time list of 100 Best Nonfiction titles included a lot of History books, as well as a "Social History" category. What? I think "Social History" is one of those lame categories where no one really knows what it means. So we're dispensing with the two categories and listing Best-ish History titles, full stop. Are you ready?

Here's Time's titles (Social History is in the second list):

The Best and the Brightest, by David Halberstam
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, by Dee Brown
Carry Me Home, by Diane McWhorter
The Fatal Shore, by Robert Hughes
The Gnostic Gospels, by Elaine Pagels
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee
A People's History of the United States,* by Howard Zinn
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William L. Shirer

The American Way of Death, by Jessica Mitford
Animal Liberation, by Peter Singer
The Beauty Myth, by Naomi Wolf
The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs
The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan
Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond
Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich
The Other America, by Michael Harrington
Why We Can't Wait, by Martin Luther King Jr.
Working, by Studs Terkel

These lists are so lame I don't even know where to start. First of all, why are books like Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and A People's History of the United States called History and not Social History? Why is a book like Nickel and Dimed called Social History and not Investigative or Journalism or Current Affairs? I refuse to play along with these categories--I'm going to offer a separate list of Investigative titles where books like The Beauty Myth and The American Way of Death (which is old, now, but that doesn't really make it "History") can go.

I don't disagree with a few titles on this list; the Studs Terkel in particular is an important and interesting oral history, and I've heard good things about The Fatal Shore, but I'll admit I've not read the majority of them, and the ones I have read didn't do much for me (in particular I've never understood the appeal of Jared Diamond, I think his writing is SO BORING).

Anyway, fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy ride; for me, History is a tough category, because I don't read a ton of it, and I tend to like the under-the-radar titles rather than the big popular Stephen Ambrose types (even before the many plagiarization charges against Ambrose I was not a fan). So this may be a somewhat underdoggy type list.

The Rape of Nanking, Iris Chang. This one should be on Time's Best History list. Period. Rather than paying lip service to women's history with Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (which also doesn't really belong in the History category), a book of history written by a woman, telling the true horror of what happened to all of Nanking's residents during the second World War, but particularly to its women residents.

Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak, Jean Hatzfeld. An oral history of the Rwandan genocide, told by the people who did the killing. It's unsettling in the extreme but you should read it nonetheless. Philip Gourevitch's We Regret To Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families is a close second in this category.

How the Irish Saved Civilization, Thomas Cahill. This title was quite popular when it came out, and with reason (I thought). Cahill's a good writer and even if you don't agree with his emphasis on the importance of Irish monks saving civilizations' manuscripts, it'll give you something to think about. Just very nice, not overdone, readable history.

Hiroshima, by John Hersey. Well, this one was written at the time, so it probably counts as Investigative as well, but now it's a fantastic read about the history of what atomic weapons do to people. Once you read this one I promise you you'll never forget learning about radiation burning people's kimono patterns directly onto their skin. Hersey was an interesting writer, although some of his works are dated now; another interesting war reporter to consider for historical purposes is Martha Gellhorn.

Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants, by Robert Sullivan. Boo on Mark Kurlansky (for me his books are too long and somewhat dry); I say this one is the best "micro-history" out there. Sullivan explores world and New York City history through the story of its lowliest and arguably most disgusting residents. (I'm still recovering from learning, in this book, that adult rats can squeeze themselves through a hole the size of a quarter.)

In Our Hearts We Were Giants: The Remarkable Story of the Lilliput Troupe--A Dwarf Family's Survival of the Holocaust, by Yehuda Koren. I no longer read books about World War II--historians and publishers seem to think it's the only era in history worth writing about, and I've just read TOO MUCH of it--but when I did this one stood out. The story of a dwarf family being experimented on by Nazi doctors is horrific, but its emphasis on the family's love and support for one another highlights the other side of human nature. Another history which is told on human scale on the topic is Death on the Black Sea: The Untold Story of the Struma and World War II's Holocaust at Sea.

Queen Isabella: Treachery, Adultery, and Murder in Medieval England, Alison Weir. I'm using this one as a stand-in for all the great Historical Biography titles I should be listing, but which I can't think of right now. It's a good idea to read any Alison Weir--she's a well-known and skilled (and comprehensive--her books are the big thick impressive type) historical biographer. I really like getting my history through biography, as a matter of fact; another great choice here would be Robert Massie's Nicholas and Alexandra, from which I learned most of what little I know about Russian and revolution history.

I know I'm missing a TON. What history titles would you suggest?

*I've read maybe half of this one. I keep trying, I liked Howard Zinn, but I just can't get into it.

100 Best-ish Nonfiction Titles: Food and Health, Part 2.

No fooling around; Health titles today (we covered Food earlier in the week). If you'll remember, here's what Time magazine had to say:

And the Band Played On, by Randy Shilts
The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, by Dr. Benjamin Spock
The Joy of Sex, by Dr. Alex Comfort
The Kinsey Reports, by Alfred Kinsey
 Our Bodies, Ourselves, by the Boston Women's Health Book Collective

Of those, I've only read the Shilts book, which I remember as being very interesting and well worth a read. I still think most of this list is weak, and would serve more as a "well-known reference book" list more so than a list of the "best nonfiction." Why not just throw the Merck Manual or the Physicians' Desk Reference or the DSM-IV on the list and be done with it? Here are the books I'd suggest instead:

Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Crossdressing Cops, and Hermaphrodites with Attitude, by Amy Bloom. A slim little book, packed with empathetic and fascinating stories about gender. Really. It's way more fascinating than it sounds and will blow your mind regarding the number of children born with some kind of genital, well, abnormalities isn't quite the word of I'm looking for, but issues.

Your Medical Mind: How to Decide What Is Right for You, by Jerome Groopman. If you're going to read a how-to book, read a good general one about understanding your own attitudes about and approaches to medicine and health care.

The Hot Zone, Richard Preston. It reads more like a thriller, but Preston's fast-paced story about the Ebola virus is both informative and scary as hell.

How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter, by Sherwin Nuland. He of one of my other favorite medical books, The Doctor's Plague, explains exactly how we die and the human body breaks down. Nuland himself is a doctor and makes the details, if not more palatable, at least understandable.

Nobody's Home: Candid Reflections of a Nursing Home Aide, by Thomas Edward Gass. I've been meaning to re-read this one because it stands out in my memory more than any book about nursing homes should. I think I appreciated it because it was a thoughtful read by someone actually doing the work of caring for old people. (Narratives by honest-to-goodness workers are kind of tough to find.) None of us want to die young, so let's face it, old-age care is something we have to think about.

I know I'm missing a ton of titles; I've read a surprising amount of really good health-care narratives (Pushed, about childbirth, and Normal at Any Cost, about giving growth hormones to short kids, also come to mind, but there isn't enough room on our list here for them.) What Health titles would you suggest?

100 Best-ish Nonfiction Titles: Food and Health

Welcome back to our continuing series on the 100 "best-ish" nonfiction titles around, undertaken in response to Time magazine's 100 Best Nonfiction Titles (no qualifying "ish" for them, damnit, they really did list the best!). Taking their categories in turn, rightfully today we should look at Food and Health books.

But first a word about those categories. The Time list is broken down into various nonfiction subject and type categories, and I can't say I agree with most of them. I say, either list the 100 top books and skip the categorization, or pick things a little less randomly. Food and Health aren't the worst categories, but later on we'll be tackling "Nonfiction Novels" and "Social History" (as opposed to History). In the meantime there, are no Travel, True Crime, or Nature Writing categories. What's up with that? Weird, Time editors, weird.

But I digress. Food and Health, okay, here we go. Here's Time's titles:

FOOD

How to Cook a Wolf, by M.F.K. Fisher
Mastering the Art of French Cooking, by Julia Child
The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan

HEALTH

And the Band Played On, by Randy Shilts
The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, by Dr. Benjamin Spock
The Joy of Sex, by Dr. Alex Comfort
The Kinsey Reports, by Alfred Kinsey
Our Bodies, Ourselves, by the Boston Women's Health Book Collective

Now, I'm going to quibble with a lot of these on the basis that they are not so much books you read as books you refer to: particularly the Art of French Cooking (which I own and which is incredible, but which is not really a book you read or even particularly use. It's largely a book you have around because you love Julia Child, and because someday you intend to use it, really), the Dr. Spock book, and Our Bodies etc. And really? The Kinsey Reports? Time magazine thinks we're actually going to pick up The Kinsey Reports? I can't even get myself to watch the movie Kinsey, although I do sort of want to see it. Ironically, I'm just never in the mood.

Anyway. Here's what I would suggest for three food titles (keeping in mind I already listed the Bourdain in memoirs):

The Tummy Trilogy, by Calvin Trillin. If you've never read Trillin, you're in for a treat. He writes about food and travel (and his wife, Alice) with such a lovely and light descriptive touch. Yummy.

Working in the Shadows: A Year of Doing the Jobs (Most) Americans Won't Do, by Gabriel Thompson. By rights, this title should go in an Investigative/Journalism/Current Affairs section, but the Time list didn't include that category either. (Weak, Time editors, weak.) I'm including it in Food because there should be at least one title about our currently fucked-up system of food production and consumption, and this is the one that sticks in my head. (Of course anything by Wendell Berry would be good too.) This is the title that turned me off supermarket chicken breasts for good, simply because Thompson's description of the horrific working conditions inside chicken plants made me so sad (not only for the chickens, but mostly for the workers handling the chickens).

I think the M.F.K. Fisher is a good choice, but why that title? Why not the better known The Art of Eating?

So: what food titles would you suggest? Don't hold back; it's not a category I know really well, so I'm sure I'm missing tons of titles.

And now this post is too long--tune in for Health sometime later this week. Geez, this list stuff takes work. I'll bet those Time editors were worn out by the time they cooked up their list.

100 Best-ish Nonfiction Titles: Essays

Welcome to another day of our alternative "best-ish" nonfiction book lists, in response to Time magazine's 100 Best Nonfiction Titles list.

The other day it took me a while to post because I couldn't think of any titles that corresponded with one of the headings chosen by the Time listmakers, "Culture." With this post I had the opposite problem: I love essay collections. I'm supposed to narrow it down to just four titles? Impossible!

So here's what Time had to say:

Against Interpretation, and Other Essays, by Susan Sontag
A Room of One's Own, by Virginia Woolf
Slouching Towards Bethlehem, by Joan Didion
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, by David Foster Wallace

Actually, I can't really argue with any of those four. I've tried and failed to read the Sontag, but I think the failing there was on my part, not Sontag's (I was giving it neither the time nor attention it deserved, and I probably never will; I wish I'd studied it in college when I had time. I do think Sontag is a skilled writer.). I also can't quibble with the choice of Woolf, although I've never made it through that book either. And I'm pretty firmly on the record as loving both Didion and Wallace (not his fiction, can't do it; just his essays) and thinking they are both important contributors to American writing of the last fifty years. So whatever I suggest today is simply in the spirit of additional suggestions.

The Braindead Megaphone, by George Saunders. Remember, we read this one for a Book Menage? It remains one of my favorite collections ever. I love Saunders's voice: smart, but somewhat frustrated; interested, but sometimes stymied by the world around him. I can't get into his fiction but this is a neat group of essays that deserved a wider reading audience.

Anything, (not a title, just any essay collection you can get your hands on) by E. B. White. Of course the man who co-wrote The Elements of Style was a master of essay style.

The Long-Legged House, by Wendell Berry. Really, any of Berry's essay collections are books you wouldn't mind having if you were stuck on a desert island. They're easy to read but you find new things in them every time. This collection is particularly noteworthy for Berry's essay opposing the Vietnam War (a timely issue, then; the book was first published in 1969).

Up in the Old Hotel, Joseph Mitchell. If you love New York City you've got to read this classic.

I know I'm blanking on titles right now; it feels like I should have at least one woman author on there (although if Time hadn't done it I would have listed something of Didion's). Anyone have any suggestions for must-read essay titles?

It's been fun to think about this category. I love, love, LOVE essays. I wanted to have a chapter of nothing but essay collections in my second reference book, The Inside Scoop, but I lost that battle, and I'm still a little cheesed about it, if you must know. Sure, there's essay collections scattered throughout the book (and indexed under "essays") but I maintain that good essay titles can be a challenge to find, particularly in libraries, where they tend to get all jumbled up together in the Dewey graveyard of the 800s, somewhere in among the poems and the plays where only the hardiest readers wander. Hmm. Maybe someday I'll make a list of 100 essay titles, just for giggles.

100 Best-ish Nonfiction Titles: Business

Moving right along in our consideration of the Time list of the top 100 nonfiction titles published in America since 1923, we find the Business titles:

Capitalism and Freedom, by Milton Friedman
Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser
The General Theory, by John Maynard Keynes
How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie
No Logo, by Naomi Klein
Unsafe at Any Speed, by Ralph Nader
What Color Is Your Parachute?, by Richard Nelson Bolles.

Here's where this list stuff starts to get a little dicey, because I really wouldn't call all of these books Business. Fast Food Nation I'd call Investigative, and hell, I'm going to include that as a category eventually, although Time didn't. And the Carnegie and Bolles titles I'd term Self-Help (and the Parachute book not very helpful self-help at that), although I suppose they really are known as business or career books. Still.

And frankly, can anyone who isn't an economics major force themselves to read books by Milton Friedman or John Maynard Keynes? Just reading the titles makes me sleepy.

Hmm, business books. That's a tough one, as a lot of my favorite business books are investigative titles, like Liar's Poker or Moneyball, by Michael Lewis. So what to do? Compromise: List a couple business books, but save most of my picks for a non-Time category of Investigative titles.

Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy, John Bowe. Bowe's exploration of modern-day slavery, one of my favorite Business/Investigative titles of all time, contains one of the most perfect insights I've ever read in a book. When discussing our current system of economics, globalization, etc., Bowe pointed out that (I'm paraphrasing) "the system isn't broken, the system is working exactly the way it was set up to work." Think about that one for a while. I literally end up quoting that one to someone or other at least once a week.

In Sam We Trust: The Untold Story of Sam Walton & How Wal-Mart Is Devouring America, Bob Ortega. Fascinating study of Wal-Mart and Sam Walton. It's a crying shame that this one is out of print. It pretty much put me off Wal-Mart for good.

As for actual, business-y business books, I might suggest Andrew Tobias's The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need, just for its sheer readability, and my brother's always been fond of The One-Minute Manager for its succinctness.

Have a great weekend, all. Next week we'll have a few regular book posts, and then finish up our lists. Good times, good times!

100 Best-ish Nonfiction Titles: Biography

Continuing on with our critique of the Time list of 100 Best Nonfiction titles, today we'll consider Biography. Here's the titles Time selected:

The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley
The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, by William Manchester
The Power Broker, by Robert Caro*

Now, first things first. Three bios? That's all? Why so many memoirs and so few bios? And, does the autobiography of Malcolm X count as bio or autobio? These questions are going to stump me all day.

So here's my three picks, although it hurts somewhat to limit it to three titles. And I'm not even a big biography reader!

Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich , Mark Kriegel. I have no interest in basketball, college or pro. But Kriegel's tale of the life of "Pistol" Pete Maravich is so much more than a sports bio; it's the biography of an immigrant family, the story of a father and a son and their complicated relationship, and the story of an unlikely sports hero.

Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child, Noel Riley Fitch. Intrigue! Action! Love affairs! Food! It's all here, centered on one of the most fascinating and likable women of the twentieth century, Julia Child.

This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer, Kay Mills. This may be a controversial choice; I suppose there are much better-known biographies out there. But I've never been able to forget it, even though I read it years ago. Fannie Lou Hamer, born in 1917 to a sharecropping family with 20 children, lived through enormous hardship and poverty and still overcame to become a leading figure in the fight for civil rights. THIS is a book they should be teaching in history and women's studies courses.

So why do you think Time magazine chose only three biographies? Do you agree with their choices? Mine? Want to make some suggestions of your own?

*Of these three, I've only read the first, and won't read the second because, for whatever reason, I find Winston Churchill boring. I think I read one of Caro's biography volumes of LBJ, and found it very interesting, but never had time to read all of them.

100 Best-ish Nonfiction Titles: Autobiography/Memoir

A word about the heading: I was going to go with "100 Nonfiction Titles You Might Actually Have a Shot At Reading" or "100 Nonfiction Titles You Might Want to Take a Whack At," but those are both too long. So "100 Best-ish Nonfiction Titles" it is.

Here's the titles Time selected for their Autobiography/Memoir "best titles of all time":

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein
Black Boy by Richard Wright
Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Manchild in the Promised Land by Claude Brown
Maus by Art Spiegelman
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin
On Writing by Stephen King
Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson

Now, to be fair, I haven't read quite a few of these titles, so I can't really disagree with them. (The titles I have read are in bold.) And of course Time magazine has to list all the very serious, critically acclaimed titles. I won't repeat any of the titles, although I would like to list the Dave Eggers book; and of course titles like Maus and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings are important for format and subject matter. But what is with the Bill Bryson book? That should be in a Travel category, I think. And I totally disagree with the Barack Obama title--and NOT because he's been a huge presidential disappointment (although he has)--but because it was too long and fairly standard coming-of-age fare.

Anyway, I digress. Here's my list:

Warriors Don't Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock's Central High, Melba Pattillo Beals. Unbelievable account of Little Rock, Ark., school integration in 1957. I am not interested in American history, particularly of the 20th century, but this book made me want to learn more about civil rights.

Lucky, Alice Sebold. During her freshman year at Syracuse University, Sebold was brutally raped, an experience she recounts in heartreading detail in her memoir--in the first chapter, mind you. This book is not for the faint of heart but I promise you you've never read anything like it. 

Waiting: The True Confessions of a Waitress, Debra Ginsberg. People are going to argue with me on this one, and say it's slight. Nothing doing. Ginsberg perfectly marries multiple memoir formats: working life, coming of age, love and parenting, self-discovery. And she does it in an economical 320 pages.

Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain. Oh, Anthony, I do love you. The smoking! The swearing! The cooking! The rock 'n roll world of restaurants! This is one of the rare memoirs that sold well and really deserved all the hype it got. And if you've never read anything by Bourdain, this is a good place to start.

A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean. I know. You're going to tell me this one's fiction. I don't care. If it was published today, it would be marketed as memoir--Maclean recounts a story that hews pretty closely to the real details of his life. And he worked on it for years and years--getting each sentence just perfect. It shows.

Just Kids, Patti Smith. I've reviewed this one, here. A memoir that drops you in another time and place and makes you FEEL the unmistakable pulls of art, love, and youth--even against the grittiest of backdrops.

Somewhere Towards the End, Diana Athill. Athill's one of the most underappreciated memoir writers we have. This memoir on aging is bittersweet without really being bitter or sweet--how did she do that?

The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion. Didion's a prose master and her subject--the unexpected death of her husband and the serious illnesses suffered by her daughter immediately afteward--leaves the reader wondering just how one woman had the ability to be overwhelmed by sorrow while still describing it in incisive detail.

84, Charing Cross Road, Helene Hanff. Okay, it's a collection of letters, not memoir. Close enough! Everyone who loves books and reading (or who loves feisty women, or who loves England, etc.) should read this slim volume of correspondence between a feisty book-loving New Yorker and a very proper bookseller in London.

Made in Detroit, Paul Clemens. A perfect coming-of-age memoir, combined with an elegy for a dying city and way of life.

Population: 485: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time, Michael Perry. Perry's beautiful book of stories about his return home to live in northern Wisconsin and become an EMT in his home community is funny, sad, beautiful, and completely honest.

Okay, that's only eleven titles, to the Time list's twelve. I'm reserving a spot because I know there's at least one title I've forgotten.

So, what do you think? Tell me yes or no on my choices, and feel free to list some of your own!

Finally, a readable book on reading.

Susan Hill's memoir of a year spent reading, Howards End Is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home, was so great that I only allowed myself one chapter of it per day, to make it last. It was the book equivalent of a box of chocolate truffles.

Hill is a British author who specializes in ghost and detective stories (her novel The Woman In Black has been made into a film, starring Daniel Radcliffe, of Harry Potter fame, that will open in 2012), but she's clearly very widely read and seems to know or at least have met everyone who's anyone in the British publishing scene. In this memoir, she moves through her own house and bookshelves, explaining why she finds certain books the places she does, and the experiences she relives in revisiting and re-reading them.

Normally these books don't do a whole lot for me. But this one was so wonderful, so straightforward, so imbued with a love for books and reading that I found myself wanting to run right out and get everything she suggests. I also happen to agree with Ms. Hill on her attitude toward the printed book:

 "It ain't broke: the book, that is. I know because I just went round the house looking for something to read, and on the way I reassured myself that as the book ain't broke around here, I do not propose to fix it with an electronic reader. Yes, let's use the whole word. Let's tell it like it is. Electronic reader. Something monotonous-looking and made of plastic, is grey and has a screen...I will stick to paper and print and pages for reading books. If it ain't broke. Of course, someone wants to persuade us that it is so that they can sell us their device. 'Twas ever thus." (p. 76.)

Awesome.

But the real genius of her book is in her descriptions of the books she has read and loved: she makes you want to read each and every last one of them. I found a lot of great authors who I already love referenced (she's got a great Penelope Fitzgerald story), and Hill also introduced me to other writers I now want to read. And in addition to recommending specific authors, she also makes a grand case just for READING:

"But if the books I have read have helped to form me, then probably nobody else who ever lived has read exactly the same books, all the same books and only the same books, as me. So just as my genes and the soul within me make me uniquely me, so I have the unique sum of the books I have read. I am my literary DNA...

All through the house, the books are murmuring, turning over in sleep like pebbles on the shoreline as the tide recedes." (p. 202.)

Awesome. Just awesome.

Your daily Langewiesche.

I continue to be unsettled in my nonfiction reading, and reading in general. For some reason I am just a bit tired lately--which means I've been reading things like Agatha Christie books. Nothing really to blog about there.

So it's mainly an update today. I did finish William Langewiesche's The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime, and liked it even more as I went on. The last segment in the book, on the shipbreaking industry in India (literally: they run old ships aground and then people tear them apart, manually, for the scrap steel), is nothing short of fantastic. What I really like about Langewiesche is how he doesn't really insert himself in the story, but you do get a feeling for how fascinated he is by his subjects. I envy that, kind of. Imagine being engrossed in something and being able to investigate and write about it for your job. Imagine being able to write this kind of prose:

"I went down to the ship when I could, past the ground crews who by now had grown used to my presence. At the torn bow, I climbed through the broken bilge into the huge forward cargo hold, now open to the sky. The ship was mine to wander--up precarious ladders to the main deck high above, through passageways and equipment rooms where the peeling paint and rusted steel gave evidence of the years of wandering and hard use, and ultimately of neglect. Nonetheless, I felt a sort of awe, and was never in a hurry to leave...

The workers did not seem to mind my presence, or even to wonder about it. They appeared sometimes like ghosts, moving fast and in file without speaking. They were very dirty. They were very poor. But they lacked the look of death that I had seen on the men in the Bhavnagar rerolling mill. They were purposeful. Toward the stern, where sunlight streamed through rough-cut ventilation holes and struck the oil-blackened walls, the towering engine room had the Gothic beauty of a cathedral--a monument to the forces of a new world." (pp. 238-239.)

Fantastic.