The Next Dark Age
We're in it Now
The Thirteenth Tale, by Diane Setterfield
The Thirteenth Tale, by Diane Setterfield, was a “Barnes & Noble Recommends” book. I found it a week or so ago at Half Price Books and started reading it because it was at the top of the pile of To Be Read books that won’t fit on my To Be Read bookcase.
You know those books that you read slowly because you just want to sink into it for awhile? I read this a chapter or two at a time over lunch last week, and I was loving it. Then I dove in an finished it this weekend.
Summary:
Mousy bookshop chic is hired out of nowhere by England’s pre-eminent novelist to write her biography as she lay dying in Yorkshire. Novelist has famously lied about her life’s story to every interviewer since the beginning of time.
The book is rather blatantly modeled after the gothic novels – the Bronte sisters, etc. – which can be annoying, but mostly I appreciated. It also has the story-within-a-story element, kind of like The Blind Assassin. The difference is that Margaret Atwood made sure that the story-within-a-story did not overshadow the main plot. Setterfield did a much better job of the story-within-a-story than in creating sympathy or empathy for the narrator.
OK, so here is what I liked – Vida Winter, the novelist, talking about why she is finally telling her true life’s story:
“My study throngs with characters waiting to be written. Imaginary people, anxious for a life, who tug at my sleeve, crying, ‘Me next! Go on! My turn!’ I have to select. And once I have chosen, the others go quiet for ten months or a year, until I come to the end of a story and the clamor starts up again.”
Then she talks about this woman in the window, or mirror or whatever, that is patiently waiting for her story to be told.
“The day came when I finished the final draft of my final book. I wrote the last sentence, placed the last full stop. I knew what was coming. The pen slipped from my hand and I closed my eyes. ‘So,’ I hear her say, or perhaps it was me, ‘it’s just the two of us now.”
That is kind of how I imagine it is to be a novelist.
In the great tradition of the great novels, the narrator is far, far less interesting than the subject of the narration. She made great observations about books and readers. One was about starting a new book too quickly, before the “membrane” of the last book finished has a chance to close. I appreciated those thoughts. However, there is a theme of twins and other halves that I found tiresome. For example:
Narrator is a twin whose sister died shortly after their birth. Narrator doesn’t learn about this until the age of ten, snooping around her parents’ stuff. Her mother never recovered from the loss. During the action of the book, she looks up and sees a woman’s face in the window. “My sister!” she thinks. No. Her reflection.
Less of this melodrama and more of her actual relationship with her mother would have suited me better. But then I am complaining about the gothic-novelishness, and that isn’t quite fair.
Whatever my petty gripes, this book kept me engaged and I enjoyed it.
Spring is Here
(I seem to have blocked out that sundae…)
The Innocent, by Ian McEwan
Book 10
The Innocent is an earlier Ian McEwan novel. Set in Berlin, 1955, it is the story of a young British man sent to work on a joint intelligence project with the Americans.
The illustration of post-war Germany was cool. The Cold War paranoia, with the defeated German population stuck in between. The best part of it for me was the British observations of the Americans.
In the beginning, it was very basic: Remember in Golden Eye, when James Bond meets up with the American Marine? Like that. Then, later in the novel, when The Innocent is no longer so innocent, he reflects on the American military men.
“They think of everything, he thought, the Americans. They wanted to make things possible, and easy. They wanted to look after you. This pleasant lightweight staircase with the nonslip treads and chain-link bannisters, the Coke machines in the corridors, steak and chocolate milk in the canteen. He had seen grown men drink chocolate milk. The British would have kept the vertical ladder because difficulty was part of a secret operation. Americans thought of “Heartbreak Hotel” and “Tutti Frutti” and playing catch on the rough ground outside, grown men with chocolate-milk mustaches playing ball. They were the innocent. How could you steal secrets from them?”
This is why I like McEwan.
My problem with the book is that I cannot believe what the characters did. OK – SPOILERS HERE:
Bad guy shows up and tries to kill Main Character and Girl. Bad Guy ends up dead. Main character and Girl dismember and hide his body.
Really? You’re a British intelligence officer in post-war Berlin, you kill a guy in self-defense and this is how you handle it? Really?
McEwan is famous for the shocking things that happen to his characters. Well done in Atonement. Even better in Saturday. But it is really his use of observation and language that keeps me going back.
St. Baldrick’s Day
For the second year in a row, a group from my office has participated in St. Baldrick’s Day, a fundraiser to fight cancer in children. Seven of my co-workers had their heads shaved at the event – one was a lady with perfectly lovely hair, I might add. After I made my online donation, the organization sent me this video. I figured the least I could do is post it:
Happy St. Baldrick’s Day!
Catching Up
My final exam grade was just released. I thought I choked and landed with an 80. And that is before my classmates start arguing with the professor about that one marked wrong when the answer I marked was taken directly from the textbook. At the end of the course, I think I will end up with my B+.
In other news: My car was making a scary noise, so she went to the shop today. Suspension, it was suspected. From the potholes. I was all prepared for a $500 bill. It was only $215. Because I was feeling so lucky that my six year old car is not costing a fortune, I ran through a mental list of the next things that will need repair.
The battery. I called my mechanic back. “Have I ever had my battery replaced?”
Him: “I don’t think so.”
Me: “She’s six years old and has 65,000 miles. How long do batteries last?”
Him: “That long. If you are lucky.”
Me: “I’m lucky.”
Him: “I’ll check.”
Then Rich and Karen, Rescue Directors Extraordinaire, brought Kiwi’s new Java tree to my house. Perks of volunteering – they even helped me build it. Check her out:
And finally, Spooky the Cat, who seems to have gained a bit of weight since his check up a few weeks ago:
Is still just licking the gravy off of his “filets”.(wow, the difference between “e-mail and copy” pictures and “import” has never been quite so clear)
I Don’t Even Know What to Title This
Laurie from Punk Rock HR wrote a post yesterday that was so funny I laughed out loud. Here is the punch line:
“I am making this confession because your company is spending six figures to implement a Gallup employee survey and you are not asking a critical question:
Where do you poop?
Believe me, the answer is both a valid and reliable measurement of how employees feel about your company”
Final Exams
My Real-Life friends have heard this story before..so be it:
When I was at AU, (before 9/11) there was an occassional bomb threat called into the big buildings during Finals Week. There was never a bomb, so we always figured some desperate kid was going to inconvenience the world because he was unprepared.
My junior year, I showed up to my Corporate Finance final only to hear the professor say there had been a bomb threat and we would re-schedule the final. I was prepared for this test. As I pondered exactly how put out I was by the re-schedule, several others went crazy.
No, they said. We are prepared for this test and want to take it right now. Can we do it on the quad?
The professor looked at us. How many wanted to take the test that minute on the quad? At least half of us raised our hands. So we were allowed to take the test on the quad while the building was being searched. The others were allowed to re-schedule.
We are in the Final Exam window for my Accounting Class. I took it on Saturday – totally choked, by the way – but the people who were scheduled for today are in large part snowed out. BU’s campus is shut down altogether. and many testing centers are also closed on the East Coast.
You might think it is some kind of reprieve, but it actually throws off your whole schedule. If you thought you were going to be done today, but have to keep studying to keep it fresh, it is a hassle. Thought you were going to have that week off of class? Now it is down to four days. Though you were going to get ahead of the next one? Not so much.
And for me, waiting to find out just how badly I choked?
I don’t even want to talk about that.
Wait Till Next Year, by Doris Kearns Goodwin
My mother could not believe that I was reading, “a baseball book”. But Doris Kearns Goodwin writes good American history, so I figured her memoir, Wait Till Next Year, had to be worth something. And it was.
In her introduction, she says that she had been interviewed by Ken Burns for his documentary on baseball. Apparently she was one of the few chicks in the country that could speak about baseball as both an historian and a fan. She said that after the documentary aired, people would come up to her after a speaking engagement or whatever, and they didn’t want to talk about Kennedys or Johnsons or Roosevelts, but the Brooklyn Dodgers.
So she started writing about baseball and it turned into a whole thing about the 1950s and the first TV on the block and the making of a generation blahblahblah. So she had to do real research and real interviews.
Goodwin lived on Long Island, so in her neighborhood, any given family could be rooting for one of the three New York teams. Her best friend/next door neighbor was a Giants fan, for example. She had some good material there.
I liked that she related the art of recording the game stats to telling a story. She tagged that early experience – giving her father the play-by-play when he came home from work – to pursuing a career in history. Things we should be teaching our kids.
So we follow Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella and the rest through many seasons of tragedy. (As if a fan from Chicago needs any help, there.) Then they finally win one, and two years later, Jackie Robinson retires and the Dodgers move to L.A.
Mixed in are the inevitable stories of bomb shelters and Joe McCarthy. Goodwin blends them in pretty well. At the end of the day, this is just a coming-of-age story. Written with a historian’s sense of perspective. Good read.
The Alex Collection
I was at my brother, Scott’s house today. My niece, Ainslie, aged three months, is just starting to dig the infant toys. So I was trying to get a decent shot on the camera phone:
“Thing in the way!” :
Then he got tired of Ainslie.
“Giraffe!”
“Bottom of My Slipper!”
And my personal favorite, “Rug!”
Such excellent use of light and shadow. You can find the entire session on my Picasa page. If you are my mother, and actually care.
My Bird is So Smart
It is not news that parrots require a lot of toys. Some things to destroy, some to make noise, some to dispense treats, some just to figure out. Kiwi the Grey doesn’t destroy things as fast as, say, a cockatoo. But then, she is sometimes convinced that a toy is going to eat her. (Have you seen those piñata things? From the Devil, she thinks.) So I am always looking for new things to try.
Barrel of Fun is a little plastic thing that hides a treat. The bird must figure out how to twist the “key” at the end to open it. It is a bit more difficult because it unlocks at an awkward point. Kiwi has figured it out and opened it three days in a row. Not a fluke.
She also poses for pictures very well. I am incredibly proud of her.
The Next Dark Age 