July Book Reviews

Hi Gang! I had so much fun writing the book recommendations for my last post I decided to make it a regular feature. Here's what I've read since June 3, in no particular order:

Novels:
The Woman Upstairs, Claire Messud  A single woman falls in love with a family. I've been at a loss for what to say about this one. I read it because I loved Messud's The Emperor's Children, about young intelligentsia in New York around 2001 - it was so cool to read a period novel about a period I remembered vividly! - and this is quite different. I was definitely engrossed, mostly in a desperate longing for the narrator to listen, even briefly, to the people who loved her and didn't want her to get hurt.

Beauty Queens, Libba Bray  "A plane full of beauty queens crashes on a desert island. Go." I laughed. Then I cried a little. Then I laughed some more. I really didn't want it to be over and I want to buy a copy for every teen girl I know (and save one for my daughter, when she's a teenager). Perfect summer beach/poolside reading.

Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann  Interlinked stories surrounding Pierre Petit's walk between the Twin Towers in 1973. The first section takes place in my Dublin neighborhood! And the rest of the book captures New York so well I forgot I wasn't alive to be there in the early 70s.

Non-fiction:
Be Awesome, Hadley Freeman  Essays by my favourite Guardian columnist. Reads like a blog in book form, and that's not a bad thing. Perfect bedtime book: each essay is long enough to be interesting but not so long that you have to keep yourself awake to get to the end, and you won't find yourself accidentally finishing the whole book at 2:30 a.m. when you meant to just read a few pages.

Homeward Bound, Emily Matchar  The thesis: supported by blogs and articles promoting a self-sufficient lifestyle and pooh-poohing the possibility of work-life balance, families of my class and race are tending to turn inward, isolating themselves from the larger world (and from society-wide solutions to their problems). Made me angry, made me sad. Counter-productively, made me want to spend all day surfing homemaker blogs and Pinterest. (Further thoughts on these issues will be a longer blog post, later.)

The Happiness Project, Gretchen Rubin  Part memoir, part instruction manual, wherein a New York writer decides to figure out how to be happier (both in recognition of her privilege and because she believes being happy will make it easier to be the kind of good person she wants to be). The first few chapters were inspiring as hell. While I did not start my own Happiness Project per se, I did add several very important items to my to-do list. By the end of the book I felt she was really reaching in order to make the project last for a whole year, and I didn't finish the last chapter. But that was okay - I got what I needed out of it. Recommended for anyone feeling a bit stuck and not sure what to change to get un-stuck.

How about you - read anything good lately?

My PeNoReMos, or: How I Learned to Read while Parenting a Baby

I owe NaNoWriMo an apology.

Two autumns ago, I wrote a thousand words or so poo-pooing the entire idea, mostly because a detailed perusal of nanowrimo.org failed to turn up any editing advice. It was all, "you go, writer! write that novel! let it be as bad as it needs to be!" without any "and then here's the year's worth of work you'll need to do to clean it up."

And then, last November, I signed up. I had a four-month-old daughter and a middle-grade novel I'd outlined in the two weeks between her due date and when she was actually born, and writing 1,600-odd words a day during naptime seemed like a good way to jump back into writing daily. (I was wrong, but more on that later.) To my surprise, long past November I kept getting NaNoWriMo e-mails full of support for next steps: revising; finding/creating a critique group; querying; self-publishing if you're up for that. So, I was totally wrong that NaNoWriMo treats writing a novel as though the first draft were all. It turns out they do provide resources for getting from first draft to finished book. Oops.

NaNoWriMo would have even been fun, if I'd actually managed to write--at all--during that month. Turns out just when you're trying to get your four-month-old to nap in her own cot is not the best time to plan on writing two-three hours a day. Who knew?

But all was not lost. Instead of National Novel Writing Month, I instituted a new goal just for myself: my Personal Novel Reading Month. Like many a new parent, I had gotten into a bad internet habit. Since I didn't have the willpower or discipline or energy to get back to writing just yet, I decided I could at least make sure I read something besides blog posts and facebook updates. And so I gave myself a strict limit on naptime web-surfing, and spent the rest of my free time reading books.

Clearly, we passed on the
reading gene.

It's a thing I did before I was a mom. Since we moved to Dublin when our daughter was six weeks old, I've been building a whole new life from scratch, rather than incorporating parenthood into the life I already had. At times it's felt like the Me I'd gotten to know and love over 38 years had been obliterated by the changes in my life since my daughter was born. I desperately wanted some way of reclaiming that old self, and felt as though the Irish Sea was between me and all of my options: I wanted to grab a drink with an old friend, but they were all in London or New York; I was ready to get back to my former volunteer work, at least in a limited way, but the school where I volunteered is in London; I would have loved to go to choir practice and sing the Bach St John Passion this spring, but I always did that with the St Paul Cathedral Chorus - in London.

In part because I had a new baby, finding new friends, work, and hobbies in my new home was a much bigger job than I had the energy for (see my previous post). It didn't help that, as I found out last week, I've been severely anaemic for pretty much all of 2013. Now that I'm taking iron supplements I feel like I can conquer the world, or at least stay awake past nine at night; but from January through May just getting to the end of the day felt like a Herculean accomplishment.

Reading, though. Reading I could do. Thanks to the iPhone, whatever book I was reading would fit in my pocket and could be pulled out and read as soon as the baby's eyes drifted closed, especially during that three-month stretch when she was almost always sick and could only sleep comfortably in someone's arms. My daughter's long-running head cold had me reading three, even four hours a day, and now that she's better I'm in the habit and still manage at least an hour over the course of the day.

The best part: for the first time in years, I feel like I'm reading purely for enjoyment. Not with enjoyment as a by-product of keeping up with what's current in my field, or picking books to assign, or analysing the writer's craft. I'm reading what I want to, because I want to, and those other things are the side benefits.

So, what have I been reading in my copious spare time? So glad you asked!

(The Best of the) Books I've Read in the last Six Months, In No Particular Order:

Narrative Nonfiction
Okay, so I'm not reading exclusively novels.

Fraud and Half Empty by David Rakoff. Man, I wish I'd known about this essayist before he died - the memorial episode on This American Life is a hell of a way to learn about work I should have been reading all along. Rakoff had an interesting life, in a low-key sort of way - he once played Freud in a department store Christmas window display - and makes it seem... not relatable, but as though it's beside the point whether you relate to it or not. He is going to write beautiful sentences, paragraphs, pages, and you're going to feel your neurons rearrange themselves as you read them. Don't take my word for it: go read "Isn't it Romantic?" from Half Empty, and see if you can ever again listen to the opening song from Rent without feeling distinctly uncomfortable.

A Parisian martini!

Paris, I Love You, But You're Bringing Me Down by Rosencrans Baldwin. An expat memoir! I read this on vacation in France and it was a very effective inoculation against the "why can't we get posted here?" wistfulness I usually get on visits to Paris. Frankly, I want to read his wife's memoir. While Baldwin was working at a glamorous advertising agency on assignments that sent him to, say, villas in Bermuda to interview Sean Connery, his wife was writing away in an un-airconditioned apartment with construction on three, then four, then all six sides. And she couldn't get a job to get out of the house because of her dependent visa, and they couldn't afford to move because they were living on one income. At least Baldwin is sensitive enough to her predicament that this is the major detail I remember from the book.

Novels! For the Young (but old folks should read them, too)

The Lucy Variations by Sara Zarr. Oh, how I wish this book had been there for me when I was a teenager. Such a familiar problem (the challenge of being true to both your art and your life) in such a rarified world (not only can the family in the book fly the best piano teachers over from Russia and get them US citizenship, they also have a full-time private cook). I got so worried about the title character I had to put the book down at several points and take some deep breaths, and I practically cheered at the very-satisfying ending. Zarr also includes a playlist at the end of the book, and any day now I'm going to go through iTunes and re-create it.

Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell. I had to read this in small chunks. Not because the baby interrupted, but because I needed to absorb all the wonderfulness a bit at a time - and since I was pretty sure the ending wasn't going to be unambiguously happy, I didn't want to get there too fast. I wonder if I would have had the guts to be friends with Eleanor or Park if I had been in high school with them. I also wonder when Rowell's next book is coming out, and how extensive a back catalogue I have to enjoy until then.

Second Chance Summer by Morgan Matson. A family goes back to their old lakeside vacation house for one last summer. Someday, you may read this book. You may find yourself maybe, say, 50 pages from finishing it as you are on your way to run errands, which will also involve having lunch out, by yourself. You may think to yourself, "I will bring this book with me and finish it over lunch." Do not do this. Unless you are comfortable with waiters seating people far away from you and giving you a wide berth while you hold your hand over your mouth and choke back sobs.

The Diviners by Libba Bray. This is so not my kind of book. Look at those other three: down-to-earth novels set in the real world, about teenagers facing heartbreaking choices. Not a whiff of the paranormal. I downloaded this one because it was Halloween and I needed to start my PeNoReMo somewhere, and for some reason I thought that meant I should read something scary. And oh, it is. Ouija Boards, and scholars of the supernatural! Would-be flappers! Demonic con men! Really gruesome murders! And a race against a heavily-portentous comet! All things I usually avoid in my reading; all things that Bray's writing, plotting and pacing made thoroughly enjoyable in this one. And now I can't wait for the next in the series.

Novels! For the Old (but young folks might enjoy; who knows? My favorite book when I was fifteen was The Prince of Tides.)

The Ten-Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer. You thought I was going to recommend The Interestings, didn't you? Like everybody else? Fooled you! Actually, I started to, but then I realized I wouldn't tell you anything you haven't already read. Instead, I'm going to divert your attention to a 2008 novel by the same author, about a group of women trying to figure out what to do with their lives now that the kids they left the workforce to raise are turning ten. I was almost halfway through the book before I figured out what the actual plot (as opposed to the situation) was - and I didn't care. I'm a sucker for a beautiful, honest moment, especially a rueful one, and this novel is full of them. It is also, once I realized what was actually happening, really beautifully structured. I'm also a sucker for craft. (Be warned that if you have any musical ear at all, you will find yourself with the phrase "Rise, sorrow, 'neath the saffron sister tree" going through your head at odd moments.)

Where'd You Go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple. I hadn't heard of this book - an epistolary novel about gossip and intrigue among the parents and administrators at an elite Seattle school - until it started showing up on Best of 2012 lists. Those lists were right. I didn't see a single element of this book coming, but they all made perfect sense once they showed up. Plus, the prose is snappy and crisp and the reading experience just flat-out enjoyable.

Have you read any of these? What did you think? What should I read next (I ask, as if my to-be-read pile wasn't in serious danger of swamping my nightstand)?

The Expat Survival Kit

London icons, a block and a half from our flat.

And then the day finally comes. ... Although there have been moments of wondering if it will ever happen, given enough time and a genuine willingness to adapt, we will once again become part of the permanent community. ... We have a sense of intimacy, a feeling that our presence matters to this group.  We feel secure.  Time again feels present and permanent as we focus on the here and now rather than hoping for the future or constantly reminiscing about the past."

Third Culture Kids

David C. Pollock

Ruth E. Van Reken 

When I first read the above paragraph last weekend, I immediately commented to Gino, "and then it'll be time to move again."

I speak from experience.  The book I quoted is right: it's taken a lot of effort (and a lot of thinking it would never happen), but the last eighteen months or so London has truly felt like home.  I have meaningful work I love, and Gino and I have built a circle of smart, interesting, caring people as friends.  We have our favorite restaurants and things to do on a free weekend afternoon, and we've worn the "touristy must-do in London" list down to a nub.  We know the relative advantages of Sainsbury vs Waitrose and that you can buy pretty much anything you can ever imagine needing at Peter Jones.  We have become, as the book puts it in another context, competent.  We're good at London, good at being Americans in London.

And next week we'll be moving into corporate housing for a stretch, pending a move to Ireland later on this summer.

I shouldn't have read Third Culture Kids so hard on the heels of Chris Pavone's The Expats, which I downloaded to read on a driving holiday around France.  I've read a lot of books about expat life over  my life, and especially the past four years, and The Expats was the first one that had me nodding along: yep, been there, done that.

The novel made me want to create a survival pack for new expats, especially the new expats brought overseas by a spouse's career.  (The term of art is "trailing spouse."  If you think that alone isn't a blow to the ego of a competent, independent, previously self-supporting adult, you would be wrong.)  It would include a copy of The Expats, because one of the amazing things about moving to a new country is the sheer amount of free time you have to get through when you get there, and Pavone's novel could kill some of that very enjoyably, while giving you a glimpse of what you're in for.  The survival pack would include a bulk package of your favorite treats from back home, a sampler of delicacies native to your new home, and a list of the instructions I wanted to give the book's protagonist:  find some kind of work, even if it doesn't pay.  Take a class in something, anything, you're remotely interested in, or pick a hobby and find a way to pursue it in a group setting.  (And don't worry about being a cliche.  Cliches are often based in truth.)   To the extent that this is in your control, make a few friends who are native to your new home, or have lived there long-term.  Get together with the other parents at your kids' school and form a baby-sitting co-op so you can have the occasional non-parental evening, even when your husband's traveling.  Don't just get through the days--invest them in building some kind of life.  

I started to feel downright cocky about the move to Ireland: I've done this before.  I've got this changing-countries thing down.  This'll be a lark.

And then Third Culture Kids knocked me off my high horse.  No Expat Survival Kit would be complete without a copy of this book.  Seriously, even if you have no kids and no plan to have them--that just means you can skip the "schooling options" bit.  You should still read most of the book, which has tons to say about the process of relocating into a new culture, and repatriating back.  It was one of those books that told me all kinds of things I didn't realize I knew.

Holy cow.  The book stressed me out in advance.  It reminded me of everything I'd forgotten about exactly how hard it is to switch cities, let alone countries.  How you have to prove yourself all over again to a whole new group of people.  How you have to figure out where to get American products, because someday you will find yourself insanely homesick and only Betty Crocker Devil's Food Cake will make you feel better.  How you have to figure out where to get everything and how many things you didn't realize you can't live without until you decided to leave them behind.  How you have to find some way of passing the time while you slowly accumulate replacements for all the bits of your life you took for granted in the old place: Your work.  Your hobbies.  Your gym.  Your favorite restaurant that actually delivers.  Your friends.

At the same time, it made me feel validated.  All the emotions I experienced in the move to London, even the really embarrassingly immature and provincial ones, are chronicled and catalogued and pronounced perfectly normal.  And who doesn't love to have their more shameful moments--that time you burst into tears in the grocery store because you didn't recognize a single brand of peanut butter, say, or the week you bought something new every single day just so that somehow, something would be different at the end of the day than it was at the beginning--pronounced perfectly normal?

Whisky tasting at the Jameson Distillery.
Dublin will have its compensations.

But it did remind me that those steps I recommended above are necessary and the rewards of going through them really are great--but oh, they're hard.  And there's no getting away from it: the reason you know you need all that stuff, the friends and the gym and the work, is that you already had it, back where you came from.  And no one is going to hand any of it to you in this new place--you have to go out and get it all again.

Everyone I've talked to about this has noted the wave of homesickness that hits around the one-year mark in a new place.  The new glow has worn off and you're just integrated enough into the new community to know how integrated you're not.  When I was about at that point, I had tea with a dear friend who was about a year ahead of me on the expat cycle, and I admitted that I was tempted to give up on making a life and just go into endurance mode until someone told me it was time to leave London.  Since someone was going to tell me to go away eventually, what was the point of making London into somewhere I wanted to live?

My friend listened patiently, and pointed out: "if you're as heartbroken to leave London as you were to leave New York, that's not necessarily a bad thing."  And surprise surprise, she was right.  The grief at leaving London, the conviction that Dublin can't possibly be as good... I wouldn't be feeling any of that if I hadn't done a pretty damn good job of making myself at home here.  And four years ago, I didn't think that was possible, either.

About halfway through The Expats, Pavone describes guests at a Christmas party in Luxembourg:

This party was dominated by the sizable contingent who'd circled around themselves as Americans, exclusionary, flag-pin wearing.  Behaving as if they hadn't chosen to live in Europe, but had been moved against their wills, and were putting up a brave resistance.  Freedom fighters.

I've definitely met those people, and as I said, I understand the temptation.  Third Culture Kids notes that one response to moving into a new culture, recognizing that you'll always be an outsider, is to broadcast your difference and cling even more closely to the culture you know and understand.  When I first moved to London, I met several women who played a lot of bridge and went on a lot of day trips and, from the way they talked about living here, generally just tried  to endure the time before they could go home and back to real life.

Having had periods of living that way, and periods of throwing myself at London until it let me in, I can tell you: in the long run it's a lot easier to make yourself at home in the new place, than to grit your teeth and endure being away from home for years at a time.

And it's so totally worth it.  It's not exactly easy to rebuild your life every few years, and it really sucks to say good-bye to what you've built.  But you have to keep reminding yourself: this is your life.  These two or three or ten or twenty years you're spending abroad, you don't ever get these back.  Home is a long way away, in both time and space. Since you have to be here, you might as well put in the effort through the initial rebuilding process (and deal with the eventual, inevitable grief).  Then you get at least a couple years where things are easy again, and you get to go home with years' worth of amazing memories and stories and friends from all over the world.

My Imaginary Boyfriends

Calvin O'Keefe.  Jeff Greene.  Joe Willard.  Stan Crandall.

Scholastic's Blog has me thinking about my first loves.

Joe Willard was the responsible,
mature man in Deep Valley.

Even without the bibliophilic inspiration, of course my first crushes were from books.  Looking back on it, I'm surprised I can't come up with a longer list.  Whatever was drawing me into all those hours of reading must have been the plots or the themes or the settings or something, 'cause it wasn't the characters.

Except for some of them.

When I read them as a kid, all of the guys in my favorite books were wise beyond their years, masters of any situation--and this was pretty much what I thought guys must be like in general.  So, in jr high or high school, if a guy I liked didn't ask me out (despite the rumor mill's assurance that he wanted to), I had no idea that he might be shy or scared of rejection or waiting for me to pick up on some of his more obvious hints and give him a smidgen of encouragement.  No, if a guy I liked wasn't asking me out, it must be because he wasn't interested.

Jeff Greene woo'd Dicey
--and me--with American
roots music.

That must have been hella wishful thinking on my part.  'Cause I've read all those books as many times as an adult as I did as a kid--which is a lot--and what I love about the books now is how none of the characters are perfect. The guys in the stories are excellent, yes, but excellent teenage boys, not paragons of maturity and wisdom.

Jeff, the boy in love with Dicey in one of my favorite books ever, is comfortable around Dicey's family and always says the right thing--except that he doesn't; he's awkward and unsure of himself and the only reason their friendship goes anywhere is because Dicey occasionally gets out of her own head enough to meet him halfway.  Joe Willard, who ends up married to my imaginary best friend Betsy Ray, is handsome and talented--but he's prickly and officious and gets offended at the drop of a hat, which is why it takes him and Betsy five books to actually get together and stay together.

Or take Stan Crandall, the love interest in the first romance novel I ever read.  The whole point of Stan Crandall is for Jane Purdy to figure out that despite his height and smarts and charm, he's not a Lord of Creation (to borrow Louisa May Alcott's turn of irony)--he's a kid, like her, and one of the big things they have in common is an overabundance of self-consciousness.

Which brings us back around to Calvin O'Keefe.  (And Josiah Davidson.  And Adam Eddington, be still my heart, Adam Eddington.  And, oh, Queron Renier.  And almost--almost--every other young man ever thought up by Madeleine L'Engle.)

Adam Eddington somehow managed
to be the boy next door and
unattainable all at once, while
Zachary Gray brings out the amateur
shrink in all of us.

Even on re-reading as an adult, Calvin is as close to perfect as a human can conceive.  He's popular but doesn't let it go to his head.  He's completely sure of himself, to the point of being able to tell Meg "what dreamboat eyes" she has, within hours of their first meeting.  He's come to grips with his dysfunctional family at a ridiculously young age.  And while the biographical details of each differ, L'Engle's heros are the only guys from my favorite books that match my youthful idealization.

Which is why, as an adult, my favorite L'Engle Guy is Zachary Gray, who never made my list of crushworthy characters.  Zachary is, at least in the books I've read the most, a cautionary tale about the tendency to get into relationships with people who need a lot more care than a teenager can hope to give.  His function is generally to be the bad-boy temptation and get rejected--for excellent reasons--by the protagonist, and the fact that he's smart, rich, sensitive, and handsome, yet bad for a girl, makes him among the most complex male characters in the L'Engle canon.

Paying it forward: who were your teenage literary crushes?  If you've re-read those books lately, how do they hold up to your memories?

More Kindled Thoughts

I started out to simply post this on facebook with a pithy comment. Then my pithy comment grew out of pithy-length and into blog-post-length, and I suddenly remembered: hey! I have a blog!

Hi, Gang. It's been a busy summer. Places to go, sisters to entertain (and be entertained by), old friends to rescue from airline cancellations. Junior League action plans to write. Novel drafts to finish. New books to read, for that matter. You understand.

Anyway, speaking of all the books I've read this summer: back to the NYTimes' panic over "E-books top hardcovers at Amazon", and why this is a non-story.

In the first place, is the NYTimes sure that this number represents people who typically read hardcover books switching over to read them on Kindle? Because I have a counter-data set of one: I have a longstanding policy--way predating the Kindle--of not buying hardcover books by authors I don't know personally. I just don't have any more room to store them.

The Kindle actually means I read a lot more new releases, because in the old days I would have waited for the paperback or for the book to show up at the library. I still do that with hardcovers that aren't available on Kindle, so there's no need to clutch your pearls over the fact that e-book sales overtook sales of "hardcovers for which there is no Kindle edition."

In the second place, the data here is completely skewed, for a whole lot of reasons. Amazon is the only seller of Kindle books, but not the only seller of hardcovers. One of the huge advantages of the Kindle is instant gratification: I order, I read. Amazon can't offer that with paper books, but the Daunt where I kill time on the way to my volunteer gig can. Hardcover is not the only print book format, and I'd wager (I should be a good blogger and look this up, but I'm not going to) it's not even the most popular: the hardcover sections of most bookstores are dwarfed by paperbacks. So measuring e-book sales against hardcover sales, even if you could enlarge your vision from Amazon and look industry-wide (and why can't you, if you've got the resources of the New York Times behind you?), is a bit of a straw man argument.

Look, I love paper books as much as the next bookworm. Here's a picture of part of one wall in my flat--it goes on, there's another bookcase on the opposite wall, and the guest room/study is similarly lined. I love my paper books. I'm a great re-reader, as well, and I love the way the feel and smell of a particular book can conjure up my life at the time that I first read it. I do want to own paper copies of some books: I have a whole shelf of autographed copies of my friends' books, and that simply wouldn't work on Kindle.

But I don't get the "oh noes, electronics are coming to steal your paper!" panic. The invention of recording didn't doom live music performance. Theatre survives alongside film; I own three radios and only one television. Publishers are still turning out hardcover books, 80 years after the invention of cheaper, easier-to-carry paperbacks.

(Okay, so the internet is killing newspapers. Fair enough. But book publishers have been smart enough not to equate "digital" with "free" in readers' minds, and have dodged that bullet. And I'll admit: I miss cassette tapes, because I don't have a way to listen to my mix tapes from high school anymore.)

I would love someone better at research than I am do write an article about how e-books are changing reading habits. Are the numbers of people who tell Pew or the NEA that they've read a novel in the past year changing? Are sales of non-fiction going up or down among different formats? Are people paying for newspaper and magazine subscriptions again, to use on their e-readers? Are total sales of all reading material, in all formats, up or down?

I'm just annoyed at the idea that the New York Times will use front-page real estate on the staggering news that people are consuming books in the same format they consume everything else these days.

Winners

The American Library Association awards--The Newbery and Printz, among others--were announced almost two weeks ago. I'm proud of myself this year: not only had I heard of the Newbery winner, I had already bought and read it!

To my shame, however, I had never heard of the novel that won the Printz award. Didn't even know Libba Bray had written a new book, to be honest. It really drove home how much I miss by not being able to browse the tables at American bookstores on a regular basis.

I've had a lot of time to read over the past week, so I'm caught up now. Writing about Going Bovine presents quite a challenge: I don't want to tell you about the book so much as I want you to read it, so I can talk about it with you. I don't want to have to be careful about spoilers--though I will, just for you--and it's hard to relate the plot or discuss the philosophy of the book without talking about the ending.

Going Bovine relates the travels of Cameron Smith, a teenager dying of Mad Cow disease. It's one of the most beautifully constructed novels I've read in a while, setting out its influences--Don Quixote and Norse sagas and Road Runner cartoons and our awful cultural priorities, which too often place physical and emotional safety above all other considerations--and then letting them all play into Cameron's quest to find the man who might be able to cure him.

According to her bio, the author is--like me--a Preacher's Kid (though I prefer "Theological Offspring"). I'm dying to know what her father thinks of the novel. The book is definitely a philosophical novel, but the book's philsophy doesn't much bother with the idea of God (though it does feature a guardian angel). Through his travels, Cameron learns that no one is in charge of the universe. He also learns that the only way to deal with the danger and uncertainty of life is to embrace it: to take huge risks that might not pay off; to try hard new things at which you might suck; to love people you might lose.

I can't tell you how much I love this approach to life. I also can't tell you how hard I find it to live by. The past two years of my life have been full of transitions. While most of them have had tremendous upsides (helloooo, London! Hello meat pies and teatime and volunteering with teens and four-hour lunches and writing whenever I want!), most of them have also involved great losses. Dealing with the losses makes it really hard to embrace the gains: it's all too easy to imagine that I might lose those someday, too. Sometimes I need a novel-length reminder that it really is better to have loved and lost, that trying and failing is better than not trying and never knowing.

P.S.You should also really read the author's blog post about "the call," which includes a paragraph detailing all of my worst fears of a writing career, and confirmation that sometimes it all works out:

Still in disbelief, I stared at a picture of The Ramones. When I first moved to New York with dreams of being a writer, I used to see Joey Ramone walking around the East Village. I had concocted a whole fantasy in which he was sort of my secret saint, a good luck charm. Anytime I saw him, I’d assume it was going to be a good day. It was one of those beliefs I made up to keep myself going while I worked in publishing for $16,000 a year and had to cover the hole in the bottom of my shoe with duct tape because I couldn’t afford new shoes (no joke) and encountered rejection after rejection for my writing. Sometimes the rejections were form rejections, the we-won’t-even-consider-you kiss-offs. Sometimes they were brutal and snide and damaging, and then I would wish for the dismissive ones. On more than one occasion, I was told that my work was “weird” and “too much.” And now, many years later, I’d just gotten a phone call about possibly the weirdest, too much-iest thing I’d ever written, a book straight from my soul with detours through my heart and head, all my armor left on the floor, and a group of people I respect so much called and said, “Hey, you know your super weird book? Well, thank you for that.” The photo of the Ramones got fuzzier and fuzzier because the tears had come. Tears of joy. Gratitude. Validation.

Am I contributing to the downfall of literature as we know it?

So, way back when I got an iPod Nano for my birthday and learned the joys of watching downloaded TV on a 2 1/2-inch screen, I asked myself: did this mean I also wanted a Kindle? Or was I more committed to the book as an object than that?

My husband answered that question for me with my Christmas gift. And the answer is: both. The Kindle is amazing and I'm so lucky to own one--and I'm not giving up my extensive library of books for anything. I'll even keep adding to it: there are some books that I'm going to want to physically own, even if I can read them another way.

Now, the next question: Does that make me a pawn in Amazon's evil empire?

Farhad Manjoo is worried it might. Pointing out that electronic delivery of books involves a host of licensing and other copyright/rights management issues, Manjoo writes:

But the Kindle's restrictions are more worrying than those associated with the iPhone, the iPod, and other gizmos. For one thing, if you objected to the iTunes Store's policies, there was always another way to legally buy music for your iPod—you could buy CDs (from Amazon, perhaps) and rip the tracks to MP3. That's not an option for books; there's no easy way to turn dead trees into electrons.

What Manjoo misses here--to my shock, frankly--is that there is a way to get content out of dead trees: you just read the book on paper. His concerns are absolutely valid for media that require some sort of electronic conversion. I don't have a DVD player, so if I want to (legally) watch a movie when I want to watch it, I'm entirely limited by what's available on iTunes or my cable provider's on-demand network; I can't just buy the disc (or check it out of the library) and stare at it. I can do exactly that with a book. And I'm not sooooo in love with my Kindle that, if a book I want to read isn't available in that format, I'll give up on reading it.

There are two things that thrill me about the Kindle: 1) I can bring along a suitcase full of books when I travel, without having to lug an actual suitcase full of books; and 2) I can read new, hardcover books when they come out, even if I don't actually want to have to find space for when I'm done reading them.

Plus, it's already saved my Cool Aunt cred once. When my whole family went to central Kansas this winter for my grandma's birthday party, we piled my niece and nephew into the two cars for the 3-hour drive from Kansas City without much attention to what gear was where. As a result, my eight-year-old niece ended up in the car that did _not_ have her books--or anything else to pass the time--in it. And she was sharing the back seat with her Aunt Kathryne, who had a sore throat and was in no shape to read aloud, or even chat much.

As Bertie Wooster would say, it was but the work of a moment with me to download Frindle onto my new device and pass it over. Not only did Julia take to the book without a word of complaint, but oh my giddy aunt, the joy when she realized she was reading a real live chapter book--not an easy reader--all by herself will probably be my biggest thrill for a while.

Two things, however, really bother me about the Kindle: 1) It might break, and probably will wear out someday; and 2) I have to watch the battery. Both of those things are the opposite of what's good about books.

The experience of reading on a Kindle differs from reading a book in a couple of significant ways. For one--as my niece discovered--you can't glean the kind of information about what you're reading from the Kindle screen as you can from a physical book. (In my niece's case, this was a good thing: if I'd handed her a paperback of Frindle, she might have gotten freaked out by its chapter-book-ness and not tried to read it alone.)

For another, you can't flip to the end and read the last page to make sure everything turns out all right. This has been a long habit of mine: I like being able to concentrate on the story without actually worrying about the characters.

But I couldn't do that with The Little Stranger. I just had to stay up late and finish it. And the ending was far more creepy and satisfying that way than it would have been if I had flipped to the last page. I am so impressed with the effect that I'm using all my willpower not to flip to the end of The Help, which I'm reading in paper copy (thanks, Mom!).

I'll be interested to see what happens with e-books and e-publishing over the next few years. After all, I've been through six different formats for listening to music in my lifetime (seven if you count "being in the same room with someone playing an instrument"), but books have always been books. I hope that the Kindle and the Sony e-Reader and whatever else they come up with will live happily alongside the wall of bookcases in my living room.