Author: sarahwp

MEN ARE FROM MARS, WOMEN ARE FROM VENUS by John Gray

I picked this book up pretty much at random from my parents’ bookcase one night when I had run out of reading matter and needed something to take to bed.

I only managed about the first thirty pages, but they were irritating. Gray makes some coherent arguments about what he imagines the differences between men and women to be, which some people might find useful to think about. For example, he encourages women not to feel rejected if a man feels like sitting quietly with the paper.

Gray says that men feel it is important to be successful providers, and thus may feel upset if they receive ‘unsolicited advice’ from women. He also says that when women wish to share their feelings, they do not want men to ‘offer solutions.’ I see. So when I say what I think someone should do, that is unsolicited advice, but when a boy tells me what to do, that is offering a solution.

Thank god it was already bedtime.

A WALK IN THE WOODS: REDISCOVERING AMERICA ON THE APPALACHIAN TRAIL by Bill Bryson

I would have thought that the major challenge of walking the Appalachian Trail would be fighting off inbred rednecks who want to kill you with chainsaws. This is however apparently only a minor aspect of the experience. Bill Bryson sets out to walk the Trail from where it begins in Georgia, to where it ends in Maine, a distance of about 2000 miles.

About a third of the way into the book, after we have suffered and staggered up endless mountains and round countless dales with him, he comes to a small convenience store with a map of the Trail, extending about four feet. He finds he has only walked the first two inches. He decides he will not be walking the whole Trail. This is apparently not unusual. According to Bryson:

2000 people start the Trail every year, and only about 10% get to the end; half don’t make it past central Virginia, less than a third of the way; a quarter get no further than North Carolina, the next state. As many as twenty percent drop out in the first week.

The driver who makes a living picking people up at the airport and dropping them at the start of the Trail tells Bryson that it is not unusual for him to hear from people asking to be picked up after three days, which is the amount of time it takes to walk to the first payphone.

The Appalachian Trail we learn is long, and steep, and often very boring. It is also very beautiful, and for that portion of the Trail that Bryson manages, he writes about this very movingly.

The Trail was created in the 1930s with voluntary labour, in only seven years, making it the largest voluntary undertaking on the planet. Much of the book is taken up with discussing how much of the American wilderness has disappeared since the Trail was founded. Apparently, early on, there were many pecan trees, but as it was normal to cut down especially tall trees (that could be as much as two hundred years old) just to make nut harvesting that bit easier, there are now few of these left. There are also many fewer birds than there used to be: in one year, Pennsylvania paid out $90,000 in bounties for the killing of 130,000 owls and hawks, to save farmers just $1,875 in livestock losses.

This book is not as comic as Bryson’s other work, but is still an interesting read, packed with fun facts like those above. Let me just close with two more, too interesting not to be squeezed in. If you can find a way to casually fit these into ordinary conversation, you get extra points.
-in the forty years before the First World War, 50,000 people died in American mines
-every twenty minutes on the Trail you walk more than the average American walks in a week.

Actually, I shouldn’t have said it’s not comic. There are some funny true stories. It’s not nice to laugh at one-handed children, but maybe its understandable if they lost their hand because their IDIOT MOTHER put honey on it, so that she could film the cute bear licking the hand with her camcorder.

SAY YOU’RE ONE OF THEM by Uwem Akpan

SAY YOU’RE ONE OF THEM is a collection of short stories which relate the struggles of young people from various parts of Africa. As recorded previously in the this blog, I generally not so fond of short stories, but I found this collection really engaging.

The first story, An Ex-Mas Feast, tells the story of a streetkid whose twelve year old sister is prostituting herself so he can go to school. This sounds like a terribly sad story, and indeed in many ways it is; but the writing is somehow also often both lyrical and comic. Here’s an example, of the streetkid looking for his sister, when he finds she has bought him a new uniform:

I felt like running out to search for her in the streets. I wanted to hug her and laugh until the moon dissolved. I wanted to buy her Coke and chapati, for sometimes she forgot to eat.

The author clearly has much experience of the lives of the very poor, for he recreates the difficult lives of those in Nairobi’s slums with great detail. We learn, for example, that the family member most in need of warmth has one of their limbs put through a hole in the family’s single blanket, to ensure that they stay in the middle.

The next story, Fattening for Gabon, is in my opinion the best in the collection, being both full of suspense, and really complex in its characters. It follows the story of two small children taken in by their uncle. The children receive great food and new clothes, and it becomes increasingly clear that their uncle is preparing them to be shipped off with human traffickers, and battling with second thoughts as he does so.

Further stories take place in religious conflict in Nigeria, and during the genocide Rwanda. As I got closer to the end of the book, I had my fingers crossed for at least one story about middle class children in Cairo, or Dakar, or Joburg; but no such luck I’m afraid. This I found to be rather sad: apparently the millions of children in Africa not victims of starvation or violence don’t have any stories to tell. Or perhaps in the minds of publishers if you’re not starving you can’t really be African?

In any case, these were well written stories, if on a rather narrow theme, and Nigerian Uwem Akpan is a talented author. I was rather surprised to learn that he is also a Catholic priest, and was quite touched to find out that many of his first stories were typed up on the seminary’s community computers, and then immediately lost to computer viruses. Oh Africa!

(This focus on poverty as a subject in African fiction I noted some time ago, here, in the context of the Caine Prize – much more on this subject can be found here with Nana at ImageNations, who has collected much useful debate on the subject)

BEFORE I FALL by Lauren Oliver

Despite being so extremely young as I am, I don’t tend to read much Young Adult fiction. I don’t generally get the point of it. However, for some reason I decided to give Lauren Oliver’s BEFORE I FALL a whirl, and I’m glad I did.

The book opens with a very detailed account of one day – February 12 – in the life of a popular high school girl, Sam. Sam goes to school, and then to a party, and each place and all its events are minutely described. This focus on one day confused me at first, in fact till the next morning, when Sam wakes up to find that it is still February 12, and she has to live the day over again in every particular.

Oh dear, I thought. How on earth is this author going to make Groundhog Day work? Shall I give up on this book now?

Thing is, it’s not really Groundhog Day. At the end of the first February 12, Sam is in a car crash, and it becomes increasingly clear that she is in fact dead. The makes the book more interesting, but also more complicated, as there is apparently therefore nothing for her to work towards. She can’t be saved. Or can she?

We begin to realise that she is being given the day again and again so that she can learn to appreciate that day. She learns to love that ordinary day, and thus in some way, to love her ordinary life. She learns to appreciate skipping breakfast, and her sister running out with her gloves, and driving with her best friend.

BEFORE I FALL is based around that lesson that’s so incredibly hard to learn, about learning to love what you’ve got.

I didn’t want to, but I found this book curiously touching.

SKIPPY DIES by Paul Murray

SKIPPY DIES is an enjoyable and complex novel, which can’t decide if it’s a tragedy or a comedy.

It’s 616 dense pages, dealing in great detail with a group of fourteen year old boys at a Catholic boarding school, in which tone, theme, and character perspective are all constantly changing.

Any Harry Potter type fantasies tend to get squashed pretty quickly: life in the Tower, an ancient building composed mostly of draughts, is a deeply unmagical experience, spent at the mercy of lunatic teachers, bullies, athlete’s foot epidemics, etc. There are some small consolations. At a point in life in which the lovely nuturing homes built for them by their parents have become unendurable Guantanomos, and any time spent away from their peers is experienced at best as a mind-numbing commercial break for things no one wants to buy on some old person’s TV channel and at worst as a torture not incomparable to being actually genuinely nailed to a cross, the boarders do enjoy a certain prestige among the boys.

Clearly, much of the book is very funny. As the title suggests however, all is not entirely well. Skippy is the student Daniel Juster, who falls madly in love with a girl from a neighbouring school. He is an unhappy and mildly dorky boy, who can’t seem to get up the courage to quit the swim team, which he seems to hate, though the reason for this is not clear. He eventually overdoses on painkillers.

Don’t be mislead into thinking that this is the story of the novel. There are about six major stories: one for Daniel, one for his history teacher, one for this room mate, one for the girl he’s in love with, etc etc. Some of these stories are comic, some sad, all are interesting. There’s a compelling examination of the extent to which the old are ranged against the young, and vice versa, and Robert Graves’ GOODBYE TO ALL THAT (reviewed by me here), about the First World War, is referenced often:

We no longer saw the war as one between trade-rivals: its continuance seemed merely a sacrifice of the idealistic younger generation to the stupidity and self-protective alarm of the elder.

This idea, of the young as constantly betrayed by the old, is very interesting. All is going very well, in short, for the first two thirds of the novel, until sadly the author begins to build in climaxes for each story, and oh god, but they are cheesy.

Guess why Skippy hates the swim team: yes, yes, got it in one, he is being abused. Guess what happens when Skippy’s girflriend gives someone a blowjob to prove she loves him: he records it on his phone. You get the idea. It’s all what elderly newspaper critics would describe as ‘gritty.’

Unfortunately the thematic resolutions are as cheesy as the plot resolutions. Here’s something:

Maybe instead of strings it’s stories that things are made of, an infinite number of tiny vibrating stories.

If I had a penny for every novel that concluded that our lives are just stories I would puke.

Or try this

So this guy’s saying, instead of searching for ways out of our lives, what we should be searching for are ways in . .

Oh dear.

OUR MONTHLY MARCEL

Here’s a little something for us to ponder this month . . .

“We are incapable, while we are in love, of acting as fit predecessors of the persons whom we shall presently have become and who will be in love no longer.”

Wise words. Poor Proust was painfully closeted all his life (see photo), so reading his work does tend to make one feel better about one’s romantic life in comparison, no matter how rubbish it might be.

I DO NOT COME TO YOU BY CHANCE by Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani

I DO NOT COME TO YOU BY CHANCE is a quirky and fun little novel from Nigeria, which I have reviewed here for Africa Book Club.

It has been most educational, teaching me why I will never order 404 in a Nigerian restaurant.

MID WEEK METRICAL

In an attempt to raise the tone of this blog, I have decided that every Wednesday we will try and improve our minds with poetry. Let’s start nice and easy, with a famous poem by acclaimed twentieth century British poet, Phillip Larkin.

This Be The Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.

EVERYTHING THAT RISES MUST CONVERGE by Flannery O’Connor

This book begins with a young man named Julian, who is being forced by his mother to accompany her on the bus to her weight loss class. Public transport has only recently been racially integrated, and for some reason she feels it is therefore now unsafe. Her son finds her attitude almost unbearably annoying. Here they are on the subject of slavery:

“There are no more slaves,” he said irritably.
“They were better off when they were,” she said. He groaned to see that she was off on that topic. She rolled onto it every few days like a train on an open track. He knew every stop, every junction, every swamp along the way, and knew the exact point at which her conclusion would roll majestically into the station: “It’s ridiculous. It’s simply not realistic. They should rise, yes, but on their own side of the fence.”
“Let’s skip it,” Julian said.
“The ones I feel sorry for,” she said, “are the ones that are half white. They’re tragic.”

I found this a strangely hilarious window into a certain period in the American South, and was excited to see where O’Connor was going with Julian and his mother. Alas, I was never to find out. EVERYTHING THAT RISES MUST CONVERGE is unfortunately a collection of short stories. Here’s a terrible confession for a literary blog: I can’t stand short stories. I find them annoying. You get all involved,and then like twenty pages later it’s over. It’s like getting dumped over and over again. So I stopped after three stories. Bad blogger! Bad!

Let me raise the tone by telling you where the title of the collection, and of the first story comes from. It refers to a work by the French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin:

“Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge”

I assume this refers to poor Julian, and find that this makes the story even more darkly comic.

BRIGHT SIDED: HOW THE RELENTLESS PROMOTION OF POSITIVE THINKING HAS UNDERMINED AMERICA by Barbara Ehrenreich

I make it a policy not to read books with a colon in the middle of the title. The colon is a sure sign of a certain kind of heavily edited, heavily marketed non-fiction that makes me want to hurl. I particularly can’t bear the idea of the earnest publishing meeting where they tinkered with the title to get it ‘right.’

That said, for some reason I decided to read BRIGHT SIDED: HOW THE RELENTLESS PROMOTION OF POSITIVE THINKING HAS UNDERMINED AMERICA. A terrible title, but a rather good book.

The author is diagnosed with breast cancer, and immediately begins to feel that she is drowning in a sea of pink sugar. She is confounded by the relentless positivity that surrounds cancer, leaving no room for the obvious emotions: anger and grief. The idea that a positive mindset is a central part of conquering cancer is endless repeated, and Ehreneich, who in her youth acquired a Phd in cell biology, looks into this claim, and finds the science behind it very weak. The mere fact that it’s all nonsense does not deter the cancer industry one bit however, and so Ehrenreich begins an examination into the whole idea of positive thinking.

She studies its roots in nineteenth century religion, right up to its current status as a quasi-religious movement led by preachers called ‘motivational speakers.’ The fact that the universe is incomprehensible and probably meaningless is no obstacle to these ‘motivational speakers,’ whose message is that you can have anything you want if you just want it badly enough. This sounds like a hopeful message, but its dark underside is of course that if you don’t have what you want (if you lose your job, for example) it is entirely your own fault.

This idea obviously works very well for corporations. Unhappy employees do not need better working conditions, raises, or health insurance: they just need a better attitude! Thus a large percentage of the ‘positivity industry’ is funded by businesses, who buy the books and CDs for their unfortunate employees.

Perhaps the most interesting part of this book was the link Ehrenreich posits between ‘positive thinking’ and that pretty negative event, the global recession. I was surprised to learn that apparently, in the last decade or so, the majority of important CEOs made use of coaches, almost all of whom push the message of positive thinking: that is, imagining the best outcome, excluding negative people, manifesting success through the power of your thinking, and so forth. She includes many anecdotes of ‘negative people,’ that we might also call ‘realists’- fired Cassandras – who tried to tell CEOs that their mortgages where dodgy, their credit default swaps dangerous, their real estate bubble about to burst. They did not fit into the triumphant visions of men making $60million a year, and so were ignored, with disastrous results.

BRIGHT SIDED is an interesting book about how psychology can effect the real world, though not perhaps exactly in the way positive thinkers imagine.

Depressing Trivia! Rhonda Byrne, who wrote the positive thinking Bible THE SECRET, apparently said that the tsunami of 2006 could only happen to people ‘who are on the same frequency as the event.’ I’d like to put her on the same frequency as a fat slap.