Dawn's Reading Blog

Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines is the counterpoint to Beautiful Boy. Tweak is by the addicted son; Beautiful Boy by the suffering father. I first read Beautiful Boy, which was also published first, with every intention of reading Tweak, but Beautiful Boy was a pretty depressing read. As I mentioned in my review of it, I’m accustomed to a “happy ever after” ending for mental illness and addiction books. Although I guess we always know that relapses are lurking in the shadows, you like to end on some kind of hopeful high note. Beautiful Boy ended with Nic in treatment but after so many relapses that neither his father nor the reader could believe he’d been through his last.

Tweak has no better picture to paint. In fact, although it ends where Beautiful Boy did, my edition contained two additional epilogues/afterwords chronicling two more (shorter, it sounds like) relapses. Since then, Nic has had a blog but when I went to check it out, I found the last post was one saying “Bye” because other things were consuming his time, which reads a bit like addict-speak for “I’m getting ready to relapse.”

Aside from my increasing frustration with Nic’s relapses, I enjoyed the book. His writing is a little too obviously casual, peppered with “like” and “you know.” It’s meant to sound like he’s really talking but it comes off as artificial over a space as long as that book is, but he’s honest and open and a good writer. I wish him luck.

This was a nice collection of Mary Cassatt’s works with a one-page summary of each of the major periods of her life and many full-color prints. It was interesting that Mary Cassat was a long way from being an ovenright success. She didn’t come to like her own work until later in life but she kept working, taking lessons and trying different mediums until she found her niche and honed her talent. She’s best known for her mother/child drawings and those were the most striking and best-represented works in this collection.

Dali is a nice collection of color prints of the artist’s works. It’s interesting that some of these works are actually smaller in person than in the prints. The book also contained detailed blow-ups of some sections of some of the works and a review of Dali’s life.

Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior is often compared to Blink and with good reason. I actually thought it was written by the same guy, but it’s not. It covers the same sort of warped thought processes we humans use to make decisions. They’re interesting to read about but often discouraging since it seems unlikely we can really overcome these ingrained human traits. It might not be advantageous to overcome them all anyway. The need to conform and the lack of time to thoroughly evaluate every possibility don’t allow us to always make the right choice based on solid evidence and rational thought. Sometimes we need to jump to conclusions or just go along with the crowd.

Of course, it’s good to be aware of when we’re doing that so the brakes can be applied in cases where clear thinking is critical, as in the example in the book of a pilot who killed a whole plane full of people by being stubbornly committed to a pre-planned course of action. But in the example of saying whether or not three lines are the same length (when they’re clearly not) because everyone else is saying so . . . well, there are times when agreeing is the right choice. The dissenter, while an important role, is not a popular one. Perhaps companies and other organizations with important decisions to make could hire consultants to dissent. These people could show up, dissent to the point of getting a good conversation going, and move on without damaging their careers. I would make an excellent professional dissenter. I’ve already spent too much time being an amateur one.

I was a little surprised by how unimportant the lobotomy in My Lobotomy seemed to be. Howard Dully’s story is a sad one of a boy who may always have been difficult being raised by a stepmother who didn’t want a difficult stepson. So there wasn’t much sympathy for little Howard, which probably made his behavior even worse. At some point the stepmother decided that he’d best be helped by a lobotomy. At the time, lobotomies were somewhat in vogue, being trumpeted by a doctor who’d invented the procedure and traveled around the country performing them.

Apparently the results were unpredictable. In Howard’s case, it’s hard to say whether or not there were results. He goes on to have an even more troubled teenage and young adult life with a lot of drugs and alcohol involved. Eventually he gets himself into recovery. Part of that is facing up to what his stepmother had done to him, which he didn’t understand at the time it happened. He becomes something of a poster boy for people who underwent unnecessary lobotomies at the hands of this doctor, having a documentary made about him and giving talks on the radio and to audiences.

I can understand how cathartic both the original procedure and the later exploration of all its ramifications must have been to the author, but to the reader, it’s hard to be sure the lobotomy influenced his life that much. His story is not unlike other stories of youngsters who didn’t get much love at home (and even those who did) and discover drugs and alcohol at an early age. That doesn’t diminish the complete irresponsibility of his stepmother (and more so father) in having this procedure done on him, of course.

Holidays on Ice is the second book of humorous essays I’ve read by David Sedaris. The first book was all biographical non-fiction. This one also included some purely fictional essays, which weren’t anywhere near as good. When he’s writing about himself as a homosexual man, I can relate to what he’s saying because he’s being real and down deep we’re all people with the same feelings and failings. But when he tries to write as a heterosexual woman, it’s just stereotypical silliness. It’s not funny because it’s no longer true.

When I got Eclipse, the third book in the Twilight series, in the mail I was in the middle of reading various other things. I tried to hold off. I really did. But after it sat there calling to me for about a week I gave in and devoured it in two days, then spent the usual next two days re-reading parts of it. I’ve stowed it away on the bookshelf now in an attempt to stop re-reading it before I have it memorized.

This one started slowly and I thought perhaps the series was losing steam, but it got plenty steamy. I regretted the lack of Edward in the last book but it was worth it to set up the Edward/Bella/Jacob triangle which is so deliciously drawn in this book. I anticipate even better things to come in the fourth book, which is already on the way.

The Twilight series is compelling. When I’m reading one of these books, I’m actively reading it. It doesn’t sit on the end table next to me night after night while I watch TV or do crossword puzzles or go for a walk. It floats into my hands as soon as I get within gravitational pull.

“Good for you” books can be compelling too. They can also be good without being compelling by being interesting, thought provoking, beautiful, informative, or revolutionary Unfortunately, many of them aren’t any of those things. Not everything with footnotes or an introduction by some literary critic I’ve never heard of is actually worth reading. For that matter, not every trashy novel is even minimally entertaining.

To wit:

The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens: OK, this isn’t horrible and I’ll finish it, but I’ve seen it ballyhooed as Dickens’ best work and it’s nothing but silliness. A Tale of Two Cities, now that’s good stuff: moving, compelling, interesting, heart-breaking. The Pickwick Papers are a disjointed series of humorous sketches sometimes connected by a plot string no thicker than “let me tell you a story.” It was originally published serially, which is exactly how it reads. This was the sitcom of its day. Not that The Simpsons can’t be genius, but will it ever become the sort of “classic” that gets taught in school?

The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books: Guess I thought I’d get some insight from this one, either about what might be interesting to read or what might inspire me to do some good writing. I didn’t get either. I got lists. Literally, lists. This book is interesting only if . . . never mind. It’s not.

The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights: This is one of those classics that’s best not read at all. We have a cultural understanding of what it entails: Aladdin and the lamp, genies, flying carpets, Scheherazade telling stories to stay alive. The reality is a misogynistic, racist cesspool of hate and stereotypes. Women can’t be trusted and will cheat if left alone for five minutes. (Men get to have unlimited numbers of wives and concubines, so their faithlessness doesn’t come up.) Not only that, but given half a chance they’ll have sex with a black man, and apparently having one of your hundreds of wives cheat on you with a black man is so unimaginably horrible (despite the fact that it seems to happen almost constantly), that it entitles you to lay mayhem on him, her, and all the women and black men you can reach. This is a thoroughly disgusting, unreadable compendium of vaguely familiar stories.

Imperial Ascent: Mountaineering, Masculinity, and Empire: Although I don’t climb mountains, most of the climbing literature I read is about mountain climbing. Rock climbing doesn’t seem to make for good stories. Too short for one thing, and we don’t die nearly as often for another. The focus of this book is on the amazing adventures white men have had in conquering the mountains and far off reaches of the world. This being 2009 and not 1909, I’ll assume there was some deeper purpose to focusing so excessively on what white men were doing and why. I couldn’t make myself read the overly scholarly text closely enough to figure out what that purpose was. All I know is that the word “masculinity” appeared approximately once per paragraph in the introduction. So I skipped forward to where I hoped the real stories would begin and found a continuation of overly quoted and footnoted text and yes, the word “masculinity.” So I quit. You don’t need to read this book. In case you’ve been wondering, I’m going to explain why our early adventurers are all white men: they were the ones with the freedom to go climb mountains. Give women and minorities permission to leave the house and the time and money to do it and guess what? We like to climb mountains too. I’ll bet we like to do it in exactly the same proportions as white men. Mystery solved. 200 pages saved.

Ten Thousand Islands: So I’m leaving on a jet plane and I ask my friend Sheila for something to take with me. She has more books than can fit in a single room if you stack that room from floor to ceiling all the way around, and I mean that literally. So she picked out a good beach book (well, forest book in my case but it seems like the same thing), only I couldn’t get more than a few chapters in before I started just not giving a damn. It’s supposed to be a mystery but things weren’t moving along and the characters were supposed to be endearingly quirky but they just seemed overdrawn and the setting was supposed to be exotic but it’s only exotic to people in their living rooms. Perhaps I’d have done better with this on the beach. Somehow having people screaming “Bear!” outside your tent while you’re reading undermines the suspense of how the intrepid PI’s fist fight is going to come out.

I say all of this because my blog would suggest that I’ve been reading nothing but vampire porn lately, which isn’t true. I just haven’t been enjoying anything but vampire porn lately.

The Conde Nast Traveler Book of Unforgettable Journeys is a collection of travel essays from the magazine. I don’t think I’d like this magazine. Although some of the places are interesting, and some of the writing was approachable, the overall style seems to be to cram as many facts, names, dates, and titles into each sentence. Sort of like this:

The arch, 112 feet at its apex and made of grey granite harvested from the coal mines of Goldospato, Austria, was constructed in January 1942, at the height of World War II and before General Schwartkopf was born, to commemorate the fall of Napolean, who is pictured wearing the regional coat of arms common to all first born sons of potatoe farmers during the Crimean War when termites overcame the elephants by eating their feed, much as they did in Atilla’s day.

Or something.

Every year the AAC sends me Accidents in North American Mountaineering as part of my membership. It’s an annual recounting of some of the accidents and fatalities that happened in climbing and mountaineering that year. It can make for depressing, though educational, reading.

Usually there’s at least one incident that stands out for me, but this year there weren’t. It did remind me of last year’s standout though, which happened on Cathedral Peak in Tuolumne where I just happened to be climbing a year ago. When I read the story last year, I’d never climbed in Tuolumne and this accident report didn’t help my uneasiness about the area.

Now that I’m back, I re-read the story and although it’s a reasonable story of small but mounting mistakes/misfortunes that ultimately turn fatal, I now have the perspective to see that they made an odd, and critical, choice very early on. Right from the beginning they were planning to rap the route and it’s those rappels that put most of the nails in the coffin. Nowhere have I seen a topo suggest that you should plan to rap Cathedral. Not that their unusual choice means they should have died, and not to suggest I wouldn’t ever make a similar set of mistakes, but it does help take the story out of the nightmare realm and move it to sad-but-possible.

I read the first edition of Galloway’s Book on Running because my mother found it at a tag sale, but I see there’s now a second edition which is the one linked here. For a book written in 1982 (the 1st edition), it holds up very well. The only part that seemed obsolete was the “running after 40″ section. 40 is the new 20 or whatever, so the idea of needing a special section for the over-40 crowd is quaintly old-fashioned. Perhaps “running after 70″. In fact, I see he’s now got a book called Running Until You’re 100, which is closer to the reality of the people I run with.

There was also a semi-slanted “running for women” section but since it mostly concentrated on pregnancy with a tiny warning about amenorrhea, I’m not going to hit him too hard for this. He did have his wife write this chapter, as though women are aliens who can only understand each other, but I guess where pregnancy is concerned that’s fair.

The rest of the book was old enough to be new again. He warns about stretching. He’s mildly rabid on the umpteen glasses of water thing, an urban legend which is only now being called into question, but he doesn’t tout sports drinks. His diet recommendations dovetail very nicely with what I happen to be eating anyway (except for chocolate, but perhaps that was in the section for women).

Most importantly, his program seems very gentle. It’s a bit like when Steve told me to start walking hills. It’s hard to believe that easing up could be the key to moving forward, but the hill walking advice came at the right time, and I’m going to give Galloway’s program a try. I start in a few weeks and I end at the Boston Marathon. Let’s see how it goes.