Dawn's Reading Blog

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.

Shawangunk Rock Climbing is mostly a picture book, but it does give a succint history of climbing at the Gunks. (By succint I mean that I read it in less than an hour and didn’t learn a whole lot.) The pictures are beautiful and make me realize that I need to get out more at the Gunks. We’re not allowed to climb at Skytop these days but Millbrook, Peterskill, and Lost City are open and there are apparently a lot of beautiful routes I haven’t been on.

I went through a bout of online dating between Todd and Steve. If I’d been tempted to do it again post-Steve (and I wasn’t), I Love You, Let’s Meet reminded me why I vowed “never again” the last time. It’s not that you can’t meet nice people online. They are, after all, the same people you’d meet anywhere. It’s that nice people become not-nice online. The longer I trolled the internet for dates, the less sympathetic, tolerant, and open I became. The more I was treated like a commodity, the more I learned to treat other people the same way. Callous blow-offs became second nature, both to give and to receive. People-shopping was the name of the game. This one’s not perfect? Back to the pool. It’s a deep pool but soon it’s filled with sharks and you’re one of them.

The other trouble with online dating is that you can’t tell the nice people from the not-nice. Anyone can fake it for a while. And the incentive to behave well with someone you’ll never see again just isn’t the same as with a person inside your own social circle. It pays to know something about the someone you’re about to dive into.

I Love You, Let’s Meet does a good job illustrating these pitfalls. It also relates some success stories. And I did have a success story. But here’s the key: he was one of the first guys I met (before I got jaded and degraded) and the relationship was ultimately eroded by suspicion. We never knew each other well enough to know if we were right to trust each other.

So if you’re going to date online, do it fast. Start with an open mind and get to know the people you meet. Don’t think, “there are a million more like this one.” Think, “I only have a few chances.” Be true to yourself and them and get out before being cruel feels commonplace. Better yet, get some hobbies–a new one if need be–and meet some real people. The real world is full of them.

Stories of addiction are getting more honest. Once upon a time, they all ended with the uplifing recovery scene. Beautiful Boy cycles through a few uplifting recovery scenes but keeps dropping you back to the reality of addiction, i.e. relapse.

Perhaps more than anything, this is a good book for someone who doesn’t have kids or who hasn’t gone through tragedy with their kids to help them understand how parents feel when their kids are in this much need. Sheff illustrates his own pain very clearly.

Lately I’ve reconnected with some old friends on Facebook and have enjoyed reading old diaries and letters and re-living those debauched younger days. It seemed innocent enough at the time. Why does the man have to hassle you? Then I read Beautiful Boy and see why the man had to hassle us, and why it’s a good thing he did, and why I came out luckier than some.

Good Morning Midnight is the story of Guy Waterman and his choice to commit suicide by sleeping out overnight on a mountain during the winter. There’s quite a long chapter about Guy’s son, Johnny, probably because it makes a better story. What can you say about Guy’s death except that he planned it for a while and then did it.

Is depression really the only reason people commit suicide? I have a hard time believing a person can maintain that level of depression for more than a year. I’m more inclined to call it determination. It does seem unfair to his loved ones, but his wife had plenty of time to separate herself in some other way if it seemed preferable.

It was interesting to read about their off-grid home in the woods. Sometimes I think I’d enjoy a simple life like that but then I realize that I’d have to have the internet.

I wish Next Man Up was written about a team other than the Baltimore Ravens. I don’t care about the Ravens and they’re not even in the same conference as the team I do care about. So I know little about their schedule, history, rivalries or players. And didn’t much care to learn.

Nevertheless, this was an excellent, enthralling book. Feinstien’s writing is highly readable with enough detail to provide context but not enough to drown out the drama. I do love behind-the-scenes NFL books to begin with and this was a superb example. Please go write one about the NFC East!