I’ve read a few books by Jodi Picault and Songs of the Humpback Whale blends in with the others. Picault is very attached to motherhood and long term relationships–not two of my specialities–but her characters are vivid and sympathetic enough to keep my attention. This one was a bit of a tragedy in that no one ends up happy, and yet she presents the fact that the lead character is going to go on being a wife and mother as triumph enough.
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.
So it’s a romantic teen novel about vampires, not something I’d normally read. But I was ultimately captivated by Harry Potter and I really enjoyed The DaVinci Code, so it’s worth it to take my nose out of the air now and then and see what the TV-crowd is reading. When you think about it, these uber-popular books must be pretty entertaining to get so many non-readers reading.
Twilight is a chick book, no mistake, and I was chick enough to be reeled in. It’s superficial and slow-moving but oh-so-sexy. After I read it, I went back and read the chapters in the middle where they’re falling in love straight through all over again. Ah, those first throbs of new love. What can beat that?
The amazing twist to the romance/passion is that the author manages to pull it off without ever having her teen protagonists do more than chastely kiss. Men should read this for the road map.
Middlesex is a richly detailed novel on a unique subject. There can’t have been a lot of background information on late-discovered hermaphroditism for the author to research to arrive at this level of apparent authenticity. Greek heritage provides a richly painted background canvas against which Callie’s odd story unfolds at just the right pace.
If I had to quibble with the book, I would say that the story got less interesting once Callie’s true gender was discovered, which is when the author really had to get into the head of someone unexpectedly changing genders. I’m not sure he captured how a real person would react, but what do I know? Callie was a girl who never questioned being a girl aside from her attraction to other girls. Sounds more like a lesbian than a man in a woman’s body. It might have been interesting to see it play out that way, though perhaps also not true to a real life scenario. From what I’ve read, boys raised as girls usually have very strong boy feelings. If you start with the wrong premise, perhaps there’s no right place to end up.
Quibble aside, this is fiction and it was enjoyable fiction on many levels.
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.
Initially I found Chocolat slow moving. Mysticism is not one of my favorite subjects and veiled references to past events that the reader isn’t going to learn about until later are an irritating device, in my opinion. But once the story got going, I really enjoyed it. The preist’s chapters are particularly good. I loved how the supposed ascetic gave all of the sensual detail. The book flagged again at the end, going out with a whimper not a bang, but it was a very enjoyable read. I wonder if the movie made out Catholicism to be evil quite as much as the book did.