This is just the kind of random, wide-ranging book I love: part memoir, part travelogue, part philosophical musing on human culture and our impact on This is just the kind of random, wide-ranging book I love: part memoir, part travelogue, part philosophical musing on human culture and our impact on the environment, Moby-Duck is an uncategorizable gem. In 1992 a pallet of ‘Friendly Floatees’ bath toys fell off a container ship in a storm in the north Pacific. Over the past two decades those thousands of plastic animals have made their way around the world, informing oceanographic theory and delighting children – but it’s a more complicated story than that.
Hohn’s obsessive quest for the origin of the bath toys and the details of their high seas journey takes on the momentousness of his literary antecedent, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale: “Now whenever we [Hohn and the second officer on his exploring ship] pass each other in the corridors or in the mess, he greets me with Ahab’s famous question: ‘Hast seen the white whale?’ To which I reply, ‘Hast seen the yellow duck?’”
Hohn’s wit allows him to navigate carefully between blithe delight at the spectacle of the floating ducks and despair at our destruction of the oceans. He visits a Chinese factory and sees plastics being made; he volunteers on a beach-cleaning mission in Alaska, where they find and airlift out over fifty tons of waste, mostly plastic washed up on shore.
I join him in feeling a mixture of hope and disgust about the environment: “I feel an irresolvable ambivalence, torn between my fondness for hominids, who are splendid and hilarious as well as idiotic, and my wish that we could populate the world without ruining it.” Like Bill Bryson or particularly Paul Collins (one of my favorite writers on any subject), Hohn writes clever, heartfelt, interdisciplinary nonfiction – just the kind of books I want to read (and write)....more
This brilliant essay collection is worth the price of admission just for the first piece, “Pain Won’t Kill You” (his 2011 commencement address at KenyThis brilliant essay collection is worth the price of admission just for the first piece, “Pain Won’t Kill You” (his 2011 commencement address at Kenyon College), which is, bluntly put, about the difference between the throwaway Facebook ‘like’ and truly falling in love with someone or something. He uses the personal example of birdwatching: “it’s very uncool to be a birdwatcher, because anything that betrays real passion is by definition uncool.”
Yet discovering that enthusiasm for birds taught him that he could transform frustrated feelings of helplessness into useful action; if he could just “run toward...pain and anger and despair, rather than away from them,” he could turn hobbies into impassioned journalism: “I started taking on a new kind of journalistic assignment. Whatever I most hated, at a particular moment, became the thing I wanted to write about.”
And this is evident in later pieces in the collection: eloquent exposés of songbird slaughter in the Mediterranean and China’s environmental degradation. I found this essay hugely inspirational. Why let myself get depressed about palm oil plantations destroying orangutan habitat, or non-recyclable plastics, or Internet pornography and other degradations of women – why not write about them as a form of protest?
Indeed, as Franzen learned, “When you stay in your room and rage or sneer or shrug your shoulders, as I did for many years, the world and its problems are impossibly daunting. But when you go out and put yourself in real relation to real people, or even just real animals, there’s a very real danger that you might end up loving some of them. And who knows what might happen to you then?”
Title piece “Farther Away” documents Franzen’s pilgrimage to Alejandro Selkirk Island (where the real-life Robinson Crusoe was stranded) to experience solitude, find some rare birds, and scatter his friend David Foster Wallace’s ashes. Franzen believes Wallace was right to posit “fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude. Fiction was his way off the island.”
“On Autobiographical Fiction” is an absolute must-read for any reader or writer. The autobiographical pieces here are, ironically, among the least interesting, though his whimsical interview with New York State is charming, and I prized this line from “Hornets” (about his hard-up house-sitting days): “Mowing lawns has always seemed to me among the most despair-inducing of human activities” (for me it’s washing dishes).
The remaining essays are a mixture of gently irascible anti-technology polemic (he detests constant cell phone use, arguing it displays the selfish attitude of ‘My emotions and my family are more important to me than your social comfort’) and literary criticism based on appreciation rather than sniping (à la Nick Hornby): he fêtes Alice Munro and resurrects a number of lost classics, such as Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children.
He ends his piece on Munro with a plea for the transforming power of literature: “Can a better kind of fiction save the world? There’s always some tiny hope (strange things do happen), but the answer is almost certainly no, it can’t. There is some reasonable chance, however, that it could save your soul.”
I agree: I’m a firm believer in and supporter of bibliotherapy. Books can be one way of becoming that impassioned, involved lover and critic of the world he describes in the first essay.
There is hardly a better reader or writer at work in America today than Jonathan Franzen....more
This is a book about D.H. Lawrence in the same way that Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation is a film of The Orchid Thief. In other words, it’s not particulaThis is a book about D.H. Lawrence in the same way that Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation is a film of The Orchid Thief. In other words, it’s not particularly about Lawrence at all; it’s just as much, if not more, about Geoff Dyer – his laziness, his procrastination, his curmudgeonly attitude, his futile search for the perfect places to read Lawrence’s works and write about Lawrence, his failure to feel the proper reverence at Lawrence sites, and so on. While I can certainly sympathize with Dyer’s wry comments about his work habits (“I hate doing anything in life that requires an effort”; “better reading than writing”; “all things in which I am interested … [are] a source of stress and anxiety”), I liked best the parts of the book where he actually writes about Lawrence. He has an impressive familiarity with Lawrence’s body of work, including the complete letters, as well as the life story, so there’s no denying he could have written a definitive biography.
I too have visited the Eastwood heritage sites in Nottinghamshire and the Taos ranch, way back in my undergraduate days when I did independent Hardy and Lawrence tourism in summer 2004 and then attended the D.H. Lawrence Society of North America 2005 conference in Santa Fe. Ultimately I found academia too dry and soul-crushing, and Dyer feels much the same: “Spare me the drudgery of systematic examinations and give me the lightning flashes of those wild books in which there is no attempt to cover the ground thoroughly or reasonably.” That, I think, explains why he didn’t write an academic study in the end. Yet he still could have written a book about Lawrence, instead of one where Lawrence lurks in the margins. I prefer the way James Lasdun worked in a brief foray to Lawrence territory in his Give Me Everything You Have....more
I enjoyed Quiet in much the same way that I enjoyed Kathryn Schulz’s Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of ErVindication for introverts everywhere!
I enjoyed Quiet in much the same way that I enjoyed Kathryn Schulz’s Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error: both are broad, multidisciplinary studies that go deep into the psychology and physiology of why we are the way we are. Although Western culture values the “Extrovert Ideal” of people skills and self-promotion, Cain reveals that one out of every two or three Americans is an introvert (so much for the myth of universal American friendliness!). By nature introverts are thinkers who work slowly and deliberately and prefer to focus on one thing at a time; they enjoy deep discussions but not small talk.
My favorite parts of the book tour those places where extroverted leadership is most expected – a Tony Robbins self-help seminar, Harvard Business School and an Evangelical megachurch. I found her discussion of introversion in relation to religion particularly astute. “I’m sure our Lord was [an extrovert]”, she heard one priest say.
Cain traces the idolizing of extroverts to 1920s America, when what she calls the “Culture of Character” was replaced by a “Culture of Personality.” Gradually it began to seem that private behavior, discipline, and honor counted less than the impression one made in public. The rise of glamorous Hollywood stars, as well as the self-help gospel found in books like Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936), fed into the charismatic personality cult that has required nearly all U.S. presidents (bar, perhaps, John Quincy Adams) to be extroverts. By contrast, many of the most successful CEOs (including Bill Gates) could be termed introverts.
One of Cain’s recurring themes is that artists need solitude to do their best work. As Franz Kafka wrote (in a January 15, 1913 letter to Felice Bauer), “one can never be alone enough when one writes.” Independence can be conducive to creativity and allows time for “deliberate practice” – after all, experts estimate that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to achieve greatness in an artistic field. Cain also cites Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, a hybrid artist-scientist figure, who contends that “Artists work best alone.” Modern workplaces may prioritize teamwork and the benefits of open-plan working, but for introverts to get their finest work done, they must have time and space to concentrate on their own projects.
Although Cain conveys a reassuring “I’m okay, you’re okay” message for introverts, backed up with plenty of strong evidence, at the same time she notes that there will always be occasions when introverts need to stretch themselves to achieve their goals. According to the “rubber band theory,” we can all choose to broaden our personalities – but only so much. Even shy people can fake extroversion to some extent; as Cain argues, “introverts are capable of acting like extroverts for the sake of work they consider important, people they love, or anything they value highly.”
If introverts’ work requires them to challenge themselves significantly (by doing public speaking, for instance), they will need to find what Cain dubs “restorative niches” where they can withdraw to be themselves, whether that be a literal nook (a quiet, private office, if you are so lucky as to have one – even now women need Virginia Woolf’s proverbial ‘room of one’s own’), or more metaphorical solace in tasks like writing, reading, and researching. Acting ‘out of character’ for too long can cause an introvert to suffer stress and illness, so it is important to acknowledge one’s natural tendencies.
Parts of the book are less interesting: Cain is not as good at describing scientific research, and her chapter on parenting introverts bored me. But in general I found it to be a fascinating and long-overdue exposé that should help many people to understand themselves, or their friends, family members and colleagues....more
Sullivan is a wonderfully opinionated essayist, and this collection about Middle America has it all: a Tea Party protest, caving in Tennessee, animal Sullivan is a wonderfully opinionated essayist, and this collection about Middle America has it all: a Tea Party protest, caving in Tennessee, animal attacks, plus a heavy dose of pop culture. There are pieces on going to Disney World with his family, attending an MTV “Real World” reunion (Sullivan seems to have a disturbingly encyclopedic knowledge about this original reality TV phenomenon), and the strange pseudo-privilege of living in a house made famous as a filming location in teen TV drama “One Tree Hill.”
Most notable, though, are his treatises about musical trends. He writes enthusiastically about Michael Jackson, Axl Rose, and the last surviving member of Bob Marley’s band. My favorite piece, though, is “Upon This Rock,” about a pilgrimage to Creation, the annual Christian music festival in Pennsylvania, in 2007. He is, perhaps, unfairly dismissive of the music itself – “For their encore, Jars of Clay did a cover of U2’s ‘All I Want Is You.’ It was bluesy. That’s the last thing I’ll be saying about the bands” – but the essay is a delightful picaresque about falling in with a group of rednecks who get into fights and cook frogs from the “crik.” He even sees a man keel over and die of a heart attack while waiting in one of the fast food lines. The experience dredges up for him his teenage “born-again” days, when he and his youth group were Petra devotees but a reluctance to witness convinced him that he didn’t really believe all of it. My teen years were full of Christian music, too, so there was plenty here to identify with and enjoy. However, you don’t need to have any interest in the musical styles discussed to find reading these essays a pleasant way of passing an evening.
(This review formed part of an article about books on music for Bookkaholic.)...more
A zippy, self-deprecating tour through the wacky world of memory championships. It's an enjoyable read, even rollicking at times, thanks to Foer’s engaging writing style and his reassuring Everyman philosophy: memory champions are made, not born....more
As a 22-year-old graduate student, I gobbled this up even though I knew very little about Original rating (2006): 5* / Rating now: 4* -> Average: 4.5*
As a 22-year-old graduate student, I gobbled this up even though I knew very little about French literature and history and hadn’t yet read any Flaubert. I wasn’t quite as dazzled by the literary and biographical experimentation this time. While I again admired the audacity of the novel, I wouldn’t call it a personal favorite any longer. I think others of Barnes’s works will resonate for me more on a reread.
Still, Barnes is in my trio of favorite authors, along with A. S. Byatt and David Lodge. He’s an unapologetic intellectual and a notable Francophile who often toggles between England and France, especially in his essays and short stories. This was his third novel and riffs on the life and works of Gustave Flaubert, best known for Madame Bovary.
Odd-numbered chapters build a straightforward narrative as Geoffrey Braithwaite, a widower, retired doctor and self-described “senile amateur scholar,” travels to Rouen for five days to see the sites associated with Flaubert and becomes obsessed with determining which of two museum-held stuffed parrots Flaubert used as his inspiration while writing the story “A Simple Heart.” Even-numbered chapters, however, throw in a variety of different formats: a Flaubert chronology, a bestiary, an investigation of the contradictory references to Emma Bovary’s eye color, a dictionary of accepted ideas, an examination paper, and an imagined prosecutor’s case against the writer.
There are themes and elements here that recur in much of Barnes’s later work:
History – what remains of a life? (“He died little more than a hundred years ago, and all that remains of him is paper.”)
Love versus criticism of one’s country (“The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonourably, foolishly, viciously.”)
Time and its effects on relationships and memory
How life is transmuted into art
Languages and wordplay
Bereavement
Indeed, I was most struck by Chapter 13, “Pure Story,” in which Dr. Braithwaite finally comes clean about his wife’s death and the complications of their relationship. Barnes writes about grief so knowingly and with such nuance, yet his own wife, Pat Kavanagh, didn’t die until 2008. Much of what he’s published since then has dwelt on loss, but more than two decades earlier he was already able to inhabit that experience in his imagination.
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