Connect the dots

It really is stunning, the sheer amount of information at our fingertips on the Web. Perhaps I should not mention that the following is how I spend my weekend, but ... alas.

Yesterday, I finished Ender's Game (who knew? I'm sort of loving science fiction!), and I picked an unread book off my shelf: Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Oxford English Dictionary, the story of OED editor James Murray and contributor WC Minor, who happened to live (for more than 30 years) in an asylum.

I'm almost finished, and my God, how the world has changed. It took decades, and tens (hundreds? Thousands?) of volunteers, reading books in English and cataloguing words, illustrated by historical usage, on slips of paper that they then passed along to Murray. I can't speak to the process that goes into the dictionary's revision today, but information is just so much faster: you don't even have to thumb through impossible, unwieldy tomes any more, you can simply log on to OED.com. I learned about the Web site's revamp (a list of changes can be found here) through a tweet by Felix Salmon; through February 5, 2011, you can log on for free and explore using the username "trynewoed" and the password "trynewoed." (Or, if you just want a glimpse of what one entry looks like, here is a sample, the definition of "digital.")

But, being curious like a cat, I was not (am not) content to simply explore the high-level subjects of the book. No, Winchester repeatedly mentions a publication from that era, The Athenaeum (a literary and scientific review printed in London from 1828 to 1923), and I wanted to know more. It was a long shot, but there was so little to lose that I decided to try anyway: I plugged the title into Google Books.

Lo and behold, a copy of an issue covering January to June, 1870, popped up; the full text was available. This issue came from the Harvard University library. It is formatted in three columns and the type is tiny; it would be difficult, if not impossible, to undertake any academic research based on this digital collection, but for a dilettante such as myself, it is a gold mine.

I've been skimming the work for quite some time now. My progress is hampered by my frequent tracking down of other interesting books mentioned, even in passing. For example, I fell into a rabbithole looking at Old Merry's Queer Discourses on Queer Proverbs, for which the etching of the cat and mice above served as a frontispiece.

Who or what was "Old Merry"? Well, for that, I have no answer; Google did not provide adequate information, only references to "old, merry England," and a link back to The Athenaeum. To the New York Public Library with ye!

Jacket copy

Sincerely wish I had this pulp edition of The Outward Room. Instead, picked up an old copy at Argosy last week; it's the Simon and Schuster second printing from 1937.

Loving the cover text from the S&S edition -- the back features a snappy bio of Millen Brand, who at the time was more or less an unknown. Interesting facts! About Brand!:

He is now thirty years old. He plays chess occasionally, but is indifferent about most games. He is no automaton. ... he has, according to his wife (who is Pauline Leader, author of And No Birds Sing), an irritatingly even disposition.

Will probably scan/write more about this later when I collect my thoughts. New York Review Books reprinted it in 2010 -- if you're interested in a work that begins with a riveting escape from a mental hospital, this is for you!

2010 in books: What I read

Definitely not going to finish The American Language (HL Mencken) or The Metropolis Case (Matthew Gallaway) before midnight, so here, with little comment, and in no particular order, are the books that fed my brain between January and December (favorites bolded):

1. Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Nick Flynn
2. Sacred Games, Vikram Chanda
3. Freedom, Jonathan Franzen
4. Lush Life, Richard Price
5. Sunset Park, Paul Auster
6. The Imperfectionists, Tom Rachman
7. Like Life, Lorrie Moore
8. Lit, Mary Karr
9. Birds of America, Lorrie Moore
10. Flaubert's Parrot, Julian Barnes
11. Anatomy of an Epidemic, Robert Whitaker
12. Rumpus Women, compilation
13. C, Tom McCarthy
14. The Street of Crocodiles, Bruno Schulz
15. My Dog Tulip, JR Ackerley
16. Make Believe, Joanna Scott
17. The Manikin, Joanna Scott
18. The Black Minutes, Martin Solares
19. Half Life, Shelley Jackson
20. The Places in Between, Rory Stewart
21. Three Cups of Tea, Greg Mortenson
22. A Short History of Women, Kate Walbert
23. Lowboy, John Wray
24. You Are Here, Meenakshi Madhavan
25. The White Mary, Kira Salak
26. Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk
27. The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafron
28. Out Stealing Horses, Per Petterson
29. Fugitives and Refugees, Chuck Palahniuk
30. The 42nd Parallel, John Dos Passos
31. The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Michael Chabon
32. The Help, Kathryn Stockett
33. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson
34. The Girl Who Played With Fire, Stieg Larsson
35. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, Stieg Larsson
36. Room, Emma Donoghue
37. The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers, Thomas Mullen
38. Possible Side Effects, Augusten Burroughs
39. A Visit From the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan
40. Shutter Island, Dennis Lehane
41. Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann
42. The History of Love, Nicole Krauss
43. Bad Marie, Marcy Dermansky
44. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, Aimee Bender
45. Bright-Sided, Barbara Ehrenreich
46. Ghosted, Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall
47. Kapitoil, Teddy Wayne
48. The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins
49. Catching Fire, Suzanne Collins
50. Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins
51. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Mario Vargas Llosa
52. The Coast of Akron, Adrienne Miller
53. The Vagrants, Yiyun Li
54. Moth Smoke, Mohsin Hamid
55. The Territory of Men, Joelle Fraser
56. Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault
57. The Historian, Elizabeth Kostova
58. Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, Geoff Dyer
59. The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters
60. Await Your Reply, Dan Chaon
61. War, Sebastian Junger
62. A Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore
63. The Ask, Sam Lipsyte
64. Little Bee, Chris Cleave

Hey, cool -- that's more than a book a week! Maybe next year, I'll make it an even 100. Not sure what to take away from this; apparently, I like women writers, I like fiction more than nonfiction, and I skew toward white American writers?

Anyone want to borrow a book? Lemme know. The lending library is open in Astoria. Also, my beloved book club has more or less disbanded. New year, new group?

Stocking the bookshelf for 2011

New additions (from Powell's Books in Portland and Argosy Books on 59th between Park and Lex):

1. Nina Berberova, The Book of Happiness
2. Millen Brand, The Outward Room
3. Richard Cobb, Paris and Elsewhere
4. Ernest Hemingway, Across the River and Into the Trees
5. Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question
6. Ed. Erin McKean, Verbatim
7. Susan Minot, Lust & Other Stories
8. Susan Minot, Monkeys
9. Graham Robb, Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris
10. Joanna Scott, Tourmaline
11. Simon Winchester, The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary

I just finished Sacred Games (Vikram Chanda) and Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (Nick Flynn). Sacred Games was just what I needed for vacation: sprawling but fast paced, absorbing, full of Hindi expletives (bhenchod!). Haven't read many memoirs lately, and Suck City was a pretty good one; it focuses on Flynn's relationship, or lack thereof, with his father, a writer/bank robber/homeless man in Boston who begins sleeping at the shelter Flynn is employed by. At heart, it's just a fascinating story. And it's true: "There are many ways to drown, only the most obvious wave their arms as they're going under." 

Sumeet and I are keeping it low-key for the night: trying out Tiffin New York, finding something good on Netflix, listening to our cat mewl, and breaking out the Martinelli's at midnight. Here's to 2011! We (plus my parents) salute you from our great backyard in Milwaukie!

Ninety nine problems but a bitch ain't one

My family is primarily composed of what can only be dubbed crazy dog people. My grandparents have always had dogs (mostly Weimeraners), all my aunts have dogs (a revolving cast of Labradors), and in my youth and adolescence we had a succession of pups: Ruby, Bob, and Dinah. My mother now dotes on Kit, a Walker hound, who is so neurotic that he occasionally becomes too afraid to walk across the kitchen tiles (my mother muses that he once slipped and fell on the slick floor; who can blame his hesitance?).

I've read my share of James Herriott, and whenever a new canine-adjacent book comes out, I can count on being passed along a copy (Marley & Me and The Art of Racing in the Rain both ended up in my possession in this way). But until this year, I had never heard of J. R. Ackerley's My Dog Tulip; catapulted, I suppose, by Paul and Sandra Fierlinger's animated adaptation of the book, though, in the past several months I feel like I haven't been able to escape raves about the slim volume. (Truman Capote: "One of the greatest books ever written by anybody in the world.")

It's a quick read, and the language is light. Expect to read a lot about the mating process. You will learn many, many things about female dogs in heat, including just how glistening their vaginas become and how useful Vaseline is in facilitating the dance of love. None of this was particularly compelling, but then I got to the last chapter.

It is a chapter in which nothing really happens, except that Ackerley and Tulip go for long walks in the woods. And to me, it was so simple and perfect: just a beautiful statement about loneliness, and companionship, and what you do when you love another being very, very much. They come across broken bottles, and Ackerley is concerned about Tulip's paws:

One pounce upon this bottle, with both front feet perhaps ... I pick it up. I pick it all up, every tiny fragment. I seek it out, I root it up, this lurking threat to our security, our happiness, in the heart of the wood; day after day I uncover it and root it up, this disease in the heart of life.

That would be a lovely sentiment to end on. But I can't leave without noting that you, the reader, will become fixated on the number of times the word "bitch" is used. It certainly is correct to use "bitch" to refer to a female dog, but you just don't hear it all that much any more. I started imagining it would be amusing to chronicle all the instances of the word, but searching Google Books takes all the fun out of that: there are 45 uses of "bitch" in My Dog Tulip. (It feels like more.) Some of my favorites:

1. "What other bitch in your condition has so wonderful a time?" (p. 158)
2. "This independent, unapproachable, dignified and single-hearted creature, my devoted bitch, becomes the meekest of beggars." (p. 159)
3. "All bitch-owners must have the same problem ... Tulip is fairly normal and regular, a six- or seven-month bitch, but there are many deviations; some bitches are quite erratic and unpredictable ... No doubt, too, the degree of intensity varies from breed to breed, from bitch to bitch ..." (p. 162)
4. "Kick her out of the way, the dirty bitch!" (p. 163)
5. "Perfection of grace. My burning bitch, burning in her beauty and her heat ..." (p. 165)
6. "How enchanting she is, the coquettish little bitch, putting forth all her bitchiness." (p. 166)
7. "Matter of fact I did find him a bitch once, but he wouldn't look at her." (p. 178)

Make Believe, Joanna Scott

Preemptive New Year's resolution: chronicle all the books I read (perfect for the obsessive in me!). So here are a few (meager, disjointed) thoughts on the piece of fiction I just finished.

Have you heard of Joanna Scott? I hadn't until I came across a trove of her books in my favorite used bookstore (Seaburn, on Broadway in Astoria); I picked up The Manikin and Make Believe because, well, she was blurbed by Michael Cunningham and Rick Moody and David Foster Wallace ("the absolute cream of our generation"), and someone at the NYTBR held, "We haven't heard a voice like hers since Ovid wrote his Metamorphoses." Endorsements like those are hard to deny.

I read The Manikin almost in one sitting; I could not put it down, and it was easily one of the best books I've read this year. (Forthcoming: a list of my favorites? Hrmmm ...) A splash of the gothic, a story about what it means to be a young woman growing up -- there were a lot of themes for me to grab onto. I'll probably need to reread it, because I consumed it so greedily and in such a fever I can hardly cite what it is that impressed me so much.

The cover copy on Make Believe made clear that the book covered very different ground, so it's not surprising that I was not as entranced. Still good, but I've read a lot more books about the intricacies of the American family than I have about creepy old houses stuffed with taxidermy projects. Make Believe is ... well, I suppose you could say it's a story of two families who suffered a common tragedy, and it explores the very different ways that the two groups of people made lives out of the wreckage. This makes it sound a bit like a Lifetime movie, or one of those terrible after-school specials so popular during my formulative years, but it is much, much more than that; it is flashbacks, and shifting narratives, and layers of chaos that are as hard to untangle as the threads that hold together the fabric of any family.

At the end of the book, Scott writes:

As for the cold, well after the first shock you just stop feeling it, you stop feeling any discomfort, instead you’re treated to the very simple certainty that you should be exactly what you are, even as you’re changing.

2010 has been a bit of a shock for me. I am still out in the cold. My fingers are numb, but I think I know better now who I am and where I want to go.

Booker barnburning: C

Have recently plumbed the Booker shortlist; read (and liked) Room, and just picked up C, by Tom McCarthy.

It's a cool sort of book; you're plugging along with the protagonist, Serge, as he grows up in the early 20th century, and then you find yourself in a seance, the ghost of his sister looming unacknowledged in the ether of the pages. Or you discover yourself in Egypt, thrust back into Serge's childhood fixation with decoding messages hidden in the pages of the newspaper when he discovers the way early Egyptians secreted stories in scarabs. At times difficult to connect with, the narrative nonetheless crackles with a kind of fateful electricity.

My favorite excerpt (fascinated as I am by the commonness of my life and its definitive experiences, which I've come to imagine are little more exciting than discovering the sky is blue):

[Y]ou have to look at all of this, at all these histories of looking. The mistake most of my contemporaries make is to assume that they’re the first—-or, even when it’s clear they’re not, that their moment of looking is somehow definitive, standing outside of the long history of which it merely forms another chapter …

Washington Post review.

Guardian review.

From the bookshelf

Summer reading was, for the most part, indulgently pedestrian: I checked out those durned Girl books by Stieg Larsson; I read the Hunger Games trilogy (by Suzanne Collins); I sped through Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett; as an aside, check out the author phot on his Web site: classic!). I also worked in A Visit from the Goon Squad (Jennifer Egan) and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (Aimee Bender) and Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness (Robert Whitaker -- highly, highly recommended, if you're of the nonfiction bent).

It's feeling more fall-like (pumpkin spice lattes: they're back!), and I feel a transition to heavier books coming on. I've been doing a bit of exploring of the Booker short-list; I just finished Room (Emma Donoghue), and I'm a few chapters into C (Tom McCarthy). 2666 (Bolano) and Wolf Hall (Hilary Mantel) are waiting for me to crack them open. At the gym today, gasping and red-faced and sweaty, the woman on the machine next to me looked over quizzically.

"How do you read like that?!"

"So many books, so little time." (Also: a bit of mania!)