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July 14
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gaby
gave
 
to:
To the Lighthouse (1927)
by Virginia Woolf
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my rating:
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read in June, 2008
gaby said:
"My feelings about this book ranged considerably. At times I thought it a horrid little trite underdeveloped high-school creative writing class level exercise; at others I found it merely boring and dated. I found nearly none of the power, wit and ins...more
My feelings about this book ranged considerably. At times I thought it a horrid little trite underdeveloped high-school creative writing class level exercise; at others I found it merely boring and dated. I found nearly none of the power, wit and insight that oozed from A Room of One's Own, and I certainly have no intention of ever reading any more Woolf....less
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gaby
is currently reading:
The Consequences to Come: American Power After Bush (Paperback)
by Robert B. Silvers
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June 16
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gaby
marked as to-read:
Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays (Paperback)
by Joan Didion
bookshelves:
to-read
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my rating:
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gaby
gave
to:
If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (Everyman's Library Classics)
by Italo Calvino
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my rating:
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gaby
marked as to-read:
Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America, The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster, and In Watermelon Sugar (Paperback)
by Richard Brautigan
bookshelves:
to-read
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my rating:
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gaby
marked as to-read:
White Mule: A Novel (Paperback)
by William Carlos Williams
bookshelves:
to-read
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my rating:
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gaby
marked as to-read:
Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence (Paperback)
by Gary Lynch, Richard Granger
bookshelves:
to-read
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my rating:
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May 13
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gaby
gave
to:
Miss Lonelyhearts (Paperback)
by Nathanael West
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my rating:
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recommended for: everyone, particularly salinger worshippers
read in May, 2008
gaby said:
"My coming to know Nathanael West was like rounding a corner and accidentally running smack into a stranger who thereafter instantly becomes your best friend. I knew almost nothing about him before picking up this greying little 100 page book for a do...more
My coming to know Nathanael West was like rounding a corner and accidentally running smack into a stranger who thereafter instantly becomes your best friend. I knew almost nothing about him before picking up this greying little 100 page book for a dollar at Black Oak. When I'd finished it a couple of days later, I was in love!
Nathanael West was born Nathan Weinstein in 1903 in Manhattan. A wealthy but iconoclastic child, Nathan dropped out of high school and got into Tufts University by forging his own transcript. After failing out of Tufts, he transferred to Brown University by using the transcript of another Tufts student named Nathan Weinstein.
Nathanael died at 37, having produced a couple of books and a couple of B-movie screenplays. He died in a car crash near Los Angeles, on his way to F. Scott Fitzgerald's funeral.
Miss Lonelyhearts was his magnum opus. Published in 1933, it is from the very first page a striking work. It follows Miss Loneyhearts, the "Dear Abby" of the day, who takes the job of writing the advice column for a newspaper thinking it'll be an ironic joke job, but who becomes infected with the extremely modern suffering of the people who write in for help. The young man is never given a name besides Miss Lonelyhearts. He immediately reminded me so much of Holden Caulfield - and in fact the whole book feels very much like a precursor to Catcher in the Rye in tone and message.
Finally, the real star of Miss Lonelyhearts is not the boyish antihero after whom it is named, but West himself and his unflinching playfulness with language. I read parts of this book aloud because the language was so physical, spectacular, and very grimcore. In one of my favorite lines, West describes that in kissing, "he drove his triangular face like a hatchet into her neck".
It does a disservice to the visceral power of this book to simply say it's the best thing I've read in a really long time, maybe years. I cannot recommend it more highly. ...less
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gaby
gave
to:
Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class (Wildavsky Forum Series)
by Robert Frank
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my rating:
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read in April, 2008
gaby said:
"I almost didn't review this book. I could tell pretty early on that I wasn't going to have much to say about it, despite having had an extensive conversation about its substantive points well in advance of having actually read it. So I thought perha...more
I almost didn't review this book. I could tell pretty early on that I wasn't going to have much to say about it, despite having had an extensive conversation about its substantive points well in advance of having actually read it. So I thought perhaps it might be best to forgo the sort of acerbic, non-plussed review I expected from myself. But when have I been known to leave well enough alone? So here we are.
I live in a bit of a self-chosen world of intellectual binaries. The things about which I spend almost all of my time thinking (music/fiction and The Law) are extremely dissimilar. Music and fiction set up little worlds, but they are worlds in which no answers are expected or even possible. The Law also provides an identifiable framework but supplies, in surprising measure, many answers (which I am expected, in surprising measure, to find).
There is a whole universe of murky area in between these two polar extremes - the seedy side of the Social Sciences. Disciplines that set up frameworks and provide the pretense of answers, but really they're just contextual minefields. And, while I don't claim to know much of anything about economics, I had always supposed that it was more in the Real Science camp than the Social Science camp. Maybe this is a misconception on my part - maybe my general Fear of Math has led me to overstate the objectivity of disciplines in which it is integral. In any case, Falling Behind seemed to me much more an exercise in subjective posturing than in Real Science Rooted in Numbers. The book is largely told in anecdote form - literally, Frank illustrates a cornerstone of his thesis by recounting the time his two sons, ages 7 and 10, fought over who had more orange juice in their glasses. Frank extrapolates from this anecdote a whole series of serious 'truths' about human nature and American economics, sprinkling his personal experiences with 'Darwinian' theory in what comes across as an attempt to siphon off some scientific legitimacy.
At another touching juncture, Frank recounts the cruel impact that 'going part-time' wrought on the psyche of his divorced male colleague at Cornell, who found that "instantly, women no longer wanted to date him". In a happy turn, Frank concludes that the negative social connotation associated with working part-time did not impact the quality of assignments he was given at work. This touched a particular nerve to me, since I've seen how 'going part-time' impacts professional women, and stunts the quality of their work assignments. Frank may have been trying to prove some deep economic theory, but this anecdote, along with many others, rang hollow, out of touch, and provided an extremely narrow account of a really huge issue.
In short, I expected a whole lot more facts and figures to back up the trends Frank purports to be tracking. His general theses make a certain amount of sense, but don't seem adequately rooted in proof. I'm not a Cornell professor to be sure, but I certainly wouldn't have dared turn in a paper with that few citations in law school.
A quick glance on goodreads shows that no one that has read this book has given it less than 4 stars. I can totally accept that I just didn't "get it". And now I'm going back to fiction....less
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April 22
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gaby
gave
to:
A Room of One's Own, and Three Guineas (Oxford World's Classics)
by Virginia Woolf
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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recommended for: feminists (revisionist and otherwise), historians, persons with interest in gender politics
read in April, 2008
gaby said:
"Woolf's lectures provide a charming, surprisingly un-dated little window into early 20th century gender politics and the awakening of literature and public discourse by women. It is at all points an empowering call to arms, as relevant in 2008 as 192...more
Woolf's lectures provide a charming, surprisingly un-dated little window into early 20th century gender politics and the awakening of literature and public discourse by women. It is at all points an empowering call to arms, as relevant in 2008 as 1928, for women to claim a stake in the world of arts and letters and science, to refuse to be silenced by men or by other women, and to just Do The Work - not because it may be the best poem or song or short story ever written, but because each piece of work is a brick laid up against another, and one day the true genius will not be able to lay down her brick without the other, perhaps inferior ones, at its side.
Oh, how I cringed as she derided the barrister, shuffling along the bright sunny day back to his office to "make more money" while she wrote books at the cafe. Yes, Virginia, how sad a sight - welcome to my spring 2008!
But the end of the lectures in particular will stay with me. She talks again of each woman artist as being set within the larger context of all women artists - and that the struggle of one sets the stage for another, 100 or 200 years later. While she teased out this theme, over and over, I struggled to recall if Plath had ever mentioned reading this book - because it struck me as almost supernatural, how much this book read like an instruction manual exclusively to her.
In the end, it is the individual's struggle more than the artifact that one creates with which one builds and contributes to a legacy, and that process is the critical part. "To work," Woolf concludes, explains, intones, "in poverty and obscurity, is still worthwhile"....less
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Instant City: A literary Exploration of San Francisco
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