Is there a children's edition?

Packing the Court: The Rise of Judicial Power and the Coming Crisis of the Supreme Court by James MacGregor Burns.

For a book both the NY Times and Washington Post called "Provocative", I was not expecting it to be quite so dry. So-and-so appointed so-and-so to the court; it became more conservative and they ruled this way in the case of Mr. someone vs Mr. Otherguy. It wasn't until the last quarter of the book that Burns started to incorporate some actual analysis and his own thoughts into the writing. Coincidence that the most interesting and thoughtful part of the book covers the 30 years or so that he's been alive? I think not. If he had just focused on recent events using history as an example to back it up when needed, I think this actually would have been a good book.


I did learn quite a bit, but I thought it was very unfriendly for "casual fans" and really geared towards history buffs who can recite the presidential order in their sleep. 


Here are some things I would have appreciated:
1) A simple who is on the court overview at the beginning of each chapter. 
2) Sidebars or boxes to explain the cases he references. How nice that they ruled in favor of Madison, now please explain who/what Madison is and what the case was about so that I can better understand the impact of the decision. Seriously, I needed google open at all times when reading.
3) Pictures of the justices, fun facts, really anything to break up the seemingly endless block of tiny text on each page.



I would recommend this book if you have a strong interest in the supreme court, can list the presidents in chronological order, and know all the major decisions by heart; or at a bare minimum, have a strong interest in history and politics. Everyone else, I suggest waiting for the children's edition...

An unexpected recommendation

My parents' friends are interesting people. And I mean that in a good way, not in a "well, that was...interesting" way. For the most part, their friends are a lot like them: they travel frequently, read quite a bit, pursue their various hobbies and interests, and usually know the useless bits of trivia on Jeopardy.

As I've gotten older, I've begun to appreciate how much we can learn from them and that as much as we believed when we were younger life sort of ended at 40 and you became this boring blob of moving flesh, the parents of today are much...dare I say it...cooler, than we thought.

Case in point: Ilana DeBare. Believe it or not I used to babysit her daughter who is now in high school. (Wow I'm getting old!) I stumbled across her blog an embarrassingly long time after accepting her friend request on Facebook and have been catching up ever since. I found this review of David Grossman's To the End of the Land and was awed. Not only am I escalating this book to the top of my reading "queue", but I hope to be inspired by her beautiful writing to make my now seemingly kindergartenesque blog (with invented words) slightly better. Here's the link for those interested:
http://midlifebatmitzvah.wordpress.com/2010/12/29/ilanas-book-of-the-year-to-the-end-of-the-land/


Status update on my current reading: Currently on page 218 of 267 in Packing the Court. Slow going as I keep falling asleep while reading it. (A testament to my permanent state of exhaustion and also the book's boringness.) I expect to finish tonight and if tomorrow is another slow day at work, possibly post a review at that time.

The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy

Thanks to two back to back weeks of working 60 hours, it took me a really long time to read this one. In my defense, the book is also very dense and the type is fairly small. 

General impressions: It was very good. Not great, but very good. Sometimes the writing flowed beautifully, seemed to match the pace and tone of the action perfectly, and made me smile. Other times it felt like watching someone tread water in a lap pool.  Roy mixes in Malayalam (native language) words which at times was a bit confusing and seemed to require too much processing. I had to reread sentences and once the entire paragraph because I kept getting stuck on "translating" something. And finally, I thought there were too many penises mentioned in completely unnecessary ways, leaving me slightly grossed out and concerned about the apparent shortage of pants in India. (Joking, joking...There's a definite erotic undertone though.)

The story is narrated in the third person, but mainly centered on dizygotic (fraternal) twins, Rahel and Estha who things just sort of seem to happen to. There's a chapter where Rahel is watching her family on the front porch, and she says it's like watching a scene in a play. To me, the whole book seemed like that. They don't actually do anything, things just sort of occur. People say and do things, and the twins (who actually view themselves as one person) just soak everything up, watching interactions, and being shaped based on the family members around them.

The book begins with the funeral of their cousin, Sophie, who visits from England "Hatted, bell-bottomed, and Loved from the Beginning"; and then in a circuitous and somewhat mysterious series of flashbacks and forwards, tells the tragic story of a family, deeply unfortunate, and their love, and ultimate betrayal, of one another leading up the night of Sophie's death. 

I thought the last chapter was especially well written and did make me cry. Though in fairness, other things that make me cry are:

a) The Liberty Mutual commercial where the people "pay it forward" and do nice things for each other because they witnessed another good deed

b) The song "The Luckiest" by Ben Folds

c) Onions

I highly recommend it, but just know that wading through her prose is slow going, and some of the subject matter such as pedophilia, violence, and incest might be upsetting. This would be a great read for a serious book club (unlike mine which is actually a wine and 'who can make the best finger food competition' club masquerading as a group of women with an interest in literature), as I think I could have benefited from some varying view points and more discussion/analysis.

Coming later this week: Packing the Court by James MacGregor Burns. And, to balance out all this learning I'm doing, I think it's about time for some trashy romance :-) Plus I still have to finish Kafka on the Shore... Stay tuned!

Guess what I found...

Last night I was playing fetch with Lulu (I throw the ball and then go fetch it) when her tennis ball rolled under my dresser. I stuck my head underneath to grab it, and guess what was there?

Kafka on the Shore (see my least favorite books of 2010 list if you don't know that I'm talking about).

The upside of this discovery: Good to know that I do not throw things away in my sleep.
The downside of this discovery: Now I have to finish the book.

The Stone Diaries - Carol Shields

Well after a week and a half of horrendously long hours at the office (not to mention on the train, at home, and pretty much anywhere else I can check email), I finally finished this book. It's a little early in the year to make such bold statements, but I'll just go ahead and make one anyway: I predict that this will make it to my top 5 books of 2011.
The book is less about what happens in an action sense, and much more about who we are as people and the events in our life that shape us. It begins with the birth of Daisy Goodwill in 1905 in a small town in Canada. Subsequent chapters are called Childhood, Marriage, Love, Work, Sorrow, Ease, and Illness and Decline, so I think you can see where this book is going. But it's not as predictable as it sounds. Years, decades even, sometimes elapse between chapters, leaving you wondering what you missed.
There are many characters, each with their own very distinct personality, who pop in and out of the story, always reappearing just in time to tie something together you were on the verge of not understanding.

It astonished him how these books were stuffed fully of people. Each one was like a little world, populated and furnished. - From the chapter Marriage, 1927.


I highly recommend this one for all audiences. If I have anything negative to say it's that there are some pictures in the middle and I wish I hadn't looked at them because it changed the way I thought about some of the characters. Otherwise, it's a phenomenal piece of literature and barring a 60 hour work week, shouldn't take too long to read.

What's on my nightstand

Just finished: Under the Skin - James Carlos Blake
Think of the literary version of No Country for Old Men. Graphic and violent but well written with splashes of irony. Recommended only for those who don't get nauseous when they see blood.

Next up:
The Stone Diaries - Carol Shields. The SF Chronicle says "Bittersweet and beautifully written..." and the book won the national book critics circle award.
The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy. A national bestseller the New York Times calls "dazzling".
Both sound promising. Thanks Mom!

I also have She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb which I finished the first 20 pages of today before realizing I'd already read it. I can't remember how it ends though, so maybe I'll read it again, just for fun.

With a name like Persimmon...

I'm not exactly sure what I was expecting from "Prozac Highway" (by Persimmon Blackbridge) but this was definitely not it. Janice, or Jam as she is known to her friends, is a mid-40's dyke (her words, not mine) permanently on the edge of a nervous breakdown. She suffers from serious depression and can't seem to perform basic human actions like brushing her teeth or walking to the mailbox. She can, however, find the time to play 6 hours of SwordQuest each day and read through the million emails she gets from her crazy-people support group/listserve. At least 1/3 of the book is messages from other group members, and another third the action taking place in her SwordQuest game. Really?! They made it across the river but then realized they were out of groceries? O no!

As the book goes on her condition worsens and finally at the insistence of her ex-lover and current friend who she makes artsy porn with, she goes to see a psychiatrist who prescribes prozac and lithium. After about a month on the medications (which takes Blackbridge about 2 minutes to go through compared with the 20 pages it normally takes her to write about a day when absolutely nothing happens) Jam begins to have suicidal thoughts. Meanwhile, she gets involved with another crazy person in the group who lives on the other side of the country and is in some sort of mental institution (but conveniently still allowed to use the computer). As their relationship deepens her sanity seems to disappear.

At this point in the book I was kind of looking forward to her just ending it all. Blackbridge drops in plenty of references about scars so I figured I had this ending in the bag. Unfortunately, the best friend appears at the last minute and rushes her to the hospital. She lives, although the ending is more than a little ambiguous.

I was ready to chalk this up as a terrible idea for a novel when I turned the book over and noticed that Persimmon herself looked just like the character, Jam. Guess truth is stranger than fiction...

The 5 Worst Books I Read in 2010

Well dear readers, I am not starting out our relationship very well. If you're looking at the date stamp on today's post then you know I lied because it is not one day after the last post. Sorry, real world duties got in the way.

This list was a little bit more difficult to compile. After all, someone worked hard and spent a long time writing their book. Chances are they're pretty proud of themselves, and they probably think it's a fantastic piece of literature. Besides, who am I to judge? Writing is art, and as we all know, art is highly personal and very subjective. Maybe a bad book is like that painting at a museum everyone walks by and thinks "my 3 year old could have drawn that!", except that one guy who thinks it's the most amazing thing he's ever seen.

So, keeping in mind that this is just my opinion, here are my least favorite (sounds nicer than worst, right?) books of 2010 in no particular order.

1) One Night at the Call Center - Chetan Bhagat
I now understand that the blurb on the back of a book is a lot like the theatrical trailer for a Lindsay Lohan movie. This book sounded so promising. A group of young adults in one of India's tech support centers receives a call from God. So far so good. Reality? A group of obnoxious overgrown teenagers who are completely unlikeable blow off work one night when they find out some of them will be laid off in the morning to go on an "adventure". It's the most boring adventure I've ever been on and so predictable I wish I had just let my imagination fill in the rest instead of wasting an hour of my life reading the second half of the book.

2) Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami
I have to confess that I didn't finish this one. I tried, I really did. About two-thirds of the way through I got to a particularly disturbing scene involving the beheading of live cats and just couldn't read any more. I put it on my nightstand in the pile and then night after night and morning after morning I picked something else to read. Weeks later I went looking for it to try again and it wasn't there anymore. Maybe I threw it away in my sleep?
The book begins with a group of school children on a class field trip who for some unexplainable reason all faint at the same time and are briefly unconscious. They wake up with nothing wrong and continue on with their normal lives, except for one little boy. Chapters alternate between the story of an old man who apparently can talk to animals and keeps referring to himself as very stupid, and a teenager who runs away from home. There are also a few brief interludes from the perspective of the teacher who was on the class fieldtrip with the kids who fainted. I can only speculate where the book was going with this one, but I'm guessing they all intersect at some point. It would have been fine had it not been for the completely unnecessary graphic scenes of animal (and human) cruelty and slow pace of the action.

3) Do Try to Speak as We Do: The Diary of an American Au Pair - Marjorie Leet Ford
I don't have nearly as much to say about this one. I thought the plot was boring, the writing uninspired, and I was relieved when it was finally over. Synopsis: After losing her job, American born Melissa decides to take a job as a nanny in Scotland and the book is her letters to her friends in the US. The mother character is unrealistically mean, and father predictably nice.
I've never seen a book where they manage to work the title into the actual dialogue so frequently. And no, that is not a compliment (writers of "Because I said So", take note). The best thing I can say about this book is that the descriptions of the food are very detailed and succeeded in making me hungry.

4) Carolina Isle - Jude Deveraux
I might say this frequently, but was without a doubt, hands down, no contest, the WORST book I have ever read in my entire life. Normally I love trashy romance novels and although I've never read anything else by Deveraux, it's a big name in the genre. While this book attempts to be both a romance and a mystery, it's neither. In fact, the only genre I can use to describe it is terrible.
The plot is ridiculous and childish (2 identical cousins decide to switch places for a summer...) and the writing is absurdly basic. It feels like the book was written for a much younger audience, which would be acceptable if it were true, but some scenes are much too "adult" to pass for teen fiction. The book feels as though there are sentences, paragraphs, even entire chapters missing. There were multiple times I actually checked that the page numbers had only increased by 1, and once I verified I was left scratching my head. The characters are shallow, I didn't like them at all much less feel sorry for them when I was supposed to, and there was absolutely no chemistry between the couples. I want those 2 hours of my life back.

5) I'll Steal You Away - Niccolo Ammaniti
This is probably my most controversial pick. The New York times said it was not great but fine, and readers on Amazon seem to agree. In addition, the book was originally written in Italian and then translated into English, so it's hard to know if perhaps something got lost in translation. I personally hated it and since this is my list, I reserve the right to insult any book I choose.
The book follows two different characters in a small town in Italy: a young boy who fails his grade school assessment and an older washed up musician whose life is going nowhere. However, the book also goes off on some unrelated tangents about completely new people and has mini-stories that seem to go nowhere. The book is witty, but the characters lack something I can't describe, and there are so many of them (all with nicknames) it's a little hard to keep track. Ammaniti also uses dreams and fantasies, but sometimes it's hard to tell whether the action is really occurring or if it's just being thought. His use of italics is questionable at best.

On an unrelated note, I just finished another terrible book which I cannot wait to insult tomorrow.

Best and Worst of 2010

As we begin 2011, I can't help but reminisce about 2010 and things I read over the past year. There were many books that were good but not especially memorable, some that were bad, and a few that stood out as exceptional or downright awful. So, dear reader(s?), I present to you my top 5 and bottom 5 books of 2010.

TOP (In no particular order)
1. Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters - Mark Dunn
This was the most creative book I read all year, and quite possibly the most creative I have ever read. Without giving too much away, I don't ever recall a book that played with letters in the same way that Mark Dunn has. He manages to keep the reader entertained by the English language, like we're all in on a joke together, without losing anything in the plot along the way.

2. The Book Thief - Markus Zusak
I stole this one from a hotel room in Jamaica (fitting, right?) and simply couldn't put it down for 2 days straight. Be warned: it's an emotional read. It's a story of a 9-year old girl in Germany in the 1930s/40s who "collects" books. Based on the era and the location I think you can guess where this one is going... What separates this one is the phenomenal writing, believable and sympathetic characters, and the touches of humor sprinkled throughout.

3. Buyology - Martin Lindstrom
Those not in the market research field may not appreciate this, but I felt like it still deserved a place on this list. After all, it's the 5 best things I read this year. Lindstrom is doing some fascinating research using neuroscience. While I spend my days designing web surveys to get into the mind of consumers (figuratively), this book hooks up some metal probes and literally gets in their head. It's clearly non-fiction, but the writing is entertaining and it's never dry or text-booky.

4. Water for Elephants - Sara Gruen
I was a little late to the bandwagon on this one and it's a good possibility that everyone has already read it. However, if you haven't, you should do so immediately.

5. We Need to Talk About Kevin -Lionel Shriver
I feel that this one needs a strong warning: It's graphic and disturbing. While it seems like it could be non-fiction, what got me through some of the hard parts was reminding myself that this is in fact a made-up story. Spoiler alert: It's the story of a boy who going on a killing rampage at his high school, told from the perspective of the mother. The book is saved by the beautiful writing, which at times borders on poetic. It's a thought provoking piece about nature vs nurture that I couldn't get out of my head weeks, even months after. It's worth a read, but maybe not right before bed...


Bottom 5 books to come tomorrow.