Books catch-up

I've had a bit more time to read lately, but not so much to blog about it. The new job is keeping me busy, and why was I ever crazy enough to think I'd have MORE time once my kid was in kindergarten rather than daycare? So, here's a brief catch-up.

Break Into Fiction (Mary Buckham and Dianna Love, 2009) uses worksheets and examples from popular movies to show writers how to apply the Hero's Journey structure to plotting their own work. A timely read for me, since plotting is one of my weak points. My last manuscript went through three full drafts--not rewrites, but full drafts--because it took me so long to figure out what the plot actually was. And I like that it uses the Hero's Journey, which feels more organic and flexible to me that other approaches I've seen, such as Goal-Motivation-Conflict. (Full disclosure: Mary Buckham is a member of my local RWA chapter.)

The House of Hope of Fear (Audrey Young, 2009) chronicles the experience of a young medical resident at Seattle's Harborview Medical Center, where I worked in a non-patient care role 2007-09. This should be required reading for anyone opposed to health care reform, since it shows what a mess the current system is. (I try not to be political on this blog, but sometimes I just can't help it.)

In the Bleak Midwinter (Julia Spencer-Fleming, 2002) is the first in a mystery series set in upstate New York and featuring a police chief (Russ) and an Episcopalian priest (Clare) as sleuths. It's very, very good, with strong writing and appealing characters. I'm normally really put off by stories that call upon the reader to root for divorce or adultery (Russ is married, not miserably but not all that happily either), but in this case I had sympathy for everyone involved.

In For a Penny (Rose Lerner, 2010) is the debut book of one of my critique partners. And it is wonderful. If you're tired of wallpaper Regency historical romances and are looking for something grounded in its place and time, this is the book for you. It's very well-written with sympathetic, engaging characters, too.

The Wordy Shipmates

The Wordy Shipmates (2008) is Sarah Vowell's rambly exploration of the early years of Puritan settlement in New England and its impact on American culture on through to the present day. And I had a lot of fun reading it because I kept imagining it in her voice.

The key word here is "rambly." Linear this book is not, and I wonder how much sense it would've made to someone who didn't go in with a fairly solid grounding in American colonial history. Then again, maybe her audience is only other history geeks like me and it doesn't matter.

Anyway, if you like Sarah Vowell, you'll like this book. Reading it made me wish I could hang out with her and geek out over historical crushes and obsessions, because she talks about John Winthrop, Roger Williams, etc. just the way I talk about the Duke of Wellington, Eugene de Beauharnais, etc.

Guyland

Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men (Michael Kimmel, 2008) is a depressing book. Kimmel's theory is that our culture has added a new stage between adolescence and adulthood, especially for young men--"Guyland," roughly the ages between 16 and 26. And that stage is pretty messed up. While acknowledging that not every guy fits the mold and that most don't go to the worst extremes, Kimmel paints a depressing picture of binge drinking, hazing hell, misogynistic porn, dysfunctional relationships with women, and post-collegiate aimlessness.

Mostly this book made me feel glad I (and my male friends) are well past this stage, and that I spent my college years in a different subculture where my only interaction with Guyland guys was occasionally having to walk by the frat houses where the brothers sat on the porch and called out 1-10 ratings or speculated on your sexual orientation. And, it also made me apprehensive when I think of my daughter being a teenager in less than a decade.

But the funny thing is it also made me feel a bit sorry for the guys, insofar as we as a culture have let them down--it doesn't make me forgive the misogyny, not even a bitty bit, but I can relate to feeling like the American Dream is slipping away from your generation and to knowing you want more from life but being totally clueless and therefore aimless about how to get there.

Predictably Irrational

Predictably Irrational (Dan Ariely, 2008) details common human foibles as seen through the lens of behavioral economics. It turns out we're not the rational actors classical economics as established by Adam Smith says we ought to be. We make poor decisions based on emotion, we procrastinate, we choose short-term comfort over long-term security, etc. We believe stereotypes--even about ourselves. One of the most disturbing studies Ariely cites, in my opinion, is the one where two groups of Asian-American women, college students, were each given a math test. Before the test, one group answered a questionnaire about their experiences as women, while the other answered one about their cultural background. A case of competing stereotypes, you see? Women are supposed to be bad at math, while Asians are supposed to be good at it. Sure enough, the women who had been reminded of their gender scored lower than the ones who'd been reminded of their ethnicity.

Definitely recommended for anyone who's interested in popular science or economics, and guaranteed to make you think more deeply about why you make the choices you do.

The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw (Book #29)

The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw (Bruce Barcott, 2008) explores the tension between conservation and economic development in the developing world through a battle over a hydroelectric dam in Belize. It's a sobering but valuable reminder that things that seem black-and-white thousands of miles away look more complicated on the ground. I still would've sided with the conservationists on this one, no matter what, but I understand better how such efforts can look like a new form of imperialism when coming from the citizens of a rich country that, for example, dammed most of its own rivers decades ago.

The War of Art (Book #14)

I have yet to sell a book, but I've finished three manuscripts and am almost 50,000 words into a fourth. When I'm in the zone and in drafting mode, I can turn out 80 pages or more a month despite working full time, having a 3-year-old child, and only being able to squeeze an hour or so per day out of the calendar to write.

If it sounds like I'm bragging, I kind of am. This is what I want to do, more than anything. (Well, more than anything I want to start SELLING those manuscripts, but you know what I mean.) So I've fought pitched battles with my own laziness, procrastination, and fear of both success and failure and trained myself to sit down, day in and day out, whether I'm feeling all creative and inspired or not, and put words on the page. And there are few tougher adversaries than laziness, procrastination, and fear. Steven Pressfield labels them Resistance, and his book, The War of Art (2003), is about defeating it.

For the most part, I found the book an inspiring reminder of lessons already learned. I like his focus on professionalism, i.e. doing the work whether you're in the mood or not. Wait for the Muse, and she'll ignore you. Start writing without the Muse, and she'll eventually come to bless you. Pressfield quotes Somerset Maugham: "I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp." I heard the same basic idea from Bernard Cornwell at a writers' conference, and it's stayed with me. He says there's no such thing as writer's block, and the day a nurse can call her hospital and say she can't come in to work because she has nurse's block and have that accepted as a valid excuse is the day we have a right to put on diva airs and not write simply because we're stuck or aren't in the mood.

Anyway, I'm with Pressfield when he talks about overcoming Resistance and writing like a pro even when you're not getting paid for your work yet. But he loses me when he starts getting all visionary and mystic about the Source of creativity, and how the ideas are Out There and we're just the channels. Um, no. Way too New Age and woo-woo for me. I get my share of blinding epiphanies and "aha!" moments, but it's my own brain that's doing it. I can get plenty of joy and even sense of the numinous out of being a storyteller, another link in a long chain going back to the bards of old and even to grandmothers and grandfathers around the fires in Paleolithic caves, without believing I'm nothing more than a channel for the muse.

Escape (Book #13)

Carolyn Jessop, the author of Escape (2007) is just a few years older than me. Reading her memoir of life in the FLDS (Warren Jeffs' fundamentalist Mormon cult), I would occasionally note the year an event occurred and try to remember what I was doing when it happened--e.g. when she was married off at 18, becoming the fourth wife of a man in his 50's, I'm pretty sure I was at band camp with my friends. And she finally fled the community, taking all 8 of her children with her, a few months before I got pregnant with my first and thus far only child. If I didn't anchor her life to mine that way, I'd forget that I was reading the story of one of my contemporaries, because it seemed so unreal that this kind of abuse was going on in my country, in my lifetime.

It's a harrowing book, but it has a happy ending because of Carolyn Jessop's strength and courage. That she managed to get out, win custody of her children, and find a way to live in mainstream society is a testimony to her resilience.

Allies for Armageddon (Book #11)

Allies for Armageddon: The Rise of Christian Zionism (Victoria Clark, 2007) explores the Religious Right's role in Middle Eastern politics. Half of the book studies the history of the movement from roughly 1600 to 1948, while the other half, IMHO the more interesting one, focuses on the belief common in conservative Christian circles that Israel has absolute, divinely ordained title to a big swath of the Middle East, including Israel, the Occupied Territories, and then some. You'll occasionally see bumper stickers in the Bible Belt that say "My country--right or wrong." You don't see "Israel--God's country, right or wrong," but that belief goes even deeper. Basically, the Palestinians don't matter, and conflict in the Middle East is a good thing, because it brings the apocalypse and Jesus' return that much closer.

It's crazy. And I used to believe it myself, 15 years or so ago. It appealed to me then because, if you accept the worldview behind it, it has a certain internal logic. Also, at that age, I loved the idea that I might be living at the CLIMAX OF HISTORY! Now? I've had enough interesting times. I'd like a few boring, uneventful decades to live my life and raise my kid and write some books. Anyway, Clark's book is a decent summary of the movement, which she seems to understand better than most outsiders.

(For the record, I'm still a Zionist in the sense that I support Israel's right to exist within safe and secure borders and to defend itself on the same terms that any other nation might. It's just that I now believe there should be a Palestinian state as well, that if something is wrong for America, the UK, Japan, etc. to do it's also wrong for Israel, and I no longer believe that 1948 triggered some kind of prophetic countdown to the Second Coming.)

Taste (Book #9)

Taste: The Story of Britain Through Its Cooking (Kate Colquhoun, 2007) makes social history out of a topic--British cuisine--that's often treated as a joke. It's full of fascinating tidbits about everything from the configuration of medieval banquets to WWII rationing, but you have to wade through a dry, encyclopedic presentation to find them.

God's Harvard (Book #8)

Patrick Henry College, the subject of God's Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America (Hanna Rosin, 2007) is no ordinary Christian college. It's designed specifically for kids from a conservative homeschool background, and its goal isn't to educate students for the pulpit and/or the wide vocational spectrum of modern life: instead, they're training culture warriors for the front lines of the religious right. The founder's stated dream is that in 30 years, the director of the Best Picture Oscar winner will receive a call from his former Patrick Henry roommate--the president of the United States. The only majors are government, history, literature, journalism, and classic liberal arts.

Rosin, a Washington Post reporter, followed a tumultuous year in the life of the still new and experimental college (it's less than a decade old). I wanted to weep for some of the students who were so bright and so ambitious being forced through a system that's ultimately so restrictive, like the brilliant girl who was groomed to be First Lady rather than President, though I also wanted to wring the kids' narrow-minded young necks for seeing the 2006 elections as a case of "evil winning." PHC is emphatically a Republican endeavor. They'd see someone like me, a Christian who votes Democrat and is supporting Barack Obama, as at best deluded and at worst willfully rebellious and evil. And...like it or not, they're here to stay. What remains to be seen is whether they'll remain influential.

Almost French (Book #7)

Almost French (Sarah Turnbull, 2001) is the memoir of an Australian woman who meets a Frenchman while traveling in Europe and ends up moving to Paris to live with him. It's a humorous tale of culture clash and learning to understand and value differences.

Reading it, I remembered my own year in England, which brought its own share of culture clashes and humorous miscommunication. But compared to Turnbull, I had it easy, very easy. England and America are cultural cousins--siblings, really. And for all the "separated by a common language" jokes, aside from some early embarrassments (I can't BELIEVE no one warned me about "fanny") and confusions (I didn't know what a "courgette" was until the cook brought out the pot of zucchini to show me), I never had any trouble communicating. And when called upon to explain or defend some aspect of American current events, I could do so fluently--this was 1997-98, so I was saddled with the Louise Woodward case and the Monica Lewinsky scandal, among other things. Poor Turnbull at first was stuck trying to explain Australia when her vocabulary didn't extend much beyond, "Not all think same. Much change."

I enjoyed the book as a window into modern France. I'm getting to know the France of 200 years ago with some intimacy, and it's illuminating to see what it's become since. Someday I hope to travel extensively there--so much art, so much food, so much history and even prehistory!--but I don't think I'd have the cross-cultural energy to live there. Turnbull's life sounds exhilarating but exhausting. (England I'd move back to in a nanosecond, given the opportunity.)

Napoleon and Wellington (Book #4)

Napoleon and Wellington (Andrew Roberts, 2001) is a readable and compelling dual biography/military history...but only if you already have a fair amount of knowledge of the men and the era. If, for example, the names Salamanca and Borodino don't mean anything to you, you'll be pretty lost.

The book is almost a biography of reputations--what Napoleon and Wellington thought of each other before and after Waterloo, history's verdict on both and its accuracy or lack thereof. I agree with Roberts' assessment of their characters--that as much as each one's apologists would like to make them into contrasting types, they were actually quite a bit alike in their sheer arrogance, talent, and ambition. Napoleon was the more ambitious, sure, but who knows what Wellington might've done if absolute power had been an option for him. He did, after all, rise as high as an Englishman could in both military and civilian arenas, and seemed to think it no more than his due. Which, at least on the military side, it was, but that doesn't change the fact that Wellington was the very reverse of a humble man.

So, yeah, Napoleon and Wellington weren't exactly opposites. I still like Wellington a lot more--he was more humane and had a better sense of humor, for starters--and take the minority view that he was the better general of the two.

Anyway, this is a very good read for anyone with a fair amount of knowledge of the era. One caveat, though: unlike most of the nonfiction authors I'm drawn to, Roberts is clearly a conservative. I don't think his politics color his views of Napoleon and Wellington, but I have trouble believing the Whigs were as nigh-treasonous as he paints them. Must find a more balanced book on that particular topic...