Friday, January 27, 2017

I Was a Teenage Activist

I like to say that my first protest was an Equal Rights Amendment march in the 1970s. I was a toddler and I made the local news. Activism was all around me growing up. I was raised in Park Slope, Brooklyn surrounded by red diaper babies and children whose parents had been active in the Civil Rights and Vietnam War protest movements. My family attended an activist church where messages from the pulpit routinely addressed social justice, LGBT rights, and the plights of people in Palestine and Nicaragua, among other topics. My parents were more left-learning democrats than big-time activists themselves, but these were the ideas that were all around me as I grew up.

While the story about the ERA protest is technically true, my entree in to activism really started with the first Gulf War in 1990-91. I started high school during the preamble to the Gulf War and quickly became an active member of my school's Student Organization for Social Justice and the inter-school coalition of student activists, Students Against War. I marched on Washington, Albany, and all over NYC. For the duration of Operation Desert Storm, we would have frequent impromptu marches between the various news outlet headquarters around Manhattan. After the war ended, I kept marching for other causes. For a while. Over time the urgency seemed to fade, life got in the way, I became disillusioned. With fewif anyidentifiable results, protesting started to seem pointless. While old friends protestedand occasionally were arrestedat the Republican National Convention, the Bush inauguration, the lead up to the Iraq War, the next Republican National Convention, and on and on, I stayed home lamenting these outcomes as inevitable and beyond my control.

I believe I've abstained from protesting as an adult more of out cynicism than complacency (though I won't deny that personal comfort and a strong fear of being arrested have also been contributing factors), but what difference does that make if the end result is the same? It allows me to feel morally superior and to assuage my guilt without actually having to experience discomfort or risk anything for my convictions. (To be slightly fairer to myself, I have always expressed support via other means: I give money to organizations doing work on causes I believe in; I volunteer; I participate in our democracy.) I guess you could say Trump's election has pulled me out of my rut. I'm still cynical, but I do believe we are better than this. I've realized I need to do more than I've been doing, and that more has to include things that make me uncomfortable. Bring it on: I'm ready.

Tuesday, January 3, 2017

Ancillary Mercy, The Talented Mr. Ripley

I read a ton over the holidays and didn't keep up with my write-ups, but I want to wrap 2016, so I'm bundling two books to finish out the year.

Ancillary Mercy, Ann Leckie
As I predicted, I finished up the Imperial Radch trilogy just as 2016 came to a close. I really enjoyed all three books, though I thought the second was slightly weaker than the first and the third. When I wrote up Ancillary Justice, I talked about a couple aspects of it that blew my mind: one was the AI narration and the other was the gender pronouns. By the second book, I was used to the gender pronouns and the narrator was in a new role that resulted in a more straightforward first-person narrative. However, the third book brings back (and even complicates further) a lot of what I found so interesting about AI and what I'll call beinghood from the first book, which I was happy about.

The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith
I started then abandoned The Talented Mr. Ripley in mid-December, but I went back to finish it on New Year's Eve when I found myself with 10 hours until the new year and not much to do. I was very conflicted about this book. I stopped reading it when I did because, in retrospect, I was having rather a bad day (week?) and the book was getting me down. What I had a hard time grappling with was that much what was bothering me about the book was also a sign of a well-created character. I think it would be hard to read the book and not hope that Ripley gets away with his crimes; as a reader, you become invested in them. But he's also hard to like, and I think that's the point. Anyway, the book was getting me down and it was just so stressful to read, I had to stop. But then it was New Year's Eve around 2pm and I had just finished the thoroughly enjoyable They Came to Baghdad and I thought, maybe I can go back to Ripley and finish it in one sitting to minimize the drawn-out stressfulness and that's what I did. Having finished it, I'm just as conflicted as I was before, but the stress has subsided, so it was probably a good thing.

The Last Will and Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo, Germano Almeida

I was doing some last minute Christmas shopping on December 24 at Hullabaloo Books in Crown Heights and browsing the fiction selection there when I spotted The Last Will and Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo. I almost dismissed it as probably Portuguese (not that I'm against reading Portuguese novels, but Portugal - and Brazil for that matter - are both already checked off on my world books list), but I pulled it out and saw this:


This felt ~significant~ because back when I had the conversation with my friend Daniel that started this whole world reading project, I asked, "What is the great Cape Verdean novel?" (I should add that the inside flap of this book describes Almeida as "the greatest living Cape Verdean writer.") So, obviously I bought the book and I started reading it shortly thereafter.

This book had a fun narrative style. It tells the life story of Senhor Araújo by way of his book-length will on the occasion of its being read before witnesses after his death. It jumps around a bit between the text from the actual will and other sources, and often you're not really sure what the source is. The story is both funny and poignant. I also felt like I got a feel for the Cape Verdean islands, which was part of the whole point of this undertaking.

Monday, January 2, 2017

2016 in Books

Last year turned out to be quite a good reading year for me. I read more books than I ever have before in a single year, 51 being the final count. I read 22 books by women, which is probably a better percentage for me than in most years. Those 22 books only represent 14 distinct authors, which isn't great. I read just one book of nonfiction. I read two books from before 1900, one of which was a reread.

My "reading project" was the main guiding principle for my reading last year, and I have to say I did pretty great in that regard. I read books from 25 countries this year. Fifteen of these (shown in bold) were countries from which I had not previously read anything. Aside from the United States, I read books from Bosnia & Herzegovina, Canada, Cape Verde, Chile, Cuba, Dominica, El Salvador, England, Finland, France, Israel, Italy, Japan, Libya, Martinique, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, Portugal, South Africa, and Spain. To see other fun stats, you can check out my year in books on Goodreads.

The list:
  • How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid
  • When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson
  • The Storyteller by Mario Vargas Llosa
  • The Infatuations by Javier Marías
  • Texaco by Patrick Chamoiseau
  • Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson
  • The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey
  • The Dog Stars by Peter Heller
  • Home by Marilynne Robinson
  • My Michael by Amos Oz
  • Illustrado by Miguel Syjuco
  • The Kingdom of This World by Alejo Carpentier
  • The Obscene Bird of Night by José Donoso
  • The Ruined Map by Kobo Abe
  • Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
  • Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (reread)
  • My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
  • In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar
  • Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
  • The City and the City by China Miéville
  • Stoner by John Williams
  • The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
  • The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
  • The Whites by Richard Price
  • A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness
  • Shadow of Night by Deborah Harkness
  • The Book of Life by Deborah Harkness
  • Conversation in the Cathedral by Mario Vargas Llosa
  • The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
  • The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson
  • Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
  • The Vintner's Luck by Elizabeth Knox
  • Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton
  • The Dream of My Return by Horacio Castellanos Moya
  • Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters by Louis Begley
  • John Henry Days by Colson Whitehead
  • The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
  • In the Dutch Mountains by Cees Nooteboom
  • The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by José Saramago
  • Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
  • The Story of a Child by Pierre Loti
  • The Fortress by Meša Selimović
  • Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera
  • All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
  • Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie
  • The Marshal and the Madwoman by Magdalen Nabb
  • Blood Rain by Michael Dibdin
  • The Last Will and Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo by Germano Almeida
  • Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie
  • They Came to Baghdad by Agatha Christie
  • The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
I'm surprised by how easy it is for me to pick a favorite book from the year, but here we are: my favorite book was The Dream of My Return. For reasons I find hard to pinpoint, this book just felt like it was for me. My other top books from the year include The Infatuations, Station Eleven, All the Light We Cannot See, They Came to Baghdad, Story of a Child, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, The Long Goodbye, Stoner, and Life After Life.